by Kate Morton
‘Drive?’
‘It’s in a place called Southrop, a village in the Cotswolds.’
‘Southrop.’ Tip focused on a line he was about to cut. ‘How did you settle on Southrop?’
‘My fiancé’s mother knows someone who owns a venue. I’ve never actually been there, but I’m heading out to have a look next weekend. Do you know it?’
‘Pretty place. Haven’t been there for years. Hopefully they haven’t ruined it with progress.’ He sharpened his blade on a Japanese stone, holding it up to the hanging light to inspect his work. ‘Still that same fellow, is it? David, Daniel—’
‘Danny. No.’
‘Shame, I liked him. Interesting ideas about healthcare, I seem to remember. Is he still working on that thesis of his?’
‘As far as I know.’
‘Something to do with adopting the same system as Peru?’
‘Brazil.’
‘That’s it. And this one? What’s his name—?’
‘Alastair.’
‘Alastair. Is he a doctor, too?’
‘No, he works in the City.’
‘Banking?’
‘Acquisitions.’
‘Ah.’ He ran a soft cloth across his blade. ‘I take it he’s a good fellow, though?’
‘Yes.’
‘Kind?’
‘Yes.’
‘Funny?’
‘He likes a joke.’
‘Good. It’s important to pick someone who can make you laugh. My mother told me that, and she knew a thing or two about everything.’ Tip ran his blade along a sweeping curve of his design. He was working on a river scene; Elodie could see this line forming part of the water’s flow. ‘You know, your mother came and saw me before her wedding, too. She sat right there, where you are now.’
‘Was she also chasing an RSVP?’
Elodie was joking, but Tip didn’t laugh. ‘She came to talk about you, in a manner of speaking. She’d only recently discovered that she was pregnant.’ He smoothed his piece of linoleum, thumbing a fine loose shard along the top edge. ‘It was a hard time; she wasn’t well. I was worried about her.’
Elodie had a vague memory of having been told that her mother suffered with bad morning sickness in the first few months. According to her father, Lauren Adler’s pregnancy was responsible for one of the only occasions on which she’d needed to cancel a performance. ‘I don’t think I was planned, exactly.’
‘I should say not,’ he agreed. ‘But you were loved, which is arguably more important.’
It was strange to picture her mother, a young woman, over thirty years before, sitting on the same stool as she was now, talking about the baby who would become Elodie. It sparked in Elodie a sense of kinship. She wasn’t used to thinking of her mother as a peer. ‘Was she worried that having a baby would put an end to her career?’
‘Understandably. Times were different then. And it was complicated. She was lucky Winston, your dad, stepped up.’
The way he spoke of her father, as if he’d been conscripted into service by her arrival, made Elodie defensive. ‘I don’t think he saw it as a sacrifice. He was proud of her. He was forward thinking in his way. He never presumed that because she was a woman she should be the one to stop working.’
Tip considered her over his glasses. He seemed about to speak but didn’t, and the silence sat awkwardly between them.
Elodie felt protective of her father. Protective of herself, too, and of her mother. Their situation had been unique: Lauren Adler had been unique. But her father was no martyr, and he didn’t deserve pity. He loved being a teacher; he’d told Elodie many times that teaching was his calling. ‘Dad was always clear-sighted,’ she said. ‘He was a very good musician, too, but he knew her talent was of a different calibre; that her place was on the stage. He was her biggest fan.’
It sounded corny when she said it out loud, but Tip laughed and Elodie felt the odd tension slip away. ‘That he was,’ said Tip. ‘You won’t get any argument from me there.’
‘Not everyone can be a genius.’
He gave her a kindly smile. ‘Don’t I know it.’
‘I’ve been watching the recordings of her concerts.’
‘Have you, now.’
‘We’re going to play some during the ceremony, instead of an organist. I’m supposed to choose, but it isn’t easy.’
Tip set down his blade. ‘The first time I heard her play, she was four years old. It was Bach. I was lucky if I could get my shoes on the right feet at that age.’
Elodie smiled. ‘To be fair, shoes are tricky.’ She fiddled with the corner of the wedding invitation on the bench beside her. ‘It’s strange watching the videos. I thought I’d feel a connection – some sort of recognition …’
‘You were very young when she died.’
‘Older than she was when you first heard her playing Bach.’ Elodie shook her head. ‘No, she was my mother. I should remember more.’
‘Some memories aren’t the obvious sort. My dad died when I was five and I don’t remember a lot. But even now, seventy-seven years later, I can’t walk past someone smoking a pipe without being hit with the strongest memory of hearing typewriter keys being struck.’
‘He used to smoke while he typed?’
‘He used to smoke while my mother typed.’
‘Of course.’ Elodie’s great-grandmother had been a journalist.
‘Before the war, on nights when my father wasn’t working, the two of them used to sit together at a round wooden table in our kitchen. He’d have a glass of beer and she a whisky, and they’d talk and laugh and she’d work on whatever article it was that she was writing.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t remember any of that with pictures, like a film. So much has happened since to take its place. But I can’t smell pipe smoke without being overwhelmed by a visceral sense of being small and content and knowing that my mother and father were together in our house while I was drifting off to sleep.’ He eyed his blade. ‘You’ll have memories in there somewhere. It’s just a matter of working out how to trigger them.’
Elodie considered this. ‘I can remember her telling me stories before I went to bed at night.’
‘There you are, then.’
‘There was one in particular – I remember it so vividly. I thought it must’ve come from a book, but my dad said it was one she’d been told when she was young. Actually’ – Elodie straightened – ‘he said it was a family story, passed down to her, about a wood and a house on the bend of a river?’
Tip brushed his hands clean on his trousers. ‘Time for a cuppa.’
He pottered over to the nearby Kelvinator and reached for the paint-splattered kettle on top.
‘Have you heard it? Do you know the one I mean?’
He held up an empty mug and Elodie nodded.
‘I know the story,’ said Tip, unwinding first one teabag and then another. ‘I told it to your mum.’
It was warm in the studio, but Elodie felt a chill brush lightly on the skin of her forearms.
‘I lived with them for a while when your mother was small, with my sister Beatrice’s family. I liked your mum. She was a bright kid even without the music. I was an unholy mess at the time – I’d lost my job, my relationship, my flat; but kids don’t care about that sort of thing. I’d have preferred to be left alone to surrender myself fully to the slough of despond, but she wouldn’t have it. She followed me around the place like the chirpiest bad smell you can imagine. I begged my sister to call her off, but Bea always did know best. I told your mum the story about the river and the woods so I could have a moment’s reprieve from that chipper little voice with its constant comments and questions.’ He smiled fondly. ‘I’m glad to think that she told it to you. Stories have to be told or else they die.’
‘It was my favourite,’ said Elodie. ‘It was real to me. I used to think about it when she was away and dream about it at night.’
The kettle started to sing. ‘It was the same for me when I was a lad.’
/>
‘Did your mum tell the story to you?’
‘No.’ Tip fetched a glass bottle of milk from the fridge and poured some into each mug. ‘I was evacuated from London when I was a boy; we all were: my mum, my brother and sister and me. Not officially. My mum organised it. Our house was bombed and she managed to find us a place in the country. Wonderful old house it was, filled with the most incredible furniture – almost like the people who’d lived there before had left for a stroll and never come back.’
Elodie’s mind went to the sketch she’d found in the archives – her idea that the tale might have come originally from an illustrated book for which the sketch was an early draft. An old, furnished house in the country seemed like just the sort of place where a Victorian book might have been tossed onto a shelf, forgotten until a little boy unearthed it mid-way through the next century. She could almost picture the boy, Tip, finding it. ‘You read the story there?’
‘I didn’t read it. It wasn’t from a book.’
‘Someone told it to you? Who?’
Elodie noticed just the merest hesitation before he answered. ‘A friend.’
‘Someone you met in the country?’
‘Sugar?’
‘No, thanks.’ Elodie remembered the photo that she’d taken on her phone. While Tip was finishing preparing the tea, she pulled it out, swiping past another missed call from Pippa and scrolling to the photo of the sketch. She handed it to him as he set down her mug.
His woolly brows lifted and he took the phone. ‘Where did you get this?’
Elodie explained about the archives, the box discovered beneath the curtains in the antique chiffonier, the satchel. ‘As soon as I saw the sketch I felt a jolt of familiarity, as if it were somewhere that I’d been. And then I realised it was the house, the one from the story.’ She was watching his face. ‘It is, isn’t it?’
‘That’s it all right. It’s also the house my family and I lived in during the war.’
Deep inside her, Elodie felt something lighten. So, she’d been right. It was the house from the story. And it was a real house. Her great-uncle Tip had lived there as a boy during the war, where a local person had invented a story that had captured his imagination and which, in turn, he’d told many years later to his little niece.
‘You know,’ said Tip, still inspecting the sketch, ‘your mother came to ask me about the house, too.’
‘When?’
‘A week or so before she died. We had lunch together and then went for a walk and when we got back here she asked me about the house in the country where I’d stayed during the Blitz.’
‘What did she want to know?’
‘At first she just wanted to hear me speak about it. She said that she remembered me telling her about it, that it had taken on magical proportions in her mind. And then she asked me if I could tell her where it was exactly. The address, the closest village.’
‘She wanted to go there? Why?’
‘I only know for certain what I’ve told you. She came to see me, she wanted to know about the house from the story. I never saw her again.’
Emotion had made him gruff and he moved to clear the photo of the sketch from the phone’s screen. Instead, the picture swiped backwards. As Elodie watched, every bit of colour drained from his face.
‘What is it?’ she said.
‘Where did you get this?’ He was holding out the phone to show the picture she’d taken, the Victorian woman in the white dress.
‘I found the original at work,’ she said. ‘It was with the sketchbook. Why? Do you know who she is?’
Tip didn’t answer. He was staring at the image and didn’t appear to have heard.
‘Uncle Tip? Do you know the woman’s name?’
He looked up. His eyes met hers but all the openness had gone. They were the defensive eyes of a child caught lying. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said. ‘How could I? I’ve never seen her before in my life.’
IV
It is just before first light and I am sitting on the foot of my visitor’s bed. It is an intimate thing to do, to watch another person sleep; once upon a time I might have said that there was no other moment in which a human being was more vulnerable, but I know now from experience that’s not true.
I can remember the first time that I stayed overnight in Edward’s studio. He had painted until well after midnight, the candles that stood in green glass bottles burning one by one to rippled pools of molten wax, until, at last, it was too dark to continue. We fell asleep together on the cushions that littered the floor of the corner nearest the furnace. I woke before he did, as dawn was creeping softly across the pitched glass ceiling, and I lay on my side with my face in my hand, watching his dreams skate beneath his eyelids.
I wonder what this young man dreams of. He returned just prior to dusk last night and I felt the energy inside the house shift instantly. He went straight to the malt house room where he has set up camp and I was with him in a flash. He peeled off his shirt in one liquid movement and I found myself unable to look away.
He is handsome in the way of men who do not think about being handsome. He has a broad chest and the arms a man gets from working hard and lifting heavy things. The men on the wharves along the Thames had bodies like that.
Once upon a time I would have left the room or turned away when a man I did not know undressed; the learned privacies go surprisingly deep. But my observation can take nothing away from him, and so I watched.
He has a stiff neck, I think, for he rubbed the palm of his hand against it and then tilted it this way and that as he walked to the small adjoining bathroom. The night had continued warm and humid and my attention lingered on the back of his neck, the place where his hand had been, where the ends of his hair curl.
I miss touch.
I miss being touched.
Edward’s body was not that of a man who toiled on the wharves, but it was stronger than one might have expected for a man who spent his days lifting brush to canvas and eyes to subject. I remember him in candlelight; at his studio in London, and here, in this house, on the night of the storm.
My visitor sings in the shower. Not very well, but then, he does not know he has an audience. When I was a child in Covent Garden I used to stand sometimes and listen to the opera singers practising in the theatres. Until the managers came, waving their arms and their threats, and I ran back into the shadows.
Although my visitor left the door to the bedroom open, the cubicle is so small that steam filled it, and when he was finished he stood in front of the mirror, wiping the centre clear with his hand. I remained at a distance behind him and if I’d had breath it would have been held. Once or twice, when the condition of the light has been just right, I have caught a glimpse of myself in the looking glass. The circular mirror in the dining room is best – something to do with its curved sides. Rarely, I have been able to make others see me, too. No, not make them, for I have not been aware of doing anything differently.
But my visitor did not see me. He rubbed his hand across his bristled jaw and then went to find his clothing.
I miss having a face. And a voice. A real voice that everyone can hear.
It can be lonely in the liminal space.
Mrs Mack lived with a man known only as ‘the Captain’, whom I took at first for her husband but who turned out to be a brother. He was as thin as she was round and walked with a lopsided gait due to the wooden leg he’d gained after an altercation with a carriage on Fleet Street.
‘Got stuck in a wheel, ’e did,’ I was told by one of the children who lived in the streets outside. ‘Dragged ’im for a mile before ’is leg broke plain off.’
The wooden leg was a handmade contraption that attached below the knee with a series of leather straps and silver buckles. It had been fashioned by one of his friends down at the docks, and in it the Captain took great pride, lavishing the limb with careful attention, polishing the buckles and waxing the straps, sanding every splinter away. Indeed, so smoo
th was the wood, so waxed were the straps, that on more than one occasion, the leg slipped out of place, causing great alarm to those around who weren’t familiar with his plight. He had been known to take the leg from his knee and shake it at those whose actions had displeased him.
I was not the only child whose care had fallen to Mrs Mack. Alongside her various other businesses, which were only ever discussed in low voices and veiled language, she had a small side interest taking in children. She ran an advertisement in the newspaper each week that read:
WANTED
by a respectable widow with
no young children of her own,
care of or to adopt a child of either sex.
*
The Advertiser offers a
comfortable home and a parent’s care.
Small premium; age under ten years.
*
TERMS
5s a week, or would adopt
entirely infants under three months
for the sum of £13.
I did not understand at first the special mention of infants under three months, but there was a girl, older than I was, who knew a little bit of everything, from whom I learned that there had been infants in the past, adopted by Mrs Mack. Lily Millington was that girl’s name and she told me of a baby boy called David, a girl called Bessie, and a set of twins whose names no one remembered any more. Sadly, though, they had all been sickly and died. This had seemed to me then like terribly bad luck, but when I said as much, Lily Millington merely raised her brows and said there wasn’t much luck about it, good or bad.
Mrs Mack explained that she had taken me in as a favour to my father, and to Jeremiah, whom it turned out she knew well; she had special plans for me and was certain that I wasn’t going to disappoint. In fact, she said, eyeing me sternly, my father had assured her that I was a good girl who would do as I’d been told and make him proud. ‘Are you a good girl?’ she’d asked. ‘Is your father right in that?’
I told her that I was.
The way it worked, she continued, was that everyone did their bit to afford their upkeep. Anything left over she would send to my father to help him with his new start.