by Kate Morton
‘You’re lost,’ she’d said in a calm, cool voice.
‘What?’
‘You’ve lost your way.’
‘I’m fine, thank you very much.’ Leonard had started down the road, shoving the card deep into his pocket, shaking off the strange, unpleasant feeling the woman had given him.
‘He’s been trying to find you.’ The woman’s voice, louder now, followed him down the street.
It was only when Leonard reached the next streetlight and read the card that her words made sense.
MADAME MINA WATERS
SPIRITUALIST
APARTMENT 2B
16 NEAL’S YARD
COVENT GARDEN
LONDON
He’d confided the conversation with Madame Mina to Kitty soon after it happened. She’d laughed and said that London was full of crackpots looking to exploit their victims’ loss for profit. But Leonard told her that she was being too cynical. ‘She knew about Tom,’ he insisted. ‘She knew I’d lost someone.’
‘Oh, God, look around: everyone’s lost someone.’
‘You didn’t see the way she stared at me.’
‘Was it anything like this?’ She crossed her eyes and pulled a face, then smiled and reached across the sheet to grab her discarded stockings, tossing them at him in fun.
Leonard shook them away. He wasn’t in the mood. ‘She told me he’s been trying to find me. She told me I was lost.’
‘Ah, Lenny.’ All the sport was gone now; she sounded only tired. ‘Aren’t we all?’
Leonard wondered now how Kitty had got on with her interview in London. She had looked smart when she left that morning; she’d done something different with her hair. He wished he’d remembered to comment. Kitty wore her cynicism well, but Leonard had known her before the war and he could see all the stitches that were holding the costume together.
As he passed the church and started down the empty lane towards Birchwood Manor, Leonard picked up a handful of gravel from the verge on the side of the road. He weighed the small stones in his palm before letting them sift through his parted fingers as he walked. One, he noticed as it fell, was clear and round, a perfectly smooth piece of quartz.
The first time Leonard and Kitty slept together was on a mild October night in 1916. He was home on leave and had spent the afternoon in his mother’s drawing room drinking tea from a china cup as his mother’s friends tut-tutted alternately, and with equal verve, about the war and the politics of the upcoming village Christmas Fair.
There’d been a knock at the door and his mother’s parlour maid Rose had announced Miss Barker’s arrival. Kitty had come with a box of scarves for the war effort and when Mother invited her to stay for tea, she had said that she couldn’t: there was a dance on at the church hall and she was in charge of refreshments.
It was Mother who suggested that Leonard ought to attend the dance. It had been the last thing he’d imagined doing that evening, but anything was preferable to remaining in the drawing room as the merits of serving mulled wine next to sherry were weighed, and so he’d leapt to his feet and said, ‘I’ll fetch my coat.’
As they walked along the village street together in the creeping dark, Kitty had asked after Tom.
Everyone asked after Tom, so Leonard had a ready answer. ‘You know Tom,’ he’d said. ‘Nothing makes a dint in his swagger.’
Kitty had smiled then and Leonard had wondered why he’d never noticed that dimple in her left cheek before.
He danced a lot that night. There was something of a man shortage in the village, and thus he was bemused (and pleased) to find himself in high demand. Girls who’d never noticed him were now lining up to dance.
It was getting late when he glanced over and spotted Kitty at the cloth-covered table on the edge of the dance floor. She’d been busy all night serving cucumber sandwiches and slices of Victoria sponge, and her hair was coming loose from its fastenings. The song was ending when she caught his eye and waved, and Leonard excused himself from his partner.
‘Well, Miss Barker,’ he said as he reached her, ‘a resounding success, I should say.’
‘You should say correctly. We raised far more than I dared hope, and all of it for the war effort. My only regret is that I haven’t danced all evening.’
‘That is regrettable indeed. Surely it wouldn’t be right for you to call it a night without at least one foxtrot?’
That dimple again when she smiled.
His hand rested in the small of her back as they danced, and he was aware of the smoothness of her dress, the fine gold chain around her neck, the way her hair shone.
He offered to walk her home and they spoke easily and naturally. She was relieved that the dance had gone well; she’d been worried.
The night had come in a little cooler, and Leonard offered her his coat.
She asked about the front and he found that it was easier to talk about it in the dark. He spoke and she listened, and when he’d said as much as he was able, he told her that it seemed like a bad dream when he was back here, walking with her, and she said that in that case she wouldn’t ask any more. They started reminiscing instead about the Easter Fair of 1913, the day they met, and Kitty reminded him that they’d walked up to the top of the hill behind the village, the three of them – Kitty, Leonard and Tom – and sat against the massive oak tree with its view over the whole of southern England.
‘I said that we could see all the way to France, remember?’ said Kitty. ‘And you corrected me. You said, “that’s not France, it’s Guernsey”.’
‘What a prig I was.’
‘You were not.’
‘I absolutely was.’
‘Well, maybe a little priggish.’
‘Hey!’
She laughed and took his hand and said, ‘Let’s climb the hill now.’
‘In the dark?’
‘Why not?’
They ran together up the hill, and Leonard had a fleeting realisation that it was the first time in over a year that he’d run without an attendant fear for his life; the thought, the feeling, the freedom was exhilarating.
In the darkness beneath the tree at the top of the hill above their village, Kitty’s face had been lit by the silver moon, and Leonard had lifted a finger to trace a line from the top of her nose, ever so lightly, all the way down until he reached her lips. He hadn’t been able to help himself. She was perfect, a marvel.
Neither of them spoke. Kitty, still wearing his coat around her shoulders, knelt across him and began to unbutton his shirt. She slipped her hand beneath the cotton and held it flat against his heart. He brought his hand to cup her face, his thumb grazing her cheek, and she leaned into his touch. He pulled her towards him and they kissed and in that moment the die was cast.
Afterwards, they dressed in silence and sat together beneath the tree. He offered her one of his cigarettes and she smoked it before saying, matter-of-factly, ‘Tom can never know.’
Leonard had nodded agreement, for of course Tom must never know.
‘It was a mistake.’
‘Yes.’
‘This blasted war.’
‘It was my fault.’
‘No. It wasn’t. But I love him, Leonard. I always have.’
‘I know.’
He’d taken her hand then and squeezed it, for he did know. He knew, too, that he also loved Tom.
They saw one another twice again before he returned to the front, but only in passing and always in the presence of other people. And it was strange because in those moments he knew that it was true, that Tom need never know and that they would be able to go on as if nothing had happened.
It wasn’t until he returned to the front a week later, and the weight of the place descended, that he began to turn things over in his mind, always arriving at the same question – a boy’s question, small and needy, which filled him with self-loathing as it grazed his consciousness: why did his brother seem so often to come out on top?
Tom was one of the first m
en Leonard saw when he reached the trenches, his dirt-smeared face erupting in a grin as he cocked his tin hat. ‘Welcome back, Lenny. Did you miss me?’
It was about half an hour later, as they shared a mug of trench tea, that Tom asked after Kitty.
‘I only saw her once or twice.’
‘She mentioned in her letter. Good stuff. I don’t suppose you and she had any special conversations?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Nothing private?’
‘Don’t be stupid. We hardly spoke.’
‘I see leave has done nothing to improve your mood. I just meant –’ his brother couldn’t keep the smile from his face – ‘Kitty and I are engaged to be married. I was sure she wouldn’t be able to resist telling you. We promised that we wouldn’t tell anyone until after the war – her father, you know.’
Tom looked so pleased with himself, so boyishly happy, that Leonard couldn’t help but give him a great big slapping hug. ‘Congratulations, Tom, I’m really pleased for you both.’
Three days later his brother was dead. Killed by a piece of flying shrapnel. Killed by loss of blood in the long dark hours after the shrapnel hit, lying out in no man’s land as Leonard listened from the trenches. (Help me, Lenny, help me.) All they managed to salvage from him, from Tom of the garden wall, Tom the breath-holding champion, Tom the boy most likely, was a cologne-scented letter from Kitty and a dirty old silver tuppence.
No, Lucy Radcliffe’s talk of guilt and self-forgiveness had been kindly meant, but whatever similarities she thought she had perceived between them, she’d been mistaken. Life was complicated; people made mistakes, certainly. But they were different. Their guilt with respect to their dead siblings was not the same.
Kitty had started writing to him in France after Tom’s death, and Leonard back to her, and when the war was over and he returned to England, she had come to see him one night in his bedsit in London. She brought a bottle of gin and Leonard helped her to drink it and they talked about Tom and they both cried. Leonard had presumed when she left that that would be the end of it. Somehow, though, Tom’s death had tied them together. They were two moons bound in orbit around his memory.
In the beginning, Leonard told himself he was looking after Kitty for his brother, and perhaps if that night in 1916 hadn’t happened he might have believed it. The truth, though, was more complicated and less honourable and he couldn’t hide from it for long. Both he and Kitty knew it was their disloyalty that night that had brought on Tom’s death. He was aware that it wasn’t entirely rational, but that didn’t make it any less true. Lucy Radcliffe was right, though: a person couldn’t go on indefinitely under the weight of so much guilt. They needed to justify their action’s devastating effect, and so they agreed, without discussion, to believe that what had happened between them that night on the hill was love.
They stayed together. Bound by grief and guilt. Hating the reason for their bond, yet unable each to let the other go.
They didn’t speak about Tom any more, not directly. But he was always with them. He was in the fine gold band with its pretty little diamond that Kitty wore on her right hand; he was in the way she looked at Leonard sometimes with faint surprise, as if she’d expected to see someone else; he was in every dark corner of every room, every atom of sunlit air outside.
Yes, Leonard believed in ghosts all right.
Leonard had reached the gate to Birchwood Manor and he went through it. The sun was getting lower in the sky and the shadows had started to lengthen across the lawn. As he glanced towards the front garden wall, Leonard stopped in his tracks. There, reclining in the sunny patch beneath the Japanese maple tree, he saw a woman, fast asleep. For a split second, he thought that it was Kitty, that she’d decided not to go to London after all.
Leonard wondered for a moment if he was hallucinating, but then he realised that it wasn’t Kitty at all. It was the woman from the river that morning: one half of the couple he’d gone out of his way to avoid meeting.
Now he found himself unable to look away. A pair of brogue shoes sat neatly beside her sleeping body and her bare feet in the grass seemed to Leonard in that moment the most erotic sight. He lit a cigarette. It was her unguardedness, he supposed, that drew him to her. Her materialisation here, today, in this place.
As he watched, she woke and stretched, and the most beatific expression came upon her face. The way she was looking at the house sparked a distant recognition in Leonard. Purity, simplicity, love. It made him want to cry as he hadn’t since he was a small boy. For all of the loss and the ugly mess and the awareness that no matter how he willed it he could never go back and make it so that the horror hadn’t happened; that whatever else he did in life, the fact of the war and his brother’s death and the wasted years since would always be a part of his story.
And then, ‘I’m sorry,’ she called out, for she had seen him. ‘I didn’t mean to trespass. I lost my way.’
Her voice was like a bell, pure and unsullied, and he wanted to run over and take her by the shoulders and warn her, to tell her that life could be brutal, that it could be relentless and cold and wearying.
He wanted to tell her that it was all meaningless, that good people died too young, for no good reason, and that the world was filled with people who would seek to do her harm, and that there was no way of telling what was around the corner or even if there was any corner ahead at all.
And yet—
As he looked at her, and she looked at the house, something in the way the leaves of the maple caught the sun and illuminated the woman beneath it made his heart ache and expand, and he realised that he wanted to tell her, too, that by some strange twist it was the very meaninglessness of life that made it all so beautiful and rare and wonderful. That for all its savagery – because of its savagery – war had brightened every colour. That without the darkness one would never notice the stars.
All of this he wanted to say, but the words caught in his throat, and instead he lifted his hand to wave, a silly gesture that she didn’t see, because by now she’d looked away.
He went inside the house and from the kitchen window watched as she gathered her bag and, with a final dazzling smile up at the house, disappeared into the sunlit haze. He didn’t know her. He would never see her again. And yet he wished he could have told her that he’d lost his way, too. He’d lost his way, but hope still fluttered in and out of focus like a bird, singing that if he kept putting one foot in front of the other, he might just make it home.
VII
My father once told me that when he saw my mother in the window of her family home, it was as if his entire life to that point had been led in the half-light. Upon meeting her, he said, every colour, every fragrance, every sensation that the world had to offer, was brighter, sharper, more truthful.
I was a child and took this story for the fairy tale that it sounded, but my father’s words came back to me on the night that I met Edward.
It was not love at first sight. Such claims make a mockery of love.
It was a presentiment. An inexplicable awareness that something important had happened. Some moments are like that: they shine like gold in a prospector’s pan.
I said that I was born twice, once to my father and mother, and a second time when I woke up in the house of Mrs Mack, above the shop selling birds and cages on Little White Lion Street.
That is the truth. But it is not the whole truth. For there was a third part to my life’s story.
I was born again, outside the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, on a warm evening in 1861 when I was a month from turning seventeen years old. The very same age that my mother was when I was born for the first time, that starlit night in the narrow house in Fulham on the banks of the River Thames.
Mrs Mack had been right, of course, when she said that the days of Little Girl Lost and Little Girl Passenger were numbered, and so a new scheme had been hatched, a new costume procured, a new persona put on like a second skin. It was simple en
ough: the theatre foyer was a hive of activity. The ladies’ dresses were bright and generous, the men’s reserve loosened by whisky and expectation; there were any number of opportunities for a woman with quick fingers to relieve a gentleman of his valuables.
The only problem was Martin. I was no longer a green child, but he refused to relinquish the minder’s role he’d been assigned. He badgered Mrs Mack, filled her head with extravagant ways in which I might come to harm or even – I had heard him whispering when he thought I wasn’t listening – be ‘turned against them’; and then he proposed an arrangement by which he might insinuate himself into my work. I argued that he was overcomplicating matters, that I preferred to work alone, but at every turn he was there, watching with a grating proprietary air.
That night, though, I had given him the slip. The show had finished and I’d made my way quickly across the foyer and out through a side exit, arriving in an alley that ran away from the theatre. It had been a good night: the deep pocket of my dress was heavy, and I was glad. The most recent letter from my father had advised that, after a number of unfortunate setbacks, the clock-making enterprise he had established in New York was almost solvent. I was hopeful that a fruitful summer would occasion his permission for me to set sail for America. It had been over nine years since he’d left me with Mrs Mack.
I was alone in the alley, wondering whether I ought to walk the shortcut home through the narrow laneways or follow instead the crowded Strand so that I might add one or two more wallets to my haul, and it was in that moment of indecision that Edward appeared through the same door by which I had left, catching me without my mask.
It was like the swift clarity that comes with the lifting fog. I felt alert, suddenly filled with anticipation, and yet at once unsurprised, for how could the night have ended without our meeting?
He came towards me, and when he reached out to brush my cheek, his touch was as light as if I were one of the treasures in Pale Joe’s father’s collection. His eyes studied mine.