by Kate Morton
Edward’s mother, for her part, encouraged our ongoing association. Sleeping Beauty was exhibited to wide acclaim in April 1862 and a hover of prospective patrons descended; she entertained dreams of Royal Academy glory and wild commercial success, but she was worried, too; for while Edward’s usual habit was to move on immediately to a new subject, he had not yet begun another painting. After the exhibition, he alternated instead between bouts of distraction, in which a faraway expression cast a glaze across his features, and periods of feverish scribbling in his notebook. Motivated by the quality of his recent work and her own reliance on his future, she urged him down to the studio day and night, plying me with cake and tea as if she feared that only by such morsels could I be kept from vanishing back to the place from which I had come.
As for Fanny, aside from a brief nod of aloof acknowledgement at the exhibition of Sleeping Beauty, I saw her only once, when she and her mother came to tea with Mrs Radcliffe and were walked down the garden path to observe the artist at work. They stood inside the door, behind Edward’s shoulder, Fanny preening and posing in a new satin dress. ‘Goodness,’ she said, ‘aren’t the colours pretty?’ – at which Edward met my eyes and within his own I saw a smile of such warmth and longing that it took my breath away.
Will you believe me if I say that in all of those months Edward and I did not ever discuss Fanny? Neither did we consciously avoid the subject. It seems hopelessly naive to say it now, but Fanny simply was not on our minds. There was so much else to talk about, and she did not seem important. Lovers are ever selfish.
It is one of my greatest regrets, to which I return over and again in my ruminations, wondering how I could have been so foolish: my failure to understand how unwilling Fanny would be to let Edward go. I was blinded, as was he, by the knowledge that for us there was no choice: we had to be together. Neither of us could contemplate the possibility that others could not see and would not accept this basic truth.
She has come back!
Elodie Winslow, the archivist from London, keeper of James Stratton’s memory and Edward’s sketchbook.
I see her at the entrance kiosk, trying to buy a ticket to enter the house and garden. There is some sort of bother: I can tell by the air of polite frustration on her face as she gestures towards her watch. One glance at my clock in the Mulberry Room and I know what the matter is.
Sure enough, when I arrive at her side it is in time to hear her say, ‘I would have arrived earlier, but I had another appointment. I came here immediately afterwards, but my taxi was stuck behind a piece of farm machinery and the lanes are so narrow he couldn’t get past.’
‘Be that as it may,’ says the volunteer, whose badge announces that he is called Roger Westbury, ‘we only allow a fixed number of visitors in, and the last allotment for today is full. You’ll have to come again next weekend.’
‘But I won’t be here. I have to go back to London.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that, but I’m sure you understand. We have to protect the house. We can’t have too many people traipsing through at once.’
Elodie looks towards the stone wall surrounding the house, the gables rising above it. There is an expression of utter longing on her face and I vow to make certain that Roger Westbury has a particularly uncomfortable winter. She turns back to him and says, ‘I suppose it’s okay to buy a cup of tea?’
‘Of course. The cafe is just behind us, over there in the long barn near the Hafodsted Brook. The gift shop is beside it. You might like to pick up a nice bag or a poster for your wall.’
Elodie starts towards the barn, and when she is halfway there, without a hint of duplicity, she turns right instead of left and slips past the open wrought-iron gate and into the walled garden of the house.
She is wandering along the paths now and I am following her. There is something different in her attitude today. She does not take out Edward’s sketchbook, and she does not wear the mooning expression of completeness on her face that she did yesterday. She is frowning slightly, and I have the distinct impression that she is looking for something specific. She is not here just to admire the roses.
In fact, she is avoiding the prettiest parts of the garden and tracing the outer border where the walls are covered with rampant ivy and other creepers. She stops and digs around in her handbag and I wait to see whether she will pull out the sketchbook.
She withdraws a photograph instead. A colour photograph of a man and woman sitting together outdoors in a grove of abundant greenery.
Elodie is holding the photograph up, comparing it with the garden walls behind, but evidently she is not pleased with the comparison, because she lowers her hand and continues on the path, following it around the corner of the house and past the chestnut tree at the back. She is nearing Jack’s rooms now, and I am determined that she should not be allowed to go without my learning more. I see her glance towards the kitchen where yesterday she saw Jack scraping his pie dish. She is in two minds; I recognise the signs. She just needs a little encouragement and I am only too happy to provide it.
Go on, I urge her. What have you got to lose? He might even let you look inside the house again.
Elodie goes to the door of the malt house and knocks.
Jack, meanwhile, who has been keeping odd hours of an evening and sleeping poorly, is napping and does not even stir.
But I refuse to see her leave, so I kneel down close beside him and blow with all of my might into his ear. He sits bolt upright and shivers, just in time to hear the second knock.
He staggers over and pulls open the door.
‘Hello again,’ she says. There is no hiding the fact that he has just got himself out of bed and she adds, ‘I’m sorry to disturb you. Do you live here?’
‘Temporarily.’
He gives no further explanation and she is too polite to ask.
‘I’m sorry to bother you again, but you were so kind yesterday. I wondered if you’d mind letting me look inside the house again.’
‘It’s open now.’ He nods towards the back door, indicating the other tourists who have just been disgorged.
‘Yes, but your colleague on the ticket desk pointed out that I was too late today to be sold a ticket for the last entry period.’
‘Did he? What a pedant.’
She smiles, surprised. ‘Yes, well, I thought so, too. But you seem less … pedantic.’
‘Look, I’d let you in any time, but I can’t tonight. My … colleague … informed me earlier that he’s sticking around to supervise some repairs. Worse luck, he expects to be back tomorrow morning to oversee the return of the furniture to its proper place.’
‘Oh.’
‘If you come back at midday they should be done.’
‘Midday.’ She nods thoughtfully. ‘I have another appointment at eleven, but I could come straight after that.’
‘Great.’
‘Great.’ She smiles again; she is nervous of him. ‘Well, thanks. I might just go and enjoy the garden for a little longer now. Until they kick me out.’
‘Take your time,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t let them do that.’
It is almost six o’clock. The last of the day’s visitors are being ushered to the gate when Jack finds her sitting on a garden seat against the stone wall that separates the lawn from the orchard. He has split a beer into two small glasses and hands one to her. ‘I told my colleague that my cousin had dropped in to say hello.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You looked like you could use a little longer.’ He sits on the grass. ‘Cheers.’
‘Cheers.’ She smiles and takes a sip of the beer. Neither one speaks for a while and I am deciding which of them to press when she says, ‘This is a beautiful place. I knew it would be.’
Jack doesn’t answer and after a time she continues.
‘I’m not always so …’ She lifts her shoulders. ‘It’s been a strange day. I had a meeting earlier and I’ve been reflecting on it. I go back to London tomorrow afternoon and I don
’t feel like I’ve done what I hoped to do while I was here.’
I want Jack to probe further, to ask her what it is that she hoped to do, but he resists my urging and in this instance he is right, because she fills the silence without being asked. ‘I was given this recently,’ she says, handing him a photograph.
‘Nice,’ he says. ‘Someone you know?’
‘My mother. Lauren Adler.’
Jack shakes his head, uncertain.
‘She was a cellist, pretty famous.’
‘And he’s your dad?’
‘No. He was American, a violinist. They’d been playing together, a concert in Bath, and were driving back to London when they stopped for lunch. I had hoped that I might find the spot where they were sitting.’
He hands back the photograph. ‘They had lunch here?’
‘I think so. I’m trying to find that out for sure. My grandmother lived in this house for a few years from when she was eleven; she and her family had to evacuate out of London after their house was bombed in the Blitz. Grandma Bea isn’t alive any more, but her brother – my great-uncle – told me that in the week before this photo was taken my mother came to see him, eager to know the address of this house.’
‘Why?’
‘I think that’s what I’m trying to work out. We have this family story – a fairy story, really – that’s been passed down the line. I only found out the other day that it was set in a real house. My great-uncle told me that he had a friend here, a local person, who told him the tale when he was a boy. He told my mum and she told me. The story is special to us; the house is special, too. Even now, today, sitting here, I feel a strange sort of possessive feeling. I can understand why my mother wanted to come here, but why then? What was it that made her go and see her uncle Tip and then come here that day?’
So. She is Tip’s great-niece, and little Tip is still alive, and he remembered the story that I told him. If I had a heart, it would be warmed. I feel the ripples, too, of other memories shifting when she speaks about her mother, the cellist, and the photograph of the two young people in the ivy. I remember them. I remember everything. Memories like the jewels in the kaleidoscope that Pale Joe kept upon his toy shelf: discrete gems that shift into new positions when they’re put together, creating different but related patterns every time.
Elodie is looking at the photograph again. ‘My mother died just after this was taken.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It was a long time ago.’
‘I’m still sorry. Grief doesn’t have a time limit, I’ve found.’
‘No, and I’m lucky to have it. The photographer who took it is famous now, but she wasn’t back then. She was staying around here and came across them by chance. She didn’t know who they were when she took the shot. She just liked the way they looked.’
‘It’s a great photograph.’
‘I was sure that if I explored every inch of the garden, I’d turn a corner at some point and see it in front of me – the very spot – and that then maybe I’d somehow know what my mother was thinking that day. Why she was so eager to get the address. Why she was here.’
The unspoken words ‘with him’ drift into the cooling air and disappear.
Elodie’s phone rings then, an unnatural, jarring noise; she glances at the screen but does not take the call.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says with a quick shake of her head. ‘I’m not usually so … expansive.’
‘Hey. What are cousins for?’
Elodie smiles and finishes her beer. She hands him the glass and tells him that she’ll see him tomorrow.
‘I’m Jack, by the way,’ he says.
‘Elodie.’
And then she tucks the photograph back into her bag and leaves.
Jack has been reflective ever since she left. The carpenter was here all evening, clattering carelessly with his hammer and nails, and after an hour or two of being unable to settle to anything, Jack went through to the house and asked if he could help. It turns out he is handy. The carpenter was happy to have an assistant and they worked together without saying much of consequence for the next two hours. I like that he has added something material to the house that will remain when he is long gone.
Jack ate toast with butter for dinner and then telephoned his father in Australia. There was no anniversary this time on which to hang the call, and conversation for the first five minutes was stilted. Just as I thought things were winding up, Jack said, ‘Do you remember how good he was at climbing, Dad? Remember that time Tiger got stuck up the mango tree, and he climbed all the way up after him and brought him down?’
Who is ‘he’, and why does Jack look so sad when he speaks about him? Why does his voice constrict and some slight shift in his bearing make him seem like a lonely child?
These are the sorts of wonderings that occupy me.
He is asleep now. The house is quiet. I am the only presence shifting in these rooms, and so I have come up to Juliet’s bedroom, where Fanny’s likeness hangs.
In her new green dress, the young woman gazes at the painter. The portrait catches her forever as she was in the spring that she met Edward. She stands within an elaborate room decorated in her father’s style. The gaping sash window beside her is open, and such is Edward’s eye for detail, his skill, that one can feel the freshness of the air against her right forearm. Damask curtains fall on either side of the glass in rich shades of burgundy and cream, framing a timeless rural view.
But it is the light, the light, always the light, that makes his paintings sing.
Critics argued that the depiction of Fanny was more than just a portrait – that it was a comment on the juxtaposition of youth and timelessness, of society and the natural world.
Edward was drawn to allusion and it is possible that he had all of these oppositions in mind when he set up at his easel. It is certainly true that the painting served a double purpose. For the view through the window, of a summer field yellowed by heat, is unremarkable in every way until one notices in the distance – almost disappeared behind a copse of trees – a railway engine pulling four carriages.
This was no accident. The painting of Fanny in the green velvet dress was commissioned by her father on the occasion of her eighteenth birthday, and the engine was no doubt an attempt to appeal to him. Edward’s mother would have urged such flattery; her ambitions for her son were naked, and Richard Brown was one of the ‘railway kings’, a man who had made his fortune in steel production and was happily poised to enlarge his business at the precise moment the railway lines were spreading across the face of Britain.
Mr Brown adored his daughter. I read his interview in the police reports that Leonard obtained when he was working on his thesis. He was distraught after Fanny’s death and determined that her legacy should not be tarnished by any talk of a broken engagement and certainly not of another woman in Edward’s personal life. Fanny’s father was a powerful man. Until Leonard started his digging, Mr Brown had managed to cut my page completely from history’s book. To such lengths would a father go for his beloved child.
Parents and children. The simplest relationship in the world and yet the most complex. One generation passes to the next a suitcase filled with jumbled jigsaw pieces from countless puzzles collected over time and says, ‘See what you can make out of these.’
To that end, I have been thinking about Elodie. There is something in her nature that reminds me of Pale Joe. I noticed it when she first arrived yesterday: the way she introduced herself to Jack, the way she answered his questions. She is thoughtful and considered in her responses, listening carefully to what he says – partly, one can tell, because she wants to do justice to what he is telling her or asking, but also, I think, because she is slightly worried at all times that she will not be equal to the task. Pale Joe was like that, too. In his case it was a consequence of having a father like his. I expect that it was common in those families of primogeniture, where sons were named for fathers and expected to grow up t
o fit into a mould; to step into the old man’s shoes and continue the dynasty.
Pale Joe was proud of his father: he was an important man in government and political circles, and a dedicated collector, too. Many a time when I was visiting the attic room and his family were out, Pale Joe would invite me to explore the grand house overlooking Lincoln’s Inn Fields. And what a place of wonders it was! His father had travelled the world and brought back all manner of antiquities: a tiger stood beside an Egyptian sarcophagus, which lay beneath a bronze mask rescued from Pompeii, which sneered beside an assortment of miniature Japanese sculptures. There were ancient Greek friezes and Italian Renaissance paintings, too, and a number of Turners and Hogarths – even a collection of medieval manuscripts including a copy of The Canterbury Tales thought to predate that in the Earl of Ellesmere’s library. Occasionally, when his father was hosting a great man of science or art, Pale Joe and I would sneak downstairs to listen at the door to the lecture being given.
The house had been remodelled to accommodate long corridors that Pale Joe called ‘the galleries’, supported by columns and arches between which the enormous walls were covered with framed artwork and shelves filled with treasures. Sometimes over the years, when Pale Joe and I were having too much fun to countenance my leaving to complete my day’s work, he would bid me to sneak quietly down into the house and find a small curiosity that I could pocket and present to Mrs Mack as my picking for the day. One might imagine that I felt some guilt over the thievery of such rare and precious artefacts, but as Pale Joe pointed out, many of them had been stolen already from their original possessors, long before I helped them on their way.
I ache to know what happened to Pale Joe. Did he marry the lady to whom he alluded that night in his attic when he spoke of unrequited love? Did he find a way to win her heart and make her see that she would find no kinder man than he? I would give anything to know. I would also like to learn what he became; into which avenue he funnelled his great energy, interest and care. For Pale Joe was proud of his father, but he worried about filling the big man’s shoes. Make no mistake: Pale Joe let me steal from his father’s collection in part because he wanted me to stay longer with him, and in part because he had a rather modern disdain for the accumulation of possessions and wealth; but there was another reason, too. Pale Joe allowed me to pinch small items from his father’s shelves for the same reason that he refused to use, when young, his father’s name: it pleased him to chip away a little at the statue’s feet.