by Kate Morton
Pale Joe, Ada, Juliet, Tip … Mrs Mack used to have a lot to say about one’s birds coming home to roost, and she was not talking of chickens or curses. There was a man who used to turn up regularly to buy pigeons from the bird and cage shop downstairs at Little White Lion Street. He ran a messenger service: his birds were sent afar and then dispatched, when necessary, with an urgent note, for a pigeon will always fly home. When Mrs Mack talked about birds returning to roost, she meant that if one sends enough opportunities out into the world, eventually they come back.
And so. My birds are coming home to roost, and I feel myself being drawn inexorably towards the nexus of my story. It all happens so quickly from here.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Summer, 2017
Elodie’s room at The Swan was on the first floor at the far end of the hallway. There was a leadlight window, with a box-seat for one that provided a glimpsed view of the Thames, and she was sitting with a pile of books and papers beside her, eating the sandwich she’d bought at lunchtime but had decided would do just as well for dinner. It did not pass beneath Elodie’s attention that it had been one week exactly since she’d sat in the window of her own flat in London, wearing her mother’s veil and watching the same river heave silently towards the sea.
A lot had happened since then. Ergo, she was ensconced in a room of her own in the tiny village of Birchwood, having been to the house itself not once but twice since she’d arrived in town yesterday afternoon. Today had presented something of a frustration: as she was being led around Penelope’s friend’s elaborate conversion in Southrop, admiring politely the boundless soft furnishings in every shade of tasteful grey, Elodie had been longing to get back to the house. She had extricated herself as soon as possible with a promise to return tomorrow at eleven, telephoned a local taxi, and then had to bite her hand to stop herself from crying tears of frustration as they travelled ten miles per hour behind the ambling piece of farm machinery.
She hadn’t made it back to Birchwood Manor before closing time, but she had at least been able to gain access to the garden. Thank God for Jack, who clearly didn’t work for the museum but apparently had some function there. She had met him yesterday when she’d arrived off the train from London and walked down to the house. He’d let her in and as soon as she stepped across the threshold, she’d been overcome with certainty that for the first time in a long time she was exactly where she was supposed to be. Elodie had felt a strange sense of being drawn further inside, as if the house itself had invited her; which was a ridiculous thing to think, let alone say, and no doubt an imagining created in order to justify an entry that was almost certainly not authorised.
As Elodie finished the sandwich, her phone rang and Alastair’s name appeared on the screen. She didn’t pick up, letting it ring out instead. He would only be calling to tell her again how upset Penelope was and to ask her to reconsider the wedding music. When Elodie had first told him, there’d been silence at the other end of the line so that she’d thought, at first, the connection had been lost. And then, ‘Are you joking?’ he’d said.
Joking? ‘No, I—’
‘Listen.’ He’d made a small choked noise of laughter, as if he were sure there’d been a simple misunderstanding that they would soon sort out. ‘I really don’t think you can back out now. It isn’t fair.’
‘Fair?’
‘On Mother. She’s very invested in playing the videos. She’s told all of her friends. It would crush her, and for what?’
‘I just … don’t feel comfortable with it.’
‘Well, we’re certainly not going to find a better performer.’ Noise had come from his end of the line, and Elodie had heard him say to someone else ‘Be there in a minute’ before he returned to the call. ‘Look, I’ve got to go. Let’s leave this for now and we’ll talk about it when I’m back in London, okay?’
And before Elodie could tell him that, no, actually, it wasn’t okay – she had made a decision and there was nothing further to talk about – he’d gone.
Now, alone in the quiet hotel room, Elodie was aware of a constricted feeling that had spread across her chest. Possibly she was simply tired and overwhelmed. She would have liked to talk to someone who’d agree that’s all it was and tell her everything was fine, but Pippa was the obvious choice, and Elodie had a strong suspicion that Pippa would not tell her what she wanted to hear. And where would that leave her? In a mess, an enormous mess, and Elodie did not like messes. Her entire life had been an exercise in avoiding, sorting and eradicating them completely.
So she put Alastair out of mind and took up the articles instead. Tip had turned up out of nowhere with them on Thursday. He’d been standing outside her flat beside his old blue bicycle when she arrived home from work. He’d had a canvas satchel over one shoulder, which he took off and handed to her. ‘My mother’s pieces,’ he’d said. ‘The ones she wrote when we were living at Birchwood.’
Inside the satchel was a tattered cardboard folder containing typewritten pages and a large collection of newspaper clippings. The by-line belonged to Juliet Wright, Elodie’s great-grandmother. ‘“Letters from the Laneway”,’ she’d read.
‘My mum wrote them during the war. They came to your Grandma Bea after Juliet died, and then to me. Seemed like it might be the right time to pass them on to you.’
Elodie had been overwhelmed by the gesture. She remembered her great-grandmother vaguely: there had been a visit to a very old woman in a nursing home when Elodie was around five. Her abiding memory was a head of paper white hair. She asked Tip what Juliet had been like.
‘Wonderful. She was smart and funny – acerbic at times, but never with us. She looked like Lauren Bacall, if Lauren Bacall had been a 1940s journalist in London and not a Hollywood star. She always wore trousers. She loved my dad. She loved Bea, Red and me.’
‘She never married again?’
‘No. But she had a lot of friends. People who’d known him – theatre people. And she was a fierce correspondent, always writing and receiving letters. That’s how I think of her now: sitting at her writing desk, scribbling away.’
Elodie had invited him upstairs for a cup of tea; she had a list of questions that had formed since she’d been to see him at his studio at the weekend, particularly after Pippa had given her Caroline’s photograph. She showed it to him, explained when and where it had been taken, and watched closely, trying to read his expression.
‘Do you recognise the place that they’re sitting?’
He shook his head. ‘There’s not a lot of detail. Could be anywhere.’
Elodie had been sure that he was obfuscating. She’d said, ‘I think she went to Birchwood Manor with him on the way home to London. The house was special to her and it seems that he was, too.’
Tip had avoided her eyes, handing the photograph back. ‘You should ask your dad about it.’
‘And break his heart in the process? You know he can’t say her name without weeping.’
‘He loved her. And she loved him. They were best friends, the two of them.’
‘But she betrayed him.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘I’m not a child, Tip.’
‘Then you’ve seen enough to understand that life is complicated. Things aren’t always what they seem.’
His words had echoed eerily the comment her father had made on the subject all those years ago when he said that life was long, that being human wasn’t easy.
They’d changed the subject, but Tip reprised it when he was leaving, saying again that she should speak to her father. He’d said it firmly, almost like an instruction. ‘He might surprise you.’
Elodie wasn’t so sure about that, but she certainly intended to pay Tip another visit when she got back to London. She had refrained on Thursday from asking him again about the woman in white, feeling that she’d pushed the friendship far enough for one day; but this morning, over breakfast, when she was reading Juliet’s articles, something had struck
her as odd.
She riffled through the folder now to find the particular article. Most of the ‘Letters from the Laneway’ pieces were stories about people in the local community, others about her own family. Some were touching, others very sad; a few were laughably funny. Juliet was the sort of writer who did not ever completely disappear from the page; each turn of phrase was distinctly her own.
At one point, in an article about the family’s decision to adopt a homeless dog, she had written, ‘There are five of us living in our house. Me, my three children, and a flame-haired figment in a white dress, created by my son’s imagination and so vivid to him that we must consult her on every family decision. Her name is Birdie and thankfully she shares my son’s affection for dogs, although she has specified that she would prefer an older dog with a settled temperament. It is a sentiment, happily, with which I fully concur, and so both she and Mr Rufus, our newly arrived arthritic nine-year-old hound, are welcome to remain part of the family for as long as they so choose.’
Elodie read the lines again now. Juliet was writing about her son’s imaginary friend, but the description was uncannily similar to the woman in the photograph, Edward Radcliffe’s model; Juliet also wrote that her son had called the ‘figment’ Birdie. The letter that Elodie had found behind the mount of the framed photograph of Radcliffe’s model was addressed to James Stratton and signed from ‘BB’.
While Elodie didn’t think for a second that Tip’s childhood imaginary friend was going to prove a profitable avenue of enquiry, having now read Leonard Gilbert’s book twice since Pippa gave it to her, she had started to wonder whether there might not be another explanation. Whether perhaps her great-uncle had seen a picture of the woman when he was a child, maybe even the lost painting itself. Edward’s book contained preliminary sketches that suggested he was about to start on a new work featuring his model, ‘Lily Millington’. What if the lost painting had been at Birchwood Manor all this time, and Tip had discovered it there as a boy?
There was no point ringing him to ask – he didn’t like the telephone and besides, the last number she had for him was so outdated it was a digit short – but she would be going to see him again at his studio as soon as possible.
Elodie yawned and climbed down from the window seat, taking Leonard’s book with her and hopping into bed. In lieu of the house itself, the book was a close second. Leonard’s own love for Birchwood Manor was tangible, even as he wrote about Edward Radcliffe’s consuming passion for the place.
There was a photograph of the house inside the book, taken in 1928 during the summer that Leonard Gilbert had been in residence. The property had been neater back then; the trees smaller, the exposure of the photograph blown out so that the sky looked smaller, too. There were earlier photographs as well: images from the summer of 1862, when Edward Radcliffe and his artist friends had been in residence. They didn’t look like the usual Victorian portraits. The people in them gazed at Elodie across time and made her feel strange, as if they were watching her. She had felt like that at the house, too – had turned around a couple of times expecting to see Jack behind her.
She read for a while, dipping into the chapter that outlined Lily Millington’s supposed role in the theft of the Radcliffe Blue diamond. Elodie had found a later article, published by Leonard Gilbert in 1938, in which he walked his theory back, based on further interviews with his ‘anonymous source’. But it wasn’t often cited, probably because it didn’t offer much new to scholarship beyond further uncertainty.
Elodie didn’t know a lot about jewellery; she would be hard pressed to spot the difference between a priceless diamond and a glass pretender. Her attention went now to her own hand lying across the page of Leonard’s book. After Alastair had slipped the diamond solitaire on her finger, he’d told her she could never take it off. Elodie had thought he was being romantic until he said, ‘A diamond that size? Far too expensive to insure!’
It worried her daily, the value of the engagement ring. Sometimes, despite what Alastair had said, she took it off before work and left it at home; the claws snagged on her cotton archival gloves and she was terrified that if she removed it at her desk it might drop into one of the boxes and never be seen again. She’d agonised over where to hide it before deciding on her childhood charm box, where it could nestle in amongst the cheerful little-girl treasures. There was an irony to the choice, and it seemed like the perfect dissemblance to hide the diamond in plain sight.
Elodie switched off the bedside lamp and, as she watched the minutes on the digital clock change with interminable slowness, her mind went to the reception venue in Southrop. She didn’t think she could face another round tomorrow of inane chatter about ‘the happiest day’ of her life. She had a train to catch at four in the afternoon: what if she were held up again, looking through pictures of different place settings, and missed her chance to see inside the house? No, it was impossible. Elodie decided that she would risk Penelope’s displeasure and cancel the appointment first thing.
She fell asleep, at last, to the noise of the nearby river, and dreamed of Leonard and Juliet, Edward and Lily Millington, and at one stage even the mysterious Jack, whose purpose at the house was still in question; who had intuited her need to see inside; who had been kind about her mother’s death. And to whom, though she would never admit it when awake, she found herself inexplicably drawn.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
There had been a change in the wind over the last half-hour. It was still not midday, but the sky was darkening and Jack had a feeling it was going to rain later. He was standing on the edge of the meadow and picked up his camera, looking through the viewfinder at the distant water’s edge. It was a powerful zoom and he was able to zero in on the tops of some reeds that grew along the bank. He sharpened the focus and in his concentration the noise of the river disappeared.
Jack didn’t take the photo. The temporary silence was enough.
He had known there was a river; in the brief that he’d been given, there’d been a map of the property. But he hadn’t realised he would hear it at night when he closed his eyes to go to sleep.
The river was placid up here. Jack had been talking to a fellow with a narrowboat who told him there was a strong pull after storms. He’d gone along with the story, but he didn’t really believe it: there were too many locks and weirs that ran the length of the Thames for it to flow with wildness. The river might have been violent once upon a time, but it had long since been shackled and tamed.
Jack knew a bit about water. There had been a creek across the road from their house when he was growing up. It had run dry much of the time, and then when the rains finally came it would fill in a matter of hours. It would rush and tumble, angry and hungry, roaring day and night.
He and his brother Ben used to take an inflatable raft out to ride the short-lived rapids, knowing full well that in a matter of days the creek would be returned to its usual stagnant dribble.
Their dad had always warned them about the raft and about kids who went into drainpipes when the floods came. But Ben and Jack only rolled their eyes at each other and made sure to blow up the raft after they’d sneaked it out of the garage and across the road. They weren’t worried about the creek. They knew how to handle themselves in water. Until they didn’t, that is. Until the flood that happened in the summer when Ben was eleven and Jack was nine.
In the distance, the sky lit up golden, and a low disgruntlement of thunder rolled softly down the river towards him. Jack checked his watch and saw that it was almost midday. The atmosphere was eerie: that strange unearthly twilight that always settled before a storm.
He turned around and started back towards the house. The carpenter had left a light on, he noticed as he crossed the meadow: he could see it up in the attic window, and Jack reminded himself to turn it off when he opened the house for Elodie.
She was waiting for him when he reached the coach way and the iron gate came into sight. She lifted her hand to wave and then she
smiled and Jack felt the same frisson of interest that he’d felt the evening before.
He blamed it on the house. He’d been sleeping poorly, and not just because of the god-awful mattress on that bed in the malt house. He’d been having weird dreams ever since he arrived, and although it wasn’t the sort of thing he’d have brought up in the local pub, there was a strange feeling in the house, as if he were being watched.
You are, you fool, he told himself. By the mice.
But it didn’t feel like mice. The sense of being watched reminded Jack of the early days of being in love, when the most ordinary of glances was loaded with meaning. When half a smile from a particular woman could cause a stirring deep down low within his belly.
He gave himself a stern word about overcomplicating his life. He was here to convince Sarah that he should be given another chance to know their girls. That was it. And possibly to find a lost diamond. If it existed. Which it most likely didn’t.
She had a suitcase with her, Jack saw as he got closer. ‘Moving in?’ he called.
A blush came immediately to her cheeks. He liked the way she blushed. ‘I’m on my way back to London.’
‘Where did you park?’