by C F Dunn
“I take it you are referring to my financial affairs again?”
“… penniless, impoverished, impecunious…”
“All right, what’s the matter?”
“It makes my income irrelevant. I feel redundant in the face of such wealth.”
“Mmm, do you indeed.” We walked on a few paces. “It’s true that we don’t need your income any more than we need what I earn, but that’s not the point. It’s fair remuneration for our efforts. Besides, you want to work for your own sense of self-worth, don’t you? As do I. It’s part of who you are.”
After a lifetime of arguments with my father it came as a welcome change not having to explain. I remembered Elena saying how she longed to bake cakes and make a home for Matias, and how work was something she did until she married. Not for me – my work had always meant more to me than a means of passing the time.
“So you’re happy for me to work when we’re married? You don’t want me to stay at home and twiddle my thumbs and cook?”
He snorted back a laugh, for which I gave a reproving look. “Sorry, that was uncalled for I know. I’m sure you could cook if you wanted to. No, I don’t expect you to stay at home and keep house – what century do you think I come from? If I wanted a housekeeper, I’d hire one, although the thought of you in nothing but an apron is quite appealing…” He raised an eyebrow and was only saved from my scathing reply because we needed to cross the road and I had to concentrate.
“What are you doing?” he asked when we reached the other side.
“Avoiding the cracks between slabs,” I said, doing just that.
“And the reason being…?”
I let go of his arm and hopped a few paces. “Ooo, you had a deprived childhood.” I spied a lovely clear stretch of pavement, free of pedestrians, perfect for playing hopscotch. “Haven’t you heard of the bears?”
“Am I going to regret asking what bears have to do with the sidewalk?”
“Probably.” I started to hopscotch down the pavement. “For the sake of the uninitiated, the corners of London streets are crowded with bears waiting for anyone silly enough to step on the lines between the slabs.”
“Are they indeed,” he said, amused.
“Oh yes. Masses of them waiting to gobble you up.” I jumped a few more steps, then spun around to face him. “Didn’t Henry grow up with Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh?”
“I’m afraid he didn’t. He’s obviously suffered as a result. I take it you did?”
I made it to the next road intersection without knocking anyone over and waited for him to join me. “It’s a fundamental part of childhood – that and Peter Rabbit and Jeremy Fisher. Did you have anything like them as a child?”
We crossed the road to a line of glossy shop windows, all halogen lights and monochromatic minimalism. I couldn’t see any price tags.
“Expectations of childhood were quite different. My mother died when I was nearly three and my father said she had a lot of sickness with her second pregnancy. I was quite lively and probably a handful, so I spent much of the time with my grandmother.” He stopped outside a window with faceless manikins sporting extravagant wedding dresses. “We have plenty of time to look at dresses if you would like to,” he offered. Frankly, I thought his childhood more interesting, but I would have to wear something for our wedding and at least this shop looked as if it avoided flounces.
“Five minutes,” I conceded.
Well, that was a joke. It took over two hours to disengage from the exceptionally helpful assistants. I stood in front of one of those mirrors designed to reflect an unrealistically positive image and felt my heart sink as the two exquisitely dressed women fussed and preened around me. There were an awful lot of off-the-shoulder designs that made the most of my freckles and not enough of my bust. Others were made more of pearls and sparkly bits than fabric and weighed a ton. I quite liked a long, slim dress in a delicate wild silk that took in my curves and ended with a modest train, but then I saw the price-tag and nearly had a fit. Less is more, I thought, and in this case, a very great deal more. The women twittered and swooped between us, flattering and gushing, but all the while I felt acutely aware that it was Matthew’s approval they sought, not mine: they assumed he was paying, and that was galling. By noon, I’d had enough.
“Time for lunch,” he said cheerfully, sensing my fraying mood before I said anything.
“You thought that funny, didn’t you?” I asked as we escaped into the sunshine.
His attempt to conceal his mirth failed. “It was quite amusing, yes. I thought the one with the black stripes looked… striking.”
“You mean the one that made me look like a zebra with a ten-foot train? Yes, wasn’t it just,” I said without any effort to disguise sarcasm.
“However, the plain one was very elegant. I thought you liked it?”
“I did.”
“But not enough to buy it?”
Not at that price. “No, not really. Golly, I’m hungry.”
“Really,” he said, unconvinced, and we went in search of somewhere to eat.
We ended up in a quiet park underneath a lace-work of trees, watching small children play in the sun-dappled shade.
“So, you were telling me about your childhood,” I reminded him, munching through an apple to make up for the chocolate and bagel already consumed.
“My childhood, yes. Well, as I said, my grandmother – your namesake – helped bring me up in those initial years after my mother died and before I went to school. I had a tutor of course, so from a very early age I had formal lessons.”
I licked my fingers. “In what?”
“Latin, Greek, and French, History, Geography, Mathematics, Music, Rhetoric – and formal lessons in Scripture – that sort of thing – a typical gentleman’s education you could call it, except…” A child fell over and he watched and waited until she scrambled to her feet without obvious injury before continuing. “Except my father was always interested in science – or science as we knew it then – so he encouraged me to take an interest in the natural world: to observe, to think, and to draw conclusions based on those observations.”
“But what about cracks and bears?” I asked, remembering the snugly times at bedtime with my mother or Nanna as they read me comforting stories from pastel-coloured picture books. “What about cuddles?”
“Expectations of childhood were different then…”
I humphed, interrupting him. “I know that, but still…”
“… and I was going to say that although it was different, I still felt loved and wanted, if that is what’s bothering you. I used to sit next to my grandmother as she worked her embroidery and she would tell me stories of her childhood and that of her parents. And she would sing and sometimes play the cittern or lute if her fingers weren’t too stiff – I liked that. She had her solar in the south wing and it was warmer there in winter than anywhere else.”
“So you have happy memories of your early childhood?” A football rolled towards us, bumping into my foot. Matthew bent down and threw it back to the waiting boy before answering.
“It was strict and quite regimented, but I found security in that and I always knew where I stood. And there was a certain amount of freedom many children don’t have now. There were fewer pressures and I had the run of the estate and no rules on safety apart from not getting myself killed. So there was freedom, and yes, on the whole my memories are happy – perhaps more so than yours because I didn’t have the friction with my father that you did.”
I didn’t want to think about the incessant rows with Dad when he was in one of his black-dog moods. “I was just thinking – can we go to the museum now? Do we have time?”
He shook his head, smiling. “No, we don’t – and we don’t have to talk about your childhood either, if you don’t want to. The Met will take a whole day to do it justice, so I thought we could save it for tomorrow.”
CHAPTER
7
Waiting Room
“Hurry up!” I all but jumped up and down in the lift but it stuck stubbornly to its sedate descent to the lobby. “Come on, come on,” I urged.
“We have all day, there’s no rush,” Matthew reminded me. “The Met doesn’t shut until five-thirty and you’ll be dead on your feet by then. Pace yourself a bit.”
“But it’s already nine…”
“Yes, and it doesn’t open for another half-hour; slow down.” The lift came to a halt with a refined thump and I shot out as the doors opened, poise and refinement put on hold. “And you haven’t eaten enough to keep you going,” he called after me. I waved the remains of the muffin I had secreted from breakfast as evidence to the contrary as I crossed the lobby, ignoring Diamond Woman sprawled conspicuously on a gilt sofa. Golly, was that fur she wore? It clashed with the fake tan.
I writhed impatiently as Matthew exchanged unhurried pleasantries with our butler (butler, for goodness sake!) who escorted us to the waiting car, but it took only minutes to reach the Metropolitan Museum.
“Where to first?” Matthew asked as I scanned the list of galleries in the entrance foyer that reminded me a bit of the Natural History Museum.
With so much to choose from, I almost salivated. “Well,” I began, reading down the list, checking each off on my fingers: “First things first – all the early galleries: Egyptian Art, Greek and Roman Art, then the Middle Ages – this is agony, there’s lots – European Paintings, the Textile Center. Where’s the Cloister Collection? It’s not housed here, is it? Will we have time to see everything? And what about you? What would you… like… to see…?”
Matthew held up a hand as I stuttered to a halt. “Right – stop – I understand your desire to feed your obsession and encapsulate world history in one day, but we won’t be able to see everything and you will need to eat at some point, so let’s prioritize and we’ll go from there.” I must have looked horrified at the suggestion that we leave something out, because he grimaced and shook his head in resignation. “All right, but don’t overdo it. You had a long enough day yesterday as it is.”
“And night,” I reminded him.
“And night,” he agreed, grinning now, “but it was a great evening. Let’s just take today one step at a time.”
By the time we had viewed American culture, skimmed Japan and China, and lingered among Arms and Armor, it neared noon. After a sit-down lunch, where he kept me in my chair until I had eaten enough to satisfy him, we headed for the European galleries. He became progressively more reflective as we toured the portraits, until we came to a painting of a thoughtful young man. After a while, I became conscious that his mood had changed perceptibly and a milky-white colour permeated the air around him, like mist, but enveloping, comforting. It wasn’t a colour I had seen around him before. My hand found his. “What are you thinking?” He contemplated the picture a moment longer before answering.
“I was thinking that this was a contemporary of mine. We didn’t know each other, but we breathed the same air, we ate the same food – yet here I am and there he is – centuries apart, and the only thing that separates us is that he is dead and I am not.”
“Does that upset you?”
“Not any more.” And he raised my hand and kissed the ring on my finger.
“I love portraits,” I said as we moved on to the next. “I like the way they form a tangible bridge with the past, more so than any other art form.”
“Perhaps, but they were often painted with an agenda in mind, be it political, spiritual or whatever, nearly always projecting an image of themselves they wanted us to see. It’s the ultimate form of hypocrisy. Take this man…” He indicated the image of an Italian banker from the late fifteenth century, his hands together in prayer. “His business was making money, yet to look at him here, he appears more like a priest than a businessman. Where’s the honesty in that?” He frowned at him. I thought he was being a tad harsh.
“But that tells us just as much about him in another way. He wants us to remember him as a righteous man, whatever the nature of his livelihood. To him that is more important than being remembered as a merchant. Whether he lived his life as he wanted us to think he did is another matter, but he thought it important enough to commit it in paint.” I recalled Matthew’s parents’ tomb lying against the south aisle of the long forgotten church far away in Rutland where he had been born, of his disfigured image – his face smashed beyond recognition – an outcast in his own community. I thought then of his likeness captured in glass with the rest of his family, immortalized. I shook my head to clear my mind of the memory and moved on to another painting.
“What about this chap?” Matthew said. “It’s clear he’s a monk and from that we are supposed to determine the man, but do we, other than he’s a Carthusian with a dodgy beard and shifty eyes? Is he being any more honest than the banker?”
“Probably not if you put it that way, but who would want to be remembered for their faults? I wouldn’t.” I wondered how Matthew would want to be remembered by the world if he had a choice: as son, father, surgeon, betrayed nephew to a jealous uncle? Or as a glitch, a misfit, a survivor? He beat me to it.
“Emma, how would you want to be portrayed?”
The question took me by surprise. “I really don’t know. It would presuppose anyone would be interested, unless I do something earth-shattering or useful in the future. Having my portrait painted would be pointless, don’t you think?”
“Why? Isn’t your work worth remembering you for?”
“Not really, no.”
“What about your descendants?”
I laughed until I realized he was serious. “Children – you want us to have children, Matthew?”
“Why not? Don’t you?”
That was something else I hadn’t given any serious thought to. For the time being, the museum galleries were forgotten.
“I don’t know. I’ve never considered myself to be very maternal, and besides, wouldn’t it add yet another layer of complication to our already complicated lives and one we could do without?”
“How so?”
“Eventually it would bring more outsiders to the family, more people to know your secret, more risk of exposure to the world.”
“Perhaps, but isn’t that a risk worth taking and didn’t we agree to call them newcomers? Isn’t it one of the greatest legacies we can leave: our children, and our children’s children – people we have loved and nurtured who can bring something good to this world?”
Put that way, he had a point, but he overlooked one thing: Archie’s little red face screwing into a full-throttled scream the moment he saw me came vividly to mind. “But Matthew – me, a mother?”
He caressed my hair with an expression he wore when he wanted to tell me how much he loved me, but couldn’t. “Yes, you. Who better than you?”
We had been alone in our corner with only the watchful eyes of the past to witness our conversation, but now a family of four rounded the corner as if on cue, a tot of about two bouncing on his father’s shoulders. The mother lifted the older boy to have a look at a fine Holbein, pointing out the detail on his clothes. The boy jiggled up and down excitedly, and I found myself trying to hear what he said, imagining what I would say if I were his mother and attempting to engage his interest. I smiled.
“I rest my case,” Matthew said softly. The family passed us, the older brother now tugging at his mother’s hand, impatient to finish with these dead men’s faces, irrelevant in his world. We continued our perambulation.
“Have you ever had your portrait painted?” I asked him.
“Once, a very long time ago, shortly before my… resurrection.” Pain lay behind the word; it still sat uncomfortably after all this time. “My father wanted a portrait in case something happened to me. He never said so, of course, but war had broken out and Death is unpredictable in whom he takes.”
“Where is it now?”
“I don’t know. Lost – destroyed probably. When I realized I wasn
’t aging I went back for it some time after my father’s death to cover my tracks, but it wasn’t there any more. I expect the servants burned it in the hope they would dissociate the household from the taint of my memory – a purge, if you will – a cleansing fire.” His mouth twisted.
I hated to see it, to hear the hurt in his voice, and my army of sprites took up arms inside me. “I detest what they did to you and what they had been prepared to do.”
His eyes widened. “No, Emma, don’t blame them; they were afraid. They lived in fear. It was all around us like a hidden enemy – we never knew when it would surface.”
“But you said they purged you, Matthew, like some disease.”
“Yes, but I don’t blame them. Their reaction was symptomatic of the time. They were ordinary people caught up in it all. You know as well as I do how it was then; you’ve made it your life’s work.”
“They had choices, Matthew, just as you or I do. They chose to disown you; they didn’t have to.”
“And you know what might have happened to them if they didn’t. Where would you draw the line to protect yourself, your parents, your children?”
“Loyalty, Matthew – they had a duty to you as their lord. What do we have unless we can depend on those around us? My ancestors’ motto was Loyauté Me Oblige, but some of them didn’t and they betrayed the trust placed in them. Treachery is never right, whatever the circumstances.”
“Even if faced with torture and death?” he asked soberly.
“Yes.”
“You can be so uncompromising sometimes; would that it were so simple.” We had caught up with the little family, the toddler creased with laughter as his brother played hide-and-seek behind his father’s legs. “Faced with a choice between protecting your lord, to whom you owe fealty and your livelihood, or your family and children, with whom you have bonds of love and kinship, who would you really choose when it came to it? Don’t tell me it would be your master, because I won’t believe you. It’s an age-old dilemma and I don’t suppose it’s any easier now than it was then, or a thousand years before that.”