Secrets of the Past

by Estella McQueen

  Using the House of Commons database, he’d checked Hansard for references to a Harry Bramall. If he was indeed an honourable member, he’d be able to pinpoint whereabouts and attendances in the chamber on specific dates. He’d be able to locate his constituency. He might even be able to work out how often he stayed in the city and how often he returned to Kent. But there was no record of a Harry Bramall during that period or, for that matter, any other. As far as the database was concerned, no such individual existed. If he wasn’t an MP, what was he? What sort of business would require him to be involved in the Queen’s trial? Was he a lawyer, perhaps? Or working for one? Again, he could find no reference.

  Harry’s London address no longer existed: the house had been bulldozed fifty years earlier to make way for a shopping centre. The Bramall family’s Kent estate might well have disappeared in sales and boundary restructuring, but Charlie could find no evidence to support this. There were no properties left to visit.

  All he knew was that there was a famous painting of Queen Caroline’s divorce trial in the National Portrait Gallery. Harry might be lurking in the background somewhere, a face in the crowd. It was worth checking out.

  ‘Okay,’ he primed himself. ‘Let’s do it.’

  The large canvas dominated the entire wall: Queen Caroline in the House of Lords. The woman herself was situated in the foreground, a single female amidst a large gathering of somberly clad male figures. The peers’ morning coats and lawyers’ robes were uniformly black, and aside from the red background, the only other colour came from the gilt pillars and chandeliers above their heads.

  What was Harry Bramall’s involvement? What had this scene got to do with him? If he wasn’t an MP, an earl, or a lawyer, what was he?

  As if compelled by enchantment, Charlie’s feet moved smoothly across the floor. A flicker of an expression was all he needed. He peered at the faces, trying to find his handsome features in amongst the plain, the dull, the ordinary. His eye roved from figure to figure, face to face. The parliamentary gathering included all the key dignitaries of the day. Harry would stand out in a crowd, of course he would. His would be the only face worth looking at. Was that him leaning over the balcony of the public gallery? Was that him on the front benches? Or there, in the doorway?

  The hubbub enveloped him, the anticipation palpable.

  A hush descends as the session begins; lawyers stand up to speak, accusations are about to be leveled at the King’s consort. Queen Caroline, lavishly clad but diminutive amidst the grand scale of her surroundings maintains her regal dignity. ‘I am a Queen, why must I be forced to endure this assault on my reputation? Why must I sit here, day after day, listening to argument and counter argument? I must leave it in the hands of my champions; I must trust that justice will prevail.’

  And then a glimmer of something in the public gallery. A whisper around the gathered fray. Someone fiddles with his buttons, someone else stifles a yawn. Another figure shares a quip with his companion. Interminable, this process, when will it be over? When can we go for lunch?

  Charlie’s heart bumped. Of course! How stupid of him. Harry Bramall wasn’t an MP or a lawyer; he was a parliamentary reporter. He was following the events. Commenting on the situation, and recording it for posterity. That’s why he was in London during the divorce trial. He worked for a newspaper.

  So why, when business allowed, and after Amelia’s letters ceased to arrive, didn’t he force his way into Addleston House and demand an audience with her? What had stopped him? Fear of scandal, exposure, the irate husband? What disenchantment could cause him to fall out of love with Amelia so easily?

  *

  He’d been diligently examining the canvas for many minutes. Other visitors who’d come to view the painting too, began to eye him strangely.

  ‘A colourful period in history,’ said the man alongside.

  ‘Oh yes, vivid.’ He’d made some headway. Now what?

  He made his way downstairs, wondering if he ought to phone Astrid, sound her out. A group of people near the ticket desk blocked the thoroughfare. Some corporate thing, he guessed. Dressed in suits and talking loudly to each other, they radiated self-importance. A school party of nine to ten year olds was clustering by the ticket desk, the teachers surrounding them were doing a head count. The uniforms were bright green, the sweatshirts oversized and baggy, grey trousers pooling around their ankles. He was about to walk past when one of the teachers turned around to face him. It was Melanie, his ex.

  ‘Charlie?’ Melanie immediately clocked him. ‘He-llo! How are you?’

  Several years ago Melanie had been all skyscraper heels, ludicrous haircuts and ‘statement jewellery’. Brash and confident, she ‘ate the room’, as his mother once described it. Not like him. He was more likely to fold the room up and put it away in a nice box somewhere. Today her clothes were a little more practical.

  He lunged forwards and kissed her on both cheeks.

  ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘thank you. How’s Adam?’

  She inclined her head a little, as though he’d made a joke and she didn’t understand the punch line. Perhaps she was embarrassed to be put on the spot in front of her colleagues, not to mention the children, who were looking up at them both with great curiosity.

  ‘Adam’s fine,’ she said. ‘As far as I know.’

  ‘What do you mean by that? Where is he?’

  She spread her arms wide. ‘As you can see I am currently standing in the lobby of a prestigious London art gallery with my Year Sixes! Adam is currently in his own school, Charlie, probably running around the playground as we speak…,’

  Charlie’s hackles rose. Don’t take the piss; you always take the piss.

  ‘Nice bumping into you, though. Give my regards to your Dad when you see him.’

  She was done with him, anxious to return to her kids. She glanced over her shoulder. ‘See you around, maybe. Take care, Charlie. Good bye.’

  The white walls of the lobby seemed to resonate with his puzzlement. She’d destroyed their marriage; surely she maintained some responsibility for it? But more importantly, why wouldn’t she let him see their son?

  Chapter Fifteen

  Once upon a time, Charlie mused, his mother must have been able to dismiss Stuart Gilchrist’s foibles as the price to be paid for living with such an intelligent, eccentric and cerebral man.

  The unfathomable part was what made his parents get married in the first place. There probably wasn’t another couple on the planet so thoroughly ill suited. Her teenage fantasy to study in England and bag herself a well-educated native, didn’t quite come off. The sort of man who earned enough money to own a decent flat in the centre of town, a cottage in the country (preferably within driving distance of Stonehenge) and a lifelong membership to the All England Tennis Club, never materialised. What Gail ended up with was a man who was allergic to pollen, who lived and worked in the London suburbs, whose friends were all academics, and who’d rather cycle everywhere on a twenty-year-old Raleigh than sit behind the wheel of a Jag. Stuart Buchanan ignored all the usual conventions of marriage and carried on as if he was single: finishing work at six; having dinner at seven; retreating to his study by eight. ‘My husband,’ Gail had once despaired, ‘would have been older than me even if he was younger than me.’

  His sombre, starry eyed father had been blown away by Gail’s brash, strident American-ness; like stepping onto a fast moving skateboard for the first time, and it wasn’t until they hit a bump in the tarmac and he ended up on the ground with a ‘what just happened’ look on his face that he realised it was too late to turn back.

  ‘Don’t you want to show me the delights of your country?’ she’d asked him. ‘Don’t you want to take me up a mountain in Scotland, or to the lakes where the poets hung out? Don’t you want to take me to one of those seaside places where they eat cream teas with ‘jam’? Or to Kew Gardens and Buckingham Palace?’

  ‘Not with my hay fever,’ he’d replied. ‘Take the kids.’


  And so mother and sons did the sights together, in the school holidays and at weekends.

  They’d never been in tune, his parents, never really understood what made the other one tick. Opposites attract didn’t even come into it. At some point during their unlikely courtship they must have thought formalizing the relationship was a good plan.

  It wasn’t ordinary things like being unable to endure his Dad’s habit of staying in of an evening to watch old recordings of ‘Silent Witness’, or his insistence on using an elaborate acquiescence when a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ would do – for example: ‘Do you want a custard cream with your tea?’ Answer: ‘It wouldn’t hurt, would it?’ ‘Would you like chips with your lasagne?’ ‘What a delightful idea.’ ‘It’s raining, do you want a brolly?’ ‘That’s an extremely sensible suggestion.’ No, it was major league things like Dad taking the rotting window frame in the spare bed room apart, on the very day that Mum had invited friends to stay. Never mind that she’d spent the best part of two days cleaning the house from top to bottom, and had reminded Dad several times that he needed to move his car into the garage to make way on the drive. Laden with food for the evening dinner, she’d arrived home from the shops to find all the freshly polished surfaces covered in a thick layer of toxic wood dust, and an arctic gale blowing through the upstairs.

  Stuart Gilchrist was currently engaged in preparing a lecture on The Charge of the Light Brigade, and was busily hunting through a corner cupboard in his study. It would be a struggle to divert him from the task in hand. ‘I’ve just seen Melanie in the National Portrait Gallery.’

  Stuart’s knees cracked as he eased back on his haunches. ‘How is she? How’s Adam?’

  ‘Well that’s just it. She didn’t really say.’

  ‘You know there’s nothing stopping you going over there for a visit. I’m sure Adam would love it.’

  Charlie stared at the bald patch on the back of his Dad’s head – tonsure he thought it was called. Like a monk. Only, there was nothing monk-like about Stuart Gilchrist. Actually, scrap that – that’s exactly what he was: his entire life devoted to study.

  ‘You know you really should file things properly.’

  ‘What for? I already know where everything is.’

  ‘And when you’re dead I’m slinging it. It’ll end up as landfill.’

  ‘Do whatever you want,’ said Stuart, and then, as if the fancy prompted itself, ‘How’s your job hunting going?’

  ‘I’ll start looking when I’ve finished at Addleston.’

  ‘Okay, take your time. No rush.’

  ‘Why? Do you want me out?’

  ‘Of course not. Don’t be so touchy.’ Stuart paused. ‘I know you miss her, but you’re better off now. You’ll always care about Adam – but you and Melanie weren’t suited.’

  ‘Tell me something I don’t know.’

  Stuart gave up on the papers and went to sit on the sofa. ‘Come here,’ he said, patting the seat next to him. Charlie did so, wondering what he was about to confess to.

  ‘You know as soon as your mother found out you’d got your university place, she phoned me at work to tell me? She was so excited; she couldn’t wait to share the news! But when she rang off, I had to make up an excuse to leave my desk. I had to go off somewhere by myself for a little weep, you see. Partly because I was so incredibly proud of you of course, but mostly because I knew this was it. This was the part where you left us –’

  Charlie patted his Dad’s fist where it lay clenched on his knee. ‘Little did you know I’d still be living here more than ten years later!’

  ‘I don’t mean that, you know I don’t!’

  ‘My own fault,’ Charlie said. ‘Not Melanie’s.’

  ‘It takes two and all that,’ said Stuart. ‘I know you found her vibrant personality totally captivating, endlessly entertaining, but your mother and I thought she could be a bit temperamental if I’m honest. Those actressy strops got a bit wearing after a while. We thought it was better to ignore it, let you make your own mistakes. In hindsight it was probably the wrong thing to do, but if this is the point where you’re expecting some sort of Buddhist enlightenment and the bestowal of gifts of worldly wisdom, then I’m afraid you’re going to be sorely disappointed.’

  It was already an unusually frank conversation, and although Gail had often remarked that father and son were in absolute symmetry, Charlie didn’t normally confide in him. Granted, if there was a cracking good Simon Schama documentary on they might happily watch it together and make approving noises, but they never talked about personal matters.

  Charlie held out Amelia’s last letter, which he’d been keeping safe and flat inside the pages of a book. ‘It’s from Amelia to Harry, but of course he never read it, it was hidden from him by Mary Ellen. Here, take a look.’

  Reluctantly Stuart reached over and took it. He read it through in silence. ‘What does she mean, ‘not the start,’ but the ‘end of her beginning?’

  ‘Harry was her lifeline, but her hopes were dashed. He let her down.’

  ‘She wouldn’t be the first.’ Stuart read it through again. ‘So sad, so final. But why do you have it?’

  ‘I couldn’t bear to part with it. And I thought I could use it to find out why Mary Ellen did what she did.’

  ‘Sentimental crap,’ said Stuart. ‘So what if Mary Ellen hid the love letters? So what if they were kept apart? Did you stop to think she might have had a valid reason for doing it? Do you think she might have done it to help them, to save them from scandal? Did you consider she might have been threatened, given no choice?’

  ‘Point taken. But don’t you think that if she cared at all, she’d have done something for Amelia?’

  ‘Maybe that’s it. She didn’t care. You must take the letter back,’ Stuart said. ‘Don’t hang on to it. Forget all about this job. Forget about Astrid.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m not stupid,’ said his Dad. ‘Relationships are difficult enough without having all this to contend with.’ He waved his hands vaguely around his head. ‘Best just to stay friends with Astrid. If you really care about her, that is.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ said Charlie. ‘It’s best that I remain celibate?

  Stuart smiled fondly. ‘I kept all your Mum’s letters, you know. The ones she wrote after she’d visited England for the first time. She was only here for the summer. She went back to Massachusetts as soon as my term started.’

  ‘What term?’

  ‘My first teaching job. We both thought it would be too distracting for me to have her around.’ Stuart gave a short, disbelieving laugh. ‘How selfish of me, was that? Basically, I sent her home, assuming that she’d forget all about me. I assumed that I’d forget all about her. But she wrote me these wonderful letters. Smashing, they were.’

  ‘Mum did? She could barely write a shopping list!’

  Stuart chuckled. ‘I’m not going to show them to you because they’re personal, but she wrote to me every week for the whole of the autumn term, and by the time January came around I was persuaded that I had to get her back to England, pronto. So I asked her to marry me and unbelievably, she said yes.’ He pondered. ‘I wonder how your nineteenth century lovers would have gone on if they’d had recourse to the internet. It’s so much easier to stay in touch these days, isn’t it? No need to rely on the tardy post coach. A few minutes spent typing or texting and bing! Away goes your message, and ping! Here comes the reply.’

  He became unnecessarily preoccupied with the current edition of the Radio Times; Charlie knew for a fact that he’d already been through it once with his highlighter pen.

  ‘She gave up a lot,’ Stuart ruminated, ‘when she came here, and I wasn’t as sympathetic as I perhaps should have been. I reasoned that it was her choice, not mine. I’d ventured to ask the question, and she’d acquiesced. I didn’t really want to think about the chances that she might regret that decision – And then of course, there was you to consider… what wit
h your – condition.’ He looked askance. ‘We both loved you very much. We could only go by our personal circumstances, our feelings at the time. That’s all we had, your mother and I, our joint resources. You were our priority. But modern psychology suggests these days that staying together for the sake of the children is emphatically the wrong thing to do.’ He was referring to Melanie again. ‘Some relationships work, others can’t,’ he concluded. ‘No rhyme or reason.’

  Bollocks to that, thought Charlie. There’s always a reason.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Astrid’s voice was brisk, business like voice over the phone. ‘Good morning. Addleston House. How can I help?’

  ‘It’s me, Charlie.’

  Her tone brightened at once. ‘Hi! Where’ve you been? I thought you’d given up on me.’

  ‘Oh I never give up. I wait till I’m given up on.’ He cringed inwardly.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I don’t think we’re quite there yet.’

  A conversational chasm opened up between them. He couldn’t think how to bridge it.

  ‘Did you have something to tell me?’ she asked. ‘Only I’m seeing Mrs Toon in a minute, and I mustn’t keep her waiting…,’

  He gathered his thoughts. ‘Okay. I’ve been doing some digging around, re our friend Harry…,’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I went to look at the picture of the Queen’s trial in the National Portrait Gallery. He’s a parliamentary reporter.’

  She exhaled loudly. ‘Of course! It makes perfect sense. Why didn’t we think of that earlier? Actually, I’ve done some digging of my own. I found a reference to a portrait attributed to a ‘Henry Bramall’ currently owned by a family in Derbyshire. It’s at a place called Brooks Grange Farm. They said we’re welcome to come and visit any time we liked. It’s a bit of trek to get there, but we could do it in a day. It might be our man, or a descendant, or a man who shares a similar name. Either way, the likeness needs to be studied. I’m sure your instincts will be confirmed once you’ve seen his face… oh, bugger!’ There was a noise like she’d spilled pens all over the desk. ‘Charlie? Still there? What do you think?’