ALSO BY KIMBERLEY FREEMAN
Duet
Gold Dust
Wildflower Hill
Lighthouse Bay
Ember Island
Evergreen Falls
Contents
Title Page
Also By Kimberley Freeman
Dedication
The Present
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
The Present
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
The Present
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
The Present
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
The Present
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
The Present
Chapter 25
The Present
Chapter 26
The Present
Acknowledgements
Hachette Australia
Copyright
For my mother
The Present
‘Mum?’
‘She gets confused. Don’t be upset if she—’
‘Mum?’ I say it more firmly, more like I might have as a teenager, benign exasperation. I am looking right at my mother’s face; she is looking right back at me, but it’s as though a veil has come down between us. On one side, the nurse and me and the pale green walls of the clinic. On the other, my mother. Lost at sea.
‘Victoria?’ she says at last, the veil dropping.
I smile. ‘It’s me. Here I am.’ She’s the only person who calls me by my full name. To everyone else I’m Tori, a contemporary no-fuss name. She named me for a queen. I’m not a queen.
‘I wandered into traffic,’ she says, by way of an explanation for the abrasions on her pale, softly lined face.
‘I heard.’
‘Could have been worse, I suppose. I didn’t break anything.’ She sniffs. ‘You didn’t come all the way from Australia for this, surely?’
The nurse pats my mother’s thigh through the blankets. ‘I’ll leave you girls to it, shall I, Mrs Camber?’
‘Professor Camber.’ My mother and I both correct the nurse at once, in identical voices of weary outrage.
‘Well, look whose memory is improving,’ the nurse says as she leaves, and it isn’t kindly. I thought nurses were kind, but the way this one has spoken about my mother is anything but: ‘The old dear.’ ‘Madam.’ ‘The silly duck.’ Mum is only seventy, and there’s nothing silly or duck-like about her.
Alone now, I return my gaze to Mum’s face. She looks frightened. The fear jumps into me, making my stomach go cold. Why is she frightened? Should I be frightened? I fake a smile over it. ‘So,’ I say.
She smiles too. Somehow my smile reassures her. ‘You didn’t come all the way from Australia for this, surely,’ she says again, and I don’t know if she’s repeating it for effect, or because she’s forgotten she already said it.
‘The accident? Not really. It’s … the other …’
Her eyes slide sideways. My mother was a great beauty in her youth, and great beauty does not leave a face ever, really. Yes, her hair is the colour of steel, her cheeks are hollow, and the skin around her lips is crisscrossed by lines; but her eyes are still huge and blue, almost violet, the lashes still long and dark.
A weak beam of sunlight spears through the window, and I hear muffled seagulls riding on the currents above the Bristol channel. Mum works in Bristol, but has always lived here in Portishead. Her house is a five-minute walk from the clinic. She must have walked past it a thousand-thousand times on her afternoon strolls, never suspecting she would end up in here: the ‘home for ladies who have gone doo-lally’ as she’d often called it.
Will she work in Bristol for much longer, though? Her reluctant retirement has been the thorn under the skin of all her emails to me over the past eighteen months.
‘It’s not as bad as they think,’ she says at last. ‘I forget some things, remember others …’
‘When your doctor phoned she said it’s not the first time you’ve wandered.’
‘I took a wrong turn on the way home from work one day. They changed the bus route and it confused me. Don’t listen to Doctor Chaudry, she’s young and thinks she knows everything.’
I don’t push it further. Four times, the doctor has said. Four times over two years Mum has been found, bewildered and lost. ‘We can assume there have been other times, when she’s managed to get herself home and not told me,’ Dr Chaudry has said. Tests, a diagnosis have all been carried out without my knowledge. The outcome was no surprise. Locksley College’s fearsome Emeritus Professor of History, Margaret Camber: doo-lally.
Definitely doo-lally.
And while that’s a terrible diagnosis for any woman to receive, it seems doubly so for a woman who has been so fiercely clever her whole life.
Triply so, because she’s my mum.
I sit and hold her hand in the softly lit room, not able to believe that it’s actually happening. That my mother is not invincible. That sickness and mortality will prey on her, just as they prey on all of us. My head grinds with jetlag. I can’t grasp whole thoughts, just the edges of them. I am sad and I want my mum to comfort me but, bafflingly, it seems it’s my job to comfort her.
‘How long are you staying?’ she asks after a while.
‘As long as you need me to.’
‘Geoff will be annoyed if I keep you here too long.’
‘Geoff will be fine.’
The quiet descends again. Then, ‘How long are you staying?’
‘As long as … I’m not sure. I haven’t booked a return flight.’
‘I need you to go to the office for me.’
‘Your office? At Locksley?’
She nods, and I notice her body is filling with energy. She grows stiff. ‘They’ll throw it all out and I’m not done sorting it yet.’
‘Your papers and books? You want me to pack them up?’
‘There’s things in there … they’ve heaped them all in the middle of the room. Scoundrels.’
‘Of course, Mum. Of course. Where would I find the key?’
‘With my other keys. My handbag is in that drawer.’
She indicates a bureau on the other side of the bed. I slide open the deep bottom drawer and pull out her handbag, then find a handful of keys.
‘I’ll go straight up there when the nurse kicks me out,’ I tell her.
Her body relaxes again. ‘I thought I saw him, you know. Emile.’
‘Who’s Emile?’
‘I realise now that’s not possible. I got mixed up. But I saw him and I walked towards him and didn’t check for cars.’
‘Who’s Emile?’ I ask again.
She shakes her head sadly. ‘I just wanted to ask him how it ended.’ She trails into mutters. The veil is down again. I’m not even sure she knows I’m here.
I stroke her hand and say nothing. The nurse comes in, cheerily announcing afternoon tea time. I don’t know whether it’s the jetlag or seeing my mother like this, but it doesn’t feel like afternoon tea time. It feels like midnight.
•
Locksley College is on a long tree-lined street just over the Clifton Suspension Bridge. It has always delighted my mother that she crosses an icon of Victorian architecture every day on her way to work, given that she is a nineteenth-century historian.
To be precise, Mum’s field is the nineteenth-century English private sphere. She even hosted a short television series once, on BBC2, called Victorian Women’s Lives. That was back in the 1990s, when I was still young enough to be embarrassed by the way my male peers at work talked about how attractive my mother was: Mum was fifty, I was nineteen, and it seemed the whole world had decided that I should stand in her shadow.
I crawl the kerb looking for a place to park the rental car. I am really too tired to drive, but I survived the two-hour journey along the M4 from Heathrow, so to stay home when Mum is so desperate for me to look in on her office seems cruelly cautious. I find a spot and pay the meter, and then cross the road to Beech House (constructed 1901, so just Victorian) and head up to the third floor via stone stairs worn into smooth grooves, to Mum’s office.
I feel … not guilty; perhaps furtive is the word I’m looking for. I glance around before slotting the key into the lock. All is quiet. It’s after six. Everyone has either gone home to enjoy the long English evening, or they are on summer sabbatical. I close the door behind me and I’m engulfed with the smells I associate with my mother: old books and rose oil. I take a moment, a few breaths, then survey the task.
My stomach tightens with anger. Mum is right: some ‘scoundrel’ has pulled all of her papers out of drawers and off shelves, and thrown them haphazardly into boxes in the middle of the room, all piled on top of each other, none sealed. It’s a terrible mess. The books are stacked on the desk and on the floor all around, the bowed bookshelves bare except for dust.
‘Oh, Mum. I’m sorry,’ I say under my breath as I pull out a sheaf of papers – old pages from a recipe book dated 1881 – and fan myself with them. The room is stuffy and hot. The task looks insurmountable.
I make a vow to come back in the morning, early. After a good night’s sleep. And then I’ll find the Dean and perhaps I’ll punch him right between the eyes for harassing my mother to retire before she is ready and for letting some clown make such a mess of these precious documents.
I sit heavily at Mum’s desk. Through the window, I see leaves and branches moving in an evening breeze, slightly distorted by the thick glass. Between two stacks of books is a tiny square of paper, frail and crisp under my fingers as I pick it up. The writing is in faded ink, long sloping letters. Underlined, at the top of the page:
To my child, whom I could not keep.
It is only one page long, and a quick glance tells me it ends mid-sentence, and so I know that this page has become separated from its siblings. I imagine the rough men who moved Mum’s things finding it as they left, perhaps under one of their dirty shoes, and carelessly flinging it onto the desk.
To my child. Whom I could not keep.
I’m crying now. I’m tired. Mum’s sick, and I haven’t told her I lost another one. Another baby. Eleven weeks, this time. I had been so close, dangerously close to announcing the happy news. And here I am about to turn forty, and there has been no child in my life. Never will be, probably.
All my children, whom I could not keep.
I blink away tears, frustrated by my own self-pity, and read the first page.
•
To my child, whom I could not keep.
First, above all, never doubt that I loved you. I love you still.
You were created with love, born with love, and taken from me, all for love. I have tried to find you now for months, but my family – especially my sister, who I thought would be kinder to me – steadfastly refuse to tell me where you are, save to say that you are well cared for. By now, you have bestowed your first smiles upon your new mama, perhaps even your first words. You have learned to love the rhythms and timbre of her voice, the feel of her arms around you, the little bed you sleep in. It cuts me sharp as a blade; but I cannot bring myself to imagine taking you from where you are safe and happy. If I did find you, if I did hold you against me as I long to do, I would be doing so in a world of uncertainty and penury. Father has made it clear to me the penalty I would pay for our family’s lost reputation. Love will not keep us from the poor house.
But I have not forgotten you and never will, my girl. Though you may never read it, I am compelled to write down the events that—
•
That’s it. I wonder how long Mum has been in possession of this letter, if the rest of it must be around here somewhere. People all over the world are always sending Mum such documents, found in the back of old books and in great-grandmothers’ musty trunks after funerals. She has been trying to convince Locksley to set up a proper archive for all this material, but in the new Dean’s eyes, if the documents aren’t about wars and politics – men’s business – the funding is thin.
I leave the page where I found it. My head is heavy and I won’t be able to stay awake much longer.
I scrawl a ‘DO NOT TOUCH’ sign, lock the door behind me, and return to Mum’s house.
•
The forgotten but familiar smell of my mother’s house greets me as I let myself in. I switch on the light in the entrance and put down my suitcase. I’ll take it upstairs later; for now, I am in search of food and somewhere to lie down.
As the light goes on in the kitchen, I blink in confusion. At first, I think Mum has hung pale yellow bunting everywhere, but I see that instead she has covered the cupboards with sticky reminder notes. Some are perfectly clear: Hairdresser Tuesday 3 p.m. Others are less so: Other book or Last round marks or Ask Beth or 1875. But there are so many, and my eyes travel over them, telling my brain what it doesn’t want to hear. Mum knows she is losing her memory; these are her attempts to preserve it.
From cupboard to cupboard I go, on a sticky-note tour of my mother’s mind. I can’t make any coherent sense of it, but I suppose that is what memory looks like: flashes diverging and coalescing. On one note, midway up the cupboard where the teacups are kept, is simply a name all in capital letters: EMILE VENSON.
It takes my jetlagged brain a few moments to catch up. Mum said that name today. Emile. I thought I saw him, you know.
She’d said something about finding out how things had ended. My mother has been single a very long time. My father, who is dead now, left when I was only two. Many men have been interested in Mum, but she shows no interest in return. I don’t know why. Is Emile a lover? Has he left her? How did I not know? Also, how did I not know my mother was writing her memories on sticky notes? How did I allow the distance between here and Australia to become a distance between her heart and mine?
I press my hips against the counter top and lean forward on my elbows. The kitchen is perfectly quiet and I can hear my own blood thrumming past my ears. Then the refrigerator motor surges to life, making me jump.
Food. Bed.
Then I can close my eyes and think about Mum, and the ocean that has grown between us.
CHAPTER 1
Agnes
1874
Agnes had counted the steps between the lower and upper floors of Perdita Hall hundreds of times. Seventeen. Wide at the bottom, narrower after the turn in the staircase, leading up to a wooden landing whose boards creaked under her feet as she made her way down the faded – but perfectly respectable – hall runner that led to Captain Forest’s office. If she turned the other way, to the right, she would come to the door of Mrs Watford, the senior mistress. That was a well-worn path for Agnes, hauled in again and again for misdemeanours. The thought of never having to see Mrs Watford again was a satisfying one, and the feeling was no doubt returned. The senior mistress’s last words to her had been, ‘At least when you leave we won’t have to open the gate; I expect you’ll simply climb over it like you usually do.’
Agnes approached Captain Forest’s closed door, and she hesitated a moment, glancing out the window at the end of the hall. She could see out over the chapel, the gardens, the workrooms and the dormitories that had been her home for nineteen years. The only home she had ever known. She wondered if she’d miss it, but that hardly seemed possible: she was aching for life to be
gin.
Agnes knocked quickly and quietly.
‘Come,’ he called, and Agnes opened the door.
She had met Captain Forest only once that she could remember. History recorded that Captain Forest met every child when they were first admitted to Perdita Hall, but as Agnes had been a baby then, she had no recollection. The other time was around her tenth birthday. She remembered him as kind, but distracted. At ten, each child in the foundling hospital was given their first trial apprenticeship, either here or with one of the trades or families in the village, and Captain Forest would treat them to tea in his office and a pep talk about what being a Perdita boy or girl meant. He had given her a slice of sponge cake and it had melted on her tongue, buttery and sweet.
Agnes briefly wondered if there would be cake today, but decided not. She was nineteen now, no longer a child. Today, everything changed.
Captain Forest sat at an immense oak desk. On the wall behind him was an ornate barometer. Paintings hung everywhere: translucent turquoise waters and ships ploughing through foam. A brass sextant sat before him, holding down papers.
Agnes went to stand in front of the desk, hands folded across her ribs on her grey cotton dress.
The warm spring light through his window illuminated the silver in his moustache and muttonchop sideburns. ‘Miss Agnes Resolute, I take it?’
‘Good morning, Captain Forest.’
He smiled and indicated the chair beside her. ‘Do sit down.’
Agnes did as she was told, running her fingertips over the fine carvings on the chair’s arms.
Captain Forest hooked a pair of spectacles over his ears and leafed through the documents in front of him. ‘You have been here all your life, Agnes. Just a babe when we took you in.’
‘Aye, sir.’
‘I see you completed your apprentice work in the laundry here at Perdita.’
‘Sewing and mending, sir. I took to it.’ Agnes was an accomplished seamstress mostly because she enjoyed the quiet in the mending room above the laundry, which gave her imagination time and space to roam.
‘Excelled at reading and writing, not so suited to infirmary or kitchen work, an adequate parlour-maid to the Bennett family in upper Hatby …’ He leafed through the pages, her history recorded flat and neat. ‘Oh, dear. You have been cautioned for behaviour many times, Miss Resolute. That is disappointing.’
Stars Across the Ocean Page 1