There! Grateful, it’s something to do with being grateful . . . I almost remember why this story is familiar, but no, it is gone again. I bite back a sigh of frustration.
‘How did you end up back at Askerby?’
Dosia’s expression flickers strangely and she looks out of the window. ‘I don’t remember,’ she says. She is lying, I am sure, but I have lied about my own memories, too.
‘I have talked too much,’ she says, and her voice thins. ‘I am just a boring old woman, talking about the war. It is all so long ago.’
‘It’s fascinating.’ I mean it, but she is plucking at the arms of her chair and I cast around for something that will divert her from whatever it is that is making her so anxious. ‘Have you got any photographs from when you were young?’
Her face clears. ‘Over there.’ Her hand trembles as she points at an old-fashioned desk, and I struggle out of the chair to limp over and pick up a faded picture of a young girl with a round, smiling face, and carefully rolled hair. There is an appealing brightness and innocence to her, and I recognize the dimple that Angie has inherited.
‘Is this you? You were so pretty!’
Dosia laughs at that and shakes her head. ‘Oh, I was not so pretty,’ she tells me, ‘but prettier than I am now!’
I set the photo back in its place and pick up its neighbour. This one is in black and white, too. It is unmistakably Dosia again, wearing a full, flowery dress and a hat shaped like a petal. She is bending slightly, with her hands on the shoulders of a small boy, and smiling up at the camera. Beside her, a man with his hair slicked back in the style of the early fifties looks moodily at the camera.
‘Is this your husband?’
That flicker again. ‘Adam, yes.’
There is something odd about the little boy. At first I think that it is something to do with the picture or that the camera has shaken, but when I look more closely I see that his face is deformed, so skewed out of alignment that I cannot prevent a sharp intake of breath. His eyes are a strange downturned shape and set oddly in his face, but he is smiling widely.
And is this your son?’ I ask, my voice carefully neutral.
Dosia shrinks back into her chair. All at once she looks very frail and her eyes skitter around the room. ‘That is Peter,’ she whispers, in obvious distress. ‘That poor boy. That poor, poor boy.’
I want to say that his disfigurement was not that bad, but clearly it was. I put the photo back and limp over to sit beside her. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I say. ‘Is Peter still alive? Does he live with you and Angie?’
‘Angie? Is she here?’ She sounds fearful and her face is clouded with confusion. My heart cracks for her. I know what it is like to be lost in a world that doesn’t make any sense.
‘No, Angie’s working,’ I say calmly. ‘She’ll be back later.’
Dosia’s mouth trembles. ‘He was a good man,’ she bursts out. ‘He had a good heart.’
‘Peter?’
‘He deserved better.’ Her rheumy eyes swim with tears and she puts her hand on my arm. It is as if a tiny bird has landed there, as fragile and as light. ‘It’s a secret,’ she says, her voice quavering. ‘You mustn’t tell.’
I have no idea what the secret is, but I pat her hand reassuringly. ‘I won’t say anything,’ I say.
‘I don’t want to leave.’ She is leaning forward, her fingers scrabbling at my arm. ‘Where would I go?’
‘Nobody is going to make you go anywhere, Dosia,’ I say, alarmed by her distress. ‘You can stay here as long as you want, I promise.’
She sinks back into her chair. ‘I won’t tell,’ she says. ‘I won’t say a word.’
I am still thinking about Peter Kaczka as I sit down to dinner that night. I wonder what it is like to grow up with a face that makes other people recoil. I had done it myself, I remember, ashamed. I couldn’t help that small shock as my mind registered the abnormality. His features were so different that it was hard to process that he was just a little boy. The only thing I could recognize was his bright, happy smile.
‘I see Kate is off with the fairies again.’ Margaret’s caustic voice scrapes through the air, and I jerk my attention back to the table. Margaret is sitting opposite me as usual, and I find myself comparing her still-beautiful face with Peter’s grotesque one. He had a good heart. Dosia’s words echo in my brain. The same cannot be said of Margaret. She and Peter are like some fable about beauty inside or out. In a fairy story, Margaret’s inner ugliness would be exposed, and Peter’s goodness would shine through, rewarding him with a handsome face to match his heart, but this is real life, and things don’t happen the way they should. He deserved better.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say with a level look. ‘I was thinking.’
‘How are your walks going?’ Jasper asks hurriedly before Margaret can frame a crushing retort.
‘I’m getting further every day.’ I pick up my knife and fork. We are having salmon tonight, with a herby cream sauce and new potatoes. There is something vaguely revolting about the pink flesh of the fish and I poke at it with my fork. ‘I made it as far as the Lodge today. I met Dosia.’
Margaret’s face twists with venom. ‘She’s still alive then?’
‘Yes.’ I refuse to let her needle me. ‘She was telling me about the war and how she came to Askerby. It was fascinating.’
The air around the table tightens unmistakably, and although when I look up from my fish everyone is bent over their plates, I get the feeling that, inside, they are all frozen. ‘What?’ I ask, puzzled.
‘Nothing.’ Inevitably, it is Fiona who recovers first. ‘Dosia is very old now. I’ve heard she’s a bit gaga.’
‘I wouldn’t say that. She said that her husband was good friends with your father,’ I add to Jasper and Joanna. I know it sounds like a challenge.
‘Adam Kaczka, that old drunk,’ Margaret sneers.
Joanna is pushing a potato around her plate. George looks uncomfortable. Philippa is concentrating on her salmon.
‘They flew together during the war,’ Jasper says. He sounds nervous, and his eyes flicker between his mother and his wife. ‘The war brought all sorts of people together. I don’t think they were friends, exactly.’
Margaret lifts her glass, and I see that her hand is shaking. ‘I always said Ralph should get rid of both of them.’
Charming. I hope Angie never has to listen to the Vavasours talk about getting rid of her grandparents this way.
‘Tomorrow I’m going to try to walk to the church,’ I say. I don’t want to listen to Margaret being vituperative about Angie any more. ‘I could see it from the Lodge, so I don’t think it will be that much further.’
‘You’ll be able to see Michael’s grave.’ Fiona sounds grateful for the change of subject.
‘He’s buried?’ Why is this a surprise to me?
‘No thanks to you.’ As ever, Margaret is ready to attack. ‘You would have it that Michael wanted to be cremated, but Vavasours have been buried here for generations.’
I frown. ‘Surely Michael’s wishes should have counted for more than tradition?’
‘Yes, so you kept saying,’ says Margaret.
I give up on the fish and put my knife and fork together. ‘I obviously changed my mind.’
‘I think you were too tired to fight it any more,’ Philippa says unexpectedly. ‘That, or you were being kind.’
‘Kind?’
‘Michael wasn’t big on confrontation. He’d have hated to be the cause of a row, and you knew how much it meant to Ma and Pa.’
‘I couldn’t bear the thought of him not being here,’ says Fiona stiffly. ‘Jasper and I were very grateful when you agreed.’
I am glad to think that I am kind. My grandmother set great store by kindness. Unexpectedly, a picture jumps into my head: my grandmother, with her bright hedgehoggy eyes and her sturdy body like a bolster. I remember her pegging the washing out on the line, how the clothes would flap and snap in the wind. The memory jabs me like
a finger poked under the ribs.
‘What about Felix?’ I ask. ‘Does he understand that his father is dead?’
‘He knows,’ Fiona says. ‘Whether he understands is a different matter. But we certainly talk about Michael with him. It’s not a secret.’
So what is the secret? I wonder. What is it that makes the house seem as though it is leaning in, listening carefully for a word out of place? That freights the air with a nervous tension, as if the entire family is tiptoeing past a slumbering beast, braced for me to blunder into it?
Is it me? Am I the secret? Or is there something older at work here, something that seeps out of the wooden panelling and gathers in the corners of every room? Whatever it is, it makes the air dense and so heavy that it presses against my face and makes it hard to breathe sometimes. And it’s not just here at the Hall. I think of Dosia cowering into her chair: It’s a secret. I won’t tell.
Outside, an unseasonable wind is picking up strength as it barrels down from the moors. It bullies the old windows and moans around the chimneys, seeking a crack in the old bricks, a way in. I tense, narrowing my eyes and angling my head to listen. Over the rattling and the whistling and the chink of cutlery on china, I am sure that I caught the end of a scream.
Askerby is a sturdy moorland village, with grey stone houses ribboning along the beck. It has a no-frills pub, popular with the walkers who head out over the moors, and is hanging onto a tiny post office cum general store. There is a pretentious spa hotel in secluded grounds on the outskirts of the village and the old vicarage has been turned into a chichi B&B.
The church of St Michael and All Angels stands on the edge of the village. Built of the same grey stone as the houses, its square tower is eerily familiar, and I pause with my hand on the lych gate, wondering if I remember it as Isabel or as Kate. Somehow I don’t think I am much of a churchgoer, but Isabel would have been many times.
I push Isabel out of my mind. I’m here to find Michael.
The sun is out today, but it’s not that warm, and I am wearing a linen jacket over a T-shirt and jeans. I’m glad of the extra layer as I wander around the churchyard. A row of old yews blocks out the sunshine and the light is muted and vaguely oppressive. It is very quiet. The grass grows lushly over the graves. On either side of the path the headstones are ranged in neat rows, but some of the older ones are almost lost in the undergrowth, or hidden under the skirts of the overhanging trees.
I find Michael’s grave easily. Its headstone is jarringly crisp against the weathered monuments around it, and stark in its simplicity: Michael Vavasour. Dearly loved.
I think about Michael reading to the baby in his arms, and I have to tip my head back to stop the tears. Dearly loved. I wish I remembered more of the ways I loved him, of how he loved me. I blink fiercely at the dense, dark yew that looms over the grave, and my mind stirs . . .
‘Don’t you want to invite your parents to the wedding?’
A pause. ‘Your parents won’t be there.’
‘They’d have to come from Somalia. Yours would only need to get a train from Yorkshire. It’s rather different.’
Michael’s hand was moving rhythmically up and down my arm, his body warm. In the darkness I couldn’t read his expression.
‘Let’s keep it just the two of us,’ he said after a moment. ‘It’s about the vows we make to each other. We don’t need anyone else there.’
‘You know you’re going to have to come to terms with your family one day,’ I said gently.
‘Pot, meet kettle.’
‘I have come to terms with my parents,’ I insisted. ‘I used to resent them for always putting other children before me, but I know now that’s just the way they are. They’re fired up about injustice, and the unfairness of a world where so many people have so little. They’re doing what they can, and they couldn’t do that with a kid in tow. At least I had Gran. I used to feel guilty about loving her so much more than I loved them, but they didn’t mind. They probably didn’t even notice,’ I added after a moment.
‘Come to terms with it, huh?’
I shifted restlessly. ‘I’m trying. But you won’t even try. You never talk about your home or your family. If we’re going to get married, we should know everything about each other. I think we should go to your parents for Christmas,’ I decided.
How did I persuade him? I don’t remember that. But I must have done, because we drove up from London the day before Christmas Eve. I didn’t really have an image of Michael’s parents in my head. Middle class, I thought, for sure, right wing and conventional probably, and completely different from mine, but I had no idea about Askerby. I just remember Michael driving up the avenue. I kept expecting an estate of executive houses to appear, but the avenue curved and there was Askerby Hall.
‘Holy cow,’ I said, gaping. ‘Which bit do your parents live in?’
‘All of it,’ said Michael.
It wasn’t a successful visit. Michael was tense and silent, while Margaret and his parents were appalled. They’d wanted him to marry someone with a headband and pearls who knew how things were done, not a girl with no sense of deference who had been brought up in the wilds of Africa and who looked them straight in the eye and refused to be intimidated.
I don’t remember meeting Philippa or George or anyone else that time, although I suppose they must have been there. All I remember is driving out of the gate in silence. We didn’t say a word until we had crossed the little bridge and then as if at a signal we both let out a breath.
‘Thank God that’s over!’
And then we looked at each other and laughed. God, yes, I remember how happy we were that we were leaving and that we were together.
Standing in front of Michael’s grave, I press the heels of my hands to my eyes. I want to remember my husband, but each memory only reminds me of what I have lost, and of how much I still don’t know.
Because if we hated Askerby so much, why had we come back? Why were Felix and I still here? And why had I jumped off the tower?
Chapter Twenty-one
Michael is buried next to his grandfather, Ralph, who has a grandiose marble slab marked with all his titles. I look down at it, remembering what Dosia told me about him: how brave and dashing and reckless he had been. Some men are made for danger. What had peace been like for Ralph? He married a great beauty, had children, lived out his days in his ancestral home. By any measure, his was a fortunate life, but I can’t help wondering how often he hankered after the dangerous days and his friendship with Adam Kaczka.
I pull my jacket closer around me. It might be sunny in the village but there is something clammy about the shade in the churchyard. The air smells of damp earth and damp leaves, of sadness and regret.
I’m getting morbid. I pick my way between the graves. There are a lot of Vavasours, but the earliest headstones seem to date from the early nineteenth century. Did they have a clear-out of graves at the end of the eighteenth century or were people buried differently then? The branches of a horse chestnut dip almost to the ground, and I duck underneath to brush the lichen from a headstone green with age. The carving is so worn now it is impossible to make out the name, but I think it might end in ‘ur’. Vavasour? I trace the date with my finger: a one and a seven, what might be a six or an eight or a three . . . it’s too late to be anybody I know, anyway.
Anybody I know? I straighten, cross with myself.
It has been a longer walk than I thought, and I lean on my stick more than I should as I head back to the front of the church and the porch. It is lined with yellowing notices about the flower-arranging rota, and lists of parish officials.
The heavy metal ring on the door squeaks as I twist it to step inside, where I’m met with that distinctively musty smell of English churches, a mixture of old hymn books and tattered kneelers and centuries of making-do and repair.
Inside the door is a table with black-and-white leaflets about the church, a pile of postcards that look as if the pictures were take
n in the early sixties, and an honesty box. The display stand is more up to date. Photographs of a school in Uganda are pinned up; there seems to be some kind of link with the parish. I study the pictures of the smiling Ugandan children. They look very familiar, and an unexpected memory insinuates itself to the front of my brain: myself as a child in Africa, sitting on the steps of a school with children like these, watching monkeys gibbering and squabbling in the trees.
Pleased to have another fragment of my past restored, I turn away and study the rest of the church. It feels very old. The silence seems congealed, faintly unpleasant. It muffles the thud of the rubber end of my stick as I make my way up the aisle of the nave and step into the chancel.
Past the choir stalls, in prime position on either side of the altar, are two tombs. On the right, a medieval knight and his lady recline side by side. Sir Piers and Lady Anne. I remember the engraving in the book, remember how once before I stood here with Edmund. I reach out and touch the clasped stone hands as I did then, and all at once the air seems to be humming warningly at me. I jerk around, obscurely certain that the church is watching me, tiptoeing closer to tap me on the shoulder. But of course, the walls are just where they are supposed to be.
This is ridiculous. My palms are damp, and I wipe the one that holds my stick on my jeans. My heart is trying to batter its way out of my chest. I stare at the altar as if challenging it to move.
Not there.
The words are in my head, but they seem to jangle in the silence, and I turn again to find myself staring at the tomb on the other side of the altar. Part of me wants to blunder back down the aisle in a panic, to burst out of the church into the sunlight and let the heavy wooden door slam to behind me, but another part is riveted on the painted effigy. The man lies alone, his hands pressed together in prayer. His doublet is blue, picked out in gold, and there is a magnificent ruff around his neck. His face is very sad.
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