But I would not quit. I knew it and, I believed, so did Dottie. It wasn’t the pay she gave me, which was small and sporadic. It wasn’t the travel, which had simply seemed like a nightmare to me, as if I were taking the train across a vast wartime graveyard, the bombed buildings just losing their char, the bodies buried just beneath the surface of the still-shattered fields. I would not quit because Dottie, viperish as she was, was my last link to Alex. And though it hurt me even to think of him, I could not let him go.
I had last seen him in early 1918, home on leave before he went back to France to fly more RAF missions, the final one from which he did not return. His plane was found four days later, crashed behind enemy lines. There was no body. The pack containing his parachute was missing. He had not appeared on any German prisoner-of-war rosters, any burial details, any death lists. He had not been a patient in any known hospital. The Red Cross, in the chaos after Armistice, did not have him on any prisoner or refugee lists. In three years there had been no telegram, no cry for help, no sighting of him. He had vanished. My life had vanished with him.
He died in the war, Dottie had said, but it was just another sting of hers. According to the official record, my husband had not died in the war. When there is a body, a grave, then a person has died. But no one ever tells you: When you have nothing but thin air, what happens then? Are you a widow, when there is nothing but a gaping hole in what used to be your life? Who are you, exactly? For three years I had been trapped in amber—first in my fear and uncertainty, and then in a slow, chilling exhale of eventual, inexorable grief.
As long as I was with Dottie, part of me was Alex’s wife. He still existed, even if only in the form of Dottie’s innuendoes and recriminations. Just hearing someone—anyone—say his name aloud was a balm I could not let go of. I had followed her across Europe for it, and now I would follow her to Wych Elm House, her family home. Where Alex had lived part of his childhood, something he had never thought to tell me.
I stared out to sea, uneasy, as England loomed on the horizon.
CHAPTER TWO
When she’d hired me, I had assumed Dottie’s trip to the Continent was a pleasure jaunt, the sort of thing rich middle-aged women did for no reason. By the time we arrived in Rome, I understood that my employer’s aim was entirely different: Though she was already richer than I could ever be, Dottie was in business to make money.
The war, Dottie explained to me as we sat in a train carriage and she inserted a cigarette into its holder, had created a great many ruined and cash-starved denizens of the upper class. The smart ones had invested in arms factories and army supplies when war broke out. The foolish ones, the ones who had sat on their ancient piles of property and waited for the old world to right itself, had lost, and Dottie meant to take advantage of it.
Her currency, her Great White Whale, was art. Paintings, sculptures, sketches, from shards of ancient Greek masterpieces to rolled-up canvases by the geniuses of the last century—all of it could be found on the Continent, owned by someone who was desperate for money. And money was something Dottie had. She offered them low prices for the contents of their galleries, paid in cash, and was slowly building a stockpile of art that would be priceless once the postwar depression lost its hold, as she believed it would.
“But you already have money,” I said that day in the train car. “You’re going to a lot of trouble.”
“Pay attention, Manders,” she said, gesturing for me to light a match for her cigarette. “Look around you at these people. Look at what’s become of them when I come to call. Rich old families—centuries old, some of them. My family is younger than theirs, and so is my money. The lesson is that we have money now, but we have no idea what will happen to us in ten years, or twenty.” She took a puff of the cigarette as I shook out the match. “I have no intention of letting anything of the sort happen to my son, or to his children. You can never have too much money. Perhaps that makes me avaricious; I suppose it does.” She took another drag and regarded me. “If my sister had had a little more avarice when she married and had Alex, you wouldn’t be in the situation you’re in now.”
Another of her stings, but it was true. I thought of her words now as I sat on a different train months later, this one traveling from London to Hertford. Alex’s mother had gone against her parents’ wishes and married an unsuitable man—she’d lived in a state of happiness and limited funds as her husband had begun to see success, until both had died unexpectedly when Alex was young, leaving him orphaned. The subsequent years had drained the little money they had left, and now it was gone.
I stared out the window of the third-class car, unseeing. I was back in England, just as I’d dreaded. I’d been given two days off, enough time to travel up to see Mother in Hertford, stay the night, and return to London, where Dottie was spending the time arranging for the delivery of her looted pieces and seeing them on to Wych Elm House.
Dottie must know all about Mother; I assumed it, though we had never spoken of it. She would make it a point to know everything about me. She could not possibly have approved of someone like me marrying into her precious family—someone who did not even know who her father was, whose mother was committed to a hospital for the insane. And yet, for all her poking and prying at me in her moods, she never threw those particular flaws in my face. She was strangely tolerant of the fact that my mother was incurably mad, that I needed days off to visit her in the hospital whose fees I paid from my salary. I asked no questions and took the reprieve of silence, since Mother was a topic I had no wish to dissect under Dottie’s blunt lens.
“She’s doing well today,” the nurse said to me as she led me to the visiting room. “We’re being ordered around like a set of ladies’ maids.” She gave me a smile.
I smiled politely back. So it was to be Mother’s Lady of the Manor mood, as I called it. I’d seen it many times. It was puzzling and sometimes irritating, but at least it was one of her calmer phases.
Mother sat in a wicker chair in the visiting room, staring out the window at the garden. She wore a gingham dress and soft slippers, her long hair tied in a loose braid down her back. She’d been given a robe, presumably because she’d complained of cold at some now-forgotten moment, and she’d left it crumpled on the floor at her feet. She was forty-six by my last count, but her skin looked younger, and her slumped shoulders and her narrow, fidgeting hands looked older. She turned her large brown eyes to me as I came in the room.
“Here’s your visitor,” the nurse said to her as I put down my handbag and lowered myself into the chair across from her.
“How lovely,” Mother said.
The hospital was situated in a former private estate, on a green hill in the countryside. It had pretty grounds and rustic shutters on the windows. The view was of the rolling countryside falling away, dotted with trees, hedgerows, and fences. The nurses spoke softly and did not shout. There were no locks, restraints, or cold-water baths. I could have put her somewhere cheaper, but instead I used most of my money to keep her here, where she’d been since I was eighteen.
She gave me a smile now, polite and frozen. Her skin was flawless, translucent in the light coming through the window. As so often happened, she did not recognize me.
“I’m your daughter,” I said gently to her as the nurse left the room.
Something flickered briefly across her face, tightened the skin between her eyes, and was gone again. “Please have some tea,” she said graciously. “I’ve asked the maids to bring it.”
I did not need to look around the visiting room to see there was no tea and there were no maids. “That’s very kind,” I said. “I’m sorry I’ve been away for a while.”
“Have you?” said Mother. “How very interesting.”
Even in a madhouse, my mother’s beauty was a sight to see. She had deep cocoa brown eyes, a pointed chin, and a nose that was small and feminine. I had not inherited her looks—my own
eyes were set straight beneath dark arched brows, my nose was unapologetically normal, and under bright light I had a faint patter of freckles on my upper cheekbones, which I did not cover with powder. My hair was dark and wild where hers was honey-colored and soft as cashmere. I must have received my looks from my father, though I would never know. Mother had never told me who my father was; if she knew the answer anymore, she was not saying.
It had been just the two of us, my mother and me, for all of my childhood, moving from place to place in the shabbier parts of London. Mother worked whatever sporadic jobs she could to support us: waitress, artist’s model, bit player at the theater, ticket girl at the cinema when the first one opened near our shared flat. I kept house, did the cooking, took care of the practicalities, and tried to go to school. We’d cobbled together food and shelter, somehow, for the first eighteen years of my life. When she was lucid, it was hard, but it was manageable. When she wasn’t—which was more and more frequently as time went on—I existed in a sort of blind panic, unable to think or breathe, pulling myself from one minute to the next, one hour to the next, waiting for some inevitable, terrible outcome, yet fighting it.
I never knew when she’d vanish in the middle of the night. I never knew when I’d come home to find her crumpled on the floor, sobbing that she didn’t want to live anymore. I never knew when a strange man would come knocking on the door, claiming that Mother had been bothering him and she had to stop before he called the police, or when she’d spend days in bed, unable to get up, even to go to her paying job before she was dismissed. I never knew when she was lying to me—she’d find a photograph of a stranger and tell me it was my father, or she’d tell me of the days she’d traveled with the circus, dancing for the audiences in tights and a pretty tiara.
The police actually had come to the door a handful of times, always after one of Mother’s spells. Vagrancy was one of her sins, wandering the streets and laughing quietly to herself. Petty theft was another—once she was in a state, she could not tell the difference between what was hers and what was not, and would pick up items and walk away with them, certain they belonged to her. And sometimes she fixated on a man, followed him and looked in his windows, convinced he was her imaginary lover or the man who would take her away.
She was always sorry, so sorry, when her mind returned. I’m not fit for you, she’d say, stroking my hair and holding me. I’ll do better, my good, sweet girl. And she would, for a time—she’d work industriously, help with the cooking and the cleaning, encourage me to study, laugh with me over the day’s absurdities. And then I’d wake in the night to find her gone, and it was happening all over again. And again.
At eighteen, I’d scraped up the money to take a typing course. I worked hard at it, and I excelled. Soon I’d be earning my own money, and things would get better. But I came home from class one day to find the police in our flat once again. Mother had been caught trying to take a fur stole from a ladies’ garment store, claiming she needed it for a trip to Russia. The stole was worth a lot of money, and the store wanted to press charges. She had to go away, the policeman explained to me, not without pity in his eyes, or face prosecution.
It was the thing I had feared all these years, the outcome that had stolen my breath and my sleep over countless nights. Exhausted and numb, I gave in—but still, I fought for her. I got a job and used the money to give her the best care I could. Always, always, I fought.
And now she sat across from me, years later, the blank look on her face saying that she did not recognize me at all.
“Did you finish Ivanhoe?” I asked her. “They were reading it to you when I visited last.”
Mother looked back out the window, where a gardener was working on the grounds. As she turned her head, I could see the red marks of scratches on her neck, just above her collar. “I have told him repeatedly that the roses are too dry,” she complained. “He never listens. I may have to dismiss him. It’s so hard to find good help, don’t you think?”
“Mother, have you been scratching yourself?”
Her voice turned icy, and still she looked out the window. “I have no idea what you mean.”
I sighed and leaned back in my seat, checked my watch. I’d have to ask the staff about the scratches—they were supposed to be watching her more closely. Had she made them herself, or had she been in an altercation with another patient? I pondered for a moment over which was most likely, but I couldn’t decide.
I looked up again to find Mother staring at me, her gaze wide and clear.
“Joanna,” she said.
I froze in surprise. It had been years since she’d said my name.
“Hello, Mother,” I replied cautiously. “It’s me.”
“I worry about you,” Mother said, pressing her fingertips to her porcelain temple and frowning. “All the time, all the time, I worry.”
I frowned. Did she mean now, or was she remembering some worry in the past? “You needn’t. I’m quite all right.”
“Where is that man you married?”
This was another surprise. I could not follow the quicksilver paths of Mother’s mind, her rapid drops down the rabbit hole. Alex had come with me twice to visit her, and though Mother had given him the same blank reaction she gave me, he’d made such an impression on her that the memory of him still bubbled up from time to time.
“He’s waiting in the motorcar,” I answered her. They’d told me it wasn’t a good idea to shock her, especially with talk of death, so when she asked me about Alex I always pretended he was alive.
“He should come in,” Mother said. “It’s impolite to leave a guest outside.”
“He has a cold,” I replied. “He doesn’t want you to catch it. He’ll come in next time, I promise.”
“Is he very sick?”
I shrugged. “You know how men are. There’s a big drama about it, but in a few days he’ll be well again.” I said it as though I were any other wife, who had her husband home every day to get underfoot.
Mother blinked at me; she had never had a husband and had no idea what I meant. “He’s very good-looking,” she said. “The man you married. Isn’t he?”
“Yes.” I forced the words from my throat. “He is.”
She opened her mouth as if to say something else, then closed it and looked out the window again, the scratches visible on her neck.
I waited. The mention of Alex, the pretense that he was outside in the motorcar and not dead these three years, hit me with a stab of pain. I wondered if that pain was my destiny, if it would ever ease. In a sharp slice of self-hatred I wished I could change places with Mother, who did not know there had been a war, did not know Alex had jumped from his airplane and disappeared. Even though she groped for the line between fact and fiction like a blind man gropes through a room, still she thought that if I said Alex waited in the motorcar, then he must be there: alive and vibrant, the brim of his hat pulled down over his handsome forehead as he leaned back in the seat, wearing an overcoat and a pair of leather driving gloves I’d bought him for Christmas, dabbing his nose with a handkerchief pulled from his pocket. For Mother, it could be real.
“That skirt,” Mother said, turning back to me again. “It’s plaid. So unbecoming. And that cardigan. You should dress more nicely for him.”
Reflexively, my hand smoothed my skirt in my lap. For three years, I hadn’t cared how I dressed. “Alex likes how I look.”
“No man likes that,” Mother said, and for a single moment the Lady of the Manor was gone and Nell Christopher stared at me. “It isn’t enough just to marry the man, Joanna. You have to keep him.”
“I did keep him,” I protested, the words out of my mouth before I could remember I was arguing with a madwoman. “He loved me. He was mine.” Until he wasn’t. Not ever again.
“You’re not listening,” she said. If she noticed that I had used the past tense when talking of Alex
, she did not let on. “No man is ever yours, not entirely. You must make an effort.” She glanced around the room. “Goodness. What time is it?”
I looked at my watch again, my heart sinking at her absent tone. “Four o’clock.”
“Oh, dear. I’m terribly sorry, but I must cut our visit just a little short. The viscount is coming, you see.”
“Today?” I said in dismay. “Now?”
“Yes. He’ll be here any minute.” Her eyes had gone blank again, just like that, looking at something I couldn’t see. “He’s taking me to Egypt. It’s going to be a grand adventure!”
The viscount—he’d never been given a name that I’d heard—was one of Mother’s favorite fictions, a wealthy man who was always on the verge of arriving and taking her away. He usually made an appearance when Mother was stressed or confused, or when she simply wished to exit a conversation. Once he was fixed in her mind, she would talk of nothing else for hours, sometimes days. It was a trip to Russia with the viscount that caused Mother to steal the fur stole from the ladies’ shop when I was eighteen.
The brief glimpse of Nell Christopher was gone, and I wasn’t sure I would see it again. The thought was painful and almost a relief at the same time.
“Mother,” I said, knowing she would not hear me, “the viscount is not coming.”
“He is!” When she was happy, she glowed with beauty. “He will be here soon. I’m not dressed properly. Where are my maids? I have to get ready.” She pulled back her sleeve and, right there before my eyes, she dug her nails into the soft skin of her arm just below the wrist and dragged them, putting red grooves into the white flesh as her gaze stayed far away.
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