The Echo of Twilight

by Judith Kinghorn

  I nodded.

  “And so tell me, how old are you, Miss Gibson?”

  I could tell she liked this also—being addressed as Miss Gibson. “Nearly six,” she replied, with great emphasis on the number.

  “Six,” repeated Ralph. “My, that’s a lot. That really is quite old.”

  “But it’s two weeks away,” she said, turning to me. “It’s still two weeks—isn’t it, Mummy—till my six birthday?”

  “Sixth,” I corrected. “Yes, two weeks.”

  “You know, I was even born on Midsummer Day,” she said proudly.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, and even right here as well . . . Even right here in this place,” she added with outstretched arms. “Because my daddy was at the war, you see, and—”

  “Lila,” I interrupted, “what about Sammy?”

  But she wouldn’t stop.

  “Were you at the war?” she asked Ralph now.

  “Yes, I was,” he said.

  “Did you see my daddy there? He was a painter, wasn’t he, Mummy?”

  I closed my eyes. Heard Ralph say, “I’m not sure . . . What was his name?”

  “Henry Gibson,” she said. Then, quieter: “But he died in the gally-polly.”

  I opened my eyes. I couldn’t look at Ralph. I knew his gaze was fixed on me. And although it had been quick and unplanned, I was grateful to Lila, for she had in that exchange told him everything he needed to know, and everything I would have struggled to tell him. And Ralph knew only too well about Henry Gibson, my grandfather, who had fought in the Crimean War.

  “I look just like him, don’t I, Mummy?”

  “Sweetheart, please—you really do need to go and find Sammy. We don’t want to lose him now, do we?”

  We both watched her walk away, and even after she had disappeared around the side of the house, we kept looking in that direction.

  Then, eventually, he said, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I couldn’t. You’d gone. You’d told me to get on with my life.”

  “I thought you had. I heard you’d married that idiot Morton and that you’d had a child to him . . . and Marie Therese, she confirmed that.”

  “I needed a husband and I used his name for a while. That’s all.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I didn’t know where you were . . . and you said, you said, Get on with your life; you said, Don’t wait for me. You said, Get married, have children. You said that, Ralph.”

  He shook his head. “You should’ve written; you should’ve told me.”

  “You never wrote to me,” I replied, louder than I’d intended.

  I heard him inhale, exhale. And then, before he turned away, as he looked up at the sky, he said, “I didn’t expect this . . . wasn’t prepared. And I’m sorry, but it’s too much . . . too much.”

  I watched him walk back down the driveway. I didn’t call after him or follow him. I knew he needed time, and so did I.

  “I like Mr. Stedman,” said Lila, wiping crumbs from her mouth as she sat eating toast in the kitchen. “He’s funny.”

  “Mm, he can be.”

  “Do you think he knew Daddy?”

  I shrugged. “Possibly.”

  “I think he did.” She took a gulp of milk. “Mr. Stedman was a soldier, too. He probably knew my daddy,” she said, full of self-importance and with the addition of a creamy white mustache.

  “There were lots of soldiers, Lila—they didn’t all know one another.”

  “Did you know him before the war?”

  “Who?” I asked, pretending.

  “Mr. Stedman!”

  “Yes . . . I did. For a short time.”

  “Was he different?”

  “Everyone was different, darling.”

  “Were you?”

  “Yes, even me.”

  “How were you different?”

  “I just was.”

  “But how?”

  “Well, I was younger, and more romantic, I suppose.”

  “What does that mean—romantic?” she asked, picking up the large knife in her small hand and smearing more jam on her toast.

  “It means . . . believing in love, and the power of it. Believing in good.”

  “Do you not believe in good now, Mummy?”

  “Yes, of course I do. But it was different then.”

  “You say that a lot . . . It was different,” she said, mimicking my voice.

  I laughed.

  Then, “Was he romantic?”

  “Who?” again pretending.

  “Mr. Stedman!”

  “What a very strange question to ask . . .”

  “I saw him looking at you.”

  “And . . .”

  With a mouthful of toast, she raised her head and fluttered her eyelids. And I laughed—again. I said, “Mr. Stedman was Ottoline’s cousin. I met him here, Lila . . . I met him here the summer war was declared.”

  “Was my daddy here, too?”

  I rose to my feet, began to clear the table. So many questions, I thought. But she had a right to know the answers to them, a right to know the truth. I said, “Perhaps tomorrow I’ll tell you all about it.”

  “About what?”

  “About Mr. Stedman—and your father.”

  “So they did know each other!”

  I would tell Lila; of course I would. She deserved to know—with or without Ralph’s agreement. I could not lie to her. Like me, she had met her father; unlike me, it had happened early in her life, and at a time when I was with her and able to explain. I would not and could not leave her with unfinished business, secrets and loose ends.

  I had expected days, not hours, but later that same evening—as the sky changed and grew ever more ominous, and after I had put an exhausted Lila to bed—there came the sound of a fist banging determinedly on wood. I peered out of the tiny window in the lobby before I unbolted the door.

  “I think we need to talk,” he said as he stepped inside, shaking the rain from his hair and smelling of whisky.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  We stood in the blue-walled room of my twenty-fourth birthday, staring about and not at each other. I’d lit a lamp in there earlier, and now I lit another. As I did so, I could feel his eyes on me. “There,” I said, turning to him and attempting a smile.

  He said nothing. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his cigarettes.

  I said, “I thought you might need some time. I know this is all a shock.”

  “Time,” he repeated, without looking at me. “I think I’ve lost enough of that as it is, don’t you?”

  He lifted his cigarette to his lips. His hand was shaking, and I longed to reach out and touch him; tell him that I had thought of him every single day and night of those missing years; tell him that nothing had changed, that nothing mattered to me other than Lila and him—his well-being.

  “Is there any whisky in this place?” he asked, gruff, abrupt.

  I’d already noted a full bottle in the larder and so went off to fetch it, and a glass.

  I was nervous, I was excited and I was also afraid. The man I’d opened the door to, the man I’d seen and spoken with earlier, was Ralph. But a different Ralph, I reminded myself in the larder in whispers, and how could he be the same? For a moment, just a moment, panic took hold of me: I didn’t know this man, had no idea how badly damaged he was. Shell shock? I knew little about it.

  When I returned to the room, as I handed him the bottle and glass, he said, “I knew you’d come—eventually. You see, I knew Ottoline had left this place to you.”

  “To Lila,” I corrected.

  “Yes,” he said, pouring the honey-colored liquid into the glass, “that was the bit I didn’t understand. Why would my cousin leave Delnasay to Morton’s child?
It didn’t make much sense—but then again, very little does these days,” he added, offering me a tight smile. He raised his glass. “Good health,” he said, then limped toward one of the windows and stood with his back to me, staring out at the stormy twilight.

  “Ottoline was Lila’s godmother,” I began quietly. “I came back here with her—the summer after we met, after the war began. In fact, Lila was born in this room, Ralph, right where you’re standing. That very spot is where Ottoline delivered our daughter into the world.”

  “Ottoline? Ottoline delivered her?”

  “There were only the two of us. By the time the midwife arrived, well, Lila was here.”

  “She never told me.”

  “How could she? No one had heard from you. No one knew where you were.”

  “Ottoline knew.”

  “No, I don’t think she—”

  “She knew,” he interrupted, loudly, turning to me. Then, quieter, “She knew and she lied to me. She wrote and told me that you’d married Morton. Told me you’d had a child, a daughter . . . But no, that was later,” he said, shaking his head and trying to remember, “not until after Billy, after I wrote to her . . .” He glanced up at me. “Then I heard from Marie Therese, heard that she’d met you—met Mrs. Morton in Northumberland. And I have to say, she was quite enamored by your . . . our daughter,” he added, closing his eyes for a moment. “But I didn’t know, didn’t know any dates—when you’d married, when the child had been born—and to be frank, I didn’t particularly wish to hear anything more.”

  “But did you never wonder? Did it never occur to you? And how could you think I’d marry Stanley Morton? How could you think that?”

  He stared back at me. “I didn’t. I didn’t think. Not for four years. I was too busy trying to stay alive.”

  “Why don’t we sit down?” I said.

  “I don’t wish to sit down.”

  So I sat down and he remained on his feet by the window, sucking the last dregs from his cigarette. Then he walked over to the marble fireplace, flicked his butt into the grate and, staring down at it, said, “It must have been hard for her, Marie Therese, seeing the child like that, realizing.”

  “What on earth do you mean? Marie Therese can’t have known.” I saw him pick up the remnants of a bunch of white heather I’d carefully placed on the mantelshelf earlier, and I said, “Oh, please don’t touch that. It’s very precious to me.”

  He moved his hand away. “Somehow, I think she did. I think Marie Therese knew Lila was mine.” He turned to face me: “And now that I’ve seen her, too—well, I’d have to be an imbecile not to recognize my own likeness.”

  “Ralph, I’m quite sure Marie Therese would have said something had she known—or even suspected.”

  “She did.” He smiled. “She’s a very clever woman, my wife.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Yes, very clever,” he said again—thinking aloud, remembering. “What did she say?” he repeated. “Only that you were clearly very much in love with your husband; and that your child was sweet and dark haired, and the image of the man in a photograph you’d shown her—a wedding photograph of you and your husband.”

  I laughed. “But that’s a complete lie. There is no photograph.”

  “As I say, my wife’s very clever.”

  “And Ottoline?” I said after a moment. “Why would she lie to you?”

  “Revenge,” he said. “She never forgave me for not telling her about Billy . . . You remember, that day he left, after he’d been to see me? She viewed it as a breach of loyalty, almost an act of war,” he added, half laughing.

  “But how did she know? I never told her.”

  “No, I told her. My conscience got the better of me after Billy’s death. I felt as though I was partly to blame.”

  “But you weren’t. Billy would have gone anyway.”

  “You’re right. But in Ottoline’s mind, had I told her, she might have been able to stop him . . . or delay the timing enough so that he wasn’t in that place—on the day he was killed.”

  I shook my head.

  “But it wasn’t just about Billy,” he said. “I think she wanted to protect you, keep me away. Shortly before I left here, she asked—no, no, not asked—told—told me that it was in your best interests, and my own, for me to go, and stay away.” In reply to my expression, he went on. “She said I was being cruel and selfish, that I couldn’t and shouldn’t mislead you, no matter what I felt. And she was right, I thought; I was being selfish.”

  “Ottoline was a hypocrite.”

  “I don’t think she was.”

  “How can you say that? What about her affairs? Her unfaithfulness to Hector?”

  He stared at me: “Hector was her rock.”

  Outside, the storm gathered pace, rushing, fearful, spluttering combative drops against the glass panes, whistling half-forgotten tunes beneath doors and down chimneys.

  “Without him,” said Ralph, continuing, “she would never have survived. You see, Hector understood her . . . her propensity for romance. He understood that she was in love with love, in love with being in love. And he understood that it made her extraordinarily vulnerable.”

  “But why lie about him? To absolve her own guilt?”

  “I think it was more complex than that,” he said, quieter now, more pensive. And then finally he sat down—on the other sofa, directly opposite me. “Perhaps adding romance and drama to what had been an almost arranged marriage brought some sort of strange freedom to her life . . . And I can’t be sure, but I imagine it began as some sort of game—to inspire Hector’s jealousy, reignite some passion . . . But with a mind so fragile, a heart so needy, it became an addiction.”

  “She was like a child.”

  “Yes, she wanted everyone to live happily ever after, and Hector knew that was impossible. He knew every one of her love affairs—real or imaginary—could only end in separation and sadness. And I think he felt guilty. Guilty that he’d married her . . . And then spent most of their marriage indulging her, trying to make up for robbing her of some happy ending of her own.”

  “She fell apart after Billy.”

  “Not completely,” he said. “She was sane enough—and cared enough—to make sure you and Lila were provided for. And I’m immensely grateful to her for that.”

  And when he smiled, my heart leaped, and I felt my solar plexus tighten, my throat close. But that gaze, and his proximity to me, was suddenly too much. I rose to my feet, and, glancing about the room as though searching for something, I said, “Well, it’s all very queer, isn’t it?”

  I moved over to the fireplace, and as I stood clutching the white marble ledge, I remembered the last time I’d hung on there like that, and later—when I’d crawled about on all fours, whimpering like an animal; and how Ottoline—then, my lady—had mopped my brow, held my hands and told me to breathe: Breathe, Pearl! And I felt myself begin to shake. Not my hands, or my legs, but my whole body.

  “I didn’t even say good-bye to her.”

  “She understood.”

  You don’t know that. And then, realizing something more, I turned to him. “You saw her?”

  He nodded. “In France . . . I stayed on there after the war.”

  “With your wife?”

  “No, Marie Therese returned to Paris at the end of the war. I was living in Provence—a tiny place north of Avignon. I had no reason, I thought, to come back to England.”

  “How were they? How was she?”

  He stared at me as though weighing something up in his mind. Then he said, “She was dying, Pearl.”

  As I sat down, I heard him say the words tumor and inoperable.

  “So she knew, she knew she was dying . . .”

  “No, Hector told me. He told me she had no idea. No one knew, he said. He had spoken with the doctors alon
e and asked them not to tell her . . . I didn’t see them for long. They made a detour to call in on me . . . She was frail, painfully thin. They had been to the Somme and she spoke about that, and the vast number of crosses—line upon line, she said. In a strange way, I think seeing so many graves helped her. She seemed . . .” He paused and glanced away. “Well, she seemed at peace with everything, reconciled.”

  “So perhaps she did know . . . and perhaps she did it on purpose.”

  “Did what on purpose?”

  “The accident. She was driving, Ralph. She was the one at the wheel.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know where you heard that, but Ottoline wasn’t well enough to drive. Hector did all the driving.”

  He went on. “I didn’t hear about the accident for some time. And yet, bizarrely, it happened not far from me. It was . . . perhaps a month or so later when I heard about it—from Marie Therese. Then, when I learned Ottoline had left the cottage and land to me, and discovered that she’d left this place to you and your—to Lila,” he quickly corrected himself, “I was angry with her. It seemed to me beyond cruel . . . to place us as neighbors.” He raised his eyes to me. “It’s why I didn’t come back at first. But it all makes more sense now. So perhaps you’re right. Perhaps Ottoline knew she had only months to live, and knew what she was doing when she revised her last will and—”

  He stopped abruptly, winced and moved his hand over his knee, down his shin.

  “Is it very painful?”

  “Only at night—and in this damp weather. But at least I still have it,” he said. “And quite a bit of shrapnel as a souvenir.”

  We sat in silence for a while. Each of us turned toward the angry darkness pounding at the glass. Then he asked, “Have you worn it all this time?”

  At first I wasn’t sure what he meant, but then I saw that he was staring at my hands in my lap—where I fiddled with his ring. “Yes.”

  He closed his eyes.

  “Ralph . . .”