by Helen Grant
Ghost leafs through it until she finds what she’s looking for. “Look.”
There’s a number written down there, in neat old lady handwriting.
“Is that her PIN number?” I say, feeling uncomfortable.
But Ghost says, “What’s a PIN number?”
“Never mind.”
“It’s for the safe,” she tells me.
We go downstairs again, and down a corridor I’ve never used before. The room we go into is a library: every bit of wall space is covered with glass-fronted bookshelves. All the books look ancient. There’s a huge globe on a wooden stand and a cabinet in the middle of the room with big drawers that might be used to store maps. There are green velvet curtains at the windows and also on a narrow bit of wall between two of the bookcases, making a backdrop for a white marble statue. You’d think it was for decoration, but Ghost pulls it to one side and there’s the safe.
“Grandmother never let me look in it,” she says. “She had to write the combination down because she forgot things, but I could never get the book because she kept it in her room. But now...”
Now she’s dead.
It occurs to me that if Ghost’s never looked in there, there may not be anything in it at all, or at least, nothing valuable. But she’s working her way through the combination and opening the safe, and then I see that I’m wrong.
There’s quite a lot of stuff in there that she probably ought to go through, now that Langlands and everything in it has passed into her keeping: documents, bundles of letters, some flat boxes that look as though they might contain jewellery. There are also banknotes. Lots and lots of them. I’d say there are thousands of pounds in there.
Tom didn’t seem very pleased when I opened the safe and showed him the money.
I had never seen any of it close up before; Grandmother wouldn’t let me. I was fascinated to look at the notes. They all had the head of a man on them. At first, I thought it must be King George, which gave me a moment of confusion: in 2017 King George must be long dead, so how could he be on these crisp and new-looking bank notes? Then I saw that it was not the King at all, but a face I recognised from the frontispiece of one of the library’s books: Sir Walter Scott.
The notes were of several different colours and there were a lot of them, mostly fastened into thick bundles. I had no idea however whether this represented a little money or a lot. I took one of the bundles out of the safe and showed it to Tom: the notes were a kind of lavender shade and had 20 printed on them.
He had a look on his face that I couldn’t interpret – a kind of stillness. He looked the way he had felt to me when I ran into his arms – as though he didn’t know how to feel.
“Is this good?” I asked him. “Is this a lot of money?”
Tom let out a long breath. “Yes, it’s a lot of money, Ghost.” He took the bundle carefully from my hands and turned it over. Then he put it back inside the safe and turned to look at me.
“Look,” he said eventually, “This is too much. This is a fortune. I don’t feel right about taking any of it.”
“Why not?” I asked. “It was Grandmother’s money, but it’s mine now. If I say you can take some of it to buy things, I don’t see why you can’t.”
“Yes, but...when you said you had money I thought you meant, I don’t know, a jam jar with fifty quid in it, a week’s food money or something.”
“I don’t see what difference it makes how much it is.”
“Well, if your Grandmother had any other relatives, they might have a claim on some of it. The police are probably trying to trace them right now. How’s it going to look if someone you hardly know has helped himself to some of it?”
That hurt. Maybe I did hardly know Tom; it was only months since I’d first set eyes on him, after all. But since Grandmother was gone, I knew him better than I knew anyone else in the whole world. I looked down at my hands, at the fingers tightening around each other.
“Grandmother didn’t have any other relatives,” I said in a low voice. “And even if she did, why would she leave any of her money to them?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t think you can just help yourself to everything. I think the will has to be read.”
That was something I knew about. A lot of the novels in the library featured wills and their contents – old people hinting at what was in them or threatening to change them in favour of this or that person.
“Well, maybe the will is in here too,” I pointed out. “All her other important things are in here. She kept her best jewellery in it.”
Tom hung back, but I began to pull things out of the safe, piling them on the library floor. Before I was halfway through, I knew that there was a lot more here than money. There were things that I would need to examine. Apart from Grandmother’s jewels in their little boxes with the gilded trim, and the fat bundles of bank notes, there were documents of various kinds: certificates with ornately engraved borders, official-looking letters, a single dark red passport with a gold coat of arms on the cover.
Grandmother’s will was easily picked out, as it was bound in a thin cover with Last will and testament printed on the front. I opened it and read: This will is made by me Rose Elspeth McAndrew born fifteenth of July 1935...
I was conscious of Tom beside me, reading over my shoulder.
1935. So in 1945 she would have been just ten years old. It chilled me, reading that. I leafed through the few pages to the end of the will and there was her signature and the date the will had been made out, which was in 1999. This made it impossible that Grandmother herself could have been suffering under some kind of delusion that we were living in 1945. She absolutely knew the truth; she had signed her name to it. There were two other names, too, of people who had signed as witnesses. I did not recognise either of them, though the addresses belonged to the town. One of them was Fraser MacFarlane, the occupation given as solicitor, and the other was George Robertson, general practitioner.
The will, as I could quickly tell in spite of the formal legal language, left everything to me. If I died before Grandmother, or within 30 days of her death, all of it would go to what appeared to be a charitable organisation of some kind. I didn’t recognise the name. There was no mention of any other relative. It was all mine. I was the mistress of an estate with a grand but dilapidated house, and in it, some old-fashioned jewellery and a lot of money in cash.
I didn’t feel any joy at this knowledge. The grandmother I thought I knew had been drifting away from me since long before she drove into the town and failed to return; now I felt as though my own self was disintegrating too. My granddaughter Augusta Elspeth McAndrew, the will said. That was me. Fraser MacFarlane and George Robertson knew that was me, too, in spite of everything Grandmother had drummed into me over the years about not letting anyone know of my existence. It was as though there were two of us: the Augusta who appeared in this formal document dated 1999, and the Augusta who had grown up believing it was 1945. Except the Augusta of 1999 really was a ghost, a nothing; she had no reality except on paper.
I closed the folder.
Tom said, softly, “You’re right. It is yours, all of it.”
“I know,” I said, and we looked at each other. Tom was close to me, so close that I felt strangely nervous. “Share it with me,” I said impulsively.
Tom’s eyes widened. “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“You don’t know me,” he said. “You can’t share this with someone you’ve only just met. I might be...”
“Evil?” I said, holding his gaze. “Greedy, cruel?”
“No,” said Tom levelly. “I’m not evil or greedy or cruel. But you don’t know me, not properly.”
“I don’t know anyone else,” I pointed out. “And I need to look like other people if I go out. You said yourself, looking like this I’d stick out. Just take some of it and get me th
e right things. Please. Just help me look like everyone else.”
“You’re never going to look like everyone else,” said Tom suddenly.
I felt a brief moment of hurt at that. I thought he was saying that it was hopeless, that I was so out of step with his world, so clueless and strange and unable to adapt that I would never pass for one of the outside people, whatever I did and whatever I wore. It felt like a judgement falling. And then I discovered that that was not what he had meant, although certainly I had a long way to go before I understood how things were done in 2017, because he put his arms around me, pulled me close to him and kissed me.
It was unexpected and strange and wonderful. He bent his head and his lips touched mine, almost experimentally, and then his mouth was moving over mine caressingly, as though he wanted to drink the hot liquid feeling that seemed to be running through every part of me.
I was afraid that my hesitant attempts to kiss him back were clumsy, and I knew that I should have stopped him; Grandmother would have expected me to slap his face for insulting me. But I didn’t want him to stop what he was doing. It didn’t feel wrong. It felt – perfectly right.
It was Tom who broke the kiss. He drew away from me a little and we looked at each other. I could feel my heart thumping; the breath seemed to shiver in my throat.
“I’m–” began Tom, and I shook my head.
Don’t say it.
I knew he was going to say that he was sorry for kissing me. But I wasn’t sorry, not then, nor afterwards.
We went through the rest of the contents of the safe after that. At first, we busied ourselves sorting through the papers, because it was easier than talking about what had just happened. If Tom regretted kissing me, I didn’t want to hear him say so, and I couldn’t think of anything to say about it at all. After a while, though, looking at all the things became so engrossing that both us forgot to be self-conscious.
“Look at this,” said Tom, holding out a photograph. It was black-and-white, so old that the paper was yellowing. The subject was a little girl dressed in a short frock, ankle socks and patent leather shoes. She was squinting a little in the sunshine, and behind her was Langlands House; the stone porch was unmistakeable. Me? I wondered briefly. Then I turned the photograph over and saw the words Rose, aged six written on the back in pencil.
“That would be 1941,” I said, staring at Grandmother’s younger self.
“The War really was on then,” said Tom.
That made me feel a little strange. So what Grandmother had told me had been true for her. She had been here at Langlands during the War. I was still staring at the photograph when Tom said, “There’s one of you.”
“There can’t be,” I told him. “Nobody’s ever taken a photograph of me.”
I took the photograph from him. Like the other one, it was black-and-white, the background plain, so you couldn’t tell where it was taken. For a moment, I thought the girl in the picture really was me, the likeness was so strong. But I had no dress like the one the girl had on: made from a checked fabric, full-skirted and drawn in at the waist. I didn’t wear my hair like that, either – the girl’s hair was about the same length as mine now that it had been cut, but hers was neatly drawn back from her forehead, whereas I let mine frame my face. The longer I looked, the more I saw subtle differences in our faces: hers was a little wider than mine, her lips a little thinner. But still, the similarity between us was astonishing.
I turned the photograph over. Rose, 1952, I read, in the same pencilled handwriting. There was a stamp, too, from a photographer in the town.
Rose? I flipped the photograph over again and stared at it.
“It’s not me, it’s Grandmother,” I said.
“No way,” said Tom, looking over my shoulder.
“It is,” I said. “It says so, on the back.” I found it hard to believe too; I could only remember Grandmother as an old woman. In the photograph, she was about the same age as me. I wondered what had happened between then and now to make her do the things she had done – to spin that enormous lie. She looked happy and relaxed in the picture.
I wondered whether there were any photographs of my parents in amongst the heaps of papers. I knelt and began to sort through them, pushing aside bound documents and bundles of letters in my eagerness for more pictures. I found a large photograph of Grandmother on her wedding day, holding onto my grandfather’s arm. She had on a simple white dress of heavy satin, and a veil held in place by a little diadem of sparkling stones. The veil was thrown back from her face and she was smiling. I looked from her to my grandfather with interest. I had never met my grandfather Angus McAndrew, who had died long before I was born. Would it have made any difference if he hadn’t died, I wondered? It made me feel a little light-headed, thinking of all the different people Grandmother must have known, all the different relationships and influences which might have led to her doing what she did. To me, Grandfather looked kind but serious. But had he been strict, or even harsh? Had the obsession with 1945 come from him, or sprung up because he had gone? I gazed at his face for a long time, but Grandfather told me nothing.
I found three other photographs, which seemed to go together; they were all of a child, a little girl, and all of them were in colour. The colour wasn’t as good as in the pictures in the magazines Tom had brought me; it had an oddly faded look. The girl was sitting in two of the photographs, standing in one of them, always in the corner of a room. A child’s room, I guessed, looking at the patterned wallpaper and the tiny furniture – I had never had anything like that at Langlands. She wore a red pinafore dress with a cream-coloured blouse underneath it, and her chubby little legs were encased in ribbed stockings. Her hair was the same colour as mine but she had Grandmother’s blue eyes. I turned over all three of the photographs; on the backs of two of them there was nothing written at all, but on the other one was inscribed: Elspeth.
“My mother,” I said, amazed. It was the first time I had ever seen any picture of her. I felt a strange tightness in my throat, as though tears were going to come, but I fought the feeling down. I wanted to see whether there were any other photographs of her, taken when she was grown up – I wanted to see her as she was when she became my mother, not just as a child. I pawed through the documents and bundles of papers, spreading them out across the library floor until Tom and I were stranded on an island within a vast sea of paper, but I did not find a single additional photograph.
I did find my grandmother’s birth certificate, and her marriage certificate, and a death certificate for Angus McAndrew, dated 1981. There was a dogeared medical card with Grandmother’s name on it too. I also found a single gold-coloured key, shiny and quite new-looking compared to the ones on the bunch Grandmother had, but with nothing to identify it; another small mystery. I found no official documents for my mother, and nothing about me: no birth certificate, no health records. As far as the contents of the safe were concerned, I existed as the beneficiary of Grandmother’s will, and otherwise not at all.
Langlands is a big house, I reminded myself, picturing all the cupboards and drawers, the bureaux and shelves, the trunks and cartons in the attic. There were hundreds, probably thousands of places where Grandmother could have stored things. I could search for years and even if I never found another photograph or document, it didn’t mean there wasn’t anything there, just that Grandmother had hidden it so well that I hadn’t been able to find it. All the same, I had the nagging feeling that if there had been anything, it would have been here. To store all this money – a fortune, Tom had said – she must have thought it was the safest place in the house.
I picked up one of the photographs of my mother again and gazed at it, trying to imagine the adult features that would have grown out of the chubby child’s face. It was horrible, feeling that she was just out of reach. It was one thing to grow up knowing that I had lost her, but it was quite another to feel that I was so c
lose to seeing her, and yet somehow, she had slipped away. Why wasn’t there more of her here, amongst the heaped papers? There wasn’t even a certificate of her death.
A thought occurred to me then, an idea so surprising that for several moments I sat there on the library floor with the papers heaped up around me, not saying anything at all. Grandmother had lied to me about the year, about the War, about the dangers outside Langlands. Perhaps she had lied to me about my mother, too.
I thought: Maybe she isn’t dead.
When Tom left that afternoon, I didn’t try to make him stay longer. That may seem strange, because there was nothing I could think of that could be better than being with him, telling him things and watching him talk when he replied, and – maybe – being kissed by him again. But still, I wanted to be on my own for a while, to think. I couldn’t tell him yet about my idea that my mother might still be alive. I didn’t want to hear him ask the obvious questions, the biggest one being: if she isn’t dead, where is she? She seemed more real to me than she ever had before, now that I had seen the pictures of her, and I wasn’t ready to let her slip away from me again, not yet.
Tom took some of the banknotes with him in the end. I could see that the idea made him uneasy, but neither of us could think of an alternative. I couldn’t go out into his world in clothes that were seventy years out of date, and I couldn’t ask him to spend money he didn’t have on me.
After he had gone, I went back to the library, where the safe still stood open, the contents spread out over the floorboards. I gathered it all up and packed it back into the safe: the documents and certificates, Grandmother’s passport, the bundles of money. As I slotted them back into careful piles, I thought about the day Tom had come back to Langlands and I had stood on the stairs with the rifle clutched in my trembling hands, prepared to defend the house and all its contents. I supposed Tom was right; I wouldn’t have handed over anything to anyone I didn’t know. But Tom was not a stranger, not really.