by Kate Morton
I cannot take my eyes from his nose-ring, cannot find the words.
‘You’re white as a sheet, darlin’. You here alone? You got someone I should call?’
‘There you are!’ It is a woman. Someone I know. ‘Wandering off like that! I thought I’d lost you.’ She clucks like an old hen, plants her closed fists against her waist, only higher, so that she looks to be flapping fleshy wings. ‘What in heaven’s name did you think you were doing?’
‘Found her here,’ says green hair. ‘Almost fell on her way up the stairs.’
‘Is that right, you naughty thing,’ Sylvia says. ‘I turn my back one minute! You’ll give me a heart attack if you’re not careful. I don’t know what you were thinking.’
I begin to tell her but stop. Realise that I cannot remember. I have the strongest sense that I was looking for something, that I wanted something.
‘Come on,’ she says, both hands on my shoulders, steering me away from the hall. ‘Anthony’s dying to meet you.’
The tent is large and white with one flap tied back to permit entry. A painted fabric sign is strung above the entrance: Saffron Green Historical Society. Sylvia manoeuvres me inside. It is hot and smells like freshly mown grass. A fluorescent light tube has been fastened to the ceiling frame, humming as it casts its anaesthetic glow across the plastic tables and chairs.
‘That’s him there,’ Sylvia whispers, indicating a man whose ordinariness renders him vaguely familiar. Grey-flecked brown hair, matching moustache, ruddy cheeks. He is in deep conversation with a matronly woman in conservative dress. Sylvia leans close. ‘Told you he was a good sort, didn’t I?’
I am hot and my feet ache. I am confused. From nowhere, a delicious urge to petulance. ‘I want a cup of tea.’
Sylvia glances at me, quickly masks surprise. ‘Of course you do, ducky. I’ll fetch you one, and then I’ve got a treat for you. Come and sit down.’ She bundles me over to sit by a hessian-covered board tiled with photographs, then disappears.
It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to evaporate with the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down, before they knew their endings.
At first glance they are a froth of white faces and skirts amid a sepia sea, but recognition brings some into sharp focus while others recede. The first is the summer house, the one Teddy designed and had built when they took up residence in 1924. The photograph was taken that year, judging by the people in the foreground. Teddy stands near the incomplete stairs, leaning against one of the white marble entrance pillars. There is a picnic rug on the grassy escarpment nearby. Hannah and Emmeline sit on it, side by side. Blonde bookends. Both with the same faraway look in their eyes. Deborah stands at the front of frame, tall body fashionably slumped, dark hair falling over one eye. She holds a cigarette in one hand. The smoke gives the impression of haze on the photo. If I didn’t know better, I’d think there was a fifth person in the photo, hidden behind the haze. There’s not of course. There are no photos of Robbie at Riverton. He only came the two times.
The second photograph has no people in it. It is of Riverton itself, or what was left of it after the fire swept through before the second war. The entire left wing has disappeared as if some mighty shovel descended from the sky and scooped out the nursery, the dining room, the drawing room, the family bedrooms. The remaining areas are charred black. They say it smoked for weeks. The smell of soot lingered in the village for months. I wouldn’t know. By that time war was coming, Ruth was born, and I was on the threshold of a new existence.
The third photograph I have avoided recognising, avoided assigning its place in history. The people I identify easily; the fact that they are dressed for a party. There were so many parties in those days, people were always dressing up and posing for photographs. They could be going anywhere. But they are not. I know where they are, and I know what is to come. I remember well what they wore. I remember the blood, the pattern it sprayed across her pale dress, like a jar of red ink dropped from a great height. I never managed to remove it completely; it wouldn’t have made much difference if I had. I should simply have thrown it out. She never looked at it again, certainly never wore it.
In this photo they do not know; they are smiling. Hannah and Emmeline and Teddy. Smiling at the camera. It is Before. I look at Hannah’s face, searching for some hint, some knowledge of impending doom. I don’t find it, of course. If anything, it is anticipation I see in her eyes. Though perhaps I only imagine it because I know it was there.
There is someone behind me. A woman. She leans across to look at the same photograph.
‘Priceless, aren’t they,’ she says. ‘All those silly outfits they used to wear. A different world.’
The shadow across their faces she does not notice; it is in my eyes and mine alone. Knowledge of what’s to come spreads like frostbite, up my legs.
No, it is not knowledge I feel; my leg is weeping where I bumped it, cold, sticky liquid seeping down toward my shoe.
Someone taps my shoulder. ‘Dr Bradley?’ A man is bending toward me, his beaming face near mine. He takes my hand. ‘Grace? May I call you that? It’s a pleasure to meet you. Sylvia’s told me so much about you. It really is a pleasure.’
Who is this man, speaking so loudly, so slowly? Shaking my hand so fervently? What has Sylvia told him of me? And why?
‘… It’s English I teach for a living, but history’s my passion. I like to consider myself a bit of a local history buff.’
Sylvia appears through the tent’s entrance, polystyrene cup in hand. ‘Here you are then.’
Tea. Just what I felt like. I take a sip. It is lukewarm; I can no longer be trusted with hot liquids. I have dozed off unexpectedly one too many times.
Sylvia sits in another chair. ‘Has Anthony told you about the testimonials?’ She blinks mascara-clumped eyelashes at the man. ‘Have you told her about the testimonials?’
‘Hadn’t quite got round to it,’ he says.
‘Anthony’s video-taping a collection of personal stories from local people about the history of Saffron Green. It’s to go to the Historical Society.’ She looks at me, smiles broadly, ‘He’s got a funding grant and all. He’s just been recording Mrs Baker over there.’
She continues, with his help, to explain; occasional snatches jump out from the rest: oral histories, cultural significance, millennium time capsule, people in a hundred years…
Once upon a time, people kept their stories to themselves. It didn’t occur to them that folks would find them interesting. Now everybody’s writing a memoir, competing for the worst childhood, the most violent father. Four years ago a student from a nearby technical college came to Heathview asking questions; an earnest young man with bad skin and a habit of shredding the skin around his fingernails while he listened. He brought a little tape-recorder and a microphone, and a manila folder with a sheet of questions written out by hand. He went from room to room, asking whether people would mind answering questions. He found plenty of folk only too happy to volunteer their stories, to unzip themselves and let the contents spill. Mavis Buddling, for one, kept him busy with tales of a heroic husband I knew she’d never had.
I suppose I should be glad. In my second life, after it all ended at Riverton, after the second war, I spent much of my time digging around discovering people’s stories. Finding evidence, fleshing out bare bones. How much easier it would have been if everybody came replete with a record of their personal history. But all I can think of is a million tapes of the elderly ruminating on the price of eggs thirty years ago. Are they all in a room somewhere, a huge underground bunker, shelves from floor to ceiling, tapes lined up, walls echoing with trivial memories that no one has time to hear?
There is only one person whom I wish to hear my story. One person for whom I set it down on tape. I only hope it will be worth it. Th
at Ursula is right: that Marcus will listen and understand. That my own guilt and the story of its acquisition will somehow set him free.
The light is bright. I feel like a bird in an oven. Hot, plucked and watched. Why ever did I agree to this? Did I agree to this?
‘Can you say something so we can test the levels?’ Anthony is crouched behind a black item. A video camera, I suppose.
‘What should I say?’ A voice not my own.
‘Once again.’
‘I’m afraid I really don’t know what to say.’
‘Good,’ Anthony pulls away from the camera. ‘That’s got it.’
I smell the tent canvas, baking in the midday sun.
‘I’ve been looking forward to speaking with you,’ he says, smiling. ‘Sylvia tells me you used to work at the big house.’
‘Yes.’
‘No need to lean toward the microphone. It’ll pick you up just fine where you are.’
I had not realised I was leaning and inch backwards into the seat curve with the sense that I’ve been chastised.
‘You worked at Riverton.’ It is a statement, no answer required, yet I cannot curb my urge to comply, to specify.
‘I started in 1914 as a housemaid.’
He is embarrassed, for himself or for me I do not know. ‘Yes, well…’ He moves on swiftly. ‘You worked for Theodore Luxton?’ He says the name with some trepidation, as if by invoking Teddy’s spectre he may be tarred by his ignominy.
‘Yes.’
‘Excellent! Did you see much of him?’
He means did I hear much; can I tell him what went on behind closed doors. I fear I shall be a disappointment. ‘Not much. I was his wife’s lady’s maid at the time.’
‘You must’ve had quite a bit to do with Theodore in that case.’
‘No. Not really.’
‘But I’ve read that the servants’ hall was the hub of a household’s gossip. You must have been aware of what was going on?’
‘No.’ A lot of it came out later, of course. I read about it, along with everybody else, in the newspapers. Visits to Germany, meetings with Hitler. I never believed the worst charges. They were guilty of little more than an admiration for Hitler’s galvanisation of the working classes, his ability to grow industry. Never mind that it was off the backs of slave labour. Few people knew that then. History was yet to prove him a madman.
‘The meeting in 1936 with the German ambassador?’
‘I no longer worked at Riverton then. I left a decade earlier.’
He stops; he is disappointed, as I knew he would be. His line of questioning has been unfairly cut. Then some of his excitement is restored. ‘1926?’
‘1925.’
‘Then you must have been there when that fellow, that poet, what’s-his-name, killed himself.’
The light is making me warm. I am tired. My heart flutters a little. Or something inside my heart flutters; an artery worn so thin that a flap has come loose, is waving about, lost, in the current of my blood.
‘Yes,’ I hear myself say.
It is some consolation. ‘All right. We can talk about that instead?’
I can hear my heart now. It is pumping wetly, reluctantly.
‘Grace?’
‘She’s very pale.’
My head is light. So very tired.
‘Dr Bradley?’
‘Grace? Grace!’
Whooshing like wind through a tunnel, an angry wind that drags behind it a summer storm, rushing toward me, faster and faster. It is my past, and it is coming for me. It is everywhere; in my ears, behind my eyes, pushing my ribs…
‘Call a doctor; someone call an ambulance!’
Release. Disintegration. A million tiny particles falling through the cone of time.
‘Grace? She’s all right. You’ll be all right, Grace, you hear?’
Horses hooves on cobble roads, motor cars with foreign names, delivery boys on bicycles, nannies parading perambulators, skipping ropes, hopscotch, Greta Garbo, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Bee Jackson, the charleston, Chanel Number 5, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, F Scott Fitzgerald…
‘Grace!’
My name?
‘Grace?’
Sylvia? Hannah?
‘She just collapsed. She was sitting there and-’
‘Stand back now, ma’am. Let us get her in.’ A new voice.
The slam of a door.
A siren.
Motion.
The Shifting Fog
‘Grace… it’s Sylvia. Hold on, you hear? I’m with you… taking you home… you just hold on…’
Hold on? To what? Ah… the letter, of course. It is in my hand. Hannah is waiting for me to bring her the letter. The street is icy and the winter snow has just begun to fall.
IN THE DEPTHS
It is a cold winter and I am running. I can feel my blood, thick and warm in my veins, pulsing quickly beneath my cold face. Icy air makes my skin stretch taut across my cheekbones, as if it has shrunk smaller than its frame, is stretched over a rack. On tenterhooks, as Myra would say.
The letter I clutch tightly in my fingers. It is small, the envelope marked a little where its sender’s thumb smudged still-wet ink. It is hot off the press.
It is from an investigator. A real detective with an agency in Surrey Street, a secretary at the door and a typewriter on his desk. I have been dispatched to collect it in person for it contains-with any luck-information far too inflammatory to be risked in the Royal Mail or over the telephone. The letter, we hope, contains the whereabouts of Emmeline, who has disappeared. It threatens to become a scandal; I am one of the few who have been trusted.
The telephone call came from Mr Frederick three days ago. Emmeline had been staying the weekend with family friends at an estate in Oxfordshire. She gave them the slip when they went to town for church. There was a car waiting for her. It was all planned. There is rumoured to be a man involved.
I am pleased about the letter-I know how important it is that we find Emmeline-but I am excited for another reason too. I am seeing Alfred tonight. It will be the first time since that foggy evening many months ago. When he gave me Lucy Starling’s address, told me he cared for me, and late that night returned me to my door. We have exchanged letters in the months since, with increased reliability (and increased fondness), and now, finally, we are to see each other again. A real, proper engagement. Alfred is coming to London. He has saved his wages and purchased two tickets to Princess Ida. It is a stage show. It will be my first. I have passed the signs for shows when I have walked along the Haymarket on errands for Hannah, or on one of my afternoons off, but I have never been to see one.
It is my secret. I do not tell Hannah-she has too much else on her mind-and I do not tell the other staff at number seventeen. Mrs Tibbit’s culture of unkindness has ensured they are all the sorts to tease, to poke cruel fun for the smallest reason. Once, when Mrs Tibbit saw me reading a letter (from Mrs Townsend, thank goodness, and not Alfred!), she insisted on seeing it herself. She said it was her duty to ensure that the under-staff (under-staff!) are not behaving improperly, keeping up improper liaisons. The Master would not approve.
She is right in one way. Teddy has become strict recently in matters of staff. There are problems at work, and although he is not by nature ill-tempered, it seems even the mildest man is capable of bad humour when pushed. He has become preoccupied with matters of dirt and filth, and has taken to checking our fingernails daily; it is one of the habits he’s adopted from his father.
That is why the other servants are not to be told of Emmeline. One of them would be sure to tell, to score points from having been the one to inform. The others are on Teddy’s team. I am on Hannah’s.
When I reach number seventeen, I enter via the servants’ staircase and hurry through, anxious not to draw undue attention from Mrs Tibbit.
Hannah is in her bedroom, waiting for me. She is pale, has been pale since she received the call from Pa last week. I hand her the letter
and she immediately tears it open. She scans what is written. Exhales quickly. ‘They’ve found her,’ she says without looking up. ‘Thank God. She’s all right.’
She continues reading; inhales, then shakes her head. ‘Oh, Emmeline,’ she says under her breath. ‘Emmeline.’
She reaches the end, drops the letter to her side and looks at me. She presses her lips together and nods to herself. ‘She must be fetched immediately, before it’s too late.’ She returns the letter to its envelope. She does it agitatedly, cramming the paper too quickly. She has been like that lately, since she saw the spiritualist: nervous and preoccupied.
‘Right now, ma’am?’
‘Immediately. It’s already been three days.’
‘Would you like me to have the chauffeur bring the motor car around?’
‘No,’ says Hannah quickly, ‘No. I can’t risk anyone finding out.’ She means Teddy and his family. ‘I’ll drive myself.’
‘Ma’am?’
‘Well, don’t look so surprised, Grace. My father and husband both make motor cars. There’s nothing to it.’
‘Shall I fetch your gloves and scarf, ma’am?’
She nods. ‘And some for yourself.’
‘For myself, ma’am?’
‘You’re coming, aren’t you?’ says Hannah, looking up with wide eyes. ‘We stand more chance of rescuing her that way.’
We. One of the sweetest words. Of course I go with her. She needs my help. I will still be back for Alfred.
He is a film-maker, a Frenchman, and he is twice her age. Worse yet, he is already married. Hannah tells me this as we drive. We are going to his film studio in North London. The investigator says this is where Emmeline has been staying.
When we arrive at the address, Hannah stops the car and we both sit for a moment, looking through the window. It is a part of London neither of us has seen before. The houses are short and narrow, and made of dark brick. There are people in the street, gambling it turns out. Teddy’s Rolls Royce is conspicuously shiny. Hannah takes out the investigator’s letter and checks the address again. She turns to me and raises her eyebrows, nods.