Sanctuary

by Lisa Appignanesi

  ‘Traced whom?’

  ‘Morgenstern.’

  ‘You mean his grave?’ A picture of dank jungle undergrowth leapt into Leo’s mind. Black and white and grey. Murky shapes in a crumpled newspaper photograph. She had never traced her own father’s grave. But Isabel had.

  ‘Brave Isabel,’ she said softly.

  Martha was shaking her head and saying yes, simultaneously. ‘Isabel never told you. You don’t understand. It isn’t easy to understand. I don’t really understand either. I don’t know why I did it.’ Her eyes had filled with tears. She rubbed them away with clumsy fingers, but they kept coming. ‘Be patient with me. I didn’t realize. I thought it would be for the best. Truth is always for the best, isn’t it?’

  There was no need for an answer. Martha had turned away from her. She was addressing some higher authority.

  Leo had the impression she had stumbled in on a stranger’s internal monologue. It was filled with pain and guilt, the origins of which were mysterious to her. She waited until Martga had composed herself.

  ‘I should start from the beginning. Yes. I’ve been thinking about it all so much. And then you’ll understand. You’ll know whether Isabel said something to you which may help us find her.’ The woman appealed to her as she wrung her hands. The fingers were gnarled, bitten at the nails. She got up and gazed out the window.

  When she started to speak, her voice was so soft, Leo found herself holding her breath in order to hear. The beginning, it seemed, was as long ago as it was far away. She was thrust into a time before Isabel’s birth and a place which ached with heat and remoteness. In her mind’s eye, because she had never been to Australia, she found herself conjuring up images of the deep American south in which Martha’s beautiful sister, Elinor, strode through a large, ramshackle farmhouse with all the high-spirited nervousness of a Katherine Hepburn left alone after a father’s death and intent on managing a declining estate.

  The sister’s quarrel. Martha, the younger one, wants to sell up and move to the city, to Melbourne, or further still, to Sydney, in order to study. Elinor tells her to go and not to bother to come back. Loathe to abandon a sister whom she knows is hardly practical, Martha nonetheless goes. For some eight months, there is no contact between them. Then Martha writes and Elinor writes back. She writes back effusively, ardently. She is in love. A young man has come to the farm in search of work. A young man with the bluest eyes and the most charming disposition. He has a dream. He wants to turn part of the property over to vines. They are to be married. Martha must come to the wedding. There are, after all, only the two of them, bar an aunt in Melbourne and some far-flung cousins.

  Martha comes home. Her sister is at her most radiant and the young man is indeed young. He is twenty-two to Elinor’s twenty-seven. And he is handsome, all golden limbs and broad shoulders and dreaming eyes. Martha is pleased for her sister, though as the reasonable one, she is a little put out when the young man deflects any questions she puts to him about his past. She is more put out by the visible bump that protrudes from Elinor’s middle, even in the flowing white linen of her chemise-like wedding dress. Since Elinor makes no mention of it, she doesn’t either. Nor does it take long for her to fall under the young man’s sway. Everything else apart, he speaks so fluently. He is intelligent. He has a stack of books on viniculture which he has ordered from far and wide, amongst other books on anthropology, on oriental religion, on Nietzsche. They talk and talk and when the time comes for Martha to leave, she is more than a little sorry to do so.

  Though she writes to her sister with some regularity, Elinor now doesn’t respond. Martha is not particularly surprised. Elinor has more important things to think about. The first contact she has with the newly-weds is some six months later. Alexander Morgenstern phones her. He asks her to come. He doesn’t say why and she assumes that the baby is due and Elinor has asked for her. She goes, despite the fact that it means taking time off both from work and the university courses she juggles part time.

  When she arrives, she knows instantly that something is wrong. The flowers and shrubs that are Elinor’s pride have been allowed to shrivel and die. Elinor is not unlike them. She sits in a rocking chair in the kitchen and rocks. Her hair is matted and frizzled. Her eyes have grown huge in her thin face, but they do not focus. She barely acknowledges Martha’s presence. When Martha looks down, expecting to see the vaster bump which is baby, there is nothing there. She thinks miscarriage and rushes to hug her sister. But then a frumpy girl walks in holding a lump of greying blanket. Inside it there is a baby. The child is beautiful, rosy-skinned with blue eyes which cling to her face like a softness.

  Martha takes the baby and learns from the girl that she is called Isabel and is about three months old. Martha holds her and holds her, and as she holds her, she knows that she has never felt or seen anything as lovely. When at last she looks around her, she also sees that nothing else in her old home is lovely. The place reeks. Dishes are piled high in the sink. There is dust everywhere. The floors might as well be outdoors.

  She sets to work, talking to Elinor as she scrubs. Her sister doesn’t respond. Nor does she acknowledge Alexander’s presence when he comes into the house with another man. He pretends not to notice. Maybe he really doesn’t. He hugs Martha, gestures round the place vaguely and says she can see why he called her. He kisses the baby and cradles her, then sets about making dinner with the other man. Elinor doesn’t get up. She only gets up when the other man walks her towards the table.

  Martha realizes her sister is ill, but she doesn’t know what to do about it. Nor does the doctor she calls in, who merely tells her what he has said to Alexander before. It will pass. What Martha can do, she does. In the three weeks that she ends up staying, she turns the house over and finds a slightly older, more responsible girl to help care for Isabel. In the evenings, Alexander no longer talks about vines. None have appeared. He now talks about India and China and Buddhism and about a dream of studying medicine. Once again Martha is captivated. She cannot understand why her sister is so unhappy.

  The only thing that changes in Elinor during the course of Martha’s stay is that Elinor cannot bear to see her sister holding Isabel. When she catches her at it, she snaps and calls for the baby to be brought to her. Isabel rarely cries. But she cries when she finds herself in her mother’s lap. Cries unstoppably, her little face contorted.

  As if the ache of memory was too strong for words, Martha had stopped speaking,

  Leo refilled her glass. ‘Post-natal depression,’ she murmured.

  Martha nodded. ‘But we didn’t have the term then or any way of dealing with the condition.’ She paused again, lost in recollection.

  Leo prompted her. ‘What happened?’

  The woman took a deep breath and met her eyes briefly. ‘The depression lifted eventually, but in a way that only made things worse.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Something had happened to Elinor. Something irreperable. It was as if she hated him now. Hated Isabel too, by turns. She would row with him, scream, even when I was there. Tell him he was a no-good, a bum, loathsome, contemptible, useless in all ways. I have to say, I felt sorry for him. He was a young man, with his whole life to lead, and there was my sister behaving like the very worst of shrews. Bed problems on top of all the others, I think. She was rigid with distaste whenever he was in the room. She wouldn’t sleep with him. It had all got mixed up with the horror of having babies.’

  Leo gazed at the kind, worn face. A look she could only interpret as longing had come over the woman’s features. Her eyes were misty.

  Martha shifted in her seat. ‘Things went from bad to worse. I think I realized even then that Elinor was a little mad, but doctors in the area didn’t diagnose that way. You were supposed to grin and bear it. I was frightened for Isabel, too. But she grew, strong and sturdy, more delectable each time I came to visit. I suggested to Elinor on one visit that she let me take the child away for a while. It would give her a break, a chance to rest, a chance
for her and Alexander to patch things up between them. But she more or less spat in my face. She would move with no signal in those days, from impassivity to venemous rage. She was beautiful again, though a little thin, dramatic. Not at all like plain old me.

  ‘Then Alexander took ill. Maybe he’d been working too hard. A terrible and unshakeable bronchitis, compounded by despair and I don’t know what. I came to see them at the time and we talked a little. He told me that if he got better, he was going to go away. I understood that he had to. That it was probably for the best. And he went. Slipped away one day quietly. Just didn’t come back when he was meant to. I wasn’t there at the time. But Elinor called for me straight after.

  ‘She was livid, angrier than I had ever seen her. When I tried to suggest that maybe it was for the best, since they hadn’t gotten on, she raged, said I understood nothing, didn’t know the utter brute he was. She showed me bruises…’

  The woman paused, put fingers to her forehead as if to rub out a migraine or memory.

  ‘She screamed, said terrible things, said that if I came off my intellectual cloud and stopped to look at the family accounts, I would see just how much he had stolen over the years. That was it, she claimed. He was dead. DEAD. Wiped out. Had never existed. His name was never to pass our lips again. She had announced it to Isabel, too. The child had been ill with a fever. Maybe she caught it from him. When she came out of her delirium and Alexander was gone, Elinor told her that father was dead. Already buried. They were going to move. But in the time that it took to sell up the place, she would go to boarding school.

  ‘Elinor told me that if I gainsaid her, she would never allow me to see Isabel again. She made me swear. I did. I begged her once again to allow Isabel to come with me. But she wouldn’t. She didn’t altogether trust me. Perhaps with good reason.’

  Martha covered her face with her hands.

  ‘So Isabel grew up thinking her father was dead. But he wasn’t.’

  Martha nodded, her face bleak. ‘He wrote to me a few times. Post cards. One from India. Another from Nepal. Then one from the United States. He wanted me to know he was doing well. Thriving in fact. Far from the mad, bad sisters.’

  ‘You loved him?’ Leo heard herself saying. She flushed.

  The woman nodded once, abruptly, then rose. She started to pace, her sturdy legs beating out an erratic rhythm on the parquet.

  ‘I even went to bed with him,’ she said softly. ‘During one of my stays, when Elinor was being at her beastliest. I thought he had married the wrong sister. I was the one who appreciated him, who understood him. I’d learned that he had grown up in an orphanage. He had a sister there who’d died, far too young. Don’t ask me how I found out. But I wanted to make up for all that. And for my sister. Another form of madness. I don’t think Elinor knew, but maybe she sensed it. And then I spent my life making it up to her.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘But none of that matters. What matters is what I said to Isabel. Fool that I am. Stupid, romantic old fool.’

  She dropped into the sofa, as if she didn’t intend to rise again. Her face was ashen.

  Leo stirred herself. ‘I should make you some food. Or take you out. There’s a nice…’

  ‘No, no. You’re too kind. And I’m really not hungry. But you must eat.’

  ‘A little something. For you, too.’ She helped her out of the sofa. ‘It’ll do us both good. We’ll need our wits.’

  ‘Yes… of course. I’m wandering. We have to face essentials.’ She squared her shoulders and started to talk again, tersely now. To get the matter out quickly.

  ‘After Elinor’s funeral, Isabel stayed with me for a few days. She wasn’t … I don’t know quite how to describe it, but she wasn’t herself. I understood that. Elinor and she had never had an easy time of their relations and now it was too late to make it up. But Isabel was wild. She told me that Elinor deserved to die, should have died much sooner. She had killed Isabel’s father, after all. Hadn’t she. Hadn’t she? And I had colluded in the cover-up. I was dirt.

  ‘I don’t know where she got the idea, but she wouldn’t let it go, and finally I told her. I had always wanted to tell her, but she had never been very interested in her family history, had never asked questions about her father. So it seemed best to let sleeping dogs lie. Then, too, I had my promise to Elinor to keep. She had somehow constructed her life on this fiction of hard-done by widowhood, and had ended up believing it was true. I was afraid, as well. You see, part of Elinor hated Isabel. Maybe, because she was so like her father - visibly, I mean. So Elinor hated him in her, the constant reminder of him. It can happen, you know. I’ve seen it. In divorce cases … So it seemed best never to bring the matter of Morgenstern up.

  ‘I’m wandering again. The point is that when Isabel started to accuse her mother to me in those days just after Elinor’s death, I leapt to Elinor’s defence. I explained a little of what had happened, but mostly I stressed that her father might still very well be alive. She hadn’t killed him. I told her he had been a good man and that he had loved her. I thought that might help her cope with the fact that he had left, never to return, and had never manifested any interest in her after his departure.

  ‘I explained to her that, in the way things can, something had simply gone terribly wrong between him and Elinor.’

  She paused, looked at Leo with a plea in her face. ‘At first she wouldn’t believe me, wouldn’t believe that Alexander was really alive, that Elinor hadn’t somehow murdered him. So I showed her the picture.’

  She rushed off, leaving Leo in the kitchen to drain pasta and toss a salad. When she came back, she was carrying a sheet of much-folded paper. She smoothed it out and showed it to Leo.

  ‘This is it. You see the picture, that’s Alexander Morgenstern.’ She jabbed toward the centre of a small work-a-day photo showing four suited men and two women, amidst columns of print. ‘The tall one, in the middle. He’s a good twenty years older than when I last set eyes on him. But that’s him. I couldn’t mistake that face.’

  Leo looked at the black and white photo. The man had a bony face, a high forehead, but seemed otherwise unremarkable in the indistinctness of the group photo. The caption beneath it however allayed any doubts she may have had. ‘The team at the Morgenstern Foundation,’ it read.

  Martha was hurrying on. ‘I happened on the picture, ten years ago, maybe more, at the clinic I was attached to at the time. I tore it out from some American medical mag. The Morgenstern Foundation apparently ran a drug addiction recovery program which had met with some success. Anyhow, for some murky reason, I kept it. And then I showed it to Isabel.

  ‘She looked at it briefly and threw it back at me. She said she didn’t want to know anything about a man who had molested his child and then abandoned his sick wife and daughter. She raged. She said that if I thought she was about to seek him out, I was crazier than my sister. She, Isabel, had never chased after men of any kind in her life, so why begin now? A father was no different. We had all conspired to turn her childhood into a tissue of lies. Even me. Even the good sister. She wanted nothing more to do with any of us. And she was glad the mother who had invented such a scheming evil lie was dead. She left the next day.’

  Leo met Martha’s eyes. ‘And that was the last you saw of her?’

  The woman raked an unsteady hand through her hair. ‘Last I saw, but not last I heard.’ Her voice trailed off.

  ‘Let’s take this to the table.’ Leo busied herself with setting places, heaping pasta onto plates. She was trying to imagine how she would feel if someone announced to her that her father had never, in fact, died; that he had spent the last twenty-five years living in the depths of Malaysia; that the death which had so affected her, that affected her fears still, was a ploy of her mother’s.

  Martha broke into the snarl of her thoughts. ‘I phoned Isabel to apologise. I left countless messages. She didn’t return my calls for weeks. I wrote letters. I really thought I had lost her.’ The tears leapt into her eyes agai
n. ‘Then she rang me, just like that, out of the blue. She told me curiosity had got the better of her. She was going to check this Morgenstern out - if he was still around. The foundation in Seattle wasn’t. She had done her usual round of thorough investigations — rung and e-mailed, checked the archives of the magazine.’

  Martha fluttered the worn sheet of paper in the air. ‘The foundation had closed down several years ago. There had been some fishy business, but no one would tell her quite what. Embezzlement of funds maybe, or threats of a malpractice suit against a doctor. Anyhow, the odd thing was that no-one by the name of Alexander Morgenstern seemed ever to have worked there. Nor could two of the members of staff she managed to track down tell her why it was called The Morgenstern Foundation. One of them thought there had been a quotation from some poet. Another thought it had originally been funded by a bequest from a Chicago millionaire, long dead. So Isabel told me to get my best glasses out and make sure the picture I so wanted to be of Morgenstern really was. I confirmed it.

  ‘The next time I heard from her, it was a message. I could kick myself for not being there. She sounded gleeful. She had tracked him, she said. She had called in favours and tracked him. He was obviously a character. Maybe he even deserved her. She giggled in a way which distressed me. Excitement and dread, all mixed up. Apparently Alexander had changed his name. He was no longer Morgenstern. He had remarried and divorced, though she was sure I wouldn’t want to know that. And she was on his trail. He was closer than either of us could have imagined.’

  ‘Did she tell you his name?’

  Martha shook her head miserably. ‘And when I tried to ring back there was no one. If only I was on the net, then maybe … But I’m too old.’

  ‘So when I told you Isabel was using the name Morgenstern, you assumed it was because she had found him.’

  ‘Yes. And I’m sure that when Isabel said he was close-by, she meant he was in England. Maybe even in London. I…’ She averted her eyes. ‘When I didn’t hear from her again, I assumed it was because she was raging at me. Somehow this Morgenstern I had presented her with as a good father hadn’t lived up to the mark. And she hated me for it. Then when you rang, that didn’t altogether make sense anymore. She was using his name, after all. But then why be angry at you or at any of her friends because of all this and not contact you?’