“I’ll see what can be arranged, ma’am,” Mrs. Davey said, sounding less than enamored by the idea.
“Tea in the garden, how delightful,” said Sylvia as the door closed. “I’ve always loved taking tea in an English garden at the height of summer. Tea and scones, and white linen . . . and green, green grass and buttercups, and daisies and butterflies and sunshine,” she went on, quietly, whimsically. “It all fits together so beautifully, don’t you agree?”
Cora glanced toward her and sat down.
“Like tea and crumpets toasted over a roaring fire in winter, when it’s dark and stormy and snowing outside, hmm?”
Cora nodded. “But the grass is hardly green, and I fear we, too, may wither and perish in this heat.”
“Oh, but we’ll be fine in the shade. You have your fan, and you’re more used than any of us to a torrid climate.”
The two women had made up their differences the previous day, after Cora had apologized. Sylvia had assured her that she had not been spying, would never dream of doing such a thing. Cora had shaken her head. “Please,” she said, “let’s not speak of it. I was out of sorts. You know me well enough by now, I think, to know it meant nothing.”
Too hot to be outside, they had spent the day together indoors, comparing notes on specific times; lost for the entire afternoon in their shared recollections, almost laughing at their younger selves. But Sylvia could see that her friend was still troubled, deeply troubled. She knew it would only irritate Cora if she asked too many questions, so instead she attempted to distract her friend with prompts beginning, Do you remember when . . .
Whilst Cora spoke, Sylvia took copious notes, and then later, in the evening, read them back to Cora, who nodded her head all through, and seemed perfectly happy with what was recorded. Before retiring to bed, Cora had thanked Sylvia for her patience, told her that she had enjoyed their day together. And Sylvia had gone to bed satisfied, happy. At last they had made a start. They had begun at Rome but Cora had assured her that they would “deal with” the beginning—Paris, and even Suffolk—all in good time. And Sylvia, keen to cement their new understanding, had said, “There’s no rush. We have plenty of time, dear.”
Shortly after they had first met in Rome, Cora had mentioned her family—her parents and siblings—to Sylvia. “All gone,” was all she could say as a tear rolled down her cheek. Later, she had elaborated on this, telling Sylvia the story of her poor family’s demise. Her mother, a renowned beauty, feted by society and despised by other women, had died in childbirth, leaving her heartbroken father to bring up their four children alone. At that time, she, her father and siblings had lived with their grandparents on their vast estate in Suffolk. But in the aftermath of this tragedy her father had taken to drink and gambling, and within twelve months of her mother’s death he had shot himself. It was then that Cora had been placed in the care of her mama’s sister, Fanny, who was living in Paris at the time with a distant French relation. Her younger brothers and sister had continued to live with their grandparents, but in the course of the following two years all three of her siblings died: one of pneumonia and two in the cholera epidemic.
But the very next day Cora appeared to regret telling Sylvia this version of events, for she had called on her and said, “What I told you yesterday . . . about my family, you haven’t repeated it to anyone, have you? You see, it’s not necessarily the truth . . . not the whole truth. I am not allowed to tell anyone . . . but I’ll tell you one day, I promise.”
The mystery had been compelling enough for Sylvia thereafter to be vigilant. But as she listened to Cora, and to others, rather than be able to piece together what might have happened, she had only become more confused. Locations changed, names altered, and siblings were unborn. Then, not long before George left Rome, and in an angry and highly strung state after an argument with her aunt, Cora blurted out another version of events, one that Sylvia, to her everlasting and eternal regret, would repeat.
Now, Cora said, “By the way, Jack has invited a girl to tea.”
“Well, how lovely, how marvelous.”
“Cecily . . . Cecily Chadwick.”
“Cecily Chadwick,” Sylvia repeated, whispering the name, as though it were a secret in itself. Then she opened her eyes wide: “Aha! Quelle surprise! Le Double Cs.”
“Yes, a queer coincidence.”
“He’s quite taken with her, don’t you think?” Sylvia said, tilting her head, peering over her spectacles at Cora.
“He barely knows her,” Cora replied. “But it would seem he likes her enough to invite her here to tea, to meet me,” she added.
“How exciting!”
Never having been married, never having had children, never having known pain and heartache or love and loss other than the deaths of her parents at ripe ages, and after calm and orderly lives, Cora believed that Sylvia viewed the world through a child’s eyes, with a child’s propensity for emotion. Life to Sylvia was exciting, splendid and marvelous, or perplexing and unfathomably queer, or sad. No two states, no two emotions, coexisted, for there had been no dichotomy, no duality in Sylvia’s world. She remained, Cora thought, oblivious to the complexities of the human heart, the nearness and sometimes overlap of love and hate. She had had no reference to, no real understanding of the characteristics of a passionate nature: that a woman could both laugh and cry with grief, or hate the man she loved, or be driven to madness, and even murder, by a thing as sweet and tender as love.
Sylvia had written about love, of course, and continued to do so. But her stories were about a particular type of love, a certain sort of character: the requited type, the fathomable sort, leading to a happy ending. Cora knew that as far as Sylvia was concerned, Cora’s life had been rich and filled with love: the love of her husbands, the love of her children and friends. Each seemingly unhappy ending had reshaped itself, altering to a happy one. And, even now, Sylvia determined a glorious sunset on Cora’s life. Oh yes, she kept saying, it would all turn out fine in the end. But would it?
The memoirs remained an issue, and in truth Cora regretted ever having agreed to it. There were ways round it, she had decided, though she was not yet entirely sure how to navigate them. In the meantime, the focus of their attention would be Rome: her first years there, meeting George, his early work. She could not let Sylvia down. The book seemed to be her raison d’être. And Cora had promised her, promised her years ago, that she would be the one, the only one, to tell her story.
Earlier that morning, alone in the temple, she had stared at the name once more. Typewritten in capitals and red ink, it was designed to shock her, warn her, she knew. But what was she to do? There was no demand for money, not yet. That would come later, perhaps. No, this was simply to let her know that the past—her past, her secret—was not forgotten.
She would just have to bide her time. After all, what was the worst that could happen? The man in question was long dead. No one would remember; no one would be interested. Any self-respecting newspaper editor would throw the story out. But as she rose to her feet her resolve sank. She had come too far to allow anyone to besmirch her name, the Lawson name, or jeopardize Jack’s future.
Chapter Seven
By noon, the thermometer outside read eighty-seven degrees Fahrenheit. By three o’clock it had risen to eighty-nine. Rosetta predicted another of her turns if the heat did not abate, and sat holding a damp towel to her head at the kitchen table, from time to time muttering expletives. Madeline was in her workroom, as usual, wrestling with swaths of green velvet: the Brownlows’ new winter curtains. And Ethne was noisily, laboriously practicing—what sounded to Cecily like one long, thumping dirge—on the pianoforte.
In a white cotton dress with a broad blue sash, Cecily descended the stairs. The dress, once her mother’s, had never appealed to Ethne and thus had come direct to her. Originally, in Madeline’s day, it had had a profusion of lace ruffles running from it
s high neckline down over the bodice, but Madeline had altered it to fit Cecily’s specifications: a narrower skirt, a flat sailor-style neckline and collar, no lace and a shortened hemline.
“You look very pretty, dear,” said Madeline, raising her head. She stood at the cutting table, scissors in hand. The room smelled of lavender and camphor and newly cut fabric. “Enjoy your tea party.”
Cecily walked across the hallway and picked up her straw hat. Earlier, after lunch, she had managed to find a few roses in the garden, a few the drought had not yet killed off, and had pinned them to the ribbon round the hat’s crown. She placed her hat on her head, checked her appearance in the mirror, and walked on, to the kitchen.
Rosetta removed the towel from her forehead and looked up as she entered. “My, you do look a picture . . . you look like a bride . . . on her wedding day!” she said, tearfully, red-faced.
Poor Rosetta. Her face, her hands—even her body—appeared to have swollen in the heat. She had dispensed with her stockings and her strangely misshapen shoes, which lay on the floor next to where she sat, and her feet were resting in a large pail of water.
“Poor Rosetta,” said Cecily, bending down and kissing Rosetta’s thick warm hair.
“My little angel, that’s what you are. My little angel, sent from Him above . . . the only one who cares about poor old Rosetta.”
Cecily moved swiftly through the darkened scullery, where flies buzzed at the mesh-covered window and crawled about the leftover ham lying out on the slate bench. She stepped out into an incandescent day. Nothing moved, nothing stirred. The air was still and silent, heavy with the weight of an oppressive heat. Even in the last hour the temperature seemed to have risen. And as she walked down the pathway and turned onto the track, she felt that weight, a pressure upon her head and in her chest, and with it, a strange sense of foreboding. Not nervousness, exactly, but the queerest sense of some future sadness, like the fluttering of an ill-conceived notion, or the fleeting scent of misfortune. For a moment, even the track ahead appeared portentous, darker. As though the arching branches had eyes, fixed on her, watching her. As though they knew a secret not from the past but from the future.
Breathing in deeply, dispelling doubt and moving on, she wondered who else might be at the house, and she hoped that Sonia Brownlow would not be there. “Sycophant,” she said out loud. Oh, how she wished Annie had been invited too. But the invitation had been for her alone.
It had been Jack who had invited her. He had called at the house himself. But he had been rather offhand, she thought, flippant. “You’re very welcome to drop by for tea on Tuesday, if you fancy,” he had said, staring toward the gate to the orchard.
“That would be nice. At what time?”
“Quarter past four.”
Then he turned and marched off down the path.
As she walked down the driveway toward the house, Cecily could hear voices drifting over the bank of rhododendrons on her right. She could hear Mr. Fox quite distinctly, too loudly, speaking about the falling attendance at church. Then another voice, unrecognizable and vaguely apologetic, saying something about faith being carried in the heat . . . or was it in the heart?
She wasn’t sure how, exactly, to announce her arrival: should she go toward the voices, take a pathway and wander through bushes, then emerge, unannounced, in front of them all; or should she go to the front door?
She walked on, toward the shadowed north-facing front of the house, where the gritted driveway merged with a large circular space big enough for carriages to turn. At its center was a bed of tall grasses and a small oriental-looking tree. Immediately in front of the house, defining its lines, emphasizing its symmetry, was a neatly trimmed box hedge. She slowed her pace as she passed two shaded windows, noting her reflection in each, and trying to see beyond the glass; but the blind within one was drawn down and the shapes within the other too indistinct to make anything out.
The front door stood open and, next to a substantial boot-scraper firmly fixed to the ground, a coconut mat said “Welcome.” Ahead of Cecily was a small anteroom with a highly polished black-and-white marble-tiled floor, another boot-scraper with brushes, a mirrored coat stand to the wall on the right, draped in a variety of cloaks and coats, and a pair of discarded galoshes beneath; directly opposite her another half glass-paneled door remained closed. Cecily stared into the glass, straightening her hat, checking and smoothing her dress, then pulled on the bell.
It took a while for the young maid to emerge from the shadows and open the door, but as soon as she did, and before Cecily could speak, she said, “Good day, do come in, please follow me, miss,” and beckoned her into the darkened hallway. She led Cecily past a long ancient-looking table, where a red leather frame announced “IN” and where an arrangement of wilting flowers had shed petals and pollen onto letters and papers scattered beneath. Above the table hung a large oil painting: a Pre-Raphaelite-looking woman with golden flowing hair, standing by a pillar and staring back at Cecily over a bare shoulder. They passed a settee of chipped gilt, faded pink velvet and tattered brocade, a stairway of threadbare carpet leading up to a half-landing where light flooded in through a tall arched window, illuminating dust motes and cobwebs. She followed the maid down a passageway, past a marble sculpture of a naked man, to another glass-paneled door, and then out onto a canopied veranda. Here stood two more sculptures, some aged wickerwork chairs and a table, and a passionflower, thick and rampant and twisted around posts. They stepped out onto a wide stone-flagged terrace, which looked out over flowerbeds and lawns, beyond the formal terraced gardens to a wilderness of trees. The maid lifted her arm, pointing to a green-and-white-striped gazebo set out on the grass. “Her ladyship’s yonder. Tea’s to be served outside today,” she said, bobbing her head and turning away.
As Cecily descended the steps leading down to the lawn, she heard the rector say, “Aha, and here she is!” Ahead, under the canvas and seated in a variety of chairs, were the rector, Sonia Brownlow and her sister, Marjorie, Miss Combe, and a bespectacled lady with thinning gray hair and a book in her lap, whom Cecily immediately and instinctively knew to be the lady novelist.
In the center of the huddle, majestically upright and watching Cecily as she crossed the lawn, was an elderly lady in an old-fashioned rigid ensemble of navy blue-and-white-striped silk with lace cuffs, and a broad-brimmed navy blue hat atop a cloud of white hair. She wore an inscrutable expression, her eyes almost closed, her mouth unsmiling. Even if Cecily had not known who she was—and she knew exactly who she was—her eyes would have been drawn to this one person. Wherever she had seen her, whether in some busy city street, on a train, in a painting or photograph, she would have noticed her, been drawn to her. For her presence was compelling, without need of name or identity. Cecily felt a new sense of trepidation.
The rector rose to his feet: “Allow me to introduce you to Miss Cecily Chadwick, ma’am,” he said, with a nod to Cecily and a half-bow toward the lady. And without thinking, completely spontaneously, for she had not planned it, and had never in her life made such a gesture before, Cecily placed one foot forward and lowered her body in a deep curtsy. As soon as she raised her head she caught Sonia’s pinkish smirk, and felt her own face tingle. But the countess’s demeanor shifted; she opened up her bright blue eyes and smiled.
“Cecily. How lovely to meet you. Do sit down, my dear,” she said, gesturing to the empty chair at her side. “I imagine you know everyone here.”
Cecily glanced about and nodded as the others said hello.
“And this is my dear friend, Miss Dorland,” she went on. “Miss Dorland and I grew up together in Rome. Miss Dorland writes novellas,” she added, with a sudden and definite emphasis on the last word.
“Novels,” the bespectacled lady said quietly. “I write novels.” And she smiled at Cecily.
“I thought we’d take tea outside today, Cecily. I do hope it’s not too mu
ch for you, dear, this heat.”
“No, no, it’s—”
“One so loathes abandoning summer, peering out at it like a sick child from beyond a window, never being able to step out into this glorious light,” she said, gesturing bejeweled hands upward. And then she tilted her head back, closed her eyes and breathed in deeply.
Cecily watched her. She saw that her skin was tanned, more tanned than anyone else’s she knew, though she had seen people—even women of a similar age—at the fair with that same sort of coloring and had always thought it attractive. But the countess was nothing like any woman at any fair. In fact, the countess was nothing like any other woman. The combination and contrast between the color of her skin, her eyes, and the whiteness of her hair was striking and, despite her age, quite beautiful. In repose, the corners of her mouth slipped downward, lending age and an air of sadness to a face that still had something of the glow of youth about it, in spite of its lines. And that mouth . . . the mouth was—or certainly had been—a very pretty mouth, Cecily thought. But it was impossible to put an age—a definite age—on the lady. To Cecily, the countess appeared settled in that ill-defined place women reach, eventually, sometime after forty. A place her mother had happily, voluntarily—and prematurely—entered; a place where white hair alone did not necessarily denote years. She glanced at the novelist: girlish in demeanor, ancient in looks, she surmised. Confusing. She looked back at the countess: ancient in demeanor, but something still girlish around that mouth, puckering, pursing, smiling and pouting in turn. Then, as though sensing the scrutiny, the countess opened her eyes and turned to Cecily with a curious smile.
“Sunlight!” she said, dramatically. “It’s what feeble bodies crave, what troubled souls hunger for.”
“I just adore sunshine,” said Sonia, emulating the countess and tilting her head upward. “I think it’s perhaps something to do with having been born in the tropics.”
The Memory of Lost Senses Page 10