Amy Snow (25 page)

He nods gravely. “That is unutterably sad, my dear.”

For all that I am comforted that Edwin knows something of my circumstances, I am jumpy as a cat as the days crawl by. It is almost a week since I received Lady Vennaway's letter—and still no clue. I worry and fret at the question of what it is she might want with me.

However, there is a consolation. April fifth is Michael's fifteenth birthday, and he has decreed that we must celebrate with a boating party to Eel Pie Island. I had not thought I would share this happy event. Usually the good folk of Twickenham save the island for summer, but Michael is resolved—whatever the weather. In the event it is fine, unusually warm for the time of year, and Michael is as smug as if he had arranged the conditions himself.

I know I should have received Aurelia's next letter by now and been on my way; I worry that something has gone awry. Yet I cannot help but rejoice that I am still here after all! I am here to step, giggling and shrieking, into a boat with the girls. I am with them as they float across the water . . . I am with them as we tumble to the daisied grass. Almost at once Madeleine catches my hand and tows me around the island, pointing out the family's favorite landmarks: the preferred spot on the shore where the picnic blanket must be spread; the hotel where summer parties achieve elevated levels of merriment; the oak tree from which Hollis once fell and broke his arm; the willow under which Edwin proposed to Constance.

I am with them as we feast heartily and play boules and cricket and collapse in laughter over family jokes, which I now understand and share. After the picnic, the adults and little Louisa doze; Madeleine and Priscilla make daisy chains. The boys play at being savages on the far side of the island. Their yells can probably be heard in Twickenham. I take myself off to sit quietly for a few minutes beneath the beautiful and romantic willow tree, thinking that
here
, this very spot, is where the family life of the Wisters began. I think of Henry, of course, and imagine him talking and laughing with me here. How I wish he could meet my friends. The thought forms, again: this is what I want. For the first time it forms itself into spoken words and I speak it aloud, in a strong voice, though there is no one but a nodding black moorhen to hear me: “This is what
I
want.” The wanting of it curls through my stomach like smoke. I have no idea how I might achieve it and still less when I might be free to pursue such a dream, but nevertheless, I have thought it and I have spoken it and it lodges inside me now.

I am with them as we reluctantly pack up and sail home again, tired and happy, breathing chill river air under a waxing moon. I am here when I should not be . . .

•  •  •

And the following day, I wake to find a letter on my pillow next to my face. It is not addressed. The envelope merely bears my initials. Someone at Mulberry Lodge has put it there.

My dearest Amy,

I pray this finds you well, little dove. I trust you are rested and restored, that you are learning your own worth outside of the slanted world that is Hatville. The Wisters love you, do they not? Come along, admit it.

And admit that you like the clothes too. Oh, Amy, that I will never see you wear them. That you and I will never dress for a dance together. Imagine if we had been part of that family, instead of growing up in Hatville. Imagine.

Do you know what we did today, Amy? We went to the stream. It is some time since we did for I have not been able to leave my bed for a long while now and besides, we are too sophisticated now to dangle over fences. But you wheeled me there today and we sat amongst the bluebells, enjoying a small picnic of lemonade—oh Lord, how I
love
lemonade—and chocolate soufflé—one of Cook's rejected creations. We thought it perfectly delicious but for Cook it was not light enough. She would have thrown it away if we had not saved it from that egregious fate! It was good of us, was it not?

I remember that day. Extraordinary to imagine that after I had gone to bed, unsuspecting, Aurelia had penned these very lines.

But you remember our happy days together well enough, I feel sure. There are other things to say. I have confided in you my parents' glorious plan to wed me to Bailor Dunthorne. Now that you have gathered your strength, or so I hope, I shall shock you further and tell you the rest.

Oh, Amy, this is hard. The forced engagement was not the only secret I was keeping from you in those days. The other goes back even further. It began when I was nineteen and my weak heart was discovered. No, it began when I was eighteen and my parents truly began to insist that I marry. Or perhaps it was even before that! Indeed, I cannot truly tell now when it began.

Heavens, dearest, this is hard to write. Amy, you remember Robin, of course. Dear, gentle, good, handsome Robin. Well, I had always fancied that he was a little in love with me. (Of course, being incomprehensibly vain, I fancied most men were a little in love with me.) The truth is I was right. And as time went by, I think I fell in love with him too.

I find it necessary not only to put down the letter but also to get out of bed and stride several times around the perimeter of my room before I can resume reading. Aurelia and Robin?
Robin?
She
thinks
she fell in love with him? I remember the kindly older boy who toted me around like a sack of fertilizer, now recast as “dear, gentle, good, handsome Robin”!
Was
he handsome? Certainly, only I never thought of it before.

I have always thought of Robin as older—he looked after me when I was a little one, he was always so capable and responsible. The truth was that he and Aurelia were the same age, I realize with a shock. I never could quite believe that she was eight years older than me—she was so unruly and fanciful and always seemed to exist outside the normal rules of time.

I get back into bed, pummel my pillows into shape with an energy I cannot quite understand, and return to the letter.

At first, of course, he was just Robin who worked in the gardens. When we were children, before you came, I suppose he was the nearest thing I had to a friend. We both loved the birds and animals and plants. We both felt far happier out of doors. I felt a peace in nature that I could never find in the human world, as you know. He helped me mend and tend things. He didn't say much, as I'm sure you recall, but when he did it was worth hearing. When my mother lost the babies, when she argued with my father, when she told me I had to do something I didn't want to do, I would go and spend time with Robin. But I never thought of him as a
boy
, we were but children.

Then you came along, Amy! You took all my time and attention and I quite forgot poor Robin. I tended you and spoiled you and it felt quite wonderful to be needed and looked up to. As you grew older,
you
became the person who soothed and cheered me. When I wanted company, I could play with you. You grew older still and your company was a great deal more satisfying than Robin's, for you were talkative and curious and lively, and those traits are not amongst his attributes!

When I was eighteen, and my parents made it clear that I must marry sooner rather than later, you know how hurt and angry I was. One night, when the pain was too much to bear, I went outside. I sat on the old swing in the rose garden and wept bitterly. I was all outside my body and did not know what would become of me. I was discovered in this tragic state by Robin.

I had not seen him, properly, for a long time. We had not talked for a long time. When he found me crying, he did not say a word—and how wonderful
that
was, after all those words, those charged, hateful words that my parents and I used to fling at each other. He simply lifted me from the swing, sat down in my place, gathered me onto his lap, and held me close to him. We were no longer children.

What I am about to tell you (and I am sure you have guessed it already) would be nothing anyone would commit to paper in the usual way of things. Even if I could tell you in person, how would I choose my words? We are not given a language for it, in our chaste society. But Amy, I will tell you true.

I cried a long time in his arms, my head against his chest, and, Amy, it felt
good
. With all the talk of marriage and duty, men had started to feel like the enemy to me! How sweet and healing to realize it didn't have to be this way.

He took me to the orchard so that we might be private, hidden by trees. We sat on the grass and he held me again and I found myself smiling, even from the depths of my unhappiness.

Our holding turned to kissing. He looked at me as though I were a rare and precious doll he could not quite believe was his to handle, as though he feared I would break under his fingertips. I felt as though a lifetime's hunger were quenched in me, just by that look.

It was the same for me, the marveling. His cheek was so soft, despite his toasted skin from working outside every day. On his jaw I learned the feeling of a beginning beard, so alien to me. I felt I were drinking him in through my fingers, palms, absorbing every inch to store in my memory.

Fear not, little bird, I shall not be so detailed about
every
part of him! I do not wish to embarrass you! I quite embarrass myself! The words look so bald on the paper like that, though what they express was not bald. It was like liquid. It was soft and silky as twilight and luminous as the stars. It felt as though the whole world was reordering itself around me.

I pray for you that you might experience what I felt that night, when you are ready and when the time is right. There was a fever to it, Amy, that was greater than I could have imagined. It felt ancient. It felt sacred. I am still marveling, years later, at the wonder of it, and that it is so forbidden. Even so, I do not regret it, not for one moment.

There was, of course, never any question of a match between us. In those early days we used to dream wistfully of it—I never heard him talk so much as when he was telling me all he wished for us. But we knew that the dreaming was like our love—an impossible, secret pleasure. We knew we were soothing ourselves with fictions. Stolen moments: those strange times of night when no one else is abroad, the gaps between reality and dreaming, those were the dimensions in which our love could be. If love it was. It makes me sad that all the truly beautiful things in my life, the things I have chosen for myself—your friendship and Robin's touch beyond anything—have had to be snatched and secret.

I lay down the letter again and sink into a reverie for some time. What a confidence to receive! I struggle to adjust my memories to accommodate this new reality. Aurelia was
in love
, all those years, and did not tell me. In all the times that we giggled about her beaux or fretted about the future, she was omitting something—someone—very significant. Robin was her
lover
! I could not be more surprised if she had told me Cook was her mother or Dora her long-lost twin.
Robin?
I think no worse of her for the act, indeed I do not. But that she did not tell me when I had thought us so very close . . . that hurts. Although I was very young then. I suppose I cannot blame her for not telling a ten-year-old about such experiences. Still, when I was older, in her last years, why did she not confide in me then?

I begin to wonder if I am impossibly naive, for this is the second great astonishment I have experienced now—the third if I am to count the fact of the treasure hunt itself. Together they make me feel I hardly knew her at all. My memory of Aurelia is as open and frank as the sun on a summer day. But this gives the lie to all that.

Anyway, it continued, this love, this passion, whatever it was, right up until the time that I went away. We knew it had no future and yet we could not stop. For as long as he was there and I was there . . . it was not to be resisted. So there you see, Amy, was yet another incentive for me to go away from Hatville. The feelings between us were not dissipating and no good could come of it. I could not have borne to see him marry someone else. Yet he could not have me, and he was a young man, a good man, in need of a lovely wife. What if they had discovered us? Can you imagine what they would have done to him? He would have been dismissed, naturally. He would have been disgraced. He would not have been able to find another position—my father would have seen to that. What an extraordinary world we live in.

You know the rest of this story, Amy. There was no happy ending for Robin and me. He waited at Hatville while I traveled, to see that I came home safely, which he doubted as anxiously as you, dear, and then he left. Our separation, I believe, had given us both a much-needed perspective, and besides, my decline, as you recall, was dramatic. He could not bear to stay and watch me die. I wonder how he does, Amy? I wonder if some perky Gloucestershire miss has now captured his heart?

So now let me return to Bailor. I saw him only once after I agreed to marry him and before I went away. At my parents' invitation, he came to dine. I was pleasant and charming all evening (so he must have been suspicious). My parents left us alone after the meal.