The Memory of Lost Senses (43 page)

It is that morning of once before now, that morning I first saw you . . . and I feel the heat. I see lambent ferns and waist-high nettles . . . a demoiselle butterfly skimming the pond. I see dragonflies, minnows and jam jars, yellow gorse and purple heather, and poppies, scarlet and black. I see fox-colored tiles and tall chimneys, and lines of silver on blue. And you say, we have our whole lives ahead of us. Our whole lives, you say, looking back at me.

Now it is early evening. The sun has slipped beneath the trees. I move through the last remnants of slanting sun upon grass, golden, parched and dry, and I hear you whispering: when this whole rotten business is over . . . when this whole rotten business is over, you say. And my heart burns but I am still. I can wait. I can wait.

The sun slips further, I hear the first owl, and I feel the edge of summer.

The baby in my arms laughs as I swing him through that fading twilight, round and round, and round again. And when I stop and look up I see you standing by the hedge once more in your cricket whites, smiling back at me, at us.

Yes, it was a stunning thought, my darling. You were my stunning thought, burning and poignant and blurring my mind.

Cecily glanced up at the lights of Piccadilly. That dark time had gone. It was over. The only thing that mattered now was the man waiting for her in the bar of the Café Royal. And their future together.

“Anywhere here is fine,” she said to the cabdriver, pulling her wallet from her bag.

Chapter Twenty-four

The letter lay unopened on the shelf of the mantelpiece. Sylvia sat with Cecily’s manuscript scattered about her.

She had looked through it, rea
d a number of chapters. But it was appalling—and quite insensitive—she thought, for Cecily to have brought it to her. Then again, the girl had always been presumptuous. Had overstepped the mark years ago. And Cora was naive and silly to have trusted her so. As for the manuscript, it was, as far as Sylvia could make out, simply the work of a rather vivid imagination, and not an accurate account of Cora’s life at all.
Loosely based
, Cecily had said. Well, it was certainly founded on delusions, presumably Cora’s. What on earth had she told Cecily? And what could she, Sylvia, say to Cecily about it?

It was curious to Sylvia that Cecily had been unable to remember the people at the farm. When Sylvia said, “And what about that nice young family at Meadow Farm?” Cecily had stared back at her blankly. “The Abels, I think they were called,” Sylvia had added. No, Cecily shook her head. “They can’t have been there for very long,” she said. “It’s been with the Stephenson family since before the war.”

Of course Sylvia was testing Cecily to see what she knew. When Cecily went on to talk of Cora’s confused ramblings, and the mention of “someone called Uncle John,” it was obvious to Sylvia that she had never been told the name, the full name. Thus, she had never made any connection with the people at the farm. Uncle John was simply Uncle John: a monster, deprived of identity, and now confined to fiction. Sylvia had made sure of that. And she had done so out of loyalty and love, nothing more.

In truth, Cora had never
consciously
told Sylvia the full name either; certainly not then, not that summer. But Sylvia had a long memory, there had been little to cloud it. And even during Cora’s fever, at the height of her delirium, when she repeated the name out loud, Sylvia already knew it. She knew John Abel and the Uncle John mentioned in Rome all those years ago to be one and the same.

When Sylvia visited the farm, she had done so in order to establish whether one John Abel was related to the other John Abel. It seemed almost too much to hope that this would be the case, that a young farmer would be able to furnish her with those missing pieces of a story which had fascinated her for the best part of fifty years. And yet there were too many coincidences for there not to be a link, for she had heard the rector inform Cora that the family came from Suffolk.

Sylvia had duly told the young man that she heard he hailed from Suffolk, and then lied, telling him that her parents, too, came from that county, the Woodbridge area, and that they had spoken of a John Abel, one who had married a woman by the name of Frances . . . a Frances who had gone to live overseas? The young farmer clearly knew something of the story, for he had nodded and, glancing at his wife—smiling knowingly, Sylvia thought—he said yes, that would be his great-uncle John. Then he turned to Sylvia. “You’re not from the Mothers’ Union, are you?”

Sylvia shook her head.

“Parish council?”

“No. I’m simply staying in the village for a while and I . . . I heard the rector mention—”

“Ah! That old busybody, I might have known.”

“John!”

“We came here to get away from Nosey Parkers,” he said, staring at Sylvia.

“John!” his wife said again.

“I do beg your pardon,” said Sylvia, turning away, about to head back to the village.

Then he began, “I never knew him, but I know enough about him . . .”

He had been a shoemaker, he said, like his father before him. “It was the family trade, see, then.” And yes, she was correct, his namesake had married a woman named Frances, or Fanny, as she was known, the daughter of a local tin man. They had moved away from Woodbridge to the East End of London. But things had gone wrong there, for his great-uncle’s wife had “up-ed and off-ed,” left her husband and disappeared without trace. “It were the great mystery in the family, that.”

“And your uncle—great-uncle—whatever happened to him?”

The young farmer looked at his wife and then back at Sylvia. “He’s long since been gone.”

Sylvia smiled, nodded. “Of course, I realize he must have passed away by now but do you know
where
he passed away? Did he . . . live for long after his wife departed?”

“Lived till he were nearly ninety. Never married again, couldn’t, you see.”

“Yes, I see,” Sylvia said, thinking aloud. “But something must have made her—your great-uncle’s wife—flee like that, in the depths of the night, and taking the poor child with her?”

“Who said anything about night? Or any
poor child
?” he asked, narrowing his gaze.

“Oh, forgive me. I’m a writer. I somehow imagined that it was at night . . . and I thought I heard tell that there was a child involved.”

The three of them—Sylvia, the young John Abel and his wife—stood under the shade of a stone archway leading to the farmyard, where a pile of manure lay steaming in the sunshine. John Abel leaned on his rake as he explained to Sylvia that it was his grandmother who had first told him the story of how her brother’s wife had vanished.

“She knew her, of course, knew Fanny Abel. Didn’t like her.” He shook his head. “Said she had had highfalutin ideas. Woodbridge not good enough for her . . . London not good enough for her! No pleasing some folk, eh?”

“No, indeed.”

“And you’re right, as it happens, there were a child, a girl, but not theirs, some relation of hers, of Fanny Abel’s. My grandmother reckoned she and the girl must have went overseas, changed their names, because he looked for them for years, did Uncle John, placed advertisements in the newspapers, done all of that.”

“And he never discovered what became of them?” Sylvia asked.

“Didn’t your mother say she ended up a duchess or something?” the woman broke in, addressing her husband.

“That’s right!” He laughed; then, scratching his head, he said, “No, no, it weren’t Fanny Abel. ’Twas the girl, the girl what ended up a duchess.”

Now Sylvia laughed too. “A duchess! Gracious me. But however did your mother hear that?”

“Woodbridge is a small place, missus . . .”

“Miss.”

“Aye, Woodbridge is a small place, and she knew the family, see, some of the family at any rate. One of them had went off to work at . . .” He looked toward his wife.

His wife stared back at him blankly for a moment; then she said, “Wasn’t it Jersey?”

“Jersey, that’s it. He went off to be gardener to some folk at Jersey, but they must’ve had connections in Woodbridge, I reckon—imagine it’s how he got the job. Anyhow, they knew, must’ve known, because they were the ones it came from, the ones what told him. Imagine, eh? Imagine finding out that your own sister was aristocracy!”

“Ah, so he was the girl’s brother, this gardener in Jersey?”

He scratched his head again, looked back at his wife. “I think that were it, weren’t it? You remember better than me.”

“Yes, that’s it,” his wife replied.

“Aye, well, they’ll all long since be dead so we’ll never know now, but I fancy the notion that I’m related to the nobility,” he said, smiling and winking at Sylvia.

“Fascinating. And your great-uncle, he died eventually at . . . at Woodbridge?”

“He was locked up,” the woman replied quickly.

“Locked up?”

“Mm. Put away. Best thing for him,” she said, glancing from her husband to Sylvia. “He was a . . . a—”

“Nothing were proven,” the farmer interrupted, suddenly raising his voice. “It weren’t proven and shouldn’t be repeated. Some silly young girl’s word against his.” He turned to Sylvia. “Best let sleeping dogs lie, eh?” he said. Then he raised his cap to Sylvia. “Good day to you, missus.”

Walking back from the farm that day, Sylvia knew what she had to do. But, trying to look forward and not back, she struggled to contain her emotions, struggled with the knowledge that she had been the one to lie. The confirmation that Uncle John had not only existed but that he had lived to the age of ninety meant she owed Cora an entirely different story, one that absolved her and gave her back the life she could and should have had.

But could she? Sylvia thought now; could Cora ever have had that life, the life she so wanted—with him, George? Sylvia reordered her thoughts. She did not want to think of her own intervention. She
had
made amends. She had given Cora that life, given it to her in a book begun as a memoir now rewritten as a work of fiction. Yes, she had given her back her life, something Cecily could never do. That was why she came to me, Sylvia thought, to sanction Cora’s memories, to fill in the gaps.
You were there
, Cecily had said. Yes, she had been there.

When Cora married Edward Lawson at the town hall of the eighth arrondissement in Paris, three days after her fortieth birthday, she became stepmother to her son’s father, wife to his grandfather. But only Sylvia and Cora’s aunt knew this. Edward remained almost as oblivious as his son. And he, like others, was intoxicated by her—that aura of experience, that enigmatic smile. For Cora had lived, she had seen life, and felt it, too. And now she seemed to guard its secret. If one could only keep hold of her, pin her down. In the meantime, one could watch. Watch
her
. The way she spoke—to a waiter, a dignitary or a dear old friend—was something to behold. The way she tilted her head and blinked as she listened to those same people as they spoke to her; the way she drifted effortlessly from one language to another. And the places she knew and the people she quoted, and her knowledge, and empathy, that ability to relate to each and every person, no matter how extraordinary, no matter how mundane, as though she was completely captivated, immersed in their experience.

And all the while George saw this. She belonged to him, and yet he had never owned her. He loved her, but he had thought he needed something more. Something he would see and know, something he would recognize when it presented itself to him. It had been her; it had been her but not her. How could it be her? He had walked away. How could it be her if he had walked away? And his father, pandering and fawning like a lovestruck adolescent—it was despicable, sickening. It had made him feel physically sick. Cora was almost young enough to be his granddaughter!

And that day, that fateful day in Paris, when Cora married Edward, how bittersweet it had been. Even at the time, the marriage had had the scent of scandal about it. In ignorance, people’s main concern had been the fact that Edward, a longtime widower, respected member of the English establishment and father of England’s greatest painter, had elected to wed a woman almost three decades his junior,
and
one residing on the Continent,
and
one with a dubious past. For no one was quite sure of her credentials or where she hailed from. But it mattered not to Edward. He was in love, bewitched, mesmerized. No one in attendance at the nuptials could have been in any doubt about that.