Windfallen (40 page)

At one point, when Adeline had cried for a whole day and a night, Lottie frantically searched her bedroom, hopeful of finding some reference to Adeline’s family, someone who could come and help lift her out of her depression. She flung her way through the rows of brightly colored outfits, her nostrils filled with the scent of oil of cloves, her skin brushed by feathers, by silks and satins. It was as if Adeline, like Lottie, barely existed; apart from one theater program showing that several years ago she had appeared in a minor role in a theater in Harrogate, there was nothing—no photographs, no letters. Except for those from Frances. Lottie thrust these deep back into their box, shivering at the thought of having to be party to Frances’s last, futile emotions. Finally, in the suitcase in the wardrobe, she found Adeline’s passport. She rifled through it, thinking that perhaps it would reveal a family address, some clue, some help as to how to assuage her grief. Instead she came across Adeline’s photograph.

She had a different haircut, but it was unmistakably her. Except the passport called her Ada Clayton.

T
HE MOURNING LASTED ONE DAY SHORT OF FOUR WEEKS.
Lottie woke one day to find Adeline in the kitchen, cracking eggs into a basin. (Lottie had mentioned nothing about the passport; people’s lives were best left, like sleeping dogs, undisturbed.)

“I am going to Russia,” Adeline said, not looking up.

“Oh,” said Lottie. She wanted to say, What about me? What she said was “What about the atomic bomb?”

Three days before Lottie and Adeline were due to leave the French house, Mme Migot had come for her final kneading session of Lottie’s womb. Or undignified peering at Lottie’s undercarriage. It was hard to know which particular pleasure she would choose for that visit. Lottie, despite feeling rather less proprietary of her body now that it had played host to another human being, nonetheless still felt invaded by the frank pulling and prodding that the older woman employed, as if Lottie were some piece of stretched-out skinned rabbit hanging up in the market. The last time she had come, supposedly to check that Camille was feeding properly, she had, without any reference to Lottie whatsoever, reached a hand inside Lottie’s loose blouse, taken hold of her breast, and, with a swift roll of finger and thumb, sent a white jet of milk spraying across the room before Lottie even had a chance to protest. Apparently satisfied, she had muttered something to Adeline and moved on without explanation to check the baby’s weight.

This time, however, she had made only cursory fumblings of Lottie’s abdomen before picking up Camille with an expert grasp. She held her for some time, chuckling to her in French, checking her umbilicus, her fingers and toes, exclaiming at her in tones far softer than those she ever used toward Adeline or Lottie.

“We’re leaving,” said Lottie, holding up a postcard from England. “I’m taking her home.”

Ignoring her, Mme Migot had grown quieter and, eventually, silent.

Then she walked over to the window and studied Camille’s face for some time.

She barked something at Adeline, who had just walked into the room, clutching a map. Still apparently rooted somewhere deep in her own thoughts, she took some minutes to comprehend, and then she shook her head.

“What now?” said Lottie irritably, fearing that she’d done something else wrong. The color of her toweling napkins had apparently been a village disgrace, the manner of their pinning a matter for Gallic hilarity.

“She wants to know if you’ve been ill,” said Adeline, frowning as she tried to listen to Mme Migot. “Julian’s friend in the embassy says I will have to get some sort of visa to go to Russia and that it’s almost impossible without diplomatic help. He thinks I should come back to England to sort it out. It’s too, too annoying.”

“Of course I’m not ill. Tell her she’d look like this, too, if she had a baby keeping her up half the night.”

Adeline said something back in French and then, after a pause, shook her head. Finally, interrupted from her book yet again, she looked over and said, shrugging, “She wants to know if you have a rash.”

Lottie was about to say something rude but was silenced by the expression on the Frenchwoman’s face.

“Non, non
,” the woman was saying, making a sweeping motion toward her own stomach.

“Before you had a bump, she means. She wants to know if you had a rash before you became . . . heavy?” Adeline, her attention finally captured, looked quizzically at the midwife.

“A heat rash?” Lottie thought back. “I’ve had lots of heat rashes. I think. I don’t cope very well with this heat.”

The midwife wasn’t satisfied. She fired off more questions in urgent French, then stood looking at Lottie expectantly.

Adeline turned. “She wants to know if you felt ill. If you had a rash when you were newly pregnant. She thinks”—she paused and said something in French to the older woman, who nodded in reply—“she wants to know if there is any possibility you could have had the rubella.”

“I don’t understand.” Lottie fought a sudden urge to reach out for her daughter, to pull her protectively back close to her. “I had a heat rash. When I first got here. I thought it was heat rash.”

The midwife’s face softened for the first time.
“Votre fillette,”
she said, gesturing.
“Ses yeux . . .
” She waved her hand in front of Camille’s face, then looked up at Lottie and did it again. And again.

“Oh, Lottie,” said Adeline, her hand to her mouth. “What are we to do with you now?”

Lottie stood very still, an unseasonal chill seeping into her bones. Her baby lay peacefully in the woman’s arms, her fair hair forming a feathery halo, her seraphic face illuminated by the sun.

She hadn’t blinked.

“I
CAME BACK TO
M
ERHAM WHEN
C
AMILLE WAS TEN
weeks old. I wrote and told Joe, and he asked me to marry him as I stepped off the train.”

Lottie sighed, placed her hands in front of her on her knees. “He’d told everyone that the baby was his. It caused a scandal. His parents were furious. But he could be strong when it counted. And he told them that they would be sorry if they made him choose between us.”

The last of the wine was long gone. Daisy sat, oblivious to the late hour, to the fact that her feet had gone to sleep under her.

“I don’t think his mother ever forgave me for marrying him,” Lottie said, lost in some distant memory. “She certainly never got over me landing her precious son with a blind daughter. I hated her for that. I hated her for not loving Camille like I did. But I suppose, now I’m old, I can understand a little better.”

“She was just trying to protect him.”

“Yes, yes she was.”

“Does Camille know this?”

Lottie’s face closed over. “Camille knows that Joe is her father. Joe is her father.” Her voice held a note of challenge. “They’ve always been very close. She’s a daddy’s girl.”

There was a brief silence.

“What happened to Adeline?” Daisy whispered. She said it with a kind of dread, fearful of what she might hear. She had found herself weeping at the story of Frances’s suicide, remembering her own darkest days just after Daniel left.

“Adeline died almost twenty years ago. She never came back to the house. I used to keep it clean for her, just in case, but she never came. After a while she didn’t even write. I don’t think she could bear to be reminded of Frances. She loved her, you see? I think we all realized it even when she didn’t. She died in Russia. Near St. Petersburg. Quite wealthy, she was, even without the things that Julian had given her. I liked to think she was there because she’d found Konstantin.” Lottie smiled shyly, as if embarrassed by her own romanticism.

“And then when she died, she left me Arcadia in her will. I always think she felt bad about me marrying Joe.” Lottie stirred, began to gather her things around her, placing her glass on the floor by the chair. “I think she thought she let me down by disappearing when she did.”

“Why?”

Lottie looked at her as if she were stupid. “If I’d had the house then . . . the money then, well, I wouldn’t have needed to get married at all.”

I
cried for six whole days on my honeymoon. Peculiar, Mummy said afterward, for someone who had been so desperate to leave home, especially as a married woman. And more so when you think of our wonderful cruise ship, with our beautiful first-class cabin, paid for by the Bancrofts.

But I was terribly sick, so much so that Guy had to spend hours wandering around on his own while I lay in our cabin feeling wretched. I still felt miserable about Daddy. And, strangely, I felt absolutely rotten about finally leaving Mummy and the children. You see, I knew nothing was going to be the same again. And though you might think you want that, when it actually happens, it feels so dreadfully final.

We didn’t behave like honeyspooners at all, really, not that I would have told the parents or anyone. No, my postcards were full of the amazing sights and the terrific dinner dances and dolphins and sitting at the captain’s table—and I told them about our cabin, which was absolutely stacked with walnut and had a huge dressing table with lights all around the mirror and free shampoos and lotions, which they refilled every day.

But then Guy wasn’t himself for a lot of it. He told me it was because he preferred open spaces to water. I got a bit upset at first and told him he’d have wasted a lot less of both of our time if he’d told me beforehand. But I didn’t like to push him too hard. I never did. And he came around in the end. And, as that nice Mrs. Erkhardt said, the one with all the pearls, simply all couples argue on their honeymoon. It’s one of those things that no one ever tells you. They never tell you about other things either. But she wasn’t so specific about those.

Besides, it was fun in parts. When they first realized we were on our honeymoon, the band struck up “Look at That Girl,” you know, that tune by Guy Mitchell, every time we entered the dining room. I think Guy got rather sick of it after the third go. But I liked it. I just liked everyone’s knowing he was mine.

I heard from Sylvia, sometime later, about Joe. Mummy was surprisingly cool on the whole thing. She didn’t even want to know whether the baby really was his, which surprised me. I would have thought she’d be simply mad to know. In fact, she got positively shirty when I brought the subject up. But then I think she had her hands full with Daddy’s drinking at the time.

I didn’t tell Guy. Women’s gossip, he said once, when I started telling him about Merham. I never mentioned it again.

D
aisy had worried for almost ten days how to properly apologize to Jones, how to find ways to convey that her look of horror, her abject tears that morning, had been a reaction not to him but to who he was not. She had thought of sending flowers, but Jones didn’t seem like a flowers man, and she was never entirely sure what the individual blooms were supposed to convey. She thought of just ringing and saying it, in blunt terms, his terms: Jones, I’m sorry. I was embarrassing and crap. But she knew she would not be able to leave it at that, that she would blather and bleat and stammer her way through a messy explanation that he would despise even more. She thought of sending cards, messages, even getting Lottie, as she was now brave enough to address her, to do it for her. He was scared of Lottie.

She did nothing.

Fortuitously, perhaps, the mural did it for her. One afternoon, as she waded, pen-sucking, through lists of specifications, Aidan had approached her to tell her that one of the painters had been scraping lichen from the outside terrace wall and had found color underneath the whitewash. Curious, they had chipped away a little more and found what appeared to be the image of two people’s faces. “We didn’t like to do any more,” he said, leading her outside into the bright sunlight. “In case we ended up pulling off the paint underneath.”

Daisy stared at the wall, at the newly revealed faces, one of whom she could just make out to be smiling. The painter, a young West Indian man called Dave, sat smoking a cigarette on the terrace. He nodded his interest at the wall.

“You want to get a restorer in,” said Aidan, stepping back. “Someone who’d know about a mural. It might be worth a bit.” He had pronounced it “muriel.”

“Depends who it’s by,” said Daisy, bending forward again. “It’s nice, though. Kind of Braque-ish. Do you know how far it goes across?”

“Well, there’s a patch of yellow in this left-hand corner and blue up there to the right, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a good six feet. You want to ask your woman there what she thinks. She might have been around when it was painted. She might know something about it.”

“She never mentioned anything,” said Daisy.

“There’s a surprise,” said Aidan, rubbing at dried plaster on his trousers. “Mind you, she never mentioned anything about diapers on-site and no drilling during sleepy-bye-byes either.” He grinned slyly and leaned back, as Daisy turned to make her way inside. “Here, you’re not putting the kettle on, are you?”

Lottie had been out with Ellie. So Daisy rang Jones, initially planning to tell him, eager to have him associate her with something good.

“What’s the problem?” he said bad-temperedly.