by John Harwood
And Phyllis must already have found and read the story. About two sisters growing up in this house. But where were the remaining pages? Where, for that matter, were the rest of Viola's manuscripts?
One came true.
I went on gazing at the photograph until I was no longer certain that the two pictures were identical. Different setting, different light, I told myself; and easily settled: I would bring my own copy up to the house on my next visit.
For the next two hours I searched the study. I leafed through every book on the shelves, took every drawer off its runners, moved the furniture, looked under the carpet. Nothing but dust and shreds of dried tobacco and an assortment of bookmarks, bus tickets, slips of paper with fragmentary jottings on them. But in several of the books, I found indentations where folded papers or envelopes had been crushed between the pages.
Someone had been through the house, not in a mad rush but carefully, thoroughly, removing letters, manuscripts, pictures, photographs… And it couldn't have been Miss Hamish because she had asked me to look for just these things.
It could have been Anne, in her last weeks alone here after Iris died. If she'd taken everything away, and died in an accident (yet another accident?) and somehow not been identified… but how could she possibly not be identified if she had all the family papers with her?
She could have made a bonfire of the lot-amnesia or breakdown again-and walked away from the entire estate to start a new life. Leaving behind just the one photograph on the cedar cabinet; which just happened to be the double of the photograph I had found in Mawson.
Again I became conscious of that faint rustling and scratching somewhere nearby, and again I found myself stumbling down the stairs, back through the dining- and drawing-rooms, fumbling with the front door locks in the semi-darkness of the porch, and out into the lane where I leaned gasping against the wall until I noticed an elderly woman with a dog, both of them watching me suspiciously. I attended ostentatiously to the Banhams, and walked away as casually as I could.
BREAKFAST, I TOLD MYSELF FIRMLY. A SOLID ENGLISH breakfast, and then some solid factual work in the Family Records Centre. I didn't run because I was afraid. I was afraid because I ran. I could always buy a large battery radio; but that would seem like sacrilege. Or a mobile phone, but who could I call?
Alice. The only person in the world I wanted to talk to. The only person I wasn't allowed to-had promised not to-ring. I started up the slope towards East Heath Road with a strange sensation of vertigo. How could I have accepted Alice's terms for so long? Or felt so sure, so much of the time, that we would fall into each other's arms one day and live happily ever after? Madness. Obscured until now, one day at a time, by the cosy routines of the library, the daily dose of worry about my mother. Tonight I would ring the hospital and ask for Alice and say, you're not the only one capable of surprises.
THE NEW FAMILY RECORDS CENTRE IN CLERKENWELL WAS clean (except for the older registers, which stank even more than I remembered), spacious and, at opening time, relatively tranquil. The crowds built up as the morning wore on, but by then I had found most of the entries I wanted; and learned nothing, in essence, that I didn't already know from Miss Hamish's or Viola's letters.
Viola's shell-shocked son George-George Rupert Hatherley-had married Muriel Celia Hatherley, née Wilson in the district of Marylebone in the third quarter of 1927. Anne Victoria Hatherley had been born in the first quarter of 1928, and Phyllis May (just to make certain, though I didn't know why I was bothering, unless I suspected my mother of forging her own birth certificate), in the second quarter of 1929. And then George and Muriel had died in the third quarter of 1930, in the district of Brighton. George had been thirty-eight years old, and Muriel just twenty-seven when the accident happened.
They had died the same way as Alice's parents, it struck me as I sat in the basement tea room amidst the roar of genealogical debate. Since our very first letters, Alice had insisted on writing as if she'd been born, rather than nearly dying, on the day of the crash. She rejected as too painful, or simply ignored, all my attempts to get her to talk about her family, until I gave up asking. Just as I had with my mother, which made Alice's attitude seem-if not normal then at least perfectly understandable. I didn't even know her exact birthdate, only that she had been born in March. We didn't do birthdays or Christmas, or send presents of any kind: all that had been left on hold, waiting for our life together to begin. Mad, mad, mad. But now I could find out.
I fought my way through the swelling mob in Births, from 1958 to 1970, without finding a single Alice Jessell.
Deaths weren't as popular as Births. It took less than twenty minutes to establish that no one called Jessell had died anywhere in England or Wales between 1964 (the year Alice ought to have been born) and the first quarter of 1978, when she first wrote to me.
Of course she could have been born-and the accident could have happened-in Scotland, which kept its own records.
At the counter they told me I could log on to the 'Scots Origins' website and run as many specific searches as my credit card would bear. I ordered my certificates and walked down Ex-mouth Market in brilliant sunshine until I found an internet café. But the Scottish system didn't allow searches later than 1924. I logged in my credit card number anyway and entered 'Jessell 1560-1924'. We have no records for this name.
I opened an email window to Alice but couldn't decide what to write. One of my favourite books, when I was about eight or nine, had been an old Puffin Tales of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, by Roger Lancelyn Green. It had sinister illustrations in the style of woodcuts, which still occasionally came to life in my dreams. One of the stories was about a knight who married a beautiful princess under some sort of enchantment which meant that after seven years she would turn into something hideous… and there was another version in which they would live happily, so long as he never questioned her about her past. Of course the questions preyed upon his mind until at last he commanded her to answer, and then… I couldn't remember exactly what happened. Something dark and irrevocable.
I logged off without sending anything, finished my coffee and moved over to the payphone by the door. I had the number of the National Hospital for Neurology and Microsurgery in East Finchley in my notebook. It couldn't do any harm-could it?-to ring the desk and ask to speak to Alice Jessell. And ring off before she answered. But on the other hand… best leave it until this evening. Collect the photograph from the hotel, take a cab back to the house, start searching the library. Concentrate on the Hatherleys and try not to think about Jessells.
THE WINDOW OF THE CAB WOULDN'T OPEN. EVERY STRETCH of grass we passed on the way up was crammed with half-naked people soaking up the sunshine. I was dripping with sweat when I paid the driver at the entrance to the lane. Half-past one.
I had brought sandwiches, bottled water, a torch and spare batteries, three boxes of matches. But when the gate had closed behind me, there was plenty of light now that the sun was overhead. I tried again to swallow the sensation of something cold and metallic lodged in the centre of my chest, about where, I realised, my mental image of Alice habitually floated-an indistinct figure in dazzling white, glimpses of a face from several different angles, never quite in focus. As much a part of me as breathing. As close to you as your heartbeat.
I took my photograph up to the study and set it beside the framed picture on Viola's cabinet. They were indeed the same, but I was no closer to knowing who she was. 'Greensleeves', 10 March 1949. Just four days after Anne's twenty-first birthday.
Alas my love you do me wrong
To cast me out discourteously…
Greensleeves was all my joy…
I couldn't see a connection with anything I knew about her. It couldn't be to do with the breaking of her engagement to Hugh Montfort, because that hadn't happened until the summer of 1949. Could someone have written a play based on the song? A play for which she had auditioned?
Once more I read through the p
ages from Violas letters, which I had left on the writing-desk. Something in the dusty-sweet smell of the paper reminded me again of that hot afternoon in my mother's room, where this had all started. Or so it felt. Were the missing papers crammed into some hiding-place I hadn't found, back in the house in Mawson? Of course I'd hardly begun to search this one; I hadn't even looked in the basement yet.
Hiding-places… the false floor in the top cupboard. Could my mother have got the idea from something in her bedroom here?
The house was completely still. I left the two pictures side by side on the cabinet and went on down the corridor.
EVEN WITH THE CURTAINS OPEN, THE LIGHT IN MY MOTHER'S room was unnervingly dim. I had already looked through the dressing-table and chest, but I searched them again by the light of the torch. I lifted the bookcase away from the wall, dragged the counterpane and bedding and then the mattress off the bed, stirring up a cloud of dust and several more heavy, slow-flying moths, deliberately postponing my last and best chance: the wall of built-in cupboards that divided this room from Anne's.
As I had noticed the day before, the beds in both rooms were centred against the common partition, with the space equally divided between the two, so that on either side of the partition there was fixed panelling to the right of the bed, a cupboard above the left-hand half of each bed-head, and then hanging space with a shelf above the rail. I shone the torch beam into the cupboard above Phyllis's bed. The gouges in the floor-long, wavering scars, about a foot apart-looked unnervingly fresh.
The shelf in the closet was indeed made up of two separate sheets of wood-I could feel them flexing-but both were solidly fixed. Silly idea in the first place. If it had been a hiding-place, Phyllis would hardly have forgotten to take whatever she'd hidden there. She'd remembered the typescript in the study, after all.
Just so I could tell myself-and Miss Hamish-I had left nothing undone, I moved on to Anne's room and repeated the search, with no better result until I took the yellowing tennis dress off the rail to see if there was anything in the pocket. It didn't even have a pocket. As I hung it up again, the shelf above the rail rattled slightly. I climbed on to the bed to get a better view. In the torchlight, I saw a faint dark line around the nearest panel.
In the cavity beneath lay a dusty quarto notebook. Lined pages, handwritten. A diary.
25 MARCH 1949
Still freezing. I meant to start this on my birthday but it's nearly three weeks. Such a let-down, turning 21. The old suffocating feeling again, worse than usual. Something's missing and I don't know what it is. Like craving for a food you've never had but you'd know at once if you could only taste it, and then you'd never eat anything else. Or finding you can't breathe ordinary air any more.
I know what Grandmama would have said. Stop moping, girl, smarten yourself up, get a job. Iris just smiles sweetly and says you must do whatever you think best dear and goes back to the seventh astral plane. Perhaps I'd be happier if I had a boring job like Filly, but then I wouldn't have any time to myself. I waste so much time and then I resent it when I don't have time to waste. I don't want to type and I don't want to nurse and I don't want to teach. But I know I could write if only I had something interesting to write about.
29 MARCH
Went to a Labour Party meeting with Owen last night. In a horrible hall in Camden that stank. Of course it's awful, slums and all that, and I know I ought to care but I don't. The secretary, Ted somebody or other, tried to make me join. I said I'd think about it but I could see him thinking, rich girl slumming. Owen must have said something. And here I am queueing for neck of lamb and counting our pennies. I'm sick of Owen; he lectures me all the time and never notices what I'm wearing.
5 APRIL
Had tea with Owen in the High Street yesterday and gave him the push. He went all doggy and pleading and I walked off despising him and feeling I'd been hard and cruel.
14 APRIL
Iris got a summons irbm Pitt the Elder and insisted I go instead. You're twenty-one now dear, and I'm sure you've got a much better head for these things than I have. She's convinced herself she's going to die quite soon: one of her premonitions. Of course there's her heart, but she's only sixty for God's sake.
Felt very nervous about having to explain to Mr Pitt that I was there instead of Iris. But he was very charming and made a great fuss of me. Miss Neame brought us tea and a proper teacake and sandwiches, and I thought he just wanted to chat about how we were managing and all that, until I realised he was leading up to something.
I did wonder if Iris had been keeping something from us but it still came as a shock. He says our capital's run down and we're going to have to sell either the house or some of the pictures, furniture or silver or something like that. Apparently he's warned Iris several times but she hasn't done anything about it.
I asked him what he thought we should do and he said that depended on how much we want to keep the house. Now is a bad time to sell, apparently, because of death duties and supertax and all that, and with the housing shortage he said it would most likely go for flats and whoever bought it wouldn't want to pay much. But on the other hand if we know we want to leave, then perhaps the sooner the better.
Until now I'd never really thought about it. Somehow I'd assumed that Filly and I would get married and Iris would find herself a companion and everything would go on just the same. Even though we freeze every winter and the garden's going to pot I can't imagine not being able to come back here.
15 APRIL
Iris more or less admitted she'd kept quiet because Horus or whoever came through on the ouija board had told her something was sure to turn up. I nearly said yes, the bailiffs, but I bit my tongue. Of course she doesn't want to move. And Filly doesn't seem to care either way; she says she just wants to get a flat of her own as soon as she can afford it. So we've agreed to ask Mr Pitt about selling some of the pictures or the good chairs.
18 APRIL
Rang up Mr Pitt this morning. He asked if we had a copy of the inventory that Grandmama had made when she did her last will; if not he'll get Miss Neame to type out another one for us. Iris didn't know so I went up to the study to look.
Even with the morning sun streaming in the study always feels slightly haunted. Perhaps it's the leftover smell of her tobacco. And there was something rustling about in the ceiling. I don't think I'm afraid of mice but I shouldn't like it to be anything larger.
It wasn't in any of the drawers, so I started looking through the little cabinet, but then I got distracted and started reading some of Grandmama's stories again. And that made me remember her reading us 'The Pavilion' in the summerhouse before the war, at least I thought then she was reading but she made it into quite a different story, with nothing about Rosalind getting married or Mr Margrave being a vampire, or of course the angel; it was all about the way the pavilion changed whenever you went to sleep in it.
I didn't find the inventory, but at the back of the cabinet underneath a stack of typing paper I found an old leather music-case. Inside was another of her stories, a longer one I'd never seen before, called 'The Revenant'.
The creepy feeling started when I looked at the date. Three years before I was born, before our parents had even met. I wondered at first if she'd put 1925 for 1935, say, but I don't think she would have written it after the accident. Of course there must be lots of stories about orphaned sisters being brought up by aunts and uncles or grandparents. And it's not as if I've ever felt like an orphan. Just that so many things seem to fit.
It's this house for a start, though only this floor, really, and the lane and the garden. But why is it different from her turning the summerhouse into the pavilion? Because F. and I are the same age as Beatrice and Cordelia? Our rooms are side by side, and the studio is where Grandmama's study is. Beatrice goes out to work and Cordelia stays home, like me. And Iris has a weak heart. But so do lots of people, and she's not fat like Aunt Una.
And their not having any money, and having to do the
ir own cooking.
And me just turning 21.
Still freezing.
19 APRIL
Read the story again last night. It reminds me of the feeling when we used to play with Iris's ouija board: the way the glass seemed to come alive and tug. I'd never thought of Filly and me as estranged, just not terribly close. But now I wonder. Just as it didn't seem odd, before, that she and I haven't talked about our parents for years and years, and now it does.
28 APRIL
Filly does remind me of a cat. And there is something guarded and distrustful about her. I notice it more and more.
But is the story making me see things that aren't there? Like walking on the heath at dusk, when you think there's a man watching you from the shadows and he turns out to be a treetrunk?
5 MAY
Mr Pitt says Christies will send someone to look at the pictures. All I have to do is ring up and arrange a time.
This is silly. Lots of people have their pictures valued.
11 MAY
Mr Montfort-Hugh Montfort came this afternoon to look at the pictures. It was Iris's day with Mrs Roper's circle so I was here by myself. All morning I kept thinking, what if he looks exactly like Harry Beauchamp?
Of course he was nothing like, except for being young and quite good-looking. He's tall, and slender, with black hair swept back from the temples, pale skin, no moustache. And no corduroy trousers-he had on a charcoal grey suit, beautifully pressed. Very dark brown eyes, the corners crinkle when he smiles.
And he didn't make me feel embarrassed about our having to sell things. I wasn't going to mention it but he was so nice I ended up telling him all about us while I was showing him the pictures-although really he was showing me: he knew about almost every one we looked at. He thinks the Blake etching might fetch quite a bit.
