At the other side of the house is a yard - a garden, it is called here - small and fairly neat; it stretches back a-ways into the plantation like an inlet at the shore. There are some vegetable beds and many terracotta pots with fading tulips and other flowers I can’t name, and a line looped between two trees where a flowered apron and a dish-towel and a gingham table cloth are drying in the breeze. To the rear of the house is a two storey addition, where a door stands open. I lean on the stone wall and take all this in - the solid presence of the house, the eeriness of the moor, the over-arching sky, the domestic detail of laundry and fading flowers - and have such a strong sense of destiny and serendipity that when Grandma says ‘Is that you, John?’ I am not at all surprised.
She is sitting on a wooden bench I hadn’t noticed, hard against the warm stone of the house, where the jut of one of the hexagonal faces of the façade shields her from the little breeze skimming across the moor. She is nothing at all like the cool, elegant woman I remember and yet she is indisputably the same. She is shrunken, bowed down by age, her face much lined and her hair silver which, in the past, was always golden brown, but her eyes are the same intelligent points of light and her brows have the same arch. Her voice is the same - English, musical - but carked, croaky with age. She is shabbily dressed, as she never was in the past, in clothes so faded it is impossible to say their original colour or pattern. Her dress is gathered in at the waist with a knotted cord, her stockings sag around her ankles, her buttoned sweater slips from her narrow shoulders and her shoes are somewhat broken and shabby. Yet even in this sorry state she still has elegance and poise. She is somebody, and she knows it. She has half-risen from her seat, one thin arm is stretched out towards me. The skin of its hand is freckled by age-spots and trembles a little, perhaps with a kind of palsy, perhaps with excitement.
‘John?’ she says again, half wonderingly, and with an undertow of deep emotion which really moves me - I had not expected her to be so pleased to see me even though I have always known I was her favourite grandchild.
Then, in a flurry, I know of course this cannot be Grandma. She has been dead for fifteen years or more and I saw her buried in the family plot on the hill behind the house. As impossible as it is, this must be Evelyn, her sister, my crazy great-aunt, and she has mistaken me for someone else.
‘I’m John Wyman Jr,’ I say, removing my hat and smiling. The wind ruffles my dark hair. In hindsight, I wish I had had cut before my trip. I run my hand through it in an attempt to tame it and then hold it out for a hand-shake. ‘I’m…’ I am about to tell her I am Amelia’s grandson but some alteration in her face, a shadow of what I make out as disappointment, tells me she has already seen her mistake.
‘You’re Amelia’s boy,’ she says, quietly.
‘My daddy was her son,’ I clarify. I am still smiling. I still have my hand extended over the low copestones of her garden wall. She, though, has dropped the hand she had held out to me.
She nods several times, and I see the loose skin of her throat working, as though she is swallowing a bitter pill. ‘He must have been born in - what? July? August 1945?’
‘Yes ma’am,’ I say, ‘July 20th. He passed away, I’m sorry to tell you, last year.’
She sits back down on the bench behind her. ‘She was expecting him, when she left, then,’ she says, almost to herself. She clasps her hands on her lap, a gesture I have seen Grandma make a thousand times, and lets out a heavy sigh. She isn’t telling me anything I don’t know. It is no secret my father had no Wyman blood in his veins; he was born before Grandma and Grandpapa got married. But Grandpapa raised him as his own and gave him the family name. If my father had wondered about his paternity, he had never done so aloud.
I wonder about it, though. It is one of the things on my bucket-list, a question I feel I need to have answered. ‘Do you know who my grand-father was, ma’am?’ I ask. I put my hand on the latch of the wonky little wooden gate to access the yard. ‘Can I come in? And will you tell me about him?’
‘Yes, yes,’ she says. ‘You had better come in.’
She leads me inside the little house. It is dark, after the brightness of the day, and it takes my eyes a while to adjust, but she goes to the fire and pulls a blackened kettle over the glowing coals and reaches cups from an old dresser as though using some ancient sixth sense born of long habitude and familiarity. When my eyes get used to the gloom, I make out a gaggle of other furniture, pots of herbs, surfaces crowded with nick-nacks and ornaments. A skein of knitting spills out of a bag besides a threadbare chair on a balding hearth rug. A faded quilt is draped over the back of the chair and I guess some nights she sleeps in the chair by the fire instead of going upstairs. On the dresser there are packets of seeds, a ball of knitting wool, a vase filled with silverware and an old brass oil lamp. In the corner is a perilous-looking staircase leading aloft but the treads are occupied by many stacks of books and other paraphernalia. Many more books are crammed along the window ledges and there is a tower of newspapers on the floor by the hearth reaching to the height of my waist. Garden hand-tools hang from nails near the door along with a faded print dress on a wire hanger. There are saucepans on the hearth and a basket under the table containing vegetables and also a pair of shoes. On the mantel a large clock ticks, but it shows the wrong time. To me it all looks like something in the Williamsburg Living History Museum - a collection of old fashioned artefacts gathered together to show what life was like long ago, but I know this is the real deal. This is how she really lives; her whole life is here. The room tells me of a life shrunken down to this small cell of existence. I can see no sign of modern living; no television, no refrigerator, no microwave, certainly no computer or tablet. I can’t even see a telephone. We passed through a kind of kitchen on our way to this room but I saw nothing in it that would not have been there fifty years ago and I feel outrage on her behalf. Where is her family? Why has she been left to moulder here? The place is a mess. Perhaps she just hasn’t gotten round to cleaning, or maybe she is too old to do it. Either way, it doesn’t seem right to me.
‘You live here alone?’ I ask.
‘I do now. I have done for…’ she cocks her head to one side, considering, ‘thirty years.’
‘How do you manage? I mean, forgive me, ma’am, but do you have help?’ I try to estimate her age. I recollect she is Grandma’s younger sister, but she can’t be much less than a hundred years old. Surely, she ought to be in a care home?
‘I don’t need help,’ she says, quite sharply, ‘and don’t call me ‘ma’am’. I’m Evelyn.’
‘Sure, Evelyn,’ I reply, quickly, feeling reprimanded.
‘I can make coffee, if you like,’ she says, in a softer tone. ‘An American man showed me how to do it.’
‘I like English tea,’ I tell her. ‘Grandma used to make it for me.’
She busies herself with the tea things, moving slowly but deliberately. Considering her age, I think she is doing pretty well.
‘So, you’re John’s grandson,’ she says, presently. ‘Tell me, do you paint?’
A spark ignites inside me, a quickened flame. Art is what lights me up. ‘Yes, Evelyn, I surely do.’
We sit in the cramped, grimy little room and drink our tea, and she tells me about my grandfather. An artist! How could he not have been? I get out my ‘phone to Google him, but she waves at it impatiently.
‘It won’t work here,’ she says.
She is right, there is no signal, and I feel again as though I have stepped over some invisible boundary into the past.
We spend the afternoon here, Evelyn and I, locked into a time long passed and yet, to us both, there, in that little bower of memory, vividly present. She takes up her knitting as she speaks, and the click of her needles punctuates her story, and the spool of yarn gets smaller and smaller as the garment - whatever it is, an afghan, perhaps - grows on the bony platform of her lap. At some point she makes more tea, and smears butter on bread, and we eat it without tasting it, an
d the light outside, filtered already by the smeary windows and the lattice of leading, fades into afternoon and then evening.
When I eventually leave the gatehouse low cloud has drawn itself like a shroud over the moor, and rain is beginning to darken her washing. She gathers it in and holds it to her body.
‘You used to be able to stay at the Plough, in the village,’ she tells me, ‘but not these days.’
‘I’ll find somewhere,’ I say. I must sleep. My eyes are gritty and I am starving, the tea and bread and butter going nowhere towards satisfying my appetite. Yet I do not want to leave her. I am gripped by the silly idea that if I go away I won’t be able to find the place again, or it will be a shell, a pile of rubble, and my aunt Evelyn long dead and buried in the churchyard, and all of this day will have been some enchantment I cannot get back.
‘I don’t want to go,’ I blurt out. ‘I feel, at long last, from what you’ve told me, I know who I am, and if I drive away, I might lose myself again.’
She nods, undisturbed by my outburst. ‘Don’t worry,’ she says, and it is with more resignation than reassurance, ‘I’ll be here.’ She cocks her head backwards, to indicate, down in the glen behind her, through the woods, somewhere in a hidden hollow of history, the old house. ‘It won’t let me go,’ she adds, cryptically.
‘I want to know all about it.’ I tell her. ‘I want to see it. Can I? Tomorrow?’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘You can go down there, and see what’s left of it. And I’ll tell you what I remember. I wrote everything down, years ago - let me see, in 1955, it would have been.’
‘I’d love to read what you wrote.’
‘You will do,’ she nods.
She looks up at me, the affection in her eyes tempered by a sad longing. ‘You look so like him,’ she murmurs. ‘When I saw you there, I thought, at last.’
‘You’re waiting - for him?’ I venture. My voice, like hers, is quiet. The buffeting of the wind across the moor and in the branches of the trees behind the gatehouse is louder. The spatter of the rain on the flagstone path is louder. My sense of her history, of her suffering, of her fortitude is louder than our low voices as we speak solemn truths.
She sighs and I detect such weariness in her. ‘For one of them,’ she says, almost to herself. ‘Surely one of them will come back for me?’
I find a motel on the outskirts of the nearby town and dial in pizza before taking a long hot shower. I Skype Tammy but she doesn’t pick up. She must be out - I have no idea of what time it is at home - or, more likely, she chooses not to answer. I text the kids because I promised I would even though they didn’t seem to care either way, and then I sleep, dreamlessly and deeply, until morning.
I shower again and check my cell - no reply to my text messages. Well, what did I expect?
The motel offers no breakfast but I am directed by the clerk to a café in town which serves ‘A Full English.’ Afterwards I buy rolls from a bakery and flowers and fruit from a fresh produce store, and cheese from a deli, fumbling with the unfamiliar coinage. I get back in my car and retrace my route to the gatehouse, parking at the end of the track and almost running until I can be sure it is intact, and my aunt Evelyn is there.
It looks as though she has been looking forward to my visit; the table has been cleared of some of its clutter, the saucepans have gone from the hearth and the shoes from the vegetable box. Evelyn wears the same clothes as yesterday, though and I can see no sign that she has prepared or eaten food in my absence.
I present the things I have bought.
‘What are these for?’ she asks. ‘Haven’t you had breakfast?’
I make an evasive reply. ‘Have you?’
She waves her hand in a gesture, telling me food is of no importance to her. I place my hand on the teapot - it is only just warm. ‘Why don’t we have a fresh pot,’ I suggest, ‘and some bread and cheese.’
She gives me a shrewd look. My scheme has not fooled her for a moment. ‘If you like,’ she says. ‘In any case, I can make you a flask and some sandwiches to have later. You’re going to need them, I think.’
On the table are a number of sketch books and propped on chairs ranged against the wall are three small oil paintings, studies of a woman painted from oblique angles. ‘Those are for you,’ Evelyn says. ‘They were to have been…’ she breaks off, ‘…but she has no need of them.’
I approach the paintings. ‘Are they…?’ I begin, ‘I mean…’ I indicate the woman in the pictures. ‘Is this you?’
‘Ah!’ she replies, ‘well, that’s a question, isn’t it?’
Her remark makes me shy of examining the paintings in detail and I turn instead to leaf through one of the sketch books. There are many pictures of a baby done in soft pencil; the creases at the wrist, the downy hair, a cherubic mouth all tenderly rendered. I recognise the style as well as the fascination; I have similar sketches at home of my own children as infants. Who was this baby, I wonder, and did she, like mine, grow into a stranger?
I flick the pages. The rest of the book is filled with studies of a building I presume to be Tall Chimneys, especially the chimneys themselves - decorative brickwork, fretted stone, a black bird poised for flight from the topmost pinnacle. I see details of mullions, a cornerstone mapped with intricate tracings of lichen, thickly leaded windows reflecting scudding clouds and crowding trees. Other sketches show the whole house - majestic with a gothic, darkly romantic dignity, rendered in grey and sepia tones, standing against a tangled forest of ancient trees. They make my heart sing - they show exactly what I have imagined; impressive age, rich antiquity, tradition, romance - a treasure-trove of history we Americans envy to our hearts’ core.
I look up from the sketches and my heart is too full to speak. Evelyn is looking at me over the rim of her teacup. ‘You see it,’ she says, quietly. ‘And when you see the house, you’ll feel it, too.’
A second sketch book seems to me to contain later works. The style is less precise; colour is used to more dramatic effect. There are a dozen watercolour studies of the moor, done when the heather was in bloom; sweeps of violet muting to lilac and brightening to pink, spikes of green, a brooding lavender-grey of cloud overhead melding with the heathered horizon so seamlessly it is impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. One catching my attention in particular shows a dark circle of black bog fringed by spiny foliage, the sky above reflected in oily, iridescent water. It seems like my grandfather’s skies are often heavy with cloud during this period of his work, the cloud laden and low over the moor. I recognise the bleakness, the discontent, the frustration which has no specific source and yet is palpable and real. I have felt it in myself since Daddy died.
The edges of each picture are smudged and indistinct, as though there was something else my grandfather had wanted to capture but couldn’t quite. Or because things have no finite end or beginning; life is not framed and separate, it is joined, it is whole, all a piece with the past and the future in the same way that the east is connected to the west and the sea to the sky to the land. I look up at my aunt as this thought comes to me and she meets my eye. As I am connected to her, I think to myself, and always have been, across the ocean and the continents, along all the years, not only through my grandma but also through a man who has been utterly outside the picture and yet there, an indelible part of it, all the same.
After our bread and cheese she sends me through the knock-kneed gates and down the drive. ‘You won’t come with me?’ I ask her. She remains outside the rusted, creeper-choked metal-work, standing in a patch of sunshine, while I, already, have been swallowed by the gloom of the tree-lined tunnel. She seems small and impossibly frail, her hair blowing in wisps, revealing the pink of her scalp, the hem of her dress flapping against her thin legs.
Her voice, when she speaks, is like the murmur of the wind through branches, the whisper of seed heads. ‘I don’t need to,’ she says, and lifts her hand to a place between her breast and her neck. ‘It’s here.’ I cannot te
ll, from her gesture, if she means it is in her heart or at her throat. I turn from her, once again fighting the hunch that when I return she will be gone, a figment of a fevered dream. But the forest is real, the path before my feet is solid if badly pitted and, at its end, Tall Chimneys waits.
The day above is bright with sun and a brisk breeze blows, but here, beneath the trees, a preternatural dimness and stillness prevails. Trees crowd to left and right, brambles have sent arching canes like barbed wire across the path; they catch at my clothes and my backpack with spiteful thorns. Nettles have invaded what must once have been a broad, smooth carriageway and I have to walk through them with my hands above my head to keep from being stung. I am glad, now, that Evelyn isn’t with me - I’m not sure she could have managed this hike. At times it is hard to see the way at all. Boulders and screes of clay have slid down from above and there are crevasses where runnels of water have gouged their way into the path. Branches and whole fallen trees often block the route. The forest is reclaiming the drive.
The way switchbacks left and right down the slope of the valley, falling sheer from its crumbling sides into a drop thick with vegetation and sharp rock. What might have caused this crater, I wonder. Is it a prehistoric quarry, hewn by iron-age men eons ago? Or older still, the landing point of a meteor? And why on earth would anyone build down here? I pick my way carefully, scrambling over roots, pushing through rampant scrub, stopping often to listen. The wood creaks like arthritic joints, branches above slash and crash. I hear birds - but they seem distant - and water, and the gentle, inexorable creep of undergrowth. The light becomes greener and more murky the further I descend. Images of lost worlds and prehistoric creatures flicker across my thoughts - who do I think I am? Indiana Jones? And yet something - a hum, a resonance - comes to me from deep within the basin. It is in tune with my own acute anticipation and what even I - ornery oil-man that I am - recognise as destiny. It is what has brought me to England, after all, a search for the place of my grandmother’s birth, a search for my own roots. I have come to ‘find myself’ as the modern parlance has it, although, until very recently, I had not known I was lost. Some of the things Evelyn has said to me in our brief acquaintance have resonated with me, too. ‘You see it,’ she said, ‘and when you see the house, you’ll feel it too.’ And I think I do feel it, a sense of natural belonging, like a pearl in an oyster, a baby in a womb. In spite of the wild, jungle-like setting and the weird, other-worldly sounds of the woodland I have a profound sense of being home.
Tall Chimneys: A British Family Saga Spanning 100 Years Page 38
