“Olivia!”
The spear was never taken down, not even when painters came to exorcise the ghosts imprinted by smoke and time on the plaster round the fireplace. They wrapped it in paper and dabbed their brushes expertly behind. I remember climbing their freckled ladder for a look (I must have been eleven or twelve), noticing for the first time that the blade, shaft, and a small pommel at the base were made from a single piece of wood. The spear seemed to belong to a place or time where metals were unknown. Yet there was nothing primitive about the thing; it was as finely worked and polished as a piece of furniture, the mere look of it conveying poise, authority.
The ghosts hid for a summer beneath pale green, resuming their haunts when winter rain trickled down the flue. My sister and I were glad to see them back. They had names: the Dark Lady, a triangular silhouette we knew to be a woman in a cloak; above her the Man in the Moon, a round stain the size of a dinner plate which, in the last of day, before curtains were drawn and lights switched on, was a mottled face. Lower down were two sinuous forms we named the Lizard Twins. Lottie, who is two years older, used to say the Lizard Twins were trying to scamper up the Lady’s skirt. When she turned thirteen she got a knowing look and pointed at some small spots (hitherto identified as lizard turds) and said she thought they must be the Dark Lady’s Curse. This was overheard by Mother, who called her out of the room. A day later, by the iron warmth of the kitchen stove with its smell of old roasts and fuel-oil, my mother appalled me with the facts of life.
The most recent male things, our father’s, were mainly photographs he’d taken in two wars: young men on windscoured airfields, brave grins behind goggles and leather, white scarves flowing like contrails from their necks; the ruins of Berlin and Hamburg, smoking silhouettes at dawn; Oriental temples in strange gardens of raked gravel and big stones. He was good, very good—I can see that now—though as a child I merely gazed at these images for hours in fascination, absorbing something of him there. His ruins have a jagged grandeur, his airfields (always a difficult subject) are balanced foreground and horizon, detail and distance—a radial engine like a metal sunflower, a dark propeller against a mare’s-tail sky, fatigue and fear behind brave smiles.
And Jon himself: as a boy at the seaside, in his RAF uniform, astride his motorbike, outside a country pub with his wife (impossible to think of her as Mother). Now that I’m in my thirties, he looks so young and handsome, a stranger who is and is not my father. How old do you have to be before you can see your parents as young people, glowing with reckless love?
Downstairs were his books. A lot about planes and engineering, also Greene, Conrad, T.E. Lawrence, Greek plays, Romantic poets. His Leica in a brown leather case. A shelf of 78s. A wireless-set with faraway cities etched on phosphorescent glass: Hilversum, Lisbon, Oslo, Prague. And in the greenhouse, under an old carpet, the motorcycle he’d bought new in the spring of ’53 and ridden only a few times before he went away. “A motorbike, Vivien,” he’d told Mother when he brought it home, “is the closest you can come on earth to flying.”
She couldn’t bring herself to part with anything of his. At first because she expected news of Jon’s return daily, running at each ring of the phone or doorbell. Then, as years went by, because there was still hope. And when hope had shrunk to a small irrational lump like the residue of a religion in which one no longer believes, still she kept all his things because getting rid of them was tantamount to sacrilege.
Korea and career. My three-year-old mind construed them as the same: fathers are detained by careers and Koreas, especially military careers.
The Korean War never ended; it was merely put on hold. History sees it as a postscript to the second war. At the time it must have seemed like the beginning of the third. But who remembers now? How many people even know that British forces took part? Korea has been shouldered out by its noisy neighbours in time: World War Two on one side, Vietnam on the other.
There were “reports”—of prisoners held in North Korea, or China, or the Soviet Union—which degenerated into rumour. Defectors from the East would revive old stories of men heard speaking English in Siberian camps or tropical prison farms. Enough to quicken hope, to make us wonder, to let ourselves pick at old scars on our hearts. Could he still be alive? Had he for all these years had a life somewhere, planting rice inside a barbed wire perimeter under a molten sun? Could he be there on the dark side of the earth—be looking up at the moon, seeing the full moon I could see when I ran outside on a summer evening? Sometimes I felt sure that the moon was a mirror in which, with a big enough telescope, I’d be able to see his face.
In those hollow days after the funeral Lottie sat beside the fireplace in Mother’s leather wingback; my sister’s theatrical way of saying she was head of the household now.
I remember her frowning and staring at the hearthrug, her face pulled out of symmetry by an active bulge in a cheek where her tongue explored a tooth. After some minutes she said: “A friend of mine’s sniffing round the two-wheeler. Says it’s a Royal Enfield, a ‘Super Constellation or something. Sounds more like a plane, doesn’t it—I wonder if that’s why Jon chose it? Anyway, he reckons the old heaps restorable. And desirable. Worth a lot more now than when it was new. We could be quids in.”
She had on a bulky fisherman’s sweater and black leggings, shoes kicked off and feet tucked under her bottom. A mermaid pose. Her lips were dark red, her sapphire eyes skilfully framed with liner. We’d been out to see our solicitor that morning, and Lottie never could greet the world without her “face,” though she was just as lovely without it. (I wasn’t bothering at all; I’d just round up my springy hair in a clasp and pull on a sweater and jeans.) The will, read to us a few days before, had not been helpful: I hereby give devise and bequeath all my real and personal estate to my dear Husband Jonathan Barkley Wyvern absolutely, in Witness whereof I have subscribed my name this seventh day of July, One thousand nine hundred and forty-nine.
The day after their second wedding anniversary. Lottie was one; I did not exist. The solicitor said there had to be a later will somewhere. Our mother would have made a new one—handwritten, at least—after her husband disappeared. We searched her desk but we knew better. Her wishes changed no more than her belief in Jon’s return.
Lottie poured herself a whisky, lifted an eyebrow. “Go on, Liv. Get a glass. I know it’s only eleven, but who’s here to tell us off? Time we acted like grown-ups, you and me.”
“I suppose this ‘friend’ of yours is some biker shag-bandit?”
“I wish. Sugar daddies are more my line these days. The offers I get! Sixty-year-olds! No, Piers is just a sweet young guy I tell all my dankest secrets. Runs a junk shop in World’s End. ‘The Den of Antiquity.’ Name’s better than the stuff inside. But he knows the price of absolutely anything. Anything old.…”
“And the value of nothing? You, for instance.”
“Not my sort, Liv. Too serious. You’d like him.”
She topped up her glass, set the bottle down on the floor beside her chair. “Poor Mum. What are we going to do with this place? Can you see yourself living here? I cant. I’m a London girl, and the trains are no good. And what are we going to do with that sodding one-eared elephant? Someone told me it’s illegal to sell ivory now, even antique. All the books! They must weigh tons. And what about this spear?” She rolled her lovely eyes at the weapon above her. “How do you flog a spear? I’m going to re-open the grate this minute and break it up for firewood.” Lottie leaped to her feet, kicked at the asbestos board that sealed the chimney, tugged at a sprung corner, gave up. She sank back into the chair, chewing her bottom lip. Then: “Have you found his eye yet?”
“Eye?”
“Henderson’s. The only thing I know about Henderson is that he wore a glass eye. A lions eye he got from a taxidermist.”
“A tiger. Mum said it was a tiger.”
She peered at a photograph across the room, at an upright chap of thirty or so in the dress of a late Vi
ctorian naval officer, firm gaze to the lens, sharp chin, nose, and shelving brow carved in shadow by a studio skylight, gloved hand on the hilt of a sword. Many Henderson’s had lived at Tilehouse Street, but this was the one we called simply “Henderson,” known to have been in Africa, owner of the spear.
“Never noticed before, but he was rather tasty, wasn’t he? Wouldn’t kick him out of bed for farting if I was a nice Victorian girl. Not while he still had both his own eyes anyway. Have to admit that’s quite good, though—a tiger’s eye. Almost worth losing one to do something like that.”
When Lottie acts tough it means the opposite. I could see by the way she’d curled herself. And she was shivering, though the house wasn’t cold. I’d flung aside the heavy brocade curtains of indeterminate colour (they looked like they’d hung in the room as long as the spear) to let the spring sun pour its honey on the floor. Mother kept the front drapes drawn for privacy, but you never shut out the sun if you live in British Columbia.
“Liquidating heirlooms isn’t going to make us feel any better, Lot. Let’s not do things we might regret. We can always rent this place out for a while. Don’t make any big decisions for six months—that’s what everyone says. I’ll take the spear. Mother always said she wanted me to have it.”
“You’re right. I’m babbling. God!” she added. “What are we worrying about the junk for? What about poor Mother’s stuff? I can’t go near it. Her clothes, Olivia. Mummy’s clothes!” She burst into tears, whisky spraying from her mouth, her eyes red and piggy. People always say that Lottie has the world by the tail; I’d never seen my sister so diminished.
It was August 1988 when we finished emptying two hundred years of life from Tilehouse Street. Perhaps one day you’ll see the place, if Lottie and I keep it. Or you could have a snoop if you live nearby—Hitchin’s about thirty miles north of London. (Where do you live, I wonder. Not knowing where you are makes you almost as unimaginable as not knowing your name.)
We started with the attic and worked down, putting things in storage, taking a few for ourselves, leaving furniture that might do for tenants, pieces without much market or nostalgic value. I stayed in the bedroom Lottie and I shared when small—still the same teddy-bear wallpaper—and did the bulk of the work. She appeared and helped (talked, mainly) whenever she could get away from London.
The house had begun as the home and office of the Henderson’s—Scots originally—Quakers entrusted with money and legal matters by less godly folk. It’s red brick, tall and narrow, a short walk from the River Hiz, whose name I’ve always adored. The faintly classical façade, suggesting exactly the sort of place a banker or lawyer should live, is right on the street. “This house has never been the same since the motorcar,” Mother used to say, quoting one of Jon’s old aunts. True enough: I remember the mirrors trembling at each bus and lorry, the lurching shadow-play thrown by headlamps on our bedroom curtains. But the back was quiet and private, a long, slim, high-walled garden, with a copper beech, a catalpa, and a gentle upward slope to a ruined greenhouse crammed with gardening tools and Jon’s old bike.
In Victorian times the Henderson’s went into the Navy and the Church, forsaking Quakerism for the Queens shilling. Among the tintypes in the study were a whiskery admiral and a deacon. Money had come and gone with empire. Mother raised us on Jon’s pension and little else. Financial crises—her teeth, Lottie’s drama school, dry rot—were met with the arrival of a van. One by one a piano, a portrait, a Tang bronze, a Tompion clock departed over the years, until little remained of the family hoard except the bric-a-brac.
I filled five boxes with Jon’s photos and negatives, and shipped them to Vancouver. Lottie wanted only a few snaps, a concise history of our parents’ courtship and her origin: in front of the King’s Oak with cocktails in their hands; at a churchyard lych-gate on their wedding day, beaming at the future through the door by which a body leaves the world.
Five boxes of Jon’s past, yet nothing of Mother’s. Not even one shot of her girlhood or her single years. Only those taken by Jon before he went away. One side of the family had too much history, the other much too little.
She wouldn’t talk, and we learnt not to ask. All she told us was that she was an orphan, a Barnardo’s girl, and the nice people there had been very kind to her. Once, when I was still quite small, I found her on the landing, stricken, clutching a piece of paper in a sodden hanky. She’d drawn me to her and hugged me half to death. “Oh, Livvy! My darling.” Her voice faint and scratchy, far-off yet shrill like an old record. “If only you knew! If only …” I stamped my foot and begged to be told. And she said—so softly I doubted later what I’d heard—that she’d been “disowned.”
Lottie and I discussed this at night in whispers. We concluded that disowning someone had to be a secret but common practice among grown-ups, like what they really knew about God and did in bed together. Mother never spoke of it again. Many years later—just before I went to Canada—Lottie asked her point blank about that long-ago meeting on the stairs. Mother laughed and said she couldn’t remember it at all.
“Perhaps you did hear wrong,” Lottie said at Heathrow. “Or she was off her head for a while. Over Jon. But I doubt it, Liv. The laugh was wrong. I’m sure that laugh was wrong. In my line of work you get an ear.”
Mother’s words came to mind as I went through her desk. I hoped to find that piece of paper, whatever it was, and other letters, especially from Jon during the Korean war, though she wasn’t a keeper when it came to correspondence. Every year, on Twelfth Night, she threw out the year’s letters with the Christmas cards. I found four—just four!—all from their early days before I was born, before Korea. The most recent was dated May ’49, and sent from a base in Scotland. I felt shabby, snooping at my parents’ intimacies, and very sad, yet the hope of finding a clue she’d missed or forgotten or hidden was irresistible. All I discovered were some names to put to faces in the photographs, and crazy post-war dreams I’d never heard her speak of: to start a flying school at a Battle of Britain airfield, or buy a small hotel in Cornwall, or leave England altogether and grow peanuts in the sun.
The attic had yielded more than four letters from Henderson alone, but they mainly concerned wills (his brothers and sisters had all died childless before him). There was also a rather pathetic correspondence about fruit trees. After retiring at the end of the Great War, he and his wife had tried to establish an orchard on their property in Suffolk, hoping the venture would keep them in old age. It hadn’t done well. The letters spoke of declining years spent fending off blight and creditors. A sad end to a life I’d always pictured as romantic and adventurous.
Often during that summer my thoughts turned to Henderson. He was a welcome distraction from my grief, a detour into a past inviting because it seemed irrelevant. Francis Barkley Henderson, known as Frank, was the last of his line. Mother sometimes called him “one of your ancestors” but that wasn’t strictly true because he died, as lawyers say, without issue.
“Well,” Mother had added with a don’t-confuse-me sigh. “If he wasn’t an ancestor he was some kind of cousin. Second or third or twice removed. How does that go? There was also a link by marriage. A Wyvern and a Henderson married Barkley sisters. They had a double wedding. Those two families must have been close. Instead of going away on holiday they’d swap houses every year for a fortnight. To save money, I suppose. Though if they’d been really hard up they couldn’t have afforded houses like this in the first place, could they? It was the Scottish blood! Your father has it. He never threw away a thing.”
Henderson had died in the 1920s, leaving Tilehouse Street to my grandfather. “The Wyverns must have been his next of kin,” said Mother. “Or the only ones he wanted to remember in his will. Your father’s relations were all rather peculiar.”
This last was a remark she often made. She said it almost admiringly, the English love of eccentrics. But there was also regret and resignation, as if she suspected that Jon—and we—carried a heredita
ry flaw, like a rare medical condition passed down by inbred royalty. Almost as if eccentricity might explain his absence. The Eastern bloc was starting to crack. That nice man Gorbachev was setting prisoners free. Why was there still no word? Could it be—she hinted—that Jon had “gone native” somewhere, was alive and well but no longer wanted to come home?
“Of course it may have been the times. I mean, why Henderson left everything to your grandfather. A lot of families died out in the First War. The boys were killed. There weren’t enough left for the girls to marry Some of them did marry but couldn’t have children. Shell-shock. Gangrene. Bits shot away.… Ghastly!” She grimaced. “You don’t know how lucky you’ve been. Your generation is the first in a century without a bloodbath. And yes—all right—” Her palms went up. “I know you’ve had to live with the Bomb.”
She’d paused and shrunk slightly in her chair, for despite her handsome airman in a silver frame on the mantel and her two girls either side of him, and various suitors (always unsuitable), I think she saw herself as an old maid. Certainly her life was blighted by war. She never found it in her to remarry, which was odd because it’s mainly from her that Lottie gets her looks. She never said much to us about marriage, either. That seemed odd too.
“I wish I knew more. I think your father said Henderson’s papers were burnt. For security reasons. Towards the end of his career he was involved in intelligence. In MI5—if that makes any sense. Was there such a thing as MI5 back then, in the First War? These things only seem important when it’s too late. No one left to ask. I only wish I knew more, so I could tell you.”
But I knew my mother well enough to hear a sprung note. She didn’t wish to tell us. There was something about Henderson, something shocking or shameful, that she didn’t want to send on down the generations.
Not until I was going through Mother’s desk for a second time did anything from Henderson’s early days turn up. Fallen or hidden behind a drawer was a small cardboard box. Inside was a weighty spherical object in a chamois purse. The famous eye. I was right: a tiger.
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