by Tanya Moir
Not long after the rabbit episode, my mother and I inherit the dining table. Since it’s going to Maggie anyway, there’s not much point — says Nanny Biggs, aged fifty-nine — in moving it to Nelson. Maggie is touched: it’s easily the nicest thing my grandparents own. In fact, it’s always looked a bit out of place in their bungalow, hunched in a corner, looking down its elegant legs at the Axminster and remembering grander times.
‘You will be careful with it, won’t you?’ Nanny Biggs scowls at my hovering fingertips as if they might sprout scouring pads at any moment. ‘It’s George the Second, you know.’
Maggie smiles. ‘I can remember hiding under it at Granny’s house.’
‘Oh yes,’ muses Sarah, eyeing the gin bottle that William is packing away, ‘May slept there most of the war.’
She’s not doing a lot of packing herself, which is why I come to be going through her dresser drawers at afternoon tea time. At first I think the newspaper under the hankies and plastic pantyhose eggs is just a lining. But there’s something about the old black and yellow bride — the dress, the hair, the smile — that looks familiar. So I unfold the page.
Baby-Burner’s Mother Found Dead, I read. Page three of the South London Examiner, 3 June 1957. The mother of suspected arsonist and child-killer Margaret May Buxton was found gassed to death in her Wimbledon home yesterday, the lead paragraph continues. Neighbours described 68-year-old Mrs Evelyn Harding as ‘a nice lady’ who was ‘very respectable’ and ‘popular in the street’. (Which, all things considered, was good of them — the neighbours, I mean. Perhaps that’s why they cut the story out and sent it here. To show there were no hard feelings. Poor old Evelyn couldn’t help what she’d bred.)
I look over my shoulder. No one’s watching, so I tuck the clipping into the bottom of a box, put Nanny Biggs’ handkerchiefs — a set cross-stitched with M for Mummy or Maggie or May or something else — back on top, cover them with pantyhose and scarves and gloves and socks, old raffle tickets and fleshy-pink things I don’t have names for. Pack it all down.
‘Janine?’ Maggie pokes her head round the door. ‘Would you like a biscuit?’
I follow her back to the lounge, eat two afghans and don’t say a word. I’m not as green as I used to be.
The next morning, Grandpa William brings the table round to Bradbury Street. To be honest, it looks even sillier here — between the beaded pot-plant holders and La-Z-Boy suite — than it did at their place. But Maggie is delighted. Before you can say macra-may!, there’s a green doily and a Temuka-ware vase of grasses sitting on top.
We stand back, admiring the way the grain glows in the Southland light, George the Second’s mahogany, this piece of wood with roots that stretch even further back than England.
‘Just imagine,’ says Maggie, ‘if this table could talk. All the family secrets it must know. The stories it could tell.’
Grandpa William fidgets in the doorway. He and Nanny Biggs are staying here with us tonight, but you can see he’s eager to get on the road. If he’s going to slip his ghosts for a day or two, he’ll need a good head start.
FOUR
Just before my eleventh birthday, I get a passport. My existence officially sanctioned, I feel a mixture of pride and alarm. I am a separate entity now, Janine Evelyn Galbraith, alone. I’ve looked at all of the pages, and nowhere is there mention of my mother.
‘It’s not for playing with,’ says Maggie, and puts it away in her bedroom drawer.
I don’t see it again until the night before we leave for London, when she places it with her own on the dining table, alongside her purse, the house keys, our thick-rustling tickets and her notes.
The next morning we pass through the glassy glamour of Invercargill Airport, through the tiers of respectfully dressed spectators with cameras outside, across the windy tarmac and up the staircase to our plane. I feel like a film star. As all the other passengers before us have done, I turn in the doorway and wave to the crowd.
‘For God’s sake, Janine,’ hisses Maggie, ‘we don’t know anyone. Hurry up and get inside.’
We hurtle blissfully into the wide summer sky. Christchurch. Auckland. Backwards across the warm Pacific night. Papeete. Honolulu. The glittering coast of the day before, Los Angeles’ impossible sprawl, its fiery river-braids of traffic.
Maggie stops knitting and leans over me to look out the window. ‘Every one of those lights is somebody,’ she says. ‘Somebody trying to get somewhere. Imagine. So many stories.’
Dawn in a huge-bedded hotel with ice in the hall and no maple syrup, thank you, on our bacon.
Then off again, into shortening days and failing light and the grey of winter. New York, stuffy and full of smoke. A bad breakfast on dirty trays.
Europe bright as a Christmas tree through the cloud. The change in the engines we’ve come to know so well, and we sweep in off the coast to circle sleepy London.
It doesn’t look like anywhere else, except maybe Coronation Street with a river. It takes a long time to get off the plane, and a long time to get anywhere else, and we walk past a lot of signs, none of which say ‘Welcome to England’.
The Piccadilly Line is busy with people with tans and braided hair and dirty packs with odd-shaped bulges. Other passengers getting on trip over them and glare. There’s a blonde girl next to me with a pattern on her palm like lace, and three dark-skinned men across the aisle in little crocheted hats and white pyjamas.
‘Stop looking at people,’ Maggie says, a Londoner again, her twenty-five-year vacation notwithstanding.
I wake up in semi-darkness, not knowing where or when or who I am. The other side of the world fills in around me. An overheated room in Bayswater with raggedy-edged towels and sticky carpet. My mother asleep three feet away in the other bed. London at the window, sirens and street lights, a heart pumping traffic. Streets where William and Sarah Biggs were young, where Harry Harding flashed Maggie’s smile, where Ted courted Evelyn Stone and smuggled rabbits.
Orange light feeling its way in. Does it recognise me, this city of my blood? Sniff-sniff. Fee, fi, fo, fum.
Buses, street-sweepers, milk carts rumble. Angry red numerals in the dark. Two dots flashing. 4:35.
‘What are you working on?’ asks Jake.
I push my notes a bit further away, to the other end of the table.
‘Sorry,’ he says quickly. ‘It’s probably private. None of my business.’
‘It’s just …’ Just what? ‘Some stuff about my family.’
‘Ah.’
‘History, I suppose you could call it.’ I get up, fetch another bottle of wine from the fridge. ‘I guess you know all about yours.’
He turns his head in surprise. ‘Why’s that?’
‘It’s important, isn’t it? Your whakapapa.’ Not a word I’m used to saying out loud.
Jake laughs. ‘I’ve never really been into all that. You should talk to my sister — she can take it all the way back. I must have missed that gene.’
‘You don’t think it matters?’
I lean over his shoulder, careful not to brush, trying not to remember those muscles I know are under his shirt — the ones you don’t see on most men, the trapezoid between clavicle and neck, the extensors of the inner forearm. The sort of body you get only through hard work, of one kind or another.
‘What, the ancestors, you mean?’ Jake smiles up at me as I pour the wine. ‘Not really. Life’s about moving on. You know? Keep looking forward.’
I wonder how much he saw of my notes.
‘So who are you writing all that for?’
The fireplace, mostly. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Posterity, I suppose. Anyone who wants to read it.’
‘Can I read it?’
‘No.’
We stare at each other for a second. Jake’s mouth twitches. I look away, rub Ella with my foot. ‘You’re not posterity.’
‘I am the here and now,’ he agrees. He stretches, pushes back his chair. ‘I’d better get going.’
&n
bsp; ‘Do you think people change?’
The non sequitur makes him pause. ‘Yeah, all the time.’
‘How?’ I ask — a bit too loudly it seems, since Ella raises her head and gives me a hard stare.
Jake shrugs. ‘I don’t know. I guess they don’t pay attention.’
I walk down to the jetty with him, help him untie his boat. Then I go back up and finish the bottle, watch the tide rise and Friday night come and go across the water. On the sofa, Ella twitches. Still racing in her dreams, maybe. That, or it’s Alzheimer’s kicking in.
If there’s one thing more dangerous than looking back, I’ve learnt, it’s looking forward.
No one in the Guildhall Library looks pleased to see me.
‘She’ll be very quiet.’ Maggie is apologetic. ‘Janine is used to libraries.’
I’ve never been in one that looks like this, though. There are frightening amounts of stone and silence here. The building may be new, but I can feel five hundred years of shushing pressing down.
Maggie has me well prepared. In my Pan-Am shoulder bag there are coloured pencils and a jotter pad, an annotated A Tale of Two Cities from the airport bookshop (which I’m not reading), and The Bafut Beagles (which I am). But my head still feels thick and gummy from yesterday’s flight, and it’s hard to concentrate on the page in front of me. The quiet is too loud. After five minutes, I get up and look at the shelves. Maggie, deep in the Medical Directory of 1855, doesn’t tell me not to.
By mid-morning, I’ve made it all the way into the Print Room, which is empty except for a thin young man with a pony-tail who demands to know who’s in charge of me. I tell him my mother is looking up stuff. He makes me show him the palms of my hands.
‘Where are you from?’
‘New Zealand.’
‘Is this your first time in London?’
‘Yes. This is our second day.’
He smiles. ‘And what have you seen so far?’
I think. ‘Heathrow. The Tube. This morning we went past Buckingham Palace and Hyde Park on the bus. It was a double-decker.’ I feel I should add something complimentary. ‘I liked all the old houses.’
‘Did you?’ He looks at me pityingly. ‘Would you like to see some pictures of older ones?’
I would.
I study London architecture before the Great Fire until lunchtime, when a flustered-looking Maggie hurries in and bustles me off to an ugly post-war tearooms outside.
She can’t stay cross for long, though. ‘I’ve found out where your great-great-grandfather Harry lived in 1845,’ she says, when our oddly named bacon sarnies arrive. ‘His house when he was nineteen years old. It might be your great-great-great-grandfather’s house. Imagine!’
I’d rather go on thinking about Elizabethan Fleet Street and the lack of an ‘r’ in ‘sandwich’. ‘Wow,’ I say, obediently.
My happy mother looks at me and smiles. She wipes the window with a thin paper serviette and glances out at the pavement. The drizzle has almost stopped. ‘I’ve got a few more books to look at this afternoon. But then we could go to a museum, if you like.’
I sit up. ‘Which one?’
‘You choose.’
Back in the Print Room, my friend Simon recommends the V&A.
‘Bart, your great-great-great-uncle, lived at the same address as Harry in 1840,’ Maggie informs me, on the bus to South Kensington. ‘It’s on his admission papers — when he passed the bar and enrolled at the Inn of Middle Temple.’
Ah yes, Hang ’Em Harding.
‘You know, we’ve only that convict’s word for it that Bart did anything wrong,’ muses Maggie to herself, as the bus shudders to a halt beside a plaque commemorating the site of Tyburn Tree. ‘Jennings might have made it all up. He lied about being deaf, after all. And let’s not forget he was a forger’s boy, a transported felon. Small wonder he’d hate his judge.’
In Hyde Park, the trees are black against the sun, and the wind is getting colder. I put my green bobbled mittens on and press them into my armpits.
‘We might find your great-great-great-grandfather tomorrow,’ Maggie warns me, ‘in the census.’
But the next morning turns out to be sunny, and Maggie is torn.
‘We’ll go to Wimbledon,’ she decides, ‘and see your great-granny’s house.’
Off we rattle, across Putney Bridge and on between endless sour grey back gardens. I think I see a fox in the weeds beside the track. Maggie tells me not to be silly.
We stand outside 7 Kings Close until my toes go numb.
‘We used to come to this house every day,’ Maggie says, in an odd sort of voice. ‘When I was little.’
I shift my feet. I can’t see any pear tree.
‘She taught me to knit. I tried to make a scarf, but it was so slow I almost gave up. Then it started to grow in the night. She told me good fairies help busy girls.’
I note they’ve never helped me.
‘We hadn’t been gone two years when she died,’ my mother adds, quite fiercely. ‘But it felt like such a long time since we’d left England. I thought Granny had just got old. Mum didn’t say anything about an accident. I’d have remembered if she’d told me.’
‘How old was your granny again?’
‘Sixty-eight.’
A lot older than Nanny Biggs, then. Knocking on death’s door.
‘We were the only family she had left.’ Maggie continues staring up at the first-floor windows. ‘I wonder if anyone went to the funeral.’
We walk on, turn into a thin road with narrow, joined-up houses and no trees, pick our way between unloved cars and drifting chip wrappers. Maggie pauses beside the ugliest house on the street.
‘That’s where your great-grandmother Biggs used to live,’ she says. ‘Before the war.’
When Maggie was dying, we talked a lot about London. Not the city we walked through together in ’81, but the London of the fifties. Maggie’s childhood, not mine.
It’s not easy making conversation with the soon-to-be-dead. They don’t care if the roses are nearly out or it might rain on Wednesday. The future is out of bounds. The present — four yellow walls, time and morphine and catheter dripping away — doesn’t give you much to go on. And the past — the past is closing.
The bedroom wallpaper my mother had when she was six. The pelicans in St James’s Park. Evelyn Harding’s kitchen. Maggie wanted someone — anyone — to know about these things.
Why, at the end of life, do we remember ourselves as children? Perhaps it’s as children we like ourselves best. Before we’ve done anything. When we don’t know who we are yet. Or maybe it’s because no one else will. Which is the same as non-existence.
So I helped my mother summon up six-year-old Maggie Biggs, take a mould to hold open the shape she made, to save her space in time.
Maggie with a granny who makes fruit cake and knits jumpers.
All those other Maggies sinking down. Disappearing under the days.
Until we were back where we started, Maggie Biggs and I. Strangers side by side in a hospital bed, drifting in and out on opioids and exhaustion.
Only this time I left alone.
When it’s my turn, I like to think I’ll forget them too. The other Maggies.
On a dim grey day in London’s County Hall, my mother is excited.
‘So the Hardings were Huguenots?’ she asks.
‘They might well have been,’ nods our new associate, a local historian called Miss Bickley.
For the last five days, my great-great-great-grandfather has led us on quite a dance. As Maggie suspected, one George Harding, aged forty-two, was at home in Cloudesley Square with his sons on census night in 1840; fourteen years earlier, we find George presenting baby Harry to be baptised in the church around the corner. But the parish registers of St Mary Islington refuse to yield further trace of him. We learn that he paid his rates on time. But we don’t know where he came from, or when he died.
Maggie, stumped, watches the clock in the Central L
ibrary tick our eight-week trip away. The tired librarian recommends a professional researcher. Reluctantly, my mother agrees to meet Miss Bickley.
Who sweeps us south, across the windy churn of the Thames, to stern-pillared County Hall and the Middlesex Deeds Registry.
‘John Emmett built Cloudesley Square,’ she explains efficiently, ‘around 1826. The registers will give us details of who the leases were sold to.’
And sure enough, there he is, George Harding, gentleman, of Spitalfields, London. Another gentleman of Spitalfields, Joshua Harding, witnesses the deed. Spitalfields’ parish registers have Hardings galore. We’re back in business.
Today, Miss Bickley has her unfiled fingernail below the name of baby Joshua’s father, one Hal Hardynge, a silk weaver of Fournier Street.
‘What are Huguenots?’ I ask.
‘French Calvinist refugees,’ Miss Bickley says, as if that explains it.
‘A bit like Presbyterians,’ adds Maggie. ‘They were persecuted in France, so they escaped to England.’
Susan Fisher is Presbyterian. I’ve been to her church, and it wasn’t very exciting.
‘They gave up everything — risked their lives — for what they believed in,’ my mother continues, irritated by my lack of awe. ‘They had to leave by boat in the dead of night, with nothing more than they could carry on their bodies, and French soldiers hunting them down. If they were caught, they’d be tried for treason.’
‘Pure souls,’ says Miss Bickley. ‘And so hard-working. They gave England the silk industry.’
I think of the pattern books in the V&A, the gorgeous, glowing flowers. It seems a nice thing to have given England.
‘Does that mean we’re French?’
‘Yes,’ says Maggie happily. ‘Our name must have become anglicised, from something like Ardenne or’ — pulling out her third-form French — ‘Jardin …’
