Secrets of the Past

by Estella McQueen

  What was the teacher talking about? Charlie had wondered. What did it matter if he was able to see things that had happened before? Didn’t everyone?

  Mum had characteristically blustered the teacher into submission, whereas Dad didn’t seem in the slightest bit bothered. But that, he knew now, was solely down to his complete inability to get worked up about anything.

  It might have been unconscious, but their parents had always paid him far more attention than his brother. Mollycoddled, according to Andy. Watched over with a hawk eye. Whereas Andy had been left to cope with growing up on his own, resentful but self-reliant. What Andy didn’t realize was Charlie felt the same way but for different reasons.

  His parents had done their best to accept the mooncalf son they’d been lumbered with. But life for an oddball was difficult and demanding. He had fallen short of their expectations so overwhelmingly; they’d been left in a state of utter bewilderment. And then to realise that some awful misalliance had triggered off a bizarre chemical reaction; a cocktail of mixed up bio- product furiously coagulating inside his mother’s womb had transmogrified into this peculiar child.

  No wonder Andy fled across the pond at the earliest opportunity.

  ‘If it was in my power to get rid of it,’ said Charlie, ‘I would.’

  ‘You’re lying,’ said Andy. ‘You’d miss it, if it went.’

  ‘But why does it happen?’ he said. ‘To me?’

  ‘I don’t know. Why are some people left handed?’

  ‘It’s not quite the same thing.’

  ‘You just have to be careful who you show it to.’

  ‘Bit late for that,’ said Charlie.

  How convenient it would have been for everyone if he could have claimed that his mother’s untimely death triggered his weirdness. Unfortunately the visions had been happening for much longer than that.

  Chapter Twenty

  Respectable and ordinary, albeit with a preponderance of kitschy Halloween stores, Peabody was only two kilometres away from the port town of Salem, infamous for the hysterical witch trials of 1692. If I’d been alive in those bigoted times, Charlie mused as he drove through town in the hired car, I’d most likely have been pressed to death too.

  An unremarkable main street offered restaurants with cut price menus, grocery stores with green awnings, road side red and yellow fire hydrants and signs that said things like ‘H and P Auto Repairs.’

  Aggy Seagrave’s house on the outskirts was a compact angular construction with a pitched roof and shuttered front windows. Judging by the condition of the exterior – peeling maroon paintwork, putty falling out of the windows, neglected, weed-ridden concrete driveway - she didn’t devote much energy to its upkeep. Aggy’s person was equally as shabby. Her un-styled, wire-wool hair frizzed around her head in a grey haze and most of the crystal decoration on her cat’s eye-shaped glasses had dropped out. Palette-wise, her bronze polo neck sweater and silver grey waistcoat blended seamlessly with her beige, un-made up face.

  The real shock, however, was that one of her legs was missing. And not just from the knee down – the entire limb was gone. The spare, unused leg of her baggy loose trousers was knotted like a tied back curtain, swinging in the breeze.

  Aggy’s first sight of Charlie was accompanied by a flicker of something that wasn’t quite disapproval but might have been disdain. She actually ‘harrumphed’, before clumping away on rubber footed crutches, banging at the door to her living room and battering her way through it. She paused only to throw over her shoulder a perfunctory, ‘Welcome to Peabody.’

  ‘You know who I am?’ said Charlie. ‘Why I’m here?’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ said Aggy, ‘but I’m no conversationalist. You’re welcome to look at my stuff, but don’t expect flags and bunting.’

  A heavy metal contraption, not unlike a steel girder with straps, was propped up against the wall in the hallway. Dense patches of cobwebs clung to its redundant, unused joints. The awkward false leg was as quaint and prosaic as the space race equipment in the Science Museum; comfort and padding ignored in the rush to send it into production. ‘Don’t you use this?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘It’s too heavy. It chafes and drags, it never fitted properly.’

  ‘You can get much better ones these days. Prosthetic limbs are light weight with proper feet and everything.’

  ‘I spend enough time in hospitals as it is. I’m not about to go through all that again.’

  She must have arms like a hammer thrower, pumping her biceps like that, thought Charlie. He daren’t ask how Aggy had lost the leg in the first place.

  Aggy hopped and bumped her good leg from the kitchen to the living room several times back and forth, before slumping with a sigh into a specially built up side of the sofa. ‘Cat!’ she said, wriggling her fingers down the side of the sofa arm, whereupon a silvery grey cat possessed of a black face and pungent fishy aroma, appeared at her side. Aggy barely looked at the animal, but fondled its face and whiskers as she kept her eyes on the TV screen.

  ‘So, shall I make myself at home?’ Charlie asked. ‘Is it ok if I get a feel for the house?’

  ‘Do what you like. I’m done with small talk. Heard all the gossip, debated the vital issues. What’s left?’

  I don’t know, thought Charlie, how about, ‘Welcome to my home, how are you? What exactly is your line of work? How can I help?’

  As if she’d read his mind, the old woman said, ‘That’s the trouble with young people: you’re all so self-obsessed.’

  Perhaps Aggy Seagrave was too poor to buy any new furnishings, perhaps redecorating required too much upheaval, but surely she could have afforded a can of aerosol polish? The shuttered house was a raggedy 1970’s time capsule. The wooden furniture was thick with layers of encrusted dirt and varnish, the curtains were torn and faded, the skirting boards chipped and scuffed.

  Floorboards were mostly bare apart from a thin runner near the front door and a shaggy brown rug in the living room. This was such a thick, crusty thing; it set Charlie’s teeth on edge. Crammed up against the disintegrating bureau was a bookcase filled with a half century’s worth of American literature. Hollywood biographies with torn dust covers and profiles of TV stars and sportsmen, whose fame hadn’t travelled as far as Blighty, mingled half-heartedly with the Readers Digest Collections.

  Charlie excused himself and went to find the bathroom. He found it at the end of the hall, where the bare floorboards had nothing on them apart from a purple oval shaped bath mat, flopped disconsolately beside the tub.

  Aggy finished watching TV and barged her way towards the blue and yellow kitchen. Charlie picked his way through the detritus and followed her in. If the bathroom décor was ‘tired’, then the kitchen was utterly ‘exhausted’. An unwashed window overlooked the concrete yard, an area decorated with a row of flower tubs made from cut down barrels, and a forlorn looking swing seat. It’s like ‘Grey Gardens’ he thought to himself, only worse.

  Aggy propped her crutches at the door and moved herself around using the backs of the kitchen chairs, all the while wordlessly making food preparations.

  ‘What are you having?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘Tinned veg and fried steak. It’s all we’ve got till I stock up at the store tomorrow. It’s edible, don’t panic.’

  ‘No, no,’ Charlie said hastily. ‘Not for me. I’ll eat later.’

  Aggy shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’ She dished up her own food and sat down to eat. ‘So,’ she said, clattering away with cutlery and condiments, ‘what is it you want to know?’ Her voice sounded rusted through with lack of use, but its oil deprived joints weren’t about to loosen up any time soon; instead she emitted a weird, low, humming noise while concentrating on the plate in front of her.

  ‘I understood you had some letters for me to look at,’ said Charlie. ‘Relating to Addleston House in England? You do still have them?’

  ‘Oh I got ‘em.’ Aggy said, then fell silent once more.

  Evidently,
the woman would only show the letters when she was good and ready, and not before.

  ‘Is there much to do around here?’ Charlie tried conversationally.

  ‘Depends what you mean,’ said Aggy. ‘There’s always the cinema, or you could get a drink? And there’s bowling… I volunteer at the local little league,’ Aggy remarked. ‘I sell kit, and sometimes they get me to officiate at games, show people their seats, that kind of thing. Also, I work part time in a sports store.’

  ‘You officiate at ball games? You work in a shop?’

  Aggy scraped a square of food neatly and efficiently off her plate and onto her fork. ‘I do. And I help out at the library once a week, sometimes twice. What can I tell you? I’m an asset to the community!’ She gave an ironic salute as if the President himself was at the table. Then she went back to chomping and humming her way through the rest of her meat and gravy.

  Charlie tried to visualise Aggy in a baseball cap with a whistle round her neck, handing out programmes and souvenirs, but all he could think of was Megs in the Addleston House gift shop, mumbling fondly over Alan Titchmarsh paperbacks and sniffing at the lavender-scented soap.

  His eyes followed the undulations of the fake plastic wood grain on the table. The placemats were illustrated with English hunting scenes, the red coats of the horse riders smeared and sticky with sauce and potato and God knows what else.

  *

  Was there any truth in that witch business? Charlie wondered as Aggy Seagrave propped herself on one crutch and leaned against the old sideboard, tugging at the stuck drawers.

  When I am as old as Aggy there, he told himself, I’ll make full use of medical science. Never mind the spring coiled legs that athletes use; I’ll get bionic legs. I will bounce around regardless of limb loss. I will pay a team of helpers to clean up my shit. I will not crumble to dust in my own squalor.

  ‘Here you go,’ Aggy said, fighting against the edge of the drawer with her hip. ‘I got a bunch of stuff, here. It might take some time to go through it. The letters are somewhere…,’

  She was holding a fistful of letters and documents, half of which skittered and slipped out of her grip and across the floor. Charlie scooped up the yellowing pile of papers and set them on the dining room table, surreptitiously using his sleeve to wipe it clean of dust while Aggy’s back was turned.

  ‘What about these?’ Aggy pointed to a pile of photo albums in various states of disarray.

  ‘Yes, if you like.’ Helping Aggy remove them from the cupboard, Charlie placed them on the table and flipped the heavy pages. War time service shots; passport photos; school portraits; loose black and white pictures with crinkly edged frames; mottled cream folders from professional studios; blurry Polaroids and holiday snaps. Decades’ worth of family history jumbled together in a mishmash of styles and eras.

  Bride after bride passed through Charlie’s fingers: one in a 1940’s heavy wool suit; one in a New Look design with yards of petticoats; another with a beehive hairdo, a white crocheted dress and black patent stilettos. ‘Silly Susanna,’ Aggy tutted. ‘Who wears black shoes with a white wedding dress?’

  There was a severe faced boy decked out in a sailor suit; a pale faced girl framed beneath tumbling curls and enormous hair ribbons; a man on horseback. If these were all Seagrave family members, any one of them could be directly descended from Mary Ellen.

  Aggy put the beehive girl to one side. ‘One of my nieces. We lost touch years since.’

  ‘Who’s this?’ Charlie picked up a sepia toned postcard of a man with white hair and heavily scored frown lines. ‘He looks like Charles Darwin.’

  Aggy examined it more closely. ‘Grandpa Anderson. Drunk, wife-beating bigamist, sent down for five years for tax evasion.’

  ‘Yeah, but what were his bad points?’

  Aggy chuckled. ‘No one forgot him in a hurry.’

  ‘And this girl, who is she?’ A faded picture of a young woman in cropped trousers and short sleeved shirt, squinting into the sun.

  ‘That’s Julia, my daughter,’ Aggy sighed. ‘She was in her late teens when that picture was taken. Around about the time she met him.’ Aggy curled her lip. ‘She was wild, then! Fooling around in his car, going to the movies, staying out late, getting’ us all riled up. But she wasn’t a bad girl, not really. She tried to settle down when the baby was born, tried to get straight...,’

  The regret in her voice was unmistakable. ‘It didn’t work?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘Let’s say there were barriers put in her way.’

  ‘By who? What happened to her?’

  Aggy changed the subject. ‘We barely had enough money to keep us in light bulbs when the kids were small. Of course when they became teenagers, they reckoned they didn’t want to stay local. They wanted to study, travel the world.’

  Sounds familiar, thought Charlie, studying the photo, looking for some physical resemblance between Mary Ellen and any of these women in the photos.

  Aggy opened another cupboard in the sideboard and leaned down. ‘This is too heavy for me; you’ll have to get it.’ A large cardboard box stuffed so full of ephemera the lid wouldn’t stay on, Charlie hefted it across to the table and put it next to the albums. Inside, notebook scraps, telegrams, typewritten letters on coloured paper, short stories written in scrappy biro, handmade Christmas cards, an elaborately decorated Anniversary card, and many children’s drawings, all conflicted for his attention. So many memories to disinter: a trailer montage of cinematic scenes and images. All here, safe, and waiting.

  Aggy Seagrave was still ferreting around inside the drawers. ‘I think these are what you want, ain’t they?’

  She held a brown paper grocery bag in her hands, crinkly and thin with age. She shunted across and tipped its contents onto the table. ‘We called ‘em the English letters. They were written by someone called Eleanor, in the eighteen twenties. They’ve been in the family for years and years, held onto in the hope that one day someone would be able to shed some light on ‘em.’

  Aggy sat down, arranging the crutches against the chair and her elbows against the table edge. ‘My Daddy gave em to me, years ago. Keep em safe, he said. ‘O’ course he might have pilfered them from somewhere, knowing him… I hung onto em anyway. I don’t know if she’s a sister of someone, an aunt, a cousin, or what.’ She glanced at Charlie, wheezing a little with the effort of using so many words in one go. ‘Maybe you’ll have more success than me, hmm?’ Aggy turned her attention back to the photo of Julia. ‘Poor kid,’ she said giving the tiniest, most imperceptible shake of the head. ‘Some people can handle being different, some can’t. These so called enlightened times are nothing of the sort. She was getting picked on at school; she just wanted to fit in, you know? She wanted to be normal. Instead she got taken advantage of…,’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  The old woman waved him down. ‘Another time maybe and I’ll fill you in. But not right now.’ She opened the English letters out flat, placing them side by side on the table. ‘You gonna read these, or not? I like the handwriting, don’t you? They mention England and this place called Addleston – like you say – so we know she came from there originally. But she must have moved here for a reason, and I reckon it must have been when she got hitched. What do you think?’

  The letters had been in the paper bag so long, they’d grown brown and spotted with age, but the ink was perfectly legible. Charlie applied himself to the task, his eyes gradually focusing on the written words and the name of the addressee: Mary Ellen Seagrave. ‘Oh my God, it is her!’

  Aggy gave a wheezing chuckle. ‘Yup, that’s right.’ She pointed to the top of the first letter. ‘Is that what you were hoping for?’

  ‘Yes, yes it was!’ Charlie ran his fingers over the crinkled paper, caressing the lines of ink, tracing his fingertips over the loops and curls of the letters. The ensuing nausea was almost a foregone conclusion. ‘I followed her all the way here…,’

  ‘She’s buried in the local cemetery,’ sa
id Aggy. ‘Mary Ellen Seagrave. Take a look later if you want.’

  Charlie picked up the first letter. ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Aggy, ‘do what you have to do.’

  ‘Dear Mary Ellen,’ he read,

  It is some time since I wrote to you, but I assume that you have had much to attend to. The journey must have taken the wind out of you. It seemed altogether strange to say farewell, and to know that we would possibly never see you again. England must seem like another world. You will have had so much to observe and learn. I confess I am a little anxious for you, but at the same time I hope you will be absolutely delighted with your new life. You are not used to such freedoms, but Samuel will tell you what to do. My love, it is your own household, you must do as you see fit! This is a novelty for you, so used are you to doing everyone else’s bidding. You will get used to the weather, and the money, and the accents. I wonder that anyone could have a sane thought under such circumstances! Fortunately, your new husband is a very patient man, and he will encourage you.

  I am so glad, my dear friend, that you formed an attachment to my brother, for if you had not done so, you perhaps would still be living in Addleston, in that miserable place, slowly fading from view – and now you are out and about with more freedom than you know what to do with. Of course I miss you greatly, but I must not be selfish. Do write to me with all your news. Forgive me, Mary Ellen, I have got myself into quite an emotional state, I must finish this, and run along now. We are dining with neighbours, and I have to get changed. Fondest love. I will write again soon,

  Your affectionate friend, Eleanor.

  *

  So, Mary Ellen had married. She’d left England and moved to America with Samuel Seagrave. Here was the proof. Charlie cast his mind back to the reading of the diary. During the short time she’d been allowed out of Addleston, she’d gone to stay with the Fawleys. Samuel Seagrave was Lady Fawley’s nephew, and Eleanor, the ‘affectionate friend’, her niece.