In the corner between the two windows was a small table with a Remington manual typewriter and piles of stationery. Set against the far window – the one with the view over Oxford and its spires – was the only pretty piece of furniture, a desk of a type I had seen before, clearly a valuable antique, although I had no idea what period, what country of origin, what wood or even remotely what value. The chair, which was pushed to one side, as if its owner had risen suddenly – to answer the phone or to rush off to an appointment – did not match.
There was a framed photograph I had not seen before of Rebecca with the children. Hermione looked about three and William about one. There was a collection of child-made mugs, bowls and ashtrays along the far edge. Some held stamps, others paperclips and rubber bands. One held pencils and felt-tip pens of various colours. On the ink blotter sat a fuchsia fountain pen and a spiral notebook. It was open to a blank page.
‘You get a sense, don’t you,’ said Danny, ‘that she’s only stepped out to make a cup of coffee?’
I nodded carefully.
She beamed at me and then shut the door. ‘You’ll appreciate this, I think.’ She gestured at the collage that covered the inside door. ‘She called it Talking Heads.’ It was a collage of famous photographs of famous writers and poets, or rather, of their heads, which had been superimposed on postcards of famous photographs and paintings. The American Gothic farmers, for example, were Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Ginsberg’s head was on a Rubens nude. Hemingway was impersonating Mae West. There was an elaborate reinvention of Las Meniñas containing transposed faces I did not recognise – except for the dwarf, whose touched-up face, I noticed with a jolt, belonged to Max.
I looked up. Danny was smiling at me expectantly. ‘It’s so very, very clever, isn’t it? It makes one quite speechless.’ She gestured at the desk chair. ‘Sit down. Drink it in. It’s what she would want.’
I sat down, with some hesitation, and Danny flopped down on the chaise longue. She put her hands behind her head, crossed her legs and gave out a sigh of relaxed relief. She smiled and then, with a suddenness that alarmed me, fixed me with a frown.
‘Look down again. No, not at the floor. At your hands, perhaps. Whatever you were just doing. That’s right. No, not quite. A bit more to the left. Yes, there. Stop. Yes, I see it now. Bea was right, there is a resemblance. I don’t know why I didn’t notice it sooner. Perhaps because of the difference in colouring, she being all reds and blacks and sapphire and ivory, while you’re … pastel. Pastel and … beige, I suppose. Hasn’t anyone ever said so to you? Hasn’t Max?’
‘Said what to me?’
‘That you look so much like her.’
‘Like who?’
‘Like whom? Like our mutual icon, you dear thing. Like Rebecca.’
‘I don’t think I look like her at all,’ I said.
‘Really? How odd! How charming! Of course you would be the last to see it. You’re not the spitting image – more, I would say, the afterimage. It’s something … something quite elusive. For example, what you just did right then with your eyebrows. When you look puzzled or uncertain, you look like her. Your expressions echo hers, but then, when they go away, you can’t imagine that you ever saw them! Terrible eerie, don’t you think? Terribly eerie! I suppose it’s what they call a fleeting resemblance.’ She uncrossed her legs and then recrossed them the other way. She looked dreamily into my eyes – catching me unawares, making me afraid to look away. Then her face broke into a smile.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s what I’ll do.’ She stood up and opened the wardrobe behind the chaise longue and brought out a long, black satin ballgown that I only belatedly recognised as the dress Rebecca had worn in her most famous author’s photo – and described to dramatic effect in the last chapter of The Marriage Hearse. It was the original of the wrong dress, and just having Danny press it against my skin made me shiver. But Danny was too busy arranging and rearranging to notice. ‘It’s elusive, whatever it is,’ she said, putting her head first to one side and then to the other. ‘It’s hard to pin down. But quite miraculous. Quite miraculous. I can understand now why Max felt compelled to intemperance.’
She stretched out her arms. ‘You can imagine how alarmed we all were at the news. Curious, too, of course! And, naturally, hoping for the best. But when children are involved, especially children who have already been through so much … Do you mind my saying all this? I hope I haven’t put my foot in it. I don’t mean to be rude. It’s just that, I’m not sure I can say precisely why, but I feel as if we’ve known each other for a long time, that there’s an affinity. It could just be the surroundings, but the bond is … it’s there, isn’t it? Don’t you agree?’
I nodded, trying to hide my uncertainty and apparently succeeding, because now she clasped her hands and heaved another of her relieved sighs. Her voice was tremulous when she spoke again. ‘Forgive me if I assume too much. I’m not at my best right now. I’m the first to admit it. The new crisis has me quite distracted. I know the simple explanation, the one that’s closest to the truth, even, is that Jack is bitter and twisted, but honestly, the actual reading of this book of his … The words on the page form a grotesquerie, a patchwork quilt of familiar details that have been wrenched from their context to form such a very different picture. I’m sure it would be unnerving even in the absence of the cruel pointing finger. I’ve doubted my sanity over the last few days. I’m sure even now I’m acting decidedly odd.’
She leaned forward. There were tears in her eyes. ‘Because the fact is, we’re all responsible for what happened, while never ever imagining for a second that it would come to this! Why, our premise was immortality. We were young! We were fearless! We threw ourselves into our experiments with such … such irreverence, but at the same time, such devout enthusiasm!’
‘You don’t have to explain. I know from my own experience,’ I said. ‘My—’
But she was too caught up with her own train of thought to hear me. ‘I’ll try and explain what crossed my mind when we came in here. It’s that they – the ones out there, for whom Rebecca is just a scandal, who don’t care for her or for her work, and certainly haven’t a qualm for her children – all they want to do is find out about her death. They’re only interested in her life to the extent that it casts light on the manner and meaning of her suicide. It’s as if this wretched, wretched never-ending scandal has petrified, fossilised her. When the Rebecca you and I know – and here I’m talking about the legacy, the work, the spirit of the work, rather – was, is, and ever shall be so very lively! Alive! The interplay! The texture! The movement in her every line – not just underneath, but in the surfaces! She was a sprite, was Rebecca, and now all they care about was whether or not she foretold her own death. So reductive! Such a dreadful, dreadful double loss! That is why I’ve kept this study like this, In medias res, I mean. To forget the scandal, remember the living spirit. Look,’ she said. She sat up and reached over to the nearest bookshelf and picked up a small marble wing. Then she walked across the room to place it where it had once belonged, on the right shoulder of a marble cupid. It was not the cupid I remembered the heroine breaking and then hiding in The Marriage Hearse, but you could see the connection. You could see how, looking at this cupid, Rebecca could have invented the other.
‘I can’t remember where she found it,’ Danny said. ‘I cannot tell you if she chose it because of the literary echo, or whether she simply found it fit in so beautifully with her own symbolic schema. But I was here when she broke it. And how we laughed! This was before the book, mind you. Or rather, as she was writing it. I was not at all surprised to see it had made the leap into fiction. Can you understand, then, why I come here? Why I haven’t changed the way things are? Don’t be like the others, Danny – that’s what this room tells me. Don’t fossilise. Don’t force disparate pieces into spurious unities. Just look and accept. Look genius in the eye. Do not deface the gravestone or move the evidence.’
‘The opposite o
f a museum, in other words?’ I suggested feebly.
She looked up, made enthusiastic to an alarming degree by the suggestion. ‘No cataloguing,’ she said. ‘No sifting the important from the unimportant. Just leaving it all there so that you can see her just from the drawers she didn’t close and the bookshelves she never finished arranging and the pens she never capped and the poem she never wrote. And most resonant of all, I think, this cupid.’
Without willing the words, I said, ‘So she broke things on purpose, did she, and then just gloated over the pieces?’
‘Exactly! Exactly! That’s exactly what I mean. You understand, don’t you? It’s not altogether nice, genius. Not at this range, anyway. But there was a generosity, too. That was part of it, always. I know she would want it because she believed in continuity.’
Here she quoted the pertinent line from ‘Fossils’: ‘“Clip my wings, then hang them out to dry/Salt them for posterity …” I’ll be following her instructions.’
‘Her instructions to do what?’
‘To offer you the room. For your work.’
Another beaming smile. How many did that make today, and amid so many smiles, why did I feel so nervous, so exposed?
‘Bea says you opened your book of short stories with a quotation from Ulysses Unmanned.’
‘Yes,’ I said, and I told her which lines.
‘And the new one?’
I nodded. ‘Although I’m thinking now it might be wiser to change.’
She put her hand out. ‘No, you mustn’t. Mustn’t! Follow the first instinct.’
‘Not just any inner voice, but the faintest …’
The quotations made her laugh out with delight. She picked up her key ring, took the key off and tossed it to me. ‘Here you go. Breathe some life back into us – before it’s too late.’
Bea’s voice floated up the stairs. ‘Anyone at home?’
It was only then that I saw the study door was open. William and Hermione were standing there, glowering.
‘Hello, children,’ Danny trilled, adding, ‘goodness, we’re not looking very happy today, are we?’
‘That’s Mummy’s dress on the chair.’
‘Yes, I know, dear. We just took it out to admire it.’
‘And those are Mummy’s slippers on your feet,’ Hermione said.
‘Yes, darling,’ Danny trilled. ‘Of course they are. That’s why we keep them in here.’
‘Those are Mummy’s slippers. Take them off.’
‘Goodness!’ Danny said, as she kicked them off. ‘I’ve never seen four such accusing eyes!’
‘It’s not four accusing eyes,’ said Hermione, who was clutching a large, dour-looking teddy bear. ‘It’s six.’
Chapter Thirteen
It did not take long for the domestic machine to save us from confrontation. First it was lunch with all its little duties and privileges. It was William’s job to find the tins, Hermione’s turn to have the first pick. She also got to open both her tin and William’s. As Hermione explained to me during a brief lull in hostilities, William’s grip was not yet strong enough, ‘nor is the situation likely to change in the foreseeable future’. She spoke slowly and emphatically, dispensing each word as if it were a marble.
William laid the table – except for the glasses, which he couldn’t reach, and the napkins, which (as Hermione informed me) he always forgot. Danny did the microwave, although Hermione was permitted to set the timer. I was assigned the squash, which chore I performed incorrectly, since I did not know it was meant to be diluted. This turned out to be a blessing, as it gave Danny the perfect topic to fill out the silence that threatened to overtake us when we all sat down. I didn’t know about squash because in America children did not drink it. Would I like to tell William and Hermione what children in America did drink? I said that I was not quite sure what they drank now, but that when I was their age, my favourite drinks had been Tang and Kool Aid. At meals I had been made to drink milk, I told them. (‘Which is not delivered by milkmen,’ Danny interjected. ‘Did your mum ever mention that to you?’) No comment, but there was a slight flicker of interest in their eyes when I told them about the pictures of missing children they put on milk cartons.
This was, however, a bit much for Danny. ‘That’s rather macabre, don’t you think?’ she said with a bright smile as she sprang to her feet to clear her plate. ‘No pudding today, my dears, as you’ll have plenty of that later on. Off you go upstairs, now! Janet will have packed your cases, but I’ve asked her to leave space for your teddies and whatnot. Run up and get them ready for inspection.’
They walked.
As we gathered up the children’s plates and glasses, Danny explained to me that she and the children were off to Somerset for the night to see an old friend of hers who had children the same age as William and Hermione ‘plus a thoroughly delightful new addition we shall be meeting for the first time’. She apologised for ‘sweeping the little darlings off like this’, but it had been arranged months ago, and although she had considered cancelling, Bea had advised against altering the children’s plans unnecessarily. ‘She thinks you’ll get used to each other much faster if their routine remains the same.’ There was also the delicate matter of her dear friend’s postnatal depression. ‘Under the circumstances, I’d hate to have to let her down.’
‘We’ll be back tomorrow teatime.’ I didn’t know exactly what time that meant, but I decided not to ask. Danny had suddenly become flustered. I offered to take over the washing of the dishes so that she could attend to the children. This prompted more thank-yous and exaggerated expressions of gratitude for my kindness.
She continued the frantically cheerful patter when she went upstairs. She was still talking at the same pitch – despite the absence of responses or even interruptions – when she marched the children and their bags downstairs again.
William was looking uncomfortable in navy shorts, matching sandals, a green and blue tartan shirt and a bright-red bow tie. His unruly hair had been trained with a wet comb. Hermione was looking sterner and more old-fashioned than ever in a smocked dress made out of the same green and navy-blue tartan. As Danny arranged and then fussily rearranged a ribbon in her long brown hair, she rehearsed them: ‘How do you do, Lord and Lady Northey?’ They repeated the sentence after her with a listlessness that seemed almost smug.
I waved them goodbye and then I went back to the cottage, faltering in the entryway, not knowing which way to go. Everywhere I looked, I saw the afternoon that stretched ahead of me, but no clues to how to fill it.
I made myself a sandwich. I ate it. I wandered around the sitting room, looking first at the paintings and photographs, then at the books. I found the shelf containing Max’s books. I had never read any of them. I picked one up, read the first poem, did not feel comfortable about the fact that I did not immediately respond to it. I put it back, picked out another book, opened it at random to a poem addressed to a woman he could not stop touching on account of not having seen her for three months. I put this book back, too.
The time had come, I decided, to explore the famous walled garden. Going out through the sitting-room door, I found my way to the gate that led into the arbour. The first view was impressive, but when I had made myself comfortable in one of the lawn chairs, the arrangements of flowers and shrubs and trees began to look too formal, too polite, too remote. This is my house, I kept reminding myself. I closed my eyes when the sun came out, and bathed in it until the heat had made me drowsy. The first thing I did when I went back inside was look at the clock. Still only half past three.
In my absence, Janet had been and dropped off my groceries. No ingredient looked quite the way I had expected. I put away the strange packages I would not be using for the carbonara. This was easier said than done, as I could made no sense of the classification system.
I went through the drawers and cabinets in search of the utensils I would be needing. There were no cast-iron pots or casseroles, only a double boiler. There was
a Chinese chopping knife and a bread knife, but no paring knife. The only bread board had a large, stained split in it, and nowhere could I find a cheese grater.
I took the keys and the cash Bea had left for me, and I went to find the black Volvo. It was odd to have the gears on my left but I told myself the best thing would be to just get out there. It was only when I was on the road, and angled in the wrong direction, that I realised I did not know how to put the car in reverse.
I tried one thing after another, but I only succeeded in stalling the car over and over. My panic increased when a fuel truck drew up on one side, and then two, three, four cars on the other. The faces of the drivers remained sullenly impassive as I continued to struggle with the gears.
A man stepped out of the third car. He looked to be in his early forties, with close-cropped brown hair, a mouth that twisted sideways, and a fierce but almost cross-eyed gaze.
‘You must be the newest addition to the House of Atreus,’ he said. His accent – Irish? Scottish? Welsh? – was unfamiliar.
‘I hope it’s not as bad as that,’ I said. ‘Is it?’
He stretched out his hand. ‘I’m Crawley. Max’s right-hand man. Or resident con artist. Token Sphinx. Bitter and twisted colleague. Best friend. As you like it. I take it from your present predicament that you’ve forgotten how to drive?’
‘Well, not quite, but—’
‘Why don’t you step out of the car and let me put this lorry driver out of his misery?’
After he had got the car off the road, he showed me the trick to putting the car in reverse. ‘Only the Swedes would think of something so clever. Just count yourself lucky you don’t have one of their old automatics. They make the Flintstones look hi tech. Where were you going, by the way?’
The Other Rebecca Page 10
