The Echo of Twilight

by Judith Kinghorn

  The things that had counted to her had gone, and the great sorrow that had claimed her heart remained there, heavy as a stone, and sometimes sending tears dripping down her cheeks as she stared ahead in wordless fury. Often, the only one able to assuage her grief was Lila, now a little person and able to speak.

  The doctor had prescribed pills, a tranquilizer of some sort, but she took others, too, not prescribed: pills to help her sleep, pills to help her wake up, pills to ease her many—and imaginary, I sometimes thought—headaches. And she drank more than ever. A small sherry, often before luncheon, a glass of wine with luncheon, and then later in the day, her favorite malt whisky. Everyone knew, but no one said anything. Ottoline’s drinking was the elephant in any room.

  Physically, Ottoline was not unrecognizable from the woman she had been. She had simply aged. Grief had turned her hair gray, her eyes dull, and though she had, eventually, a year after Billy’s death, stopped wearing black, her preference for somber colors made her once youthful complexion more sallow. She had no interest in fashion, and I wondered if the bright, colorful gowns in her closets would ever again be worn. Would Felix Cowper still recognize her? I wasn’t sure. She never mentioned his name. And when her beloved dog, Lolly, finally passed away—ancient, deaf and blind, but for so long cherished—Ottoline barely noticed. It was as though she had slipped beneath the surface of life to a place where nothing could reach her.

  The shift for me—the final shift, if you like—came in October 1918.

  I had been to Newcastle, shopping at Fenwick department store for fabric with which to make arm covers for some of the worn-out chairs in Ottoline’s sitting room. There, I had taken tea among impatient mothers and their patient offspring, watching innocent eyes follow waitresses carrying trays with tall glasses and long spoons, pastel ices flowing in cochineal syrup. Afterward, I’d walked down Northumberland Street staring into shopwindows at shiny new gramophones and gadgets for the home. Things I could never afford, for a home I would never have. And yet, despite the depravations of wartime, the city’s streets seemed to contain a collective optimism and a contagious ebullient energy, an energy completely lacking at Birling. And later, as I was motoring northward on the Great North Road, it came to me with sudden clarity how isolated I was and had been, and how much I needed to get myself and Lila away from that place—so drenched in grief.

  But as soon as I saw Rodney emerge from the house, eager to greet me, I had second thoughts. For this place was my home, our home—and those within its walls the only family we had. How could we leave them?

  “Successful trip?”

  “Yes, and most enjoyable.”

  “I’m afraid we’re all caught up in a rather queer occurrence,” said Rodney, sounding unusually awkward.

  “Oh yes, and what’s that?” I asked, lifting the packages from the back of the motorcar and handing them to him.

  “Well, it seems Her Ladyship has taken Lila on a little excursion . . .”

  I turned to him. “What do you mean, a little excursion?”

  “A day out.”

  “Was Ottoline driving?”

  “I believe so. They left not long after—”

  “But Ottoline’s not well enough, Rodney—and her driving is quite appalling at the best of times.”

  “I don’t imagine they’ll be too much longer. In fact, when I heard the motor, I thought they were—”

  I didn’t wait for any more. I ran to the house and marched into Hector Campbell’s study, and not like any lady’s maid—and certainly not like the young woman who had appeared in that same room with blisters so many years before—but like a mother whose daughter had been abducted, kidnapped.

  I said, “Your wife has taken my daughter. She has taken her out in the car.”

  He placed his head in his hands. “Yes, I know.”

  “What are you going to do about it? Because I want her back . . . I want my daughter back now.”

  He raised his eyes to me. “Look here, you and I both know that Lila’s quite safe. You and I both know how much Ottoline adores her.”

  “No. It’s not right. I am her mother. And Ottoline took her without my permission. I don’t want to have to call the police.”

  He sighed, removed his spectacles and looked down at them. He said, “Pearl . . . Pearl . . . You, more than anyone, perhaps even more than me, know Ottoline. She wouldn’t hurt a fly. Couldn’t. And yes, fragile she may be, but she is not irresponsible.” He looked up at me. “Those she loves, she holds dear, keeps safe. Would defend with her life. It’s her nature. You know that. Love is all that matters to her.”

  “And isn’t it a shame that you didn’t realize this years ago?”

  His eyes widened.

  “She’s not well enough to be driving herself, let alone a child—my child.”

  “I’m quite sure,” he began again, his voice like a doctor’s, perfectly pitched, perfectly measured.

  “Do you have any idea what is happening in this house? Do you not see? Ottoline is slowly killing herself . . . drinking herself to death, popping pills to make her forget, to make her sleep, to take away her pain.”

  He closed his eyes. “I really do think you’re overreacting, my dear.”

  That my dear triggered something. Something I had pushed down and gulped back for years, and now it rose up—and rose up in a great torrent.

  “Men like you, Lord Hector, are everything that’s wrong with this world. You spend your life pretending—pretending everything is fine in order not to have to deal with the truth. You turn your wives into jewelry-clad imbeciles and keep your mistresses in the shadows. Then, one day, one of those women you’ve . . . you’ve bedded has a child—your child. And without any hope of a life, without any financial support or status, they unravel, and walk into a river. That’s what your sort do to women.”

  “I think you’ve said enough.”

  But I hadn’t; there was more.

  “You abandoned your wife—and no doubt countless others—but what you need to realize is that you also let down your sons. What sort of example were you to Billy, to Hugo? How does it feel to have sent your boys off to their deaths and still be here, sitting in the comfort of your study, smoking cigars, shuffling papers—and telling me about love?”

  He stared at me. “How dare you?”

  I was spent. My heart slowed, the room took shape once more and the man in front of me changed from every villain in every nightmare to something else, something pathetic: a relic, a throwback; another old man with a stiff collar and a sad past. And then, with regret too ancient for this lifetime etched in his features, he whispered, “I loved my sons . . . I love my wife.” And I turned and walked out.

  Even now, I’m shocked by how I spoke to Lord Hector that day. I had never in my life spoken to anyone like that. And though I was vaguely aware that the hypocrisy belonged to us all, that I, too, was culpable in the great deceit of love—for hadn’t I knowingly slept with another woman’s husband?—my fury that day was not just with Lord Hector, but with almost every man I had ever known—and one I had not: my absent father.

  After I left His Lordship’s study, I stood in the hallway, staring about and wondering what to do. Hector Campbell was as deluded as his wife, I reasoned. My words—no matter how impassioned—would mean little to him. After all, I was a woman and a servant. In the eyes of men like him, there could surely be no cheaper combination. For the next hour or so, I wandered about the garden, up and down the driveway—listening for the sound of a car as I attempted to repair my relationship with God, promising him everything if he kept my daughter safe and brought her back to me. Then I went to the kitchen where a contrite Mrs. Lister told me she had had no idea that Her Ladyship was taking Lila out in the motorcar; she had thought they were going for a little walk. That was all.

  She said, “Now you sit down, and I’ll make us
a nice cup of tea.”

  “I don’t want a cup of tea.”

  “I’m sure they’ll be back soon . . . won’t have gone far.”

  “They’ve been gone all day,” I said, wringing my hands and walking in circles.

  “Her Ladyship will—”

  “Her Ladyship is not fit to be at the wheel—and you know that.”

  “Yes.”

  At that moment my ear pricked up at the distant honking of a horn, and I ran out of the kitchen and up the stairs, along the passageway toward the hallway, colliding with Rodney. “They’re back,” he said, breathless, all smiles.

  As I walked into the marble hallway, Lila appeared. “Mama! Look! See what I have for you!”

  My daughter handed me a package. I didn’t look at it, nor did I wait for Ottoline to emerge through the doorway. Instead, gripping Lila’s hand tightly and amidst much protesting and the onset of tears, I marched her away and up to our room. There, I closed the door, fell to my knees and held her. When I finally released my hold on her, she stared at me, her tearstained face set in a pronounced frown, her bottom lip stuck out in displeasure. Then, full of new sympathy: “Don’t cry, Mama.” She reached down, lifted the package from the floor. “Look, see what Auntie got you . . . Look, Mama.” She took my hands, carefully placed the gift into them.

  I said, “She is not your auntie, Lila.”

  “She is.”

  “She is not.”

  “She is!”

  Slowly, I unwrapped the package: a first edition of Wuthering Heights.

  “It’s a book, Mama.”

  I had a passionate impulse to pack our bags, to leave there and then and burn every one of my bridges. But then what? Heaven only knew, because I had nowhere to go.

  Later, as I lay on the bed next to my daughter, stroking her precious golden curls, I heard all about her day out with Auntie: They had been to the beach, to see the sea, had lunch at someone’s house (this, I later learned, was in fact a restaurant), and then gone shopping in the big town, where they had had ice cream.

  Eventually I said, “I don’t want you to go out in the motorcar again without me.” And to the inevitable why? I replied, “Because I say so.”

  There was no explanation, no apology from Ottoline when I attended her later that same evening. She simply said, “We had the most wonderful time, you know,” and then recounted some of their day in more intelligible terms than Lila’s earlier account. “I do adore her,” she said, smiling at herself in the mirror. “Little Lila . . . She’s like one of my own. Yes, truly, just like one of my own.” She laughed. “In fact, a number of people today thought that she was. Yes, they thought she was mine. They said, ‘So like you . . . so like her mama.’”

  My anger had subsided and I had my daughter back—she was safely upstairs, in our bed, asleep—and I had decided not to confront Ottoline on the matter, because there was little point, I thought. But I was newly unsettled by this. I said, “And did you tell them? Did you tell them that she is not yours?”

  Ottoline thought for a moment, then shook her head. “No, I don’t believe I did. Why would I?”

  “Because it’s the truth?” I suggested.

  She swiveled round to face me. “But I thought she belonged to us both. I thought we agreed to that?”

  “Well, I named her after you . . . and I made you her godmother—”

  “No, no,” Ottoline interrupted. “In Scotland, after she was born, we agreed—yes, we did, we agreed that she would be brought up here at Birling and that we would share her. You can’t go back on that promise now, you know, just because it suits you. Jealousy is a very destructive emotion, Pearl. Very destructive.” She snatched the hairbrush from my hand, turned back to the mirror and began brushing her hair. “You’re jealous because Lila loves me. You’re jealous because I gave her such a wonderful day out.”

  I didn’t say anything. There was no point in fighting delusions. I turned back the bedcovers and bid her good night. Then I returned to my own room—weary, wrung out by the events of that day. I held on to Lila’s small body as though it were the crown jewels and I were the guard. The woo-woo from owls beyond my window failed to soothe me, and the familiar rattling of corncrakes in the moonlit meadows sounded newly jarring. I fell into a fitful sleep, waking from nightmares and reaching for Lila, until at last another day dawned.

  It wasn’t yet nine, but I was as usual in the laundry when I heard the distinctive footsteps upon the long, stone-flagged passageway and some scurrying in the kitchen.

  “I think we need to have a chat,” said His Lordship, standing in the doorway.

  I dried my hands. I knew what was coming, and I was ready for it, or so I thought. Thus, I followed him back along the passageway, up the stairs, across the marble hallway, down the corridor and into his study. He closed the door after me.

  “Please, do take a seat,” he said, gesturing to the chair in front of his desk.

  I sat down. He sat down.

  “I’m troubled, Pearl. We need to clear the air . . .”

  He took off his spectacles, reached inside a drawer, pulled out a cloth and began polishing them. “It’s not easy,” he said. Then he put his spectacles back on, swiveled his chair and looked out of the window. And I waited. And I waited.

  The shelves in his study were lined with leather-bound books—books I’d never once had the opportunity to survey or been invited to borrow. Amidst these were framed photographs of young men with differing hats and beards: some standing, some seated; dressed for cricket, rugby, rowing, hunting or shooting. On his desk, I saw a single photograph: Ottoline.

  “I knew when I married her,” he began eventually. “Her father was honest, perfectly honest. He told me, explained everything. She had her first breakdown at sixteen. Spent time in a nursing home.” He paused here, and I saw him lower his head for a moment. “No, let’s not pretend—they’re called asylums. She had tried to kill herself. Can you imagine? At sixteen . . .”

  I said nothing. I was forewarned, and forewarned is forearmed, and a leopard does not change his spots, I thought, falling back once again on Kitty’s proverbs.

  He went on. “But she was different, so different to other girls . . . unpredictable, a touch wild perhaps, but exciting all the same. And I fell in love with her. I adored her. I knew the moment we met that I wanted her to be mine—and not to own, but to love and make happy. That was all I wanted, you see, to make Ottoline happy. Her happiness and well-being meant more to me than anything. Still do.” There was another pause; he lowered his head again. “The first affair came shortly after Hugo—a young army officer, and very handsome, as I recall. Of course it ended, the way these things inevitably do. She came back to me, as I’d hoped, and for a time we were happy. Then came Billy. It was not long after . . . I knew the chap, saw it unfolding, thought I had no choice but to let it run its course. But this time it was different; there was a child. A girl.”

  He turned to me, removed his spectacles. “Has she ever told you?”

  I nodded. “Yes, sort of.”

  He stared down at the papers on his desk. “It was a difficult time for her. She’d always longed for a daughter . . . and afterward, well, she was told there could be no more babies. The affair had ended—oh, long before the baby—and she sort of . . . sort of unraveled and fell apart. I took her away, to Switzerland. On our return, she told me that she hated me, hated me for marrying her. Said she had never loved me, never could or would.” He glanced up at me. “But time passes; we move on. I still love her, and I have to believe she loves me. Otherwise, my life has been meaningless.”

  “She told me it was you. She told me you’d had affairs from the start.”

  He closed his eyes.

  “What about Mrs. Parker?” I asked.

  “The Parkers have been devoted friends to us both . . . In fact, it was Virginia Pa
rker who cared for Ottoline after she lost her daughter, who came to stay here and nursed her. Throughout all of it, Virginia was stalwart in her support—indeed, in her defense of Ottoline.” He raised his eyes to me. “I’m not sure why she turned on Virginia. But Ottoline does that—with people, places, causes. She falls in love very quickly, and falls out of love just as fast.”

  That strange word-filled, sun-filled morning helped me at last begin to understand Ottoline, her nature and the nature of her marriage. But it was too late. Something inside me had snapped and was broken. Lord Hector knew it and I knew it. We both knew my time was done. And yet, his humility, his honesty and, perhaps more than anything else, his undoubted love for Ottoline, touched me. And so when he rose to his feet, when he came toward me, his hand outstretched, I not only took hold of it—I took hold of him. He smelled of cedarwood cologne.

  “Do I really seem like a Lothario to you?” he asked, stepping away and peering at me over his spectacles.

  No. He didn’t. And never had.

  In the end, I left quietly, and not until the day after the armistice, which was in itself a queer day at Birling, because no one seemed to be aware of it, or to care. There was no celebration, no party. It was just another day, another day at the end of a very long four years. Lord Hector remained in his study; Ottoline pored over her scrapbooks; Mrs. Lister rolled out pastry and Rodney wound clocks. So it was, really, just another day in the great sweep of days that would see them all on and take them to an end.

  It was not yet light when I picked up my pen. And it was hard to know what to say, where to begin, and I was pleased to have Lila there in the room to distract me from what I knew could so easily become a lengthy letter of love, and regret, and recrimination. Thus, fast, and without too much thought, I wrote:

  My Lady, Ottoline,

  I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me for what will seem to you a hasty departure. But I have given much thought to this and over a long period of time. I hope you will be able to understand my need to establish a life for Lila and myself, away from Birling, and understand that Lila needs more than you & me, and Mrs. Lister & Mr. Watts as playmates. In the not-too-distant future she will be starting school, and it is important to me that she have friends & learn about life, real life.