‘She killed herself, Mumma!’ Cord wanted to laugh.
‘She was fragile. Too fragile for this life, Cordy. Couldn’t you see that?’
Cord thought of the diary, safe in her bag, which she had now read five or six times. She would bury it under the porch at some point, where it had always been. Remember Mads in the right way, say sorry. She thought of the girl in the pages of that diary, who fought and struggled and tried to make it all better, but who couldn’t.
‘She wasn’t always fragile—’
‘Maybe she wasn’t, but she became like that. Life wore her out. It wasn’t you, darling, it wasn’t even Tony. I saw the effect her childhood had on her. That awful father. How desperate she was to be part of us. She got what she wanted but the wave of all of that pain, well, darling, it simply crashed over her at times – she couldn’t stop it. And she did do wrong, of course I know that. Of course she shouldn’t have slept with him.’ Tears swam in her watery, drooping eyes; she put her hands out towards her daughter. ‘Forgive me. It makes me rather unhappy. I loved the girl, I loved her almost as much as you two. Those grandchildren might not be my flesh and blood, or they might – they’re still mine, and I love them to pieces. I can’t condemn her. It was what she had to do.’ Althea wiped her nose on a cotton handkerchief; her fragile shoulders hunched over, and Cord felt great tenderness towards her. ‘There’s one thing I wish she’d known. She never knew the whole truth. If she’d known, maybe she wouldn’t have blamed herself so much.’ She sat back again and patted at her neck, unconsciously.
‘The truth? About what?’
‘About Ben, darling.’ Althea moved a little on the cushion and peered out at the beach, and the sky. ‘Look, it’s going to rain soon. Fix me a drink, will you, dearest? A gimlet, perhaps? I want a drink.’
Cord couldn’t quite believe it. ‘Oh, honestly. Afterwards, Mumma. Tell me.’
‘Well.’ Althea’s thin fingers plucked at the wicker of the seat. ‘Darling. Ben – Ben isn’t really Tony’s son. I’d have thought you’d have worked that out as well, with all that time to think about it.’
Cord’s eyes widened. ‘What?”
Althea shrugged. ‘Really, when you think about it, they’re nothing like each other.’
‘Ben – Ben isn’t Daddy’s?’ Cord blinked. ‘So – who’s his father?’
‘Doesn’t really matter. That’s not the point, darling—’
But Cord wasn’t letting her get away with that. ‘Come on, Mumma. You can’t not tell me, not after all this. Does Ben know?’
Althea exhaled. ‘Yes, yes. Ben knows. OK. An old actor friend of ours. Simon Chalmers. He was Daddy’s flatmate. We used to see rather a lot of him, in the early days. Then . . . Well, we saw rather less of him,’ Althea said. She spoke quite calmly. ‘You know, it wasn’t that uncommon then. There were a lot of parties, all sorts of things went on . . . I remember once at a house party of a friend of the Armstrong-Joneses, near Bath it was, where—’ She stopped. ‘Anyway. Those early years of our marriage, they weren’t easy. Daddy was – oh, he was difficult! And I was young, and used to having my own way . . .’ She folded her hands on her lap, looking out to sea.
‘Simon and I had a very brief affair. Daddy found out, he was furious, it ended, I had Ben, he looked like Simon, we never spoke of it, and—’ She made a little gesture, brushing her hands together. ‘There you go. He used to come and stay in the early days, do you remember him?’
‘Yes, of course. He’d come with Bertie.’ Cord shook her head, utterly bewildered, as memories surfaced in her mind’s eye, new slides on a carousel. ‘He had blonde hair. Oh, oh, my goodness. He was fun. And he loved spy novels.’
‘That’s him. You liked him.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘Well, Daddy liked to think he was hip and fine with it, that we were all just humans and should get along, and he didn’t have a leg to stand on when it came to fidelity. But Simon did used to wind him up. Popping down here when Daddy was away, always trying to persuade me to . . . Anyway, I didn’t mind, isn’t that awful? But Daddy got sick of it, of him and Bertie too, he banned them from coming. I suppose it was fair enough. Simon married some girl and I didn’t see him much after that. He died a few years ago. He was a lovely man. Troublemaker, but awfully good fun.’
‘So Ben’s met him?’
‘Absolutely.’ She nodded, and Cord saw the years of intimacy her mother had had with her son, years she, Cord, had missed out on. ‘Of course. Simon gave Ben a job after university, actually, working on a film. He was a great help. And when Daddy died Ben came to me and told me he’d always known and said he wanted to meet him properly.’
‘No.’ All this time, the secrets she’d been holding on to, and there were Ben and their mother carrying one of their own, quietly dealing with it.
‘He went to see Simon, several times after Daddy died. He went to his funeral, darling.’
‘I can’t believe it.’
‘You do, though.’ Althea drummed her fingers on the chair. ‘My point is, darling, that the girls might have been fathered by Tony, but your brother wasn’t. I made one mistake. One. Sleeping with Simon a few times when your father was away, but I was furious with your father and darling, I was attractive then, and awfully lonely. You might say what they did was much worse—’
‘Of course it was!’ Cord interjected.
‘They were damaged children, Tony and Mads, both of them.’ Althea shifted carefully on the seat, adjusting her voluminous skirts, and then she rubbed slowly at her temple with one pointed finger. ‘I’ve learned nothing over the years, apart from lines from terrible plays I did fifty years ago that I can’t seem to forget – and one other thing, that damage done in childhood stays with you for ever.’
Cord could see a kite, a Disney princess of some description bobbing about on the beach, being lifted up and then diving dramatically out of view before popping up again. She could feel the anger ebbing away from her, the loss of something on to which she had been holding so tightly, as though she had been holding her breath for a long time. She nodded.
‘Oh, when I first knew him, Cordy. He was utterly beautiful. He’d been this huge sensation in Hamlet and he was so vain, so pleased with himself, so terrible at being falsely modest. And it was charming, utterly beguiling. They’d all had him, he’d been with hundreds of women and Uncle Bertie warned me off him. But I saw straight through it. It wasn’t the handsome tousle-haired star I wanted, it was this little lost boy underneath, who was frozen in time, who couldn’t get out. Frozen exactly at the point that aunt of his left him . . . It was him I fell for, him I wanted to look after.’ She looked up, with a smile. ‘We were really happy, you know. I loved the bad boy and I loved the little lost boy, and I let the bad boy do what he wanted and I looked after the lost boy. And, Cordy, for years I thought he was cured of it, that we’d packed these demons away and then something happened to change it.’ She blinked, trying to remember. ‘He became much worse. Selfish. Cruel. He wasn’t ever cruel. Then Ben ran away after the row about the school, and perhaps we all grew older, and less tolerant . . . I didn’t have the appetite for it in the later years, I grew angrier with him . . . I regret it.’ She was silent then, and pointed at the kite, now fluttering higher than ever before. ‘But it’s very important you understand, that you remember that for years, until Ben ran away and still for a time after that, we gave you a proper childhood, it was everything, we were in love, we were happiest when it was the four of us together and yes – it was glorious.’
Cord took her mother’s hands. ‘Yes,’ she said simply. ‘Yes, it was.’
She leaned forward and touched her forehead to Althea’s, and they stayed like that for a long while. Cord could hear her mother’s breathing, feel her skull hard and warm against her temple, the ticking time bomb.
‘Do you know what happened to Great-Aunt Dinah?’ she said, eventually. ‘Did you ever find out?’
‘She came back, becaus
e she brought the angel back.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, she took it with her when she left. So she must have brought it back at some point. So there’s that. But we have no idea how or when it reappeared. I never knew, anyway. It was just hanging up there one year, and it hadn’t been before and it wasn’t till your father was getting old that he started saying things . . . I don’t know where she went.’
Cord propped the little square stone up against the cushions, and stared into the angel’s huge eyes. ‘Perhaps we never will.’ She turned to her mother, and said quietly, ‘I’m so sorry. All those years I lost.’
Althea said softly, ‘Darling. You did what you thought you had to. I couldn’t have done what you did. So you mustn’t look back at those years now without remembering it was the right thing to do. It won’t help Ben, or the girls, to know what we know. You are a brave, good girl, darling, and I’m so sorry everything else has been so hard for you – there – ah, don’t cry, Cordy. Cordy, don’t cry.’ She was smiling, though her eyes were swimming with tears. ‘There, there.’
And Cord rested her head on her mother’s thin, frail shoulder, and cried for all of them and when she had finished crying, she sat up, eyes and nose swollen with weeping, and cleared her throat.
‘The kettle’s boiled but I think I’ll make you that gimlet.’
‘Strong, please. I’m absolutely not supposed to drink, and I don’t bloody care. What does it matter?’
‘Mumma, you look well, you know,’ Cord said in the doorway. ‘You don’t look as though . . .’
‘Don’t.’ Althea shook her head violently. ‘Don’t talk about it. We don’t bring it up. I’ll conk out one day and that’ll be that, but the point is we don’t talk about dying, we live while we can.’ She turned, slowly, pointing into the sitting room. ‘All those photographs. That American girl’s taken most of them down, hasn’t she? Ah well. I didn’t realise till it was almost too late what matters. It’s the real life in between those photographs, that’s what’s important. That’s what you remember. The little moments. How happy we were. We were happy, weren’t we?’
Cord paused, for a long time, her throat aching. Eventually: ‘Yes,’ she nodded, smiling at her mother, eyes full of tears. ‘We were. We were happy.’
‘So, darling. Fetch me that drink.’
And Cord, walking slowly, her head spinning, went into the kitchen of the house that would be hers and mixed an extra strong gimlet for herself and her mother, and when Ben and Lauren arrived back half an hour later, and it was drizzling, the view across the bay obscured by mist, Althea was asleep with the angel next to her on the sofa and Cord beside her, dried tears on her cheeks, an empty glass in her hand as the rain pattered softly down.
‘Oh, Cordy,’ said Ben, as he came up the steps, dripping wet. ‘Sis – is everything all right?’
Cord smiled at him, smoothed her skirts down, and stood up. She took his hand, clutched the finger and thumb. ‘No. But it will be. Lovely, lovely Ben.’ She held his hand tightly and he looked at her, astonished. She smiled over his shoulder at Lauren, then at her brother. ‘It will be, I promise.’
Epilogue
I
Summer 2015
The wake for Althea Wilde at the Bosky was quite something; Olivia de Quetteville, long a widow since Guy had died ten years previously, declared that Althea and Tony would have been immensely pleased at the amount of champagne consumed, the number of guests, the lateness of the hour at which the party concluded. ‘Just like the old days,’ she said. ‘No bad behaviour, sadly, but you can’t have everything.’
Althea died in July, having enjoyed several months when her condition did not worsen and only at the very end was she beset by seizures and pain, and it was controlled with morphine. She was only seventy-five, still young, but she seemed happy to be going, as Ben said, slightly mystified, to Cord, and Cord could only smile and agree. Althea had remained in control, she had died with the Bosky rejuvenated, with her children by her side, and those beautiful girls whom she called her grandchildren too. She hated the idea of a long decline, she’d run out of books to read, and her admirers were getting thin on the ground as time went on, or dreadfully bald – in short, the thing was as within her control as one could hope for, given the circumstances.
The funeral was at the Norman church in the village and Althea was buried next to Tony in the uneven ancient graveyard that gave way to the orchard where the boughs of the apple trees were bent with fruit, fringing the garden where Tony had first acted in A Midsummer Night’s Dream all those years ago. From the graveyard you could see the sea, a fine blue ribbon with the white of Bill’s Point in the distance. It was a private service, just the immediate family, although Uncle Bertie, now eighty-five, was dusted off and allowed to come, and he read: ‘I am a spirit of no common rate; The summer still doth tend upon my state.’ For, as he said, Althea was like a Fairy Queen, surrounded by admirers, never happier than in the warmth of approval and admiration.
On the Sunday of the August Bank Holiday, Ben and Cord held a wake for her – in reality, Lauren organised it all. Cord, arriving on the Saturday to help, was astonished to find, as she came up the steps, three stacks of chairs on the porch, two trestle tables on the sand nearby, and a young man up a ladder attaching strings of Chinese lanterns to the gables and the roof. Above the door in pride of place, the angel, hanging on a new hook and smiling down at them once more.
‘The pub down the lane is doing the food,’ said Lauren. ‘Big plates of sandwiches and salads and I have a guy bringing some local bread and crab for crab rolls, and these –’ She pointed at three rolled-up rugs in a canvas bag. ‘I thought people could go sit on the sand in front of the house, or maybe we could all go to the beach or even the beach hut now we’re finally getting around to having it knocked down, we could say a few words or whatever . . .’ She trailed off, smiling at Ben. ‘Why are you laughing?’
‘Mumma wouldn’t like people standing around being solemn, I don’t think,’ he said, putting his arm around her and kissing his wife’s ash-blonde head. ‘Or talking about their feelings.’
‘Besides, she never went to the beach unless she could help it,’ Cord added. ‘She was always just up here, on the porch, with a drink and her sunglasses on.’
‘Feet up on the table, reading a script.’
‘Or The Thornbirds or a P. D. James or something. She really was fantastically lazy. It was Daddy who was usually down there with us.’
‘He taught us how to swim, how to play rounders, and how to properly hide in hide-and-seek. Cordy, remember that time he told us all the story about the ghost of the young lady who lost her young man to smuggling and wanders the lanes looking for him, and Mads wrapped her hair entirely round her head because she was so terrified and it got so tangled we nearly had to cut it all off?’
‘Mads’s hair, honestly, it used to cause her so many problems,’ said Cord.
‘How so?’ said Lauren, rolling up the rug again.
‘It was very, very long, and she used it as a sort of safety blanket. She chewed it, she covered herself up in it, she twisted it . . . She used to sleep with it around her, didn’t she, like a cloak.’
He nodded. ‘Just like Emily, isn’t it strange?’
‘I hadn’t noticed before,’ said Cord, ‘but you’re right. Of course, she does it too.’
Lauren added, ‘And Iris twists her hair into tiny points, like Ben. It’s cute.’
‘Oh—’ Cord began, and then she stopped. Perhaps she did. Perhaps – so many perhapses, and they’d never really know the truth other than that they were here together again.
‘It’ll be OK, this party, won’t it?’ said Cord.
‘Of course it will,’ Lauren said. ‘Your mom was so well loved. Everyone who’s invited is coming.’
Cord turned to her brother. ‘But won’t people want to know what happened . . . Why we didn’t come here for so long . . .’
Ben didn’t a
nswer.
‘You know what,’ said Lauren. ‘I think you just tell the truth. Say you weren’t so close, all of you, for a few years there, but that before Lady Wilde died you were all reconciled. People aren’t as interested as you think they are. They just wanna hear an explanation that makes sense so they can get on with eating and drinking. Tell them the truth.’
‘The truth,’ Cord said, and she turned away from them both so they wouldn’t see her smile, for how could she explain to them? ‘A version of the truth.’
Four of Althea’s carers from Driftwood popped down the lane to drink to her memory, and added considerably to the party as two of them were Polish and brought vodka. Jan from the village, Mrs Gage’s daughter, brought her three children, and the vicar and his wife came too.
‘It’s lovely to be here,’ said the vicar, Reverend James. He was an ex-trader from the City, a rangy, rather intense man who’d found God, retired early and been ordained a few years ago. ‘I used to run along the beach and wonder who this house belonged to. Then I’d hear stories from the older villagers about the Bosky and the famous Wildflowers and I’d feel rather sad no one was using it.’
Cord offered him a sausage roll. ‘We didn’t come here for years. Things were rather difficult after my father died, for various reasons.’
‘I heard something like that,’ said the vicar, and his long ascetic face grew thoughtful. ‘Here’s a thing I keep meaning to tell you and your brother since your mother’s funeral. Your father’s first acting job was at the vicarage. Did you know that?’
‘I didn’t,’ said Cord. ‘What was it?’
‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream, funnily enough. He was Bottom. The comedic role, rather unusual to give it to a fourteen-year-old, wouldn’t you say? But I suppose it was during the war. The vicar then was a remarkable man. He took your father in after his aunt left from what I understand, and sponsored him through drama school. He took lots of photographs, of the plays and life in the village – there’s one of your father with the girl who played Titania, lovely thing she is . . . And a terrific one where they’re all flat on the ground and a Messerschmitt is flying over during a rehearsal.’
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