Facing the Light

by Adele Geras

  And, of course, it wasn’t just Gwen and Rilla on their own, as it had been in the old days. The grandchildren were all here too, with their – what was the modern phrase? – partners. How silly that sounded! What was wrong with ‘sweetheart’? She hadn’t had a chance to talk to Efe properly yet. He’d gone off with James to walk around the garden and she’d only managed to greet him briefly. Leonora knew that what she felt for her eldest grandchild was out of the ordinary. Love, certainly, but something else too. A particular kinship, because they were alike in so many ways and because Efe reminded her of his namesake, her father. She knew more about him than anyone, though sometimes she wished she didn’t. She pressed her lips together and decided this was not the moment to think about all that. She pushed it to the very back of her mind and opened a drawer in her dressing-table.

  Without thinking about why she was doing so, she took out from under a neatly folded pile of scarves a square purse made from some kind of thick cotton. The letters roughly and clumsily embroidered there (MUMMY) made her eyes fill with tears. Rilla had stitched the purse at school, and though she was never the best needlewoman in the world, she’d loved her enough then to make this present for her. Leonora kept her precious dolls in it. No one else knew where they were hidden. She opened the purse now and took out the little doll that looked as she herself had once looked: pretty, very young, in a lovely dress. Oh, how I wish I could be her again, Leonora thought. Not an old woman with too many sorrows.

  She felt her head swimming, and hastily replaced the dolls. Calm down, Leonora, she said to herself. She closed her eyes, breathed deeply, and felt a little better. Sometimes, she imagined her head divided into compartments, rather like her jewellery box, each lined with scarlet velvet and tightly shut for most of the time. That’s how it must stay, she thought. I will close that drawer and go back to thinking about the days ahead. She would, she knew, have her work cut out trying to foresee and head off any trouble arising between members of her family. She was still capable, surely, of seeing that everyone behaved themselves. That couldn’t really be troubling her, could it? So what was it?

  She sat at her dressing-table and picked up the silver-backed brushes that had belonged to her mother. Poor Maude, Leonora thought. What would she think of the fact that she was now known to most people simply as the wife of Ethan Walsh? A shadow, there one second and gone the next, crossed the glass in front of her eyes and she turned to see what it could have been, her heart beating rather too fast in her chest. Nothing. A trick of the light. Possibly even the reflected image of the painting that hung on the wall above her bed. That must have been it, the white of the swans on the water, seeming to move. Not really moving at all.

  Leonora soothed herself by looking at the photograph that stood on her dressing-table. Alex had taken it a couple of years ago. She smiled to think of her younger grandson and how, from the very first time he’d held a camera when he was no more than six years old, he’d almost never put it down. Whatever the occasion, there he’d be, snapping away quietly instead of talking to people. She would never have admitted to having a favourite grandchild, but there was, she felt, a special bond between herself and the rather quiet little boy who had always seemed to enjoy her company and never required anything from her that she couldn’t give. Even as an adult, he was still her darling, and she didn’t think anyone quite appreciated how talented he was.

  He has a gift, Leonora thought, for seizing the right moment, and quite often for showing more about people in the shot than they realized. There they were, she and Gwen and Rilla, fixed forever as they were that day, sitting on the bench under the magnolia tree in the Quiet Garden. I look good in that blouse, she thought, with Mummy’s pearls around my neck. Gwen had Gus on her lap, and the blue of her cardigan was flattering. Rilla looked happy in this picture, which made a change. She wasn’t often seen to smile in photographs and Leonora knew that was because Rilla felt it made her look too fat. She had on a long, gold-coloured dress, quite unsuitable for the country, and Leonora felt a momentary irritation, mixed with the concern that she always felt for her younger daughter. It wasn’t as though she was a stranger to Willow Court. She knew that it wasn’t a long-dress sort of place. Also, she was wearing altogether too many necklaces, which was typical of her. Leonora stared at Gwen looking down at the cat on her lap, and at Rilla looking at Gwen. Not me, she thought. I’m looking straight at the camera. Meeting its eye. The magnolia tree was lovely, studded with its pink and white tulip-like flowers. We seem happy enough, Leonora thought. She sighed, and turned her attentions to her face in the mirror.

  It was quite passable for nearly seventy-five, she thought, but that white hair. Where had it come from? When she wasn’t confronted by her own image in the glass, and on good days when her legs and arms obeyed her, it was easy for her to think of herself as Leonora Simmonds the beauty, the young mother whose two little daughters were her pride and joy. Her treasures. Concentrate on the good things. Don’t give houseroom to shadows. Keep problems in their place. That was always her style. It was what made her a force to be reckoned with. She smiled. Sean had called her that. She’d liked his words and summoned them up now to help sustain her till she saw him. A force to be reckoned with. She made her way slowly to the bathroom. It was getting late. She wouldn’t be able to stay with Nanny Mouse for very long.

  *

  Nanny Mouse was so old that everyone had lost count. She’d been Leonora’s nanny then Gwen’s and Rilla’s, and she’d always been called that. Anyone who met her asked, of course, how she had acquired her name and had to be told, rather boringly, that Leonora had called her that when she was tiny and unable to say Miss Mussington. Mouse she had become, and Mouse she remained, and the name suited her well. Even in her young days there was something rodent-like about her small hands and neat waist, and the way her teeth protruded ever so slightly. She’d worn her hair in a bun at the nape of her neck for nearly a century, and her clothes were as fixed as the seasons – black skirt, woolly cardigan, and a high-necked white blouse in the winter; navy-blue cotton dress (long-sleeved, however hot the weather) in the summer. Nanny never removed her cameo brooch, which was pinned to the front of whatever she wore. The children used to giggle and say she probably pinned it to her nightie.

  She lived in Lodge Cottage, the pale, square little house at the bottom of the drive beside the main gate. Leonora had decided ten years ago that she was too old to live alone and for all that time, Miss Lardner had been Nanny Mouse’s companion, looking after her day and night with the utmost devotion. Which was pretty good considering Miss L was no spring chicken herself, as James often said. She must be sixty-five at least, Leonora thought. Miss Lardner was a quiet, rather enigmatic person, who kept herself to herself. She was tall and well-built and no one ever called her by her given name, which was Doreen. She talked to Nanny, cooked for her, and made sure she didn’t slip in the bath. And was well paid. For her part, Nanny, who had looked after everyone for more years than most people survived on this earth, resented the waning of her powers and spent many happy hours grumbling at poor Miss Lardner, who seemed to take it all with equanimity. I’m quite used to it, she always said. She’s an old lady after all. I don’t mind.

  Miss Lardner was waiting when Leonora arrived.

  ‘She’s in a good mood today, Mrs Simmonds,’ she said, opening the door. Leonora’s first name did not cross Miss Lardner’s lips, and after all these years it would somehow have been awkward to mention it. The front room of the cottage was golden with sunshine, and she smiled. There was Nanny Mouse, asleep in the chair by the unlit fire. The table under the window had just been polished and a vase stood ready.

  ‘I knew you’d bring flowers,’ said Miss Lardner. ‘If you give them to me, I’ll put them in the vase and bring them in with the tea.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Leonora, handing over the roses Gwen had picked earlier that morning. Nanny loved roses best of all, or she used to, and Leonora went to a great deal o
f trouble to find the best of the late-flowering varieties to bring whenever she visited, even though she wondered how much of anything the old lady actually took in. Sometimes she seemed to be, in Efe’s words, on the ball. The phrase had made Leonora laugh the first time he’d said it. Nanny Mouse and balls of any kind inhabited quite different worlds. Most of the time, however, she was totally out of it, another of Efe’s expressions. Now the old lady sat quite upright in the chair with her eyes closed, but otherwise looked much the same as she always did.

  ‘Nanny Mouse has been freeze-dried, like a string bean,’ Alex said once, and it was true. She seemed fixed, and that was something to be grateful for, but Leonora knew that somewhere, in some way, the old lady’s body was ageing, growing weaker, and that fairly soon she would no longer be with them.

  ‘I’m not sleeping, Maude dear,’ Nanny Mouse said quietly into the golden afternoon. ‘You can come and sit down and tell me things.’

  ‘You startled me, Nanny!’ Leonora said, kissing the cheek that smelled the way it always did, of lavender talcum powder. ‘And I’m not Maude. I’m Leonora.’ She sat down in the chair on the other side of the fireplace and began to talk. Nanny Mouse liked to keep up with what was going on at Willow Court. She was particularly interested in the filming.

  ‘The television people. Are they coming to see me?’

  ‘Of course, Nanny. You’ll be in the film. You’re the only person in the family apart from me who actually knew Ethan Walsh.’

  Nanny Mouse nodded. ‘I did. He was good to me. In his way, you understand. He wasn’t much of a one for women. Poor Maude!’

  The old woman fell silent then. She was holding a handkerchief, twisting a corner of it with her fingers. Silence began to grow in the room, seeping into the shadowy corners the sunlight couldn’t reach. Leonora spoke to disperse it, to distract Nanny. The whole family knew that she found it painful to talk of a time when she was very young, whether because it made her feel older, or for some other reason never given.

  ‘The children are here, Nanny. I’ll bring little Douggie to see you. You remember him, don’t you? Efe’s son? My great-grandson. Of course you do. He’s such a lovely little boy.’

  ‘But he mustn’t wander,’ Nanny said, looking up and leaning forward and plucking at Leonora’s knee. ‘Terrible when they wander. Were you here when he wandered away?’

  ‘Douggie’s never wandered away,’ Leonora said, and she could feel her heart beating in her throat. Nanny wasn’t talking about Douggie. Change the subject. She said, ‘You should see the food up at the house, Nanny. We’ve got pounds and pounds of strawberries. Enough for an army. I’ll send some down to you tomorrow if you like.’

  ‘Strawberries,’ Nanny Mouse repeated. ‘Oh, yes, I do like them! We had them for the wedding, didn’t we?’

  ‘My wedding, yes,’ Leonora said, trying to keep up.

  ‘He was dead by then, of course, or maybe he died just after that.’

  ‘Daddy? Yes, he died just before my wedding. I used to think how very sad it was that I couldn’t properly enjoy my wedding day, because my father had just died.’

  ‘And good riddance!’ Nanny Mouse said firmly. Miss Lardner came into the room just then and showed off the vase of late roses.

  ‘Look at these, Nanny!’ she said. ‘Mrs Simmonds has brought us some lovely roses.’ Nanny Mouse stared at the pink and cream-coloured flowers and the dark green leaves, not seeing them.

  ‘No one knows anything,’ she said to Leonora, her hands like mouse paws trembling in her lap. ‘No one hears what I say any more, and I say good riddance. I’m glad he’s dead.’

  She leaned back in her chair, tired from the emotion she’d expended. There were tears in her eyes. Leonora sighed. She knew that Ethan Walsh was a subject best avoided. Poor old Nanny is irrational when it comes to Daddy, Leonora thought. A little soft in the head, I expect. Well, she is frightfully old. It was time to change the subject again.

  ‘Alex is going to come and see you, Nanny. Everyone’s here for my birthday.’

  ‘Is it Leonora’s birthday come round again? Will she have a magician?’ Nanny Mouse’s eyes sparkled. Leonora looked at her and shivered. Please God don’t let me become like this, she thought. How ghastly to have a kind of wilderness in your head, and be forever wandering around in it, not sure at all of where anything was or when things happened. How unbearable to be so lost! She closed her eyes. I pray it never happens to me. I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear to be lost in my own head.

  *

  Sean Everard found that he was smiling to himself almost all the time these days without even knowing it. People kept telling him so. His PA, Jacy (whose lack of a letter ‘k’ had long ago ceased to annoy him), said he looked as though he’d lost a penny and found a pound. Purely in career terms the whole thing was a feather in his cap. When he’d gone to pitch the programme, he’d told himself not to hope. Who was going to finance an hour-long documentary on the life and art of Ethan Walsh? Okay, he was well known and his reputation was riding high these days, but still, there wasn’t much crowd appeal in an English painter who lived all his life in one place and didn’t do anything more sensational than make amazing images. Sean couldn’t believe his luck when the Powers That Be had okayed the project and when Leonora Simmonds, the artist’s daughter, had agreed to see him. He admitted it. He was as excited as any kid.

  He’d done his research and discovered that she was a formidable woman. It was easier for her, he supposed, than for many others, to be forceful and charismatic because of the money that had come down to her from her great-grandparents. She’d never had to work, and even being widowed at a ridiculously early age had not stopped her doing everything she intended to do. Her husband had probably been insured, which can only have added to her security if not to her happiness. They must have been very much in love, Sean thought, or surely a woman as attractive as Leonora would have married again? What she had done after her husband’s death was to throw herself into all sorts of charitable work, as well as managing the estate and looking after the pictures. Then, later on, she’d served on committees of all kinds. Now, Leonora was on the board of three small museums, and a governor of several schools. Not a woman, Sean thought, to sit at home and sigh and gaze out of the window, like the Lady of Shalott.

  And now he was going down there for her seventy-fifth birthday party. It had been her idea to include the festivities honouring her in the programme about her father. She might be delicate-looking and old-fashioned and so on, but she was a shrewd cookie when it came to public relations.

  ‘I’m an asset, aren’t I?’ she’d said to him, and she was flirting. There wasn’t any question about it. Did seventy-five-year-olds still fancy people? Leonora wasn’t the kind of woman you could ask about that outright, but whatever. She liked him and that was great, and better than great, because here he was now, bowling along the M4 to Wiltshire with the top down and the scents of summer flying past his nose. Okay, maybe there was an admixture of petrol fumes on the one hand and manure on the other, but Sean refused to smell those. Flowers. Grass. Blue sky and cotton-wool puffs of cloud, which didn’t have a proper smell, of course, but the air wafted various fragrances into his nose and he was someone who always accentuated the positive.

  Ethan Walsh, Willow Court, those pictures. Sean had been obsessed with them for more than thirty years. As an eighteen-year-old, in 1970, he’d been taken to the house by an aunt with a greedy interest in other people’s gardens. The avenue of what he’d been told were scarlet oaks leading up to the front door was like nothing he’d ever seen before, and very impressive but, as for the rest of the garden, well, Sean had nothing against flowers and bushes and greenery, but houses were more his thing, and so he’d made his way inside. Hadn’t asked anyone, but just strolled up the steps to a sort of terrace and the French windows had been open and he’d gone in and found himself in an empty room. All the usual things that are always in rooms must have been there, chairs, table
s, sofas and so forth, but Sean didn’t see them. On the wall above the fireplace were three paintings, hung in such a way that the eye moved from one to the other harmoniously; hung so that the colours of one led on seamlessly to the colours of the one above it, and then on to the one beside it. He gazed and stared and his mouth may have fallen open. It was the first time he’d seen real paintings. The blue! You could put out your hand and touch it and it would have been cool and shining under your hand. That was magic. One picture was a still life of apricots in a white china bowl on a table. Soft-bloomed apricots, pink-gold against the crockery and the blue-and-white checked cloth laid over the table just visible in one corner, and Sean looked at it and felt that if he could only sit there, in the painting, right next to that fruit, everything troublesome and difficult would fall away and he would be perfectly, ridiculously happy. Those apricots would be all he ever needed. Next to the still life was a landscape, and Sean recognized it as the view up the drive to the house, but painted in autumn to show off the disconcerting scarlet of the trees, and a small, grey, rectangular building in the far distance.