Facing the Light

by Adele Geras

  She thought about her mother’s death, and tried to imagine the weight of misery and desperation that had led her to do such a thing. Leonora had always firmly believed that suicide was a supremely selfish act for the mother of a young child. Because, she thought, I could never do it, that’s why. And Maude must not have felt like my mother at all. It must have seemed to her that Nanny Mouse was more of a mother to me. Did she think I loved Nanny Mouse best? This fear brought new tears to Leonora’s eyes. Maybe I added to her misery by not loving her enough. By not preventing her suicide with my love. Oh, I’m sorry, Mummy. So sorry.

  Leonora took a deep breath and resolved to spend all her energy and time in promoting Maude’s genius, and in telling her story. It was the least she could do. She looked up at the painting above her bed. White swans on the lake, always on the point of moving. Feathers that seemed about to ruffle in the breeze.

  Her eyes were not up to searching for the hidden signature, the little lion, among the green and the white and the dark blue brush-strokes. It struck her as astonishing that no one had noticed it all through the years, but Maude had gone to great lengths to hide it, and no one was looking for it. Tomorrow … no, not tomorrow, that was going to be busy enough … on Monday she would ask Alex to find it for her. A thought came to her suddenly, and she wondered whether little Douggie might have found one of Maude’s hidden lions on the dolls’ house wallpaper and that was why he’d pulled at it, and stripped it from the roof. That would explain, perhaps, why such a quiet and undestructive child might have been tempted. She would look at everything after the party.

  She turned to the presents. How lucky she was! Chloë’s little cupboard with its tiny drawers full of items which brought back her past was quite lovely. There was a miniature locket holding a portrait of Mr Nibs, her very first cat. Chloë must have remembered him from the times she’d sat on Leonora’s lap and looked at the old albums. There was a wedding-ring and one dried pink rose to represent her wedding, and baby boots for Gwen and Rilla. There was a corner of Efe’s first school report; a copy of a bookmark Chloë had made when she was about twelve, one of Alex’s earliest photos. All sorts of things that brought back good memories. Clever, talented Chloë!

  Efe and Fiona had given her a most beautiful cameo brooch, set in gold, and matching earrings. They would look perfect with her dress tomorrow, which was fortunate. Leonora hoped very much that Fiona would be feeling better by then. She wouldn’t want to miss the chance of dressing-up. Douggie had slept particularly well tonight. She couldn’t remember when she’d last seen him, which puzzled her a little. Efe generally brought him in to say goodnight to her before he went to bed, but today was such an unsettled kind of day that all the routines of Willow Court had been thrown into confusion.

  Gwen and James’s gift was in an envelope, two tickets for a long weekend in a very good hotel in Venice, in October. All expenses paid. Who should she take with her? There would be time enough to decide that when the party was over, but what a glorious thing it would be to look forward to.

  Sean’s white television set stood on the small table at the end of her bed. She smiled. She’d held out for so long against television in the bedroom that it would be an admission of defeat to confess how much she was longing for the winter evenings when she’d be able to lie on her bed under a soft blanket and watch her own set all by herself, without having to consider what other people felt like looking at. Never mind, she’d admit to being wrong. It would be bliss. Sean had also promised her a tape of the Ethan Walsh – no, the Maude Walsh – programme, and she could put that in her video machine and play it back whenever she felt like it. It was, she considered, a very thoughtful present.

  Beth had bought her an antique cheval glass, which she’d put near the window. I can take down the old full-length mirror on the inside of the wardrobe door now. She smiled. Beth never did like it, and always wrinkled her nose when she saw it, saying that it was no better than the average changing room mirror and dreadfully unflattering.

  ‘Good enough for me,’ had been Leonora’s answer. ‘I’m not as interested in what I look like as I used to be.’

  She smiled to read what Beth had written on the card attached to the mirror. For someone beautiful who deserves a proper reflection. She was surprised at how moved she was by Beth’s kindness and devotion.

  She leaned forward to touch Rilla’s present. When the packet fell open, she wasn’t a bit sure that what she could see would be her sort of thing. She’d thought (and now she felt ashamed for thinking it) how typical it is of Rilla to buy me something she’d like to wear. She didn’t even know what to call it. ‘Dressing-gown’ wouldn’t describe it. Of all the words in the language, those signalled cosy, comfortable, woolly, fleecy. Peignoir was wrong. That brought into her mind something flimsy and probably transparent. This garment was most probably a robe, with all its associations of grandeur and splendour. Leonora picked it up from the bed and put it on over her clothes, and it fell to the ground in a glitter of brocade, gold thread in a rose pattern on a darker gold background.

  She looked in the cheval mirror and smiled. I look resplendent, she thought. I look like an empress. She was surprised at how satisfying the fabric felt on her body. The robe fell open to reveal its secret beauty: from shoulder to hem the whole thing was lined with pink velvet, silky, opulent, and exactly the sort of pink she adored, which was neither too bright nor too washed-out, but what she always thought of as ‘dusty’. It was a shade which had something in it of grey, like a rose that had started to fade. She stared at her reflection in the glass and thought, I love it. I love how I look in it. I don’t ever want to take it off. Clever Rilla! I must make a point of telling her tomorrow how very beautiful her present is, and how much I appreciate it.

  Still in the robe, she sat down at the dressing-table to look at Alex’s gift. The album which he had promised to fill with images of Willow Court and of her birthday was almost empty, but there were a couple of photographs already in place. One was an exact copy of the painting which depicted the vista up the drive, with the oak trees showing scarlet and the house grey and small at the top of the avenue. Alex must have taken this last October and kept it to start the album off. On the next page, there was a portrait of her, and however long she looked at it, she couldn’t recall when she’d been in exactly this pose. She was in the nursery, sitting next to the dolls’ house with one hand on the roof and the other on her lap.

  I look as though I’m talking to someone, she thought. Talking to Alex, it must be, because he took the photograph. She examined the picture more closely. Why had she never had the dolls’ house photographed before? It looked magnificent, perfect in every detail, with all the dolls visible and seeming to be almost on the point of moving. The green of her blouse exactly matched the willow branches on the wallpaper. She blinked tears from her eyes. Mummy chose that paper, she thought, and closed the album. There was still one more thing she had to do.

  She opened the drawer where she kept her scarves and took out Rilla’s home-stitched purse. The dolls that had lain in it for most of the last half-century were exactly as they were when Leonora had stopped playing with them. She placed them one next to the other on her dressing-table. There we are, she thought. That’s what we looked like then. The lilac dress of the little-girl doll was unfaded; her face was pink and the embroidered smile was quite unchanged. The mother and father dolls reminded her of Ethan and Maude, and yet of course they were nothing like the real people. Dolls did what you wanted them to. Dolls were actors in the dramas that children created. It occurred to her that she ought to have let these three be played with. She ought to have allowed them some kind of life instead of burying them deep. It wasn’t too late.

  Leonora went to the bedroom door and opened it. There was no one in the corridor and she walked along to the nursery. The bulbs in here, she thought as she switched on the lights, could do with being brighter. The strips of wallpaper from the roof had been put away safely in he
r desk until she could think about what should be done with them.

  She took off the dustsheet that covered the dolls’ house and folded it up. It oughtn’t to be hidden, she thought. I will keep it open for everyone to look at from now on. It should be visible. Maybe there’s even time for Sean to put it in the film. She stroked the roof. What would she be doing now, thinking now, if Douggie hadn’t started tearing at the paper? If the nursery door had been locked, or if he’d found something else in Willow Court to interest him? Maude’s sorrow, Ethan’s secret, would still be lying there, undiscovered. She would have told Efe that the paintings were on no account ever to leave this house. The memory of that black shape in the water, the strands of her own mother’s hair floating on the surface of the lake, everything she’d remembered about that day, would still be buried somewhere in her heart. All our lives, she thought, hinge on the tiniest of events. If this girl doll, she thought, comes in too early from the garden, she might see Daddy Doll hitting Mummy Doll about the head.

  No, she thought. I’ll give them some comfort. She took all the Delacourts … wasn’t that what Gwen and Rilla used to call them? … out of the house and put them on the window sill. I’ll tell Gwen that’s what I’ve done, she said to herself, and after the party she and Rilla can decide what’s to become of them.

  She knelt down carefully and placed her own precious dolls around the table in the miniature dining room and put a tiny roast chicken in front of them. Then, for good measure, she added a red jelly made of papier mâché. It’s going to be a lovely meal, she decided. Everyone will have the most wonderful time. There will be no quarrels. Never again. They are going to live happily ever after. Leonora gathered the folds of her rose-and-gold robe around her and left the nursery, closing the door quietly behind her.

  Sunday, August 25th, 2002

  Leonora’s Birthday

  Even in the midst of her nightmare, Leonora was aware that she was dreaming. A man was standing next to her bed and singing. It wasn’t a proper song and his voice was not a human voice but something between a bird’s cry and the grinding of gears. His face was turned away, and Leonora knew that this was precisely the right time to wake up because, if she didn’t, the man would turn round and his face would be unspeakable. She opened her eyes and settled into the comfort of finding her own bedroom all around her. Who was he? Ethan? Efe? Peter, even? She still felt, as she had felt every single morning since Peter’s death, a tightening around her heart; a little fluttering of sorrow that he was not sleeping there, just there beside her. What would he look like, she wondered, if he were still alive? Eighty-two years old, he would have been. White-haired. Wrinkled. Perhaps, like Nanny Mouse, wandering in his thoughts. She shuddered. It was too dreadful to think about.

  She pushed back the covers and sat on the edge of the bed, with her heart beating a little too fast. Her bedside clock told her that it was just after half past four. It was far, far too early to get up, but Leonora knew that she wouldn’t fall asleep again. She walked very carefully across the room and drew the curtains. When I was a girl, she thought, I used to bound out of bed and be at the window in two strides. Never mind. I’m here. I’m seventy-five. It struck her suddenly as a very long time to have been alive. Streaks of gold and pink and palest blue lay across the sky, and soon the sun would appear and the day would begin. She made her way to the bathroom and thought, I’ll just go back to bed and lie quietly until I hear someone else getting up.

  Once she was settled against her pillows, she closed her eyes and thought of her birthday guests, all over the county and even further afield, getting up and choosing their best clothes and making their way towards Willow Court. She’d always thought of herself as having led a quiet life, with very little of what she called ‘gadding about’, but it seemed as though all those afternoons spent sitting at one or another polished table, contributing to the deliberations of this or that committee was a more sociable activity than she had realized. There were the Heads of several schools of which she had been a governor until very recently, with whom she’d formed rather formal friendships, but they were friendships nontheless. I’ve got quite enough going on in the family, she thought, and came to the conclusion that she valued her friends precisely because they weren’t caught up in any emotional turmoil. They were restful for the most part. Talking to them allowed her to participate in a world outside Willow Court and she was looking forward to seeing them again.

  She felt rather like the conductor of a large orchestra, waiting to raise her baton and start the whole thing off: conversation, laughter, food, the meetings with old friends. Everything. Whatever could have been done to make sure that the day went well had been done. She’d even remembered to ask Sean to go down to Lodge Cottage in good time and fetch Nanny Mouse and Miss Lardner up to the house in his car. He didn’t mind. In fact, he appeared delighted. Rilla probably thought that her new amour was something between herself and Sean and that no one else was aware of it. Leonora smiled. It was perhaps rather impulsive of Rilla to attach herself to him so quickly, but he was, as far as Leonora could see, a good man, a kind man, and he appeared to be fond of Rilla. Perhaps her daughter was right and the only thing that really mattered was to be as happy as possible whenever you could. Peter … Rilla had been right to remind her of that moment, all those years ago, when a young soldier had walked into the kitchen and she’d known she loved him before he’d even opened his mouth to speak. She’s not a child, Leonora thought. She can look after herself.

  *

  Gwen had set her alarm for half-past five but found herself wide awake at five o’clock. She was excited. She couldn’t help it. She sat up and started to get out of bed as quietly as she could. There was no need for James to be woken this early, but he stirred as he felt her push back the covers and said, ‘Surely it’s not morning already?’

  ‘Not for you,’ she whispered. ‘Go back to sleep. I’m just going to do a few things before Bridget arrives.’

  ‘Mmm,’ James said, and buried his face in the pillow.

  Gwen pulled on a tracksuit and went to brush her teeth. Ever since childhood, she’d loved the feeling of being up and about when everyone else was asleep. She looked out of her bathroom window and thought, as she always did when she woke up early during the summer, that this was easily the best part of the day. The sky was pearly with new light and still faintly pink where the sun had just risen. A few fluffy clouds were dotted about the blue, like those a child might have painted. The dew was still on the grass, sparkling where the light caught it just as dew was meant to do. Gwen smiled. She would go down and have a cup of coffee and a slice of toast before everything got too hectic. In her experience, on occasions like this birthday party alcohol began flowing as soon as two or three people were assembled anywhere and it was just as well to get some nourishment inside you. She felt a knot in her stomach somewhere, and thought, it’s like going into battle, or something.

  She tiptoed downstairs and into the kitchen. It struck her as strange that Douggie was still asleep, but maybe he’d had a disturbed night. As she put the coffee on, it occurred to her that she hadn’t heard him in the night. She frowned. I’m sure I’d have woken up, she thought. That must mean he slept right through. What a good boy he is. She put the bread into the toaster and fetched the butter from the fridge.

  As she ate, she made a mental note of everything that needed looking at before she went out to meet Bridget. The vases of flowers all over the house, the present tree (just to make sure that all the latest gifts had been added to the pile), the downstairs lavatory to check that clean towels had been put out and new pot-pourri arranged in the blue and white bowl on the shelf. After I’ve done all that, she thought, I’ll go and wake Mother with a cup of tea and bang on Rilla’s door. She won’t want to have to hurry with her titivating.

  ‘Made any extra for me, darling?’ James came into the kitchen, smiling. ‘Lovely day again, I’m glad to say.’

  He sat down opposite her and Gwen mar
velled, as she always did, at the way her husband was instantly awake and completely himself first thing in the morning, however much he’d been drinking. There used to be days, after particularly bad nights when the children were little, when she felt she could scarcely keep her eyes open at the breakfast table and was rather irritated by James being quite so (in his own words) ‘bright-eyed and bushy-tailed’. Now she was grateful for his cheerfulness and energy.

  ‘Get that toast down you,’ he said, ‘and we’ll go out and see if Bridget’s here yet. I want to give the marquee a last look round.’

  ‘It was fine last night,’ Gwen said. ‘Just needed the flower arrangements on the tables and the place settings.’ She sighed. ‘Everything’s gone rather too smoothly, as far as the catering’s concerned. I’m nervous. Holding my breath in case something goes wrong.’

  ‘Nonsense, darling, nothing will go wrong. Everyone will have the time of their lives. I just hope your mother is herself. That suicide note must have been a shock for her, don’t you think? Still, she’s a tough old bird, isn’t she?’

  ‘James!’ said Gwen, trying to sound offended and not quite succeeding, because after all he was speaking no more than the truth. Leonora was tough, but probably not as strong as she and everyone else liked to believe. ‘Come on, then. Finish up your coffee and let’s go.’

  *

  Reuben Stronsky spent the first part of his drive to Willow Court thinking about the call he’d taken on his cell phone just before he set out. It was from Efe, sounding hurried and anxious, as though there were some kind of emergency happening where he was. Maybe that was just the bad reception in this part of the world. ‘A turn-up for the book’ he called it, and that quaint British expression meant that Leonora Simmonds had changed her mind and was going to allow the Walsh pictures to be housed wherever he, Reuben, thought best. He couldn’t help smiling and wondered what had swung it for him. When Efe told him about the real creator of the pictures, he was overwhelmed and wanted to discuss it further, but it was clear that Efe was eager to get off the phone and said only that he’d asked the parking staff to watch out for Reuben’s car. Details of the revelations would have to wait.