“Well, I can’t help but wonder if all those questions were simply too much for her. For Cassandra, I mean.”
“I don’t think it was the census, Sylvia. Cassandra had always been fragile, always of a melancholic nature. No, I think she’d teetered on a brink for years, and but for Jack, who knows? Perhaps she’d have taken her own life many years ago. But she waited, she waited until . . . until he was an adult.”
“Unfathomable . . . and I don’t imagine she ever thought you’d come back,” Sylvia mused aloud. “I suppose that’s why she waited until he was grown up, had finished his studies. But,” she gasped, shaking her head, “such a dreadful thing to do to him, poor dear.”
“Best not spoken of, I think, Sylvia. ’Twas a wicked and selfish act and I have nothing more to say on the matter.”
“Well, we have had rather a lovely day to ourselves, have we not?” said Sylvia, after a moment or two. “And certainly, everyone considered it a great honor to have you there to judge and present the prizes today. Oh yes, it’s quite clear that they hold you in very high esteem. In fact, you appear to be something of a celebrity, my dear.”
“I don’t think so. A foreigner, perhaps, an outsider.”
“But you’re not. And you really mustn’t say such things. People will take you at your word, especially country folk.”
“Perhaps not but I feel like one, and I’m never entirely sure where my allegiance lies . . . Though dear Bertie used to laugh at me whenever I said such things.” She paused, smiling, remembering. “‘My dear,’ he would say, ‘you are as English as I.’ Of course he was being ironic because he was a Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and his mother a Hanoverian.”
“The King was fond of you, wasn’t he?”
“Oh yes, he was a dear friend, and of course a very dear friend to . . .”
“George?”
“Mm, yes, George,” Cora replied vaguely.
George. His face had haunted her dreams and waking hours for half a century. And yet it was hard to fathom the passing of time and nearness of him, the years between then and now. George. Each and every day of her life she remembered him. His face stared back at her through open doorways and panes of glass, through seasons and years, across a continent and a sea. All of her imaginings led her back to him: the what-ifs, the whys, the silent conversations stretching through time. And sometimes, alone, she spoke his name out loud, lengthening that one adored syllable. But what would he think of her situation now? she wondered. He never knew, never knew any of it, I never told him . . .
“And would he have loved me any the less?” she murmured.
“What’s that, dear?”
Cora started. “Oh, nothing . . . nothing at all.”
“You know, you quite put me to shame today,” Sylvia began again. “I’d never realized that you had such an understanding and knowledge of flowers and plants.”
“Not really, my dear, I just know a little about many things—and don’t they say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing?”
“But it always seems to me that you know a great deal about everything,” Sylvia replied. “And I insist, you must tell me where this knowledge came from.”
Cora turned to her friend. “You know, I’m rather beginning to think you’d be better employing your investigative talents in writing crime thrillers instead of silly romances that . . . that have no bearing on real life!”
For some minutes the two women sat in silence.
“I’m sorry,” Cora said, “I’ve a great deal on my mind.”
“Is it about Jack?” Sylvia asked, leaning forward.
“No, not entirely . . .” She paused, looking at her friend with newly anxious eyes.
“Then what is it, dear? Please tell me what it is that’s troubling you so.”
Cora reached over, placed her hand upon Sylvia’s. “I’m not sure I’ve ever told you how much your friendship means to me,” she said, her eyes on their hands. “You’ve been the best, the very best.”
“We’ve been good friends to each other, dear. And you’ve been more than a friend to me, you have been family to me. But I can’t bear to see you like this, not now. We’re both much too old for any more drama.”
Cora tried to smile, shook her head. “Oh, it’s nothing . . . nothing sinister. Complications to do with the trust estates, that’s all.”
“Ah, I thought as much. But you know, you really mustn’t worry so. All will be well. Edward was a good man, a good husband. I’m quite certain he’ll have made sure that you’re looked after, provided for.”
“Well, I’m not destitute, not yet.”
“Nor will you ever be, not whilst I’m alive. But it’s a scandal”—Sylvia shook her head—“for you to be so fretful at this stage in your life. Dear Edward would turn in his grave!”
“It is what it is, we all have our crosses to bear . . . and I have spent too much of my life creating heroes and villains out of mere mortals.”
She saw Sylvia open her notebook once more and scribble something down. And Cora smiled. “Dolce far niente,” she said, closing her eyes.
“Ah yes, dolce far niente,” Sylvia repeated, without looking up.
“You know, I close my eyes and I’m back there.”
“It’s this blessed heat. Easily as hot as Rome in August, and to think . . .”
Cora could hear Sylvia’s voice, but she could no longer make out the words, and she had no wish to. She wanted to go back there, to that time, always that time, always that place.
Weeks away from England, isolated and undisturbed, Rome had been a small city then, shriveled within its walls. A place of lopsided crucifixes and littered shrines, and scattered ruins tangled up in weeds and undergrowth, and centuries of rubble and dust, where cows and sheep grazed about the tumbled pillars of ancient palaces and ragged clothes lay out to dry upon their scorching stones. Where animal carcasses, flasks of oil and balls of cheese dangled against the crumbling plaster of windowless shops; where tailors, milliners, shoemakers and carpenters huddled in doorways, a shrine to the Madonna and a candle flickering in the dimness behind them. And in the summer months, when the Tiber exposed her yellow banks and a fetid air hung over the city’s ruins, the place languished in that sweet idleness the Romans called “dolce far niente.”
“Never look back,” her aunt had told her. “Your life . . . our life began here in Rome.” And for so long, so very long, she had not looked back. She had only ever looked ahead, always ahead. But that other time, that time before Rome—for so long pushed away, denied, so much so that it had almost been forgotten—seemed determined to be acknowledged. And names for so long unuttered, buried in the past, had been written down for her to see: John Abel.
She opened her eyes. Sylvia was watching her, and she smiled. Now, a new secret hung between them, an invisible pendulum swinging between each and every glance. And Sylvia’s constant surveillance, that seemingly relentless albeit well-meaning scrutiny was awaiting answers, waiting for her to elucidate upon then and now, and everything in between.
But no, she couldn’t. How could she? She would have to introduce Sylvia to new words—words even she found hard to say. And it would mean going back to the beginning, the beginning of everything. It would mean unraveling seven decades of careful arrangement. She thought of her aunt, of all the times she had warned her about any permanent return to England. But she had had no choice in the matter. After all, the boy had no one, and she had nowhere else to go.
Such a tawdry business, blackmail.
Chapter Four
“A French cook, I ask you!”
Rosetta was rolling out pastry once more, sprinkling flour across the pine table, wiping her brow between every roll. The kitchen was airless and hot. Cecily sat watching her, only half engaged in their desultory conversation which had meandered from shortcrust pastry to the shortcomings of the soon-to-be-appoint
ed cook at Temple Hill.
“How’s she going to find a French cook round here? And what do the French know about English food? It’ll all be foreign, oh yes, you mark my words, and then she’ll have to eat humble pie, advertise again,” Rosetta went on, oblivious of any pun. “Never trusted the Frenchies, never would—look at what they did to their own King . . . wouldn’t want one in the house, rob you as soon as look at you. And she’s half-French—at least.”
“Actually, I think she’s English,” Cecily said without looking up. “Her grandson’s certainly English.”
“Hmm. He might be,” Rosetta said, skeptically. “But there’s been stuff said, hasn’t there? And there’s no smoke without fire.” She glanced over at Cecily. “But that’s not to say he’s got her ways.”
“Her ways?”
“All them marriages, that life abroad. It’s not normal, is it?”
Cecily didn’t answer. What was normal? Was Rosetta’s life normal? Was her mother’s? Normal was surely whatever was normal; normal was subjective. Normal meant nothing, she concluded swiftly. There was little point in debating semantics with Rosetta.
“I’m not altogether sure what you mean,” she said.
“Well, seems to me she’s had a pecular sort of a life. Moving about all the time, marrying willy-nilly. It smacks of one thing . . .”
“Mm, what’s that?”
Rosetta put down the rolling pin and leaned toward Cecily, her broad hands flat on the table. “Lustfulness.”
“Lustfulness!” Cecily repeated.
“You may well smirk, my girl, but it’s what robs men of what little sense they’re born with and sends women to the county asylum.”
Lustfulness. It was not a word Cecily had heard spoken out loud before, or not that she could recall. Lustfulness: is that what had driven their new neighbor from one country to another, one man to another?
“And it all comes from the French . . .” Rosetta was saying, stuck on her theme now. “I don’t want to know what they get up to over there, and I don’t want them bringing it over here neither.”
Diminutive, dark, and comfortingly round, Rosetta, Cecily thought, would have made a brilliant actress. She understood drama, knew how to deliver lines. But her talent had been wasted—in service, and in a kitchen, someone else’s kitchen. For that was where she had spent her life. She had never been married and Cecily couldn’t be sure how old she was. Like so many others, she appeared to be aging and old at the same time. She was suspicious of any written word apart from those in the Bible, which she read most evenings, and she took enormous comfort in prayer. “I’ll make sure I include him/her/them/it in my prayers,” was one of her stock replies, and to almost anything. And though she liked to complain about the rector—his choice of hymns, his sermons, and his fondness for the New Testament—she was an ardent churchgoer, attending all three services on a Sunday in her waist-length cape and tiny bonnet tied tightly under her fat chin.
The only thing Cecily knew for sure, the only thing she could relate to, was that Rosetta had loved and lost. She had only mentioned him once: someone named Wilf. He had been killed in the Boer War.
“But if she has known great love over and over, is it so very wrong for her to have accepted it? How many hearts could have been broken? How many tears shed? And which is nobler, to take love and cherish it, or to throw it back because one has already known it?”
But Rosetta appeared not to hear her. She continued with her rolling pin, eyes cast downwards, and said, “And who knows where she’s come from . . . could be anyone at all . . . anyone at all . . . I’ve read about folk who go overseas and come back all la-di-da, oh yes . . . could be anyone at all. Makes you wonder what happened to all them husbands,” she added, glancing up at Cecily with wide eyes.
Cecily laughed. She said, “Oh Rosetta, only you would suspect the poor old lady of murder!”
Rosetta made no reply. She pursed her lips and stretched her short neck as though trying to swallow words. Then she said, “You should go and tidy yourself up, missy. The Foxes are due here at seven.”
Cecily Chadwick had been born toward the end of a century, and toward the end of a life. Her first proper word, whispered—as she’d been taught—was “Daddy”; her first sentence, with a finger to her lips, “Daddy not well.” She had taken her first steps the day of a great earthquake in Japan, but there had been no tremor of excitement in her small hushed world. And then, at the end, it had gone quieter still and all black and white as her ashen-faced mother, already in mourning, with the nurse and the rector by her side, explained, “Daddy has gone.”
Since that time there had been little physical alteration in Cecily’s life. She had stayed on at the village school teaching the infants, and continued to live with her mother and sister in the house her father had built. But lately she had begun to feel a suffocating tightness about the village, like a gown she had outgrown but was still forced to wear. The sameness of each and every day was inescapable, the prospect of change remote. A yearning for excitement, she had been told, was the ambition of a shallow and idle mind, the ambition of pleasure-seekers.
Then, early in the spring of that year, the Countess from Abroad had moved into the house on the hill, the place known as Temple Hill. For days before her arrival all manner of vehicles had come and gone, struggling up the steep track, knocking branches from trees, churning up rocks and sand and dried mud. One wagon had failed to make it up at all, had stopped right there in front of Cecily’s garden gate. The men had had to carry each piece of furniture up the track, resting halfway, upon tables and in chairs, for a smoke. She had watched them disappear over the brow of the hill, stepped out through the gate and peered inside the wagon at the ornate antiques, rolls of carpets, tapestries, paintings, cabinets, settees and chairs. Stacked high at the back were crates and tea chests, a marble sculpture of a naked woman and, immediately in front of her, uncovered and gazing out into the sunshine, the bronze head of a Roman-nosed bearded man.
In the weeks that followed, as news of the countess’s arrival gathered pace, Cecily heard many things: the lady had lived in exile for almost all of her life, the lady was of foreign blood; her manner was unusually forthright, her manner was curiously reticent; she was Catholic, she was Protestant; she was penniless, she was rich. There was, however, consensus on one thing: the countess’s style was universally acknowledged as cosmopolitan.
It was the rector, Mr. Fox, who first alluded to royal connections, and there was talk of lineage and ancestry, albeit unspecific and somewhat vague, linking her to Louis Philippe, the last King of France. To Cecily, Mr. Fox appeared to know more than anyone, and certainly more than he was prepared to divulge. But once, over tea and cake, he slipped up and offered Cecily another tantalizing scrap, a chink into that rare knowledge. Oh yes, she had indeed been someone in her day, he said. “But the dear lady has come here in search of privacy and peace . . . and we must grant her that.”
As time went on, a selected few had been invited to the house for tea, always at a quarter past four. These, the chosen ones, had seen for themselves the fine French and Italian antique furnishings, paintings, sculptures and souvenirs; the paraphernalia of a life spent in a far more sophisticated milieu than their village. They spoke of the countess’s knowledge of Italian and French art and architecture, her apparent fluency in both languages. And when they learned that she had grown up in Paris, well, it came as no surprise.
But there was also talk of lost children, and husbands long since deceased, and though some appeared to consider this careless, almost wanton behavior, Cecily began to sense something of unutterable tragedy lying at the heart of the story. She pictured marble tombstones scattered across the desolate hillsides of foreign countries, and she could not help but view the countess as the sole survivor of an epic adventure. That the lady’s Grand Tour—gone horribly wrong perhaps—had finally, albeit inexplicably, led her
to Bramley seemed a curious fluke of fate. And meaningful? Perhaps.
That the countess had had a remarkable life Cecily was in no doubt, for already she knew that her neighbor had lived in a way others had not. But Cecily’s mother remained unconvinced. She appeared, to Cecily at least, somewhat piqued by the rector’s unquestioning predisposition toward their new neighbor; said he appeared “a little starstruck.” But yes, she had conceded, smiling, the lady had undoubtedly led a colorful life. “But then, what goes on abroad, what’s acceptable on the Continent, is different. Quite different.”
“You mean the husbands, the marriages?” Cecily had asked.
“I mean everything.”
For weeks Cecily had been desperate for a glimpse of the Countess from Abroad. And once, driven by that desperation, that need to know, to see for herself, she had ventured up the track, and then further still into the tangled hollow of rhododendrons bordering the driveway to Temple Hill. Like a spy on a mission, gathering intelligence, she had crouched there, waiting. But nothing happened. No one emerged from the house and no one arrived. And to Cecily there appeared to be no signs of life within it.
“But does she never go anywhere?” she had later asked her mother.
“I believe she’s quite old, dear. So no, I imagine she doesn’t go far. Not now.”
“It must be strange,” Cecily continued, “to have traveled so much, so far, and then come to a stop. A stop here.”
Madeline Chadwick looked at her daughter: “But she might not be stopping, dear. I heard talk that she’s only here for the summer, is returning to the Continent for the winter.”
“Only here for the summer?” Cecily repeated. “But all that . . . stuff—surely she can’t be thinking of moving again?”
And then her sister, Ethne, said, “I don’t know why you’re so fascinated. Is it the title, dear? Because you know they’re two a penny on the Continent.”
The Memory of Lost Senses Page 6
