The Memory of Lost Senses

by Judith Kinghorn

  The withholding of information can be peculiarly frustrating, not least for the withholder . . . What you failed to grasp was that I had to protect dear Jack. He had a future ahead of him. Indeed, he WAS the future, the very best of me, and all I had left of George. It was this, & this alone, which caused me to question the merit & potential ramifications of allowing the truth to be told. No one else mattered a jot. They have all gone, and though George & Edward’s reputations would be held up to scrutiny, their judgments perhaps questioned, I think the truth would only add to intrigue & the myth of George in particular.

  I am including some pages from your notebook, the ones I tore out—confiscated, though I rather think they read like a novel &, if you were to do anything with them, I would prefer that you took out the extraneous detail & imagined dialogue . . .

  As regards “The Beginning,” that part of my story you were so very desperate to hear about & for so long, and which I rather think you know a little about by now, I leave it for you to decide whether or not to include it in any book. Is it relevant? Of any interest? I am still unsure. Also, I must admit that my memory is not what it was, & thus some things continue to elude me. However, & most peculiarly, certain details of my early life, which have remained something of a blur for so long, have recently come back to me, & I am able to confirm a few Facts. So, to the beginning . . .

  Heart pounding, Sylvia turned the page.

  I was born & baptized Coral Lillian Stopher in the year eighteen thirty-three. My parents’ names were Coral & Samuel. Both originated from Woodbridge in Suffolk, which is where I was born & where my father was employed as an undergardener & outdoor servant at a place called Standen Hall. I lived at this place—with my parents, sister & two brothers—in rooms above the stables. The Lillian in my name came from my maternal grandmother, a woman I cannot recall and possibly never knew, and my parents used this name for me, its abbreviated version—Lily. Thus, I was once Lily Stopher.

  When I was perhaps six or seven years of age we left Standen Hall, for reasons I know not, but I suspect that my father lost his job there for he had nothing to go to and we nowhere to live. It is my belief now that we were homeless for some time, for I have memories of walking many miles & of sleeping out in fields, under stars.

  It was around this time that my mother disappeared, though I do not recall her actual departure or any “Goodbye,” she was simply there and then not there, & I always assumed she would be coming back, that she had not abandoned us, perhaps because I had been told by someone at some stage that she had simply “gone for a while.” Not long after this my father too must have “gone,” for I have very few memories of him without her, my mother. As I say, my memory is not what it was & there are gaps and this time is one of them.

  My siblings were eventually placed into the care of various scattered family members, & I into the care of my maternal aunt, who had married a shoemaker, a man by the name of JOHN ABEL. Aunt Fanny and Uncle John at that time resided somewhere in the vicinity of Bethnal Green the Whitechapel area, in East London, and I recall little of it apart from the brutality of the man, my uncle. He fitted into that world & my aunt did not. But I do remember our rooms, how cramped and gloomy and very small they were, & how vast and sinister-looking the lunatic asylum on the old Roman road. That building haunted me before I understood why. I had no idea then that it was in fact the very place my mother had “gone for a while.”

  My memory of our departure—the night we fled, & the events preceding it—is now muddled & vague . . . due perhaps to the fact that it is a memory for so many years unpracticed, not exercised, but instead exorcised. I can have been no more than twelve years of age, certainly of an age when I should be able to recall more, but though I have tried I am unable to summon detail, or perhaps I have no wish to.

  Here, there was a line crossed through, and crossed through so many times it was impossible to make out the words.

  What I do know is that my aunt and I took off into the night knowing we had committed a crime, knowing the law would not protect us, knowing people were hanged for murder and tried for desertion, knowing my aunt could not afford to go through Parliament and obtain a divorce. We traveled first to Jersey, later to Paris, & thence onwards to Rome, where my aunt had secured a position as housekeeper for a Mr. Staunton. It was the start of a new life, she told me, and a place where no one would ever find us. She was true in this, for in the doing I never again saw any member of my family.

  It was many years later that I learned the truth of what happened to my mother, that when she left us she had in fact walked to London, whereupon she was found in a desperate & hysterical state on the streets, and later committed to the Bethnal Green Lunatic Asylum. She had been incarcerated there for over twelve years by the time the cholera epidemic swept through its doors and rescued her. As to my father, he passed away the year I was twenty-one, at the workhouse at Colchester, the very same place he had been headed when he left my siblings & myself in a derelict barn by a roadside. One imagines he had gone there looking for work and, unable to secure any employment, could not face returning to four hungry, motherless children.

  My mother’s fate has been an immovable stain on my mind, for I long ago realized poverty & insanity to be irrevocably linked—that one simply preceded the other, and my mother’s madness to be the direct result of a bleak existence. My aunt once told me that three of her eight brothers had been committed to the Country Lunatic Asylum, the same three who had tried to move on in life, the same three who had had Removal Orders placed on them, returning them back to where they had started, back to the parish of their birth. I understood early on how madness could rescue a person & obliterate pain, that money afforded comfort & comfort afforded reason.

  My life overseas enabled me to crawl out of that mire & become someone. Had my father not lost his job we would not have become homeless, & perhaps my mother would never have taken it upon herself to walk away one day down the old London Road. We would have remained together, & I would have had a family, my own family. But I would never have met George, never have become who I am—or once was. These are the things I ponder upon now, how my life should have been or could have been. And it is a queer conundrum. One offers me an identity, a family, and perhaps a sense of belonging . . . the other, opportunity. But which, I wonder, would I have chosen, then, had I been able?

  So that was the beginning, Sylvia. That part of my story you so wished me to tell you. I was born poor, horrendously poor, nothing more or less. Unlike you, I was not a banker’s daughter, I was a servant’s daughter . . . and, even worse, an unemployed underservant’s daughter. Poverty made my mother go mad, ruptured my family, & drove my aunt to desperate measures.

  When I told you in Rome all those years ago that I had killed a man, I was not lying, for it was how it seemed to me at that time. I yearned to tell the truth, to confide in someone, you, and for you to understand that possibility & be able to make a choice, to be my friend or not, & to see me as more than that which I had come from. And you did . . . and yet you used my confession & my trust in you to betray me, electing to repeat it, without context or furnishing of background from me. However, it is a long time ago, & we are older and wiser, and the world has changed.

  Please do not be sad about this last chapter—ironically, the start of my story—or about our “upset” or by my passing. My life has been rich and full, & friendships do not last forever. In many ways you have achieved much more in your life than I. You leave a legacy in your words, your books, & I leave nothing other than my memories, which I am doubtful anyone will be interested in now, but perhaps.

  Here the pen changed. And the hand, too, appeared altered.

  I have spent a great deal of time cogitating & pondering this letter, and if I am to be honest, completely honest—and that is my intention—there is another matter to set straight, and this may come as something of a shock to you.

  As regards my �
�Comte de Chevalier de Saint Léger,” he never existed.

  Sylvia looked up. “Never existed? But of course he did! I met him, I met him in Rome . . .”

  There was no wedding at Le Havre or anywhere else, & there was no fine chateau in the Loire. There is not and never was any Comte de Chevalier de Saint Léger. There was however an Antonin de Chevalier, my rather gallant French army officer & lover of three years. When I met Antonin, after Freddie passed away, I longed to escape from Rome, longed for change. I had been living on hope for so long, the hope that G would return there & to me, and, like any insubstantial diet, my near empty life had left me famished & weak. When I took little G off to France—to stay, or so I told everyone, with Antonin’s family—it was not with the intention of staying away for two years, & of course I had had to tell my aunt that I was engaged to be married, otherwise she would never have allowed me to go. When I wrote to her, and to you too, about the place “Chazelles,” it was not altogether a lie, the house was indeed called Chazelles, but perhaps more dilapidated farmhouse than castle, & buried in obscurity in rural Nièvre.

  It was in fact my aunt who decided that I was residing in a castle & that Antonin’s family must have a title lurking somewhere, all good French families did, and she embraced this notion long before I. That is not to say it was forced upon me, but rather that I chose not to enlighten her on the truth of my circumstances. I chose not to disillusion her. She had been through so much & had such hopes and dreams for me. I think I realized then that I could return to Rome as someone else, someone quite different, & so caught up with my new & improved self & the possibilities ahead that it was impossible for me to relinquish the idea of that new identity. Everyone who mattered in Rome had a title—genuine, defunct or bogus—so why should not I also?

  After Antonin was killed I had no choice but to return to Rome—as his widow. My aunt believed I had married Antonin at Le Havre, and we had indeed been living as man & wife, I was long used to referring to myself as such & had been “Madame de Chevalier” for over a year. I am not altogether sure now where the “Saint Léger” came from, or why I added it to the name. I rather think I must have felt the name needed something more, and that it had a nice ring to it. The only time I can recall any problem was when I married Edward—with all the various paperwork, or lack of. But of course he saw to all of that.

  One thing I wish to make clear is that there was no plan or premeditation on my part. It was an evolutionary process, a small detail, which began as a misunderstanding & developed into something more. In the end, of course, the name secured not George but his father, a man who would have done anything to stop G & me from marrying when we were young. I suppose one could say then that my revenge—if indeed it was revenge—was not simply on George but on his father, too. And yet, like my first marriage, that union was an arrangement that suited both parties. Edward offered me much-needed security—a home (my first & only home) & an income. In return, I gave him the Countess de Chevalier de Saint Léger Lawson. Je pense, quid pro quo.

  But enough. It is late & I am weary . . . and yet it is impossible for me to end this without mentioning George. I think you & you alone know that my life has been shaped and defined by him, his presence, that he was and remains my only one true love. That love began over seventy years ago in Rome, is with me now & shall go with me after death. If I am to be remembered for anything, I hope it will be for my love of him, & as the mother of his sons.

  And so, I leave it with you, dear Sylvia, to decide how & what to record, if anything at all. I have always felt alone in this world, an exile even before I became one. But we are, I think, all in transit . . . hopefully, to something better.

  The letter was signed: Yours, Cora Lawson.

  Sylvia stared at the signature. Then, as though emerging from the depths, she gulped and swallowed, and began to weep.

  By the time Sylvia first met her, Cora had already dropped the last letter of her given name and assumed the name Staunton, the name that would become hers through marriage. At that time, the focus of attention had been on Cora’s aunt, the new Mrs. James Staunton. There were rumors then that Mr. Staunton had advertised for a new wife. And there was gossip and intrigue then about who she was or had been, and where she hailed from. Everyone knew there was a secret, but no one guessed that the secret was murder—attempted or otherwise, or desertion, or bigamy. No one had had the imagination for that: no one apart from Sylvia.

  It had at first been all the little things, the tiny incidental details, which allowed Sylvia to build a picture. And then the mistakes: the mention of an “Uncle John,” and Cora’s knowledge of things she should not have had knowledge about; and sometimes the fear, as well. Long before Aunt Fanny’s tutelage paid off, before the reinvention was complete, Cora had been a mass of contradictions, both in character and in what she said. And Sylvia, the budding novelist, had not only been captivated and inspired, she had taken note. Cora was older than her years and Cora still cried for her mother; Cora was streetwise and savvy, and Cora was afraid of strangers; Cora was reticent and studied, and Cora was verbose and impetuous; Cora was from Suffolk, and Cora was from London; Cora had been an only child, and Cora had siblings—all dead. And so it went on.

  It was easy enough to see that Cora lied, but what Sylvia wanted to know was why she lied; what inspired the lies and contradictions. When she had asked Cora, “Did you run away?” Cora had not appeared shocked. They had been sitting on the bench by the fountain in the Piazza d’Ara Coeli, and Cora had simply stared at her and said once more, “I am not allowed to tell anyone . . . but I’ll tell you one day, I promise.” And then she lifted Sylvia’s hand and kissed it. No one had kissed Sylvia’s hand before, no one had ever promised her anything. No one was like Cora.

  Then, George Lawson arrived in Rome. Cora fell in love and had no time for sitting by fountains with Sylvia. Cora changed. And stories were practiced and put in order. Sylvia heard them, each one slightly more polished than the last, until there was a final, definitive version. And it was impressive; Sylvia could not have done better herself. But George Lawson was not the man for Cora. Sylvia knew this. He was self-centerd and ambitious, determined to prove himself. He would not stay in Rome; he would not marry Cora. He was using her.

  When Sylvia penned her note to George, telling him she had information she thought he ought to know, her only thought had been Cora: protecting her from an inevitable heartbreak. And when she met him that day and he said, “If this is another rumor about Cora or her aunt, I rather think I’ve heard them all,” Sylvia knew he had not heard what she was about to tell him. No one had. Not even Cora.

  She explained that this was not idle gossip but had come from Cora herself, and though she had been sworn to secrecy, she felt duty bound to tell him. Yes, he wanted to know what it was Cora had told her. And so Sylvia told him the truth. Or what she thought might be the truth.

  She had no idea then that her actions—motivated by nothing other than love, the desire to protect the person she loved—would carve the future path of Cora’s life; or that as a result of those actions Cora would spend all of her days estranged from love, would make it her mission to prove something and become someone, or that that someone would be George Lawson’s stepmother. Sylvia never imagined that.

  And yet it was she, Sylvia, who had comforted Cora after George broke off with her and left Rome. It was she who had held Cora in her arms and smiled down at her when she said, “You’re the best friend anyone could ever have, Sylvia.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  The doorman saw them into the taxicab. It wasn’t far to walk, but it was easier for them, easier for Jack. Piccadilly was busy and progress was slow. Through the window Cecily watched the drifting crowds, those milling about the statue of Eros, amidst pigeons and fruit barrows, under the rain-laden sky; she could hear the echo of music drifting out from an arcade, and newspaper boys shouting about curses and Pharaohs, and “Lo
rd Carnarvon struck dead!” And there was perhaps some queer synchronicity at work that day, she thought, when the taxicab finally pulled up opposite the Academy, outside the Egyptian Hall.

  They were on time. West End church bells were chiming seven o’clock as they walked through the entrance of the Academy. Mr. Davidson was waiting. He stepped forward to introduce himself. “Please, do come this way,” he said. He led them through the vast lobby, past vaguely familiar sculptures—Cecily knew she had seen before—then down a corridor and into a paneled room. There, another man stepped forward to shake their hands. “Stephen Fowler, a pleasure to meet you both.”

  Mr. Davidson asked them to take a seat. They sat side by side upon a long leather chesterfield sofa. He laid out some paperwork on the table in front of them—which Cecily was expecting, which their solicitor had already looked over—for her to sign. After signing her name—Cecily Staunton—a few times over, Mr. Davidson offered them a glass of sherry. Still on his feet, he made a toast: “To Aphrodite!” And the three raised their glasses and repeated it. Then he sat down in the armchair opposite Mr. Fowler, and said, “As you know, Mr. Fowler has spent these last few years researching Lord Lawson’s life and work, and he has a few questions he’d very much like to ask you.”

  Cecily reached over and took hold of Jack’s hand. She said, “I’m happy to answer anything I can. Unfortunately, my husband’s memory is not what it was.”