London House, page 6
“It’s spectacular. Where’d you get this table?”
Standing in front of the doors was a rough wood table with seating for at least sixteen. It was smooth and irregular as if hundreds of years of cooking and cleaning had worn their stories into it.
“It was in a storage closet aside the garage. I expect a couple hundred years ago, it was the kitchen’s main counter and cooking space and, rather than throw it away—because nothing in this house ever got thrown away—someone shoved it into a closet that was once part of the stable. You know, that back west corner?”
I shook my head.
“Anyway, I had it hauled out and I rubbed it down myself every night with oil for a month. It was a cathartic experience. Better than therapy.”
Something incongruent caught my eye. Something massive and royal blue.
“What is that?”
“My oven. Come see. It’s an AGA and it’s my favorite thing in the whole house. It’s always on and always warm. It heats this room all by itself. I had to take a class to learn how to use it. You can’t adjust any of those compartments.”
She stepped away from the stove and went through the motions of preparing coffee. As soon as it was steeping in her French press, she turned back to me. “While this rests, we’ll tour the other floors then come back down here.”
The first floor—an American’s second floor—was equally transformed. The bedrooms no longer sported peeling wallpaper, water-stained ceilings, and soiled carpets.
The floors here were an interwoven parquet. Mom had used very few rugs. That struck me as I recalled always feeling damp and cold during my short visits. She grinned when I commented.
“The floors are heated. I did it throughout the whole house. It not only keeps everything drier—eleven percent drier—but it feels wonderful. I just couldn’t bear to cover them.”
Mom led me through the four bedrooms flanking the sides of the house, saving the front center room for last. I turned back at the doorway.
“Why’d you pick that corner one for your room? You should have this one.”
She smiled, small and mysterious, as she led me around the doorway into the room.
It was mine. So clearly mine.
It was not exactly like the room I’d grown up in, but of the same value and texture if you’d combined mine with my sister’s. She had used our colors—greens for Amelia, purples for me—but in a far more sophisticated manner. The walls were covered in a cream paper, with hand-printed, raised white stripes running down every few inches. The curtains hung straight, with no tiebacks or frills, and puddled onto the wood floor. They looked as if someone had taken a bridal bouquet of deep, rich flowers and thrown them onto the fabric. The flowers had scattered and, rather than assault you with chaotic color, they teased you closer. The bed was draped in white with the same floral fabric covering three Euro shams across its headboard. A chartreuse reading chair and ottoman sitting in the corner brought out the greens. The room also had a small desk.
“I hoped you’d come someday.”
I turned to her. Unable to speak, I nodded. Then to fill what felt to be an uncomfortable silence growing, I did what I always did. I pushed Jason between us. “What did Jason say?”
Mom smoothed over the comparison I hadn’t explicitly made. “Ten years is a big age gap. I was so different for you both. We were all different after Amelia, and I made so many mistakes . . . We’ll talk.” She squeezed my hand. “Come see the rest of the house.”
I swallowed. I blinked. I followed my mom down the hallway.
As we made our way to the top floor, I envisioned the abandoned nursery, the playroom, the series of servants’ quarters, and the dark wood–paneled attic that had occupied my last thirty hours of thought.
The west half was now one long open room. Its walls were painted a warm cream, and it held reading chairs set in the dormer window bays. Bookshelves lined the walls, and a massive, high wood table stood in the center of the room.
“I designed this myself. I come up here to work on things, wrap gifts and such. It’s nice to be able to stand.”
She opened double doors to the east side, revealing a fully appointed one-bedroom apartment. I raised a brow.
“I planned this floor for Jason’s family or yours someday to have privacy when you come to visit.” She smiled. “Or for someone to live in when I get old.”
“Mom.”
“Don’t ‘Mom’ me. I may be ten years younger than your dad, but it’ll happen.” She pushed open a panel of wall where I hadn’t noted the outline of a door. “The attic is still back here. I had it thoroughly cleaned and sealed and added lighting and better shelving, but for the most part, I left it untouched.”
“It’s really nice, Mom.”
I stepped back into the large room with the high table. It was a stunning house, and only up here, looking at a worktable—the most basic thing in the home—did I realize how enormous it was and how lonely she might be.
She must have trailed my thoughts. She shrugged. “I also come up here to sit or when life feels big. Sometimes we need smaller spaces to confine us, comfort us. I refinished it first and even lived up here for a couple years while working on the rest of the house.”
“Mom.” I sighed. Something hard softened within me.
She smiled. It was less buoyant this time. “None of that. It’s so good to see you. I . . . I have so much I want to say.”
“I came to talk about Grandmother and that letter we found all those years ago.” My reply felt curt. It sounded curt.
“I see.” She tilted her head. “Let’s head back downstairs then.”
Nothing more was said until we sat at the broad table, coffees in hand, with a slice of homemade zucchini bread sitting in front of me. I wasn’t hungry—and hadn’t been for the last couple days.
“I can’t believe you’re here.” Mom’s eyes widened as if she was absorbing every detail of my face. “Tell me about life. How’s your job?”
“Good.” I nodded. “It’s busy, but good.”
“But?”
I wrapped both hands around my coffee, unsure how to start, how to explain. My relationship with Mom had been fraught for years, but in some ways it was more honest and forthright than my dealings with my dad. She’d been more open and approachable once upon a time, and that memory lingered—as clearly did my longing for that time because she could still sneak in between the chinks in my armor. It was both soothing and disconcerting.
I drew a deep breath to keep focused on the here and now. “I like it, but it’s not what I want to be doing. I loved the law. It fit how I think, and it felt personal. What I do now might help humanity, but I never see or know the individual.”
I picked at a corner of the zucchini bread, surprised I’d shared so much and made myself vulnerable to her opinion, or to her dismissal.
“You’re twenty-eight.” She reached for my hand and squeezed her assurance. “There’s still time to find what you want and where you want to be.”
“Not so much.” I chuckled, hoping it didn’t sound as disillusioned as it felt. “Jason sent me a terrifying article that these years aren’t the throwaways everyone says. They’re ‘formative.’” I made air quotes to make light of an article that had kept me awake for two nights after I read it.
“Oh, your brother.” Mom laughed. “To have three parents is not easy, dear.”
“But he’s not wrong. A couple of my friends have babies. Two more are finishing law school. My college roommate is the youngest partner ever at Bain and Company, and the medical research Callie is doing is groundbreaking.”
“Okay, not that much time.” She lightened her comment with a smile. “What brings you here? Why do you want to talk about the letter?”
“I came to set our family ablaze.”
“What?” She set down her cup.
“I read it on the plane. It’s what Churchill told some guy when he started Britain’s first real spy division in World War II. He was ‘to set Europe ablaze.’”
“This sounds dangerous.”
“It feels dangerous.”
To come here, to pursue this search, meant breaking another cord with my dad. So few tied us together, I feared that breaking this one might sever us completely.
“You’d better start at the beginning.”
And so I did . . .
When I finished, she pushed away from the table and set a kettle on the stove. “No more coffee for me or I’ll get jumpy.” She pulled a tea tin from the shelf. “I hoped that afternoon would set your father free. I’d never understood why he was so closed, aloof. I thought it was a British thing and he’d warm up, and when we first met, he wasn’t so much that way with me.” She glanced at me. “Or when Jason was young. He was warmer, more giving. There was an endearing eagerness about him. But even then it felt like work and not his natural disposition. Then Amelia died and perhaps we both stopped trying.” She looked straight at me. “Not perhaps. We did stop. I’m so sorry, dear.”
“I’m not here for that.” I pulled my head back, just as I’d seen my father do countless times, unable to tread where she was leading. “I want to talk about that afternoon.”
Mom nodded. “I think every fear he had got named that day.”
My name.
I pressed my lips tight to keep from saying it. It would sound churlish, childish, and self-centered. But it was how I felt and—calling to mind the look he threw me as I left the drawing room that long-ago afternoon—I realized I’d felt that way for twenty years.
Mom sighed as she crossed the kitchen to me, tea in hand. “It wasn’t her name so much, but the reality of her. It was the lie they told and the fear behind it. That lie took on a life of its own and formed their family—our family, in a way. Caroline changed from a bright spark, one he chased to bring his mother joy when nothing else could, to a shadow from which no one was ever going to escape.”
Her words drew me back to my Friday meeting at the coffee shop. Mat had said something about the fact that how we absorbed and translated history mattered and that it was never objective. The emotions we brought to it changed it. At the time, I associated his comments with world events; now they struck close to home. Aunt Caroline’s betrayal changed us all. My failure changed us all.
Mom continued, “When one approaches death, I suspect life looks different. Your grandmother’s perspective certainly changed. She was racked with guilt those final months—for not being bold, for not being more forthright with her sister, for not forgiving her husband, for feeling trapped and weak and unable to break free, and for lying to your dad and sending him away. For so much. It was heartbreaking and she was all alone.”
“You were here.”
“I was alone right beside her,” Mom whispered. She then flashed a smile as if hoping the emotion would follow the action. “But you’re here now.”
“I need to see the letters, Mom. Do you have them?”
“I do . . . all of them.”
Seven
Mom refused to give them to me right away. She looked over her teacup and stared at me while delivering her edict.
“What do you mean, not yet?”
“This might not be as easy as you think. Rest for a couple hours. We’ll go for a long walk and grab tea at the Orangery. Then we’ll get them from the attic.”
“Is this a joke? I just told you my flight home is Tuesday.” I pushed back, a little annoyed that she was playing a protective and concerned mother now.
“Then you’d better head upstairs for your nap quickly.”
I opened my mouth to protest again. But she had the letters and I had only forty-eight hours.
As I walked back up the flights of stairs, I recognized something small unfurling within me. There was something novel, enticing, and comforting about being taken care of. I supposed we never grow out of that longing—and, I had to admit, the prospect of a nap, food, and finally getting to walk through a London park was compelling.
I washed my face, brushed my teeth, and collapsed onto the bed while Mom’s comment about how this was the lie that formed our family played on a soft repeat. It sounded dramatic, yet I suspected she was right.
A rap on my door sat me up straight.
“Are you awake?”
“I don’t think I slept.”
She stepped into the room. Her shoes made soft squeaks on the floor. “It’s noon. You slept.”
“Four hours? I’ve wasted time.” I tossed back the covers and threw my legs over the edge of the bed.
“Not at all. Grab some comfortable shoes and let’s get going. It’s about a two-mile walk.”
We headed up Belgrave Place into Knightsbridge and entered Hyde Park at the Mandarin Hotel. It was bustling and sunny and glorious. Black cabs zipping down the streets, smartly dressed pedestrians in Belgravia, fast-paced tourists in Knightsbridge, and a more relaxed early summer Sunday scene once we hit the park—kids ran along the paths, riders on horseback trotted the outer dirt-and-gravel path, and blankets dotted the grass as far as I could see.
“You’ll love the Orangery. They refurbished it and Kensington’s rear gardens a few years ago. The architect, the same one who designed Britain’s World War Two Normandy memorial, did a beautiful job retaining its history while bringing it into the present.”
I scanned the room as the hostess seated us at a corner table next to a tall arched window. Mom was right. While I didn’t know what it had been, what it was was spectacular. I felt like I had stepped into a Regency novel with delicate food to match the pristine high walls with their ornate top moldings, arched doorways, and floor-to-ceiling windows you could step through if you needed to beat a hasty retreat or get to an assignation in the gardens beyond.
I dropped my napkin into my lap, wondering at the small world nature of it all. The past. Respect. Translation. Adaptation. The things we reform; the things we let go.
I hoped I could do as well.
After lunch we walked home. Few words were spoken. I wondered if Mom felt as I did—that we were about to pass a point of no return. Our mood reminded me of walking into class on the day of a law final. No one ever spoke. What was ahead absorbed our focus, charged the air around us, and held our futures in its grasp. It was either that, or Mom and I simply had little to say to each other after so many years.
We entered the house through the side door I remembered from years before. Although we had walked out the front, it was clear this was the entrance Mom used most. The small mudroom had a soapstone floor, already worn with water spots and life. Three pairs of Hunter boots stood sentinel in a tray—one the most startling orange color. Several coats hung on thick wood pegs and shelves held a variety of baskets to drop objects within. She plopped her house key into one and her handbag within another.
She then led me up the back stairs to the top floor. We came out at the workroom with its high center table. But rather than stand empty, the table now held three large cloth bins.
“While you slept I emptied the trunk. There was no way we were going to be able to lift it so I filled these. These are all letters.” She pulled at one bin. “At least what I thought were letters—all the packets tied in ribbons. This one holds books. I assume they are Margaret’s diaries.” She walked around the table and laid her hands on the third bin. “And this last holds papers, odds and ends, and a few photographs.”
She pointed back toward the attic. “You can also go through the trunk. There are still dolls, clothes, and lots of stuff in there, but I think this is what’s pertinent to your search.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” She paused, a question flickering across her face before she verbalized it. “Can . . . Can I stay? Can I help?”
I pulled out one of the four high stools. “You’ve never been through this? Not while you were here with Grandmother all that time? Not after?”
“Back then I felt it would have been a huge invasion into her privacy. Besides, Caro—that’s what she called her sister—was all she wanted to talk about those last months. After almost eighty years of silence, she couldn’t stop. I got to know both Margaret and Caro that way.”
Mom dug through the bin of odds and ends and pulled out a photograph. “Then I didn’t want to search. I wanted Caro to be for me just as Margaret remembered her. Despite everything that happened, your grandmother adored her twin.”
She handed me the photograph. Two young women captured from the waist up. Lovely women. Mirror images. Yet different. One had her long dark hair pulled back. The other wore her hair short, curled close to the jawline, much like I’d seen in Downtown Abbey and Foyle’s War. The one with long hair seemed wide-eyed and anxious or sad, I wasn’t sure which, and the short-haired girl’s head tipped back as if the camera caught her mid-laughter. Her bold joy was infectious. It made me smile and wonder why her mirror image, standing so close I couldn’t find the line between their shoulders, wasn’t joining in the fun.
“You look like them.” Mom tucked a strand of my dark hair behind my ear.
I wanted to disagree, but I couldn’t. For the first time, I saw rather than simply accepted what I’d been told. Before me were two iterations of me. The same wide, light blue eyes, dark hair, and square jaw—although my jaw was not so pronounced. Both my parents had brown eyes and Mom, a heart-shaped face.
“You and Dad said that, but I never saw myself in Grandmother.”
“She was very changed by the time you knew her.”
I turned the picture over. The year 1936 was written on the back. “They would have been eighteen? I assume Caro has the short hair?”
“Yes. She moved to Paris that year. Perhaps this was taken on a visit home.” Mom nodded at the table. “Where do you want to begin?”
“I’m going to start with the letters.” My thinking was that Caro’s letters would provide the best insight into her story.
“I’ll sort through Margaret’s diaries.” Mom stacked six identical books—all brown leather, hardbound with cream pages tipped gold at the edges—on the table. “The last book ends in October 1941.”
