The Secret Book of Flora Lea: a Novel, page 13
“No, love.” She turned to face him, so tired that the right words were hard to find. She couldn’t tell him what at that moment twisted and tumbled in her gut—not worries over money, for that she would find a way. Uneasiness about seeing Harry again made her feel unsettled; thoughts she could usually avoid were bubbling to consciousness. “I will pay for them,” she said softly, kissing him.
“You don’t always have to be so independent,” he said, running his hand along her thigh. “It’s like you don’t want me to take care of you. It’s like you want to prove that you’re not your mother, and I am not your stepfather.”
“You may be right,” she said, “but some things must be mine alone to take care of.”
He pulled her even closer, as if to prove the opposite with his touch.
CHAPTER 19
March 1960
Dinner was light that night for Peggy and her mother, Linda: roasted chicken and asparagus. Peggy had been too preoccupied to cook much more. While Mother had typed, Peggy felt her mind jumping about like a grasshopper in tall grass, never settling. This was at least in part because her Whisperwood sisters had become grasshoppers in the last story.
Her distraction had started with that strange phone call. She’d spent two days pondering it. Her story? Where did it come from?
Peggy’s education had been focused on mythology and fairy tales, which most people didn’t know are not the same thing, and yet they are connected, part of a larger universe. She’d studied everything from Greek gods to Indian deities, from Celtic myths to Grimm’s fairy tales. She could unravel a story with its multilayered meanings and Jungian archetypes. And yet when it came to her own life story, she was at a loss. She knew the motivations of the characters in her novels better than she understood what she herself wanted—or why.
Knowing why was always important; why the orphaned sisters chose certain transformations or adventures. And always, it returned to this: an escape from the orphanage of cruel Madame Bullynose, becoming who they were meant to be. But Peggy’s desires, whatever they might be, seemed to shift with the hours. Poor character motivation was the death knell to any story.
She thought of Wren’s question: Why are you so frightened of the answer?
A storm flared outside the windows, rattling the frame of the house, as lightning traveled across the ocean waves.
Peggy carried their empty dishes to the sink. “Mother, remind me how Whisperwood came to exist.”
“Why are you asking?” Linda’s voice was tight as a wire strung across the yard for laundry.
“It’s one of the questions in the publicity kit. They want to know its origins. They want me to write about my inspiration.” Peggy kept her back turned, so her mother wouldn’t see the lie that slipped so easily from her lips. Writing fiction had made her an adept liar, quick to the story, but she usually didn’t employ these skills with her mother.
“Your aunt Maria and I made it all up when you were a little girl. You wanted your daddy so badly you wouldn’t stop crying. God rest his soul. And I wanted to give you a safe place to escape.” A sigh. “I’ve told you this.”
“Yes, my daddy.” Peggy wished above so many other wishes that she remembered him, but he’d died when she was five years old during the invasion of Pearl Harbor, his body sent home in a coffin with an American flag over it.
In his photograph, he was elegant in the way of soldiers: hat straight, a stern expression on a chiseled face over a uniform with emblems she didn’t understand. Garrett Witherspoon Andrews, a name as handsome as his face. There were a few pictures of him. In one, he held Peggy as a baby. She could see the profile of his smile as he stared at her adoringly, at the bundle of baby she once was but had no memory of being.
Peggy asked her mother, “But did you hear it somewhere else first or did it come straight from your imagination?”
Linda laughed, a gay sound that signaled the fun mother was coming near, the one who played gin rummy and drew hopscotch on the sidewalk in chalk and ran into the waves with Peggy until they both collapsed on the sand. “It’s our story, my love.” She paused.
The troubled water inside Peggy settled. The woman calling from England was daft, as they say. But one more question waited impatiently.
“The name, Whisperwood: Was that mine or yours or Maria’s?”
Mother rose from the table and came to Peggy’s side at the sink, taking her hands and kissing them each on the palm. “There is no mine or yours. There is only ours.”
“But the name—” Peggy said, looking up from the sink.
“I don’t rightly remember, my sweet girl. The name arose from the tellings. Maybe it was partly mine and partly yours or even Maria’s, combining just as our stories do.”
“Yes,” Peggy said. “As our stories do.”
* * *
After their nightly reading of the day’s pages, and a conversation about what had worked and what hadn’t, Peggy laid awake in bed for hours, thrumming with energy like the lightning outside. Her bedroom was decorated for a princess: pink and frothy, with a four-poster bed and a gossamer white canopy, which was now in shadow.
The room hadn’t changed in the eighteen years they’d lived in Cape Cod. Her memories of California were blurred and ragged: crashing waves on another coast, green fields in the countryside of Napa where they’d once lived.
Why are you so frightened of the answer?
Her defenses rose: She wasn’t frightened. It was just that her story’s origin had never mattered until now. Origin myths were the most important tales ever told: They were used to explain the creation of the world.
And yet not once had Peggy given a thought to how her world, Whisperwood, began. She’d been told a simple story: Mother and her sister, Aunt Maria, made up stories to comfort Peggy after Daddy died.
Outside her window, somewhere in the distance, lightning struck a tree with a splintering and explosive sound, and Peggy jumped out of bed. There was no use trying to sleep. She wandered into the kitchen, but she didn’t turn on the light; that would wake Mother. She reached in the lower kitchen cabinet and slipped her hand into the trash, past slippery asparagus to the crumpled paper with Hazel Linden’s phone number. She carried it back to her bedroom. Like the Teen Magazine she’d often hidden from her mother, who thought them vapid and ridiculous, Peggy hid the scrap of paper beneath her mattress, then she slipped under her pink covers again.
She closed her eyes and thought of the fairy tale of the princess and the pea; the small and imperceptible pea beneath a pile of mattresses had been a sensitivity test, to see if the princess was worthy of the prince. No one needed to prove Peggy’s sensitivity, but she swore she could feel the crumpled piece of paper beneath her mattress.
CHAPTER 20
March 1960
The black cab pulled in front of the Palladian Georgian house with its symmetrical brick façade and ornate woodwork. The gravel drive crunched beneath the tires as the red-nosed cabbie wrapped up his chatter about the decline of London with Prime Minister Macmillan at the helm, about the budding protests against nuclear weapons, about America possibly entering the Vietnam War, and weren’t they all just tired enough of war?
Hazel paid the cabbie with, “Yes, aren’t we all tired enough of war.” And she climbed out to stand at the end of a bluestone walkway. She gazed up at her mum’s grand house. Its façade whispered old London stories of family heirlooms in the attic and genteel afternoon teas. Alastair Tennyson was descended from some duke or viscount or some such thing that Hazel gave no importance to, but obviously Mum had. And now there was their son, a fourteen-year-old dubbed Tenny.
He was, Hazel realized with a jolt, the exact same age she was when they’d been sent to the country. Tenny had the better life; he’d never know the exile and fear. He’d never know what it meant to be sent away from comfort, familiarity, and love.
Hazel walked up the path, stepping from stone to stone until reaching a large wooden door carved with a family emblem of a lion and castle. She hesitated. This was her mum’s house and rightly so she should just walk in, but it was also the house of her stepfather (she hated that term).
She couldn’t fully reconcile the mum she knew in Bloomsbury with the mum who lived here. Hazel and Mum talked often, and they loved each other, but a long shadow had fallen over them both after Flora disappeared, and lingered still with its cold gray shade.
One day, in 1945, on an autumn afternoon two weeks after the church bells had announced that the war was over, Hazel had returned home from the bookstore. Mum was waiting on the flowered couch, patting the cushions for her to sit. “I need to talk to you,” Mum had told her. “I am marrying Tennyson next month. A small affair in his back garden with only family. A heart,” she told Hazel, “can hold much joy and great sorrow at the same time. It’s a mystery and it’s also true.”
Hazel felt that Mum’s joy was a betrayal. Flora had been gone for five years by then, and it felt like she’d been gone for but a day and also forever. Sometimes Hazel would calculate Flora’s age and she had at that moment: eleven years old to Hazel’s age twenty. And Father, five years older than Mum, would have been forty-five years old. It was an alternate family, Hazel knew that. A completely imaginary family still intact and whole in her heart, alive and thriving. Hazel needed to believe Flora was actually alive and eleven years old. If Mum married and moved forward with her life, if she vacated this flat and moved somewhere else, how would Flora find them?
It was an irrational and absurd thought and Hazel knew it even as she thought it. But absurdity didn’t change her deep-settled belief that Mum needed to be in their family home for Flora to return to it.
Hazel had blurted out, both incredulous and surprised, “Marrying him? Are you serious, Mum?”
“I am.” She’d fluffed the pillow next to her, rested her arm on it to display the large rectangle-cut sapphire engagement ring sparkling on her left ring finger.
Hazel hadn’t wanted to see the proof in a large stone and she turned away. “Do you love him?” Hazel had popped off the couch in her indignation, pacing the living room. She slammed her hand on the mantel and turned to face her mum. “Do. You. Love. Him?”
“I do, my dear. I know that’s hard for you to understand, but there is room in me for this love without taking away other loves.”
“No,” Hazel had shouted.
“I want you to have this flat if that’s what you’re worried about. I want you to stay here. Live here. It’s yours now.”
“I don’t want your leftovers.” Hazel hadn’t meant it; of course she wanted the flat, but it seemed the hurtful thing to say. Now she’d be left alone with the ghosts of her family.
“Then consider it a gift from your papa.”
“Mum,” Hazel had said. “Please don’t marry him.”
“Why?” Mum had twisted the ring with her other hand, fiddling with it. “It doesn’t change what happened.”
Hazel had shut her eyes and known that this was the crux of it all: her childish wish that if they stayed right here and changed very little Flora might return.
Grow up, Hazel, she thought.
Mum had stood, walked to Hazel, and faced her with a sad smile. “It’s not possible, my dear daughter, to change what already happened. If I could, I would. I’d give up anything and everything.”
“Even Tennyson?”
“Even Tennyson,” Mum had agreed. “But giving him up now doesn’t fulfill that wish.”
It had been the right time, Hazel had thought. Right now she could tell Mum about Whisperwood and how Flora had gone to look for it, how Hazel had kissed Harry in the hollow tree and forgotten about her sister just long enough to lose her, how love and desire and storytelling had altered their lives so that they arrived at this moment. She could tell her mum that loving someone new would mean moving on from Papa and from Flora, and that there was no way that Hazel could do the same.
But the confession lodged in her tight throat like a cork, and she said not one word.
Now on Mum’s front stoop, that shadow remained, long and dark and cold. It was time to remove it.
Hazel pushed the large ceramic button and rang the bell, which echoed inside like a church tower calling the hour.
Moments later the door opened and Hazel faced Tenny. “Happy birthday!” she said cheerily.
“Thank you, sister.”
She walked past him into the dark and cavernous entryway. Oil paintings of Tennyson ancestors hung on every red-damask wallpapered space. The large iron base on the round oak table in the hallway held enough roses to fill their childhood garden. However, they did smell heavenly.
“Where’s Mum?” she asked.
“In the sunroom.” Tenny looked about, as if checking for someone. “All she’s talked about this morning is you coming to visit. So be nice.”
“I’m always nice.”
Tenny stared at her, his brown eyes like shiny stones in a river, alert and aware. His blond hair tousled just right and his thin chiseled nose telling a story of his ancestry. “No, you’re not.” Then he was up the stairs, taking them two at a time.
Hazel wandered to the back of the house down a hallway that led to the sunny room where Mum sat at a glass table, eating her breakfast and reading The Observer, a bold headline about Macmillan and De Gaulle’s “tête-à-tête.”
“Hello, Mum,” Hazel said.
Mrs. Alastair Tennyson looked up with a wide smile. “Darling!” She put down the paper and held out her hand for Hazel to come to her. She tapped the front page. “Look, it’s coat week at Rodex. We should plan an afternoon of shopping.”
Hazel kissed her mum’s cheek. “Sure, Mum.”
Mum was free of pretense this morning: no makeup and her still dark hair falling over her shoulders. She was radiant at fifty-five years old, a vital force as always.
Hazel sat next to her mum and shifted her chair so they looked at each other. She set her bag on the floor.
Mum tilted her head at Hazel. “You look peaked. Oh, dear, are you pregnant? I do love Barnaby Yardley.” Mum smiled, hope rising.
“Sorry to disappoint you, Mum. No.”
“I could have the most glorious engagement party here. We could string lights and hire a quartet and my florist, oh, she could make the most divine arrangements—”
“Mum, I am not engaged and I am not pregnant. Maybe someday, but not today. I’m sorry to disappoint you.”
Mum leaned forward. “You never disappoint me. I just want happiness for you.”
“Marriage and a baby don’t always equal happiness.”
Mum cringed and closed her eyes for a moment before opening them. “I know that, Hazel. So what is it then?” She lifted her teacup and sipped.
“I think I may need some tea and some of what you’re eating, if I may?”
While her mum went off to the kitchen to tell the cook to make another plate of eggs and hash, Hazel gazed around a room slathered in sunlight, like butter on toast. Her mum had made a quiet and lovely life for herself. Photos in silver frames stood on the side banquet: Hazel at five years old in the backyard, Hazel and Flora with Papa in a rowboat on the lake in Victoria Park on Hazel’s thirteenth birthday, Mum and Alastair’s wedding, Tenny at his birth. Flora might have disappeared from the world, or Oxfordshire, but she’d never disappeared from Mum’s life.
At the far end of the table, a mirrored frame glittered. Hazel went to it and picked up the photo: Hazel and Flora stood hand in hand in front of their childhood Mecklenburgh flat, the one she still lived in. The photograph was taken the day they’d left London for the countryside. It was early morning, Hazel remembered. Their knapsacks slung over their shoulders with the gas masks bobbing, grotesque with their wild-eyed goggles. Hazel’s smile was forced while Flora grinned sincerely, holding Berry under her arm, smothering his face.
All in one fell swoop Mum had been left alone in Bloomsbury to face what might come.
When Mum returned with the plate of breakfast and set it on the table, she turned to see Hazel crying.
“Hazel, Hazel.” Mum rushed to her and threw her arms around her. “What is it?”
Hazel held the photo.
“Oh, darling.” Mum’s shoulders slumped and her mouth, now surrounded by thin lines, turned downward. “Sit, dear.”
Hazel put down the photo and sat across from her mum.
“Hazel, I couldn’t go to Binsey with you back then, my dear girl. You know that, don’t you? Not only did I have to work but they would not billet an adult.” She handed Hazel a linen napkin to wipe her tears. “God, I was so young. I had you when I was twenty years old. I did the best… I did…”
“Mum! Stop. I know.”
“I don’t regret it, but I wouldn’t do it again,” she said firmly.
“I don’t blame you, Mum. I never did.”
“Deep down you may still wonder why I deserted you both.”
“I don’t, Mum.”
“If I could go back in time and change that decision, I would. The government was telling us how to keep you safe. If I’d abandoned my work, I was slacking off, not doing my duty for the crown, and for the family. I thought you’d be back quickly. I had no idea…”
“… what would happen. I know.” Hazel wiped away proof of her tears.
Hazel hesitated. Today was her mum’s son’s fourteenth birthday and guests were coming over tonight. There were caterers and florists even now arriving at the back service entrance. “I want you to enjoy Tenny’s birthday.”
“If this is about Flora, you tell me now. What is it?”
Like diving into a cold lake, it was best to just jump, so Hazel jumped. “You know how Flora and I used to make up stories?”
“You always whispered them, darling. There was a river, that much I knew. And a castle. But the rest was vague and belonged to you and Flora.”
“We gave our place a name.”
“What was it?”
