Well, what could the British wife do? She had been living all la-di-da upper crust with this man she thought she’d married—who turned out to be already married. Married and with a daughter diagnosed with polio. That was when the British wife learned of the Indian one, when the half-Indian daughter was put in the iron lung in which she would die.
Passage on a ship was quietly arranged, and the British wife was given money, and she set off. It was foolish: the world was at war; the seas weren’t safe. But what choice did she have? To bear the shame of living with a man who was not her husband even legally, and who did love his legal wife? Graham is quite clear on that: the British wife was taken on only to be able to keep the Indian wife and child comfortably within reach. Graham’s mother is the wife his father truly loved.
Graham’s father, not the British wife, was the one who should have been shamed, and perhaps he would have been if the truth were made public. But it never has been the same thing for a man to have an unwed woman as it is for an unwed woman to have a man.
Let her disappear from the face of the earth. Let the whole world think she abandoned him. Let her disown this life and start over in some new place, where nobody would know of her shame.
Graham’s father hadn’t imagined any other narrative, the rumors of the British wife being buried somewhere in the woods.
When his father and his daughter died in the same week, not long after the British nonwife left, Graham’s father moved his Indian wife into Ainsley’s End, never mind all the gossip. He loved her too much to hide her anymore. And so it was at Ainsley’s End that Graham was born.
—Graham Wyndham V, son of a long line of respectable Graham Wyndhams, I said to him.
—Precisely, although it was my uncle for whom I was named, my father’s older brother who was killed in the war. That was what was always said, although no doubt my father meant by the name to establish that his son belonged in proper British society despite my mixed heritage. So much harder to dismiss a Lord Graham the fifth than a Martin Junior. But of course that was seen to be the dog’s bollocks it was.
Martin Wyndham. His father’s name was Martin Wyndham, the groom’s name on the marriage license I’d found. Mother must have stood at an altar here in England with Graham’s father, pledging until death did they part, thinking she’d live out her years in the wealth and respectability of Ainsley’s End, only to discover she’d married a bigamist. Mother must have been the proper British wife who disappeared, the wife people think was murdered and buried somewhere in the Claife Heights woods.
—Your mother is not so very unlike mine, Bea tells me.
We are back at the inn, and I’ve written this all in my journal, and still it doesn’t seem real.
—My parents were the children of tradesmen who’d risen up to a place in London society, Bea says, and I was giving up all the respectability they’d gained, tossing it away for the sake of love just as you were tossing off all the respectability your mother had reclaimed in fleeing this place.
—I don’t know, Bea.
—It isn’t so improbable, you know, Allison, Bea says. It’s the answer you came here looking for, after all. What you came for again and again. Did you not think you’d find it?
And because the Mouse has teased Miss Moppet—Miss Moppet thinks she will tease the Mouse.… She ties him up in the duster, and tosses it about like a ball. But she forgot about that hole in the duster; and when she untied it—there was no Mouse!
—FROM The Story of Miss Moppet BY BEATRIX POTTER
“LUCKY DAMNED DUCKS,” JULIE SAID TO ROBBIE. THEY HAD REMAINED tossing crumbs from the bird-crap-covered pier after we returned from the cookery lessons, while I went back to the cottage and Anna Page walked up the hill for herbs. “How often do you suppose this pair gets fresh hot cross buns?” she asked.
“Lucky damned swans,” Robbie said as the pair surged at the bread, then backed away.
“You don’t actually cook anything but pasties, do you?” Julie said. “You’re the type to make a homemade dessert and get everything else takeout from Lucy’s. I know your type. You put it on your own china and pretend you’ve made it all yourself, to impress.”
“You think I have china?” Robbie said.
Julie laughed. She couldn’t help herself. “You use paper plates and plastic cups on your silver tray with the moonflower, I guess?”
“I’d have a silver tray with no china to put on it?” he said.
She laughed again.
“It wasn’t a moonflower, either, it was a morning glory,” he said.
“You’re stretching it,” she said, the thought that his hair couldn’t be more tousled in the morning than it was coming off the lake surprising her. What did she care how he looked in the morning, or when he served his damned tray?
“Well, you might be right about the moonflower. ‘Gone and not gone. Is this garden the one we walked in hand in hand,’ ” he conceded, something in his voice or his weathered face not quite of him, the way Aunt Brett was when she was quoting, like she so often was.
Robbie kissed her then, the lingering taste of raisins from the cross buns and almonds and lemon from the scones catching her off guard.
“Oh, sorry!” he said in a chirpy voice that wasn’t the least bit apologetic.
“You are not!”
“I’m not,” he admitted, “but I thought I ought to get that in before you find I don’t even have the moonflower.”
Flustered, she said, “Or the takeout from Lucy’s—”
“The takeaway? They do make a fine beef and swede pasty, does Lucy’s, and brilliant puddings. But I only try to pass those off on foreign girls like you. The locals, they know Lucy’s when it’s served to them.”
Julie laughed again, she didn’t know why. He was making fun of her, and she was laughing. “You were flirting with Anna Page all through the cross buns and the scones,” she said, “and now you think you can kiss me just because you want to.”
Robbie had such an impish face when he laughed: his lake-blue eyes widening and the lines between his nose and lips deepening, a thin scar stretching on his chin, some last vestige of a childhood cricket accident, perhaps. “But I can, now, can’t I,” he said.
He tried to kiss her again, but she pulled away, thinking of Isaac.
“Who were you quoting?” she asked. “The line about moonflowers.”
“I was quoting, was I?” he teased.
“ ‘Seventeen and insane,’ that’s Ray Bradbury,” she said. “That was a quote, and you didn’t correct Anna Page on it. She said Vonnegut, and you didn’t correct her.”
He reached out and touched her hair the way Isaac sometimes did when he knew what she wanted to say but couldn’t, when he wanted to save her from having to say the words.
“Don’t you bother yourself with being jealous of Anna Page,” Robbie said gently. “She’s a fun one to take the mickey out of, that’s all.”
“I’m not jealous of Anna Page,” she said.
His blue eyes searched her face, as if there might be some explanation for her feelings in the tilt of her straight nose.
“She wants to fix her mother up with Graham, never mind that he’s creepy,” she said.
“Our Lord Wyndham?” He smiled, the creases around his mouth and his eyes deepening. “But he isn’t at all a creeper. He’ll rabbit on, he will, but he’s a regular bloke under all that poof. Surely he likes to have a pint at the local same as anyone. A Hawkshead Bitter, I’d think.”
“The suspect defending the suspected,” she said, feeling somehow that he was talking about her even though he was talking about Graham. “A single man who cooks nothing but pasties defending the recluse from the big estate.”
Robbie dipped his head toward the water, toward the faint reflection of his body next to hers over the straight line of pier. “But things aren’t always as they look, are they?” He considered her, the memory of his wife damp in his eyes despite all the intervening years. His wife and h
is daughter both, like Isaac and Oliver. Except Isaac still had Oliver, and Robbie had nobody.
“Take you, Julie, you’ll be telling the whole world what to do when you haven’t got a baldy yourself.” He touched her elbow, his two fingers pressing at the joint making her arm relax, leaving her aware of how tight her shoulders were. “Your grief is here in your elbow, idn’ it? In the way you hold yourself so carefully, lest anyone see.” Still holding the elbow, he touched a finger of his free hand to her forehead, ran it down between her straight brows to her nose. “It’s there in the bridge of your nose, though you do a fine job of making all that grief look like something else.”
He stared across the darkness that was the lake now, to the small islands in its middle, all but one uninhabited. “Have you ever seen the stars in the Southern Hemisphere?” he asked. “There’s no pole star there, no simple way to get your bearings. There’s a Southern Cross, and there’s a false cross. What you do is you find the brightest star—Alpha Centauri—and from that you can find your way to the Pointers. And from the Pointers you can determine south.”
He touched her shoulder, easing her back until the hard wood slats pressed cold against her shoulder bones, relieved only by the gaps and the softer moss, and all she saw was the starry sky. How long had they been talking?
“People call Alpha Centauri the brightest star in Centaurus,” he said as he lay beside her.
“Half man, half horse,” Julie said.
He propped himself up on an elbow. “You’re wrong about me, you know,” he said. He touched a finger to her lips before she could say anything. “The rocket with parm salad. The beef and swede pasty. The pudding. I make it all.”
He traced his finger over her chin and down to the base of her throat. She swallowed, feeling the ridged insides of her neck against the press of his touch. “And the silver tray?” she whispered.
He lay back on the pier and looked upward toward Andromeda and Cassiopeia, leaving Julie free to study his face, the roughness of acne scars marking what might have been a more difficult youth than his charm suggested. Maybe that was why he’d learned to be charming, to make up for the acne.
“My silver tray, it’ll be fierce tarnished,” he said. “I might manage a proper morning coffee, though, for the right lass.”
A meteor shot across the sky, but by the time she said “Look,” it was already gone.
“The Orionids,” he said. “If you watch between Orion’s head and Gemini’s feet, you can see twenty-five shooting stars in an hour this time of year.”
“It was for your wife?” Julie asked. “The silver tray. The morning glory.”
In the long pause that followed, Julie knew the answer.
“And sometimes the both of them, when Erin was old enough to climb from her bed and into ours. That’s years ago now, though.”
Julie closed her eyes for a moment, wondering how Isaac would have survived losing Oliver, too.
“What do you write, Robbie?” she asked.
“Everyone writes something in the Lake District, except those that are painting,” he said.
“Janet said you cook almost as well as you write.”
He sighed slightly. “Well, I was a journalist, wasn’t I?”
In the upturn of the question, she heard Isaac’s voice: Without letting her know I told you? The betrayal already begun.
She whispered, “Why do you turn everything into a question, Robbie?”
He whispered back, “Why do you tamp all you want to know down to a whisper not a soul can hear?” He studied the sky, small bright points fighting against the dark. “That was how I met Cornelia, covering the Troubles from the sidelines while she was deep in them, trying to change the world.”
“Cornelia,” Julie said.
“And you?” he said. “Why do you ask so many questions of others without answering any yourself?”
“What do you write now, Robbie?” Julie insisted.
They watched together as a second star shot off from the princess chained to her chair.
“It isn’t a single star you’re seeing when you see Alpha Centauri,” he said. “It’s a binary system, Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B, two stars the human eye can’t separate. Gravitationally, they’re a single object, aren’t they? A third star hangs with them as well, Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf that can’t be seen with the naked eye at all.
“Red,” he said. “It’s such a brutal color.”
Julie peered up at the red dwarf she couldn’t see.
“A dozen years ago now, it was,” Robbie said, “in the Omagh bombing.”
“In Ireland,” Julie said.
“All the time Cornelia put herself in harm’s way, but never with Erin. Then the Good Friday Agreement is signed and the Troubles are said to be over, and they go off for a day’s holliers, the two of them, and a car bomb explodes.”
Another star shot across the sky, fading to nothing. In the darkness left in its wake, Julie remembered that first evening, Robbie talking about the Crier killing his wife. She imagined that he might have been talking about himself somehow. Not that he’d killed his wife but that he ought to have kept her from dying. Thinking that was how she felt about Jamie, not that she killed her but that she ought to have kept her from dying, she ought to have seen that Jamie wasn’t herself before it was too late.
“I have scars,” she said quietly. She was glad not to have him turn to her, not to worry if he was looking at her face or her chest.
“We all have scars,” he said. “How’s a person to be interesting without her scars?”
“I’m in love with someone,” she said.
Robbie considered this, again without turning to her. “So it’s love now, not just ‘involved’?”
Julie didn’t answer.
“And he’s in love with you?”
The question so direct that she hesitated.
“You’ve awfully lovely lips for them belonging elsewhere,” he said, his voice teasing, not judging. He smiled at her, turning only his neck and head, his body still flat against the pier.
She didn’t move away from him, but she kept her gaze fixed upward, thinking of Isaac, thinking it was daylight in California, he couldn’t see this extraordinary sky.
Robbie studied the stars with her, the two of them feeling the cooling night air, and hearing the quiet.
“He’s a good man, I hope,” Robbie said finally.
Julie heard in his words what he was asking: Who is he?
His name is Isaac, she thought. She could tell him. What would it matter, a confession to this man she would never see again? But she couldn’t bring herself to say the words.
He fingered her hair the way she’d fingered Isaac’s the night he told her about Jamie’s cancer, the way she’d fingered Jamie’s the next morning as her sister told her the news she already knew.
“Proxima Centauri, she’s a flare star,” he said. “She undergoes random dramatic increases in brightness from magnetic activity. She’s the star closest to the sun, but she won’t likely support life on any nearby planet, because of the flares.”
From the Journals of Ally Tantry
15.11.2009, Ambleside. I went down to Liverpool to have a look through the ship passenger records. It took me the whole day, but then I found it: Caroline Anne Crompton—my mother—set sail from Liverpool to New York in January 1943. 1943. The year I was born.
Bea says we are who we choose to be, and nothing of where we come from has the power to take that from us. “Family history is little more than expectation to be overcome,” she insists. “A straitjacket of limitations on who we otherwise might be.”
“I will not have Mr. Jackson; he never wipes his feet.”
—FROM The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse BY BEATRIX POTTER
KEVIN AND I ONCE LOOKED AT A HOUSE WITH A DOUBLE TUB, IMAGINING ourselves bathing side by side in the same warm water, then climbing out to wrap ourselves in warm towels. He wanted to put in a bid, but the house was expensive; we
were only poking around, the way people do in Palo Alto. At home that night, he drew a bath for me, the bubbles overflowing the top of the tub even before I got in. He turned off the lights and lit candles, saying in a funny-sexy whisper, “ ‘But they did not keep “self-fitting sixes”: it takes five mice to carry one seven inch candle.’ ” He washed my hair, his fingers slow and soothing on my scalp. “Close your eyes,” he said, and he rinsed the shampoo away with clear, warm water from a pitcher, and washed my face slowly with a clean washcloth and the face soap I always use. He washed my neck. My shoulders. My breasts. My stomach. Between my legs. We had no towel warmer, but it didn’t matter. He lifted me from the tub—soaking his rolled-up sleeves, his shirt buttons that were cool against my bare, wet skin—and carried me to bed. And the next morning, I found him at his computer long before dawn, working on a story. “About a couple who think of buying a house with a double tub,” he said. I suggested I ought to write my own version of the story, and he said he hoped I would.
I plugged the rubber stopper in my mother’s tiny cottage sink and turned the hot-water faucet, which ran cold at first, leaving the pool tepid as I washed my hands and splashed my face. I looked up to see myself in the mirror only to find the blank wall. The hand towel smelled of my mother’s soap, the smell of Mom when I came down to the dining room table where she was writing to say good night. Her bubble bath here, as I opened it, was a blue vanilla, where at home it had been pink, but I closed my eyes to see Mom in her dank little developer bathtub at home, pulling her knees to herself and setting a wet washcloth over her small breasts, smiling as if a daughter who couldn’t leave you alone for the time it took to bathe was a delight.
“Mommy, I need bubbles,” I’d once barged in to inform her—not a memory I can recall but a story Mom told on me so many times that it feels like memory. I’d tendered a plastic teacup from my doll tea set, and Mom, relieved that I didn’t mean to climb in the tub yet again, put in a few drops of bubble bath for me.