“Eeeeeewwww,” Jamie said, the same way they’d said it when they were kids together, wondering if there were some connection between the weird-looking snake and their mother’s warning about how she might look after her surgery.
Julie turned from their mother chatting with the restaurant owner—her face so like their faces—to her sister’s mirror of her. It would turn out to be the last birthday lunch they might ever be mistaken for each other. By the New Year, when their own not-quite-shared birthdays came, Jamie would be gone.
“I used to wish you dead sometimes,” she said to Jamie. “Not really, you know, but … I used to wish there wasn’t anyone like me, that I was just myself and there was no matching you.”
She was looking for absolution, she knew that. For Jamie to forgive her for stretching yarn across their shared room when she was nine, forbidding Jamie to step on her half. For hiding Jamie’s envelope from Yale, the school they both wanted to go to, but Julie had so longed to have that moment of pride to herself. Julie chose Yale to get far away from everyone, including Jamie; Jamie chose Yale because Julie was going, because Jamie never had been able to imagine the two of them apart. And there Julie was, facing a future without Jamie, regretting that she’d ever thought she wanted what she could no longer bear. Looking for absolution for all the meanness she’d inflicted over all the years of sharing rooms and lives and looks, all the small ones and the one big one, too. She hadn’t told Jamie about that, and she didn’t suppose Isaac had, either, but the truth was, she was afraid to know.
Across the room, their mother set a hand on the restaurant owner’s arm and said some last thing, then turned toward them, all her accumulated years showing in the set of her shoulders, the frown she was trying to work back into a smile.
“Jamie, I—”
Jamie leaned across the table and set a hand on Julie’s, stopping her.
“Definitely nothing less than a D-cup, Jules,” she said. “A D-cup in expensive hand-tatted lace. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
Julie had stuck with the same B-cup she and Jamie had shared since puberty, though, the same ratty bra wardrobe. It would be too odd to look in the mirror every day at a different body, to have that reminder that she’d chosen different breasts, and why. Julie has scars, yes, much like Jamie’s. But they tuck underneath, where she doesn’t see them unless she looks.
Ahead, on the pier, a shadowed figure: a coyote or a cougar? Did they have cougars in England? Julie didn’t know.
When the shadow emerged as human—someone sitting on the pier—Anna Page called out in a hushed voice, “Robbie?”
They weren’t teenagers anymore, but Julie was overrun with the awkward irritation she’d always felt on those nights when Anna Page dragged Jamie and her out to meet boys, even when the boy Anna Page had arranged for Julie to meet was cute. Robbie was already turning to see them, though, and waving, leaving her no choice but to stomp on this little tryst.
She probably had coal dust on her face, she thought; it had been far too cold for the tiny shower in the tiny bathroom, and she wasn’t about to bathe in the tub by the fire. She should have known Anna Page was planning a midnight rendezvous: she had left a ring of gray around the slipper tub.
Anna Page’s hand on Julie’s back urged her forward, as it had so often when they were teenagers out meeting boys. In retrospect, Julie would see this for what it was, Anna Page Woodhouse in action, trying like Jane Austen’s Emma to make matches while steadfastly avoiding commitment herself. (Anna Page’s efforts to find the right someone for this friend or that worked out just often enough—with Jamie and Isaac, for example, or with Kevin and me—that she took to thinking herself a yenta, which Jamie was forever reminding her meant “matchmaker” only on Broadway; everywhere else, it meant “gossip” or “shrew.”) That night, though, Julie was too wrapped up in her own awkward emotions to do anything but try for humor. “And I was thinking it was past everyone’s bedtime,” she said.
“Aye, but I’m seventeen and insane, aren’t I?” Robbie answered, the phrase annoyingly familiar. Some rock song, Julie imagined. Some TV show.
“Seventeen?” Anna Page teased. “I wouldn’t have guessed.”
Robbie laughed softly. “Sorry!” he said brightly, as if it were the most delightful thing in the world to apologize. “I don’t mean to misrepresent. Maybe I’m fifty-seven and insane.”
Maybe I’m forty-seven and insane, that’s what Julie thought, although she’d turned forty-eight that year, on her first not-quite-the-same birthday without Jamie, the first age Jamie would never turn. New Year’s Day and the library closed, but she’d slipped out of bed after Noah was asleep, and biked there. She’d left the lights off as she collected the jumble of books by the return slot and scanned them in, organized them by call number on a cart and tucked them back where they could be found. She’d searched fourteen long rows of books before coming upon a copy of Brenda Rickman Vantrease’s The Heretic’s Wife under R instead of V. That order restored, she sat on the floor, leaning back against the three copies of Middlemarch she couldn’t persuade anyone to read, turning the smooth, soothing pages of the publishers’ catalogs and imagining from the artwork and the descriptions which books Jamie would have chosen to read.
“There’s a grand bit of sequin tonight on the Big Dipper’s handle,” Robbie said. “A supernova—something you see once in a blue moon.” The three of them climbed into his boat, and he rowed them to the center of the lake, where he dug around in a pack tucked into the bow and pulled out a small telescope. He helped Anna Page position it, touching her shoulder and her arm and her hand.
“I see it!” she said delightedly before giving Julie a turn.
“And yet what you’re seeing isn’t there anymore,” Robbie said. “If you were sitting in the Pinwheel Galaxy, there’s not a bit of that supernova left. The brilliant flash, she’d be the remnant of the star’s death.”
Julie lowered the telescope to see Robbie staring off at the dark shore, a single light visible in what must be the tower of the big house, Julie supposed.
“The Crier of Claife, he’d be out wandering on such a fine night, wouldn’t ’e,” Robbie said.
“A fair-weather ghost who kills his wives?” Julie said.
Robbie smiled, his face light in the darkness. “But it was only the one wife he killed, wasn’t it? The English one.”
Something in his voice left Julie wondering how his lips would taste, which she supposed was one part his knowledge of the night sky and one part her suspicion that Anna Page meant to be kissing him in that boat, or perhaps screwing him. The fact that Julie was approaching fifty and she still wanted men to choose her over Anna Page was a sad comment on their friendship, but there it was.
“You’re from Ireland, Robbie?” Julie said. “And you came to England when you bought the boat business?”
“Ah.” Robbie stared up at the sky for such a long time that Julie expected him to start talking about the stars again.
Robbie Smythe. The name seemed familiar, but surely that was the thinking of it again, or the commonness of the name.
“Well, I’d been here before, on holliers, hadn’t I. The land of Wordsworth and all tha’. I di’ not buy the boats until after the old man died, though. He’ll be haunting the boathouse, with a mick having his business now.” He laughed halfheartedly.
“Why did you leave Ireland?” Julie asked.
He looked away, in Anna Page’s direction. She’d been the one he had arranged to rendezvous with, of course. Julie never quite understood why men were so often drawn to Anna Page. Julie was as attractive in a blonder, good-girl way, and men weren’t forever falling all over her.
“I suppose I’ve come on an errand for my wife,” Robbie said uncertainly.
Julie, with a pointed glance at Anna Page, said, “You’re married.”
“I lost Cornelia a decade ago, and our daughter as well.”
“I … I’m so sorry,” Julie stammered, mortified at the hint
of triumph that had been in her voice.
Toward the shore, a gentle splash sounded. “That’ll be the Crier in for a swim,” Robbie said, although it was only the flap of wings on water, a swan foraging for a midnight snack.
“So you’re here on … like a dying request?” Julie said.
“I suppose it’s what I imagine her dying request would have been.”
“And you’ve just come on this errand for her now?”
The three of them stared up at the sparkle of star that they couldn’t see without the telescope, that wasn’t really there.
“I’ve put it off, haven’t I?” he admitted finally. “But it’s an old broom knows the dirty corners best.” He dipped a hand in the lake and let it dangle there. “It’s a … a friend of hers I’ve come here to meet.”
As Robbie set his hands on the oars again, Julie imagined him carrying a lantern, wearing a hooded robe and walking through the forest, searching for the bones of his dead wife and child, as Isaac might go out in search of Jamie if he didn’t have Oliver.
“That thing you said earlier,” she said. “Seventeen and insane?”
Robbie studied her, his eyes the blue of the lake in the evening as the sun set. “It’s from Fahrenheit 451, idn’ it?”
Anna Page said, “Kurt Vonnegut.”
A hint of a smile touched Robbie’s eyes, but he didn’t correct her. “ ‘When people ask your age … always say seventeen and insane,’ ” he said. “Isn’t this a nice time of night to row? I like to smell things and look at things, and sometimes stay up all night, rowing, and watch the sun rise.”
He leaned in to the oars then, headed back toward the shore. And because he didn’t correct Anna Page, Julie didn’t, either, tempting as it was. But she did think Ray Bradbury. With perhaps a few edits compliments of Robbie Smythe thrown in for good measure. Even the firemen in Bradbury’s dystopian novel didn’t use water, and if there was a boat to row anywhere on the pages of Fahrenheit 451, Julie didn’t remember it.
From the Journals of Ally Tantry
13.2.2009, Hill Top Farm, Near Sawrey. On the way to Beatrix’s house today, she pointed out little things that, if you’ve read her books and know they’re there, you recognize: the Tower Bank Arms from The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck; the cottage that was Ginger and Pickle’s store and the charcoal burners’ hut from that book; the hole where Benjamin hid before rescuing the Flopsy Bunnies, up on Oatmeal Crag; and the beehive set in the garden wall that appears in The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck, when poor Jemima despairs of having her eggs forever found and carried off. Bea pointed out that she included the gate in Jemima, too, as well as the front door, which she also drew in The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan. I didn’t tell her that we’d rarely read that one.
Bea and Norman—not Mr. Warne this morning but Norman—had dreamed of living together on a farm up here, but Bea didn’t buy Hill Top until the winter after he died, when she was thirty-nine. She spent her grief learning the boundary fences and property lines, and commissioning work to be done. When she returned the next spring, it looked quite ugly, she told me. The winding road with its charming tumbledown wall covered with polypody was straight and white and bare; soil was piled in heaps everywhere; and most of the work had been improperly done.
I wonder how much of the change in her perception of the farm was due to the improvements she commissioned and how much to the stark reality of arriving alone and unmarried to a life she meant to share with a man who was dead.
—I could not even be seen to mourn Norman’s death, as I’d ceded to my parents’ demand to keep our engagement secret, she said. When I became engaged to Mr. Heelis years later, my father and I about came to fisticuffs, much like Tommy Brock and Mr. Todd.
In case you don’t know, Tommy is the badger in Mr. Todd’s book, and Mr. Todd is himself a fox, and Bea’s family was of the class who prefer their daughters remain spinsters rather than “marry down” to earned, rather than inherited, wealth.
—My parents used the law as an excuse for their opposition to me marrying Jim, I told her. He was from India and it was illegal in Maryland for whites to marry nonwhites.
It’s one of the things Bea and I have in common: sour-faced mothers who would have us remain spinsters rather than marry men we loved. That and the shared name in our family trees.
—I can’t figure out how to tell Jim I went to Manchester when he was in his meetings in London that time he and I came to England together, I said. And I can’t exactly tell him about the marriage license I found there without telling him I went.
Mother’s maiden name—Caroline Anne Crompton—listed as the bride for a groom who was not my father. Crompton, which was Bea’s paternal grandmother’s name, although the two are separated by generations.
I’d found the address given for my mother on the license, but it was a gas station, and the boy pumping gas had gawked at me as if I were batty. “A house, miss?” he’d said. “There’s been only this petrol station as long as I’ve known.”
I’ve never told Jim about that and I’ve never told him about the two days I spent wandering around the narrow roads on my first trip to the Lakes, either. It all seems so silly, trying to find some connection to my mother’s past here. But where else can I look with the trail in Manchester gone cold? Never mind that my search for the groom’s address the first time I came to the Lakes turned up nothing more than a one-track road through maybe four houses, none big enough to warrant a name.
—Jim grieves for the way my parents cast me out when we married, I said to Bea. He feels angry at them, and he feels responsible for the pain they caused by abandoning me.
—Of course he does, Bea said.
—Even though it was their fault, not his, I said.
—I know, dear, she said.
—It feels a little like betrayal, to bring my parents back into our lives. What point is there to it, with them both so long dead? It feels a little like betrayal even to talk to the Wednesday Sisters about it behind Jim’s back.
—And so you haven’t, Bea said.
I thought I might tell the Wednesday Sisters about the marriage license the first time I said I was coming to the Lake District, but how could I say it without sounding nutty? I wanted to travel thousands of miles and spend thousands of dollars to get to the English Lake District because my mother who’d disowned me might once have been engaged to a butler or a cook or a stable boy from a house near Windermere? And before I could explain myself, Frankie had said, “Ally is sixty-five years old, Linda, and she’s never even slept in a room by herself except in her own bed when Jim is away on business. Can’t you see she might want to go alone?” So there I was, handing over my ticket to Hill Top Farm. Just Bea and me and the ghosts of our mothers. Bea isn’t Frankie. She isn’t Linda or Brett or Kath. But I can talk to her about my mother without betraying Jim.
—Those are your shoes, Bea? I said, noticing a pair of gardening clogs tucked under a chair by the fireplace.
She looked from the shoes under the chair to the lace-ups on her feet today.
—Have you ever seen such a place for hide-and-seek, and funny cupboards and closets? she asked (refusing to engage about the shoes). But oh, how the people here laughed at my purchase of Hill Top, she said. Of course, the rats had opened up a hostel here, every rodent from every corner of the Lake District making a point of stopping in.
She pointed to the places in the floorboards that were repaired with cement, where the rats had chewed the wood through—rats she dispatched without possibility of heirs, I’m sorry to report. Never mind the cute little critters in her books; our Bea is a practical gal.
The low-ceilinged farmhouse is quite modest for a woman who grew up in wealth, who made a fortune as a writer and left fourteen farms and four thousand acres of land to the National Trust—together with her flocks of Herd-wicks, she is quick to remind me. Upstairs, she directed me to a letter she’d gotten even after she was quite famous, from a magazine editor who did
take one story but rejected the others, one on the excuse that it was “not altogether happy.” Not altogether happy—an apt description of Bea’s reaction to seeing her little books set about beside the real-life inspirations: the stairways, the grates, the clocks, the ceramic ham in the dollhouse, which Tom Thumb shattered in his attempt to have it for dinner.
—Heavens to Betsy, that’s all you wanted to show me, Bea? A rejection letter?
—It is.
—If there is no end of failure, I said, then perhaps there might be no end of success, too, if you just go on about putting words to paper?
—If there is no end of failure, Allison, Bea said, success must be the act of putting words to paper as best we can.
We’ve left Hill Top now and settled in at a tea shop in Buckle Yeat cottage, the backdrop for the puddle ducks’ excursion up the road in The Tale of Tom Kitten. Bea’s gaze is fixed on Esthwaite Water while I’m trying to commit the details of Hill Top to my journal.
—You must keep writing, Allison, Bea says (as if I’m not doing so when she says it). There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they’ll take you.
—Did you actually say that, Bea? I thought that was a line in a movie.
—But it’s quite a fine line, isn’t it? Although I do think I’m less prim than I was portrayed there, don’t you?
—Less prim? Or less thin?
I eye the second scone she’s selected.
—You’re in your sunset, Allison, she says, and you’ve never published—
—I never wanted to publish my children’s stories. I only wrote them for Hope and Sammy.
—So you say.
She takes her time about having a bite of the scone.
—You must keep writing, Allison, she repeats. Whatever it is you write. You ought to find a place here in the Lake District, like my Hill Top. Use this excuse of writing about me if you wish. A woman does need her own space, doesn’t she?