When Lawrence had gone Selina thought again about that morning, waking up on her wedding day in the room in Marchmont Street. She remembered watching the dawn creep across the walls, making the edges of things grow more definite: the chair and the desk, the coffee cups and wine glasses. The kitbag, packed for America.
The opposite was happening now.
The light was fading and the world was sliding out of focus, until there was only voices and memories and feelings. Pain, of course; her constant shadow. But mostly overwhelming love.
Sometimes that hurt more.
‘Is she sleeping?’
‘Yes. But I think she knows you’re here. I think she can hear you. Talk to her – she’d like that.’
‘I don’t know what to say…’
‘You’ve got lots to tell her. About coming to London with Polly on the train. And about Edith’s house, and the children and their strange pets. Tell her about the nursery—’
‘And Mrs Hesketh’s studio?’
‘Yes. All of that.’
‘All right.’
The Heskeths’ house was directly opposite Regent’s Park and it looked like a miniature castle. Alice had noticed it before, when she’d visited the zoo with Mama because, with its arched windows and grey stone gables and rows of chimneys, it was the kind of house you couldn’t help noticing, and wondering who lived there.
The answer was an eccentric family who perfectly fitted their unusual home. Mr Hesketh was an ancient naturalist who had travelled to all corners of the globe in his younger years before a late marriage and the arrival, in rapid succession, of his four children. The eldest of these – Perseus, or Percy for short – was a year or so younger than Alice, but he had an easy confidence that made him seem older. All of them were perfectly sanguine about the addition to their chaotic nursery, treating Alice with the same benevolent curiosity as the injured jackdaw Percy was nursing back to health.
Polly had brought Alice to London on the train, the day after she had tried to make the journey on her own. Without Alice to look after at Blackwood there was no need for Polly to return, so Lawrence took a room for her in a boarding house in the next street to the hospital, so she could be on hand for Mama. Alice was glad to have her there, but she found she liked the Heskeths’ house, with its cheerful nursery and shelves full of gloriously illustrated books. She had been given her own tiny bedroom, with a velvet patchwork counterpane and gold stars painted on the ceiling, but the part of the house she loved best was Mrs Hesketh’s studio. (She had been instructed numerous times to call her Aunt Edith, but shyness had so far prevented her.)
Mrs Hesketh was an artist, and while her children roamed the park across the road or conducted alarming experiments in the scullery downstairs she retreated to an airy turret room stuffed with treasures – fragments of stained glass, a broken violin, the battered plaster head of a statue – to paint. She must have understood that Alice, still in shock and struggling to come to terms with Mama’s illness, was overwhelmed by her children’s exuberance at times, and she cleared a table in one corner for her to use, supplied with paper and charcoal and watercolours. Passing behind her one afternoon she bent over to look more closely at the sketch Alice was doing, of a feather she had found on the walk home from the hospital.
‘Extraordinary,’ Mrs Hesketh muttered, leaning over to pick up the paper. ‘Exceptional. You have your father’s talent, young lady, that’s for sure.’
Alice was surprised.
‘Do you know Papa?’ She had never suspected that stern, upright Rupert Carew had an ounce of artistic ability.
Beneath her gypsy headscarf Mrs Hesketh’s face flooded with red. She put the drawing down quickly.
‘Oh – from years back. A whole lifetime ago. Good heavens – is that the time? Let’s go and see what’s for tea before those savages devour it all.’
‘Alice?’
‘She’s gone. Back to Edith’s.’
‘Of course.’ Through the cracks of her eyelids and the haze of pain, Selina could see that the curtains were drawn shut. ‘Is it late?’
‘Not so very late. She’s probably having tea in the nursery about now, toasting muffins on the fire with the others.’
‘She likes it there.’
‘Yes, and the other children like having her. She and Percy have forged quite a bond over his collection of fossils.’
‘She’ll want … to draw them…’
‘She does. She’s brilliant. I thought that maybe I was biased, but Edith says it too. She can’t get over how good she is.’
Selina let her eyes close again, counting in her head until the pain passed. It came in waves and there was no point in trying to fight them anymore. The only thing to do was let them take her, drag her down, and hope that she would resurface. She counted her breaths and tried to concentrate on Lawrence’s voice. His words. After Rupert’s cool indifference, his pride in Alice was like a candleglow in the darkness. The glimmer of sunlight on the surface of the water above her head. She focused on it now, and willed herself back to it.
‘Shall I get the nurse?’
She shook her head. ‘We need to talk … About Alice. Afterwards.’
‘Yes.’
She loved him for not pretending. She loved him for understanding that she didn’t have the energy to cut through meaningless reassurance and lies.
‘Will you take care of her?’
‘Of course I will.’ There was a break in his voice. ‘I don’t know her very well yet, but I love her. I’ll do whatever’s best for her. And for you.’
Another wave was surging inside her; she knew that in a moment she would be sinking. ‘You … were going to Spain … The war…’
‘There’ll be other wars. I’m not going anywhere.’
She gave herself up to the swell.
If time had gone slowly at Blackwood, it flowed by quickly in London. Too quickly. Like water draining out of the bath, Alice knew that it would soon be gone, and she dreaded it.
She saw Mama every day. She was at her best in the late mornings, when the doctor had done his rounds and the medicine the nurses gave her (not on a spoon, but by injection) had had a chance to work. When she arrived Mama was usually awake, her eyes shining with pleasure to see them, but after an hour she would be tired out, drifting in and out of sleep. Sometimes it was obvious that Mama was in great pain. She would close her eyes and her whole body would go stiff, and Alice couldn’t look at her then because the suffering on her face was too hard to bear.
But in between those times they talked. There was always news to report from the Hesketh nursery, of the jackdaw (called Jackson, of course) and his increasing appetite now he was recovering, which meant Percy was forever in the garden digging for worms. Mama said he must be a good person to go to such lengths for an injured bird. Alice remembered the cat she had written about in the first clue in the treasure hunt – the one that her friend had hit with his car, and she had buried in the garden square with the kind stranger. She wanted to ask Mama about it, but she was far away again, beyond Alice’s reach, battling a savage enemy no one else could see.
Sometimes Mama talked. Alice would lie beside her on the bed (carefully – oh, so carefully) and Mama would talk about when she was a little girl, playing games with Uncle Howard and tricks on her governesses, running around, half wild in the great gardens at Blackwood. Mr Patterson had been her friend too, she said, and all the gardener’s boys – in the days when there had been gardener’s boys. She had gone quiet after that, and the hand stroking Alice’s hair had stilled.
‘Mama?’ Alice whispered.
Mama had lifted her hand then, and kissed Alice’s head. ‘It’s all right, darling. I was just remembering, that’s all. Wishing I could go back.’
‘Can she?’ she asked Lawrence later, when Mama had slipped away again and he was taking her back to Regents Park; walking, because it wasn’t far, and they both liked the sting of the cold air and the chance to breathe and think and talk. ‘Can she go back to Blackwood? If I was poorly like that I’d far rather be at home, with familiar things all around. Polly could look after her, and maybe the nice nurse could come too, to do the injections and things. And I think Grandmama should spend more time with her, because she’ll be sad later if she doesn’t. If Mama was at Blackwood she could look out over the gardens and it would make her feel better. Maybe she might even be well enough to go out there sometime…’
She stopped then, because she knew it wasn’t possible. Not just that Mama would be able to walk outside again, but that she would be well enough to make the journey to Blackwood at all.
‘I don’t think…’ Lawrence said slowly.
‘It’s all right. I know it can’t happen.’
They walked on for a few paces. He was holding her hand, which was another thing she liked because it was a perfectly normal thing to do out on the street, but it felt special. He gave it a squeeze.
‘Maybe not, but you’ve given me an idea.’
The swell of the wave was more powerful now. It had dragged her far from the shore and rolled her round and round. Just when she thought its strength might be ebbing it gathered again and she was helpless. She cried out. She knew how hopeless it was, but she couldn’t stop. On and on, begging for mercy, though her voice was lost in the roar.
The nurses came. Hands on her, faces mouthing words she couldn’t hear. Polly was there, her hands cool and her voice immeasurably comforting. She stopped fighting after that, stopped trying to get back to the light and air and gave herself up to the great sucking ocean of pain.
When she surfaced again the light had changed. The wave had receded and her body felt insubstantial, as if it was already dissolving. Opening her eyes a crack she saw the Chinese House at Blackwood, the sun slanting across the wooden boards of the deck. She saw the orangery, with the fountain at its centre. She saw herself, aged twenty-one, lying on the tiled floor with her eyes closed and bars of shadow making patterns on her skin.
The images flickered across her exhausted mind, filling the black, blank spaces. Colour seeped into them, and sound and sensation. The sun on her face. The touch of his fingertips on her bare midriff. The taste of buttery new potatoes. When she closed her eyes she was there again, walking through the shadows between the yew hedges, and Lawrence was behind her, close by, carrying the gramophone down to the Chinese House.
She heard the music. Even when the surging waters closed over her, she heard the haunting soar of strings, and it carried her through.
The pain in Alice’s tummy had mostly gone now. It was only in the mornings, emerging slowly from sleep, that it came back, but it was no longer the sharp, insistent jab that it had been. It was harder, blunter, like a punch to the stomach or a weight being dropped on her. The weight of reality.
On the morning of her birthday it was worse than usual. The date had always held a kind of magic, but the very fact of it rolling round as if everything was normal felt like a mockery. The only thing that made her feel better was the thought that most people didn’t know about it, and those that did had probably forgotten.
But it didn’t turn out like that. Going down to breakfast she discovered that the chair in which she usually sat had been decorated with paper streamers and Christmas tinsel, and a large parcel had been left on the table in her place. ‘Many happy returns, my dear,’ Mr Hesketh said with great kindness, peering at her over the tops of his spectacles. ‘It might not be the happiest of birthdays, but achieving double figures is a milestone. We must try to make it one on which you look back fondly in years to come.’
The parcel contained a book – The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of British Birds and Mammals. It was one she had discovered upstairs on the shelves in the nursery and to which she returned often, turning the pages slowly and marvelling at the watercolour plates inside.
‘Your very own copy,’ Percy said cheerfully. ‘Look – it says so in the front.’
For Alice, she read. ‘Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.’ With love on your birthday from us all. Six signatures, of varying degrees of flamboyance, were scrawled beneath.
‘Thank you,’ she managed to croak.
‘Oh gosh, don’t blub – you’ll set us all off,’ Percy said. ‘Quick, help yourself to sausages. We only have them for special breakfasts, so it would be an awful waste to weep all over them.’
Mrs Hesketh told her that Lawrence had left the house early, so she would take Alice to the hospital to see Mama. She parked her car (the yellow one in which Lawrence had come to Blackwood) outside the main door and insisted on coming in to deliver her safely. Alice tried to tell her that there was no need and she knew the way up to Mama’s room well enough by now, but she was very glad that Edith hadn’t listened when they bumped into Papa on the stairs.
Alice felt herself going very red. If Mrs Hesketh hadn’t been there she thought she might have turned and run away, though she wasn’t quite sure why. In case Papa was angry with her, perhaps. In case he made her go back to Onslow Square with him. She hadn’t realized until that moment how much she didn’t want that. How, without Mama, their comfortable house in Onslow Square was just that – a house. No longer home.
Papa seemed to falter as he noticed her, which made Alice go even redder; she had never seen him anything less than perfectly assured before, utterly composed. He removed his hat and nodded curtly to Edith, then his gaze moved down to Alice. ‘I’m just on my way out, as you can see. Your mother is asleep. If she wakes up, tell her I was here.’
He said nothing to Mrs Hesketh, and gave no sign that he knew her. From years back, Mrs Hesketh had said, but still, Alice was surprised. Papa was very correct when it came to manners, and she wasn’t the kind of person one would forget.
Before she even went into Mama’s room she could see that it was different. There were photographs – big black and white photographs, five times the size of ordinary snapshots – stuck to the walls around the bed. On the table at its foot, beside a huge bouquet of lilies, there was a gramophone.
Mama was sleeping, propped up against a bank of pillows. She was wearing a beautiful grey silk bed jacket and her hair was brushed to spun gold over her shoulders. Letting go of Edith’s hand Alice went forward, gazing around at the photographs.
‘It’s Blackwood!’ She kept her voice to a whisper. ‘That’s the orangery, with the fountain in the middle. And there’s the Chinese House. Who took them?’
Sunlight slanted across the pictures and the leaves were lush and blowsy with summer. And Mama … Mama was young and strong and golden.
‘Lawrence did, a long time ago,’ Edith said softly.
‘Alice?’
They both turned. Mama’s eyelids had lifted a little. Her eyes seemed unusually dark.
‘Yes, Mama. I’m here.’
‘Happy birthday, my darling. Are you alone?’
‘No. Mrs Hesketh is here. She brought me, in her car.’
‘Edith…?’
‘That’s right.’ Edith went forward, closer to the bed. She looked very large in her big blue coachman’s cape, but her voice was very gentle, very kind. Mama’s pale lips softened into a smile.
‘We almost met … years ago. At a party.’
‘The Napiers. Grosvenor Square.’
‘You had … painted…’
‘Their portrait,’ Edith finished for her. ‘That’s right.’
Mama’s eyes closed. The smile widened. ‘Lawrence’s chest.’
Alice’s head felt very full of jagged, disjointed thoughts, like pieces of a puzzle that didn’t fit together. Or maybe did fit, but to make a picture that was completely different from the one she was expecting. The letter in the dressing up box had mentioned a boy with his whole chest painted with Van Gogh stars. Mama had run away from the party with him and they had had dinner late at night in a tiny French restaurant.
Mrs Hesketh was holding Mama’s hand, which looked as thin and frail as Jackson the jackdaw’s claw in her strong, square one. ‘You have my word,’ Alice heard her say softly. ‘One mother to another.’ She turned away, staring hard at the arrangement of lilies on the table at the foot of the bed, not wanting to know what they were talking about. Or knowing, but not wanting to admit it.
‘Ah – and talk of the devil,’ Mrs Hesketh said with sudden, forced cheerfulness. ‘I’m just on my way, dear boy. I’ll leave you in peace.’
Alice was aware of a sense of relief at seeing Lawrence. Release, like something tight inside her relaxing a little. He was holding a large, square box and he came over to where Alice stood, shoving aside the flower arrangement and the gramophone on the table to put it down. He ruffled Alice’s hair and wished her happy birthday, then went over to Mama, bending to kiss her in a way that Papa never had.
‘You got it?’
‘I did.’
Mama tried to raise herself up and he helped her, cradling her against him as he banked up the pillows for her to rest on. She was so frail. So terribly delicate. Alice had given her back the aquamarine pendant, and it rested against her hollow chest, catching the light and glittering with each rapid breath. Her face was tense and shuttered, but as Lawrence settled her back against the pillows she cried out and her hand grasped at his arm, clutching his sleeve so hard that her knuckles gleamed like pearls beneath the thin skin.
Alice turned away as Lawrence held her and soothed and stroked. She wanted to cry out too – wanted to scream and snatch at Mama’s shoulders and shake her until this brittle, unrecognizable shell dissolved and the old Mama came back – but she knew it wouldn’t work. Nothing would work now. Her hands were curled into painful fists and the pain stabbed at her tummy. She held her breath until her ears rang, trying to squash down the sobs that she was afraid would escape with it.
And then, through the boom and roar of her fury she heard a sound that made her stop. And breathe. A plaintive little sound that came from the box on the table.
Lawrence laughed shakily. ‘I think you’d better open your present.’
The box was lined with straw. The tiny kitten had obviously been asleep in it, but it was awake now, looking up at her with wide round eyes. He was entirely black, so that when he opened his mouth to make a sound his tongue looked startlingly pink. Alice gasped.
‘Is he really mine?’
‘All yours.’
Tentatively she picked him up. Cupping him between her hands, she held his tiny body against her chest, carried him closer to where Mama lay, and crouched down. ‘Feel, Mama. He’s so tiny, and so soft…’
Mama lifted her hand and, as her fingertips brushed the downy fur she smiled, properly and delightedly, so that for a moment it was possible to glimpse her as she used to be. Beautiful and alive.
‘What are you going to call him?’ Lawrence said.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Cartwright…’ Mama murmured, and she turned her head towards Lawrence, though her eyes didn’t seem to focus.
He took hold of her hand and cradled it as tenderly as Alice was holding the kitten. His voice was calm but his face reminded Alice of a painting she had seen of Jesus on the cross.
‘Perfect.’
That night, as the kitten purred loudly on the quilt beside her, Alice unearthed the satchel she had hidden in the bottom of the wardrobe and took out the stash of letters.
She picked up the last one again. It was the only one in which Mama had written Lawrence’s name, but Alice understood now that it was the final clue. The missing piece. She hadn’t mentioned him by name in the earlier letters, but Alice understood now that he was on every page. In every part of Mama’s story.
The story of how Alice came to be.