A few days after the funeral Evie’s things had been returned to the house in Battersea. For a time I could not bear to look at them. The sight filled me with a confused sense of grief and guilt: guilt that I perhaps had not been the granddaughter I could have been to her, busy as I was selfishly wanting Mum all for my own. So for several weeks everything sat in the drawing room, untouched. It was a space we had seldom used and, now that it was only me, I never entered.
Though Evie had not lived there for some time the house seemed even quieter with her gone. Sometimes now I began to wonder if I, too, was gradually becoming a ghost. My meagre presence in the place seemed to make no mark upon it. However much I cleaned – I gave up after a while – the dust seemed determined to settle. I avoided looking in mirrors … I did not like what they revealed to me of myself. But I was most afraid that one day I might not see anything at all.
*
Over the weeks, my curiosity about Evie’s things grew. I began to wonder whether that room might harbour something that would further illuminate the secret. Perhaps there was more, I started to think, more that she had not had time to show me.
The room began to exert a pull upon me. Eventually, in the early hours of one morning, I made my way there with the fixed yet unconscious purpose of a sleepwalker, pushing open the door to reveal the dark mound of possessions in the centre of the rug – smaller than might be expected, but no less significant for that.
For someone who had been born into money, Evie had not surrounded herself with much, never one for jewellery or expensive clothing or any of those other accoutrements of wealth. But there were treasures of another order to discover here: an inventory of memories. A small pair of silk ballet slippers, hopelessly battered and worn: the blush pink faded to a sullen grey. Made for tiny feet, I realized, those of a child. Possibly, considering the size and age, my mother’s first-ever pair. I found myself gripping them, holding them to my chest like a magical talisman, as though they might still exude some essence of her.
There were programme brochures from what might have been every performance Mum had ever danced in, the earliest among them already desiccated with age. There were photographs, too, and I took my time looking through these, suspended somewhere between pleasure and pain. One thing that gave me pause was the number of photos there were of me, and not only those in which I appeared alongside Mum. There I was in my primary school uniform on my first day, a look of ill-concealed terror on my face – I was a painfully shy child. Then one of me as a teenager, dressed in T-shirt and shorts in Battersea Park, in what seemed from the seared grass in the background to be midsummer, my camera slung about my neck. Another of me on my twenty-first birthday, in the black crêpe de Chine I wore for supper with my mother. I felt a pang then, because I remembered how pleased I had been that it would only be the two of us … that Evie wasn’t coming. And she had kept the photograph here for all these years, along with her most treasured memories of Mum.
I came to the letters next. There were hundreds – maybe even thousands – each stack tied neatly together with string. Seeing that vast number, collected here, I could understand how tempting it might have been for Evie to tell herself that the letter had merely come from another fan. There were so many that it was hard to believe that each represented a person who had sat down and written a letter to my mother, to tell her how her performance had affected them. But that was Mum for you, I suppose. That was how talented she was – although it had often seemed something greater than talent, almost a magical power.
I did not know exactly what I hoped to achieve, when I untied the string on the nearest bundle. I read the first few letters from start to finish and would have carried on like this, had I not realized that I would be there for days if I did. So I began to sift through them, instead – my gaze catching on those phrases that demanded to be read: … the most exquisite thing I have ever seen … I will remember you as long as I live …
A small part of me felt a kind of indignant possessiveness as I read the most recent ones, those letters that had flooded in after her death. I knew it was irrational, but it felt as though these people – these strangers – were clamouring for a part of her to keep for themselves. Did they not understand that the memory of her was a precious, finite quantity, not one upon which they could stake their claim?
I left these, and moved instead to the letters that were faded and frail with age, some so delicate that they had to be handled with great care, making it a painstaking process.
Then I found it, what I had been hoping – and fearing – to discover. It was the handwriting that I noticed first: so distinctive as to be unmistakable, though it could not be definitive proof on its own. But there was the name, too.
I read it through, quickly, in such a state of nervous excitement that I didn’t take any of it in. Then a second time, forcing myself to go more slowly. If I had been hoping for something revelatory this was not it. In many ways it read like any another fan letter, remarkable only for its brevity. What made it special was the fact that it was from her, Célia:
16 November 1956
Dear June,
I came to the performance last night and watched you dance as Giselle. You made me believe so strongly that you were that little peasant girl, lifted and then cruelly broken by love, that the ending was, in a word, shattering. It was perhaps the most beautiful thing I have ever seen … and the most tragic.
Yours,
Célia
I went back to my pile, fingers trembling as I sifted carefully through brittle leaves of paper. After a few minutes of searching I found another. The same handwriting, another short note … and then that name. It struck me then as an unusual name. It could have been ordinary, English – save for that accent on the ‘e’, which made it instantly foreign. Italian, possibly, or French.
Quickly, taking less time to be delicate now, I began to hunt through the other piles … just in case. What I discovered was far greater than I could have imagined. A letter, it appeared, for every year that my mum had been performing. I laid them all out together, and they covered the entire rug. I sat back on my heels and stared at them, the blood beating loud in my head with excitement and something not unlike fear. Had Evie seen these? She must have done. Mum, too, must have seen them, though she had never remarked on them. Then again, there was nothing exceptional in the fact of the letters themselves. Many particularly avid fans might write again and again. Only when placed in the context of that first, all-important letter did they attain a new significance.
Suddenly it looked like the evidence of an obsession: decades of the sender’s life devoted to this one-sided communication. The breathtaking futility of it. But perhaps she – this Célia – had not thought it futile. Maybe she had believed it would eventually bring Mum to her. What did that say about her … about the state of her mind?
This secret that Evie had forced me to acknowledge had suddenly become all the more compelling. At the same time, I perceived a danger in it that I had not been aware of before. Possibly, even when she had believed her reasons to be selfish, Evie truly had been protecting Mum from her past. Perhaps it was enough that she had been able to unburden herself of her secret, without my needing to explore any further. What good could come of it? It was all so long ago, and if the woman who had written the letter were Evie’s age, she might also now be gone.
I went back to my room, and took the drawing out of its envelope. Once again I was transfixed by it – by this woman who was so similar in appearance to my mother that I, her own daughter, had at first been convinced it was her. Every time I saw it, it stole my breath from me. How could a mere few strokes of pen do that, exert such a pull of memory and emotion? I had no doubt that it was the work of a master – and I knew, too, that I could not rest until I had found out more.