I stayed in a hotel in the East Village, and hardly slept the first night, despite the jet lag. I lay there listening to the hooting of car horns, the laughter, shouts and music bleeding through from the street and the roar and rattle of the subway beneath me. Nothing could have been further removed from the blue quiet of those Corsican nights that had been punctuated only by the sound of the wind and the chirruping of crickets in the maquis.
When morning came I lounged in bed, feeling gritty-eyed and almost drunk with tiredness. My whole mission felt even more surreal now than it had done at the departure gate in Charles de Gaulle.
A toasted sandwich and a black coffee in an Italian greasy spoon a couple of streets away went some way towards restoring me. I checked my reflection in the washroom there and combed my hair, rather pointlessly, as it quickly rearranged itself into its habitual tangle. For some reason it had suddenly become important that I should be looking my best. It bothered me that there were dark circles beneath my eyes, that any colour I had managed to pick up in Corsica seemed to have disappeared overnight. In the halogen light, my skin had the bluish tinge of skimmed milk.
I liked the East Village, I decided, making my way to the subway at Astor Place. It was raw and unformed back then – a creative’s Mecca, not unlike modern-day Brooklyn. The phone boxes here weren’t plastered with phone-sex ads but with flyers for exhibitions and ad hoc installations in flats, warehouses and vacant lots. Art was visible on the street, too: en route to the platform I saw a Keith Haring-like mural of nude commuters carrying briefcases.
New York then was a cheaper, rougher place than it is now, and the Village was almost unrecognizable from what it has become. At least, that’s my experience. Travelling back recently, I saw bijou espresso bars and boutiques, sleek four-wheel drives, loft conversions. You could find the imprint of the old place, if you looked carefully. Or could you? Was, perhaps, the gritty appearance of the record shop I found on Bleecker Street merely clever, nostalgic ersatz? It was difficult to say.
It was also different to the city I had known when I visited with Mum. She had been an honorary guest at a special Christmas exhibition by the New York Ballet, and we had stayed in the St Regis, a white-and-gilt wedding cake of a hotel on Fifth Avenue. The city had glittered with new-fallen snow: as deliriously unreal as the one that lived inside the snow-dome Mum had given me on the plane. We had come on one other occasion, in summer – though I had been too young to remember much of that. Now that Mum was gone, I found it hard to accept that there were memories like this, that would be forever lost to me.
It seemed that I was bound to return to that world of old New York splendour. The apartment was in one of those huge blocks that soar into the sky on the east side of Central Park, and I was immediately intimidated, understanding that I was about to enter into a rarefied sphere. These buildings housed the inconceivably wealthy – the old, moneyed American families, scions of the dynasties that had built New York. I knew suddenly how Tom must have felt, walking up to the front door of Chebworth Manor. I recalled what Oliver had said about the townhouse in Paris: Alice had clearly returned to the life of privilege.
I thought the porter would look at me askance, but when I gave my name he smiled as though we knew one another and swept me inside with a bow. Inside, the building was even more awe-inspiring than without, and there was more marble, more gilt, more baroque splendour than I remembered at the St Regis.
I was taken up to her floor in one of those lifts in which you aren’t allowed to press the buttons yourself: a liveried member of staff does it for you. When the doors pinged open at the top, a single door faced us beyond a carpeted antechamber.
‘Is the way to the apartment through there?’ I asked the attendant, bemused. ‘Which number is it?’
‘That is the door to the apartment. She has this floor and the next one up.’
‘Oh.’
I pressed the doorbell and waited for so long that I was tempted to ring again. At last I heard quick footsteps behind the door and it swung open to reveal a tall woman in a tailored tweed suit.
She spoke before I could introduce myself. ‘Hi, Kate. I’m Julie.’ She was American. ‘I’m Célia’s housekeeper.’
Then a voice called from within, high and slightly quavering. ‘Is it her, Julie?’
Julie smiled and beckoned me in. ‘Would you like anything to drink?’ she asked, as we passed through an elegant, sage-green anteroom. I opened my mouth, but was suddenly lost for words. Julie seemed to understand. ‘Well,’ she said, gently, ‘I usually bring her coffee at eleven, in half an hour, so you could have something then.’ As she spoke I noticed a picture hanging behind her – a charcoal sketch of a street scene that, judging by the unmistakable shape of the fire hydrant in the corner, had to be New York. The style was by now familiar to me: I recognized that sparseness of line, that expert but restrained treatment of light and shadow. And there in the corner was the small hieroglyph I knew so well: those two linked initials.
We were moving through into open space, entering the great lofty sitting room of the apartment proper: high-ceilinged and airy, thanks to the huge windows that looked on to the park. Of the other three walls, only the smallest and most necessary of spaces remained between the artworks that had been hung upon them. The effect should have been one of chaos, and yet it was not. Or rather, it was the best sort of chaos: carnivalesque, a celebration of colour and human creativity.
A tiny figure perched in an armchair facing us, the light coming in behind her haloing her white head. Her smallness was, if anything, emphasized by the size and clamour of the room in which she sat.
‘Hello, Kate,’ she said.
My voice, when I spoke, sounded not at all like my own. ‘Hello, Alice.’ Perhaps I should have called her Célia. That was her new name: Alice was a person from the past. Yet that person, the one Thomas Stafford had loved, was the one I knew.
Julie moved across to her and plumped the cushion at her back, helping her to sit up in her chair. Alice was far frailer than Stafford, I saw. I couldn’t imagine how it could be that she still travelled between New York and Paris; it was hard to believe that she ever left the chair for long. She was no longer slim, as Stafford had described her, she was skeletal: delicate as a bird’s bone. For all that, her expression was alert, her gaze upon me interested and alive. How I wish I had inherited those eyes. Mine are also grey, but to leave it there is to mislead: a comparison of lead with silver. Hers had a unique luminosity, like mother-of-pearl, their brilliance undimmed by age. She was dressed immaculately, and yet there was something bohemian about her appearance – in the bright splash of the blue silk scarf about her throat, the golden bangles that clattered up her arm as she reached towards me.
I moved closer and she grasped one of my hands in both of hers, half a handshake, half a caress. Her skin was cool, as thin and dry as tissue paper.
‘So you are Kate,’ she said. ‘You are Kate, and you have come to see me, at last.’ A pause. Her eyes were travelling my face, and I felt completely exposed to that silver gaze. I fought the urge to step back, to lower my head in case she found me wanting.
‘You are like her, unmistakably, and yet I think, though it is a boast to say it, that you are even more like me. Or as I once was.’
I couldn’t speak. I looked beyond her to the table beside her. On its surface sat a pair of reading glasses, a stack of books, and a photograph. It was my mother, performing in Swan Lake. She was Odette, in that moment when she emerges from the lake a woman for the first time, no longer a swan. Mum looked as beautiful and ethereal as I had ever seen her: hardly real. I hadn’t seen that image for a long time, but it was a well-known shot. Alice must have found it somewhere and bought a print, I realized. The idea that this woman, surrounded by the otherwise richness of her life, had had to buy a photo of her own child was almost unbearable. But she had left her behind, I reminded myself. Whatever Marguerite had said, that fact was incontrovertible.
I looked back at Alice and she was studying me closely. ‘I imagine you must have much to ask me,’ she said.
‘Yes. I …’ In the end, I asked the only question that I could think of, even though it was probably too soon to ask it. It was the only question that seemed important. ‘Why did you leave my mother?’ I said. ‘I mean … I know you were young, and …’
There was a long pause, and then Alice smiled, sadly. ‘But, you see, I never did leave her.’
‘I thought—’
‘Or at least, not knowingly.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I think, perhaps, that I have rather a lot to explain.’
Julie chose that moment to enter with a pot of coffee and wafer-thin almond-studded biscuits. She poured two cups, and left the room. As we drank the silence was punctuated only by the ring of our delicate china cups on their saucers. Then Alice finished her tiny biscuit and placed her coffee carefully down before her.
‘You must understand,’ she said, suddenly, ‘I had always intended to bring her with me.’
‘That was what Mr Stafford said.’
‘Yes – because I told him as much.’
‘So how did she get left behind?’
I’d anticipated excuses that I might, perhaps, be ready to forgive, knowing that she was so young and undoubtedly so afraid. She would not be the only woman to have acted as she did. But I could not have anticipated what came next.
‘I did not know that I had left her – not in the way you think. You see, they told me that she had died.’