‘So how did you find out about Mum?’ I asked Alice. ‘How did you discover that she didn’t die, after all?’
‘I went to see my mother when I learned that she was very unwell. She had suffered a gradual mental breakdown – no doubt brought on by the continuing shame over my stepfather’s fall from grace. For someone with such a fear of scandal, I am sure she’d had rather a hard time of it. There was money, but the humiliation would have been terrible for her.
‘I hadn’t had any contact with her for twenty years. I read about her illness in a newspaper, if you can believe it. I’m not sure exactly why I decided I had to go, but I know I would not have forgiven myself if I hadn’t.
‘She was completely changed from the woman I had known. Meek, fearful – a rather pathetic figure. Perhaps it was a result of the illness, or simply of the scandal that had caused it in the first place, but it seemed that she now questioned all that she had been certain of before. But she was so altered that, when she told me, it was as though she were speaking of the actions of another. My anger with her felt thwarted. I knew then that I had to try to free myself from it, or I would carry it for life. I had learned that much from experience.
‘I was forty-one years old when I learned the truth, and your mother was by then almost the same age as I’d been when I had her.’
Julie entered with a tray bearing lunch, and I was amazed to discover that more than two hours had slipped by without my noticing. The spread was almost preposterously British: the sandwiches were cucumber, the crusts neatly excised. It was a translation of English custom from across the water and from an earlier time, unweathered by exposure to the customs of modern Britain. There was lemonade, too, in a cut-glass pitcher. We were silent as we ate. I was too stunned by what Alice had told me to think of anything to say. Of all the things I had imagined I would never have expected that.
Alice picked her way through two tiny triangles, and swallowed as much of the lemonade as a bird might drink of water from a leaf. When she was finished, she passed a hand in front of her eyes and seemed to sink further into the chair, as though the effort had sapped her last reserves of strength.
‘I’ll go,’ I said, standing. ‘I can see that you’re exhausted.’
She made no attempt to deny it, but said, ‘I am so lucky that you have come to find me, Kate. I have always hoped that, by some miracle, your mother might turn up at my door, and then, when you were born, that you would, too. That I might get that one chance to meet you. I never allowed myself to believe it would happen though.’
‘I’m glad too,’ I told her, conscious of a tightness in my chest, trying not to think about the fact that only half of her wish had come true.
‘You’ll come back?’ she asked, a little querulously. ‘Tomorrow?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Good. I will look forward to it so much,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’
‘For what?’
‘For not judging too harshly, when you didn’t know the truth. For giving me the chance to redeem myself.’
I felt guilt then, sharp and sour, because I had judged her harshly, because I had been unable to stop myself from believing the worst.
‘When you come tomorrow,’ she said, ‘I think we should go for a walk. What do you say?’
I couldn’t help glancing down at her legs, which seemed frail and misshapen inside her loose trousers, but I nodded, all the same.
She gestured towards the park. ‘Let’s meet by the boating lake. Do you know the one?’
I started to shake my head, but something surfaced from the depths of memory: eating ice cream from a glass flute with a silver spoon, watching through the windows as the gliding triangles of colour moved like shapes dancing in a kaleidoscope. It wasn’t the boating pond in Battersea Park, I knew, nor that one in the Tuileries where Mum and I had drunk hot chocolate together from Styrofoam cups. It must, I decided, have been Central Park, that first time we’d visited the city – the time I’d believed beyond memory. So I nodded. ‘I think I do,’ I said.
I wandered back to my hotel, trying to reconcile the person I had come to know via Stafford – that girl so full of youth and vigour – with the old woman I had met. Stafford’s recollections had so captivated me that I had failed to consider the changes that the passing of time would have wrought, ageing her almost beyond recognition from that figure in the sketch. The sleek black hair faded to bone white, the supple lines of her frame diminished to brittleness.
To see her there in her chair, so small and frail, had been a great shock. Nevertheless, once she had started talking, this had lessened, because it was evident that there was immense strength in her still. Her voice was not an old woman’s, weak and tremulous, but deep and clear – like those silver eyes, it had not aged with the rest of her.