I FELT NERVOUS setting off to visit George Senhouse in his nursing home and unsure that I should be going to see him at all. It might be embarrassing, for him, for me. I don’t like to embarrass people, whereas Rory loves to: he does it deliberately. I tried, on the train to Brighton – I’d had enough of driving after that long journey back from Scotland – to think of what I was going to say to Mr Senhouse, but I couldn’t seem to frame questions properly. I’d done the same, I remembered, on my way to meet Gracie Monroe in Bequia and then, when I’d got there, I had forgotten what I’d decided to ask. But this was different – this encounter called for specific enquiries. I always knew Gracie would be most unlikely to be able to tell me much, that the chances of her knowing who Susannah was were minimal and the whole idea was a bit ridiculous. This time I knew for a fact that the person I was going to see had not only known Susannah but had been close to her, for a short time at least. It made the starting point easier but the questions somehow harder.
Looking out of the train window, I wondered idly why George was in a Brighton nursing home (though actually it was five miles from Brighton). He was a Cumbrian and his sister still lived in Maryport – but then I knew nothing about him. Perhaps he’d moved south long ago and settled in Brighton. But I thought of John Graham, who must be about George’s own age, and how fit and lively he had been, both physically and mentally, and I thought again how strange it was that George appeared to live permanently in a nursing home. Something must have happened to him, and realising that I began to worry that he might not be in any state to tell me anything at all. I could be going to see a man wrecked by illness, whose memory and speech were both affected.
I got a taxi at Brighton station and enjoyed the ride along the coastal road to the nursing home. The sea was rough, great grey waves smashing on the shingle sending up sheets of spray which reached over the esplanade, drenching pedestrians. I thought of the Caribbean and its beautiful blues and greens and the tenderness of the creamy lines of foam at its edges. I wondered if George’s home looked over this sullen sea and if he, too, watched it and thought of that other ocean where he had sailed with Susannah. But when we reached Downside House I saw it had no windows facing the sea. It was a couple of miles inland and in a dip, surrounded by trees. The views would be of the downs. I’d imagined an old building, perhaps a converted manor house, but it was new and looked more like a modern hotel, which was a surprise. My head, I realised, had been full of Dickensian notions of nursing homes, which had made me think of them as workhouses.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. The entrance hall was light and airy, circular in shape, with a floor tiled in pretty green-and-white patterned tiles. There was a round pine table in the centre on which there was a large jug full of yellow tulips. As soon as I walked in a woman came out of a room to the right, smiling pleasantly and asking if she could help. I’d feared a dragon – more mistaken notions, though this one had been encouraged by the curtness of the woman who’d answered the phone when I made that first call. I said I’d come to visit George Senhouse and had checked that I could two days ago. She nodded and said he might not be back in his own room yet, he might still be finishing lunch in the dining-room, but she would take me along. I felt desperate to be forewarned of his condition, so as I accompanied her down a corridor leading off the hall, I asked how he was. ‘Just the same,’ she said. There seemed no point in pretending I knew what that meant, so I confessed I had no idea and asked point-blank, ‘Why is he in here?’
She knew it was odd, of course, that any visitor should have to ask what was wrong with the patient they were visiting, but she expressed no surprise and didn’t seem in the least suspicious of me. She told me George had had a serious accident several years ago in which he’d damaged his right arm so badly it was useless. The accident had been at sea, but she didn’t know the details. The reason he was living here, though, wasn’t because of what the accident had done to him but because soon after it he had had a stroke which left him paralysed on his right side. The paralysis had lifted partially, but his speech was still very indistinct and he was too incapacitated to live on his own. His wife had died long before all this happened and though he had two sons, both married, they lived abroad. ‘He gets very depressed,’ she finished. ‘He doesn’t get many visitors, so he’ll be delighted to see you.’
By this time she’d reached George’s room and led me into it. As she’d predicted, he wasn’t there, but she said he’d be back from lunch soon and I should make myself at home. I was glad when she left me, needing time to adjust to everything she’d told me. Clearly, this man wasn’t going to be anything like the healthy John Graham, and if his speech was impaired the chances of any kind of fruitful conversation were poor. This was all going to be a waste of time and I chided myself for not having checked up on George’s condition before ever I came. I stood hesitantly in the middle of the room, wishing I could run away without being seen, but I felt I was trapped. George would by now have been told of my arrival and common decency demanded I should stay for at least a few minutes. Uneasily, I paced about the room, noting how comfortably it was furnished. I thought probably the furniture was his own – it didn’t look institutional. There were a couple of armchairs covered in a rose-strewn chintz and a footstool with an embroidered top, and a small walnut desk, all of which looked somehow personal items. The room was L-shaped and in the smaller part there was a bed with a table beside it. I looked at the framed photographs on it, and on the window ledge. There was George, I presumed, on his wedding day. His bride looked haughty and stared defiantly at the camera with an air of refusing to smile. George wasn’t smiling either. He was very handsome, tall and athletic-looking. I thought of Susannah and felt a funny sort of flutter in my stomach.
There were no more photographs of his wife, but there were several of children I took to be his sons. They were all taken on boats and in these George was smiling and looking supremely contented with a son on either side. The last frame I peered at was the most recent of these photographs. It was of one of the sons’ wedding. George had aged well, very well. This event had obviously been before the accident and stroke because he looked so fit, still quite the sporting hero John Graham had described. His hair was white but there was lots of it and his face was more attractively weather-beaten than wrinkled. I’d picked the photograph up to study it more closely when I heard voices and the sound of what I guessed was a wheelchair being pushed, its wheels squeaking slightly on the floor. I put the photograph down hurriedly and turned to face the door. It was a shock to confront the man being wheeled in. I would never have recognised him from the photographs I’d just been scrutinising. Anyone, sitting in a wheelchair and recovering from a stroke would look different, of course, but the contrast was violent. Here was a once tall, powerful-looking man now so shrunken and thin that he appeared lost in his clothes and the skin of his face too loose for its size – it literally hung over the prominent cheekbones. Only his hair was the same, thick and plentiful, but even that told against him, because it was now much too luxuriant for the wasted face.
‘There we are, George,’ the young woman, who’d wheeled him in, said. ‘Here’s the visitor we heard about. Isn’t that nice? Now, are you going to get yourself into your armchair or do you want help?’
George ignored her. He was staring at me and frowning. I felt myself blushing, the heat rushing through me together with an obscure sense of guilt. Remembering that George was said to have difficulty speaking, and not wanting him to struggle to ask who on earth I was and what did I want, I said quickly, ‘Mr Senhouse, you don’t know me, but my name is Catherine Musgrave and I’m the daughter of someone you knew a long time ago. I’m Susannah Cameron’s daughter – maybe you remember her?’ Instantly, his expression changed. The frown lifted and he gave a little grunt. The nurse, who was still patiently waiting, said again, ‘Do you want a hand, George, then?’ and he shook his head and gestured, rather rudely I thought, for her to go. Then he put the brake on the wheelchair and began slowly to lever himself up, using his left hand only. It was painful to watch as he strained first to stand up, then to walk to an armchair, but finally he managed the two or three steps and sat down. ‘Sit down,’ he said to me, nodding at the other chair. To my relief the two words were enunciated perfectly.
We faced each other at a distance of a mere foot or so. I tried to smile and keep very still, realising he wanted time to inspect me. I knew he was checking off my features one by one and comparing them with Susannah’s, the way people who’d known her always did before delivering the inevitable verdict that I was not a bit like her. I waited for this, but George surprised me. He nodded and seemed to relax a little, or maybe he was simply making himself more comfortable in his chair. He took a deep breath, paused as though exerting some kind of control, or following an exercise he’d been taught and had to struggle to master, and then he said, ‘A look of her,’ and nodded again. I felt absurdly pleased and relieved.
‘People don’t usually tell me that,’ I said, smiling and realising that for the first time in my life I was happy to be told I had anything of Susannah about me. ‘They all say how unlike her I am –’
‘Not like,’ he interrupted, ‘look of her. Different.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Strong face,’ he said. ‘Same express –’
But he couldn’t manage the whole word ‘expression’ and it frustrated him. He tried again and I jumped in to say it for him, though worried that this was the wrong and tactless thing to do, but he accepted it. He looked so tired, with the effort of speaking, that I thought I should talk and answer those questions I felt he was bound to have but which he wasn’t able to ask without exhausting difficulty.
‘Mr Senhouse,’ I said, ‘you’ll want to know why I’ve come to see you like this, so suddenly, out of the blue.’ He nodded. ‘Well, my mother died when I was six months old …’
‘Heart?’ he asked.
I said yes, registering that this meant he had known about Susannah’s condition. He’d known and still taken her on that daring sailing trip all the way to the Caribbean. ‘You knew about her heart, then?’ I asked, and again he nodded. ‘And yet you took her with you to Bequia, sailing all the way to the West Indies?’ I tried not to sound critical but instead to suggest admiration.
‘She was –’ and the word sounded like ‘trimmed’. I guessed ‘determined’ quickly, and that was right. This was awful, I was subjecting him to such an ordeal, and I hurried on explaining the reason for my visit, passing over the memory box without listing its other contents and merely focusing on the address book and how curious I’d been about the addresses in it, which had led me first to Bequia and then to the Grahams and finally to him. ‘So really’, I finished, ‘I just wanted it confirmed that Susannah actually did sail to Bequia and that it was with you.’
He smiled and lifting his head up and stretching his neck back he said, ‘Wonderful, it was wonderful!’ Every word came out perfectly and he was so delighted he repeated ‘wonderful’ several times. I saw, as he went on beaming at me, that the right-hand side of his face didn’t smile like the left but was frozen, yet it was possible to glimpse what a great, generous smile he had once had. I was about to ask him about the cabin which I’d never been able to find, when he pointed to a chest of drawers in the corner of the room. ‘In top drawer,’ he said, slurring the words badly after his triumph with the previous ones, but I was still able to understand first time. ‘You want me to get something in the top drawer?’ He nodded, looking eager and even excited. I opened the drawer. It was full of photograph albums, a dozen or so of them arranged in two layers in the wide, deep drawer. ‘Dates,’ he said. I saw each album had a label with a year’s date on it. He had terrible trouble trying to tell me the date he wanted but finally I identified 1956.
I brought the correct album over to him and put it on his knee. It was a large, oblong album and on its cover was a small photograph of a boat under which the date was printed. Slowly, after gesturing that I was to stand and look over his shoulder, he turned the pages. There was no need for any commentary. Susannah and he were in every photograph, sometimes in a group, sometimes just the two of them. They always had their arms round each other and they were almost always laughing. Or kissing. They were both tanned and their hair bleached with the sun. They wore shorts or bathing costumes, Susannah’s a bright pink. I didn’t need to ask if they had been lovers – it was all so obvious. There were no photographs that I knew of which showed my father and Susannah looking as this couple in Bequia did. George came to the end of his album and stopped at the last photograph. I recognised where it had been taken – it was high up on the hill where Gracie Monroe lived. George and Susannah were facing each other, arms entwined round each other’s waists, her face slightly uplifted, his slightly lowered, so that they were looking into each other’s eyes. We both stared at this photograph for a long time, as though paying it our respects.
Finally, George closed the album. I sat down facing him again. His expression was odd. I couldn’t decide whether I should understand by it that he felt he had made some sort of statement by showing me the album and was waiting for a response, or whether it was telling me there was nothing more to say. I settled for feeling he wanted me to react. ‘So you and Susannah were lovers?’ I asked. He laughed and raised both his hands in what looked like exasperation at my idiocy – of course they were lovers. ‘So what happened?’ I said. ‘Why did she marry my father? Why were you kept a secret?’ He stopped laughing and sighed and picked up a notepad and pencil lying on the table beside him. He wrote something with his left hand, laboriously, and showed it to me. It said, ‘Is your father dead too?’ I said yes. This seemed to relieve him, and he began to write some more. I watched as he covered three sheets of paper, writing excruciatingly slowly, wishing so desperately that he could talk easily to me and tell me in minute detail all about his relationship with Susannah. He’d obviously been right-handed and writing with his left was almost as hard for him as trying to speak coherently. I felt I was asking far too much of him and that my very presence and my questions were a cruel intrusion on his memories. I really wasn’t entitled to put him through this.
But he looked calm enough after he’d read through what he’d written and handed it to me. I read it myself, twice, and said, ‘Thank you,’ and folded the sheets of paper carefully and put them in my bag. I stayed another half-hour, telling him everything I could think of about Susannah’s subsequent life after she married my father. I wasn’t sure how much he would know – it wasn’t clear from what he’d written if they’d severed all contact and completely dropped out of sight of each other, or whether perhaps mutual acquaintances might have kept them informed of each other’s lives. I told him properly about the memory box now, saying I was sure its purpose was to tell me things no one else would or could, and that I felt some sort of written explanation was probably intended but never got made and so I was left with a puzzle and he was a part of it. I said I was sure he had been of vital importance to her, and the trip to Bequia the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her. It had been her great adventure, he had been her great romance. And I said that what I had just learned from him, from what he had written down, linked me to Susannah more securely than anything could ever have done.
Before I left, as tea was brought in, I said I would come again. I meant it. I had no intention of getting what I wanted out of George Senhouse then abandoning him. We shook hands and, on impulse, I bent down and kissed him, and he gripped my hand tightly and seemed touched. On the way out, I walked down the corridor with the woman who had first shown me in and took the opportunity to ask some more about George. She’d said he didn’t get many visitors and I wondered why he hadn’t moved to be near his sister. She said he’d been living in America before his accident, for years and years, she thought, and when it happened he was taken to hospital in Brighton. He’d only been in this country on holiday and had no residence here except for a cottage somewhere on this coast. Once the accident was followed by the stroke he was in no fit state to return to America and it was his sons who had made the decision about this nursing home. She didn’t know if he would have preferred to be in the north or not.
It seemed such a sad way to end his days. All the way back on the train I was thinking about George and wondering how I could fill in the gaps in his story. I thought it would be easy enough to get his sons’ addresses and write to them, or even to go and see his sister in Maryport, who would have all the history, but somehow I doubted if I ever would. That part of his history which concerned me most I now knew. I took out what he had written and smoothed the sheets out. Already I almost knew the words by heart. If only Susannah had told this tale in her words how much more they would have meant than poor George’s stumbling sentences all these years later. And yet he’d managed to give me the essential facts from which I could construe the rest, or fancied I could. It was an ordinary enough story after all, and it was quite easy to fill in the detail for myself. When they returned from Bequia by air, after selling the boat, Susannah believed herself to be pregnant. She was distraught at how her career would be ruined before it had begun – she would have to drop out of university – and at the thought of her mother’s distress, but never for one moment did she think of trying to get rid of the baby. He wanted to marry her anyway and was secretly glad that her pregnancy would force her to marry him then and not make him wait three years until she’d finished her degree. They agreed to marry at a register office and tell no one until it was over. And then, the morning of the day they were to be married, Susannah found she wasn’t pregnant after all. She refused to marry him, saying marriage was no longer necessary. He was furious. He hadn’t thought theirs was to be a marriage of mere convenience. They quarrelled. He was so upset and disappointed he said things he later regretted and he thought maybe she did too. At any rate, there was a lot of shouting and she left his room saying she never wanted to see him again. He never for one moment believed she really meant it, but was too proud and angry to go after her and she never phoned or wrote to him. He kept expecting to hear from her but never did. He knew he should go to her but he was hurt and felt humiliated, and he didn’t. Then he left to go to America to do a business course. She’d known he was going and he kept expecting that, as the date for his departure drew near, they would somehow make it up. But they didn’t. He left and was away a year. He did write then, but got no reply and wasn’t even sure she’d got his letter. When he came back she wasn’t at her home but on holiday ‘with friends’, her mother said. He thought John Graham might be one of these friends and contacted him, but he didn’t know where she was or who with. George went back to America to start a job and met and married Celia.
All this was written down in short, choppy sentences, betraying little emotion except for the last line. ‘We threw it away,’ he’d written. ‘My fault. Regretted it ever since.’ I supposed ‘it’ meant true love, or something similar. Clearly, George didn’t feel he’d found it again with Celia. Susannah had been luckier. She’d found my father and he was perfect for her, or so everyone had said: they were love’s young dream. Well, my grandmother had said so, but then what, after all, had she known? She hadn’t known about George Senhouse for a start, nor where her daughter really was when she’d said she would be working in America at a camp during the vacation. (George had told me about this subterfuge when I’d asked him how on earth Susannah had managed to conceal the Bequia jaunt from her mother.) Susannah, it turned out, had been incredibly devious and cunning and I’d reached the stage of beginning to question every single thing I’d been told about her. But, as I’d said to George, I’d also reached the stage of seeing myself in her more truly than I had ever done. She made mistakes. She loved George but she wasn’t prepared to marry him just to prove she did. She expected him to think as she did and when he didn’t she was sure he would in the end. All she had to do was leave and he would follow. He was in the wrong and she was not.
But did she love my father, in time, later, just as much? Was the bust-up with George a blessing in disguise? Back to questions again, of the maddening variety that no one could answer. Maybe Susannah had been luckier than George, but even if my father had still been alive, I doubt if he could have completely convinced me on that score. He wouldn’t know how he compared with a former lover she may never have mentioned to him. But of course he did make her pregnant and gave her me and made her happy in a way George had not, so she was luckier in the end. Except George had had children too – oh, it was too confusing, and too pointless, trying to sort out what I thought, how Susannah came out of all this. I longed to talk about it with someone clear-headed who would be able to assess all this in a way I could not and point out the real significance of what George had told me. Tony could do it. He’d enjoy the challenge. But he was ill and ought not to be bothered with my problems. His own were far more serious and pressing – how could he be expected to care about a muddle that had happened so far in the past? I shouldn’t even mention any of this to such a sick man.
But I did. The next time I went to see him Tony was out of intensive care and in a side room of his own. He was awake, his eyes were fully open, and he was propped up on his pillows. The tubes had gone, but not the bandages, and though he looked awful he was alert. He didn’t smile when he recognised me but instead made a grimace I remembered so well, a mock-mournful pulling down of the lips and a raising of the eyebrows which was meant to convey everything being too much for him. I couldn’t help but smile myself and kiss him, lightly, gently, on the side of his face. ‘Well,’ he said, his voice croaky and not like his at all, ‘surprise.’ I said I didn’t know why he was surprised, I’d left a note saying I’d come again, hadn’t I? Then I asked not how he was feeling but where it hurt, and he groaned and said everywhere, but that the damage wasn’t as bad as first thought. He’d had his spleen removed, and some of his ribs were broken, others cracked, but the main worry was his head. He’d had an operation ‘to clean something up’, as they’d put it, and now he was supposed to be all right, his brain wasn’t after all injured, ‘or not much’. But every bloody movement was agony and he had no energy. And the worst part was not the pain but lying thinking all the time of how the accident had been all his own stupid fault.
I’d thought that the last thing he would want to do would be to tell me what had happened, and I’d certainly had no plans to ask, but it seemed he desperately needed to go over it all. He insisted he’d been entirely responsible for the collision with the lorry. He’d misjudged the distance when turning from a side road into a main road and failed to estimate the speed of this approaching lorry. It was so unlike him – he was such a good and careful driver, as I knew – and he couldn’t credit he’d made such an error of judgement. The only consolation was that no one else was hurt.
‘Don’t think about it,’ I said. ‘It won’t help, brooding about what’s over. I know, I know, it’s stating the obvious, but that’s because it’s true.’
‘Can’t help it,’ he said. ‘My head’s full of it. I’ve nothing else to think about.’
So that was why I told him about my visit to George Senhouse and then, of course, to make sense of this had to work backwards to the finding of the memory box. I was afraid of tiring him, but he seemed to love the distraction and it was only towards the end of my little account that his eyes began to close. He struggled to stay awake but I squeezed his hand and said I must go, and when he said, ‘But you’ll come again?’ I said yes; it was impossible to refuse. I visited him three times that week and saw him get just a little stronger each day. He was able to concentrate more and though our conversation was full of pauses, when he drifted off occasionally, it became increasingly personal. I knew how dangerous the situation was becoming. Tony was growing more and more convinced, I could see, that my visits and concern for him meant we might get together again. There was an edge to his voice when he talked about Susannah and George, going over what I’d told him about what had gone wrong between them. ‘Poor George,’ he said. ‘I can imagine how he felt.’
‘He should have gone after her,’ I said. ‘He was to blame too.’ I knew what was coming as soon as the words were out of my mouth. But Tony didn’t say what I’d thought he would say, not then. He was silent, and we passed on to trivialities, as we very often did.
The next week, I arrived one day to find him out of bed, sitting beside it looking exhausted and frail but pleased with himself. He said he’d been told that in another couple of weeks, if he maintained this progress, he could go home. I didn’t ask if ‘home’ would mean his parents’ home. I didn’t want to think about his discharge at all. How could I say that when he was better I’d stop seeing him? I couldn’t, and anyway I didn’t know that I wanted to. I didn’t know any more how I felt about him. What I’d been feeling since I heard of his accident was, I reasoned, just common-or-garden sympathy, the sort anyone would feel for someone they’d once been close to. Sympathy, pure and simple. But it wasn’t either pure or simple. It wasn’t only sympathy I felt now but some of the old attraction that had once drawn me to him. Not physical attraction but some sort of emotional tie. I realised I had missed him and that my misery over my parents’ deaths had obscured how much. I’d missed his company. All the things that had grown to irritate me about him seemed suddenly of no importance. We might clash in personality, but that very clashing had fired something in me and without it I’d become deadened.
‘Remind me,’ he said one day, the day he actually walked to the end of the corridor with me, ‘remind me what happened. I’ve forgotten, honestly. Why did we split up? Remind me.’ I said nothing. We were at the lift and I prayed for it to come quickly. All my normal sharpness deserted me. ‘Come on,’ he urged. ‘What did I do, or not do? What happened to us? All I can remember is the shock of it.’
‘Nothing happened,’ I said. ‘It was me. I didn’t want anyone near me. I was in a state.’
‘And I couldn’t help.’
‘Nobody could. I just wanted to be by myself, to be miserable on my own, sort myself out.’
‘So are you sorted?’
‘A bit.’
‘And you’re happier on your own? Happy?’
‘Not exactly happy, but better. I’m not so messed up.’
‘No, that’s me now, the messed-up one.’
‘But that’s because of the accident. You’ll soon be back to normal and …’
‘Will I? Well, I don’t seem to want to be. What’s the point?’
The lift came. I kissed him and got into it, so relieved. He’d looked as though he might start to cry and I couldn’t bear it. The only way to cure his distress would be to suggest that we might live together again and I didn’t want to say that, not yet, not while he was still far from well. I wanted to wait and see how things went once he was out of hospital and back at work. I knew that by thinking this I was admitting I would see him once he was discharged, but that had become inevitable. He was the one who had refused just to be friends. If he thought that by constantly visiting him I was saying I wanted to be more than friends again I couldn’t help it. I would have to make him accept that friendship must come first and there could be no guarantees about the future beyond that. I did want him back in my life, that was all.
It was odd how comforting it was to acknowledge that and how happy it made me feel, whatever the problems ahead.