Women’s Prison, Arue. April, 1990
A NOTE IS ALL I HAVE FROM YOU. I think of it as yours despite the formal stationery and wary tone: We have recently been contacted by a young lady whose particulars appear to match your own. It found me here just before Christmas—a few weeks after my arrest.
I’d left my name with the contact agency several years ago, long enough to grow discouraged and then push discouragement to the back of my mind. So your note was a shock, though I’d invited it—a shock followed by relief and joy. You were alive! You wanted us to find each other. You weren’t hiding, weren’t exacting a sullen revenge that might last until I died.
Particulars. They mean dates, ages, numbers on certificates. These aren’t always reliable in our family, as I shall tell. But there can be no mistake; only your particulars could possibly “appear” to match my own. This young lady is you. And this older one is me, who gave you life at sixteen, and gave you away.
• • •
Who are you now? And how and what and where? I’m brimming with questions. I’m ready for the best, the worst, the in-between. Like most of us you’re probably in between. And twenty-two is so damn young, but for the first time in your life you’re feeling old. You’re thinking of endings and beginnings, which is why you’ve begun to look for me. But maybe you haven’t yet made up your mind you’ll even see me. So I’ll go first: Olivia Wyvern, Cell 15. Your mother.
There’s this tiresome obstacle to our reunion: I’m imprisoned on the far side of the world (assuming you’re still in Britain). It’s not a bad jail. How many have palm trees in the yard, French bread, an ocean view? And a good friend is moving heaven and earth to get me out of it. My government—I’m a Canadian now—is sympathetic. The consul here is on my side. Ottawa is asking questions about the charge, the so-called evidence. People are beginning to see that.… been framed.
It can’t be easy finding your mother after all these years, only to learn she stands accused of murder—well, for complice, which means “accessory.” But truly there was no murder. Or if there was it had nothing to do with me. I was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
She would say that, wouldn’t she? Will you allow me the presumption of innocence, which is more than I’ve had from the Napoleonic Code? (Tahitis a French colony.) I am not guilty. But I do plead guilty to a charge concerning you: I threw away the life we might have lived together. No law sets penalties for that; it was a crime of the will and the heart. Both you the innocent and I the guilty have served over twenty years for it.
• • •
The people in London who matched our particulars have also offered advice on how to proceed. Phone calls out of the blue are not recommended. Start with a letter, they say—enclose photos, snippets of hair, take your time. Phone calls and meetings will come later. Phoning is difficult here, anyway, and a meeting out of the question. But I have plenty of time. So this is a long letter to prepare you for the next step, if and when.
Already I’ve a lot to thank you for. Without your note I might still be stewing in the bath of outrage, fear, and hate in which I fell at my arrest. You’ve kept me busy writing this since January. They let me spend four hours a day in the library. The light’s good in the morning, a breeze comes through the bars, mynah birds squabble in the palms, and it’s the only room without a reek of sewer. This place is so French: good food, bad drains. The washbasin in my cell is a mixed blessing—no plug or trap to keep down smells and cockroaches. Until Pua showed me the remedy (chewing gum and a coin), I thought I might be gassed in my sleep or nibbled raw. Tahitian roaches are as big as mice and they go for the dead skin on your feet.
I don’t mean to make too much of these discomforts. My hotel in Papeete was much the same, at ninety dollars a night. In French Polynesia they know how to let off nuclear weapons but they’ve never grasped the rudiments of plumbing.
I know I should start with I love you. But how can I say that without it ringing false, the sudden intimacy of salesmen and seducers? Were strangers, you and I, despite our blood. I don’t even know your name. And I may as well tell you straight that I’ve never been very good at love, though I am working on it. Often I think love stalled in me the day you went away.
So this won’t be that kind of letter. What I can give you, for now, is my story. And in return I hope someday you’ll give me yours. I’ll try to stick to the point, though it doesn’t come easily—my minds a sackful of cats and they’re all clawing their way out at once. Be patient while I let them go in an order that makes sense, at least to me. Mine isn’t the usual tale of a girlish mistake with a pimply boy in the bicycle shed. This stretches across a hundred years and half the world. I’ll start with me, but you must hear from Frank Henderson too. I’m enclosing copies of his papers. More than a century ago, when he was about your age, he sailed to the South Seas aboard a warship. It’s ultimately because of him that I’m here now.
We seem to be a family of writers—diarists, memoirists—the kind with secrets to dribble onto paper and hoard away. For whom, I wonder. For posterity? Or as a form of exorcism? Of course you may decide, after reading what I have to say, that you want nothing to do with me. How far can we go with genes; do they call to one another like the deeps? Damn the genes, let me choose my friends, and to hell with blood relations. I can hear myself saying something like that in your position. That’s your right, and if it’s your choice I’ll respect it. But if ever you change your mind, know that I’ll never hide from you again.
I was kept in the dark all my life, until after my mother died. You musn’t wait that long. I thought I knew my past but didn’t, and this ignorance is half to blame for many things. Hear me out and at least you’ll be able to make an informed decision after learning what I’ve learnt, much of it just recently, about who we are. Knowing is in our power. And knowing may kindle love, which is not.
In the beginning we were four: my parents, my sister Lottie, and me. Soon we became three, when Jon, my father, failed to come home from the Korean War. He was a pilot in the RAF, until then a brave and lucky one who’d flown against Hitler long before Lottie and I were born. We’ve always called him Jon, perhaps because Mother did, or because Daddy wouldn’t do for a father who was … missing. We were a family of three women for so many years that it seemed to us (though never to our mother) the natural order of things, an order without men.
I didn’t leave home until my twenties, but once I did I kept going—from England to Canada, a land where pasts are easily forgotten. I’ve settled in the west, on the coast of British Columbia, where I make a living making films. Nothing grand. You won’t see my name in lights, though you might spot me now and then if you look at documentary credits. This too, for all its precariousness, had become an order of its own.
Then Mother died.
One day she’d been perfectly well, a sprightly sixty-seven who walked an hour in the park every day, rain or shine; the next she was dead. Cardiac arrest, possibly induced by chronic stress. Lottie’s voice in tears from London, in the middle of a wet Vancouver night two years ago. I was in England the next day, the phone ringing with distant relations. And the worst of it was that we could hardly bring ourselves to tell anyone—except her closest friends, who knew how she lived—exactly what had killed her. How can you tell people that your mother died over a parrot?
Soon after I was born our father had brought home an African grey, rescued impulsively from a pet shop window, a “good talker” who uttered nothing but parrotish clicks, warbles, and rending shrieks. He named this bird Lord Jim, and told Mother it’d be no bother at all—it would learn to speak at the same time I did, and would keep her company whenever he was away.
Jim was a quick study. Soon he could chime like the doorbell and sing snatches of aria complete with the records hiss. He did a faultless imitation of Mothers telephone hello, terrified the red setter next door by barking back verbatim, mastered the clank and whoosh of the downstairs 100. His command of the noises made by babies and toddlers in distress drove Mother up the wall. Many was the time she woke in panic, ran to Lottie or me, to find us blissfully sleeping and not a peep from the wily bird under his velvet cloth. Many was the time, she told us, that she sent Jon off to his squadron with Don’t expect to find that bloody parrot here when you get back.
But Jim also learnt a great many things from our father, besides the usual jokes: Jon’s catch of breath as he dozed off after lunch, his RAF expressions, the Lord! Who’s that? he’d exclaim when someone knocked at the front door, and a squeak the stairs made under his weight only.
For all this Mother grew to love Lord Jim.
The bird was accustomed to our father’s comings and goings, his long absences and sudden returns, but he knew something dreadful had happened when that telegram came in 1953. July 20th. One week before the Korean armistice.
Ministry of Defence <STOP> To Mrs. J. B. Wyvern, 84 Tilehouse Street, Hitchin, Herts. Regret to inform you <STOP> Group Captain Jonathan Barkley Wyvern reported missing over Yalu <STOP> Plane and parachute not located <STOP> Details to follow soonest.
No details ever did.
The parrot went silent, refused food, began to moult. He plucked out his remaining feathers until he was bald everywhere except the back of his head—a revolting sight, raw and primaeval like an embryo dinosaur.
When we’d got over our own grief enough to deal with Jim’s we tried tempting him with favourite morsels—pistachio nuts, dried apricots, brandy-soaked croutons (Jon used to get him sloshed). The parrot wouldn’t even leave his cage, and when Lottie put her hand in he bit her finger so hard that she had to have stitches and a tiny cast. Had Mother been herself, Lord Jim might have met his end that day, but she said she couldn’t face another loss. The bird was given one more chance, and seemed to understand he’d done something unforgivable but had been spared. Slowly he began to eat. A downy coat of grey sprouted on his nakedness. And a few weeks later she heard him say, Lord! Who’s that?
Jim learnt nothing new after 1953. Television, when it came, made no impression. Other parrots picked up the I Love Lucy theme, or the William Tell overture (which only a true high-brow can hear without thinking of the Lone Ranger). But not Jim. In the sixties he ignored the Kinks, Janis Joplin, the Singing Nun—all the records Lottie and I played to destruction. But neither did he lose the things he had, especially our fathers voice and personal sounds. More than thirty years after he’d last heard it, Lord Jim could reproduce Jon’s sudden snore so faithfully that Mother, absorbed in knitting or a crossword, would start from her chair with a terrible little cry.
To Lottie and me the parrot was a veteran of the heroic age of our fathers photos, his uniforms, his old motorbike outside. To Mother he was an archive of her husband, a medium who could raise his presence at the fireside, his tread on the stairs.
One May morning two years ago, Mother found Lord Jim dead among the nut shells on the floor of his cage. We’d known the day would come (the bird must have been at least forty, perhaps much more) but neither Lottie nor I had foreseen what his death might do to her. After we’d left home—Lottie at seventeen, to model and act in London; I for Canada—he was the only living creature who could bridge the years between Jon’s life and Mothers. All the frail hopes that Jim’s cracked incantatory voice had nourished for thirty-five years died with him. A tide of silence, swollen by the greater silence she’d denied, welled up in the house, drowning the past.
Our response as daughters was inadequate, and arguably fatal. I, finishing production of a CBC special, sent flowers. Lottie came down and stayed for a few nights, but had to go back to her Rosalind (a critical success) at the Haymarket.
Mother died ten days after Lord Jim.
The importance that had kept us away dissolved immediately in grief. I was on the next plane to London, walking in the front door, into Lottie’s arms, to an island in time I had thought would last forever. Through all the years I’d lived in Canada, Mother had been kept from time and change, no matter what I saw on visits home. Whenever I came over for Christmas or a summer break I re-entered a childhood landscape, seeing her and her house not as they really were but as they’d always been.
Now that she was dead I felt her not as an external presence watching me or flitting from the corner of my eye—nor as an absence, like Jon—but within me, looking through my eyes, guiding my hands and footsteps, her words and intonation falling from my lips. I’d walk into the garden, feel sunlight on my face, and know that the dead don’t go away, they live inside us. The dead make us alive. I rejoiced in being possessed by her, resolving not to let the texture of the world wear smooth again, or Mother’s spirit separate from mine.
Tilehouse Street was the home of the Wyverns, and before them the Henderson’s, for nearly two hundred years. For us it was a women’s house full of men’s things—things from a lost world of empire and unreconstructed manhood. A dinner-gong hung from a tusk mounted on the back of a wooden elephant with a missing ear. A forbidden cupboard under the stairs held shotguns, fishing rods, an array of lures and flies with faintly risqué names: Pink Ladies, Royal Coachmen, Woolly Buggers, a Nympho. Dragons guarded our underwear in Burmese lacquer chests. And in the drawing-room, ranged above the mantel mirror, was a great spear more than twice the length of a man.
“Oh that,” Mother would say crisply to visitors. “That’s an assegai, you know.”
Sometimes she’d add that it had been there a century, ever since Henderson came back from Africa where he’d lost an eye in some native war and won a medal from Queen Victoria which was somewhere in a box. As a child I never wondered how she knew the thing was specifically an assegai, beyond asking what an “assy guy” might be. “That’s what they call a spear in Africa, darling.”
“Can we take it down so I can hold it?”
“No, Livvy. It’s not a toy. Spears are dangerous. Anyway, it’s much too heavy.”
“Have you held it, Mum?”
“No, dear, I haven’t. And I don’t intend to.”
“So how do you know it’s too heavy?”
“Olivia!”
The spear was never taken down, not even when painters came to exorcise the ghosts imprinted by smoke and time on the plaster round the fireplace. They wrapped it in paper and dabbed their brushes expertly behind. I remember climbing their freckled ladder for a look (I must have been eleven or twelve), noticing for the first time that the blade, shaft, and a small pommel at the base were made from a single piece of wood. The spear seemed to belong to a place or time where metals were unknown. Yet there was nothing primitive about the thing; it was as finely worked and polished as a piece of furniture, the mere look of it conveying poise, authority.
The ghosts hid for a summer beneath pale green, resuming their haunts when winter rain trickled down the flue. My sister and I were glad to see them back. They had names: the Dark Lady, a triangular silhouette we knew to be a woman in a cloak; above her the Man in the Moon, a round stain the size of a dinner plate which, in the last of day, before curtains were drawn and lights switched on, was a mottled face. Lower down were two sinuous forms we named the Lizard Twins. Lottie, who is two years older, used to say the Lizard Twins were trying to scamper up the Lady’s skirt. When she turned thirteen she got a knowing look and pointed at some small spots (hitherto identified as lizard turds) and said she thought they must be the Dark Lady’s Curse. This was overheard by Mother, who called her out of the room. A day later, by the iron warmth of the kitchen stove with its smell of old roasts and fuel-oil, my mother appalled me with the facts of life.
The most recent male things, our father’s, were mainly photographs he’d taken in two wars: young men on windscoured airfields, brave grins behind goggles and leather, white scarves flowing like contrails from their necks; the ruins of Berlin and Hamburg, smoking silhouettes at dawn; Oriental temples in strange gardens of raked gravel and big stones. He was good, very good—I can see that now—though as a child I merely gazed at these images for hours in fascination, absorbing something of him there. His ruins have a jagged grandeur, his airfields (always a difficult subject) are balanced foreground and horizon, detail and distance—a radial engine like a metal sunflower, a dark propeller against a mare’s-tail sky, fatigue and fear behind brave smiles.
And Jon himself: as a boy at the seaside, in his RAF uniform, astride his motorbike, outside a country pub with his wife (impossible to think of her as Mother). Now that I’m in my thirties, he looks so young and handsome, a stranger who is and is not my father. How old do you have to be before you can see your parents as young people, glowing with reckless love?
Downstairs were his books. A lot about planes and engineering, also Greene, Conrad, T.E. Lawrence, Greek plays, Romantic poets. His Leica in a brown leather case. A shelf of 78s. A wireless-set with faraway cities etched on phosphorescent glass: Hilversum, Lisbon, Oslo, Prague. And in the greenhouse, under an old carpet, the motorcycle he’d bought new in the spring of ’53 and ridden only a few times before he went away. “A motorbike, Vivien,” he’d told Mother when he brought it home, “is the closest you can come on earth to flying.”
She couldn’t bring herself to part with anything of his. At first because she expected news of Jon’s return daily, running at each ring of the phone or doorbell. Then, as years went by, because there was still hope. And when hope had shrunk to a small irrational lump like the residue of a religion in which one no longer believes, still she kept all his things because getting rid of them was tantamount to sacrilege.
Korea and career. My three-year-old mind construed them as the same: fathers are detained by careers and Koreas, especially military careers.
The Korean War never ended; it was merely put on hold. History sees it as a postscript to the second war. At the time it must have seemed like the beginning of the third. But who remembers now? How many people even know that British forces took part? Korea has been shouldered out by its noisy neighbours in time: World War Two on one side, Vietnam on the other.
There were “reports”—of prisoners held in North Korea, or China, or the Soviet Union—which degenerated into rumour. Defectors from the East would revive old stories of men heard speaking English in Siberian camps or tropical prison farms. Enough to quicken hope, to make us wonder, to let ourselves pick at old scars on our hearts. Could he still be alive? Had he for all these years had a life somewhere, planting rice inside a barbed wire perimeter under a molten sun? Could he be there on the dark side of the earth—be looking up at the moon, seeing the full moon I could see when I ran outside on a summer evening? Sometimes I felt sure that the moon was a mirror in which, with a big enough telescope, I’d be able to see his face.
In those hollow days after the funeral Lottie sat beside the fireplace in Mother’s leather wingback; my sister’s theatrical way of saying she was head of the household now.
I remember her frowning and staring at the hearthrug, her face pulled out of symmetry by an active bulge in a cheek where her tongue explored a tooth. After some minutes she said: “A friend of mine’s sniffing round the two-wheeler. Says it’s a Royal Enfield, a ‘Super Constellation or something. Sounds more like a plane, doesn’t it—I wonder if that’s why Jon chose it? Anyway, he reckons the old heaps restorable. And desirable. Worth a lot more now than when it was new. We could be quids in.”
She had on a bulky fisherman’s sweater and black leggings, shoes kicked off and feet tucked under her bottom. A mermaid pose. Her lips were dark red, her sapphire eyes skilfully framed with liner. We’d been out to see our solicitor that morning, and Lottie never could greet the world without her “face,” though she was just as lovely without it. (I wasn’t bothering at all; I’d just round up my springy hair in a clasp and pull on a sweater and jeans.) The will, read to us a few days before, had not been helpful: I hereby give devise and bequeath all my real and personal estate to my dear Husband Jonathan Barkley Wyvern absolutely, in Witness whereof I have subscribed my name this seventh day of July, One thousand nine hundred and forty-nine.
The day after their second wedding anniversary. Lottie was one; I did not exist. The solicitor said there had to be a later will somewhere. Our mother would have made a new one—handwritten, at least—after her husband disappeared. We searched her desk but we knew better. Her wishes changed no more than her belief in Jon’s return.
Lottie poured herself a whisky, lifted an eyebrow. “Go on, Liv. Get a glass. I know it’s only eleven, but who’s here to tell us off? Time we acted like grown-ups, you and me.”
“I suppose this ‘friend’ of yours is some biker shag-bandit?”
“I wish. Sugar daddies are more my line these days. The offers I get! Sixty-year-olds! No, Piers is just a sweet young guy I tell all my dankest secrets. Runs a junk shop in World’s End. ‘The Den of Antiquity.’ Name’s better than the stuff inside. But he knows the price of absolutely anything. Anything old.…”
“And the value of nothing? You, for instance.”
“Not my sort, Liv. Too serious. You’d like him.”
She topped up her glass, set the bottle down on the floor beside her chair. “Poor Mum. What are we going to do with this place? Can you see yourself living here? I cant. I’m a London girl, and the trains are no good. And what are we going to do with that sodding one-eared elephant? Someone told me it’s illegal to sell ivory now, even antique. All the books! They must weigh tons. And what about this spear?” She rolled her lovely eyes at the weapon above her. “How do you flog a spear? I’m going to re-open the grate this minute and break it up for firewood.” Lottie leaped to her feet, kicked at the asbestos board that sealed the chimney, tugged at a sprung corner, gave up. She sank back into the chair, chewing her bottom lip. Then: “Have you found his eye yet?”
“Eye?”
“Henderson’s. The only thing I know about Henderson is that he wore a glass eye. A lions eye he got from a taxidermist.”
“A tiger. Mum said it was a tiger.”
She peered at a photograph across the room, at an upright chap of thirty or so in the dress of a late Victorian naval officer, firm gaze to the lens, sharp chin, nose, and shelving brow carved in shadow by a studio skylight, gloved hand on the hilt of a sword. Many Henderson’s had lived at Tilehouse Street, but this was the one we called simply “Henderson,” known to have been in Africa, owner of the spear.
“Never noticed before, but he was rather tasty, wasn’t he? Wouldn’t kick him out of bed for farting if I was a nice Victorian girl. Not while he still had both his own eyes anyway. Have to admit that’s quite good, though—a tiger’s eye. Almost worth losing one to do something like that.”
When Lottie acts tough it means the opposite. I could see by the way she’d curled herself. And she was shivering, though the house wasn’t cold. I’d flung aside the heavy brocade curtains of indeterminate colour (they looked like they’d hung in the room as long as the spear) to let the spring sun pour its honey on the floor. Mother kept the front drapes drawn for privacy, but you never shut out the sun if you live in British Columbia.
“Liquidating heirlooms isn’t going to make us feel any better, Lot. Let’s not do things we might regret. We can always rent this place out for a while. Don’t make any big decisions for six months—that’s what everyone says. I’ll take the spear. Mother always said she wanted me to have it.”
“You’re right. I’m babbling. God!” she added. “What are we worrying about the junk for? What about poor Mother’s stuff? I can’t go near it. Her clothes, Olivia. Mummy’s clothes!” She burst into tears, whisky spraying from her mouth, her eyes red and piggy. People always say that Lottie has the world by the tail; I’d never seen my sister so diminished.
It was August 1988 when we finished emptying two hundred years of life from Tilehouse Street. Perhaps one day you’ll see the place, if Lottie and I keep it. Or you could have a snoop if you live nearby—Hitchin’s about thirty miles north of London. (Where do you live, I wonder. Not knowing where you are makes you almost as unimaginable as not knowing your name.)
We started with the attic and worked down, putting things in storage, taking a few for ourselves, leaving furniture that might do for tenants, pieces without much market or nostalgic value. I stayed in the bedroom Lottie and I shared when small—still the same teddy-bear wallpaper—and did the bulk of the work. She appeared and helped (talked, mainly) whenever she could get away from London.
The house had begun as the home and office of the Henderson’s—Scots originally—Quakers entrusted with money and legal matters by less godly folk. It’s red brick, tall and narrow, a short walk from the River Hiz, whose name I’ve always adored. The faintly classical façade, suggesting exactly the sort of place a banker or lawyer should live, is right on the street. “This house has never been the same since the motorcar,” Mother used to say, quoting one of Jon’s old aunts. True enough: I remember the mirrors trembling at each bus and lorry, the lurching shadow-play thrown by headlamps on our bedroom curtains. But the back was quiet and private, a long, slim, high-walled garden, with a copper beech, a catalpa, and a gentle upward slope to a ruined greenhouse crammed with gardening tools and Jon’s old bike.
In Victorian times the Henderson’s went into the Navy and the Church, forsaking Quakerism for the Queens shilling. Among the tintypes in the study were a whiskery admiral and a deacon. Money had come and gone with empire. Mother raised us on Jon’s pension and little else. Financial crises—her teeth, Lottie’s drama school, dry rot—were met with the arrival of a van. One by one a piano, a portrait, a Tang bronze, a Tompion clock departed over the years, until little remained of the family hoard except the bric-a-brac.
I filled five boxes with Jon’s photos and negatives, and shipped them to Vancouver. Lottie wanted only a few snaps, a concise history of our parents’ courtship and her origin: in front of the King’s Oak with cocktails in their hands; at a churchyard lych-gate on their wedding day, beaming at the future through the door by which a body leaves the world.
Five boxes of Jon’s past, yet nothing of Mother’s. Not even one shot of her girlhood or her single years. Only those taken by Jon before he went away. One side of the family had too much history, the other much too little.
She wouldn’t talk, and we learnt not to ask. All she told us was that she was an orphan, a Barnardo’s girl, and the nice people there had been very kind to her. Once, when I was still quite small, I found her on the landing, stricken, clutching a piece of paper in a sodden hanky. She’d drawn me to her and hugged me half to death. “Oh, Livvy! My darling.” Her voice faint and scratchy, far-off yet shrill like an old record. “If only you knew! If only …” I stamped my foot and begged to be told. And she said—so softly I doubted later what I’d heard—that she’d been “disowned.”
Lottie and I discussed this at night in whispers. We concluded that disowning someone had to be a secret but common practice among grown-ups, like what they really knew about God and did in bed together. Mother never spoke of it again. Many years later—just before I went to Canada—Lottie asked her point blank about that long-ago meeting on the stairs. Mother laughed and said she couldn’t remember it at all.
“Perhaps you did hear wrong,” Lottie said at Heathrow. “Or she was off her head for a while. Over Jon. But I doubt it, Liv. The laugh was wrong. I’m sure that laugh was wrong. In my line of work you get an ear.”
Mother’s words came to mind as I went through her desk. I hoped to find that piece of paper, whatever it was, and other letters, especially from Jon during the Korean war, though she wasn’t a keeper when it came to correspondence. Every year, on Twelfth Night, she threw out the year’s letters with the Christmas cards. I found four—just four!—all from their early days before I was born, before Korea. The most recent was dated May ’49, and sent from a base in Scotland. I felt shabby, snooping at my parents’ intimacies, and very sad, yet the hope of finding a clue she’d missed or forgotten or hidden was irresistible. All I discovered were some names to put to faces in the photographs, and crazy post-war dreams I’d never heard her speak of: to start a flying school at a Battle of Britain airfield, or buy a small hotel in Cornwall, or leave England altogether and grow peanuts in the sun.
The attic had yielded more than four letters from Henderson alone, but they mainly concerned wills (his brothers and sisters had all died childless before him). There was also a rather pathetic correspondence about fruit trees. After retiring at the end of the Great War, he and his wife had tried to establish an orchard on their property in Suffolk, hoping the venture would keep them in old age. It hadn’t done well. The letters spoke of declining years spent fending off blight and creditors. A sad end to a life I’d always pictured as romantic and adventurous.
Often during that summer my thoughts turned to Henderson. He was a welcome distraction from my grief, a detour into a past inviting because it seemed irrelevant. Francis Barkley Henderson, known as Frank, was the last of his line. Mother sometimes called him “one of your ancestors” but that wasn’t strictly true because he died, as lawyers say, without issue.
“Well,” Mother had added with a don’t-confuse-me sigh. “If he wasn’t an ancestor he was some kind of cousin. Second or third or twice removed. How does that go? There was also a link by marriage. A Wyvern and a Henderson married Barkley sisters. They had a double wedding. Those two families must have been close. Instead of going away on holiday they’d swap houses every year for a fortnight. To save money, I suppose. Though if they’d been really hard up they couldn’t have afforded houses like this in the first place, could they? It was the Scottish blood! Your father has it. He never threw away a thing.”
Henderson had died in the 1920s, leaving Tilehouse Street to my grandfather. “The Wyverns must have been his next of kin,” said Mother. “Or the only ones he wanted to remember in his will. Your father’s relations were all rather peculiar.”
This last was a remark she often made. She said it almost admiringly, the English love of eccentrics. But there was also regret and resignation, as if she suspected that Jon—and we—carried a hereditary flaw, like a rare medical condition passed down by inbred royalty. Almost as if eccentricity might explain his absence. The Eastern bloc was starting to crack. That nice man Gorbachev was setting prisoners free. Why was there still no word? Could it be—she hinted—that Jon had “gone native” somewhere, was alive and well but no longer wanted to come home?
“Of course it may have been the times. I mean, why Henderson left everything to your grandfather. A lot of families died out in the First War. The boys were killed. There weren’t enough left for the girls to marry Some of them did marry but couldn’t have children. Shell-shock. Gangrene. Bits shot away.… Ghastly!” She grimaced. “You don’t know how lucky you’ve been. Your generation is the first in a century without a bloodbath. And yes—all right—” Her palms went up. “I know you’ve had to live with the Bomb.”
She’d paused and shrunk slightly in her chair, for despite her handsome airman in a silver frame on the mantel and her two girls either side of him, and various suitors (always unsuitable), I think she saw herself as an old maid. Certainly her life was blighted by war. She never found it in her to remarry, which was odd because it’s mainly from her that Lottie gets her looks. She never said much to us about marriage, either. That seemed odd too.
“I wish I knew more. I think your father said Henderson’s papers were burnt. For security reasons. Towards the end of his career he was involved in intelligence. In MI5—if that makes any sense. Was there such a thing as MI5 back then, in the First War? These things only seem important when it’s too late. No one left to ask. I only wish I knew more, so I could tell you.”
But I knew my mother well enough to hear a sprung note. She didn’t wish to tell us. There was something about Henderson, something shocking or shameful, that she didn’t want to send on down the generations.
Not until I was going through Mother’s desk for a second time did anything from Henderson’s early days turn up. Fallen or hidden behind a drawer was a small cardboard box. Inside was a weighty spherical object in a chamois purse. The famous eye. I was right: a tiger.
With this were two cuttings, short obituaries. He’d made a good start in the Navy, winning a gunnery prize (absurdly named the Goodenough), but had retired for health reasons while still a junior officer. A decade later he went out to West Africa and took part in the Ashanti wars. There was also a medal in the box, a Distinguished Service Order awarded in 1898 for bravery in action the previous year. One of the cuttings, entitled “Henderson, the Man Who Fell Asleep and Doubled His Life,” launched into a colourful tale, but half was missing. All I could glean was that an African chief had threatened him with death, and he managed to escape somehow by dozing off. Mother had told us this too, adding that Henderson returned with the spear.
As if to underline this last point, she’d enclosed a snapshot of the weapon, perhaps the only photo in the house taken by her. (It seemed too inept to be one of Jon’s, foggy with movement and overexposure.) The intriguing thing about the picture was a human figure: a man I didn’t know—certainly not my father—the cut of his jacket suggesting a demob suit of the late 1940s. He was tall and broad-shouldered, yet stooped, his back to the camera, his head just turning towards the lens, a hand stretching for the spear. The figure seemed furtive, yet familiar, like a glimpse of the auteur in one of Hitchcock’s films.
Lottie came to help less often towards the end. By then I was down to the cellar, to jelly moulds, canning jars, and baffling Victorian gadgets.
The last thing I dealt with was a plywood cubicle in the corner furthest from the window. My fathers darkroom.
We burned with curiosity about this place when we were young. It was always kept locked. Mother said it was full of poisonous chemicals, and anyway she’d no idea where Jon had kept the key. This may have been true; I couldn’t find one. But the little room had to be cleaned out now. I forced the hasp with a screwdriver, a deed that seemed a greater violation of the past than anything else I did that summer at Tilehouse Street.
Dust lay in a fine snowfall over a sink, draining-board, an enlarger, and shelves of squat brown bottles. I lifted a glass stopper and got a brassy whiff of hypo. The last person to breathe that was my father; for a moment he was a presence, not an idea.
Beneath the enlarger was a metal box, heavy and padlocked. So I did another break and enter. It was full of photographic paper, yellowed and useless. But underneath were several notebooks. Jon’s! I thought. But they were dated 1899 and filled with a scrawl I’d seen before, though here it was shakier and more crabbed than in the letters about fruit trees.
Henderson’s papers. Some of them, at least. But why would my father have locked them away down here?
The handwriting was a challenge. I didn’t have time to read the notebooks properly until I got them home. The first two or three were about Africa, the rest about a long voyage, many years earlier, to the South Pacific. Apart from dog-ears and some wine or tea stains, they seemed to be just as Henderson had left them. There were no notes from Jon, no torn-out pages, no indication why he’d hidden them away. The memoirs seemed nothing more than a curiosity, a relic like so many others from our family’s past.
Months later, in Vancouver, I began to see their true significance. I brought photocopies on my own trip to the South Seas; now I’ve read them through so many times I know whole passages by heart. And I believe I’ve retraced a wheel of cause and effect, set in motion by Frank Henderson, which has rolled down upon our lives through a century: on Jon’s, Mother’s, mine, and therefore yours. I hope my conclusions are the right ones. To me they seem inescapable. I long to know how all this looks to you.
Over to Frank.