Facing the Light (46 page)

Leonora looked out of the window. The shadows of trees were black on the lawn and every rose was edged with gold.
What I don't know can't hurt me
. She said it over and over again, as though it were a magic spell that would keep her safe.
What I don't know can't hurt me
.

———

Gwen's tea had gone cold and she didn't have the energy to get up and make more. Rilla was busy whipping cream for the strawberry shortcakes. Mary wasn't due back in the kitchen for another couple of hours and had reacted rather better than Gwen had expected to the news that Rilla wanted to be in charge of dessert for tonight. The
plan had been for a fresh fruit salad and cream, but when Rilla said, ‘This'll save you all that cutting and chopping, won't it?' there wasn't much Mary could do but agree.

Gwen had hulled the strawberries and cut them into neater slices than Rilla herself would have done. She was, in Gwen's opinion, an inspired rather than a careful cook, and she did go in for rather a lot of tasting of anything she happened to be mixing in bowls, but still, Gwen felt herself relaxing more than she had for a long time in the kitchen, warm from the sun coming in at the window. The back door was open; she could hear Douggie and Fiona in the Peter Rabbit garden and hoped, selfishly, that they'd stay away for a while and let her enjoy these few minutes, which took her back to when she and Rilla were little girls allowed to help make cakes as a special treat.

She said, ‘Chloë's tree's worked out rather better than I thought. I was a bit worried that it would all be hideously modern and not look right in the hall, but it'll be lovely, won't it?'

Rilla nodded absently. She wasn't really listening, being absorbed in spreading the shortbread with cream, arranging strawberry slices in concentric circles on the lustrous white and admiring her own handiwork. She said, ‘Mmm. Lovely.'

‘You're miles away. Honestly, I don't know how you do it.'

‘Do what?'

‘I don't know. Be so relaxed about everything. I can see you've not even given a thought to what Philip and Chloë might be uncovering up there in the nursery.'

‘That's not true, actually. I have thought about it, but I've decided that it might be nothing at all. A shopping list or something,' Rilla said.

‘It didn't look remotely like any list I've ever seen. You don't seem to be in the least worried.'

‘I've stopped worrying because I don't know exactly what I'm supposed to be worried about. Your problem is, Gwen, that you go searching out the difficulties instead of waiting for them actually to happen.' She was now eating leftover slices of strawberry.

‘Well, one of us has to be prepared,' said Gwen. ‘And you seem to be in a sort of private cloud-cuckoo land.'

Rilla smiled enigmatically. ‘I'd forget all about it, you know, until you have to deal with it. And in any case, it would have to be quite something to ruin the party, surely?'

Gwen frowned. ‘I give up, I do really. You don't even admit to the possibility of a catastrophe.'

Rilla looked at her sister. ‘My idea of what constitutes a catastrophe is a bit different from yours. The cancellation of a party doesn't come anywhere near it, I promise you.'

‘Oh, God, Rilla, I'm sorry!' Gwen was near tears. ‘I don't know what I'm saying any more. Of course I didn't mean. Don't think I …'

‘It's okay, Gwen. Don't start crying, please. That's all we need.'

‘I'm sorry. Really I am. And I know it's nothing like your feelings, but we haven't forgotten Mark's death either. You don't ever get over something like that, do you? I feel guilty, too, for not talking to you about it enough. I know you said at the time you didn't want to discuss it, but I should have persisted, shouldn't I? I couldn't believe it when you said it wasn't our fault, mine and Mother's. You'd left Mark in our care after all. If I'd been in your position, I'd never have spoken to us again.'

‘I didn't think it was your fault, Gwen. I still don't. Either of you. I should never have left him. My fault, the whole thing. And how could I not have spoken to you? You and Mother and Beth were all I had in the world. I couldn't have managed without you.'

Gwen was silent, remembering the funeral. A grey March day and the wind like a knife and she and Leonora holding Rilla up, one on each side of her, their arms linked through hers as the tiny white coffin was lowered into the hard earth and Rilla, pale and breathless with grief, dazed and full of pills. If you were close enough to her, and Gwen was, you could feel her whole body trembling. The trees were just beginning to come into leaf, and yet that day Gwen felt that spring, proper spring, with warmth and sunshine and new flowers, was a complete impossibility. She wiped a tear away while Rilla was moving the plates into the larder.

‘Did you notice', Rilla said as she came back into the kitchen, ‘how great that tree of Chloë's is? She's really talented, you know.'

‘That's what I was saying before,' Gwen laughed. ‘That's precisely what I was saying while you were doing the strawberries, only you weren't listening. I thought it would be a disaster, and I was wrong.'

‘You ought to tell her. She'd love it if you admired it.'

‘Would she? I find it so hard to talk to her, Rilla. You've no idea how envious I am of the way you and Beth seem to just, you know, chat like real friends. Chloë hates me.'

‘What rubbish! You shouldn't think that, Gwen, honestly. She's young, that's all. You ought to try pretending that she's not your daughter but some stranger who's just wandered into your house. A guest.'

‘Would that work? Worth trying, I suppose. She's so prickly, though. And all sorts of things she does irritate me, like the way she dresses, for instance. You don't know how lucky you are. Beth's so elegant and
together
. Chloë's all over the place.'

‘Speaking as someone who's often just as all over the place as she is, it doesn't matter a bit, Gwen. There's all sorts of other things that are more important, and if you
let stuff like that get you down you'll never be happy. Never. Now come on, enough of all this. Let's go and find James and see how the marquee's coming on. It's going to be the best party, whatever they're in the process of finding up in the nursery.'

Gwen followed Rilla out of the back door, and shut it carefully behind her. I wish, she thought, that I shared her optimism. There were altogether too many unknowns in the situation for Gwen to feel easy in her mind.

*

‘There was a time,' Leonora said, addressing Sean's profile as he drove, ‘and not so very long ago either, when I would have scorned the idea of going down to Lodge Cottage in a car. I used to run up and down the drive as a girl and think nothing of it, and it's really only in the last couple of years I've become lazy.'

‘I was born lazy,' said Sean, ‘so it suits me to take the car for even the shortest of distances. The crew have gone down already, so we should be all set to film when we get there.'

‘Miss Lardner will want to give us a cup of tea,' Leonora said. She hoped that she was sounding normal. She felt as though an earthquake had taken place inside her, and it surprised her that Sean couldn't see it. She felt confused, mystified, and uncertain of what she remembered. Something – she was not sure what it was – hovered at the edge of her memory, just out of reach. She had dressed most carefully for the filming in a silk dress of a particularly deep raspberry pink that flattered her skin, with pearl studs in her ears and her pearl necklace. It was becoming harder and harder to disguise things with make-up and she hoped that her eyes did not give away the fact that she had shed tears earlier.

‘Are you all right, Leonora?' asked Sean. ‘Has something happened?'

‘No … no, nothing at all. Thank you for asking. I'm feeling a little tired, that's all.'

For a wild moment, she considered telling Sean everything. He was such a sympathetic listener. But then there they were, at Lodge Cottage, and the sound man was standing outside the open front door waving at them and the moment passed. A good thing, too, Leonora said to herself as she got out of the car.

‘We're all set, Sean,' the sound man said, and they went into the house. Miss Lardner had set tea in the front room, on a table that had been polished to such a dazzling shine that the lighting man had asked for a cloth to cover it up a little.

‘Nanny Mouse, how lovely you look!' said Sean, going up to the old lady as though she were his own grandmother and kissing her on the cheek. Nanny Mouse smiled, and Leonora thought she was blushing. Certainly, she looked as well as she had for a long time, and she sounded firm in her own mind today, as she greeted them all and told them to sit down.

‘Leonora,' Sean said to her, ‘if you could sit down there … that's right, by the window. Then if you don't mind pouring the tea, we can just talk naturally. I'll be out of shot, but of course the whole thing will be edited as you know. I'll get the ball rolling by asking a question, and we'll see where we go from there, shall we?'

Leonora nodded. She picked up the rose-patterned teapot and said, ‘No sugar for you, Sean, is that right?'

‘Yes, thank you. Now, Nanny Mouse, shall we get started? Do you remember whether Ethan Walsh ever came into the nursery when Leonora was a little girl?'

Nanny Mouse was silent for a while, and Leonora wondered whether perhaps it would be necessary to prompt her, but then, like a bottle suddenly uncorked, she started talking, ‘The Master loved the nursery. That's what he told me. No nonsense in here, Nanny Mouse,
he'd say and he'd laugh heartily. And he liked to read to Miss Leonora at bedtime.
Little Women
was her favourite book. I remember that. Of course she could read perfectly well herself, but it's not the same, is it? Not the same as having your daddy reading to you.'

‘What about her mother?' Sean asked. ‘What about Maude?'

‘Oh, no, she never read to her. She wasn't that sort of mother really. She was always very shy, was Miss Maude. She had one layer of skin missing, that's what I told her. Thin-skinned. She wasn't very strong, you know and she bruised very easily. I knew about the bruises of course, though she thought I didn't see them. I did. I saw everything. It was my job really, to see things. I had Miss Leonora to think about and the Master was most particular that she shouldn't know.'

‘What?' Leonora asked, hearing her own heart beating. ‘What was it that Daddy didn't want me to know?'

‘Oh, he didn't want you to know anything, dear,' said Nanny Mouse, as sunnily as though they were discussing nothing more important or interesting than the day's shopping list. She ticked items off on her fingers one by one. ‘Not about the bruises. Certainly not about how Miss Maude died, but of course you don't remember about that at all, do you? The Master told me you couldn't possibly remember. He assured me you didn't and you've never said a word so I suppose he's right, though I must say I've always thought it strange that you could put such a thing out of your mind. Still, it's a mercy, for who'd want to remember anything like that?'

The air in the small room seemed all at once to thicken and darken round Leonora's head. She took a deep breath. What was Nanny Mouse saying? She closed her eyes and saw an image on the inside of her eyelids, as clear as any photograph: the lake and something in it, floating under the willows. Something dark spreading on
the surface of the water. A skirt, that was what it was. Leonora opened her eyes and spoke to Nanny Mouse in a voice that sounded to her ears not like her own voice at all, but that of a small child, hardly daring to make a sound. ‘Mummy drowned in the lake, didn't she, Nanny? She was in the water, wasn't she?'

‘Leonora found her,' Nanny Mouse said confidentially, as though she were addressing a perfect stranger. She had slipped from recognizing Leonora to not having the least idea who she was. ‘Poor little mite. She'd run down to the lake because everything in the house was crosswise; out of sorts. Dreadful atmosphere for a child, and they never paid her the least mind, you know. Quarrelling all around her and worse. Much worse. I don't hold with children seeing all that. Never have. My children don't see such things if I can help it. I told her. I said, what you don't know can't hurt you, and I believe that.'

Somewhere, very close to her shoulder but also so distant that it might have been in another universe altogether, Leonora was aware that the camera was still turning, but she could feel the tears starting up again somewhere in her head. She could hear Sean saying something, asking her something. She pulled her attention over to where he was sitting and tried to listen.

‘Leonora, I've stopped filming. Are you all right?'

She nodded, not caring, wanting to say, ‘Do whatever you like', but not finding the right words. All the words she ever knew seemed to have left her and for a second she wondered whether perhaps she'd had a stroke. I'm seventy-five tomorrow, she told herself. I'm old. Maybe this is a stroke. Or some kind of heart attack. She made herself breathe slowly, in and out of her nose, and count at the same time from one to ten. There. That was better.

‘I'm perfectly all right now, thank you,' she said at last, and lifted her teacup to take a sip of Earl Grey, lukewarm now but still a comfort. ‘Please continue filming.'

‘Tell me about the routines of the house,' Sean was saying to Nanny Mouse. ‘Did Ethan Walsh have a particular time when he liked to paint?'

Leonora only half listened to the answer. She was somewhere else. She was down by the lake and it was hot and there was her mother, floating on the water, her face all white and her eyes staring. I found her, she thought. I found her and she was all wet and dead and I ran back to the house to get everyone to save her and they couldn't and then I fainted, and I was wet and cold, and after I went to bed there was nothing but fever and more fever and bad dreams all the time, and pain in my chest, and when I woke up, they told me a lie. They told me my mother had been very ill and had died from her illness and I believed them. Nanny told me and Daddy told me and I believed them because I wanted to. Because I didn't want didn't want didn't want to know that I'd found my own mother with water filling her mouth and dragging at her skirt and making her skin all pruney and white and horrible. I didn't want to know that, so I forgot it. Pretended I never ever knew it at all. Pretended that she'd died neatly in her bed and I'd never seen her floating in the lake with willow leaves caught up in her fingers. But I remember now.