The Legacy (23 page)

Later on, I show Mum the photographs I’ve found for her. She identifies the people I didn’t recognize—more distant relatives, people now dead, faded away, leaving only their faces on paper and traces of their blood in our veins. I show her the one of Caroline, taken in New York with the baby cradled in her left arm. Mum frowns as she scrutinises it.

“Well, that’s definitely Caroline—such pale eyes! She was striking, wasn’t she?”

“But what was she doing in New York? And whose baby is it, if she only married Lord Calcott in 1904? Do you think they had one before they got married?”

“What do you mean, what was she doing in New York? She was
from
New York!”

“Caroline? She was American? How can nobody have told me that before?”

“Well, how can you not have realized? With that accent of hers . . .”

“Mum, I was five years old. How would I have noticed her accent? And she was ancient by then. She hardly spoke at all.”

“True, I suppose,” Mum nods.

“Well, that explains why she was in New York in 1904. So, who’s the baby?” I press. Mum takes a deep breath, inflates her cheeks.

“No idea,” she says. “There’s no way she could have had a child with Henry before they wed, even if that wouldn’t have caused a huge scandal. She only met him late in 1904, when she came over to London. They married in 1905, soon after they met.”

“Well, was she married before? Did she bring the baby over with her?”

“No, I don’t think so. You really would be better off asking Mary. As far as I know, Caroline came over from New York, a rich heiress at the age of around twenty-one or twenty-two, married a titled man at quite some speed, and that was that.”

I nod, oddly disappointed.

“Perhaps it was a friend’s baby. Perhaps she was its godmother. Who knows?” Mum says.

“Could have been,” I agree. I take the picture back, study it closely. My eyes seek out Caroline’s left hand, her ring finger, but it’s hidden in the folds of the ghostly child’s dress. “Do you mind if I keep this one? Just for a while?” I ask.

“Of course not, love.”

“I’ve . . . been reading some of her letters. Caroline’s letters,” I am strangely reluctant to confess this. Like reading somebody’s diary, even after they’re dead. “Have you got that family tree? There was a letter from an Aunt B.”

“Here you are. Caroline’s side of things is a bit sketchy, I’m afraid. I think Mary was more interested in the Calcott line—and all of Caroline’s family records would have been in America, of course.” There is nothing, in fact, on Caroline’s side, except the names of her parents. No aunts or uncles, a very small twig to one side before Caroline joined the main tree in 1905. Caroline Fitzpatrick, as she was then.

I study her name for some time, waiting, although I’m not sure what for.

“In this letter, her aunt—Aunt B—says that whatever happened in America should stay in America, and she shouldn’t do anything to mess up her marriage to Lord Calcott. Do you know anything about that?” I ask. Mum shakes her head.

“No. Nothing at all, I fear.”

“What if she did have a baby before she came over here and got married?”

“Well, for one thing she wouldn’t have managed to get married if she had! Well brought up girls did not just have babies out of wedlock back then. It would have been unthinkable.”

“But what if she did get married to someone else before Lord Calcott? I found something up in the loft—in the trunk where Meredith put all of Caroline’s stuff—and it says
To a Fine Son
on it,” I say.

Mum raises her eyebrows a little, considers. “It was probably Clifford’s. What kind of something?”

“I don’t know—it’s some kind of bell. I’ll fetch it down later and show you.”

We have drifted into the drawing room. Mum picks up each photo from the piano and studies it at length, her face hung between expressions. She runs her thumb over the glass of Charles and Meredith’s wedding portrait. A futile little caress.

“Do you miss her?” I ask. Normally a stupid question when somebody’s mother dies. But Meredith was different.

“Of course. Yes, I do. It would be hard not to miss somebody who knew how to fill a room quite the way my mother did.” Mum smiles, puts the photo down, wipes her fingermarks away with the soft cuff of her cardigan.

“Why was she like that? I mean, why was she so . . .
angry
?”

“Caroline was cruel to her,” Mum shrugs. “Not physically, or even verbally . . . perhaps not even deliberately; but who can say what damage is done when a child grows up unloved?”

“I can’t imagine. I can’t imagine how a mother could fail to love her child. But,
how
was she cruel to her?”

“Just in a thousand and one little ways,” Mum sighs, thinks for a moment. “For example, Caroline never brought her a present. Not once. Not on birthdays or at Christmas, even when Meredith was small. Not on her wedding day, not when I was born. Nothing at all. Can you imagine how something like that might . . . chip away at you?”

“But if she’d never had a present, perhaps she didn’t know to expect one?”

“Every child knows about birthday presents, Erica—you’ve only to read a storybook to learn about them. And the staff used to get her little things when she was small—Mother told me how much they meant to her. A rabbit—I remember her mentioning that. One year, the housekeeper gave her a pet rabbit.”

“That’s . . . really sad,” I say. “Didn’t Caroline believe in presents?”

“I just don’t think she was aware of the date, most of the time. I honestly don’t think she knew when Meredith’s birthday was. It was as though she hadn’t given birth to her at all.”

“But if Caroline was so awful, why was Meredith so devoted to her? Why did she move back here with you and Clifford when your father died?”

“Well, difficult or not, Caroline was her mother. Meredith loved her, and she was always trying to . . . prove herself to her.” Mum shrugs sadly, opens the piano lid and presses the top note. It floats out, fills the room, in perfect tune. “We were never allowed to play this piano. Not until we’d reached a certain standard. We had that battered old upright in the nursery to practice on instead. Clifford never did get good enough, but I did. Just before I went away to university.”

“There are lots of letters from Meredith in Caroline’s things. They all sound rather sad, as if she was always more or less by herself—even when she was married.”

“Well,” Mum sighs. “I don’t remember my father, so I don’t know how things were before he died. She loved him, very much I think. Perhaps too much. Caroline once said to me that losing love like that left a hole you could never fill. I remember it clearly because she so rarely spoke to me. Or to Clifford—she hardly seemed to notice us children at all. I’d been watching Mum out in the garden, and I jumped when she spoke because I hadn’t heard her sneak up behind me.”

“She could still walk, then?”

“Of course she could! She wasn’t always ancient.”

“But why didn’t Caroline love Meredith? I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I, dear. Your great-grandmother was a very strange woman. Very distant. Sometimes I would go and sit next to her and try to talk to her, but I soon realized she wasn’t listening to a word I said. She would just stare right through you, with those gray eyes of hers. No wonder Meredith married so soon—she must have been thrilled to find somebody who would listen to her!”

“It’s amazing how normal you are. What a great mother you are.”

“Thank you, Erica. Your father helped, of course. My knight in shining armor! If I’d moved back here after my degree, if I’d stayed here long enough to resent them both . . . who knows?”

“Perhaps not everyone is cut out for parenthood. I can’t imagine Meredith was the cuddliest . . .”

“No, but she was a good mother, for the most part. Strict, of course. But she wasn’t as . . . sharp when we were small, as she was after we’d been living back here for a few years. As Caroline grew frail, she needed a lot of looking after. I think Mother resented that. She did her best for us, but I don’t think she got over losing my father, or the disappointment of having life begin and end here—she and Caroline, cooped up in this old house. But we turned out OK, didn’t we? Clifford and I?” she asks me, her face shaped with sudden sadness. I cross the room, hug her.

“More than OK.”

“I’ve come to collect some kisses!” Dad announces, finding us, brandishing mistletoe and a grin.

A
fter dinner we put all our presents under the tree. Eddie looks like a miniature gent in his navy blue monogrammed dressing gown, stripy pyjamas and red felt slippers. He checks the gift tags and positions each parcel carefully, according to some private scheme. We drink brandy, listen to carols. Outside the rain is lashing at the house in waves. It sounds like handfuls of gravel, thrown against the windowpanes. It makes me shiver.

Sometime around midnight the rain stops, the clouds roll away, and a bright moon bedazzles the night sky. It lights the green paper vines climbing the walls in my room, the single wardrobe, the arched window looking east over the driveway. There’s a rookery in the naked chestnut tree outside, the nests like clots in the twiggy branches. I can’t get to sleep. My brain scrambles to life each time I start to drift, sending up a starburst of faces and names and memories to confound me. Brandy does this to me sometimes. I have to unpick each thought from the knotted mess, work it loose from my mind and let it float away. I keep the memories of Dinny, though; I don’t let them go. New ones I’ve made, to add to the well-worn, sunshine ones. Now I know how he looks in winter light, in rain. I know how he looks in firelight. I know how alcohol takes him; I know how he makes a living, how he lives. I know how that wide, lazy childhood smile has grown up, changed, become a quick flash of teeth in the darkness of his face. I know he resents us, Beth and me. And soon, perhaps, I might begin to understand why.

C
hristmas morning passes in a rushed, comforting haze of food preparation, champagne and piles of torn shiny paper. Dad helps Eddie unpack his new games console, and they experiment with it on the inadequate television in the study while we women occupy the kitchen. The turkey barely fits into the Rayburn. We have to poke its legs in, and the tips of them blacken where they touch the sides.

“Never mind. Everyone prefers breast, anyway,” Mum says to Beth, who waves a nervous hand through the tendrils of smoke rising from the oven. It will take hours to roast and, pleading a slight headache, Beth retires to lie down. She shoots us a mute, angry glance as she goes. She knows we will talk about her now. I don’t know if she sleeps at such times or if she just lies there, reading wisdom in the cracks in the ceiling, watching spiders enmesh the light shade. I hope she sleeps.

Mum and I slide ourselves onto the kitchen benches, link hands across the table, our conversation hanging awkwardly around the urge to talk about Beth. I break the silence.

“I found a load of newspaper clippings in with the photos in one of Meredith’s drawers. About Henry,” I add, unnecessarily. Mum sighs, withdraws her hands from mine.

“Poor Henry,” she says, and strokes her fingers over her forehead, brushing back an imaginary hair.

“I know. I’ve been thinking about him a lot. About what happened—”

“What do you mean, about what happened?” Mum asks sharply. I look up from the thumbnail I was picking.

“Just, that he vanished. His disappearance,” I say.

“Oh.”

“Why? What do you think happened to him?”

“I don’t know! Of course I don’t know. I thought, for a while that . . . that perhaps you girls knew more than you were saying . . .”

“You think we had something to do with it?”

“No, of course not! I thought that, maybe, you were protecting somebody.”

“You mean Dinny.” Something flares inside me.

“Yes, all right then, Dinny. He had a temper, your young hero. But, Erica, Henry vanished! He was taken, I’m sure of it. Somebody took him, carried him off and that was the end of it. If anything had happened to him here on the estate, anything at all, then the police would have found some evidence of it. He was taken away, and that’s all there is to it,” she finishes, calm again. “It was a terrible, terrible thing, but nobody is to blame except the person who took him. There are just a few very dangerous people out there, and Henry was unlucky enough to meet one of them.”

“I suppose he was,” I say. None of this rings true to me. None of it convinces me. Eddie by the pond, throwing a stone; and that watery ache in my knees.

“Let’s not talk about it today, shall we?”

“OK, then.”

“How has Beth been?”

“Not great. A bit better now. We went to a party at the camp the other night, and she chatted to Dinny a bit; and she seemed to pick up a little. And now that you and Dad are here too . . .”

“You went to a
party
with
Dinny
?” Mum sounds incredulous.

“Yes. So what?”