The Silent Tide (47 page)

Isabel thought about it all. She could imagine her mother as a very young woman, proud, keeping up appearances, suffering in silence, guarding her sister Penelope, whose own aloofness was a form of armour. Yes, it all made too much sense.

‘Our gardens backed on to one of the Broads and we had our own mooring and a small sailing dinghy. One day, when your mother was nineteen and I was sixteen, we found a strange boat tied up and four young men sitting on our jetty eating sandwiches. When we confronted them, they said they hadn’t seen the Private sign and were terribly apologetic. They were nice boys, Londoners all of them, in their early twenties, but despite their good manners we knew instinctively that they weren’t Mummy’s type. Pam and I thought them very dashing, especially when they larked about and flirted with us. Right from the start, though, it was obvious that the best-looking of them had his eye on Pamela. Your father was one of those quiet, brooding types then, Isabel – the way I imagined a Romantic poet to be.’

Isabel smiled. It was hard now, remembering him from when she was small, before the quiet brooding turned morose. Mostly it was an impression of gentleness.

‘It is a bit chilly,’ her aunt said, standing up and tossing her cigarette on the sand. ‘I think it’s time to go back.’

They walked slowly side by side. Penelope had fallen silent again. Isabel asked, ‘What happened next? I mean, I know they went away together.’

‘They did, yes. Your grandmother, predictably, kicked up a terrible fuss about Pamela seeing Charles, and Pamela was always stubborn. I often wonder whether, if Mummy had kept quiet, the whole thing would have died a natural death. As it was, Pamela simply would have him, and that was that. There was the most ghastly row and Mummy said she didn’t want to see her again. So Pamela went away. I suppose she must have got Mummy’s consent, I really can’t remember. I do know we didn’t go to the wedding.’

‘They lived in Kent, didn’t they, by the time they had me?’

‘They lived with his relatives in Clapham for several years. Your mother used to write to me from there. It was before the Slump, and your father had what I’m told was a good job at the Post Office, but it wasn’t until he was promoted that they could afford to set up house.’

‘I wasn’t born till later on.’

‘Yes – on the tenth of February nineteen twenty-nine. There, I remember your birth date perfectly.’

Isabel smiled. ‘You’ve always been good at that.’

‘I have, haven’t I?’ Penelope stopped for a moment and turned to look out to sea. She murmured what sounded like, ‘At least I got something right in my life.’

Whether it was these words, or something else like them, she sounded utterly desolate. Aunt Penelope clearly carried some terrible burden that Isabel had never previously suspected. She waited, hardly daring to speak in case she caused her aunt to close up again, and then she’d never learn whatever it was that she and her sister had spoken about – the thing that had opened up a rift between them.

After a long moment, Penelope called to Gelert and they set off once more. Isabel felt increasingly puzzled as her aunt did not continue with her tale, but instead spoke of Berec’s friends Gregor and Karin. Apparently Penelope had had the bright idea of involving Stephen in the campaign to stop the deportation, and Stephen had mobilised one or two well-known writers in their defence. It looked as though the deportation might be stopped.

‘Stephen is a good man,’ Penelope said quietly.

Isabel remembered what Stephen had said, about knowing Penelope for so long, and she thought of Berec and how he’d introduced her to Stephen, then for some reason she recalled the envelope with Stephen’s handwriting that she’d seen in her aunt’s kitchen in Earl’s Court all that time ago. ‘Aunt Penelope,’ she said, ‘you remember how I got my job at McKinnon and Holt. Was that because of you?’

Penelope smiled. ‘No, dear, that was all due to you impressing him. He merely wrote to me for a reference – which I was happy to give.’

‘I’m so glad that’s all it was,’ Isabel said, relieved. ‘Thank you.’

They had reached the beach house now. Inside, Penelope rubbed Gelert dry with a towel then started laying out cheese and bread and wrinkled apples on the kitchen table, and poured them both glasses of ruby port. The heavy warmth of the drink spread through Isabel’s veins like liquid fire. It made her brave enough to say, ‘It’s lovely, being with you like this. Oh, I wish I’d seen more of you when I was growing up.’

Penelope laid some cutlery on the table and frowned. ‘We lived such different lives, your mother and I. And she was shocked to her little puritan core when I refused to put up with Jonny any more. I still don’t think she understands. Just because she stuck with your father all these years . . .’

‘She loves him’ Isabel said loyally. ‘He can’t help what happened to him.’

‘Yes, she probably does,’ Penelope said with a sigh. ‘And, of course, she had all of you to think of.’

‘You and Uncle Jonny didn’t try to have children?’

‘Neither of us wanted them. Anyway, Jonny was too drunk most of the time to do much in that direction.’

Isabel thought of the conversation she’d had with her aunt, when she’d found she was going to have Lorna and her aunt had dropped dark hints about getting rid of the baby. Perhaps Penelope had not been sharing her own experience, after all, just passing on information in case it was useful.

‘I can laugh at it now. It’s all a very long time ago,’ Penelope was saying. ‘Life goes on. But not if we don’t eat.’

The rest of the day passed pleasantly enough. They had tea in a café in the town and bought fresh herring for dinner, about which there was much palaver as neither of them liked the messiness of gutting fish. They grilled them and ate them with new potatoes and a bottle of crisp white wine, whilst Penelope told amusing stories of her life in London, stories peppered with names Isabel had faintly heard of and others who’d vanished into oblivion.

That night, Isabel slept more soundly than she had done for a long time. This house felt like a sanctuary; it must be something about the wood and its cosy situation, protected from the elements behind the dunes. She woke at one point in darkness, heard her aunt’s door open and close, the click of the dog’s claws on the floorboards, but quickly sank into slumber once more.

In the morning she woke late to find that she was alone in the house. On the kitchen table was an envelope addressed to her and a key. Puzzled, she opened the envelope. As she drew out the papers within, a five-pound note fluttered to the floor. She picked it up and left it on the table whilst she investigated the rest of the contents. There was a letter and another envelope with her name on it. She started, naturally enough, by reading the letter.

My dear Isabel,

I have taken the coward’s way out and gone back to London. Please don’t think that I’m not utterly ashamed of myself, because I am, but performing the task that your mother has commanded me to has proved impossible. I hate confrontation of any sort and I cannot bear to see your face when you learn this news. All day yesterday I tried to tell you, but I just haven’t been able to do so. I know I’m leaving you without a lift home, so I hope the enclosed will cover the cost of a taxi. Ask at Bunwell’s for Eric. He’s the son-in-law and I’ve always found him most reliable.

Now to finish the story I started to tell you on the beach yesterday. After Pamela ran away with your father, I’m afraid things went badly for me. It’s quite a burden suddenly to become not only the sole repository of a mother’s hopes and expectations, but also the target of her frustrations. I think, looking back, that she must have had some sort of breakdown, for she would often indulge in fits of rage or weeping, which I found terrifying.

When I was eighteen I was sent to live with my uncle’s family in Norwich for a year whilst I learned shorthand and typing. Your grandmother wanted me to take a job somewhere respectable locally until I came across ‘someone suitable’ as she to meet youpre McKinnon put it, but I got it in my head that I wanted to follow Pamela and move to London. I wrote to her several times about how to do this, and after first trying to dissuade me she told me that I could stay with them for a short time whilst I found somewhere.

In the event I never got there, because of someone I met on the train. His name was Tom, Tom Spencer, and whilst he was definitely from the sort of family Mummy would approve of, he was not, as they say, the marrying kind. I thought he was marvellous, so beautiful and fascinating, and well-connected. I don’t know what he saw in me. I was impossibly innocent in those days. Mother never told me a thing about men; she had these wonderful rose-coloured memories of Daddy and that’s all she knew. Tom took me in hand right away – I think he saw me as a sort of project, like
Pygmalion
. He found me a nice little job typing for a literary agent and I took a room with some friends of his, and for the next three or four years my life was a great whirl of parties and cocktails and late nights. Such fun, you’d think, but at the same time it didn’t seem at all real. Nobody was very serious about anything, and you only had to look around in London with your eyes open in the 1920s to see just how serious life could be. Even Tom learned in the end. His plane was shot down over the Channel in 1940. He’d made an exceptionally glamorous pilot and I hate to think about the messiness of his end.

The partying ended abruptly for me when I discovered I was to have Tom’s child. It’s astonishing how my so-called friends melted away. Tom, of course, denied it was his. No one, it seemed, could help me. So I went to the only person I could count on. Not my mother, the shame would have finished her. I went to Pamela.

You were born in a home for unmarried girls in South London. Most of the girls found it terrible, giving up their babies for adoption by couples they didn’t know, never to see them again. I was lucky, so they told me. At least my child would stay in the family, be a part of my life, but once I’d handed you over to Pamela I felt an appalling sense of relief.

I’d regained my freedom, you see. And Pamela wanted you. They had no child of their own, and feared they never would. You looked so like my sister. She loved you straight away. You should have seen the light in her eyes when she gazed into yours for the first time. And me? By giving you away to my sister I felt I’d lost all rights to you. It was only fair to let you all alone. I went back to my job with the literary agent but I was an innocent no longer. Not long afterwards I met Jonny, and thought I’d found my chance for security and respectability. How wrong I was.

We never saw the need to tell you any of this, your mother and I. The moment never presented itself. But now it’s time. I am truly sorry for the pain this knowledge will give you. I am sorry for failing you over and over again, first as a mother, then as an aunt and as a friend. None of it was planned, it was just how life happens.

Your very affectionate

Penelope

Isabel sank onto a kitchen chair and read the letter through again. She still couldn’t believe what it said. Finally she remembered the little envelope waiting on the table. She opened it. Inside was a piece of thick paper which she unfolded. It was a birth certificate. Here was her name,
Isabel Mary,
and Penelope’s,
Penelope Frances Lewis
as she was called then, but under
Father
was simply the word
Unknown.
Her date of birth was still 10 February 1929, the place of birth Wandsworth, South London.

It must have been soon afterwards that Charles and Pamela had taken her to live in Kent. A new start, she supposed, where no one would know them. And then four or five years later, the gift of twins of their own, followed eventually by Lydia.

Penelope was her real mother. Everything about the letter and the certificate spoke truth. It was unforgivable that no one had told her this before. Her whole life was not as she’d believed it to be. She didn’t want Penelope to be her mother. The woman had never cared for her, never. And now she’d been too afraid to tell Isabel, had run off to hide from her reaction.

She remained at the table without moving for some time, smoothing out the letter to read it a third time, then perusing the slip of stiff paper where her name was clearly written,
Isabel Mary.
Under
Mother
she touched the names
Penelope Frances Lewis
with her finger as though they might dissolve at will, but they remained clear and resolute.

It was difficult to accept the new facts presented to her. Her head knew, but her heart refused to regard the mother she had always known, as being her mother no longer. Penelope was no less emotionally distant for no longer being her aunt. Even her father, despite their difficulties, was still in all ways except the biological, her father.

And yet . . . This great secret was something her mother and Penelope had between them finally decided that she needed to know, now that Pamela was so ill. How had she never guessed? Nothing in all her twenty-four years had ever given her room to doubt the bedrock of her family life. Her mother had always been unwavering in her deep love. Her father had become curmudgeonly, oppressive even, but no more to her than to her brothers and sister; he’d treated them all equally, in this as everything. Had there not been the unmistakable evidence of this paper slip of officialdom with her name and birthdate on it, she might not have believed it.

And yet . . . It left her betrayed. Lied to. Her bedrock had crumbled. The world was now a completely different place, as if it had changed its mind and begun to revolve the other way.

And yet . . . Essentially, what had changed? Nothing. Only her perceptions. She wasn’t who she thought she was. Her parents were liars, or at best dissemblers. Her aunt had marked the occasion of revealing herself as Isabel’s mother by abandoning her all over again.