House of Echoes. Barbara Erskine
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Joss was taken aback.
‘That’s right. It is here, now.’
‘Right. I’ll come over now.’ Joss shrugged as she hung up. ‘A somewhat peremptory Miss Sutton wishes to see me now. I’ll take a rain check on the coffee, Luke, and go before she changes her mind. She says she has something for me. Will you watch Tom Tom?’
‘OK.’ Luke leaned across and kissed her cheek. ‘See you later then.’
This time when Joss knocked at the cottage door on the green it opened almost immediately. Mary Sutton was a small wizened woman with wispy white hair, caught back in a knot on the top of her head. Her narrow, birdlike face was framed by heavy tortoiseshell spectacles.
Joss was shown into a small neat front room which smelled strongly of old baking and long dead flowers. A heavy brown oil cloth covered the table on which was a small notebook. It was identical to the one Joss had found in her mother’s desk. Her eyes were glued to it as she took the proffered seat on an upright chair near the window.
After several long seconds of silent scrutiny the solemn face before her broke suddenly into a huge beam. ‘You may call me Mary, my dear, as your mother did.’ Mary turned away and began to pour out tea which had been laid ready on a tray on the sideboard. ‘I looked after you when you were very small. It was I who gave you to the adoption people when they came to collect you.’ She blinked hard through her pebble lenses. ‘Your mother could not bring herself to be there. She walked in the fields down by the river until you had gone.’
Joss stared at her aghast, trapped into silence by the lump in her throat. Behind the glasses the old lady’s eyes, magnified into huge half globes, were brimming with tears.
‘Why did she give me away?’ It was several minutes before Joss could bring herself to ask. She accepted the tea cup with shaking hands and put it down hastily on the edge of the table. Her eyes had returned from Mary’s face to the notebook.
‘It was not because she didn’t love you, my dear. On the contrary, she did it because she loved you so much.’ Mary sat down and pulled her skirt tightly over her knees, tucking the voluminous fabric under her bony legs. ‘The others had died, you see. She thought if you stayed at Belheddon, you would die too.’
‘The others?’ Joss’s mouth was dry.
‘Sammy and George. Your brothers.’
‘Sammy?’ Joss stared at her. She had gone cold all over.
‘What dear?’ Mary frowned. ‘What did you say?’
‘You looked after them? My brothers?’ Joss whispered.
Mary nodded. ‘Since they were born.’ She gave a wistful little smile. ‘Little rascals they were, both of them. So like their father. Your mother adored them. It nearly broke her when she lost them. First Sammy, then Georgie. It was too much for any woman to bear.’
‘How old were they when they died?’ Joss’s fingers were clenched in her lap.
‘Sammy was seven, near as makes no difference. Georgie was born a year after that, in 1954, and he died on his eighth birthday, bless him.’
‘How?’ Joss’s whisper was almost inaudible.
‘Terrible. Both of them. Sammy had been collecting tadpoles. They found him in the lake.’ There was a long silence. ‘When Georgie died it was nearly the end of your mother.’
Joss stared at her speechlessly as, shaking her head, Mary sipped at her tea. ‘They found him at the bottom of the cellar steps, you see. He knew he was never allowed down there, and Mr Philip, he had the cellar keys. They were still there, locked in his desk.’ She sighed. ‘Sorrows long gone, my dear. You must not grieve over them. Your mother would not have wanted that.’ She reached for the notebook and took it off the table, holding it on her lap with little gentle stroking movements of her fingers. ‘I’ve kept this all these years. It’s right you should have them. Your mother’s poems.’ Still she didn’t release the volume, holding it close as if she could not bear to part with it.
‘You must have loved her very much,’ Joss said at last. She found there were tears in her eyes.
Mary made no response, continuing to stroke the notebook quietly.
‘Did you – did you know the French gentleman who came here?’ She studied the old lady’s face. There was a slight pursing of the lips, no more.
‘I knew him.’
‘What was he like?’
‘Your mother was fond of him.’
‘I don’t even know his name.’
Mary looked up at last. This at least was something she seemed able to divulge without reservation. ‘Paul Deauville. He was an art dealer. He travelled the world I understand.’
‘Did he live in Paris?’
‘He did.’
‘And my mother went to live with him?’
A definite frisson – almost a shudder. ‘He took your mother away from Belheddon.’
‘Do you think he made her happy?’
Mary met Joss’s eye and held it steady through the grotesquely magnifying lenses of her glasses. ‘I hope so, my dear. I never heard from her again after she left.’
As if she were afraid she had said too much Mary clamped her lips shut, and after several more perfunctory attempts at questioning her Joss rose to leave. It was only as she turned to walk through the front door into the blinding frosty sunlight that Mary at last relinquished the notebook.
‘Take care of it. There is so little of her left.’ The old lady caught her arm.
‘I will.’ Joss hesitated. ‘Mary, will you come and see us? I should like you to meet my little boy, Tom.’
‘No.’ Mary shook her head. ‘No, my dear. I’ll not come to the house if you don’t mind. Best not.’ With that she stepped back into the shadows of her narrow front hall and closed the door almost in Joss’s face.
The graves were there, beyond her father’s. Quite overgrown now, she hadn’t seen the two small white cross headstones side by side in the nettles under the tree. She stood looking down at them for a long time. Samuel John and George Philip. Someone had left a small bowl of white chrysanthemums on each. Joss smiled through her tears. Mary at least had never forgotten them.
Luke and Tom were busy in the coach house when she got home. With one look at their happy oily faces she left them to their mechanical endeavours and clutching the notebook retreated to the study. The sunshine through the window had warmed the room, and she smiled a little to herself as she stooped and throwing on some logs, coaxed the fire back into life. In a few moments it would be almost bearable. Curling up on the arm chair in the corner she opened the notebook at the first page. Laura Manners – Commonplace Book. The inscription in the flyleaf of this notebook was in the same flamboyant hand as that in the other. She glanced at the first few pages and felt a sharp pang of disappointment. She had assumed her mother would have written the poems herself, but these were bits and pieces copied out from many authors – a collection obviously of her favourite poems and pieces of prose. There was Keats’s ode To Autumn, a couple of Shakespeare sonnets, some Byron, Gray’s Elegy.
Slowly, page after page she leafed through, reading a few lines here and there, trying to form a picture of her mother’s taste and education from the words on the page. Romantic; eclectic, occasionally obscure. There were lines from Racine and Dante in the original French and Italian, a small verse from Schiller. She was something of a linguist then. There were even Latin epigrams. Then suddenly the mood of the book changed. Stuck between two pages was a single sheet, old and torn, very frail, held in place by tape which had discoloured badly. It was an India paper page, torn, Joss guessed from a Roman Missal. On it, in English and in Latin, was a prayer for the blessing of Holy Water.
…