I'll Be Seeing You (2 page)

‘I should think so. Flavia will probably come up at the weekend and give me a hand. We'll need to get the house ready and organize the catering.'

‘Catering?'

‘For after the funeral. People will expect to be invited back. Sandwiches and tea, at least. And something stronger.'

‘Oh, Lord. Can't we skip all that?'

‘Not really. I expect there'll be quite a few turning up. She and Da had a lot of friends. Remember all the people at
his
funeral?'

Drew replaced the specs, frowning. ‘Speaking of the house, what the hell are we going to do about it?'

Apart from a separate bequest to her granddaughter, Flavia, and donations to charities, my mother's will had left the remainder of her estate, including the house, equally to us.

‘Sell it, I imagine. Unless you've any better ideas.'

‘I didn't mean that. Selling the house itself shouldn't be too difficult, but what are we going to do about the
contents
? The furniture. All the rest of the books. Ma's stuff. There's an awful lot.'

‘I know. We could try and go through some of it this evening. Decide what to keep.'

‘The trouble is, Sonia and I just don't have any space left for anything else. I could maybe squeeze in a few more books and the odd picture, and Da's chess set – if you don't want it, Ju – but that's about it.'

I knew it was true. Drew's small house in Cambridge, as well as his rooms in college, were already crammed full.

I said, ‘It seems an awful shame. I'll take as many books as I can and some pictures, but I couldn't get most of the furniture up the stairs – even if I had the room, which I haven't.'

‘How about Flavia?'

I smiled. ‘Flavia likes Conran. All very sleek and modern. But I'll ask her, of course.'

‘Most of it will have to be sold with the house, then. Nothing for it.'

‘Do you mind if I have Ma's writing bureau? The one in her bedroom.'

‘No, of course I don't. Take anything you want, Ju. Anything. Now, what about a sandwich or something to eat? I think they do bar snacks and I could do with a bite.'

I watched him amble off in search of a menu: a tall and professional figure with slightly hunched shoulders, dressed in an old tweed overcoat that he had had for aeons, with a woollen scarf wrapped round his neck. He was a repeat version of our father – rather eccentric, rather vague, his mind seemingly operating on some other and more rarefied plane. This was indeed the case. My brother was a brilliant mathematician; my father's intellect had been even more outstanding. And mathematicians at that level inhabit a world of their own.

After the pub we called at the vicarage. There had been several changes of vicars since my childhood days and I hardly knew this one, who was quite new. Like the funeral director, he was a relatively young man, but I liked him a great deal more. The hymns were settled, readings chosen and the old form of service would be used – all the
Thees
and the
Thous
and the beautiful old words. I felt that, with him, Ma was in safe hands – a lot safer than with the funeral director's complete caring package.

The house referred to by Drew, where our parents had lived for so long and where we had grown up, was in Summertown, in the northern part of Oxford. Victorian red brick, slate-roofed, gabled, stone-mullioned, castellated and crenellated, laurels at the front and a large and rambling garden at the back with a magnificent beech tree. It had been built, of course, for a Victorian-sized family, complete with staff. The main rooms were lofty, the sash windows fitted with wooden shutters that folded back, clanking and thudding, into deep recesses, the fireplaces were black cast-iron monstrosities. The kitchen had been equipped with a coke-guzzling range which was supposed to heat the radiators as well as cook the food, but they rarely rose above lukewarm. In any case, the shortage of fuel in those early post-war days meant that they were seldom turned on at all.

I had been three years old when we had moved in during 1947, soon after my father had taken up a post at Oxford university, and my brother, Andrew, had been born three years later. The only staff had been Mrs Collins who came twice a week, on Mondays and Fridays, to help with the cleaning – excluding my father's study at the far end of the hall. With her penchant for chat and her noisily flailing brooms and flapping dusters Mrs Collins was forbidden access and the room remained undisturbed and uncleaned, except sporadically by my mother, for years and years.

My father was, as I have said, a brilliant mathematician, but we only understood quite how brilliant after his death. The obituaries referred to him as a genius, describing his work at the codebreaking centre, Bletchley Park, deciphering German codes during the Second World War. The Enigma machine codes had been broken, but the fiendishly complicated machine, Fish, used by the German Army High Command for top-level communications, had proved even more difficult. A twelve-wheel contraption with hundreds of metal lugs turned each character into a string of electrical impulses converted into code before transmission. Cracking the code had taken many months, involving highly abstruse mathematical calculations based on one lucky careless slip by a German radio operator. My father had been a vital part of the team which had finally unlocked Fish's secrets. Unlike the breaking of the Enigma codes, this had been accomplished without ever seeing the machine. The method of deduction alluded to in the newspaper was incomprehensible to me – I have trouble with basic arithmetic – though Drew, of course, had understood. But our father had never once spoken of his time at Bletchley Park, and even Ma had only the haziest idea of what he had been doing during the war. ‘Something very dull to do with communications,' was all he would tell her – or us, whenever we asked him. He was not, apparently, the only one to clam up. While others were trumpeting aloud their wartime exploits, those at Bletchley Park remained silent. Churchill called them the geese that laid the golden eggs but never cackled.

The call on the vicar concluded, Drew and I went back to the house. The range had been replaced during the Seventies with an oil-fired Aga, but the Victorian radiators had stayed stubbornly lukewarm and the hallway, as we entered, felt damp and chill. We kept our coats on. Drew lit the gas fire in the study and I went to make some tea. The kitchen had always been the hub of the house. We ate there at the big scrubbed-wood table and the lodger students that my mother took in to fill up empty bedrooms always joined us in termtime. Something was always cooking on or in the range: soups, stews, potatoes, puddings, pies – simmering, baking, bubbling, sizzling, with the kettle hissing for the next cup of tea or coffee.

I filled the kettle, set it on the hotplate and fetched mugs, tea bags, milk, sugar. The two third-year St Hilda's students still living in the house had left their mugs and bowls and plates washed up and draining neatly on the rack and while I was waiting for the kettle to boil, one of them returned. Her bespectacled face appeared uncertainly round the edge of the door, framed in the nylon fur of her anorak hood. She was the one who had found Ma unconscious on the kitchen floor and sent for the ambulance.

‘Is there anything we can do, Mrs Porter?'

There wasn't, I assured her. And they were welcome to stay on until the house was sold. I promised to keep them informed.

‘We're so sorry,' she said. ‘We liked your mother. Very much. Everybody did.'

I knew it was true. As far as I was aware she had had no enemies, only friends.

I carried the tea through to the study where the old gas fire was making its usual pop-popping noises. How many times over the years had I carried a mug of tea to my father at work in there, and how often had I returned later to find it scummily cold and untouched on his desk? As a very small child, I could remember stretching up on tiptoe to reach the brass handle, pushing open the door and wandering around the book-lined room, fingering this and touching that. The study door was never locked, admission never denied – except to Mrs Collins. The outsize chess set on the table by the fire was always an attraction: pawns, bishops, rooks, knights, queens and kings drawn up and poised for battle, black team against white. I would shunt them to and fro across the squares. The humble pawns could be made to scoot about, the bishops and rooks to slide, but the majestic kings and queens had to be lifted. Sometimes Da would look up from his desk to smile and make some kindly and indulgent remark; at other times, he was too absorbed in his work to notice me at all.

Drew was at the bookshelves, taking down a dusty volume and opening it up. When Da had died a lot of his books, as well as his papers, had been given to the university but there were still plenty left in the study and in the rest of the house – shelves of them in almost every room, including many of our books from childhood. I put Drew's mug on the desk, close to the silver-framed photograph of Ma in her WAAF uniform. She smiled at me from out of the past. Trim and slim, tie neatly tied, uniform cap stylishly worn, her dark hair rolled up behind the ears, Forties fashion. People had always said how alike we were: same build, same features, same colour hair – until hers had eventually gone pepper and salt in her late sixties. Throughout my life she had been there at all the stages, for the good times and the bad, the easy and the hard; suddenly, she wasn't. She had gone and she had denied me the comfort of some last words together. I felt, childishly and I knew unreasonably, that, at the end, she had deserted me.

‘Tea's up.'

Drew grunted, already engrossed in the book. Like father, like son. I left him to it and took my own tea upstairs to the main bedroom, as glacially cold as the hall. I switched on the lights and stood for a moment in the silence, warming my hands round the mug. Ma's dressing gown was still hanging on the hook behind the door, her slippers placed beside the big double bed, her woollen cardigan draped across the back of a chair, her string of pearls lying on the dressing table, and there was a faint trace of the floral scent that she always wore. Her death seemed quite unreal: a horrible misunderstanding. I had never, after all, witnessed her dead. By the time I had reached the hospital she had been taken away to the mortuary and I had refused, in cowardly panic, to see her, afraid that the sight of her dead might erase the memory of her alive. Now, I could almost believe that she might come back at any moment. The front door would click open and shut, her footsteps would sound across the hall, her voice call out from the stairs:

‘Juliet, darling, is that you? I'd no idea you were coming. What a lovely surprise!'

Instead, there was only silence.

For no particular reason, I went over to her desk – an Edwardian lady's kneehole writing bureau with drawers down each side and a fold-up lid. On the top was a photograph of Drew and myself as children, arms linked together, and, beside it, one of my daughter, Flavia, taken twenty years ago at four years old. Her only grandchild.

The desk lid was closed but the key had been left in the lock. I sat down where she had sat, put the tea mug aside on the floor and turned the key, lowering the lid gently onto its brass hinges. In front of the pigeonholes, propped up conspicuously so that it could not possibly be missed, was an envelope addressed to me in my mother's hand, in the royal blue ink she always used.
For Juliet
.

I picked it up and turned it over. More writing, but smaller, on the back. I took my reading glasses out of my coat pocket.
To be opened by her, and her alone, after my death
.

I felt no premonition or apprehension. I simply thought that it was probably about some wish that she wanted carried out, not already mentioned specifically in her will. Something she felt she could rely on me to see to rather than Drew. She had known, after all, that she was dying and there had been plenty of time to think about such things, to make additions and amendments. I slit open the envelope with the ivory paperknife kept in one of the pigeonholes, and took out a folded sheet of writing paper and, tucked inside, an old black and white photograph. I glanced at the photo briefly. It showed a group of men – obviously an air crew dressed for flying – in front of a large plane. The men at the back were standing, the ones in the front crouched down on their haunches. I put it aside on the desk, wondering who on earth they were, and opened out the letter. It was dated three days before she died and the writing was shaky.