The House at Tyneford (53 page)

“Yes,” I agreed. “Definitely too old. It’s obscene. You’re how old? Seventy-five? A hundred?”

He laughed, a low chuckle in his throat. “Old enough to know better.” He bent to kiss me. “Alice. Elise.”

I held him back and shook my head. “No,” I said. “Elise has gone. With you I am only Alice.”

“All right then, Alice, but I’m still going to kiss you.”

Daniel was only the second man I had kissed in my life. His lips tasted of salt and suddenly I realised I was crying. His face was slippery with my tears and my mouth stung with salt water. I remembered that Passover long ago and I heard Julian’s voice: “A man who has experienced great sorrow, and then has known its end, wakes each morning feeling the pleasure of sunrise.” But it had not ended. I felt sorrow and pleasure rushing at me all at once and I could not breathe, and I knew that if Daniel stopped kissing me I should dissolve into a blank, like the novel in the viola, but he did not stop. His fingers trailed down my cheeks to my breasts and the soft skin of my belly and I unfastened his shirt with steady hands and pressed my lips against the rough grey hair. I felt his mouth on my thigh and then his tongue, delicate as a snake’s. I was breathless as though from running as he pushed my knees apart and then he wrapped himself in me, a tangling of limbs and loves and lives. As he moved inside me, I felt a sob build in my chest and I cried out. I broke apart and he held me. I was new and warm and naked. I lay in his arms and I understood. I am two women and I love two men. Elise will always love Kit and Alice loves Daniel. This was not the life or the love I had expected but it was love all the same. We must leave Tyneford, but we would not leave alone.

I
am Mrs. Rivers after all. Alice Rivers. Our wedding photograph sits on my dressing table, and next to it is the photograph of Kit and me, taken the summer we were engaged. I am happy in both pictures.

I don’t remember very much about the wedding itself. It was before we left Tyneford, but I wouldn’t marry in the church, so it took place in the Dorchester registry office. It was a bright December day, the ground carpeted in frost thick as snow, while shining icicles hung from the trees. I wore Anna’s pearls and Mrs. Ellsworth made me a corsage with greenery from the garden. Daniel and I waited our turn, queuing along a linoleum corridor filled with soldiers and their sweethearts. We had no guests. A young lieutenant and his soon-to-be bride acted as our witnesses. I forget their names now. We ate our wedding breakfast in the kitchen at Tyneford, Wrexham insisting on serving us the tinned asparagus omelette in his white cotton gloves and Mrs. Ellsworth dabbing her eyes. We gave champagne to the WAAFs but I did not drink, as champagne made me think of Anna.

The only cloud was Margot. She did not answer my telegram. She did not wire or write. I knew she blamed me for the blank novel. For the next three years I sent her long letters and presents for the baby, pleading with her to understand, but she never replied. After the war, my letters were returned, stamped NO SUCH PERSON, ADDRESS UNKNOWN, and I no longer wrote.

I have had so much time over the years to think about our rift. At first I believed she was angry and unable to forgive me. Once we stopped writing to each other we receded from one another’s lives. The conversation had faltered, and after a while neither of us knew how to begin again. And yet, I also wonder if the silence was something else. We had lost almost every part of our old lives. I became Alice and I suspect that Margot similarly became another version of herself. We were the only things tying one another to our lost family and it was simply easier to try to forget, to hide the past in silence and busy ourselves with the present. I thought of her often. I could not eat her favourite rose creams or listen to Berlioz’s viola concerto. And as I grew older, I thought more and more about my niece, Juliana.

I always hoped that we would be allowed back to Tyneford, and we were, one last time. The Ministry of Defence decided that the land was essential for armed forces training and informed us that they were compulsorily purchasing the entire estate. Tyneford would no longer belong to the Rivers family, even in name. We returned one afternoon in early March 1963. A light wind blew from the east, and a fine film of drizzle obscured the vista of the bay. I was glad of the rain. I was not sure I could have borne to see it dazzle in the sunshine. We parked some distance down the now gravelled road and walked the last mile to the village. I didn’t see the houses at first; the trees had crept forward and embraced them in a mass of spring green as though they wanted to pull them deep, deep inside the woods. Cottages lurked among silver birch, hazel and tangles of blackthorn like drawings in a fairy tale. Everything was green—the springy moss clinging to the boughs of the trees, the bright lichen spotting the bark and the leaf shadows on the stonework. We walked closer and saw that the roofs had caved in and the timber upper floors rotted away so that fireplaces sprouted from halfway up the walls. Fingers of ivy poked through the stonework and forget-me-nots trembled between the flagstones. The walls were pockmarked with bullets, some of which had rusted and bled in the rains, leaving brown-red smears.

From the village we walked up to the house. The army had pulled down the Tudor wing some years before, and it stood half naked, the bare timbers exposed to the daylight like ribs. We picked our way inside; the doors had long since been wrenched from their hinges. The hall was open to the sky and it rained onto the stone floor, the parquet having been stripped out and shipped away to America by GIs years before. The drawing room held the reek of fox, and I saw that one had made his lair in the great fireplace. He hadn’t noticed us and dozed on, his scarlet brush poking out between the discarded fire irons.

Hand in hand, Daniel and I wandered onto the terrace and looked out over where the garden used to be. All that remained were the stone steps leading down to the lawns. The lawns themselves had reverted to meadow grass and weeds tore through the lavender and thyme borders. Then the sun slunk out from behind a cloud, casting a watery light across the valley and catching a treasure hoard of golden daffodils and the red flash of a kite’s wing. The song of a Dorset warbler punctured the stillness, and in a shaft of pale sun I glimpsed clusters of buttery primrose speckling the path leading to Flower’s Barrow.

We walked down to Worbarrow Bay in silence, scouring the beach for Burt’s cottage. It had sunk back into the strand, pebbles washed away in the tide so that only a tumbledown pile of brown and white stones remained. There were no boats in the bay, but the gulls shrieked and a black cormorant dabbled and fished. As the sun sank into the sea and dusk gathered on the hills, we left the shore and walked back to our car, knowing we intruded upon the stillness. Mankind did not belong here anymore.

The next journey home happened later, in the autumn of 1984. We stood in the hurry of Vienna’s Westbahnof, knocked by suitcases and the jostle of other people’s farewells. Daniel took my hand. “Are you all right, darling? Shall I get you some water?”

I shook my head and held on to the crook of his arm. I glanced up at the station clock. Eleven fifty-nine. The train would arrive in one minute—at least in Austria they ran on time. I couldn’t bear even a minute’s delay. My heart thundered in my ears and I forced myself to breathe. I gripped the viola case even tighter. Twelve o’clock. There was the shriek and stutter of a train pulling up to the platform. Doors slammed open. Luggage was handed out and a flurry of travellers hurried toward me. Standing on tiptoe, I peered through the crowd for her—a slim girl with blondish hair, doubtless very smartly dressed. People rushed me on both sides, and I swivelled and stared but could not see her. The crowd thinned and I choked back a sob. How could she miss the train? How could she?

“Elise.”

I turned around. I saw not a girl of twenty but a woman with white hair standing before me. The green eyes were the same. She smiled and I stepped forward into her arms, the viola case sandwiched between us.

“Margot, Margot” was all I managed for a minute or two. “I forgot. It’s been so long, I was looking for a girl.”

She gave a short laugh. “You’ll make me wish I’d dyed my hair.” She appraised me with that look of old, head tilted to one side. “You’re just the same.”

I flushed as though I were still nineteen. “Yes, well, I was thinner for a while in between.”

Margot laughed. “I didn’t mean that.”

There was so much to say and it hadn’t been said for so long that we stuttered on small talk. I admired her brooch; she liked my ring. We spoke in English, and silently I marvelled at her American accent, those glamorous vowels. Our husbands had discovered one another and discussed the weather and the inconvenience of foreign travel. After a few minutes Margot interrupted.

“Is this the viola?”

I nodded, my mouth dry. “Yes. I had it mended and restrung.”

I offered it to her, and she took it in silence. She swallowed and then opened her mouth as though to speak, but said nothing. It was suddenly very quiet in the station, as though the din had been smothered and Margot and I stood alone on platform twelve.

From outside, the Opera House looked almost the same, an island of light in the middle of the Ringstrasse. Men in black tuxedos and women in long dresses swarmed up the steps to the colonnade. A rope of lanterns glimmered above the bronze statues poised on the first-floor loggia, the light pooling about them like halos. Above us, a pair of winged horses reared, heads thrown back, metal manes streaming. Daniel and I edged forward, absorbed into the throng, and I listened to the once familiar chatter, the air humming with the excitement of opening night. I’d been here so often with Julian and Margot and the trio of aunts—Gretta fussing over whether she’d forgotten her opera glasses and wouldn’t be able to spy on her friends (she liked to be able to give Anna a minute report of the audience’s reaction; a single yawn in the balcony was noted and divulged). Gerda used to hurry us, tripping over the train of her old-fashioned skirts. Poor Margot was always quiet and a little pale, imagining too clearly her mother’s nerves. Julian and I, not being musicians ourselves and never having known the terror of performance, merely simmered with pride. Anna was going to sing! Our Anna. But that was many years ago and Anna had not sung here for a long time. I glanced at the grey and white heads in the crowd and wondered if any of them remembered her.

Daniel and I lingered outside in the cool of the loggia, he wondering at the exquisite frescos of
The Magic Flute
and I listening to the car horn concert from the street below. We were both strangers here. My home was the Vienna of 1938, not this shrieking modern city. I was relieved to speak in English. I was not forced to have waiters and the maître d’ sneer at my museum German. Daniel sensed my reluctance and it was he who told the taxi driver the name of the hotel and ordered our linzer torte and coffee
.
I could wear the mask of a British tourist, an Englishwoman able only to stammer and smile, ordinarily ignorant.