The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein (Mammoth Books) (56 page)

Aunt Rosemary was in her mid-seventies. She was almost handsome, but she walked with a terrible crablike limp, and all of her movements were haphazard and unco-ordinated. She had told David that she suffered from chronic arthritis, made worse by the treatment that doctors had given her in Paris in the 1920s. In those days, the latest thing was to inject the joints of arthritis sufferers with gold, a technique that was not only ruinously expensive but permanently crippling.

“David, you came,” she said, her lower lip sloping in a parody of a smile. “Will you have time for some tea?”

“We’d love to,” said David. “Wouldn’t we, Bonny?”

“Oh yes,” Bonny agreed. “We’d love to.”

They sat in the small gloomy sitting-room drinking weak PG Tips and eating rock cakes with cherries in them. Aunt Rosemary had to keep a handkerchief gripped in her hand in case cake-crumbs poured out of the side of her mouth.

Bonny tried to look at something else. The clock on the mantelpiece, the china figurines of racehorses, the goldfish flapping in its murky bowl.

Before they left, David went to the toilet. Bonny and Aunt Rosemary sat in silence for a while. Then Bonny said, “I was asking David earlier why you never go to visit his mother.”

“Oh,” said Aunt Rosemary, dabbing her mouth. “Well, she and I were very close at one time. But she was the kind who always took and never gave. A very selfish woman, in ways that you wouldn’t understand.”

“I see,” said Bonny, uncomfortably.

Aunt Rosemary laid a distorted hand on hers. “No, dear. I don’t really think that you do.”

David spent almost the entire weekend up in the attic. Fortunately, Bonny didn’t mind too much, because she had a wallpaper design to finish for Sanderson’s, a new range based on the 19th-century fabric designs of Arthur Mackmurdo, all curling leaves and flowers in the arts-and-crafts style. The attic was airless and rather too warm, but it was well-lit, with a dormer window looking out over the lawns, and a cushioned window seat where David could sit and sort through some of his father’s old documents and photograph-albums.

The albums smelled like musty old clothes and unopened closets: the very essence of yesterday. They contained scores of pictures of smiling young medical students in the 1920s, and people in boaters and striped summer blazers having picnics. His father had been photographed with lots of pretty girls, but after March, 1938, he was only ever photographed with one girl – Katya Ardonna Galowska – and even though she was his own mother, David could clearly see why his father had adored her so much.

Their wedding day – April 12, 1941. His mother had worn a smart titled Robin Hood hat and a short dress with a bolero top. His father had worn a tight double-breasted suit, and spats. Yes,
spats
! They looked as glamorous as film stars, the pair of them; like Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, and their eyes had that odd, unfocused brightness of the truly happy. The truly happy look only inward, dazzled by their own delight.

David in his mother’s arms, the day after he was born. There was
a larger print of his photograph in the drawing-room downstairs, in a silver frame. David when he was eleven months old, sleeping in his mother’s arm. Her face was limned by the sunlight that shone through the leaded-glass window, her wispy curls shone like traveller’s joy. Her eyes were slightly hooded, as if she were dreaming, or thinking of another land. She was so magnetically beautiful that David found it almost impossible to turn the page – and when he did, he had to turn back again, just for another look.

The date on the photograph was August 12, 1948.

He kept on leafing through the album. There he was, at the age of two, his first visit to the circus. His first Kiddi-Kar. Oddly, though, no sign of his mother – not until January, 1951, when she was pictured next to a frozen pond somewhere, wrapped up in furs, her face barely visible.

She appeared fairly consistently until September, 1951. She was standing at the end of Sea View pier on the Isle of Wight (a pier that was later blown down in a storm). She was wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a calf-length floral dress, and white strappy shoes. Her face was hardly visible in the shadow of her hat, but she seemed to be laughing.

Then again, his mother seemed to disappear. There were no photographs of her until November, 1952, when she had attended Lolly Bassett’s wedding at Caxton Hall, in London. She wore a grey suit with a pleated skirt. She looked extremely thin, almost emaciated. Her face was still beautiful but slightly
lumpy
in a way, as if she were recovering from a beating, or hadn’t slept well.

Throughout the first five photograph albums that he looked at, David discovered seven material gaps in his mother’s appearance . . . almost as if she had taken seven extended vacations throughout his early childhood. When he came to think about it, she
had
been away now and again, but he had always been so well looked after by Iris, his nanny (his father’s maiden sister), and then by Aunt Rosemary, that it had never really occurred to him until now how extended those absences must have been. He remembered that his mother had been ill a great deal, in those days, and that she had been obliged to stay in her bedroom for weeks on end, with the curtains tightly drawn. He remembered tiptoeing into her bedroom to kiss her goodnight, and scarcely being able to find her in the darkness. He remembered touching her soft, soft face, and feeling her soft, soft hair; and smelling her perfume and someting else, some strong, penetrating smell, like antiseptic.

But then, in 1957, she had reappeared, as strong and as beautiful as ever before, and the sun had shone in every room, and his father
had laughed, and he had thought sometimes that he must have the best parents that any boy could wish for.

There was a sixth album, bound in black leather, but it was fastened with a lock, and he couldn’t find the key. He made a mental note to himself to look through his father’s desk.

He turned back to the photograph of his mother in 1948, and laid the flat of his hand on it, as if he could somehow absorb some understanding of what had happened through the nitrates on the paper.

All through his early life, it seemed as if his mother had come and gone, come and gone, like the sunlight on a cloudy afternoon.

He parked outside Northwood Nursing Home and spent some time wrestling the MG’s waterproof cover into place, because it looked like rain.

Inside, he found the registrar’s office down at the end of a long linoleum-floored corridor, which echoed and smelled of wax polish. The registrar was a tired-looking woman in a lilac cardigan who noisily clicked extra strong mints around her teeth, making little sucking noises. She made it more than obvious that David’s request was extremely tiresome, and that she could have been doing something much more important instead (such as making Nescafe).

David waited while she leafed through the record-book, making a performance of turning each page.

“Yes . . . here we are. July 3, 1947. Mrs Katerina Geoffries. Blood group O. Medical history, measles, chicken pox, mild scarlatina. Live male birth – I presume that’s you? – weighing 7lbs 4ozs.”

David peered over the desk. “There’s another note there, in red ink.”

“That’s because somebody has checked her medical record at a later date.”

“I see. Why would anybody want to do that?”

“Well, in this case, because of her accident.”

“Accident? What accident?”

The registrar stared at him very oddly, her eyes magnified by her spectacles. “You are who you say you are?” she asked him.

“Of course. Why shouldn’t I be?”

The registrar closed the book with an emphatic slap. “It just strikes me as rather peculiar that you don’t know about your mother’s accident.”

David pulled out his wallet, and showed the registrar his driving-licence and a letter from the Borough Council. “I’m David Geoffries. Mrs Katya Geoffries is my mother. Look . . . here’s a photograph of us together. I don’t know why she never told me about
her accident. Perhaps she didn’t think that it was very important.”

“I would say that it was extremely important – at least as far as your mother was concerned.”

“But why?”

The registrar opened the book again, and turned it around so that David could read what was written in red ink. “Senior med. reg. from Middlesex Hosp. inquired blood grp & med. history urgent 2 a.m. 14/09/48 (unable contact GP). Mrs G. seriously crushed in car accident.”

Underneath, in black ink, in another hand: “Mrs Geoffries deceased 15/09/48.”

David looked up. He felt as if he had been breathing in nitrous oxide at the dentist – light-headed and echoey and detached from everything around him. “This must be a mistake,” he heard himself saying. “She’s still alive, and perfectly well, and living at The Limes. I saw her only yesterday.”

“Well, if that’s the case, I’m very pleased,” said the registrar, making a loud rattle with her mint. “Now, if you can excuse me – ”

David nodded, and stood up. He left the Nursing Home and stood on the steps outside, while the rain began to spot the red-asphalt driveway, and the wind began to rise.

He found a copy of the death certificate at Somerset House. Mrs Katerina Ardonna Geoffries had died on September 15th, 1948, in the Middlesex Hospital, cause of death multiple internal injuries. His mother had been killed and here was the proof.

He visited the offices of the
Uxbridge Gazette
and leafed through amber-coloured back-issues in the morgue. There it was: in the issue dated September 18th, complete with a photograph. A few minutes after midnight, a Triumph Roadster had run through a red traffic-light at Greenford, and collided with a lorry carrying railway-lines. David recognized the car at once. He had seen it in several photographs at home. It hadn’t occurred to him that it had failed to reappear after September, 1948.

His mother was dead. His mother had died when he was only a year old. He had never known her, never talked to her, never played with her.

So who was the woman in The Limes? And why had she pretended for all of these years that
she
was his mother?

He went back home. Bonny had made him a devastatingly hot chili-con-carne, one of his favourites, but he found that he could only pick at it.

“What’s the matter?” she asked him. “You’re so pale! You look as if you need a blood transfusion.”

“My mother’s dead,” he said; and then he told her whole story.

They left their supper and sat on the sofa with glasses of wine and talked about it. Bonny said, “What I can’t understand is why your father never told you. I mean, it wouldn’t have upset you, would it? You wouldn’t have remembered her.”

“It wasn’t just me he didn’t tell. He didn’t tell
anybody
. He called her Katya and he told everybody how they had met in Poland before the war . . . he used to call her the Queen of Warsaw. Why would he have done that, if it wasn’t her at all?”

They poured over the photograph albums again. “These later pictures,” said Bonny, “they certainly
look
like your mother. She’s got the same hair, the same eyes, the same profile.”

“No . . . here’s a difference,” said David. “Look . . . in this picture of her holding me when I was eleven months old, look at her earlobes. They’re very small. But look at
this
picture taken in 1951. There’s no doubt about it, she’s got different ears.”

Bonny went to her easel and came back with her magnifying-glass. They scrutinized the woman’s hands, her feet, her shoulders. “There . . . she has three moles on her shoulder in this picture, but not in this one.”

At last, with the bottle of wine almost empty, they sat back and looked at each other in bewilderment.

“It’s the same woman, yet it isn’t the same woman. She keeps changing, very subtly, from year to year.”

“My father was a brilliant surgeon. Maybe he was giving her cosmetic surgery.”

“To make her earlobes bigger? To give her moles where she didn’t have moles before?”

David shook his head. “I don’t know . . . I can’t understand it at all.”

“Then perhaps we’d better ask the only person who really knows . . . your mother, or whoever she is.”

She sat with her face half in shadow. “I am Katya Ardonna,” she said. “I always have been Katya Ardonna, and I will remain Katya Ardonna until the day I die.”

“But what about the accident?” David insisted. “I’ve seen my mother’s death certificate.”

“I
am
your mother.”

He went through the photograph albums again and again, searching for clues. He had almost given up when he found a photograph of
his mother at Kempton Park racecourse in 1953, arm in arm with a smiling brunette. The caption read,
Katya & Georgina, lucky day at the races
!!

Clearly visible on her friend Georgina’s shoulder were three moles.

Georgina’s father sat by the window, staring sightlessly out at the traffic on the Kingston Bypass through his grimy net curtains. He wore a frayed grey cardigan. A resentful tortoiseshell cat sat in his lap and gave David an unblinking death stare.

“Georgina went out on New Year’s Eve, 1953, and that was the last anybody ever saw of her. The police were very good about it, they did their best, but there were no clues to go on, not one. I can see her face like it was yesterday. She turned round and said, ‘Happy New Year, dad!’ I can hear it now. But after that night, I never had one happy new year, not one.”

David said to his mother, “Tell me about Georgina.”

“Georgina?”

“Georgina Philips, she was a friend of yours. One of your best friends.”

“Why on earth do you want to know about her? She went missing, disappeared.”

David said, “I think I’ve found out where she is. Or at least, I think I know where part of her is. Her arm?”

His mother stared at him. “My God,” she said. “After all these years . . . I never thought that anybody would ever find out.”

She stood in the centre of her room, wearing nothing but her pale peach dressing-gown. Bonny stood in the corner, right in the corner, fearful but fascinated. David stood close to his mother.