The Memory of Lost Senses (46 page)

“She won’t like it,” Cecily said. “I know that. But I’m going to ask her again about George Lawson and Cora.”

“You really want your story to be true, don’t you?”

“No, not necessarily, but I would like to know the truth.”

“Did you tell her about the Uncle John character, the blackmail?”

She sighed. “Yes, and she said the same as you. Said it was all nonsense.”

“I never said it was nonsense,” he replied, tenderness in his voice. “I simply said that it didn’t seem feasible. She may well have received some unpleasant letters, though you never found any, did you?”

“No. No, there were very few letters at all.”

They sat in silence for a moment, then she said, “You know, you once told me—years ago, I think it was on your last leave—that you’d found out something about Cora.”

He laughed. “You’re not expecting me to remember what it was now, are you?”

“No, I suppose not,” she said, sighing. “You said you couldn’t tell me until you had spoken to her about it . . . whatever it was.”

“Well, whatever it was, we’ll never know.”

Chapter Twenty-seven

Sylvia had already moved the envelope about the room: from the mantelshelf to the windowsill and back again. Now it lay on the table in front of her. She enjoyed looking at it. It made her happy to see it sitting there, waiting to be opened. She would find the right time. Until then, she could wallow in its potential, imagine its contents . . .

My own dearest Sylvia, Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me . . .

My dear Sylvia, Can you find it in your heart to forgive me?

Dearest Sylvia, Soon, I shall be gone, and I cannot bear that thought without first making amends with you . . . my only true friend . . .

Dear Sylvia, Mr. Cordery is planting out the herbaceous border and I was wondering if there are any violet plants to be had in London at this time of year
 . . .

Sylvia, I am at a loss to know WHAT to say to you, even now. The fact that you took it upon yourself to speak to X and visit Y is beyond me, but . . .

Sylvia placed the envelope on the table in front of her. She poured herself a sherry. Then she sat down. She tried to ignore the cream paper in front of her. She looked about the room, sipping the warm liquid in her glass. It was at moments like these she often wished that she had taken up smoking, or another hobby: something one could pick up and put down, something to distract oneself with. But now the envelope was shouting out at her, begging to be read. And that was what she had been waiting for: beseechment.

She picked it up, read her name out loud. Then, slowly, running her index finger under the flap, she severed the seal and lifted the paper to her face. It smelled of violets, the scent of Cora. And she sat with it, unsealed, in her hands for some time. It was the first step. She glanced at the clock: five to seven. She would wait five more minutes.

It was a difficult five minutes. Time seemed to slow down, minutes stretched out, self-consciously, as though knowing they were being watched. Finally, the clock chimed the hour and she pulled out the sheets. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight: eight pages from Cora! Her heart soared.

The letter was dated 15 September 1917. Sylvia lingered for a while on that date, making calculations: seven years after they had last seen each other . . . six years ago . . . and wasn’t that the time when Jack went missing? She read the first three words a few times over, out loud and slowly, knowing she could loiter there in safety: “My dear Sylvia . . . my
dear
Sylvia . . .
my dear
Sylvia . . .” It was a good start, a nice opening. She cast her eyes down over the page. Certain words sprang out: Cecily’s name, Jack’s name, the word
blackmail
and a few capitalized words, which appeared to her rather angry. She took a deep breath and began.

My dear Sylvia,

How very queer it feels to be penning a letter to you once more, and in the knowledge that by the time you read these words I shall be no more . . . for I am to ask Cecily to pass this on to you in the event of my death, which I fear cannot be too far away.

Much has happened since we last saw each other & none of us I am certain could ever have imagined or begun to comprehend the obscene horror upon us now. I am unable to make any sense of the carnage & see only the WASTE. Like everyone else, I have prayed & pleaded with God, I begged him to keep Jack safe, to end this fighting, but my darling boy is “missing,” & though I try to keep Hope and Faith, to live within that state, God’s voracious appetite for young souls offers me no hope at all. I do not see my grandson returning & experience tells me I will not be spared.

It is this sense of waste that has caused me to reflect upon my own life, & I see now only the brevity of our time here, that it lasts but a moment, & I begin to understand that the most important thing of all is to be TRUE to oneself . . . something I have struggled with, due perhaps to the absence of anyone to remind me & other things which I shall come on to. I realize also that before I am able to forgive myself I must forgive others . . . and so, dear Sylvia, I want you to know that I forgive you. Though I cannot condone your underhand tactics, & consider blackmail wholly immoral & beneath you or any decent human being, I am quite sure by now you bitterly regret such an undertaking. However, I know you were desperate, & I see also that I was much to blame. Furthermore, I know that you were not alone, & that the coincidence of another at the same time as yourself was unforeseen & not in your plan.

The withholding of information can be peculiarly frustrating, not least for the withholder . . . What you failed to grasp was that I had to protect dear Jack. He had a future ahead of him. Indeed, he WAS the future, the very best of me, and all I had left of George. It was this, & this alone, which caused me to question the merit & potential ramifications of allowing the truth to be told. No one else mattered a jot. They have all gone, and though George & Edward’s reputations would be held up to scrutiny, their judgments perhaps questioned, I think the truth would only add to intrigue & the myth of George in particular.

I am including some pages from your notebook, the ones I tore out—confiscated, though I rather think they read like a novel &, if you were to do anything with them, I would prefer that you took out the extraneous detail & imagined dialogue . . .

As regards “The Beginning,” that part of my story you were so very desperate to hear about & for so long, and which I rather think you know a little about by now, I leave it for you to decide whether or not to include it in any book. Is it relevant? Of any interest? I am still unsure. Also, I must admit that my memory is not what it was, & thus some things continue to elude me. However, & most peculiarly, certain details of my early life, which have remained something of a blur for so long, have recently come back to me, & I am able to confirm a few Facts. So, to the beginning . . .

Heart pounding, Sylvia turned the page.

I was born & baptized Coral Lillian Stopher in the year eighteen thirty-three. My parents’ names were Coral & Samuel. Both originated from Woodbridge in Suffolk, which is where I was born & where my father was employed as an undergardener & outdoor servant at a place called Standen Hall. I lived at this place—with my parents, sister & two brothers—in rooms above the stables. The Lillian in my name came from my maternal grandmother, a woman I cannot recall and possibly never knew, and my parents used this name for me, its abbreviated version—Lily. Thus, I was once Lily Stopher.

When I was perhaps six or seven years of age we left Standen Hall, for reasons I know not, but I suspect that my father lost his job there for he had nothing to go to and we nowhere to live. It is my belief now that we were homeless for some time, for I have memories of walking many miles & of sleeping out in fields, under stars.

It was around this time that my mother disappeared, though I do not recall her actual departure or any “Goodbye,” she was simply there and then not there, & I always assumed she would be coming back, that she had not abandoned us, perhaps because I had been told by someone at some stage that she had simply “gone for a while.” Not long after this my father too must have “gone,” for I have very few memories of him without her, my mother. As I say, my memory is not what it was & there are gaps and this time is one of them.

My siblings were eventually placed into the care of various scattered family members, & I into the care of my maternal aunt, who had married a shoemaker, a man by the name of
JOHN ABEL
.
Aunt Fanny and Uncle John at that time resided somewhere in the vicinity of
Bethnal Green
the Whitechapel area, in East London, and I recall little of it apart from the brutality of the man, my uncle. He fitted into that world & my aunt did not. But I do remember our rooms, how cramped and gloomy and very small they were, & how vast and sinister-looking the lunatic asylum on the old Roman road. That building haunted me before I understood why. I had no idea then that it was in fact the very place my mother had “gone for a while.”

My memory of our departure—the night we fled, & the events preceding it—is now muddled & vague . . . due perhaps to the fact that it is a memory for so many years unpracticed, not exercised, but instead exorcised. I can have been no more than twelve years of age, certainly of an age when I should be able to recall more, but though I have tried I am unable to summon detail, or perhaps I have no wish to.

Here, there was a line crossed through, and crossed through so many times it was impossible to make out the words.

What I do know is that my aunt and I took off into the night knowing we had committed a crime, knowing the law would not protect us, knowing people were hanged for murder and tried for desertion, knowing my aunt could not afford to go through Parliament and obtain a divorce. We traveled first to Jersey, later to Paris, & thence onwards to Rome, where my aunt had secured a position as housekeeper for a Mr. Staunton. It was the start of a new life, she told me, and a place where no one would ever find us. She was true in this, for in the doing I never again saw any member of my family.

It was many years later that I learned the truth of what happened to my mother, that when she left us she had in fact walked to London, whereupon she was found in a desperate & hysterical state on the streets, and later committed to the Bethnal Green Lunatic Asylum. She had been incarcerated there for over twelve years by the time the cholera epidemic swept through its doors and rescued her. As to my father, he passed away the year I was twenty-one, at the workhouse at Colchester, the very same place he had been headed when he left my siblings & myself in a derelict barn by a roadside. One imagines he had gone there looking for work and, unable to secure any employment, could not face returning to four hungry, motherless children.

My mother’s fate has been an immovable stain on my mind, for I long ago realized poverty & insanity to be irrevocably linked—that one simply preceded the other, and my mother’s madness to be the direct result of a bleak existence. My aunt once told me that three of her eight brothers had been committed to the Country Lunatic Asylum, the same three who had tried to move on in life, the same three who had had Removal Orders placed on them, returning them back to where they had started, back to the parish of their birth. I understood early on how madness could rescue a person & obliterate pain, that money afforded comfort & comfort afforded reason.

My life overseas enabled me to crawl out of that mire & become someone. Had my father not lost his job we would not have become homeless, & perhaps my mother would never have taken it upon herself to walk away one day down the old London Road. We would have remained together, & I would have had a family, my own family. But I would never have met George, never have become who I am—or once was. These are the things I ponder upon now, how my life should have been or could have been. And it is a queer conundrum. One offers me an identity, a family, and perhaps a sense of belonging . . . the other, opportunity. But which, I wonder, would I have chosen, then, had I been able?

So that was the beginning, Sylvia. That part of my story you so wished me to tell you. I was born poor, horrendously poor, nothing more or less. Unlike you, I was not a banker’s daughter, I was a servant’s daughter . . . and, even worse, an unemployed underservant’s daughter. Poverty made my mother go mad, ruptured my family, & drove my aunt to desperate measures.