The Memory of Lost Senses (8 page)

“Well, yes, and he seems so . . .”

“Fine?” Cora suggested.

Sylvia tapped her pencil on her lip, then nodded. “Yes, fine.”

“Well, I rather think he is. He’s not like her, you know? Good gracious no, nothing like her. He’s like his father, and like . . .”

“George?”

Cora turned to her. “Like his grandfather,” she said.

“You know, the timing of it has always struck me as a queer thing,” Sylvia began again.

“The timing of it?”

“Yes. The fact that it happened immediately after the government’s census . . . that she recorded herself and then, almost the very next day, was no more.”

“They’re abominable things,” Cora said, raising a hand dismissively.

Sylvia smiled. “But you’ve never had to do one, dear.”

“No, and nor would I!”

Sylvia shook her head. “It’s the law, I’m afraid. Everyone has to.”

“The law is an ass.”

“You know, you’d have had to give them your
full
name,” Sylvia went on. “Yes, and oh my, that
would
confound them!” she said, clapping her hands, and then intentionally mispronouncing Cora’s full name. “And ’ow you spellin’ that, ma’am?” she added, in a mock cockney accent, Cora presumed, and giggling.

“I do not use Lawson, Sylvia, as you very well know. My name is quite long enough without it. And anyway, the name proved . . . problematic. I have no desire to raise my head above the parapet again.”

“No . . . no, of course not,” Sylvia replied, gathering herself. “And you’re right, censuses are awful things and ask all manner of questions: what one’s occupation is, how many children one has given birth to. Oh, it goes on and on. And for the life of me I do wonder why. Wonder who all this information is for.”

“Statistics,” Cora said, with great emphasis. “Statistics and pigeonholing, placing us all into tidy identifiable groups. The modern world is becoming obsessed by statistics . . . utterly intrusive and condemnable, I think.”

“Well, I can’t help but wonder if all those questions were simply too much for her. For Cassandra, I mean.”

“I don’t think it was the census, Sylvia. Cassandra had always been fragile, always of a melancholic nature. No, I think she’d teetered on a brink for years, and but for Jack, who knows? Perhaps she’d have taken her own life many years ago. But she waited, she waited until . . . until he was an adult.”

“Unfathomable . . . and I don’t imagine she ever thought you’d come back,” Sylvia mused aloud. “I suppose that’s why she waited until he was grown up, had finished his studies. But,” she gasped, shaking her head, “such a dreadful thing to do to him, poor dear.”

“Best not spoken of, I think, Sylvia. ’Twas a wicked and selfish act and I have nothing more to say on the matter.”

“Well, we have had rather a lovely day to ourselves, have we not?” said Sylvia, after a moment or two. “And certainly, everyone considered it a great honor to have
you
there to judge and present the prizes today. Oh yes, it’s quite clear that they hold you in very high esteem. In fact, you appear to be something of a celebrity, my dear.”

“I don’t think so. A foreigner, perhaps, an outsider.”

“But you’re not. And you really mustn’t say such things. People will take you at your word, especially country folk.”

“Perhaps not but I feel like one, and I’m never entirely sure where my allegiance lies . . . Though dear Bertie used to laugh at me whenever I said such things.” She paused, smiling, remembering. “‘My dear,’ he would say, ‘you are as English as I.’ Of course he was being ironic because he was a Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and his mother a Hanoverian.”

“The King was fond of you, wasn’t he?”

“Oh yes, he was a dear friend, and of course a very dear friend to . . .”

“George?”

“Mm, yes, George,” Cora replied vaguely.

George. His face had haunted her dreams and waking hours for half a century. And yet it was hard to fathom the passing of time and nearness of him, the years between then and now. George. Each and every day of her life she remembered him. His face stared back at her through open doorways and panes of glass, through seasons and years, across a continent and a sea. All of her imaginings led her back to him: the what-ifs, the whys, the silent conversations stretching through time. And sometimes, alone, she spoke his name out loud, lengthening that one adored syllable. But what would he think of her situation now? she wondered.
He never knew, never knew any of it, I never told him
 . . .

“And would he have loved me any the less?” she murmured.

“What’s that, dear?”

Cora started. “Oh, nothing . . . nothing at all.”

“You know, you quite put me to shame today,” Sylvia began again. “I’d never realized that you had such an understanding and knowledge of flowers and plants.”

“Not really, my dear, I just know a little about many things—and don’t they say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing?”

“But it always seems to me that you know a great deal about
everything
,” Sylvia replied. “And I insist, you must tell me where this knowledge came from.”

Cora turned to her friend. “You know, I’m rather beginning to think you’d be better employing your investigative talents in writing crime thrillers instead of silly romances that . . . that have no bearing on real life!”

For some minutes the two women sat in silence.

“I’m sorry,” Cora said, “I’ve a great deal on my mind.”

“Is it about Jack?” Sylvia asked, leaning forward.

“No, not entirely . . .” She paused, looking at her friend with newly anxious eyes.

“Then what is it, dear? Please tell me what it is that’s troubling you so.”

Cora reached over, placed her hand upon Sylvia’s. “I’m not sure I’ve ever told you how much your friendship means to me,” she said, her eyes on their hands. “You’ve been the best, the very best.”

“We’ve been good friends to each other, dear. And you’ve been more than a friend to me, you have been family to me. But I can’t bear to see you like this, not now. We’re both much too old for any more drama.”

Cora tried to smile, shook her head. “Oh, it’s nothing . . . nothing sinister. Complications to do with the trust estates, that’s all.”

“Ah, I thought as much. But you know, you really mustn’t worry so. All will be well. Edward was a good man, a good husband. I’m quite certain he’ll have made sure that you’re looked after, provided for.”

“Well, I’m not destitute, not yet.”

“Nor will you ever be, not whilst I’m alive. But it’s a scandal”—Sylvia shook her head—“for you to be so fretful at this stage in your life. Dear Edward would turn in his grave!”

“It is what it is, we all have our crosses to bear . . . and I have spent too much of my life creating heroes and villains out of mere mortals.”

She saw Sylvia open her notebook once more and scribble something down. And Cora smiled. “
Dolce far niente
,” she said, closing her eyes.

“Ah yes,
dolce far niente
,” Sylvia repeated, without looking up.

“You know, I close my eyes and I’m back there.”

“It’s this blessed heat. Easily as hot as Rome in August, and to think . . .”

Cora could hear Sylvia’s voice, but she could no longer make out the words, and she had no wish to. She wanted to go back there, to that time, always that time, always that place.

Weeks away from England, isolated and undisturbed, Rome had been a small city then, shriveled within its walls. A place of lopsided crucifixes and littered shrines, and scattered ruins tangled up in weeds and undergrowth, and centuries of rubble and dust, where cows and sheep grazed about the tumbled pillars of ancient palaces and ragged clothes lay out to dry upon their scorching stones. Where animal carcasses, flasks of oil and balls of cheese dangled against the crumbling plaster of windowless shops; where tailors, milliners, shoemakers and carpenters huddled in doorways, a shrine to the Madonna and a candle flickering in the dimness behind them. And in the summer months, when the Tiber exposed her yellow banks and a fetid air hung over the city’s ruins, the place languished in that sweet idleness the Romans called “
dolce far niente
.”

“Never look back,” her aunt had told her. “Your life . . .
our
life began here in Rome.” And for so long, so very long, she had not looked back. She had only ever looked ahead, always ahead. But that
other
time, that time before Rome—for so long pushed away, denied, so much so that it had almost been forgotten—seemed determined to be acknowledged. And names for so long unuttered, buried in the past, had been written down for her to see:
John Abel
.

She opened her eyes. Sylvia was watching her, and she smiled. Now, a new secret hung between them, an invisible pendulum swinging between each and every glance. And Sylvia’s constant surveillance, that seemingly relentless albeit well-meaning scrutiny was awaiting answers, waiting for her to elucidate upon then and now, and everything in between.

But no, she couldn’t. How could she? She would have to introduce Sylvia to new words—words even she found hard to say. And it would mean going back to the beginning, the beginning of everything. It would mean unraveling seven decades of careful arrangement. She thought of her aunt, of all the times she had warned her about any permanent return to England. But she had had no choice in the matter. After all, the boy had no one, and she had nowhere else to go.

Such a tawdry business, blackmail.

Chapter Four

“A French cook, I ask you!”

Rosetta was rolling out pastry once more, sprinkling flour across the pine table, wiping her brow between every roll. The kitchen was airless and hot. Cecily sat watching her, only half engaged in their desultory conversation which had meandered from shortcrust pastry to the shortcomings of the soon-to-be-appointed cook at Temple Hill.

“How’s she going to find a French cook round here? And what do the French know about English food? It’ll all be foreign, oh yes, you mark my words, and then she’ll have to eat humble pie, advertise again,” Rosetta went on, oblivious of any pun. “Never trusted the Frenchies, never would—look at what they did to their own King . . . wouldn’t want one in the house, rob you as soon as look at you. And she’s half-French—at least.”

“Actually, I think she’s English,” Cecily said without looking up. “Her grandson’s certainly English.”

“Hmm. He might be,” Rosetta said, skeptically. “But there’s been stuff said, hasn’t there? And there’s no smoke without fire.” She glanced over at Cecily. “But that’s not to say he’s got her ways.”

“Her ways?”

“All them marriages, that life abroad. It’s not normal, is it?”

Cecily didn’t answer. What was normal? Was Rosetta’s life normal? Was her mother’s? Normal was surely whatever was normal; normal was subjective. Normal meant nothing, she concluded swiftly. There was little point in debating semantics with Rosetta.

“I’m not altogether sure what you mean,” she said.

“Well, seems to me she’s had a
pecular
sort of a life. Moving about all the time, marrying willy-nilly. It smacks of one thing . . .”

“Mm, what’s that?”

Rosetta put down the rolling pin and leaned toward Cecily, her broad hands flat on the table. “Lustfulness.”

“Lustfulness!” Cecily repeated.

“You may well smirk, my girl, but it’s what robs men of what little sense they’re born with and sends women to the county asylum.”

Lustfulness. It was not a word Cecily had heard spoken out loud before, or not that she could recall. Lustfulness: is that what had driven their new neighbor from one country to another, one man to another?

“And it all comes from the French . . .” Rosetta was saying, stuck on her theme now. “I don’t want to know what they get up to over there, and I don’t want them bringing it over here neither.”

Diminutive, dark, and comfortingly round, Rosetta, Cecily thought, would have made a brilliant actress. She understood drama, knew how to deliver lines. But her talent had been wasted—in service, and in a kitchen, someone else’s kitchen. For that was where she had spent her life. She had never been married and Cecily couldn’t be sure how old she was. Like so many others, she appeared to be aging and old at the same time. She was suspicious of any written word apart from those in the Bible, which she read most evenings, and she took enormous comfort in prayer. “I’ll make sure I include him/her/them/it in my prayers,” was one of her stock replies, and to almost anything. And though she liked to complain about the rector—his choice of hymns, his sermons, and his fondness for the New Testament—she was an ardent churchgoer, attending all three services on a Sunday in her waist-length cape and tiny bonnet tied tightly under her fat chin.

The only thing Cecily knew for sure, the only thing she could relate to, was that Rosetta had loved and lost. She had only mentioned him once: someone named Wilf. He had been killed in the Boer War.

“But if she has known great love over and over, is it so very wrong for her to have accepted it? How many hearts could have been broken? How many tears shed? And which is nobler, to take love and cherish it, or to throw it back because one has already known it?”