The Remaining Voice

The Remaining Voice

A ghost story

by

Angela Elliott

First Kindle Edition

Copyright Angela Elliott 2013

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in any form, in whole or in part, without written permission from the author.

Prologue – Present Day

I have two choices: take my secret to the grave, or share it with my daughter Eva. I was never involved in covering up a death, but for the last fifty-six years I have been haunted by what I saw. I have tried to let it go, but some things just stick with you.

I stare into the smoky fire Eva has set in the grate of our rented cottage in the Cotswolds. Rain beats hard on the window. The stream on the other side of the street is a torrent that must soon burst its banks.

“The wood is wet,” I say.

“Well there’s nothing I can do about it,” replies Eva. She gets annoyed when I state the obvious. I wish for heat. Eva disappears into the kitchen and I worry about how to begin my story. The doctor says my cancer is in remission, but I do not believe him. My head is fuzzy. I hope it is just tiredness. I caught the afternoon train from London so that I could spend a couple of days with Eva, before she begins her rehearsals with the Opera House. Safe on the railway’s spine, I passed high through floods, the sky as grey as church lead, the atmosphere oppressive. It set me to thinking. Eva has to know my secret. It was shared only by those immediately involved, and now they are all dead. I am the only one left.

“Even the bad things have their place,” I say to the room.

“What do you mean?” Eva says, walking in, a plate in each hand. Our supper is a salad, salmon and a baked potato. It smells delicious, but my stomach is queasy.

“Just that I’m remembering some uncomfortable things. I really don’t think I can eat this.” I smile meekly and place the plate on coffee table.

“S’okay,” says Eva. “I’ll fix you something later if you want.” She sits in an armchair and wolfs down her food. I worry for her digestion.

“You look tired Mom,” Eva says, eventually.

“No, I’m fine.” I smile at her. She’s a good girl - clever - brighter than me anyhow. “Your father would have been proud of you, you know. Fantastic career and a wonderful husband.”

Eva mutters: “Yeah, but where is Malcolm when you need him?”

I watch her pour a large whiskey. I wonder if she’s not drinking a little too much. I want her to know that I love her, that she is special, that I could not have asked for a better daughter, but as usual the words have gotten stuck. We do not do well with sentiment in our family.

“Perhaps that’s what comes of living on both sides of the Atlantic,” I say. My daughter was born in Paris, but brought up in New York. She became accustomed to transatlantic travel at an early age. “Maybe he’ll come next time dear,” I say, and pat the sofa next to me. “Come here. You’ve been working too hard, what with the Met and the Royal Opera House. You are stretching yourself way too far.”

Eva has just been given the role of Juliette in Gounod’s
Roméo and Juliette
, although she is in her forties and possibly too old. But then this is opera, and what do I know?

“I don’t want to think about it,” she says.

Her voice is precious and reacts to every stress and strain. I do not want to add to her problems, though if I tell her…

If
I tell her she will be more than little shocked. It has to be done though. I cannot die without salving my conscience, and I have no one else.

I try to keep it light, saying: “Oh, wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could take the role to Paris? The Opera Garnier is so lovely.”

Eva frowns. “They just use it for ballet now Mom. In any case, I’ve sung in Paris. It was the year Dad died.”

I nod. I don’t want to remember my husband’s passing. He was such a wonderful man.

“Did I tell you about Great-Aunt Berthe?” I say, carefully. “She lived in Paris. She was a remarkable woman you know. A singer like you.”

“You told me. You said music ran in the family and that’s why I became a soprano.”

“I did? Oh. You’re a lot like her.”

Eva tucks her legs up on the sofa and snuggles her head into my shoulder, just like she did when she was little. I pat her arm. It is the best I can do under the circumstances. I am not sure she will want to snuggle up next to me once she has heard what I have to tell.

“It was a bad March the year I met your father,” I say. “The wind blew so… and the rain.” I shake my head at the memory. “I had not been to Paris since I was little. Did I tell you that?”

“Yes Mom you did.”

“There were bad things about that time, but there were good things too. Maybe life evens out if you let it. He helped me you know - your father. I couldn’t have gotten through that terrible month without him. First there was…” I wave the memory away.  I don’t want to even think about my first husband, let alone try to explain him to Eva, though I know I will have to if I tell it right. “Well, of course there was the inheritance to deal with… and then the ghost.”

Eva sits up straight. “The ghost?”

“Why sure honey. I told you about that.” But I had not. No… I’d not said a word. I knew full well that this was the first time Eva had heard about it.

“Well, you told me about your family in Paris, and how you met Dad.”

I shudder. I had not told her everything, and certainly not the truth.

“Oh dear, but it was so long ago.”

“It can’t have been that bad.” Eva makes herself comfortable.

“Perhaps,” I say, unconvincingly. “That whole episode chilled me to the core.”

“What episode? What are you talking about?”

“I don’t think I can…” I am in two minds. I want to tell her, but, I am afraid that if I do, the story will conjure my ghost back into being.

“We’ve got all night,” says Eva. “It’s only half past six. It’s that or the TV, and I’m done with soaps and talent shows.” She closes her eyes and I kiss her forehead.

“Okay,” I say, nervously.

“Don’t leave anything out.”

The fire spits an ember onto the hearthstone and I pray have enough strength to reach the end of the story.

Chapter 1 - Spring 1957

One morning, a few months before the Great War, Great-Aunt Berthe took the channel steamer to Dover and never set foot on French soil again. For over fifty years her uninhabited apartment on the Rue Tronson du Coudray in Paris gathered dust. Neither of the wars that blighted the twentieth century touched Berthe’s former home. No one broke in and stole the contents. No one requisitioned it for troops. No one squatted and made it their own. Then Berthe died, and I learned that she had willed the property to me, together with her home in Hampstead. I could not imagine what it was I had done to deserve her money, and I put off contacting the lawyer for two weeks. Then, right out the blue, my landlord gave me notice to quit my Manhattan apartment. With nothing better to do, and temporarily homeless, I took a flight to London. A week later I found myself in Paris, waiting in line at the airport for a taxi to whisk me to my hotel and the start of a new chapter in my life.

I should explain - I was newly separated and trying hard to pretend it meant nothing. I was living a lie. I woke every morning in a pall of gloom that took until mid-afternoon to clear. I had loved Simon, but he had one affair after another and eventually left me for his secretary. I had no money and no job, and if I’d had any sense at all I would have gone home to my father. As it was, I was out of my comfort zone and balancing on an emotional knife edge, unable to do anything except wallow in self-pity. The news that I had come into an inheritance, was a welcome respite from the bleak life I envisaged was my future, and I was intrigued to find out more about my great-aunt.

By all accounts, Berthe had been a recluse and everyone, including my father, thought she had been dead for years. It was only when the letter from Kingston, Parker and Post, Attorneys at Law, arrived that we realised she had been alive all along. We had no idea of the manner of her death and the thought that she may have suffered a lengthy illness with no family to care for her, upset both my father and grandfather greatly.

The lawyer occupied an impressive seven storey building in Baker Street, London. With the location came a past that included occupation by the government during the War. They made much of it in the foyer with photographs of Churchill and Spitfires. I thought it was a joke when the receptionist, for lack of anything useful to say, told me that the old war rooms were down in the basement and would I like to see them. “No,” I said, “not today.” All I wanted was to find out what it was Great-Aunt Berthe had left me.  Not least because I was stoney broke. I’d had to beg money from my father to pay for my trip.

Fletcher Kingston’s office was on the second floor. He was a large man in an ill-fitting tweed suit. I imagined him more at home traipsing through the underbrush on a shoot, his gun tucked under his arm, his faithful retriever at his heels, than behind his desk in central London. He told me that strict instructions had been left as to the manner of Berthe’s burial: cremation, no friends, no family, no flowers. She was an extremely old lady, and had been fragile for a while – looked after by a private nurse who had found her dead in her armchair a little before teatime.

“It was only after Miss Chalgrin had been dispatched in the manner she had chosen that I contacted your father, and then only to tell him that you were the heir to your great-aunt’s estate. I had a long talk with your grandfather too because part of that estate is bound up in the French property, and there are complications.”

I listened to Fletcher Kingston ramble on. He was saying something about Berthe’s English will not being valid in France, and that although she had left me the property in Paris, grandfather would probably get it.

“You understand?” Fletcher asked. “There is nothing I can do about it. However, a general agreement has been made with your grandfather as to how things will proceed.”

I mumbled ‘yes’. I was not sure about any of it. I had not slept well since arriving in England. I presumed all would become clear, in time.

“Both your father and grandfather have agreed that you will go to France and make an inventory of the contents of the apartment in Paris.”

“I am to have no say?”

“You can decline, if you so wish. But in the long run it will be you who will benefit.”

“Alright, I’ll go.”

Fletcher nodded. “Good. Of course, how your great-aunt came upon her money is a mystery. Your grandfather hadn’t seen her in years and didn’t know how she earned her living. I think he may be keeping something from me. Perhaps you can persuade him to let you in on the secret.”

Fletcher leaned across his desk at me and smiled.

“Your family want you to go to Paris. There is a lot of work to do. But for a few thousand pounds in her bank account and a few stocks and shares, Berthe’s money is all tied up in the properties, and in whatever you find in them. You will have to meet with the French lawyer, on behalf of your grandfather, who cannot, I understand, travel. He has signed a Power of Attorney, which means you can act in his best interest. You are to introduce yourself to the French lawyers. I have made an appointment for you with them.”

He sat back and folded his arms across his ample belly.

“Your grandfather trusts you. Berthe must have too.”

“I didn’t even know she existed, and how she knew about me… I have no idea.”

Fletcher peered over the top of his glasses at me. “Well, let’s hope that’s something you’ll find out.”

*

That’s how I found myself waiting for a taxi at the airport in Paris, the wind taking my breath, the chill spring air cutting through my light raincoat. I found respite behind a wall. I inspected it absentmindedly, as tears formed in my eyes. It was just the bitterness of the weather - nothing more. Certainly, not because I had just remembered the way Simon had looked at me on our first date. We were sitting in the cheap seats at the Metropolitan Opera House, and I was craning my neck to see over the balcony to the stage below. The lights had dimmed and he turned in his seat and brushed my hair from my cheek. I was a romantic fool. I thought I had seen something more than lust in his eyes. I kissed him as the overture swelled. I was an idiot. Such a cliché. I kicked the wall in frustration.

Had Berthe ever been in love? I knew that after she left France she lived alone in her Hampstead apartment. Her brother, my grandfather, followed her to London at the end of the Great War. He stayed with her for precisely one night and claimed that she was not the sister he had known as a child.  They had never been a close family and grandfather was younger than Berthe and had seen his friends killed on the Somme. For a long time he had shell-shock and could not talk about it to anyone. Right after his visit to her, he found passage across the Atlantic and set up home in Brooklyn with his new wife, my grandmother.

Before I started for Paris, I talked to him on the telephone. It was hard for him to remember, it had been so long – that, and life had not been kind to him. He had always had a fragile state of mind and had become a heavy drinker in his later years.  All he could say was, as a child, Berthe liked to sing. She was always singing. Always had a tune in her head. Always prancing about and playing at make-believe. Everyone loved Berthe. Everyone. That was more or less all grandfather remembered and, but for that one night, he had neither seen nor spoken to her since.

“She didn’t want to know her family. We were dead to her,” Grandfather explained. “She made it plain. I was not to contact her. Ever.”

“But why?” I asked him.

“Oh it is too long ago to remember,” he replied, and that was the matter closed, except that he said he wanted me to have whatever I found in her apartment.

“I do not need it. Take it all. I will make sure the lawyer understands.”

“Okay Gramps.”

“And sweetheart,” he said. “Come visit me when you get back. Tell me what happened to my big sister.”

It seemed to me he knew more than he was letting on. If we were dead to her, then how come she knew all about me? How was it she chose me above her brother to inherit? What was all that about?

After I visited Fletcher Kingston in Baker Street, I took the bus up to Hampstead. The sky was a thunderous grey and threatening rain. I let myself into Berthe’s apartment on the first floor of a well-proportioned Edwardian building on Frognal Lane. Mrs. Nichols, her neighbour, (who stopped me on the landing and quizzed me about why I was there) told me that Berthe never ventured further than the French café on Heath Street. Mrs Nichols even managed to find me a photograph of a garden party thrown for the Coronation. There was Berthe, sitting in the background in the shade of a tree. Bunting had been strung from branch to branch. The photograph had faded and Berthe was fatter than I had imagined, with an apple-dumpling face and hair pulled back into a bun. She was wearing a flower-print dress and large pearl earrings. She looked decidedly uncomfortable.

"She didn't stay long," muttered Mrs. Nichols. "She was a one for keeping herself to herself she was." It figured. Berthe seemed to me annoyingly aloof; a shadow person living a shadow life.

“You can keep it dear.”

She watched as I let myself into Berthe’s apartment. It smelt of polish and the kind of dead air you get when the windows have not been opened for a very long time. The living room was bathed in light. The walls were a soft salmon pink, the carpet a Turkish weave in reds and gold. It should have been warm and airy but it was dark and dingy. The chair she had been found in stood directly in front of the fire, and it didn’t take much to imagine her staring into the flames, until she dozed off to the fizz of the dying embers. I found no radio, no books or music of any kind, and definitely no record player or television. What did she do with herself? She had not always been an old lady. She had been a child once; a child that had enjoyed singing and dancing. What had happened that she should live out her life in this silent entombment?

I wandered into her bedroom. The curtains were closed and I opened them, flooding the room with light, perhaps for the first time since her death. Her bed was covered with a pink camberwick bedspread, like Grandmother used to have on hers, only in turquoise. Opening drawers, I found silk underwear, still wrapped in tissue paper and as fresh as the day it had been bought. On her dressing table lay a hair brush and a silver-backed hand mirror with a relief pattern and slight tarnishing. I touched it lightly and felt the delicate hairs on the nape of my neck tingle. There was no make-up, no talcum powder, no creams or lotions. What did an old lady need with make-up anyway? Or silk underwear, come to think of it.

I rummaged through the wardrobe. Her clothes were functional, her shoes, most of which looked to be unworn, were lined up in a row. I stared at them disconsolately. In the kitchen not a spoon was out of place, not a teacup unwashed, and not a single plate left out. The sink shone, the bowl propped up against the draining board, the taps turned off so hard I could not budge them. The refrigerator had been cleared; probably by the carer. The stained ring from the bottom of a milk bottle was all there was to show that it had once held more than air. I thought it probable that the same person who had cleared the refrigerator had gone through the rest of the apartment, sanitising it for my inspection.

I found a file of bank statements, in date order, in a cupboard, and sat for an hour or more going through Berthe’s finances. The nurse was paid for via an agency. I wrote their name down in a notepad, newly acquired for the job at hand. I would telephone them later. Perhaps I could talk to the nurse.

Further into the file I discovered that Berthe had paid a maintenance fee on the Paris apartment each month, but save for that her spending had been frugal. Her home here in Hampstead was owned outright and she had various bank accounts, and a few shares. None were worth a huge amount of money – that, as Fletcher had said, was all tied up in the properties. I glanced up from my task and noticed it had started to rain. I hadn’t brought an umbrella. I would get wet. I picked up the photograph Mrs Nichols so kindly said I could keep. I had found no other pictures, no letters from family or friends, and no old Christmas or birthday cards. There had to be more to the woman than a sterile apartment and a solitary life.

The rain obscured the view from the kitchen window, but I knew that out beyond the trees, which pressed in close to the back of the apartment block, lay street after street of beautiful and expensive properties. This was a lovely part of London, but as much as it was a wonderful apartment in a good location, I couldn’t see myself living here. I wasn’t sure I wanted to live in Paris either, but at least after the sale, I could afford buy something more suitable for my needs in New York.

A noise, like someone crying softly, brought me out of my reverie. I followed the sound down the hall, stopping to look in on the bathroom (cold, white, charmless), and the spare room (the one I thought the nurse stayed in overnight sometimes – bed made, yellow curtains, bedside table and beige-shaded lamp). Nothing. I re-entered Berthe’s bedroom. It was as I had left it earlier. The drawer with the silk underwear was still slightly ajar. I closed it, noticing how the wood caught slightly as I pushed it home. As I did so the air grew close, and a wash of sadness came over me so strongly that for a moment I almost burst into tears. I groped for the edge of the bed and sat down. I was sure there was someone in the room with me. I heard them breathing – heard a whisper of air escape from between their lips and heard the wheeze of inhalation. Fearing someone was behind me, and not able to bring myself to turn round, I glanced in the dressing table mirror. There was no one there. So why did I feel as if someone was about to reach out to me – to press their hand on my shoulder, to caress my hair? I spun round. No, there was no one there. I was alone, yet still I heard the breathing. It was like the rasp of an elderly person just before they breathe their last. I listened, head cocked, my hands shaking, until the sound faded away. Eventually, all I could hear was the rain on the windowpane and the tick of a clock on the living room mantelpiece.