Julia listened, fascinated. Under her father’s careful BBC diction there was a hint of an accent she had never heard before.
Her father took a long sip of his wine, and when he spoke again his voice was the one she knew again. “That,” he added blandly, “was one of the best things about your mother. She hadn’t an ounce of snobbery about her. Your cousin Caroline looked down her nose at me, made fun of my clothes, my accent, my attempts to fit in, but Alice—Alice just didn’t see it. It didn’t matter to her. Whatever else, your mother had a good heart.”
Julia didn’t like the sound of that whatever else. “So what went wrong?”
Her father shrugged. “It was inevitable, I suppose. At least, I can see that now. At the time…” He sliced a baby carrot neatly in half before spearing it with his fork. “There was your mother, the original free spirit, and there I was, trying so very hard to make something of myself. The very things that had originally drawn us to each other became irritants—especially once there was a child involved.”
“Me,” said Julia.
“You.” For a moment, she thought he meant to leave it at that, but, then, slowly, he went on, “We began to have rows. Just little ones at first. She was upset about the hours I put in at the hospital; I couldn’t understand why she couldn’t see that it was for her—for you—that I was doing it. You can imagine. We grew … increasingly impatient with each other.”
Julia sat very still, not even daring to take a drink from her wineglass. She didn’t want to say anything to derail the flow of memory. They had never spoken like this before and she deeply doubted it was likely to happen again.
Her father looked off over her shoulder, reliving events long gone by. “Your mother told me she wanted a husband, not a pile of medical books on the kitchen table; I told her that we couldn’t all live in an airy-fairy fantasy world, that the rent had to be paid somehow. She accused me of being mercenary. I called her unrealistic. These art classes she was teaching, they didn’t pay, not one red cent. It was all very well for her to talk about living on love alone, but we had a child to feed and clothe and I couldn’t bear the thought of your growing up as I had, in shame and squalor.”
The ferocity of her father’s voice made Julia sit up a little straighter in her chair. “It sounds like you were coming from very different places,” she said cautiously.
“Judiciously put.” Her father looked at her with something akin to amusement.
It made Julia feel, suddenly, very young and gauche. What did she know about what her parents had gone through? It was bizarre to think that, at the time, they had both been younger than she was now, even her father. Younger than she was and dealing with a marriage that wasn’t quite working and a child who needed to be clothed and fed and comforted.
It made her own life feel very empty and shallow.
Her father twisted the stem of his wineglass between his fingers, saying thoughtfully, “Maybe, had we been older, more mature, we might have handled it better. At the time, all either of us could feel was that we had been wronged and the other one couldn’t see it.” He looked up at Julia, his eyes meeting hers across the table. “It all came to a head when you were five.”
He was silent for so long that Julia began to think that he didn’t mean to go on. “What happened?” she asked.
Her father picked up a bread roll and began absently tearing the contents into neat little segments. Even in distress, he was tidy about it. All of the pieces were the same size and shape.
“Your mother was teaching a class at the local community center. I was meant to pick you up from school. Something happened at the hospital—I can’t remember now what it was.” He dropped the last piece of bread on his plate with something like disgust. “At the time, though, it seemed of the utmost importance.”
The acid edge to his voice made Julia wince.
It was easy enough to see where this was going. “So you forgot me,” she said matter-of-factly. “It happens.”
“That wasn’t exactly how you felt at the time.” Her father took a sip of his wine. “The school called your mother. When she found you, you were shivering and crying. You had,” he added in that same clinical, detached tone, “wet your pants from fear.”
Julia looked down at her plate. She remembered that, or at least she thought she did, the horrible embarrassment of it. She was in a room with brightly painted cubbies, with her coat on, and they were turning all the lights off, one by one, because all the other children had gone, and she was the only one left. Even now, years later, she could feel that prickle of panic, the fear that no one was going to come for her.
“I think I remember that,” she said quietly.
“It was the final straw for your mother.” Her father repositioned the butter knife on his bread plate, placing it at the mathematically correct angle. “By the time I got home, she was packing her bags. Your bags, too. She told me that if I cared about the bloody hospital more than my bloody family, I could bloody well live there and see if she cared.”
Yes, she remembered that, too. The linoleum of the kitchen floor cold beneath her knees. Mummy shouting, her voice hoarse, rough. Daddy angry. She’d been put into a fresh dress and dry panties, but she couldn’t stop shivering.
Her father’s cool voice brought Julia back to the present. “Your mother told me that she had had quite enough. She wasn’t going to risk your well-being to my indifferent care.”
“What did you say?”
Her father’s face twisted. “I told her to go right ahead. I told her to go on and leave. And she did.”
The waiter made a sally in the direction of their plates. Julia’s father waved him back.
Taking the wine bottle from its bucket, her father emptied the remains into Julia’s glass. “There you have it. Your mother was leaving me when she died. And I drove her to it.”
TWENTY-THREE
Herne Hill, 1850
By the evening of January 12, Evie was safely Mrs. Edward Sturgis and well on the way to Lisbon and Imogen had stowed what few necessaries she intended to take to her new life in a small portmanteau.
It was a little disconcerting, how little she had to show for her ten years in this house. Her pearl earrings and brooch she left; those had been gifts from Arthur. The locket her father had given her, the cameo set that had been her mother’s, those she packed, along with warm stockings and a change of linen and two of her very simplest traveling costumes. She wouldn’t need gowns where they were going.
She would have liked to bring her father’s Book of Hours, but that would feel like stealing. In the eyes of the law, it belonged to Arthur.
In the eyes of the law, she belonged to Arthur, too, but that had ceased to worry her. The closer the hour came to her departure, the more sure Imogen was of her decision. She felt no regret at the prospect of leaving Herne Hill, except, perhaps, a little for the young girl she had been, who had been so sure she would find happiness within the walls of this house.
Already the room in which she had slept for the past ten years had ceased to feel like her own. It had never truly been her own. It was merely a place she had sojourned awhile. The flowered drapes and china knickknacks felt as impersonal and distant from her as a room at an inn.
She had no doubt they would stay in rougher places along the way. Gavin said he had some money saved up, the money Arthur had paid him for her portrait and nearly a hundred guineas for the sale of his Mariana, the painting that had brought him to Arthur’s house and to her. It seemed fitting that the price of it should finance their flight to the New World.
The wretched sickness and fatigue of the past months had finally left her, and in its place came a surge of optimism, of hope. Fortunately, Arthur and Jane had attributed her high spirits to Evie’s wedding, never guessing that her mind was awhirl with the prospect of passage across the seas. She knew, realistically, that New York was a city like London, that she and Gavin should find the same coal-blackened buildings and noisome streets, but
in her dreams she saw the coast lying before them as it must have done for the earliest explorers, verdant and wild, a brave new land bursting with promise.
They would try New York first. Gavin was to see to a new identity for them, and he was quite insistent that their child be born in the metropolis, where they might be sure of finding a well-trained midwife. But once the child was well enough to travel, they might drift down the Mississippi to the estates of the great planters, who would be sure to want themselves immortalized in oils. Or they could take a stagecoach out west, to the new lands just being conquered, to places where no one would ever care where they had come from or who they had been. The future was alive with possibility and Imogen felt alive with it.
She curled her fingers protectively over the child in her belly. By her own reckoning, she was about four months along now, long enough that she could feel the hard curve of the baby beneath her skin, where her stomach had once been flat and soft.
As she stood there, by the window, waiting for Gavin’s signal, Imogen thought she could feel a little flutter, the tiniest brush of movement.
It was fanciful, she knew, but she liked to think the baby leapt for joy.
Imogen lifted the curtain and peered outside. The glass of the window was cold beneath her palm. How many hours had she stared out at this same stretch of land? The garden lay dark and quiet, the white roof of the summerhouse a gentle shadow. The frost on the ground had an eerie glow in the moonlight, a phosphorescent clarity such as sailors claimed to see on certain haunted stretches of sea.
It was too far from where she stood to see the orchard gate, but she could imagine the scene. She could see Gavin, burdened with his parcels, slipping around the worn wood slats, making his way cautiously between the ranks of trees, his shuttered lantern in his hand. There would be a hired carriage waiting for them some several streets away, waiting to take them to the docks and the ship that would carry them to their new life, carry them far away before Arthur and Jane, flush with the success of Evie’s wedding, ever realized Imogen was gone.
She had gone to bed with a headache, blaming the exigencies of Evie’s wedding.
“I shan’t be down for breakfast,” she had told an openly hostile Jane. “And you needn’t burden Anna by telling her to bring a tray. I shall sleep until I wake.”
By the time anyone thought to look for her, she would be well away. The ship sailed with the morning tide.
The creak of the floorboard brought her out of her reverie.
“Imogen?” called a voice from the hall softly. And then, again, “My dear?”
Imogen let the curtain fall. Hastily she shoved her portmanteau under the bed. She couldn’t be seen still clothed. She yanked up the covers and slid beneath them, trusting to the coverlet and the dark to hide her buttoned boots. As a final thought, she pulled the pins from her hair, so that the long coil unraveled into one long braid that fell over her shoulder.
She was just in time. The door opened, and a light shone in.
“My dear?” Her husband stood silhouetted in the doorway, a candle in his hand.
“Arthur?” She hoped she sounded like someone just aroused from sleep. Her body thrummed with nervous energy, her heart racing, her torso damp with sweat beneath the layers of clothes and coverlet. “What is it?”
Arthur couldn’t have discovered their plans. True to their resolve, she and Gavin hadn’t met again, not since that afternoon in the garden. No, it must be something innocuous and foolish: Anna had misplaced his slippers, or there was a book he couldn’t find. Please God, Imogen prayed, let it be something swift and simple.
Arthur ventured farther into the room. The glare of his candle made Imogen wince. That, at least, she didn’t need to feign. “Jane tells me that you are unwell,” he said.
“It is nothing,” said Imogen, damning Jane to the lowest levels of Dante’s inferno. “Merely this ridiculous head of mine.”
Setting his candle down on the mantel, Arthur seated himself, gingerly, on the chair by the side of her bed. “I cannot like these headaches.”
Beneath the coverlet, Imogen squirmed with suppressed impatience. “A little rest is all the cure I need.”
By the light of Arthur’s candle she could see that the hands of the clock on the mantel read five minutes to midnight. Five minutes until Gavin was meant to come to collect her.
Arthur settled himself more comfortably on the chair, bracing his hands against his knees. “I blame myself.”
“For my headaches?” Good heavens, did he mean to sit here all night?
Arthur wagged his head mournfully. The candlelight played along the silver and red of his whiskers. “I have left you too much on your own. An idle mind soon causes phantasms of the brain.”
“I assure you,” said Imogen desperately, “it is nothing so serious as—as a phantasm. Merely the headache. It is all this horrid, rainy weather we have been having, nothing more. A period of rest will see me well again.”
On the mantel, the clock ticked away. The curtains were down. Even had she dared to turn her head, she couldn’t have seen the signal. Was Gavin already down there waiting for her? A hideous suspicion kindled in Imogen’s breast. But no. If Arthur had learned of their plans, wouldn’t he choose some other means? He couldn’t hope to sit beside her bedside all night.
At least, she devoutly hoped he wouldn’t.
“You must be tired, too,” she said, with what she hoped was the proper simulacrum of wifely concern. “It is no easy thing seeing your only child away.”
“Yes,” Arthur agreed. He showed no sign of moving. “How empty this house will seem with only we two left in it.”
Imogen would have felt sorry for Jane had she the energy for it. As it was, the clock on the mantel read ten minutes past the hour.
Perhaps Gavin had been detained on the way—the roads were slick and muddy; the hired carriage might have got mired in mud or lost a wheel. Either way, he must know that she hadn’t abandoned him. He would wait and give the signal again; she was sure of it.
Arthur was still following his own line of thought. “I must devise some plans for our entertainment,” he said, “to keep us from being too sad and sorry in our beloved one’s absence.”
“Yes, do,” said Imogen. Preferably right now. She blinked up at him with the most pathetic expression she could muster. “Perhaps we might discuss it on the morrow? My head…”
“Very well, my dear.” She suffered him to kiss her cheek, his whiskers brushing across her face. “Sleep well. We shall speak more of this in the morning.”
With any luck, she wouldn’t be there in the morning.
“Yes,” said Imogen demurely. “Over breakfast. Good night, Arthur.”
She waited until the door had closed behind him, until she had heard his step retreating down the hall, and then she waited some minutes more, just to be sure.
Thrusting the covers aside, Imogen flew to the window. The frost lay hard on the ground; the birds had abandoned their nests; all was dark and still. Imogen strained to discern a dark shape among the shadows, but the dark boughs of the trees that had afforded her and Gavin shelter in their trysts in the summer thwarted her quest, creating their own fantastical shadows across the winter-hard ground.
There was no sign of light from the summerhouse.
Imogen waited by her post until her body was as chill as the glass of the window and her eyes were red with fatigue, but the signal never came.
Herne Hill, 2009
Julia stood in front of the painting in the attic and tried to remember the little girl she had been.
It was a good thing her father had put her in a cab home, because she wasn’t entirely sure she would have been competent to navigate the train. It wasn’t the wine, although she had had a good bit of that, and a good bit more after her father’s bombshell. It was more the disorientation of watching the past as she had thought she had known it turn on its head and lock into a different shape, like one of those trick pictures that
was quite definitely one image when you looked at it straight on but, when twisted, turned out to be another thing entirely.
She’d had no idea that her father had spent the past twenty-odd years blaming himself for her mother’s death. Or that, in her own weird way, she had been the proximate cause. She could understand why her father felt guilty; she felt guilty herself. If five-year-old Julia had been able to hold it together …
That was absurd, of course. She’d been five. She’d been alone and scared and in a cloakroom with an impatient assistant teacher. She wasn’t to know that her panic would set in train a chain of events that would upend all their lives. Who could have? It had been a perfectly logical five-year-old reaction, sniffles and loss of bladder control. That was what five-year-olds did.
They hadn’t pursued the topic further over dinner. When the coffee came, black for her father, a cappuccino for Julia, they had reverted, by mutual, unspoken consent, to safe topics, impersonal topics: her father’s conference schedule, the books she had been reading.
Back to the old routine. On the surface, at least.
Julia had nodded and smiled and kept up her end of the conversation with her mind circling over and over what her father had told her, restructuring the landscape of her childhood.
She’d always assumed, when she’d allowed herself to think about it, that her parents’ relationship had been a great love affair, that Helen was her father’s consolation prize, the sop of old age. After all, he needed someone to keep him company when Julia went off to college. But her mother would always be the Great Love of His Life. That was why he wouldn’t talk about her. That was why he blamed her so for dying.
It didn’t sound like that anymore. It sounded like her parents had stumbled into something too young and discovered they weren’t really suited to each other at all.
But they were stuck with each other. Because of her.
Julia wondered what would have happened if her mother hadn’t died in that crash, if her father hadn’t whisked her away to New York, and Third Avenue, and an entirely new life. Would she have found herself in the middle of a prolonged and acrimonious divorce? She’d seen it among school friends: weekdays at Mom’s and weekends at Dad’s and complicated negotiations over who was going to attend which school play.