They lived in a semi-detached house, with dark, sooty evergreens in the front garden, in a long road of exactly similar dwellings. The house, in the photographs he had since seen of it in reports of the case, looked smaller than he remembered it. In the gate was his father’s brass plate, announcing: FREDERICK C. CAWTHRA, TEACHER OF MUSIC.
At the back of the house was an oblong piece of garden of which Mr. Cawthra was very fond. Jim used to potter with him on summer evenings when he did his gardening; digging plantains out of the patch of grass they called the lawn; fetching the trowel and the watering pot from the tool shed, trying to make himself useful.
Apart from those evenings, he seemed to spend most of his time in the kitchen, getting in the way of Annie, the general servant, or being regaled by her with stories of crime or illness; she had a large family which included a consumptive sister and an epileptic brother, and she loved to talk about them. The kitchen was in the basement, and there was always strong, sweet tea and cold bread-pudding.
Upstairs, the house was dark, summer and winter, for Auntie Lilian could not bear the sunlight and kept the shades drawn; from the back room came the sound of the piano, and the pupils practicing The Maiden’s Prayer and The Dance of the Little Silver Bells. Sometimes a girl’s voice would float out, singing “The Garden of Sleep,” or “The Blue Alsatian Mountains.” While these went on, Auntie Lilian would lie on her sofa with her eyes closed, dabbing Eau de Cologne on her temples, and say that it was all killing her. Sometimes when he was in bed at night, he would hear their raised voices below, quarreling...
Mr. Cawthra was a little man with a pointed beard and twinkling eyes. He was mild and jolly, and when he took Jim for walks they always had fun together. At first they used to go alone; later, Auntie Vi-Vi joined them. That was Jim’s own name for her. Her real name was Violet Delcey. According to the books, his father met her in 1911, and she came to live with them the next year. She was a cashier in the local department store, called the Bon Marché, and came to Mr. Cawthra for music lessons. She had a sweet mezzo-soprano voice, and Jim thought her singing of the Flower Song from Faust the most beautiful thing he had ever heard.
Here again, he was not sure what he remembered and what he had read. The books described her as a quiet, modest, gentle-spoken girl, with Titian hair; one of them, more flowery than the rest, said that she had the pale, grave face of a Madonna. Jim thought that he remembered a tip-tilted nose, which gave her face a saucy look. According to the story, she became his father’s mistress, and Auntie Lilian made scenes of violent jealousy, weeping and threatening to kill herself. Jim could almost swear now that he had heard her do so. According to the story, too, Violet Delcey felt her position very keenly and tried to break off the relationship and leave the house. Mr. Cawthra’s evidence was that they ceased to be lovers, but that he begged her to stay on because she was so good with the child.
Good with him? Had she been, Jim wondered? It seemed, as he looked back, that they were always having secrets — secrets from his father and Auntie Lilian; that they used to call at houses when they went for walks alone, and have tea with servants in the kitchen, and that sometimes there were young men present, and a lot of giggling went on; and then on the way home, Auntie Vi-Vi would take him to a tea-shop for a threepenny ice, and tell him not to say anything at home about where they had been. And there was Albert, too. Albert was a sailor.
But on the other hand he could remember her reading aloud to him from the storybooks, sitting in the big armchair while he balanced on her lap, her arm around his waist, her red hair tickling his face; and when he had earache she used to come and sit on his bed, and bring him salt-bags and sing to him until the pain left him and he went to sleep.
She wore a brooch, which she told him was a cat’s-eye, and this frightened him because he thought of the stone as being a real eye, extracted from a cat’s head and in some way petrified. Even her reassurances, when he confessed to this after a nightmare, failed to remove his fear of the brooch completely; it remained a sinister thing in his memory, even now. He could not recall her wearing any other ornament, and saw her always in his mind as very neatly dressed, in a white blouse and plain gray skirt, and a patent-leather belt at her waist. This was the Violet Delcey of recorded fact; how did the Auntie Vi-Vi of his memory square with her?
In the summer of 1912 Auntie Lilian was taken ill... ill enough to have to stay in bed, this time. It was a hot summer, and Aunt Bet and Uncle Harvey were visiting them from America. They were relatives of Jim’s own mother, childless, and they took to him at once. They stayed in a boarding-house just down the road, because the only spare room at home was the one in which Violet Delcey slept, and she was needed there to nurse and look after Auntie Lilian. Jim spent his days with them, and presently moved over to the boardinghouse altogether, because the house was upset with illness and he was in the way. After Jim had been with them a little while, Aunt Bet asked him how he would like to go back to America with them.
“We planned to adopt you almost as soon as we saw you,” she told him, when she was giving him the whole history some years afterwards. “You were so like poor Gertrude, and such an unhappy-looking little boy. It wasn’t any fit household for a child to be brought up in. We could see that, the minute we arrived, even though your Aunt Lilian was sick in bed, and Violet Delcey was taking care of her and keeping out of everybody’s way. But I caught a couple of looks between her and your father that told me all I needed to know, so we spoke to him about it — about taking you back with us, I mean — and he didn’t make any objection. Of course, at that time, we hadn’t the least idea what was going to happen.”
After a couple of weeks in London, his uncle and aunt went on a trip to Scotland, where Uncle Harvey’s family had come from, two generations back. Jim went with them, and it was while they were away that Auntie Lilian died. They hurried back to London. Jim thought he could remember the funeral, and being given seed-cake to eat, and Auntie Vi-Vi wearing black, with a large black hat that had a big pearl hatpin in it.
At any rate, it was two weeks later, so Aunt Bet told him, that they sailed for America, and after that there was the house in Rockford, Illinois, and school, and new playfellows; a new life and new interests. Everything was different. He missed his father sometimes, and when he asked for him, Aunt Bet said, “You’re our boy now,” and took him into the kitchen, where she gave him something to eat. One day she told him that his father was dead. He was surprised, and worked himself up into crying a little in bed that night. Then he forgot him.
It was when he was fourteen that Aunt Bet told him the whole story. Uncle Harvey had died two years before, and she herself was ill at the time. She must have known or guessed that she had not long to live. She sent for him to come to her room, on a sweltering summer afternoon and, sitting up in the double bed, pushing the streaks of her gray hair off her damp, red forehead, she told him as kindly as she could the facts of the Cawthra case.
“It’s a dreadful thing I’ve got to tell you, Jim, and I’ve dreaded having to do it, ever since you came to live with us. But if I don’t tell you, somebody else will, and not in a nice way, either.”
He sat on his chair by her bedside, and fidgeted. He wanted to be out with the other boys, and not in here listening to her.
“Come up on the bed, Jim,” she said, “and give me your hand.”
He seated himself on the high bed, and put his hand unwillingly into hers, which was moist and work-scarred.