I moved on to the desk. Writing paper in the top drawer, pens, pencils and rulers in the second, envelopes in the third. And at the back of the envelope drawer, a packet of unused aerograms so ancient they belonged in a museum. Australia. 9d. Slipped in amongst them was a stiff blue envelope, unsealed, which also looked very old; the dark brown glue on the flap was cracked and flaking.
Inside the envelope was a black and white photograph of my mother with me, only a few months old, perched on her knee in one of those miniature flying suits that babies wear, beaming up at her and waving one chubby hand in obvious excitement. I didn't recognise the room, or the sofa she was sitting on. She was smiling at me, looking amazingly youthful, far younger than she appeared in her wedding photograph. And different. For a start, her hair was much longer than I could recall; longer and curlier and more abundant. Her dress-I didn't know enough about fashion to say exactly, but it was more stylish than anything I could remember her in; and sleeveless, which she didn't usually wear, even in summer.
And there was something else unusual, apart from her looking so extraordinarily young and carefree. In the albums in the sitting room we had innumerable photographs of me at every possible stage of development, but nearly all of them were of me and my father, or of me alone. My mother's dislike of being photographed had extended even to being photographed with me; in the ones in which we both appeared, she was invariably looking away from the camera so that you could not see her face. Of all the photographs of her-of us-I had seen, this was by far the most joyful. So why had she hidden it away at the back of a drawer?
I went through the packets of envelopes much more carefully, but there was nothing else in the drawer. Taking the photograph with me, I wandered out of the study and up the hall to her bedroom, not really knowing why. I went over the dressing-table again, removing all the drawers and checking the underside of each one. Nothing but dust, and a reel of white thread which had fallen down inside the cabinet.
The kitchen steps were still where I had left them, beneath the right-hand cupboard. Could she possibly have been looking for this photograph? I remembered the horror creeping over her face, that last afternoon in the sunroom.
I had to keep you safe.
From whom? Or what?
You shouldn't he here. She'll see you.
Who would see me? I caught myself glancing uneasily towards the door. Not Viola, surely? I couldn't recall the very last thing she'd said.
Take me back to my room, Gerard. Bring me the steps. Go away and make the soup.
I climbed up for another look at the top cupboard. There were faint marks like scratches on the dusty floor of the cupboard. But the dust was otherwise smooth and undisturbed. The floor was just a sheet-no, two half-sheets-of plywood, the underside presumably forming the top of the wardrobe. I pried at the edge of the right-hand half and it lifted out of the frame.
Only I was not looking down through the wardrobe, but into a shallow recess. In which lay a large sealed envelope. Inside was a thick wad of typewritten sheets. 'The Revenant'. Below that, in the lower right-hand corner of the tide page, 'V.H. 4 Dec 1925' in a clear, spiky hand. I checked the envelope again and found a small printed slip: With the author's compliments.
Still standing on the top step, I began to leaf through the typescript. As I turned to descend, a photograph slid from between the pages and fluttered to the floor.
I had imagined that if I ever saw her again, recognition would be instantaneous and complete. But it was not quite like that. The dress with shoulders gathered like the wings of angels, the swan-like carriage of her head, chin slightly lifted, gazing off to the left, the dark mass of hair drawn back in what I now knew was called a chignon-all seemed exactly the same, yet I felt sure something had changed. Well of course she looks different, I told myself, I've changed. I was ten when I last saw her. I hadn't heard, then, of chignons, or fine bones, or classically proportioned features: we didn't talk like that at Mawson Primary. Nor had it struck me that she wore no jewellery at all, neither necklace nor earrings. The back of her dress was secured at the neckline by a plain velvet bow.
Of course I hadn't met Alice then, either. This woman didn't look like my imagination of Alice; she was beautiful, but in a more spiritual, less sensuous way. Yet she reminded me of someone; someone I'd seen very recently.
The photograph in the blue envelope. Side by side, the family resemblance was clear; a resemblance that must have faded very quickly, for I couldn't see it in any of my memories of my mother. And since the woman in the studio portrait was, just as clearly, not my mother, who else could she be but the young Viola?
I turned over the photograph and saw that there was writing on the back: a faint inscription in pencil. 'GREENSLEEVES' 10 MARCH 1949
Greensleeves? If that was the date it was taken, it couldn't be Viola after all. But I couldn't imagine this face inspiring horror in anyone. Not even my mother. All these years I'd assumed she had beaten me for looking at the photograph. But she'd never actually said so. And since she'd already disposed of The Chameleon (unless it was hidden somewhere else in the house), I picked up 'The Revenant' again and went through it more carefully. But there was nothing else hidden between the pages. It was just a plain typescript, a fair copy on quarto paper with no corrections or annotations.
One came true. I took the typescript over to the window and settled down on the floor, my back against the wall, with the story my mother had died trying to keep me from reading.
The Revenant
PART I
Though a Shbourn house stood only a few hundred yards from the village of Hurst Green, the surrounding woodland was so dense, and the trees so tall, that Cordelia had often imagined herself living deep in an enchanted forest. As a child, perched high above the lane in her favourite window-seat, she had dreamed away whole days as Mariana, the Lady of Shalott, and other melancholy heroines of romance. No handsome prince had so far appeared, possibly because the sign at the village end of the lane made it look like a private drive. Just beyond the house, to the left, the lane diminished to a muddy footpath. It was, in fact, a right-of-way through the wood, but the villagers seldom used it, and not simply because of the mud. According to local legend, as Cordelia had later discovered, the house was not only unlucky, but troubled by the apparition of a veiled woman in black: the ghost of her own grandmother, Imogen de Vere.
It was a tall, tower-like stone house, perhaps a hundred years old, evidently built, as Cordelia's Aunt Una was fond of complaining, by someone with a passion for climbing stairs. From the rear of the house, the land sloped downwards, and from the upstairs windows you could look out across the garden and above the treetops, over green pastures and wooded hills. But at the front, there was only a narrow forecourt of gravel and then the lane, beyond which the trees grew even higher than the house. By the time she was sixteen, Cordelia had advanced from the window-seat to the sill of the second-floor sitting-room window, where she liked to read on summer afternoons. Aunt Una could never see her leaning against the frame of the open window, so close to the edge that she could look straight down the long vertical fall to the gravel below, without an involuntary squeak of dread. But Cordelia was not in the least afraid of heights.
About ghosts she was not so sure. When she was seven or eight, she and her sister Beatrice had spent many days happily playing at ghosts with the aid of a worn-out sheet begged from Mrs Green the housekeeper, creeping along gloomy corridors and lurking in empty rooms, sending one another into paroxysms of pleasurable terror, until one afternoon it occurred to Cordelia to surprise Beatrice by dressing up as Grandmama's ghost. All she could recall of Grandmama, who had died just before her fifth birthday, was a silent, veiled figure, sitting by the fireside or moving about the garden. It was not polite to mention the veil. As Aunt Una had privately explained, Grandmama always wore it because she had once been very ill, and light was bad for her skin.