V.
Harry flung up one arm as if to ward off an assailant. Beatrice cried out in fear, which turned to fury as she recognised her sister.
"What are you doing, hiding there?" she cried, advancing on Cordelia.
"I was on my way to meet Harry-"
"No you weren't, you were spying on me. You're so jealous, I cant even walk with him from the station, why do you think I never speak to him when you're around? Because you cant bear it, I only have to look at him to have you sneaking off to Uncle…"
"-I say, steady on," said Harry nervously.
"-I am not jealous," said Cordelia, backing away from her sister's tirade.
"Then why were you spying?"
"I wasn't-"
"Yes you were, or you would have waved as soon as you saw us."
Beatrice would not concede an inch of her ground, and soon Cordelia found herself apologising while Harry stood feebly by, leaving her no choice but to retreat. She did not stop at the house, but kept on until she reached the riverbank, hot, humiliated, and confused. Being in love, she thought, has not made me a better person as it is said to do in novels. Beatrice is right; I am jealous, and distrustful, and clutching, and thoroughly miserable, and I hate myself… and if he does not follow I will break our engagement. The light was fading rapidly. A few moments later the still surface of the rock pool was broken by a large raindrop, then another, and then the heavens opened with a flash and a deafening thunderclap.
I read and re-read these pages sitting in Viola's armchair, distracted once or twice by the sensation, rather than the actual sound, of the faint rhythmic scraping or rustling I had heard the day before. The novella she mentioned could only have been 'The Revenant': the typed page in my hand was numbered '82', and the typescript back in my hotel room broke off at 81. So… I stared at the photograph, trying to imagine what must have happened: Phyllis running in here, perhaps, as she was packing to leave after the quarrel with Iris, wrenching the desk drawer open and snatching the typescript… which must, presumably, have been kept with the bundle of letters for these pages to be caught up together. But not the photograph… she must have had her own copy… well, obviously. Perhaps it really was Viola and the inscription had nothing to do with the picture at all.
And Phyllis must already have found and read the story. About two sisters growing up in this house. But where were the remaining pages? Where, for that matter, were the rest of Viola's manuscripts?
One came true.
I went on gazing at the photograph until I was no longer certain that the two pictures were identical. Different setting, different light, I told myself; and easily settled: I would bring my own copy up to the house on my next visit.
For the next two hours I searched the study. I leafed through every book on the shelves, took every drawer off its runners, moved the furniture, looked under the carpet. Nothing but dust and shreds of dried tobacco and an assortment of bookmarks, bus tickets, slips of paper with fragmentary jottings on them. But in several of the books, I found indentations where folded papers or envelopes had been crushed between the pages.
Someone had been through the house, not in a mad rush but carefully, thoroughly, removing letters, manuscripts, pictures, photographs… And it couldn't have been Miss Hamish because she had asked me to look for just these things.
It could have been Anne, in her last weeks alone here after Iris died. If she'd taken everything away, and died in an accident (yet another accident?) and somehow not been identified… but how could she possibly not be identified if she had all the family papers with her?
She could have made a bonfire of the lot-amnesia or breakdown again-and walked away from the entire estate to start a new life. Leaving behind just the one photograph on the cedar cabinet; which just happened to be the double of the photograph I had found in Mawson.
Again I became conscious of that faint rustling and scratching somewhere nearby, and again I found myself stumbling down the stairs, back through the dining- and drawing-rooms, fumbling with the front door locks in the semi-darkness of the porch, and out into the lane where I leaned gasping against the wall until I noticed an elderly woman with a dog, both of them watching me suspiciously. I attended ostentatiously to the Banhams, and walked away as casually as I could.
Breakfast, I told myself firmly. A solid English breakfast, and then some solid factual work in the Family Records Centre. I didn't run because I was afraid. I was afraid because I ran. I could always buy a large battery radio; but that would seem like sacrilege. Or a mobile phone, but who could I call?
Alice. The only person in the world I wanted to talk to. The only person I wasn't allowed to-had promised not to-ring. I started up the slope towards East Heath Road with a strange sensation of vertigo. How could I have accepted Alice's terms for so long? Or felt so sure, so much of the time, that we would fall into each other's arms one day and live happily ever after? Madness. Obscured until now, one day at a time, by the cosy routines of the library, the daily dose of worry about my mother. Tonight I would ring the hospital and ask for Alice and say, you're not the only one capable of surprises.
The new Family Records Centre in Clerkenwell was clean (except for the older registers, which stank even more than I remembered), spacious and, at opening time, relatively tranquil. The crowds built up as the morning wore on, but by then I had found most of the entries I wanted; and learned nothing, in essence, that I didn't already know from Miss Hamish's or Viola's letters.
Viola's shell-shocked son George-George Rupert Hatherley-had married Muriel Celia Hatherley, nee Wilson in the district of Marylebone in the third quarter of 1927. Anne Victoria Hatherley had been born in the first quarter of 1928, and Phyllis May (just to make certain, though I didn't know why I was bothering, unless I suspected my mother of forging her own birth certificate), in the second quarter of 1929. And then George and Muriel had died in the third quarter of 1930, in the district of Brighton. George had been thirty-eight years old, and Muriel just twenty-seven when the accident happened.
They had died the same way as Alice's parents, it struck me as I sat in the basement tea room amidst the roar of genealogical debate. Since our very first letters, Alice had insisted on writing as if she'd been born, rather than nearly dying, on the day of the crash. She rejected as too painful, or simply ignored, all my attempts to get her to talk about her family, until I gave up asking. Just as I had with my mother, which made Alice's attitude seem-if not normal then at least perfectly understandable. I didn't even know her exact birthdate, only that she had been born in March. We didn't do birthdays or Christmas, or send presents of any kind: all that had been left on hold, waiting for our life together to begin. Mad, mad, mad. But now I could find out.