I fought my way through the swelling mob in Births, from 1958 to 1970, without finding a single Alice Jessell.
Deaths weren't as popular as Births. It took less than twenty minutes to establish that no one called Jessell had died anywhere in England or Wales between 1964 (the year Alice ought to have been born) and the first quarter of 1978, when she first wrote to me.
Of course she could have been born-and the accident could have happened-in Scotland, which kept its own records.
At the counter they told me I could log on to the 'Scots Origins' website and run as many specific searches as my credit card would bear. I ordered my certificates and walked down Ex-mouth Market in brilliant sunshine until I found an internet cafe. But the Scottish system didn't allow searches later than 1924. I logged in my credit card number anyway and entered 'Jessell 1560-1924'. We have no records for this name.
I opened an email window to Alice but couldn't decide what to write. One of my favourite books, when I was about eight or nine, had been an old Puffin Tales of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, by Roger Lancelyn Green. It had sinister illustrations in the style of woodcuts, which still occasionally came to life in my dreams. One of the stories was about a knight who married a beautiful princess under some sort of enchantment which meant that after seven years she would turn into something hideous… and there was another version in which they would live happily, so long as he never questioned her about her past. Of course the questions preyed upon his mind until at last he commanded her to answer, and then… I couldn't remember exactly what happened. Something dark and irrevocable.
I logged off without sending anything, finished my coffee and moved over to the payphone by the door. I had the number of the National Hospital for Neurology and Microsurgery in East Finchley in my notebook. It couldn't do any harm-could it?-to ring the desk and ask to speak to Alice Jessell. And ring off before she answered. But on the other hand… best leave it until this evening. Collect the photograph from the hotel, take a cab back to the house, start searching the library. Concentrate on the Hatherleys and try not to think about Jessells.
The window of the cab wouldn't open. Every stretch of grass we passed on the way up was crammed with half-naked people soaking up the sunshine. I was dripping with sweat when I paid the driver at the entrance to the lane. Half-past one.
I had brought sandwiches, bottled water, a torch and spare batteries, three boxes of matches. But when the gate had closed behind me, there was plenty of light now that the sun was overhead. I tried again to swallow the sensation of something cold and metallic lodged in the centre of my chest, about where, I realised, my mental image of Alice habitually floated-an indistinct figure in dazzling white, glimpses of a face from several different angles, never quite in focus. As much a part of me as breathing. As close to you as your heartbeat.
I took my photograph up to the study and set it beside the framed picture on Viola's cabinet. They were indeed the same, but I was no closer to knowing who she was. 'Greensleeves', 10 March 1949. Just four days after Anne's twenty-first birthday. Alas my love you do me wrong
To cast me out discourteously…
Greensleeves was all my joy…
I couldn't see a connection with anything I knew about her. It couldn't be to do with the breaking of her engagement to Hugh Montfort, because that hadn't happened until the summer of 1949. Could someone have written a play based on the song? A play for which she had auditioned?
Once more I read through the pages from Violas letters, which I had left on the writing-desk. Something in the dusty-sweet smell of the paper reminded me again of that hot afternoon in my mother's room, where this had all started. Or so it felt. Were the missing papers crammed into some hiding-place I hadn't found, back in the house in Mawson? Of course I'd hardly begun to search this one; I hadn't even looked in the basement yet.
Hiding-places… the false floor in the top cupboard. Could my mother have got the idea from something in her bedroom here?
The house was completely still. I left the two pictures side by side on the cabinet and went on down the corridor.
Even with the curtains open, the light in my Mother's room was unnervingly dim. I had already looked through the dressing-table and chest, but I searched them again by the light of the torch. I lifted the bookcase away from the wall, dragged the counterpane and bedding and then the mattress off the bed, stirring up a cloud of dust and several more heavy, slow-flying moths, deliberately postponing my last and best chance: the wall of built-in cupboards that divided this room from Anne's.
As I had noticed the day before, the beds in both rooms were centred against the common partition, with the space equally divided between the two, so that on either side of the partition there was fixed panelling to the right of the bed, a cupboard above the left-hand half of each bed-head, and then hanging space with a shelf above the rail. I shone the torch beam into the cupboard above Phyllis's bed. The gouges in the floor-long, wavering scars, about a foot apart-looked unnervingly fresh.
The shelf in the closet was indeed made up of two separate sheets of wood-I could feel them flexing-but both were solidly fixed. Silly idea in the first place. If it had been a hiding-place, Phyllis would hardly have forgotten to take whatever she'd hidden there. She'd remembered the typescript in the study, after all.
Just so I could tell myself-and Miss Hamish-I had left nothing undone, I moved on to Anne's room and repeated the search, with no better result until I took the yellowing tennis dress off the rail to see if there was anything in the pocket. It didn't even have a pocket. As I hung it up again, the shelf above the rail rattled slightly. I climbed on to the bed to get a better view. In the torchlight, I saw a faint dark line around the nearest panel.
In the cavity beneath lay a dusty quarto notebook. Lined pages, handwritten. A diary.
25 MARCH 1949 Still freezing. I meant to start this on my birthday but it's nearly three weeks. Such a let-down, turning 21. The old suffocating feeling again, worse than usual. Something's missing and I don't know what it is. Like craving for a food you've never had but you'd know at once if you could only taste it, and then you'd never eat anything else. Or finding you can't breathe ordinary air any more. I know what Grandmama would have said. Stop moping, girl, smarten yourself up, get a job. Iris just smiles sweetly and says you must do whatever you think best dear and goes back to the seventh astral plane. Perhaps I'd be happier if I had a boring job like Filly, but then I wouldn't have any time to myself. I waste so much time and then I resent it when I don't have time to waste. I don't want to type and I don't want to nurse and I don't want to teach. But I know I could write if only I had something interesting to write about.
29 MARCH Went to a Labour Party meeting with Owen last night. In a horrible hall in Camden that stank. Of course it's awful, slums and all that, and I know I ought to care but I don't. The secretary, Ted somebody or other, tried to make me join. I said I'd think about it but I could see him thinking, rich girl slumming. Owen must have said something. And here I am queueing for neck of lamb and counting our pennies. I'm sick of Owen; he lectures me all the time and never notices what I'm wearing.
5 APRIL Had tea with Owen in the High Street yesterday and gave him the push. He went all doggy and pleading and I walked off despising him and feeling I'd been hard and cruel.
14 APRIL Iris got a summons irbm Pitt the Elder and insisted I go instead. You're twenty-one now dear, and I'm sure you've got a much better head for these things than I have. She's convinced herself she's going to die quite soon: one of her premonitions. Of course there's her heart, but she's only sixty for God's sake. Felt very nervous about having to explain to Mr Pitt that I was there instead of Iris. But he was very charming and made a great fuss of me. Miss Neame brought us tea and a proper teacake and sandwiches, and I thought he just wanted to chat about how we were managing and all that, until I realised he was leading up to something. I did wonder if Iris had been keeping something from us but it still came as a shock. He says our capital's run down and we're going to have to sell either the house or some of the pictures, furniture or silver or something like that. Apparently he's warned Iris several times but she hasn't done anything about it. I asked him what he thought we should do and he said that depended on how much we want to keep the house. Now is a bad time to sell, apparently, because of death duties and supertax and all that, and with the housing shortage he said it would most likely go for flats and whoever bought it wouldn't want to pay much. But on the other hand if we know we want to leave, then perhaps the sooner the better. Until now I'd never really thought about it. Somehow I'd assumed that Filly and I would get married and Iris would find herself a companion and everything would go on just the same. Even though we freeze every winter and the garden's going to pot I can't imagine not being able to come back here.