“No. Nothing at all, I fear.”
“What if she did have a baby before she came over here and got married?”
“Well, for one thing she wouldn’t have managed to get married if she had! Well brought up girls did not just have babies out of wedlock back then. It would have been unthinkable.”
“But what if she did get married to someone else before Lord Calcott? I found something up in the loft-in the trunk where Meredith put all of Caroline’s stuff-and it says To a Fine Son on it,” I say.
Mum raises her eyebrows a little, considers. “It was probably Clifford’s. What kind of something?”
“I don’t know-it’s some kind of bell. I’ll fetch it down later and show you.”
We have drifted into the drawing room. Mum picks up each photo from the piano and studies it at length, her face hung between expressions. She runs her thumb over the glass of Charles and Meredith’s wedding portrait. A futile little caress.
“Do you miss her?” I ask. Normally a stupid question when somebody’s mother dies. But Meredith was different.
“Of course. Yes, I do. It would be hard not to miss somebody who knew how to fill a room quite the way my mother did.” Mum smiles, puts the photo down, wipes her fingermarks away with the soft cuff of her cardigan.
“Why was she like that? I mean, why was she so… angry?”
“Caroline was cruel to her,” Mum shrugs. “Not physically, or even verbally… perhaps not even deliberately; but who can say what damage is done when a child grows up unloved?”
“I can’t imagine. I can’t imagine how a mother could fail to love her child. But, how was she cruel to her?”
“Just in a thousand and one little ways,” Mum sighs, thinks for a moment. “For example, Caroline never brought her a present. Not once. Not on birthdays or at Christmas, even when Meredith was small. Not on her wedding day, not when I was born. Nothing at all. Can you imagine how something like that might… chip away at you?”
“But if she’d never had a present, perhaps she didn’t know to expect one?”
“Every child knows about birthday presents, Erica-you’ve only to read a storybook to learn about them. And the staff used to get her little things when she was small-Mother told me how much they meant to her. A rabbit-I remember her mentioning that. One year, the housekeeper gave her a pet rabbit.”
“That’s… really sad,” I say. “Didn’t Caroline believe in presents?”
“I just don’t think she was aware of the date, most of the time. I honestly don’t think she knew when Meredith’s birthday was. It was as though she hadn’t given birth to her at all.”
“But if Caroline was so awful, why was Meredith so devoted to her? Why did she move back here with you and Clifford when your father died?”
“Well, difficult or not, Caroline was her mother. Meredith loved her, and she was always trying to… prove herself to her.” Mum shrugs sadly, opens the piano lid and presses the top note. It floats out, fills the room, in perfect tune. “We were never allowed to play this piano. Not until we’d reached a certain standard. We had that battered old upright in the nursery to practice on instead. Clifford never did get good enough, but I did. Just before I went away to university.”
“There are lots of letters from Meredith in Caroline’s things. They all sound rather sad, as if she was always more or less by herself-even when she was married.”
“Well,” Mum sighs. “I don’t remember my father, so I don’t know how things were before he died. She loved him, very much I think. Perhaps too much. Caroline once said to me that losing love like that left a hole you could never fill. I remember it clearly because she so rarely spoke to me. Or to Clifford-she hardly seemed to notice us children at all. I’d been watching Mum out in the garden, and I jumped when she spoke because I hadn’t heard her sneak up behind me.”
“She could still walk, then?”
“Of course she could! She wasn’t always ancient.”
“But why didn’t Caroline love Meredith? I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I, dear. Your great-grandmother was a very strange woman. Very distant. Sometimes I would go and sit next to her and try to talk to her, but I soon realized she wasn’t listening to a word I said. She would just stare right through you, with those gray eyes of hers. No wonder Meredith married so soon-she must have been thrilled to find somebody who would listen to her!”
“It’s amazing how normal you are. What a great mother you are.”
“Thank you, Erica. Your father helped, of course. My knight in shining armor! If I’d moved back here after my degree, if I’d stayed here long enough to resent them both… who knows?”
“Perhaps not everyone is cut out for parenthood. I can’t imagine Meredith was the cuddliest…”
“No, but she was a good mother, for the most part. Strict, of course. But she wasn’t as… sharp when we were small, as she was after we’d been living back here for a few years. As Caroline grew frail, she needed a lot of looking after. I think Mother resented that. She did her best for us, but I don’t think she got over losing my father, or the disappointment of having life begin and end here-she and Caroline, cooped up in this old house. But we turned out OK, didn’t we? Clifford and I?” she asks me, her face shaped with sudden sadness. I cross the room, hug her.
“More than OK.”
“I’ve come to collect some kisses!” Dad announces, finding us, brandishing mistletoe and a grin.
After dinner we put all our presents under the tree. Eddie looks like a miniature gent in his navy blue monogrammed dressing gown, stripy pyjamas and red felt slippers. He checks the gift tags and positions each parcel carefully, according to some private scheme. We drink brandy, listen to carols. Outside the rain is lashing at the house in waves. It sounds like handfuls of gravel, thrown against the windowpanes. It makes me shiver.
Sometime around midnight the rain stops, the clouds roll away, and a bright moon bedazzles the night sky. It lights the green paper vines climbing the walls in my room, the single wardrobe, the arched window looking east over the driveway. There’s a rookery in the naked chestnut tree outside, the nests like clots in the twiggy branches. I can’t get to sleep. My brain scrambles to life each time I start to drift, sending up a starburst of faces and names and memories to confound me. Brandy does this to me sometimes. I have to unpick each thought from the knotted mess, work it loose from my mind and let it float away. I keep the memories of Dinny, though; I don’t let them go. New ones I’ve made, to add to the well-worn, sunshine ones. Now I know how he looks in winter light, in rain. I know how he looks in firelight. I know how alcohol takes him; I know how he makes a living, how he lives. I know how that wide, lazy childhood smile has grown up, changed, become a quick flash of teeth in the darkness of his face. I know he resents us, Beth and me. And soon, perhaps, I might begin to understand why.
Christmas morning passes in a rushed, comforting haze of food preparation, champagne and piles of torn shiny paper. Dad helps Eddie unpack his new games console, and they experiment with it on the inadequate television in the study while we women occupy the kitchen. The turkey barely fits into the Rayburn. We have to poke its legs in, and the tips of them blacken where they touch the sides.
“Never mind. Everyone prefers breast, anyway,” Mum says to Beth, who waves a nervous hand through the tendrils of smoke rising from the oven. It will take hours to roast and, pleading a slight headache, Beth retires to lie down. She shoots us a mute, angry glance as she goes. She knows we will talk about her now. I don’t know if she sleeps at such times or if she just lies there, reading wisdom in the cracks in the ceiling, watching spiders enmesh the light shade. I hope she sleeps.