“Please do not fret about your Aunt’s departure-here you will have all the home and family that you will ever need! I know it troubles you to part on bad terms with her, but surely… I can’t make out what it says next. In fact, most of this paragraph…” I squint at it. “I have seen to it that… It pains me to… Be patient for just a little while longer, my darling, and before you know it we will be together. I have found a place beside the house where I am going to make you a garden. I remember you told me once how much you would love to have a garden. Well, you shall have one of your very own, and you can grow in it whatever you wish to. The soil here is a little sandy, but many things will flourish in it. And we will flourish here, I know it. My heart reminds me of your absence every day, and I thank God that we will soon be reunited.
“There’s a huge chunk here that I can’t make out at all-it looks like it got wet or something, at some point,” I interrupt myself, scanning down the rest of the page. “Then he finishes: I long to see you again, and it gladdens my heart to know that you will soon be setting out to journey here to me. Be at ease, darling-very soon we will begin the rest of our lives. Yours always, C. How about that, then?”
“So, she was married!” Beth exclaims.
“It would seem so… nothing actually says that they were but I can’t think of another reason, back then, that he would write a letter like that-about starting their lives together and her having a new family and all the rest of it.”
“Where was she travelling to? What does the postmark say?” I study the envelope.
“I can’t make it out. It’s totally worn away.”
“Shame. What if she was meant to travel out to marry him and something happened before she got there?”
“But then what about the baby?”
“True. So she lost a husband and a baby before she even came over here. And she was how old at that point?”
“Twenty-one, I think. She’d just come into her money.”
“How amazing-that none of it was on her marriage certificate, or was known until now! I wonder how it was forgotten?” Beth muses.
I shrug. “Who knows. If she divorced him, maybe she wanted it kept quiet? Mary said that Caroline never wanted to talk about her early years-perhaps she had something to hide. And remember that letter from Aunt B I showed you-that mentioned things that happened in America staying in America. She was definitely worried about a scandal of some kind. If her husband had died, it would have just said widow on her marriage certificate to Lord Henry. She must have left him. And if her baby died, that might explain why she was always so frosty, so impenetrable.” At this Beth falls quiet.
She has not mentioned Dinny’s visit to the house. She has not passed on his thanks to me, and I can’t find out if this is deliberate, or an oversight, without letting on that I was listening. But it is niggling me. I itch to hear what it is he wants to say to her.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Erica, why are you so keen to know all this? To know everything?” She looks across at me from the shadow of her hair, her long eyelashes. The fire behind her gives her an orange gleam.
“Don’t you find it interesting? I want to know why… why our family hates the Dinsdales. Hated the Dinsdales,” I correct myself. “I want to know how Meredith got as cruel as she did-as bitter and twisted as she did. And the answer seems to be that she inherited it from Caroline. And I just want to know why…”
“And you think you’ve found out?”
“Why they hated the Dinsdales? No. I have no clue about that. It couldn’t just have been class prejudice-it had to be more than that. It was more than that. It was personal. And anyway, in her letters it sounds like Meredith wasn’t that bothered when class barriers started to come down during the war. But at least I think I know why Caroline was so cold. Why, as Mum said, she never loved Meredith.”
“Because she lost a child?”
“Lost a whole life, by the sounds of it. You remember that time, at that summer ball, when Caroline thought she recognized the waitress?”
“Yes?”
“I wonder who she thought it was. I wonder why she was so upset by her.”
Again Beth doesn’t answer, blocks herself from me in that way I can’t stand. “And I can’t get those blasted marsh flags out of my head! I’m sure I remember something about them…” But Beth isn’t listening to me any more.
“Losing a child… I can’t imagine how that must feel. A child that has had the chance to grow, to become a real person. When your love for it has had years to deepen. I just can’t imagine.”
“Neither can I.”
“No, but you can’t even begin to, Erica, because you don’t know what it feels like-you don’t know how strong that love is,” she tells me intensely.
“There’s lots I don’t know,” I aver, hurt. In the silence, the fire pops, shifts as it burns down.
“We never missed Henry,” she murmurs, sinking back into the shadow of the armchair so that I cannot see her face clearly. “We saw the search for him and the way it nearly pulled the family apart. In a way, we saw the consequences of… what happened. But we never missed him. We were only ever on the edges of it… of the mess. The pain it caused…”
“It was hard to miss him, Beth. He was vile.”
“He was vile, but he was just a little boy. Just a little boy, Erica. He was so young! I don’t know… I don’t know how Mary survived it,” she says, her throat tightening around the words. I don’t think Mary did survive it, not entirely. For a hideous moment I picture Beth being like Mary. Beth, twenty years from now, every bit as empty and deadened as Mary. For surely that is how it will go, if I do not manage to heal her. If I have got it wrong-if I have made it worse, bringing her here. I do not trust myself to speak. In my hands the letter to Caroline is as light as air; so insubstantial, the words of this lost man barely touching the pages, his voice whispering down the years, fading into the past. I touch my fingers to the C with which he signed himself, send out a silent thought to him, back through time, as if he might somehow hear it, and take comfort.
It’s late now and Beth went to bed hours ago. Only two days since Christmas Day, since I last saw Dinny, and yet there’s a kind of quiet desperation gathering beneath my ribs. If Beth won’t tell me what happened then Dinny has to. He has to. Which means I have to ask him; and I know, I know he does not want to be asked. Pitch black outside but I haven’t bothered to draw the curtains. I like sitting in full view of the night. There’s some stupid film on the television, but the sound is turned down and I have been staring at the fire as it dies, and thinking, thinking. Nobody else to hear this wild weather but me, but it’s comforting to know she is up there. The house gives me an empty feeling. Without her it would be unbearable. Now and then a drop of rain makes it down to the embers, hisses as it lands. A shred of what was wrapping paper, now a gray ghost of itself, is stuck to the grate. It bends this way and that in the vacillating updraft, as the wind curls into the chimney pots. I am hypnotized by it.