Eleven
WITH teacups in hand, Charlotte and Emmy settled onto padded metal chairs in the shade of a towering poplar tree while Julia scampered about the garden. Rose trailed after Julia with casual but undeniable interest. Paved in Cotswold stone, the little terrace where they sat sipping tea was surrounded on three sides by more trees, flower beds, a sizable vegetable garden, orchard trees, a chicken coop, and, beyond the perimeter of Charlotte’s property, a murky pond that ended in reeds and a horizon of pearl-blue sky.
“I don’t need to worry about Julia getting too close to the pond, do I?” Emmy said as Julia skipped after a pair of wood ducks waddling toward the water.
“It’s quite shallow at the edge. Unless you think she will run headlong into it,” Charlotte replied. “I’m sure she will be fine. And Rose will get after her if she goes too close.”
“She will?”
“Well, not necessarily because she senses danger. She just knows how I feel about muddy shoes in the house.”
Emmy took a sip of her tea and sat back in her chair.
“You’ve felt responsible for your sister for a long time, haven’t you?” Charlotte said, but her gaze was on Julia a hundred yards away.
For a second Emmy wasn’t sure how to respond. She sensed admiration in Charlotte’s tone, or maybe solidarity as she had obviously taken on responsibility for her own sister, Rose, albeit to a much greater extent. “I suppose I have. It’s not like I had a choice. Our mum’s not . . . She’s not like most mothers. She’s . . .” Emmy’s voice fell away. She didn’t know what word she was looking for.
“She’s ill?”
Emmy shook her head and a tiny laugh escaped her. “No. She’s not ill. She’s . . . She was only sixteen when she had me. She’s never been married and Julia and I don’t even have the same father. Her mother—my nana—was hard on her. They didn’t get on very well. I think maybe Mum’s getting pregnant—both times—was something my nana never forgave her for.”
“And yet it takes two people to create a baby,” Charlotte said gently, pouring more tea into her cup from the teapot sitting on a little table between them. She offered the pot to Emmy, who silently extended her cup.
Charlotte’s soft but candid tone surprised Emmy. Mum had spoken to her from time to time about men, mostly how Emmy should not trust the ones who liked to say nice things about how she looked. Mum never talked about sex with Emmy. Everything Emmy knew about how babies were made she had learned from classmates at school in hushed conversations peppered with twittering laughter.
“Did neither father provide for your mother?” Charlotte continued when Emmy said nothing.
“Uh, well. Neville—that’s Julia’s father—he liked being a father when it was convenient for him and when it didn’t get in the way of things he liked better. And he didn’t know how to handle money, if that’s what you mean. Whenever he had any, he spent it as soon as he got it. He was an actor. And was unemployed a lot of the time.”
“Was?”
Emmy looked to Julia running up and down the bank of the pond. “He died in a car accident in Dublin not too long ago.”
“Oh. I’m very sorry.”
Emmy brought her attention back to Charlotte. “Julia doesn’t know he’s dead. She thinks he’s still in India. Mum has always made up stories about where Neville was when he would disappear, so that’s where she thinks he is. It’s been a year since she’s seen him.”
Charlotte nodded thoughtfully. “I see. And Julia doesn’t ask about him?”
“Sometimes. She can go for weeks without mentioning him, and then she will see something that reminds her of him and she’ll ask when he’s coming back.”
“Strange that she calls him by his first name, isn’t it?”
Emmy shrugged. “It suited him. And Julia didn’t care. She liked him because he’d bring her trinkets and toys now and then, and he never did any of the things that little children wish their parents wouldn’t do, like make them mind or insist they eat their vegetables or demand they clean their room.”
“So you don’t think she should be told he has died?”
“It’s Mum who thinks she shouldn’t be told. She found out he was dead the same day the evacuation notice came. Mum said it was too much for Julia to handle all at once. She made me promise I wouldn’t say anything. So I haven’t.”
Off in the distance, Rose knelt down and Julia followed suit. Rose was showing Julia something in the water.
“One of the turtles, probably,” Charlotte said, as if reading Emmy’s mind. “We’ve several that prefer our edge of the pond.”
Emmy watched as Julia put her hand in the water, squealed with delight, and drew it back out.
“And what about your father, then, if I may ask?” Charlotte said.
Emmy hesitated a moment before answering. “You can ask, but I haven’t much to say about him. I don’t know who he is. Mum said he was not someone I ever needed to think about.”
Charlotte furrowed her brow. “So she was not in love with him?”
Again, Emmy shrugged. “I guess not. I don’t know. She met him at a party, apparently. And she had been drinking.”
“At such a young age?”
“It happens.”
“And no one held the young man responsible?”
Emmy had always pictured Mum having met someone a bit older than she was at the party who had changed the course of her life, not another teenager like herself. It wasn’t until Emmy was sitting there with Charlotte, discussing the very thing Mum and Nana never talked about, that she suddenly realized that if her father was a few years older than Mum, then he’d taken advantage of an underage girl, and that was against the law. He would have been arrested if Mum had named him. That Emmy had never given this any thought irritated her.
She looked up at Charlotte, and her face must have revealed that she had realized something she hadn’t considered.
“What is it, dear?” Charlotte said.
“Nothing.” Emmy drained her cup.
It all made sense. No one had held her father responsible because Mum hadn’t identified him. That was why there was such animosity between Mum and Nana. Any parent whose barely sixteen-year-old daughter ended up pregnant would want to know who the father was. If Mum had refused to say, which surely was the case, it could only have been for one of three reasons that Emmy could think of: She had been protecting the man, she was embarrassed to admit she didn’t know his name, or she had struck a deal with him.
Emmy set her cup down on the little table, angry that she had let herself be satisfied for fifteen years with such vague answers about who her father was.
“Emmeline?”
“Can we talk about something else?”
A slight pause. “Of course.”
At that moment Julia called for Emmy to come look at the baby turtles. She and Charlotte rose from their chairs, and Emmy was thankful that the conversation she had wanted to end fell away, but only partially so. She knew she would revisit it in her strange bed that night.
A few seconds later they were all at the water’s edge, and Julia was pointing to several young turtles swimming in the shallows, their little armored backs glistening. A few feet away, the wood ducks that Julia had followed paddled toward the pond’s center. A pair of dragonflies darted past them and skimmed across the water’s surface.
Surrounded by such pastoral splendor, Emmy found it hard to believe there was a war going on.
Her presence there at a pond in the middle of nowhere was the only proof that there was.