‘Why would he do that?’ Pippa had asked with a frown when Elodie mentioned this thought to her over tapas and sangria one night.
Elodie wasn’t sure, only that although there was nothing overt in his correspondence, no declaration of unrequited love or confession of deep-seated unhappiness, she couldn’t help but sense something melancholy lurking beneath the pleasant surface of his personal letters; that he was a seeker for whom true fulfilment remained forever out of reach.
Elodie was used to the sceptical look that settled on Pippa’s face whenever she said that sort of thing out loud. She would never be able to describe the intimacy of working day after day amongst the artefacts of another person’s life. Elodie couldn’t understand the modern urge to share one’s innermost feelings publicly and permanently; she guarded her own privacy carefully and subscribed to the French notion of le droit à l’oubli – the right to be forgotten. And yet it was her job – more than that, her passion – to preserve, and even to reanimate, the lives of people who had no choice in the matter. She had read James Stratton’s most private thoughts, journal entries written without a view to posterity, yet he had never even heard her name.
‘You’re in love with him, of course,’ was Pippa’s comment whenever Elodie tried to explain.
But it wasn’t love; Elodie simply admired James Stratton and felt protective of his legacy. He had been granted a life beyond his lifetime and it was Elodie’s job to ensure it was respected.
Even as the word ‘respect’ took form in her mind, Elodie thought of the sketchbook, deep inside her bag, and her cheeks flushed.
What on earth had come over her?
Panic mixed with a terrible, wonderful, guilty sense of anticipation. Never in the decade that she’d worked in the archive room at Stratton, Cadwell & Co. had she transgressed so emphatically the edicts laid down by Mr Pendleton. His rules were absolute: to take an artefact from the vault – worse, simply to shove it in one’s bag and force upon it the sacrilege of being transported on a twenty-first-century London bus – was beyond disrespectful. It was inexcusable.
But as the number 24 skirted Mornington Crescent station and started up Camden High Street, with a quick glance to reassure herself that no one was watching, Elodie took the sketchbook from her bag and opened the pages quickly to the drawing of the house in its river setting.
Once again she was struck by a sense of profound familiarity. She knew this place. In the story that her mother used to tell, the house had been a literal gateway to another world; for Elodie, though, curled up in her mother’s arms, breathing in the exotic fragrance of narcissus that she wore, the story itself had been a gateway, an incantation that carried her away from the here-and-now and into the land of imagination. After her mother’s death, the world of the story had become her secret place. Whether at lunchtime in her new school, or at home in the long quiet afternoons, or at night when the darkness threatened suffocation, all she had to do was hide herself away and close her eyes and she could cross the river, brave the woods and enter the enchanted house …
The bus arrived at South End Green and Elodie stopped briefly to make a purchase at the stall by the Overground station before hurrying up Willow Road towards Gainsborough Gardens. The day was still warm and very stuffy, and by the time she arrived at the door of her father’s tiny house – originally the gardener’s cottage – Elodie felt as if she’d run a marathon.
‘Hello, Dad,’ she said, as he gave her a kiss. ‘I’ve brought you something.’
‘Oh, dear,’ he said, eyeing the potted plant dubiously. ‘Even after how things ended last time?’
‘I believe in you. Besides, the lady selling them told me this one only needs watering twice a year.’
‘Good God, really? Twice a year?’
‘That’s what she said.’
‘Miraculous.’
Despite the heat, he’d prepared duck à l’orange, his speciality, and they ate together at the table in the kitchen as they always did. They’d never really been a dining-room family, only on special occasions, like Christmas or birthdays, or the time Elodie’s mother had decided they should invite the visiting American violinist and his wife for Thanksgiving.
As they ate they spoke of work: Elodie’s curation of the upcoming exhibition and her father’s choir, the music lessons he’d been giving recently at one of the local primary schools. His face lit up when he described the little girl whose violin was almost as long as her arm, and the bright-eyed boy who’d come to the practice room of his own accord and begged for cello lessons. ‘His parents aren’t musical, you see.’
‘Let me guess: the two of you came to your own arrangement?’
‘I hadn’t the heart to say no.’
Elodie smiled. Her father was a soft touch when it came to music and wouldn’t have dreamed of denying a child the opportunity to share his great love. He believed that music had the power to alter people’s lives – ‘their very minds, Elodie’ – and nothing made him quite as excited as discussing brain plasticity and MRI scans showing a connection between music and empathy. It made Elodie’s heart clench to watch him watching a concert: the utter transfixion of his face beside her in the theatre. He had been a professional musician once himself. ‘Only second violinist,’ he always qualified when the subject arose, a trace of reverence entering his voice as he continued predictably: ‘Nothing like she was.’
She. Elodie’s gaze drifted to the dining room on the other side of the hall. From where she was sitting only the edges of a few frames were visible, but Elodie didn’t need to look upon the wall to know exactly which picture was hanging where. Their positions never altered. It was her mother’s wall. That is, it was Lauren Adler’s wall; striking black-and-white photographs of a vibrant young woman with long, straight hair and a cello in her embrace.
Elodie had made a study of the photographs when she was a child and they were thus printed indelibly on her mind’s eye. Her mother, in various attitudes of performance, concentration fine-tuning her features: those high cheekbones; the focused gaze; her clever articulated fingers on strings that gleamed beneath the lights.
‘Fancy a bit of pudding?’
Her father had taken a quivering strawberry concoction from the refrigerator, and Elodie noticed suddenly how old he was compared with the images of her mother, whose youth and beauty were locked in the amber of her memory.
Because the weather was glorious, they took their wine glasses and dessert upstairs to the rooftop terrace that overlooked the green. A trio of brothers were tossing a frisbee, the smallest one running back and forth across the grass between the others, while a pair of adults sat together nearby, their heads bent close in conversation.
The summer twilight cast a soporific glow, and Elodie was reluctant to spoil things. Nonetheless, after a few minutes of the easy companionable silence in which she and her father had always specialised, she ventured, ‘Do you know what I was thinking of today?’
‘What’s that?’ He had a spot of cream on his chin.
‘That bedtime story from when I was little – the one about the river, and the house with the moon-and-stars weathervane. Do you remember it?’
He laughed with soft surprise. ‘Goodness! That’s taken me back. Yes, of course, you used to love that one. It’s been a long time since I’ve thought of it. I always wondered that it might not be a bit too scary for a child, but your mother believed that children were much braver than they were given credit for. She said that childhood was a frightening time and that hearing scary stories was a way of feeling less alone. It seemed that you agreed: whenever she was away on tour you were never happy with the books I read. I used to feel quite rejected. You’d hide them under your bed so I couldn’t find them and demand that I tell you instead about the clearing in the deep, dark woods and the magic house on the river.’