They are all like that at first. Unobservant, caught in their own loop, absorbed by whatever it is that they believe they must get done. I am patient, though. I have little else to do besides watch and wait.
I can see him now through the window, making his way towards the little churchyard on the edge of the village. He stops and seems to read the headstones as if he is searching for someone.
I wonder for whom. There are so many buried there.
I have always been curious. My father used to say that I was born wondering. Mrs Mack said that it was only a matter of time before I ended up as flat as the curious cat.
There. He is gone now, over the top of the rise so that I can no longer tell which way he walks, or what it is that he carries inside his bag, or what he intends to do here.
I think I might be excited. As I said, it has been a while, and wondering about a new visitor is always buoying. It takes my thoughts away from the bones of habit upon which they usually pick.
Bones like these …
When they all packed up and fled, as the carriages tore like demons from hell along the coach way, did Edward glance behind him and glimpse in the dusk-lit window a sight to replace his nightmare?
Repaired to London and back behind his easel, did he blink sometimes to clear my image from his sight? Did he dream of me during the long nights, as my thoughts have dwelt on him?
Did he remember then, as I do now, candlelight flickering on the mulberry wall?
There are others, too. Bones that I have forbidden myself to polish further. There is little use wondering when there is no one left to ask.
They have all gone. They are all long gone. And the questions remain mine. Knots that can never be untied. Turned over and over again, forgotten by all but me. For I forget nothing, no matter how I try.
CHAPTER THREE
Summer, 2017
The odd, unsettled feeling was still with Elodie the following day and she spent the train ride into work jotting down everything she could remember of her mother’s bedtime tale. As London blurred on the other side of the window, and a group of schoolboys further down the carriage sniggered at a phone screen, she rested a notepad on her knee and let the real world disappear. Her pen raced across the page, but as the train drew nearer to Waterloo, her enthusiasm began to wane, her pace to slow. She glanced over what she’d written, the tale of the house with its celestial weathervane, and the mercurial wending river and the wonderful, terrible things that happened in the woods at night, and Elodie felt slightly embarrassed. It was a children’s tale, after all, and she a grown woman.
The train stopped at the platform and Elodie gathered her bag from the floor beside her feet. She eyed the sketchbook – wrapped now in a clean cotton tea towel – and a wave of uncertainty washed over her as she recalled her recklessness the afternoon before, the sudden compulsion she’d felt to take it, her growing conviction that the sketch presaged some sort of mystery. She’d even harboured a suspicion – thank God she’d had enough sense not to share it with her father! – that the sketch had been waiting for her all of these years.
Elodie’s phone rang as she was passing St Mary le Strand and Penelope’s name appeared onscreen. As a butterfly swooped in Elodie’s stomach, it occurred to her that her father might have had a point. That perhaps it was the wedding after all, and not the sketch of the house, that was stirring up these strange feelings. She ignored Penelope’s call, tucking the phone away in her pocket. She would log in with her formidable mother-in-law-to-be that afternoon, after she’d met with Pippa and had something concrete to report.
For the many thousandth time, Elodie wished that her own mother were still alive to create some balance in the force. She had it on good authority – and not just from her father – that Lauren Adler had been extraordinary. Elodie had gone on a research binge when she was seventeen, the internet first and then beyond that by applying for a Reader Pass at the British Library, collecting every article and interview that she could find relating to Lauren Adler’s glittering career. In her bedroom at night, she’d read all of the articles, forming a picture of an exuberant young woman with a stunning talent, a virtuoso whose mastery of her instrument was complete. But it was the interviews that Elodie had savoured, for there, between the inverted commas, she’d discovered her mother’s own words. Her thoughts, her voice, her very turns of phrase.
Elodie had read a book once, found beneath the bed in a hotel room in Greece, about a dying woman who wrote her children a series of letters about life and how to live it in order that she might continue to guide them from beyond the grave. But Elodie’s mother had had no warning as to her impending death and had thus left no such sage advice for her only daughter. The interviews, though, were the next best thing and seventeen-year-old Elodie had studied each one, learning them by heart and whispering certain choice phrases to the oval mirror above her dressing table. They had become like revered lines of poetry, her very own list of life commandments. Because, unlike Elodie, who’d been struggling with bad skin and a hopeless case of teenage insecurity, seventeen-year-old Lauren Adler had been radiant: as modest as she was talented, she’d already played solo at the Proms, cementing herself forever as the nation’s musical sweetheart.
Even Penelope, whose self-confidence was as old and established as the string of perfect pearls around her neck, spoke of Elodie’s mother in tones of nervous awe. She never referred to ‘your mother’; it was always ‘Lauren Adler’: ‘Did Lauren Adler have a favourite concert piece?’ ‘Was there a venue that Lauren Adler preferred above all others?’ Such questions Elodie answered to the best of her ability. She did not mention that much of her own knowledge had been acquired from interviews that were freely available if one knew where to look. Penelope’s interest was flattering and Elodie clung to it. In the face of Alastair’s grand estate, his tweed-and-twill parents, the weight of tradition in a family whose walls were covered with ancestral portraits, Elodie needed every advantage she could claim.
Alastair had mentioned in the early days of their relationship that his mother was a classical music buff. She used to play herself when she was a girl, but had given it all up when she became a debutante. He’d told stories that endeared him to Elodie, of the concerts his mother had taken him to when he was a boy, the excitement of the London Symphony Orchestra opening night at the Barbican or the conductor’s arrival on stage at the Royal Albert Hall. It had always been just the two of them, their special time. (‘My father finds it all a bit over the top, I’m afraid. His favourite cultural activity is rugby.’) They still had a long-standing ‘date night’ each month, a concert followed by dinner.
Pippa had arched her brows when she heard that, particularly when Elodie admitted that she hadn’t ever been invited to join them, but Elodie had brushed it off. She was sure she’d read somewhere that men who treated their mothers well made the best partners. Besides, it was nice for a change for people not to assume that she must be a classical music aficionado. Throughout her life she’d had the same conversation over and over: strangers asking what instrument she played, the look of confusion when she told them that she didn’t. ‘Not even a little?’