Alastair had understood, though. ‘I don’t blame you,’ he’d said, ‘no point competing with perfection.’ And although Pippa had bridled when she heard this (‘You’re perfect at being you’), Elodie had known that wasn’t what he’d meant – that he wasn’t being critical.
It had been Penelope’s idea to include a film recording of Lauren Adler in the wedding ceremony. When Elodie said that her father kept a full video set of Lauren Adler’s performances and that she could ask him to pull them out of storage if Penelope wished, the older woman had looked at her with what could only be described as genuine fondness. She’d reached out to touch Elodie’s hand, the first time she’d ever done so, and said, ‘I saw her play once. She was stunning, so focused. A technician of the highest order, but with that added quality that made her music soar above all others. It was terrible when it happened, just terrible. I was bereft.’
Elodie had been taken by surprise. Alastair’s family did not ‘reach out’ and they did not broach subjects like loss and bereavement in casual conversation. Sure enough, the moment was over as quickly as it had come, Penelope moving on to general musing about the early arrival of spring and its implications for the Chelsea Flower Show. Elodie, less adept in quicksilver changes of subject, had been left with a lingering sensation on her hand where the other woman’s touch had been, and the memory of her mother’s death had shadowed her for the rest of the weekend.
Lauren Adler had been the passenger in a car driven by the visiting American violinist, the two of them making their way back to London after a performance in Bath. The rest of the orchestra had returned the day before, straight after the show, but Elodie’s mother had stayed behind to take part in a workshop with local musicians. ‘She was very generous,’ Elodie’s father had said many times, practised lines that formed part of the adoring litany of the bereaved. ‘People didn’t expect it from her, someone so impressive, but she loved music and she went out of her way to spend time with other people who loved it, too. It didn’t matter to her if they were expert or amateur.’
The coroner’s report, accessed by Elodie from the local archives during her summer of research, said that the accident had been caused by a combination of loose gravel on the country lane and poor judgement. Elodie had wondered why they hadn’t been on the motorway, but coroners didn’t offer speculation as to travel arrangements. Thus: the driver had taken a hairpin bend too quickly and the car had lost traction, skidding across the verge; the impact had thrown Lauren Adler through the windscreen, breaking her body in countless places. She would never have played the cello again had she survived, a fact that Elodie had learned from a couple of her mother’s musician friends whose conversation she’d overheard from her hiding place behind the sofa at the wake. The implication seemed to be that death was the lesser of two ills.
Elodie had not seen it that way, and neither had her father, who’d made it through the immediate aftermath, the funeral, in the grip of a shock-induced composure that was more alarming for Elodie in some ways than his plunge into the grey depths of despair afterwards. He had thought he was concealing his grief by remaining behind the closed door of his bedroom, but the old brick walls were not as thick as all that. Mrs Smith from next door had smiled with grim knowing as she stepped into the breach, serving up soft-boiled eggs and toast for dinner each night and telling Elodie vivid stories about London in the war: her girlhood nights spent amidst the bombs and the Blitz, and the day the black-rimmed telegram came with news of her missing father.
Thus, the death of her mother was something Elodie could never quite untangle in her memory from the sound of explosives and the smell of brimstone and, on some deep sensory level, the fierce longing of a child in need of a story.
‘Morning.’ Margot was boiling the kettle when Elodie arrived at work. She pulled down Elodie’s favourite mug, sat it beside her own and dropped a teabag over the side. ‘A word to the wise: he’s on the rampage this morn. The time management fellow has issued a list of “recommendations”.’
‘Oh, dear.’
‘Quite.’
Elodie took the tea to her desk, careful not to catch Mr Pendleton’s eye as she passed his office. She felt a collegial affection for her crotchety old boss, but when the mood took him he could be punitive, and Elodie had enough to get done without the assignment of a gratuitous index revision.
She needn’t have worried: Mr Pendleton was well and truly distracted, glaring blackly at something on his monitor.
Elodie settled herself at her desk and without wasting a moment transferred the sketchbook from its towelling shroud within her handbag back to the box from the disused cloakroom. It had been a temporary madness and it was over. Best thing now was to catalogue the items and assign them a place in the archives once and for all.
She donned her gloves and then took out the hole punch, the ink well, the wooden desk insert and the spectacle case. Even the most cursory of glances revealed them as mid-twentieth-century office paraphernalia; the initials on the spectacle case meant that they were safely enough recorded as having belonged to Lesley Stratton-Wood; and Elodie was glad to relax into the ease of preparing a clear contents list. She fetched a new archive box and packed the items, carefully affixing the list of contents to one side.
The satchel was more interesting. Elodie began a meticulous inspection, noting the worn edges of the leather and a number of scuffs on the back, closer towards the right-hand side; the needlework in the joins was of a very high quality, and one of the buckles bore a set of five hallmarks suggesting that it was sterling and British-made. Elodie fitted the monocle magnifying glass to her left eye and took a closer look: yes, there was the lion for sterling; the leopard for London – uncrowned, which placed the item after 1822; a lower-case ‘g’ in old English font connoting the year (a quick consultation of her London Date Letters chart revealed it as 1862); the duty mark showing Queen Victoria’s head; and, finally, the maker’s mark, a set of initials that read ‘W. S.’
Elodie consulted the directory, running her finger down the list until she reached ‘William Simms’. She smiled in recognition. The satchel had been made by W. Simms & Son, a high-end manufacturer of silver and leather goods with a Royal Warrant and, if Elodie remembered correctly, a shop situated on Bond Street.
Satisfying, but not a complete story, for the other marks on the satchel, the scuffs and patterns of wear, were of equal importance in determining its past. They showed that the satchel, no matter how exclusive its provenance, had not been purely decorative. It had been used and used well, slung over its owner’s shoulder – the right shoulder, Elodie noted, as she ran her gloved fingers gently along the unevenly worn strap – and knocked habitually against the owner’s left thigh. Elodie mimed hanging a satchel over one of her shoulders and realised that her instinct would have been to drape it in the other direction. There was a strong chance then that the satchel’s owner had been left-handed.
That ruled out James Stratton, even though his document holder had been inside the satchel; but then, the gilt initials sealed to the leather flap of the satchel had done that already. ‘E. J. R.’ Elodie traced a gloved fingertip lightly over the cursive E. The same initials were on the sketchbook. It seemed safe to assume then that the person who had made the sketches was the same person to whom the initials belonged and that this was his (or her) satchel. An artist, then? James Stratton had liaised with a number of well-known artists of the day, but the initials were not immediately familiar. There was always Google, but Elodie had an even faster line to information about art. She pulled out her phone, quelled a heart flutter as she noticed that Penelope had left a second message, and then sent a text to Pippa:
Morning! Can you think of an artist, probably mid-Vic, with the initials EJR??