‘Why?’
‘I think that’s what I’m trying to work out. We have this family story – a fairy story, really – that’s been passed down the line. I only found out the other day that it was set in a real house. My great-uncle told me that he had a friend here, a local person, who told him the tale when he was a boy. He told my mum and she told me. The story is special to us; the house is special, too. Even now, today, sitting here, I feel a strange sort of possessive feeling. I can understand why my mother wanted to come here, but why then? What was it that made her go and see her uncle Tip and then come here that day?’
So. She is Tip’s great-niece, and little Tip is still alive, and he remembered the story that I told him. If I had a heart, it would be warmed. I feel the ripples, too, of other memories shifting when she speaks about her mother, the cellist, and the photograph of the two young people in the ivy. I remember them. I remember everything. Memories like the jewels in the kaleidoscope that Pale Joe kept upon his toy shelf: discrete gems that shift into new positions when they’re put together, creating different but related patterns every time.
Elodie is looking at the photograph again. ‘My mother died just after this was taken.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It was a long time ago.’
‘I’m still sorry. Grief doesn’t have a time limit, I’ve found.’
‘No, and I’m lucky to have it. The photographer who took it is famous now, but she wasn’t back then. She was staying around here and came across them by chance. She didn’t know who they were when she took the shot. She just liked the way they looked.’
‘It’s a great photograph.’
‘I was sure that if I explored every inch of the garden, I’d turn a corner at some point and see it in front of me – the very spot – and that then maybe I’d somehow know what my mother was thinking that day. Why she was so eager to get the address. Why she was here.’
The unspoken words ‘with him’ drift into the cooling air and disappear.
Elodie’s phone rings then, an unnatural, jarring noise; she glances at the screen but does not take the call.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says with a quick shake of her head. ‘I’m not usually so … expansive.’
‘Hey. What are cousins for?’
Elodie smiles and finishes her beer. She hands him the glass and tells him that she’ll see him tomorrow.
‘I’m Jack, by the way,’ he says.
‘Elodie.’
And then she tucks the photograph back into her bag and leaves.
Jack has been reflective ever since she left. The carpenter was here all evening, clattering carelessly with his hammer and nails, and after an hour or two of being unable to settle to anything, Jack went through to the house and asked if he could help. It turns out he is handy. The carpenter was happy to have an assistant and they worked together without saying much of consequence for the next two hours. I like that he has added something material to the house that will remain when he is long gone.
Jack ate toast with butter for dinner and then telephoned his father in Australia. There was no anniversary this time on which to hang the call, and conversation for the first five minutes was stilted. Just as I thought things were winding up, Jack said, ‘Do you remember how good he was at climbing, Dad? Remember that time Tiger got stuck up the mango tree, and he climbed all the way up after him and brought him down?’
Who is ‘he’, and why does Jack look so sad when he speaks about him? Why does his voice constrict and some slight shift in his bearing make him seem like a lonely child?
These are the sorts of wonderings that occupy me.
He is asleep now. The house is quiet. I am the only presence shifting in these rooms, and so I have come up to Juliet’s bedroom, where Fanny’s likeness hangs.
In her new green dress, the young woman gazes at the painter. The portrait catches her forever as she was in the spring that she met Edward. She stands within an elaborate room decorated in her father’s style. The gaping sash window beside her is open, and such is Edward’s eye for detail, his skill, that one can feel the freshness of the air against her right forearm. Damask curtains fall on either side of the glass in rich shades of burgundy and cream, framing a timeless rural view.
But it is the light, the light, always the light, that makes his paintings sing.
Critics argued that the depiction of Fanny was more than just a portrait – that it was a comment on the juxtaposition of youth and timelessness, of society and the natural world.
Edward was drawn to allusion and it is possible that he had all of these oppositions in mind when he set up at his easel. It is certainly true that the painting served a double purpose. For the view through the window, of a summer field yellowed by heat, is unremarkable in every way until one notices in the distance – almost disappeared behind a copse of trees – a railway engine pulling four carriages.
This was no accident. The painting of Fanny in the green velvet dress was commissioned by her father on the occasion of her eighteenth birthday, and the engine was no doubt an attempt to appeal to him. Edward’s mother would have urged such flattery; her ambitions for her son were naked, and Richard Brown was one of the ‘railway kings’, a man who had made his fortune in steel production and was happily poised to enlarge his business at the precise moment the railway lines were spreading across the face of Britain.
Mr Brown adored his daughter. I read his interview in the police reports that Leonard obtained when he was working on his thesis. He was distraught after Fanny’s death and determined that her legacy should not be tarnished by any talk of a broken engagement and certainly not of another woman in Edward’s personal life. Fanny’s father was a powerful man. Until Leonard started his digging, Mr Brown had managed to cut my page completely from history’s book. To such lengths would a father go for his beloved child.
Parents and children. The simplest relationship in the world and yet the most complex. One generation passes to the next a suitcase filled with jumbled jigsaw pieces from countless puzzles collected over time and says, ‘See what you can make out of these.’
To that end, I have been thinking about Elodie. There is something in her nature that reminds me of Pale Joe. I noticed it when she first arrived yesterday: the way she introduced herself to Jack, the way she answered his questions. She is thoughtful and considered in her responses, listening carefully to what he says – partly, one can tell, because she wants to do justice to what he is telling her or asking, but also, I think, because she is slightly worried at all times that she will not be equal to the task. Pale Joe was like that, too. In his case it was a consequence of having a father like his. I expect that it was common in those families of primogeniture, where sons were named for fathers and expected to grow up to fit into a mould; to step into the old man’s shoes and continue the dynasty.