‘Freezing, yes. But Giles, why couldn’t you—’
‘Vennie’s had a fire laid in the other room, as these radiators seem to have given up the ghost,’ Aunt Dee said. Her voice held a fussy, conciliatory tone. ‘And, Win, I got out a photograph album I wanted to show Laura. It’s upstairs – could you get it?’
When Winifred was out of the room, Aunt Dee turned to Giles and began to persuade him to make it up to his sister.
‘All right, all right,’ he muttered eventually, promising that he would make sure she was invited to some other gathering soon. Laura thought it odd that they were relying on Giles, whose manner did not seem particularly engaging, to help Winifred with her social life.
In the living room, Aunt Dee began to show Laura the huge leather-bound book that Winifred had brought in. To her surprise, Laura found it intriguing. Her mother had almost nothing of the family, no photographs and no objects, and Laura had always dismissed her memories of a perfect childhood in a perfect world. So it was a shock to see these images of her mother’s lost life: here was a sepia photograph of a timbered house in Oxfordshire, and here two solemnly starched little girls with their mother, whose face was long and lugubrious and who wore a tightly corseted dress. Here were the same two girls, adolescents in frilled blouses.
‘Look,’ said Aunt Dee, taking a breath as she held that one up to the light. ‘We were just leaving for school in Lucerne, that’s right – they sent us for a year, to finishing school …’ In her voice was the memory of some richness, some freedom – but the page was quickly turned and here was Aunt Dee again in a posed studio photograph, alongside a man with a little moustache who seemed much older than she was. ‘There isn’t one of Polly and your father,’ she said, and let out a breath. ‘It was all such a rush. Father was so very sad when she went. He never quite forgave your father for living so far away – and …’
There was a pause, and Laura caught again the undertone of disapproval. Looking at Aunt Dee’s engagement photograph, seeing the frank stare of the young woman with her hand resting on her fiancé’s, Laura was struck by the thought of her mother at about the same age, and the force of desire that must have led her to follow the young man she fell in love with across the ocean at the end of the Great War. ‘I think it must have been terribly romantic,’ said Winifred, clearly also thinking of Polly’s elopement.
Once again, images arose unbidden in Laura’s mind. A window into the kitchen of her home opened in her mind, with her mother sitting there in her best blue dress, weeping. Her father had promised to take her out to dinner for her birthday, and had forgotten or got too drunk to come home. She heard Mother telling her never, never to marry beneath herself, and saw her red-knuckled hand grasping the glass of gin. Laura pushed the image away and looked back again at the photographs. Aunt Dee was pointing to one picture, and telling Laura that was her great-uncle Francis, her grandfather’s brother, who had had a fine career in India, and Laura began to realise that there were all these stories that she did not know, about this English family she hardly knew.
When the fat album had been closed and coffee brought in, Winifred and Giles went on sparring, complaining to one another about old battles. As they spoke, Laura found herself watching Aunt Dee, trying to see how the confident outward look of the girl in the photograph could have developed into the watchful manner of the woman before her now. She was not unlike her own mother, Laura thought, seeing how her gestures seemed truncated and hesitant, how she seemed more eager than was necessary to smooth over the disagreements between her children.
When Giles moved to go, saying he was meeting a friend, Winifred said goodbye to him with bad grace. Laura could see that she had still not forgiven her brother for spoiling the planned weekend. Sure enough, as soon as they were upstairs alone, Winifred started complaining about him. Apparently he had some well-connected friends that he had met at university, and Winifred rather liked one of them, but there seemed to be some resistance on Giles’s part to taking her about.