“My mother nearly didn’t marry,” said Mrs. Bird, pressing her lips and savoring the whisky warmth. “What do you think of that? I almost didn’t exist.” She laid a hand against her brow in a performance ofquelle horreur!
I smiled.
“She had a brother, you see, an adored older brother. The way she tells it, he was responsible for making the sun rise each morning. Their father died young and Michael—that was his name—stepped in and took over. Real man about the house, he was; even as a boy he used to work after school and on weekends, cleaning windows for tuppence. Giving the coins to his mum so she could keep the house nice. Handsome, too—hang on! I’ve a photograph.” She hurried to the hearth, wriggled her fingers above the host of frames cluttering the mantelpiece, before diving in and fishing out a small brass square. She used the plumped-out front of her tweed skirt to wipe dust from its face before handing it to me. Three figures caught in a long-ago instant: a young man whose destiny made him handsome, an older woman on one side, a pretty girl of about thirteen on the other.
“Michael went with all the rest of them to fight in the Great War.” Mrs. Bird was standing behind me, peering heavily over my shoulder. “His last request, when my mum was seeing him off on the train, was that if anything happened to him she should stay at home with their mother.” Mrs. Bird took back the photo and sat again, straightening her glasses on her nose to look at it further as she spoke. “What was she to say? She assured him she’d do as he asked. She was young—I don’t suppose she thought it would come to anything. People didn’t, not really. Not at the start of the Great War. They didn’t know then.” She pulled out the frame’s cardboard stand and set it on the table by her glass.
I sipped my whisky and waited, and at length she sighed. She met my eyes, opened her hand upwards in a sudden motion, as if to toss invisible confetti. “Anyway,” she said, “history happened. He was killed and poor old Mum resigned herself to doing as he’d asked. Can’t say I’d have been so obliging, but people were different back then. They stuck by their word. Grandmother was a right old harridan, to be honest, but Mum supported them both, gave up hopes of marriage and children, accepted her lot.”
A flurry of heavy raindrops spat against the nearby window and I shivered into my cardigan. “And yet, here you are.”
“Here I am.”
“So what happened?”
“Grandmother died,” said Mrs. Bird, with a matter-of-fact sort of nod, “very precipitously in June 1939. She’d been ill for a time, something to do with her liver, so it was no surprise. Rather a relief, I’ve always gathered, though Mum was far too kind to admit such a thing. By the time the war was nine months old, Mum was married and expecting me.”
“A whirlwind romance.”
“Whirlwind?” Mrs. Bird bunched her lips, considering. “I suppose so, by today’s standards. Not at the time, though, not in a war. I’m not so sure about the ‘romance’ part, either, to be honest. I’ve always suspected it was a practical decision on Mum’s part. She never said as much, not in so many words, but children know such things, don’t they? No matter that we’d all prefer to believe we were the product of grand love affairs.” She smiled at me, but in a tentative way, as if she were sizing me up, wondering whether she could trust me further.
“Did something happen?” I asked, edging closer. “Something to make you feel like that?”
Mrs. Bird drained the rest of her whisky and twisted the glass back and forth, making rings on the tabletop. She frowned then at the bottle, seemed to be engaged in some deep and silent debate; I can’t say whether she won or lost, but she took the top off and poured us each another.
“I found something,” she said. “A few years back. After Mum passed away and I was taking care of her affairs.”
Whisky hummed warm in my throat. “What was it?”
“Love letters.”
“Oh.”
“Not from my father.”
“Oh!”
“Hidden in a can at the back of her dressing-table drawer. I almost didn’t find them, you know. It wasn’t until an antiques dealer came to see about buying some of the furniture. I was showing him the pieces and I thought the drawer was stuck, so I pulled it, rather harder than I needed to, and the can came scuttling to the front.”
“Did you read them?”
She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I opened the can later. Terrible, I know.” She flushed and began smoothing the hair by her temples, hiding, it seemed, behind her curled hands. “I just couldn’t help it. By the time I realized what I was reading, well, I had to keep on with it, didn’t I? They were lovely, you see. Heartfelt. To the point, but almost the more meaningful for their brevity. And there was something else, an air of sadness in those letters. They were all written before she married my dad—Mum wasn’t the type to play up once she was wed. No, this was a love affair from back when her own mother was still alive, when there was no chance that she might marry or move away.”
“Who was it, do you know? Who wrote the letters?”
She left her hair alone then, flattened her hands on the table. The stillness was arresting, and when she leaned towards me, I felt myself incline to meet her. “I really shouldn’t say,” she whispered. “I don’t like to gossip.”
“Of course not.”
She paused and a thread of excitement plucked at her lip; she shot a surreptitious glance over each shoulder in turn. “I’m not one hundred percent certain; they weren’t signed with a full name, just a single initial.” She met my eyes, blinked, then smiled, almost slyly. “It was anR.”
“AnR.” I echoed her accentuated pronunciation of the letter, thought about it a moment, chewed the inside of my cheek, and then I gasped. “Why, you don’t think …? ” But why not? She meantRfor Raymond Blythe. The king of the castle and his longtime housekeeper: it was almost a cliché, and clichés only got that way because they happened all the time. “That would explain the secrecy in the letters, the impossibility of being open about their relationship.”
“It would explain something else, too.”
I looked at her, still dazed by the whole proposition.
“There’s a coldness in the eldest sister, Persephone; a coldness towardsme. It’s nothing I’ve done, certainly, and yet I’ve always felt it. Once, when I was a girl, she caught me playing by the pool, the circular one with the swing. Well—the look in her eyes; it was as if she’d seen a ghost. I half believed she might be going to throttle me, then and there. Since I found out about my mum’s affair, though, the likelihood that it was with Mr. Blythe, well, I’ve wondered whether Percy might not have known; whether she might not have found out somehow and taken umbrage. Things were different back then, between the classes. And Percy Blythe is a rigid sort of person, one for rules and traditions.”
