Mrs. Bird herself was setting tables in the main room and her plump, apron-wrapped figure was such an ordinary, comforting sight that I felt possessed by a strong urge to hug her. I might have, too, had I not then noticed that we weren’t alone.
There was someone else, another guest, leaning forward to pay close attention to the black-and-white photographs on the wall.
A very familiar person.
“Mum?”
She looked up and offered me a tentative smile. “Hello, Edie.”
“What are you doing here?”
“You said I should come. I wanted to surprise you.”
I don’t think I’d ever been so pleased or relieved to see another person in my life. I gavehermy hug instead. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
Perhaps my vehemence showed, perhaps I held on just a mite too long, for she blinked at me and said, “Is everything all right, Edie?”
I hesitated as the secrets I’d learned, the grim truths I’d witnessed, shuffled like cards in my mind. Then I folded them away and smiled. “I’m fine, Mum. Just a bit tired. There was quite a storm last night.”
“Mrs. Bird was telling me, she said you’d been rained in at the castle.” The buckle in her voice was only slight. “I’m glad I didn’t set off in the afternoon as I’d planned.”
“Have you been here long?”
“Only twenty minutes or so. I’ve been looking at these.” She pointed to a nearby photograph, one of theCountry Lifepictures from 1910. It was the circular pool, when it was still under construction. “I learned to swim in that pool,” she said, “when I was living at the castle.”
I bent closer to read the annotation beneath the photo:Oliver Sykes, overseeing the construction, shows Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Blythe the work on their new pool.There he was, the handsome young architect, the Mud Man who would end his days buried beneath the moat he was restoring. The brush of prescience swept across my skin and I felt heavily the burden of having learned the secret of that young man’s fate. Percy Blythe’s entreaty came drifting back to me:Don’t forget your promise. I’m relying on you.
“Can I get you ladies some lunch?” Mrs. Bird said.
I turned away from Sykes’s smiling face. “What do you say, Mum? You must be hungry after the drive.”
“Soup would be lovely. Is it all right if we sit outside?”
WE SATat a table in the garden from which we could glimpse the castle; Mrs. Bird had made the suggestion, and before I could demur, Mum had declared it perfect. As the farmhouse geese kept busy in the nearby puddles, ever hopeful that a crumb might fall their way, Mum began to talk about her past. The time she’d spent at Milderhurst, the way she’d felt about Juniper, the crush she’d had on her teacher, Mr. Cavill; finally, she told me of her dreams of being a journalist.
“What happened, Mum?” I said, spreading butter on my bread. “Why did you change your mind?”
“I didn’t change my mind. I just—” She shifted a little in the white iron seat that Mrs. Bird had towel-dried—“I suppose I just … In the end I couldn’t …” She frowned at her inability to find the words she needed, then continued with new determination. “Meeting Juniper opened a door for me and I desperately wanted to belong on the other side. Without her, though, I couldn’t seem to keep it open. I tried, Edie, I really did. I dreamed of going to university, but so many schools were closed in London during the war and in the end I applied for work as a typist. I always believed that it was temporary, that one day I would go on and do what I’d intended. But when the war ended I was eighteen and too old for school. I couldn’t go to university without my diploma.”
“So you stopped writing?”
“Oh no.” She drew a figure eight in her soup with the tip of the spoon, round and round again. “No, I didn’t. I was rather stubborn back then. I set my mind to it and decided I wasn’t going to let a small matter like that stop me.” She smiled a little without looking up. “I was going to write for myself, become a famous journalist.”
I smiled too, unfeasibly pleased by her description of the intrepid young Meredith Baker.
“I embarked on a program of my own, reading whatever I could find in the library, writing articles, reviews, stories sometimes, and sending them off.”
“Was anything published?”
She shifted coyly in her seat. “A few small pieces here and there. I got some encouraging letters from the editors of the bigger journals, gentle but firm, telling me that I needed to learn more about their house style. Then, in 1952, a job came up.” Mum glanced over to where the geese were flapping their wings and something in her bearing changed, some of the air went out of her. She set down her spoon. “The job was with the BBC, entry-level, but exactly what I wanted.”
“What happened?”
“I saved up and bought myself a smart little outfit and a leather satchel so I’d look the part. I gave myself a stern talking-to about acting confidently, speaking clearly, not letting my shoulders slouch. But then”—she inspected the backs of her hands, rubbed a thumb across her knuckles—“then there was a mix-up with the buses and instead of taking me to Broadcasting House, the driver let me off down near Marble Arch. I ran most of the way back, but when I got to the top of Regent Street, I saw all these girls sallying out of the building, laughing and joking, so smart and together, so much younger than I was, and looking as if they knew the answers to all life’s questions.” She swept a crumb from the table to the ground before meeting my eyes. “I caught sight of myself then in a department store window and I looked such a fraud, Edie.”
“Oh, Mum.”
“Such a bedraggled fraud. I despised myself and I was embarrassed that I’d ever thought I might belong in such a place. I don’t think I’d ever felt so lonely. I turned away from Portland Place and walked in the other direction, tears streaming. What a mess I must’ve looked. I felt so desolate and sorry for myself and strangers kept telling me to keep my chin up, so when I finally passed a cinema I ducked inside to be miserable in peace.”
