Odette who left her long before she was bodily gone.
Cecilia blinks. ‘I suppose it doesn’t matter now.’
‘Unfortunately, it very much does.’
Leo goes to the writing desk and unlocks a drawer to remove two buff pieces of paper. He holds them out to her, and when she does not come to take them, he pushes them into her hand.
‘Go on then. This is what you wanted to know.’
Cecilia looks down at the papers, both oblong in shape, printed with red ink and black where they have been filled out by pen.
Leonard Moore Hart. Born 1876.
Mother: Penelope Hart.
Father:
Cecilia Moore Hart. Born 1879.
Mother: Penelope Hart.
Father:
They are both blank. The spaces for a father.
She looks over them again.
‘I don’t understand. What is this? Where is Father?’
‘Where indeed.’
‘Is it some error?’
‘They weren’t married, you fool. That is the secret Mother was keeping. The secret Claudine was using to blackmail her. You know, I went digging in all sorts of places looking for some sort of nastiness in Mother’s past and I found nothing, but when I was organising Mother’s things after she died, there it was. In the simplest, most obvious place: our birth certificates.’ Leo has returned to the fire, as though its heat gives him some anchor amidst his fear and anger. ‘We are illegitimate.’
Cecilia stares at the certificates again.
Oh yes. She sees it now.
It is quite neat. Claudine must have sent Penelope a copy to show she knew about her secret.
‘But Mother had a ring,’ she says slowly. ‘She told us all about their wedding.’
‘Because no one ever lies, do they, Mousy? There’s no marriage record I can find, so it was all, as they say, utter horseshit.’
No wonder her mother was terrified.
Cecilia wonders if she should be feeling anything yet.
Leo gives the fire another kick. ‘The worst thing is, the more I think about it, the entry for “father” being blank must mean that Father wouldn’t attend the registration. He could have gone with Mother and agreed to have his name on the paper. Hell, they could have even lied to the registrar and put themselves down as a married couple. But they’re both dead now, so I suppose we can never ask them why they did the stupid things they did. We just have to live with the legacy of their actions.’ Leo laughs. ‘I suppose you had the right of it. Life’s quite funny really. We were only financially ruined before – now we’re socially ruined, too.’
‘If we tell anyone.’ There is something else welling up inside Cecilia, like the laughter, only wilder.
‘Yes, Mousy,ifwe tell anyone. I’m sure everyone will be flocking to see a bastard lawyer. Well. The good thing is you’ve no marriage prospects, so we hardly have to deceive anyone there.’
Penelope tried so hard to protect them, and she has ended up dead for all her troubles. It is as though her mother’s death has revealed a grand secret to Cecilia, far grander than this talk of illegitimacy and ruin. The special knowledge with which she is now privileged is that there is no sense to the world. Just and entirely that. Sense is a conspiracy that people walk around creating together, telling each other that the unjust are punished and hard work gains reward. That it is possible to make plans, tolive in an ordered way, to exert one’s will upon one’s life. But it is all an illusion.
Chaos is all there is. Directionless, unexpected chaos.
