I Remember You (39 page)

‘She wasn’t very lovable,’ said Tess.

‘She wasn’t, I’m afraid.’ Adam nodded. ‘All these years I’ve been, I’ve been keeping this secret, because I had to, and trying to…’ He shook his head. ‘Trying to meet her halfway. But she gave me nothing. Responded to nothing. Acted like she didn’t care. I’d have tea with her twice a year, and she’d berate me for an hour and a half about how I’d let her and the Mortmains down, how I should have gone to university, why didn’t I have a job? What was I doing with my life? And then I’d leave, and that’d be it. And I couldn’t tell anyone.’

‘You couldn’t have told me?’ Tess said.

‘She was desperate for me not to tell anyone. Said they could know when she was dead and that was it.’ The corners of Adam’s mouth turned up, swiftly, sadly. ‘I wanted to talk to you about it. But you know perfectly well, T, we weren’t close after that all happened. I treated you abominably badly. I couldn’t burden you with anything else. I don’t think you’d have listened anyway.’

Tess didn’t know what to say. After all these years of getting over him, of losing the friendship that meant so much to her
and then finding it was repairable, gradually, of wondering what on earth he was thinking and why he was the way he was, and he had given up all his secrets to her in five minutes. She tugged his arm.

‘Look, Adam. I know it’s going to be hard, coming back, but you’ve done the right thing. And you know something? I’m here for you, brother.’

He smiled. ‘Thanks.’

‘I mean it. You need a friend.’ She nodded. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t one before. But I’m your friend now. It’s going to be OK, all of this. You’ll sort it out. It’s a fresh start, remember? Not going back to the past.’

Adam nodded. ‘You’re right,’ he said, his voice lightening. ‘Now the will’s nearly sorted out, and I’ve cleared my head, I can sort of see the horizon again. I just need to leave the past behind.’

‘That’s a good thing,’ she said fervently.

‘Perhaps we both do,’ he said. He held out his hand, and she shook it, then he put his arm round her, and pulled her towards him. ‘Buy you a drink?’ he said. ‘If you think I dare show my face in the pub.’

‘I’ll be with you,’ she said. ‘Remember, that’s a promise.’

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Thanks, T.’

‘Just don’t sleep with my housemate again, OK?’

‘That’s also a promise.’

They walked through the graveyard, his arm still around her shoulders. Tess’s feet were freezing, she noticed now, a clammy coldness that was almost painful. She stamped her boots on the ground.

‘It’s beautiful here, I have to say,’ Adam said. ‘All that time in this totally different landscape, and I’d think of being back here.’ He looked behind him, down into the valley. ‘All these people who were here before us. They had the same view.’

They turned towards the church, to avoid the Mortmain tombs. ‘Do you think you’ll change your name?’ Tess said.

‘No,’ said Adam. ‘Too weird to do it now. And—it comes with all this stuff. Stuff I don’t want.’

They were in front of the church now, in the shadow of the building. Tess stamped her feet again and stopped, in front of a row of graves, fiddling for her gloves in her coat pocket. She stared at the grave in front of her.

‘Adam…’ she said. ‘Philip, Adam.’

‘What?’ Adam was tying his scarf a little tighter. She pointed.

‘Philip Edwards. Adam…’

And she read:

In Loving Memory of Philip Edwards 1924-1943

He died for his country that we might live in freedom Beloved son of Thomas Edwards, vicar of this Parish, and Mary Edwards

Brother of Primula Edwards

Have I been so long a time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip?

They both stared at the stone. There was silence for a full minute.

‘Philip Edwards,’ said Adam. ‘My God.’ He bowed his head, collecting himself. ‘You know, that was one of the readings Leonora asked for, at her funeral.’

‘I remember.’ Tess had now read the order of service about twenty times. Thoughts were jostling for space in her brain. ‘That’s him. She—she called out his name. When she—’

‘What?’ Adam said.

‘Just before she had the stroke.’ Tess remembered it now,
as clearly as if she were back there. She could hear the traffic, smell the fumes, see the rage and hate, the expression—was it despair?—in the old woman’s eyes.
Where’s Philip? Where is he?
‘It must be him. It has to be.’

Adam slowly shook his head. ‘My God.’ He looked back at the grave. ‘So it was you, old chap,’ he said. He stared, unblinking. ‘He was only nineteen.’

‘You can find out—’ Tess began. ‘Make sure. Perhaps there are relatives—’

He stopped her. He was smiling. ‘I am sure. That’s the weird thing.’ He tensed his shoulders and then let them drop. ‘Right,’ he said, as he breathed out at the same time. ‘God, what a welcome back.’

‘He’s with his daughter,’ Tess said. ‘In the same graveyard. I wonder if he ever knew?’ She bit her lip; tears filled her eyes, and she turned away, so he wouldn’t see how upset she was.

‘We’ll never know,’ Adam took her hand. ‘Let’s go and get that drink, T. I think we deserve it.’ They walked to the church gate. ‘Happy birthday, Mum,’ he said softly as they turned onto the high street, towards the Feathers. ‘I miss you.’

October 1943

She was sent to her room after she had told her mother, like a little girl. A little girl with a six months’ pregnant belly.

‘Go to your room, Leonora.’

‘Mother—’

‘
Go to your room
.’ Leonora had never seen her mother so—was it angry? No. Terrified, she thought. Fear was written on everyone’s faces these days as a matter of course, though people tried to hide it, pretend everything was all right; but Leonora saw it magnified on her mother’s face that sunny autumn day, when she finally plucked up the courage to tell her.

‘I’m—I’m sorry,’ Leonora whispered. She was clutching the fine lawn cotton of her dress in her hands; it was creased and puckered, her hands were clammy. It was cold in her mother’s sitting room; the fires were never lit now, much of the house was shut up. They were getting ready to turn it into a girls’ boarding school, and much to her father’s displeasure the family was packing up to move into the town, to Leda House, her mother’s family home.

Alexandra Mortmain looked out of the window, down towards the black iron gates of the entrance to the hall. She
swallowed, and Leonora felt sick, sicker than the nausea that had gripped her for months now and that never seemed to go away. Her mother was scared, too. That made it worse.

‘Mother, I haven’t told you everything—who—’ She paused. She simply didn’t know how to frame the words.
It’s Philip, Philip Edwards
, she wanted to say.
I love him, I’ve always loved him! We’re going to get married, Mother, he comes back on leave in a month, I’ll tell him then!
Somewhere in Leonora’s mind was the tiny kernel of an idea that perhaps, just perhaps, it could all be satisfactorily resolved. Couldn’t it? It said in the marriage service, ‘with my body I thee worship’, didn’t it? For he had, oh, he had, and what had happened was because he honoured her and she him. And she loved him, yes she did…But Leonora knew, if she was absolutely frank with herself, that it was not to be. The look of horror, disgust, fear, written so large on her mother’s face was evidence enough.

For months now, Leonora had kept the growing secret to herself; she was sure Eleanor, her maid, must have had some idea. For she was sick every morning, she felt sick all day, in fact. She felt as if something were dragging her down, pulling her inside out. She didn’t know what it was and, because menstruation was something shameful, to be discussed only in the most urgent of circumstances, she put her lack of monthly bleeding down to one of the many symptoms that seemed to be assailing her. She was dying; she was being punished for what she had done with Philip, for loving him.

It wasn’t until she felt her baby kick, and carry on kicking, five months into her pregnancy, that Leonora realized what was happening to her. And what could she do? There was nothing she could do, nothing at all. She couldn’t tell anyone. She might have told Eleanor, but she wasn’t there, she had been put to work at Home Farm. She had no friends, now school was over, and young Miss Mortmain had not been encouraged by her parents to befriend any of the girls at her school. She couldn’t tell Philip—how could she put this in a
letter? One day, one of her father’s dogs, whom she feared almost as much as her father, jumped up and nearly pushed her to the ground. The dogs were kept permanently hungry, the better to run after anything that trespassed on the grounds. Tugendhat’s black expressionless eyes, his snarling teeth glistening with saliva, terrified her.

When she knew there was no other option, it somehow gave her a strength of purpose. She knocked on her mother’s door one afternoon, holding her head up high, waiting for the slightly querulous, petulant ‘Yes?’ in answer, entered the room, and told her.

Leonora sat in her room, ten minutes later, swinging her legs off the edge of the old bed which creaked as she rocked gently back and forth. The baby moved inside her; she rubbed her stomach tenderly, as she could only do when she was by herself. She gazed out of the window, trying to find order in the rhythmical ache of the bed; the curtains around the bed swayed slightly, giving off a haze of dust that swam in the golden light flooding through the glass. There was nothing she could do; she had to tell them.

She thought of the last time she had seen Philip, at a tea dance her parents had given for the town after the church fete. It will not stop us, this war, everyone said; we will carry on having church fetes, tea dances, living our lives. They had smiled across the room all evening, talked briefly in front of others, sharing secret looks, knowing they would see each other at some point. Then, as Leonora returned from the kitchen where she had been supervising the lemonade, Philip had emerged silently from the shadows, and pulled her towards the back corridor which led out to the kitchen garden, where the boots, the coats, the servants’ things were kept. They kissed, they did not say a word, and she gasped, shocked by her own pleasure in him again, amazed at this—this which was was happening to her—as he ran his hands up her bare
legs, unbuttoned her dress, kissed her skin, held her breast in his hand, boldly moved her hands to the front of his trousers, so that she could feel what she did to him. He would have gone further—

‘No,’ she said, smothering a laugh. ‘Not here, Philip—how can you!’

‘But I’m going away,’ he said, kissing her neck. ‘I want you so much, Rara.’

‘I know,’ she said, soothing, mothering him, stroking the back of his neck where his painfully short cropped hair met the top of his spine. ‘Soon, I promise.’

‘Very soon,’ he said, kissing her again. ‘My Atalanta.’

She laughed softly again, and put her head on his chest; he touched her hair gently, and sighed. From the grand sitting room came the strains of a song, played on the wind-up gramophone.

‘What is it?’ she said. ‘What are they playing?’

‘I heard it in London,’ he said. ‘They play it all the time, in the officer’s mess.’ They swayed slowly together, just the two of them, silhouetted against the light pouring through the door from the setting sun and he sang to her, so softly, as the song played faintly, the notes echoing on the polished floor.

I remember you, You’re the one who made my dreams come true, A few kisses ago…

He held her hand, put his finger in the centre of her palm so she felt the pressure of it, fleetingly, as they separated, and walked back towards the drawing room again.

And that was the last time they had spoken. That was all she had. That, and the strangely sunny certainty that he loved her and he would come back for her—for that she never doubted.

So as Leonora waited in her room, and the minutes turned into an hour, maybe more, she thought of that last meeting,
relived it over and over, her hands resting on her bump, the rocking motion of the bed and the memories of Philip soothing her, lulling her into a sort of calm.

The sharp rap at the door, when it eventually came, made her jump. ‘Miss Mortmain. Your father wants to see you. In his study. Says immediately.’

It was dark now. Leonora climbed gingerly off the bed, put on her sandals, and opened the door.

She came down the stairs gently in the dark, the gloom of the unlit hall making the slippered wood treacherous. A strip of light slid out from under the door to her father’s study. She raised her hand to the dark oak, and saw it was shaking. She knocked.

‘Come.’

For months now, Leonora’s father had been writing a new book, his first since
Roman Society
which had been published nearly eight years ago. It was about the army, about battle stratagems and campaign fighting, and it had a peculiar resonance now, of course. Leonora had often wanted to ask her father about his work, but she never could pluck up the courage. He terrified her.

Sir Charles Mortmain stood by the window behind his chair, with his back to her as she entered. Piles of books surrounded him, and a pipe rested on the green leather surface of the desk, the edges of which were tooled in gold. The door creaked loudly behind her as she gently shut it. The loud ticking of the grandfather clock was the only sound in the room.

‘Father—’ Leonora began. She stood by the door, all composure gone. She didn’t know whether to advance further.

‘You will not call me so.’ Sir Charles did not move; she strained to see his face in the reflection of the glass. ‘You will leave here tonight. A motor car is on its way now. I have spoken to—’

‘Father, if I could—’

‘Stop!’ Her father’s hand was held up, and his voice was loud, clear and sharp. ‘I. Have. Spoken. To.’ He paused. ‘To Miss Wheeler, who is your mother’s old nurse. You will go to her tonight.’

‘Father—’

‘DO NOT CALL ME THAT NAME AGAIN.’

At the rage, the venom in her father’s voice, Leonora stepped back, involuntarily, bumping into the door.

‘You are not my daughter,’ her father said. ‘We simply—’ he paused, as if choosing his words—‘yes, we simply do not have a daughter any more. You will have this bastard, God damn it to hell, and you will return to Langford, and we will never refer to it again.’ And then he turned round, and she saw his face, and fear washed over her anew. ‘But be clear on this matter. Be very clear. You are not my daughter, nor shall you ever be.’