Miriam's Talisman (2 page)

‘It suits you well, the talisman.'

‘Talisman? Is that what it is? I'm not sure what that means. It was Miriam's.'

‘Yes, I know. She always wore it. And now you seem to be in possession of it.' His fingers gripped the rim of the marble table. ‘An intriguing design. Celtic obviously. Do you know anything about it?'

‘No, only that she wore it constantly. She gave it to me last night.'

‘Did she, indeed?' His voice fell to a whisper. ‘Did she?' His arm reached out. ‘May I?' Slim fingertips took hold of the silver shape, tracing the interwoven lines and knots of the pattern. His hands were shaking. How pale they were, almost silvery blue, long and tapered with a delicate webbing of skin between each finger. ‘I would like to see it more closely. Would you mind just slipping it off for a moment?'

It was a reasonable request, a harmless curiosity, and I responded accordingly. Or was it the habit of obedience? ‘Do as you're told, there's a good girl.' I took the chain in both hands, about to lift it over my head. Then something held me back, something Miriam had said as she gave it to me. I thought at the time she must be delirious and I should humour her, but I had given my word. It was a promise, the last one I ever made her. I hesitated, then let go of the chain, allowing it to fall back into place.

‘No. No, I'm sorry, but I'd rather not if you don't mind. It's very special. I don't want to take it off, well not yet anyway.'

He sighed heavily. ‘Of course not. How insensitive. I should never have asked, I apologise. I know how very precious it must be to you.'

‘She told me never to part with it. As you say, she always wore it. Perhaps I will too.'

‘Perhaps.' He looked suddenly weary and defeated, slumping back into the chair, his head thrown back.

I thought of the bird I had seen in my dreams, its cry of despair. I watched the angular line of his throat rise and fall as he struggled to hold down his own distress. Why should Miriam have meant so much to him? We had become very close, my grandmother and I, over the last few years. It was strange that she had not spoken to me of this man.

He looked at me again and his expression softened into a gentle smile. ‘I have intruded upon you long enough.' His departure was as abrupt as his arrival, and for a moment I almost asked him to stay. But then didn't. ‘We shall meet again soon, Little Wren.' He stood and turned from his chair, and his long black coat swirled around him like a cloak. At the door he turned and looked back to me. ‘Try talking to Greg Uson. I'm sure he can help.' Then he was gone.

The café subsided back into normality, and all the mundane noises of dampened conversation and clinking china sank in to fill the spaces where he had been. The only evidence of his presence was a half-finished cup of coffee.

After a few moments, I began to wonder if he had ever been there at all.

G
REG
U
SON WAS
the obvious person to talk to, so why the hell hadn't I thought of him myself? Within half an hour I was sitting on the leather chesterfield in the outer office, waiting for him.

I've known him forever. He's not exactly my uncle. One of the strange things about our family is how we call each other by our first names (or perhaps it's one of the least strange things, now I think about it). Anyway, I'm sure that was all Miriam's doing. David and I have always called our mother Hannah behind her back, following Miriam's example, although Hannah would have been furious when we were young. Now we use her given name most of the time. Everyone called Miriam by her first name. She made it clear that that was who she was and that she didn't require unnecessary labels. Yet, though we're not related, we all call Greg Uson our ‘Uncle Greg'. He'd always been there for us, and in the old days he used to come to our house often. I'd been coming to this office for as long as I could remember, though not so much in the past few years, and I realised, as I entered the outer room, that I'd kind of lost touch with him.

I could recall coming into this room when I was small and sitting on that same sofa, hoping my father, Richard, could snatch a few moments from business to speak to me. I'd had to struggle on and off the huge, leather monster. I would perch on the edge, afraid that if I sat back my bottom would slip forward and I would slide down into a heap on the floor. My legs dangled in mid-air, the heels of my prized Nike trainers drumming against the padding. In a way I measured my growth and maturity by my ability to master this leviathan of the furniture world.

The room was as I remembered it, with its monumental oak desks and moulded ceilings, everything dark and heavy. I suppose it said something about the nature of the legal profession, impressive and imposing. Nothing had changed. The books were still there, lining an entire wall, as intimidating as they had seemed when I was small. They were far too large for me to hold then, and I knew it would be pointless my trying to read, let alone to understand, the thin, filmy pages of minute type. I would wait patiently for my father to appear. I could read the gold writing through the glass of the outer door. It was back to front and inside out, but I knew the names and was able to trace the letters slowly from right to left.
James, Uson and Blackthorn, Solicitors
, it used to read in those days, Blackthorn being my father, of course. Now the letters spell out
James, Uson and Bendage
.

That morning I arrived unannounced, but the secretary, whom I hadn't met before, seemed to be expecting me and called Uncle Greg on the intercom.

‘Miss Blackthorn has arrived, Mr Uson. Will you see her now?'

‘Yes, tell her I'll be right out.' His voice spat and crackled through the desk speaker.

The secretary was a middle-aged woman, rather plain and very businesslike. The firm had obviously learned its lesson about employing pretty young secretaries. The woman who presided over the outer office when I was young was very pretty. She had short, curly blonde hair and wore lots of make-up, meticulously applied, like one of those models in Hannah's magazines. She'd always seemed delighted to see me, and would neglect her work while she asked me about school and friends and things I was sure grown-ups weren't really interested in. When I was very small she would search out all the different coloured pens and plain paper so that I could draw pictures to put on the staffroom wall. In the later years, she often helped with my homework.

Eventually my father would appear. ‘Ah, Jean, you've been keeping my girl amused. Thank you.'

‘No problem, Mr Blackthorn, we've had a good time.' She would smile at him and he would rest his hand on her shoulder while he looked at what we had been doing. I thought she was beautiful and clever and perfect; a sort of angel of shorthand and typing.

Then one day she was gone and so was my father.

It was just after my fifteenth birthday. David, my older brother, was away at university most of the time, so it was just Hannah and me at home. Richard had been spending more and more time at the office and we saw little of him. His workload was increasing, or so he said. I had come home from school to find the house untidy, the breakfast dishes still unwashed, and Hannah silent at the kitchen table, still clutching the letter. She had crumpled
and smoothed it out again so many times that the paper had become limp. I took the letter from her and read it myself. Then I handed it back. I too was silent. She read it over and over again for days afterwards. Perhaps she was hoping there was something she'd missed, a message hidden between the lines that would explain what she had done to deserve this.

I think I was more dismayed by Hannah's silence than by my father's leaving. Perhaps I'd never been that close to him, not really. I was Daddy's little girl, of course, and he was our beneficent king, the grand provider of the executive home, the private school and the ballet lessons, to whom we should all be eternally grateful. But it was Hannah who ran our lives and who had raised us. My father was a sort of heroic figure, who always seemed to be working or involved with something outside the home. So I can't say I truly missed him. But the act of abandonment ignites fear in a child, and it was that, rather than his absence, that fuelled my grief.

And I felt partly to blame. Hadn't I loved Jean, worshipped her as Richard did? Hadn't I colluded, however unwittingly, with the two errant lovers? I forced myself to bear my portion of the guilt and made acts of contrition by cleaning the oven and washing the kitchen floor. Of course I never talked to Hannah about Jean. In fact Hannah and I never really talked about Richard's leaving at all, especially the reasons why. She made it clear that she could cope, that we could manage alone.

‘We'll show him,' she repeated constantly, although show him what she never said.

But she did show him. We survived, Hannah saw to that. David had already achieved a degree of independence, so
Hannah, the lioness, threw her energies into providing for me, her remaining cub. She went back to work. Finding a job was easy enough. She had trained as a legal secretary—that's how she had met Richard in the first place—and she became even more fiercely independent despite all the offers of support that came from friends.

Miriam made some tentative approaches, but was, of course, rejected.

We continued, as a family, to use the same firm of solicitors, and Uncle Greg was superb at looking after our affairs. I think he somehow felt responsible for Richard and Jean, and wanted to make amends by protecting our interests. Also Greg was my godfather. Not that our family set much store by religion, even though I had been christened. I think Hannah had it done more to annoy Miriam than anything else. But it did make a bond between us.

I'm not sure, even now, what I really felt about being deserted by my father. I did talk to Miriam about it once. ‘Do you think it was wrong, what Richard and Jean did?' I'd asked.

‘It depends what you mean by wrong. It certainly hurt many people, and that was bad. But they were in love, or thought they were. Perhaps more people would have been hurt if he had stayed with Hannah. Who can measure one person's pain against another's? Besides, he and Jean needed each other. I'm not sure Hannah needed him.'

I could understand that. I doubted Hannah had ever needed anyone. She could stand on her own.

‘But what about David and me, didn't we need him?'

Miriam paused at this and looked into the distance. After a while she spoke slowly. ‘Yes, perhaps a child should
have a father. It is easy to lose sight of everyone's needs.' I knew she wasn't talking about Richard and us any more. I sensed I was treading on dark and dangerous ground. I decided not to pursue the matter further.

One of the inner doors swept open and Uncle Greg appeared, a huge, square block of a man, solid in his granite grey suit. He scooped me up and hugged me to him.

‘Ah, Chloe, you're here! That's a relief! We didn't know where to find you, and Hannah was beginning to get worried.' My nose crushed against his silk shirt, I could smell the muskiness of his aftershave and the dry tang of stale cigar smoke.

‘You've spoken to Hannah? You know then? About Miriam.'

‘Yes, she rang me first thing this morning with the news. My love, I'm so very, very sorry.' He just held me for a while and I leaned against him, taking comfort from the wall of his body. Then he grasped my shoulders and held me at arm's length.

‘You must be exhausted. You look all-in. Is Mrs Beckett making you some tea?' He looked over my head at the secretary. ‘Could you rustle up something, Susan? Perhaps a sandwich?'

‘Oh no, please, I don't want anything, really.' The office was only a short drive from the café, and the bittersweet taste of the coffee was still with me; a remnant of something I wanted to hold on to, to savour a little while longer.

‘Well, come into my office and we can sort things out. Susan, would you please ring Mrs Blackthorn and let her know that Chloe is with me now.'

I sank into a deep armchair as he closed the office door,
then took up his customary seat behind his desk. He would take charge now, become the consultant—and I would lay my problems out in front of him and he would pronounce the words that would make everything all right again. This is how it had always been between Uncle Greg and us three women. He was the wise counsellor who petted me, coaxed sense from Miriam, and allowed Hannah's rasping demands to wash over him.

‘If you promise not to tell Mrs Beckett,' he whispered, ‘I might be able to find us a drop of brandy.'

‘Brandy? Uncle Greg, it's not even lunchtime.'

‘These are extraordinary times, Chloe. We're allowed to bend the rules.'

Despite my protests he forced a tumbler into my hand. Still protesting, I took a sip, gasped and choked as the spirit sent a burst of fire down my throat.

‘I heard your studies went well. A degree course, wasn't it?'

‘Yes. Computers, of course. And I managed to land a plum job at one of the science park laboratories. It's a big American company, very dynamic. But I expect Hannah's told you all about it?'

‘She's very proud of you, you know.'

‘Yes, I know.' I felt as if I'd been reprimanded—not an uncommon reaction for me then.

‘I gather you were with your grandmother when she died.'

‘Yes. Hannah's told you?'

‘She did, but I'd like to hear your version.'

Dear old Uncle Greg. It was his way of giving me an opening to unload something of yesterday's nightmare. In that old, familiar sanctuary I began to relax a little,
helped, no doubt, by the warmth of the brandy. I was ready to talk.

‘Yes, I was with her. I went to see her after I'd finished work. You know how I'd often call in before the weekend to see if she needed anything. Well, that was my excuse: I really wanted to see if she'd made any plans that I wouldn't want to be left out of. Usually I'd find her at the table, wading through piles of scattered papers or rearranging her book collection. Though I wouldn't have been surprised to have found her outside. It had been a sunny day and she might well have been working in the garden. Clearing away the debris after the summer riot, she called it. Instead she was sitting in her armchair. She was very still and quiet. Said she felt a cold coming on and could I light the fire for her, but when I felt her forehead she was burning up. So I called the doctor.