Miss Appleby's Academy (2 page)

At night she would tell George stories of how his parents had come from Ireland in a very large ship, hoping for a better life, they had got him to the New World and could manage no more, but he had Emma and her father and the prosperity of a town like Mid Haven.

It was indeed a haven, she always thought, with its college, lovely buildings, pretty streets and squares. The New England houses were well built of white wood and it was prosperous. It had culture, education and people like her father, she thought affectionately, people who cared about those less fortunate than themselves.

From the beginning Emma found herself desperate to keep the child. Her father certainly gave the matter no more thought: he accepted George into their household with joy and would sit the little boy on his knee and read to him things which would have been well beyond the child’s comprehension, though George always seemed happy sitting there, listening to her father’s melodious voice as he talked of the things which mattered to him: philosophy and science. He would read poetry and George would sit quite still and watch the pages of the book and absorb the words.

Her brother, Laurence, said that it was ridiculous, the
child was too young to understand. Laurence had told her that she should not keep the child: she was an unmarried woman, whatever would people think? He should go to a couple who might raise him, but Emma did not take his advice.

‘I found him,’ she said. She might just as well have claimed him as she would a game, she thought with guilt afterwards.

Her mother had died some months before and their household was silent with grief. She and her father now had something to do besides wish things were otherwise. The child made a huge difference.

‘You have no idea what he’ll be like,’ Laurence said.

‘He’s a boy like any other,’ Emma said.

At least Laurence did not suggest that he and Verity should take George. Verity was delivered of a boy two months later and they had sufficient to cope with, Emma judged. Laurence, she knew, had looked at the child’s black hair and blue eyes and milky skin. He was so obviously Irish, and the Irish were not well liked here. They did not stay, they moved further into the country as George’s parents had been trying to do.

George was a sunny-tempered child. The first words he said were her father’s name and hers, and Emma was delighted every day by his company. She taught him the names of the flowers and trees in the garden. He loved to watch the birds come down to drink from the stone birdbath and take baths, the bigger ones in turn, the small brown birds jumping in and out of the water in game.
George liked to run about in the spring warmth, and for her to run giggling after him.

She could not imagine having had a child of her own and loving him more. There had been a time when she looked on other women’s children with envy and wondered why she had been singled out for such a life and wished for a husband and a home and for somebody to shut the bedroom door with them both inside, but it had not happened and yet she had George and he was a delight.

As he got older and went to school, waiting for George to come home each day was one of the pleasures which made Emma’s life worthwhile. He would run all the way back because although he liked school he liked to be with her much more. He would fling open the door, throw his schoolbag towards the hallstand and then call her name from halfway between the various downstairs rooms, and when he saw her he would run and throw his arms about her. She did not think that life could be any better.

*

‘You have too much to do,’ Laurence said, and sighed heavily as he closed the sitting-room door. Emma looked up. She had been mending George’s torn trousers. He loved climbing trees and was forever tearing his clothes.

It had been a long hot summer and although she usually enjoyed the summer it seemed to her that since her father had been taken ill in June the heat had been relentless and the yellow flowers had grown so tall that they had overbalanced onto the lawn. The fruit had not ripened as
it should have done for lack of water: the plums had shrivelled stonelike upon the trees and the apples and pears were lost among the many leaves which overshadowed them. The blackbirds had had the best of the strawberries and blueberries because she had not had enough time to pick them.

‘Could George not have done that for you?’ her sister-in-law Verity had said, and Laurence added, ‘What an idle little fellow he is.’

She had tried to distract George from her father’s illness by telling him to go fishing or swimming with his friends, but George had devoted himself to her father and would read him to sleep while the bumble bees buzzed their way through the second flowering of the purple chive clusters below, the windows open to the garden.

‘What were you thinking of, putting a herb garden there?’ Verity asked. ‘It’s the perfect place for roses.’

Emma could smell the thyme which flowered a delicate shade of pink, the lemon balm which overran the path so that you could not help standing on it and dispersing its clean sharp scent into the afternoons. Her father loved the smell of the herbs; he had said in jest before the stroke which took his power of speech that he loved it better than any flower because it reminded him of Emma’s wonderful dinners.

The evening of the stroke, when she had hoped he was getting better, she looked in on him after George had gone to bed. She thought he was asleep. The weather had broken, she was glad of the cooling breeze but was about to close
the window against the rain when she heard him murmur to her from the bed. She stopped.

‘Leave the curtains open, child, I like them like that. I like to see the rain and hear it when I drop off and it’s the relief of it. Leave the lamp off, open the window and let the air in.’

She obeyed him, and the smell of fresh rain on the herbs beneath was calming.

‘You haven’t called me “child” in years,’ she said, going to him, only half able to see how he looked because his face was in shadow. ‘You seem a little better.’

‘I’m worried, Emma.’ He moved about in the bed as though he were uncomfortable, and she went over and smoothed the sheets and coverlet as she had a done a hundred times since he had been taken ill. She wished she could do more.

He patted the bed and she sat down.

‘There’s nothing to worry over,’ she said in her strongest voice. ‘Everything’s going to be fine.’

‘Oh Emma, what a very bad liar you are.’

She tried to laugh this off, but the lump in her throat wouldn’t allow it. She shook her head.

‘I have nothing to leave you—’ he said.

‘I won’t need anything, Father.’

‘It’s all been so badly done, and I’m sorry.’

The tears would not hold and began to glass the front of her eyes. She moved herself as though the distraction would stop them, and when her voice came out it was the whisper she had promised herself it would not be.

‘You’re all the world to me,’ she said. ‘The best father a woman ever had.’

He shook his head and moved about even more, so agitated. ‘I’m sorry for the things I did in my life which were ugly and hurtful. I wish there was some way I could make up for them now, but there isn’t. I’ve had to live with it.’

‘You’ve never hurt anybody,’ she said, dismayed that he should regard himself in this way.

He lay back on the pillows and his voice was weaker. ‘When you’re a young man you think everything you do is right, you’re brought up to believe it. It doesn’t matter how bad it is because the world is yours and women and children they come second.’

‘Please, don’t upset yourself. There’s no need.’

‘Do you remember the garden path at home? The smell of the herbs reminds me of it and your mother calling you into the house for your tea.’

Vaguely she thought she could hear her mother’s voice, in a wild cold place and the house where the fires were big.

She had chance to recall nothing more because her father’s face and his body began to alter as the stroke invaded him. Those were to be the last words he said.

*

She had tried not to think about that conversation, she still held that he would get better. She had to hold on to that, there seemed nothing else, but she was reminded of it all once again; she could not tear her mind from the
memory. She tried to concentrate on Laurence now, thinking that he might suggest she should hire someone to help in the garden. She was taken aback when he said, ‘George should go away to school.’

Emma was so shocked that she didn’t know what to say, and took refuge in, ‘Father is devoted to him.’

‘Most of the time I don’t think he’s aware of anyone. He’s sleeping more and more deeply.’

Emma wanted to shout out loud that he was doing nothing of the kind, instead of which she blinked down at the tidy needlework as though there were more to do.

‘Dr Shuttleworth says he won’t last the week,’ Laurence said.

Emma bit off the thread now that the trousers were finished, folded them and found herself unable to move or speak.

‘I thought I would come round later and go through Father’s papers. There are so many of them which he’s ignored, it could take weeks.’

Emma wanted to scream and shout that their father was not dead yet, but she felt a sudden sympathy for her brother because he didn’t look at her and she thought that perhaps sorting papers was his way of dealing with something which men were not allowed to acknowledge hurt them deeply.

‘I think that’s a good idea,’ she said with energy, and she waited for him to look at her, but of course he didn’t. He didn’t ever seem to look at her directly: he always had such important things to do and so many of them.

He merely nodded and went away home for his evening meal.

He came back almost straight afterwards, as though for once he wanted to be in the house; perhaps he too wished for a way to hold off their father’s death and thought, as a man might, that if he were there and the doors bolted death would have no way in. It was a foolish notion which Emma rather liked, but instead of her brother’s presence being of comfort it was quite the opposite, and all the time he was there in the study she moved from room to room trying to be efficient and accomplishing nothing.

In the end she went and opened the study door. There were papers stacked beside him and he said, in an attempt at humour, ‘I don’t think he’s ever thrown anything away,’ and Emma smiled in acknowledgement of the attempt and moved further into the room as Laurence frowned at the papers in his hand. ‘Look at this.’

She went and bent over to look.

‘It’s really old,’ Laurence said, ‘just some notes about a lecture he was probably giving. It’s from when we lived in England, well, not me obviously, but you and Mother and Father. He never talked about it, did he?’

‘You’re too young to remember. He did say something before he was so ill, but it was vague. And I don’t remember much, just a house set up high in the village where we were. Tow Law Town. A little mining town in the middle of County Durham. We were happy there. He used to lift me up and throw me up high and catch me. He seemed so tall.’

‘He was. Is,’ Laurence amended.

‘So are you.’ Her brother was one of the tallest men in the area. Somehow she had always thought it would have made him kinder, that he might hold off life for her, that he might have shielded her and her father as he grew older, but he never had. Perhaps he was the kind of person whose ability to love was limited to his wife and children. It must be, she knew, a great responsibility.

He got up abruptly, in case, she thought, he was about to show his feelings. He said it was late and Verity would be expecting him home. Seconds later he was gone, leaving the desk untidy. Would he come back tomorrow? Would he spend part of each evening there so that she could grow used to him and maybe they would talk more about their early life and she could tell him things which he could not remember? She thought she might like that.

*

Long after she had imagined George in bed she found him asleep beside her father. She would have left him there, but he sensed her and opened his eyes.

‘May I stay here?’

‘Of course. I didn’t mean to disturb you.’

George looked intelligently at her and then, after making sure the old man’s eyes were closed and his breathing steady, he turned to her once again. ‘He’s going to die soon, isn’t he?’

‘No—’

‘Please don’t say that. It’s the kind of thing Aunt Verity would say. She told me he would go to the angels last
time I saw her.’ George raised his eyes to the ceiling, but they were glassy.

Emma smiled at this. ‘Everyone dies eventually,’ she said.

‘It isn’t eventually yet,’ George said, closing his eyes and turning towards her father.

Emma kissed him goodnight and went off to her bed. She tried not to think about her father dying; she didn’t think she could bear it any more easily than George could. She didn’t sleep. The night was warm. Usually she loved the fall, but this one was already on its way and she did not think her father would live to see their favourite time of year. She felt as though the leaves, having had too dry a spring and summer, would not turn the usual gold and rust and orange. This year it was as though they had shrunk away, curled up against the wind, shrivelled.

She lay awake until she heard the clock in the church strike three and then she got up and wandered across the hall. George and her father lay as before but not quite, she realized. There was something different. Her father was stiller than he had been. She walked quietly around the bed and then back again, and she sat down softly in her mother’s favourite rocking chair and waited for the dawn because she did not want the little boy to wake up and discover alone that the man he had thought of as his father had died in the night.

*

Judge Philips was a friend of theirs, so although he could have left it to other people, after the funeral was over and
the mourners had gone, he lingered. Laurence said to him, ‘I expect after all that tea, Judge, you’d like something a little stronger.’

The Judge slid his huge wobbling backside forward in Emma’s best chair. She had feared for it ever since the moment he had sat down because it had been her father’s chair, and as he rose to his feet she wished for perhaps the tenth time that she had moved it into another room where it could not be so ill-treated. He reached the table where he had deposited what she realized now was the will, picked it up and waved the papers at Laurence and said, ‘After you, good sir.’ He nodded towards the door.