The House of Memories (2 page)

Eight months after the divorce became final, my mother married again, to a German businessman called Walter she’d met at a garden center. They’d both reached for a large terra-cotta pot at the same time. When she would retell the story in the many magazine articles about her in later years, she would say it was Cupid at work—Walter’s surname was Baum, the German for tree, and they’d met in a garden center! That terra-cotta pot led to coffee and on to a series of secret dates—she’d told me she was going to night classes. “I didn’t want to get your hopes up until I knew for sure myself,” she said. I hadn’t had any hopes. I was still getting used to Dad being gone, not wishing for a new father.

They had a small wedding. It was my stepfather Walter’s second marriage too, so neither of them wanted a big fuss, they said. Walter came complete with a large bank account, his own stockbroking business, a lot of silver hair, a beard, a big house in Richmond and a son, my instant stepbrother, Charlie. (Full name Charlemagne. Truly.) He was two years older than me, eleven to my nine. Charlie’s mother had gone back to Germany to live after the marriage ended. She wasn’t well, my mother told me. Certainly not well enough to look after Charlie. Mum tapped her head and did a kind of rolling thing with her eyes as she told me. It took me a while to realize she meant Walter’s ex-wife wasn’t well in her head. It was years later before I learned more about her. Neither Charlie nor Walter mentioned her much in the early days.

And so the two of us joined the two of them and we became four. Less than two years later, three weeks after my eleventh birthday, four turned into five, with the arrival of a baby girl called Jessica Eloise Faith Baum.

“We’re a proper family now,” my mother said. I remember wondering what we’d been before.

She also told me that she was changing my name by deed poll to Baum. “It’s too confusing otherwise,” she said. “And we should all have the same surname.”

“But I like being Ella Fox,” I told her.

“You can keep it as a middle name,” Mum said. “You might as well have some reminder of your father. It’s not as if he goes to much trouble to keep in touch any other way.”

She was right, unfortunately. Dad rang only occasionally from Canada. He sent me Christmas presents and birthday cards that mentioned me visiting him in his new home, but the visits never happened. Mum didn’t speak of him at all if she could help it. When she was with her friends, she referred to her first wedding day as the Big Mistake Day. None of their wedding photos were in the house. They’d somehow been left behind when we moved in with Walter and Charlie. So had all the other photos of Dad. If it hadn’t been for Uncle Lucas sending me a replacement set of photos (at my request), I’d have forgotten what my father looked like. Lucas and I had become occasional pen pals since we met that day in London. I liked having a pen pal on the other side of the world, especially one who was related to me.

A month after I turned twelve, it was Lucas who rang with the news that my father had been killed in a lightplane crash in Ontario. He wrote to me afterward.
My dear Ella,
he said.
I know you hadn’t seen your father in some time, and I also know he was sad about that. And I know that you have a new father and indeed a whole new family now and I hope all is well. But if you ever need some advice from your Wily Old Fox of an uncle, please send me a letter or a fax (I have just installed a very smart-looking fax machine) and I’ll get back to you as quickly as I can.

I wonder whether Lucas had any idea what he might have unleashed with that simple, kind note. From that day on, he became my combination agony uncle, imaginary friend and sounding board, all via the wonders of a fax machine.

My stepfather worked from home sometimes, and he had all the basic office equipment in his study. I’d watched him send a fax one day and thought it was the most amazing thing. He noticed my interest and let me send the next one for him, instructing me in his exact, near-perfect English. That was always when Walter and I got on best, when he was teaching me something and I was being obedient in return. Outside of those times, I think we did our best to ignore each other. It was easy enough to do without any feelings being hurt—my mother kept up such a constant stream of chatter and opinions that she papered over any silences or gaps in our relationship. And of course Walter had Charlie to talk to, in English and German, and then baby Jess as well. His real children. Looking back now, I realize it was hard for him too, and for my mum, with not only a new baby, but a new stepchild to get used to. But back then, I just felt lonely and sad a lot of the time. Like that baby fox in Lucas’s office.

Two nights after I got Lucas’s letter, while Mum and Walter were out at a work dinner and Charlie, Jess and I were being babysat by our middle-aged neighbor (who always turned on the TV as soon as my mother and Walter left), I tiptoed into the office and switched on the fax machine.

I decided to copy Lucas’s straight-to-the-point style of communication.

Dear Uncle Lucas,

I need your advise.
(Spelling wasn’t my strong point back then.)
I don’t feel virry happy. I have a new baby sister but she crys all the time and Mum likes her more than she likes me.

What should I do?

Your neice,

Ella

I carefully keyed in the long fax number Lucas had included with his letter, fed in the paper and watched it go, holding my breath. I sent it a second time just to be sure. And a third time. Five minutes later, I was sitting in Walter’s chair, chewing the end of my ponytail and swinging my legs, when the fax machine began to make a new noise. I watched, wide-eyed, as a piece of paper started to move of its own accord, go through the roller and appear in the tray. I picked it up.

Dear Ella,

She’s a baby. Babies cry. That’s their job. Give her time to grow up and get interesting, then decide if you like her or not. And I’m sure your mum loves you both. That’s
her
job.

He’d not signed it, but underneath the writing was a little drawing of a fox. A cheeky fox, with a glint in its eye.

I took out a fresh piece of paper from Walter’s stationery drawer.

Thank you. I will wait.

I signed mine with a little drawing of a fox too, except my fox looked more like a skunk. I fed it into the machine and carefully pressed all the numbers again. Off it went. A few minutes later, another whirr of the machine and a new piece of paper appeared.

You’re welcome.
Underneath it, another fox. This one was winking.

I took all the faxes into my bedroom and read them once more before I went to sleep, feeling much better. In the morning, I put them away carefully in my treasure box.

The next day after school, Mum called me into the kitchen. “You really shouldn’t use Walter’s fax machine without asking, Ella.” Before I had a chance to speak, she went on. “There’s no need to look so cross. Lucas wasn’t telling tales. He rang to ask permission to send you faxes occasionally. Walter and I have discussed it. As Walter said, he is your only uncle. So as long as you don’t get too carried away, you can fax Lucas now and again and he says he’ll get back to you as soon as he can. But don’t annoy him, will you? He’s a very busy man.”

That surprised me. “Is he? Doing what?” All I could picture Lucas doing in that big London house of his was making a mess.

“I don’t know exactly, Ella. Professor-y things.”

“But what kind of things?”

Mum waved her hands in an “I can’t even begin to explain” motion. “Ask him next time you fax him.”

So I did. Lucas faxed back the very next day.

Dear Ella,

This week I am busy studying the following subjects:

Political allegiances in postwar Britain

Trends in liberal versus conservative educational policy

The rise in pro-monarchist sentiment between WWI and WWII

I also need to get the plumbing in the downstairs bathroom fixed.

I faxed back.
Thank you
,
Lucas. You are very busy.

As a bee,
he said in return.
Or a fox.
He signed it with that winking fox again.

It was like having a hotline to heaven. I faxed Lucas at least twice weekly and he always faxed me back. Except of course we called it foxing, not faxing. They weren’t long letters. Questions or minor complaints from me, usually. Quick answers or snippets of information from Lucas, or one-liners that he called Astounding Facts of a Fox Nature.
Did you know that baby foxes are called kits, cubs or pups? Did you know that a female fox is called a vixen? Did you know that a fox’s tail makes up one-third of its total length?

Occasionally a present would arrive in the post. Not at birthdays or Christmases, but out of the blue. Always something to do with a fox, of course. A T-shirt with a fox on the front. Fox notepaper. A fox brooch once. I either used, lost or grew out of everything, except the fox key ring.

He sent books too.
I am a crime aficionado,
he said in one note,
and you seem like an inquisitive young lady, so I hope you will enjoy this genre too.
I did, reading every one that he sent—from Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven, Famous Five and Five Find-Outers series, to Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, to Agatha Christie’s novels. As I got older, Lucas sent books by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Arthur Conan Doyle. An Astounding Fact accompanied every one:
Did you know Enid Blyton wrote eight hundred books in just forty years? That Agatha Christie also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott? That Raymond Chandler only started writing detective fiction in his mid-forties?

Jess was too young to care then, but Charlie was always curious about my faraway uncle. Not jealous. Even back then, Charlie was the most even-tempered, laid-back person I knew.

“Any new facts from the fox?” he’d ask.

I’d go to my Lucas folder and read out the latest fax. Charlie was always very impressed.

I didn’t send Lucas any astounding facts in return, but I did send him regular updates on school results or any academic prizes I happened to win.

Your father would be proud of you. I’m proud of you,
he’d fax back.

We didn’t meet in person again until I was twenty-two. After finishing an Arts degree, I’d decided to take a gap year. I’d studied English literature; my father was English, I had a British passport—I headed straight for London. When I e-mailed Lucas (we’d progressed from faxes) to tell him I was coming, he insisted I stay with him until I found my feet. He was still in the same house, which was still full of bright but financially impoverished student lodgers, but he was now more than their innkeeper. He’d become their employer, setting up a discreet, high-level pool of personal tutors. It worked in everyone’s favor, he told me. His lodgers always needed extra money. Struggling students always needed extra tuition. Well-off parents were always happy to pay. A win-win-win situation.

I stayed for a month that first time and loved every minute—his house, the tutors, the city, Lucas himself. The following year, I returned and stayed for six weeks. After that, I visited as often as I could. I’d pay my own airfare after saving every cent I could from my new, full-time job in a Melbourne publishing house, supplemented by my evening job as an English tutor. Lucas’s tutors had given me the idea. I steadily rose through the ranks at the publisher, from editorial assistant to copy editor to editor. At the age of twenty-eight, single and restless, I resigned from my job, packed up my flat, said farewell to my friends and family and flew to London yet again. I worked for Lucas as his cook and housekeeper for two months before I found a short-term job as a badly paid editor with a literary magazine in Bath. I still traveled back to London most weekends and stayed in Lucas’s house each time, going to the theater or, more often, staying in and cooking dinner for him and whichever of the tutors happened to be in the house. Which was how, where and when I first met Aidan.

Two years later, on a sunny Canberra afternoon, Lucas was the witness at my registry-office wedding to Aidan Joseph O’Hanlon, originally of Carlow, Ireland, lately of London and now of Australia. Aidan and I had moved to Canberra a year after we met, when he was offered an interpreting and translating position with the trade commission there. He was fluent in French, Italian, Spanish and German. I’d gone freelance, able to work as an editor from anywhere.

It was important to us both that Lucas was at our wedding. He’d brought us together, after all. My mother was vaguely friendly to Lucas, I think. Marriage to Walter had softened her or at least helped her forget how annoyed she’d once been with my dad and, by extension, Lucas. Walter made stilted conversation with him, as Walter tended to do with everyone. Jess pretty much ignored him. Aged eighteen, she was too busy flirting with the young guitarist we’d hired to provide background music at the reception.

Charlie was living in Boston by then, happily married and soon to become a father for the fourth time. Yet he still made the long journey to our wedding, staying for just three days. That meant so much to me.

Aidan and I didn’t go on our honeymoon until Lucas returned to England. We spent the week after our wedding playing tour guide with him, visiting the galleries and museums in Canberra, driving up to Sydney and down to Melbourne. Lucas and I had been close before my wedding. We became even closer afterward. A month after Lucas went home, Aidan and I headed off on our official honeymoon—two weeks in the US, spending several days, of course, with Charlie and his family, including his new baby son. Aidan and Charlie got on so well. They were both clever, gentle men, so I’d hoped and expected it, but I was still relieved.

Back home in Canberra, work and everyday life took over from weddings and travel. I e-mailed Lucas as regularly as ever, about authors I was working with, or asking his advice about points of grammar. I told him about Aidan’s job. Lucas told me he had a full house—six lodgers, the most ever. More clients than he could supply tutors to, as well.
I fear for the future of this once great country, but rejoice in my rising bank account,
he said.