The House of Memories (3 page)

Less than six months after the wedding, the news that Aidan and I were having a baby unleashed a torrent of one-line Astounding Fact e-mail from him. He continued to send them all the way through my pregnancy.
Did you know that the first sense a baby develops is hearing? That a baby is born around the world every three seconds? That a baby is born without kneecaps?

When I e-mailed five hours after the birth (long and painful, both facts immediately forgotten) to tell him we’d decided to call our newborn son (big, healthy, so, so beautiful) Felix Lucas Fox O’Hanlon, I heard nothing back. I was too exhausted and too dizzy with love to mind, I think. Perhaps he was away. Two days later, there was a knock at our Canberra apartment door. Aidan told me the postman could barely carry the parcel inside, it was so huge. It was a five-foot-high toy fox.
Thank you,
Lucas’s handwritten note said.
I am overjoyed for so many reasons.

After that, Lucas started writing to Felix more than me. I pretended to be hurt, but I loved it.

Dear Felix,
he would e-mail.
How is the sleeping going? Have you been told that Felix is the Latin word for lucky or happy?

Felix wrote back to him too, of course, channeled through me or Aidan. He was very articulate for a baby and very appreciative of the new series of Astounding Facts for Infants.

Dear Lucas,

Yes, I am sleeping and also feeding very well, thank you for asking—I have already put on 800 grams. Thank you also for the link to the Large Hadron Collider Web site. I look forward to seeing it for myself one day.

Love for now from your grandnephew, Felix.

We sent Lucas dozens of photos of Felix. Lucas sent Felix books. Boxes of them. Not just picture books either. He sent Dickens, Tolstoy, Austen, Homer. . . . His goal, he told us, was for Felix to have a complete library of the classics by the time he started school. At the rate the books were arriving, Felix would have had a full library of the classics by the time he started kindergarten. For Felix’s first birthday, Lucas sent him another five-foot-high toy fox. To keep the other fellow company, he said.

A month after that, Lucas surprised us—delighted us—with a spur-of-the-moment visit to Canberra. He stayed for less than a week, too short, but enough time for us to take dozens of photographs of him and Felix together. Serendipitously, his visit coincided with one of Charlie’s trips back to Australia.

I can still picture one afternoon in particular. We were having an informal lunch at our apartment, the balcony doors wide open, the sun streaming in, a light breeze in the air. There in our small living room were my four favorite people in the world—Aidan, Lucas, Charlie and Felix. There was a moment, a beautiful, sweet moment, when I took a photograph with perfect timing: Charlie making a corny joke, Lucas throwing back his head and laughing, Aidan smiling and shaking his head, and there, in Aidan’s arms, Felix, giving his big, gummy, delighted smile and kicking his legs at the same time, as if the smile alone wasn’t enough to signify how much fun he was having. In the photograph, his legs are just a blur. At the time, I remember a feeling, like a dart of something, that felt like light, a warm feeling, a rush of it. I realized afterward it was joy.

After Lucas went home again, the e-mail between him and Felix increased. There were intense discussions about communism versus capitalism and the merits of cricket compared to football. The books kept arriving. Poetry from Byron, Yeats and Wordsworth. The Spot books. The Mr. Men tales. Lucas was no literary snob. Aidan had to put up another bookshelf in Felix’s room. Felix e-mailed Lucas to say thank you and to remark that his bedroom looked more like a library these days.

Wonderful!
Lucas e-mailed back.
A boy can never have too many books. Wait till you see what I’m sending you for your second birthday. . . .

But then—

When—

Afterward—

After it happened, as soon as Lucas got my message in the middle of his night, he wrote to me. On paper, not by e-mail. It arrived by courier. One line of writing, on thick parchment paper, with the fox drawing on the letterhead.

My dearest Ella, I am devastated for you both. I am here if you need me. Lucas.

It said everything I needed to hear. It made me cry for hours. I had already been crying for hours.

Almost twenty months had passed since that day. I wasn’t arriving in London unannounced. Lucas had e-mailed a fortnight earlier:
Where are you now, Ella?

I was in Margaret River, in Western Australia. My contract as a casual worker at one of the largest wineries in the area was up. I’d been offered an extension but I was ready to move. Since it happened, I hadn’t stayed anywhere for long. I’d left Canberra within weeks. I’d moved to Melbourne, then Sydney, before I’d heard about the winery job. I’d been there since.

I’d like to see you,
Lucas had written.
Please let me buy your airfare.

I wanted to see Lucas too, but I didn’t need his help with the airfare. I’d saved every cent I’d earned. There was nothing I wanted or needed beyond the basics. I booked my ticket the next day. It felt exactly the right thing to do, after months of feeling like I was living in fog.

Even flying into London that morning had felt right. Because I thought being here again might help? Because I had loved it once, and had been happy here? I think I hoped that being back would help me or force me to feel something other than despair.

Come and see me as soon as you get here, would you? Come straight from the airport.

Lucas wasn’t being mysterious. He was always matter-of-fact like that.

You do know you are welcome to stay for as long as you need to?
Mi casa es su casa
.

My house is your house.
He had said that to me many times over the years. To his many student lodgers as well, I knew. Aidan had always laughed at his terrible Spanish pronunciation. Lucas was a genius historian but a bad linguist.
Thank you, Lucas,
I wrote back.

I walked the short distance from Paddington Station to his street. Twenty-seven years had passed since my first visit to Lucas’s house. He’d been in his mid-thirties then. He was in his early sixties now. Yet he always looked the same to me. I was the one who’d changed most over the years, from that seven-year-old fox-stealing curly-haired child to the thirty-four-year-old woman I now was. I’d been a tall, skinny child. I was still skinny, still taller than average. My dark brown hair had been long until a year ago. I’d cut it two days after I arrived in Margaret River and kept it short since.

The houses on his street still reminded me of wedding cakes. His blue door was still in need of painting. There was a new door knocker, in the shape of a fox. I only had to knock once. The door opened and there he was, smiling at me. His hair was still a big mop of unruly curls, a Fox family trait. He still wore glasses that could have come from a museum. His baggy, grubby clothes might have belonged to a gardener. Seeing him standing there, so familiar and so solid, I couldn’t help myself. I started to cry.

“Ella.” He held me tight, waited until my tears slowed, then took a step back. “Come in.”

If he was my aunt rather than my uncle, it would have been different, I’m sure. It would have been all talk, no silences.
I’m so sad for you, Ella. You poor thing. How can you even begin to get over something like that?
All the words I’d heard from so many people in the past twenty months, heard so many times that I couldn’t hear them anymore. I hadn’t told the people around me in the winery in Margaret River what had happened, why I was there. I didn’t tell them that I was an editor, not a vineyard assistant turned restaurant kitchen hand. I could have got work in my own industry. I’d had many offers after word got around, but I needed everything to change. I couldn’t have any reminders of what my life had once been like.

Time and again, people who did know what had happened suggested that keeping busy would help the healing process. It’s not true, you know. Nothing helps. Because whatever I do with my body, my brain keeps ticking away, going over and over every second of that day, trying to find a new way of remembering, another way of changing what happened, winding itself into knots. That was—that is—the torture of it. Because it doesn’t matter how many times I examine it, how often I try to rewrite that day in my mind; the ending is the same. And no amount of physical work helps: outside pruning grapevines, rod tying, picking grapes, or the work I did once I moved into the winery complex itself—washing floors, doing dishes, waitressing, being a kitchen assistant, working any shift on offer, doing overtime uncomplainingly, working the longest hours I could and spending any free time I had walking to tire myself out, to try to exhaust my body so my brain would have no choice but to sleep as well. . . . Nothing works.

“You look well,” Lucas said.

He was being kind. I knew I looked exhausted. I probably had mascara all over my face now too. I tried to smile. “You too. Have you been working out?”

It was an old joke between us—Lucas would sooner fly to the moon than go to a gym. He grinned, running his fingers through his curls, ruffling them more than usual. He always did that when attention turned to him. I imagined he was like that at the university too, tousling his hair during his lectures, getting closer to the image of a mad history professor with every sentence.

“I like the jumper,” I said. It was a jumper I’d knitted—tried to knit for him—twenty-one years ago, when I was thirteen.

I’d found the pattern in an old magazine and got our next-door neighbor to teach me how to make it. It was supposed to have a design of a fox—of course—on the front. I made a mess of it, unpicking and reknitting it so many times that each strand of wool was covered in grime from my increasingly sweaty fingers. I had trouble with the sleeves and the turndown collar, and as for the fox design . . . By the time I finished, the creature on the front looked more like E.T. than a fox. But I proudly sent it off, wrapped in Christmas paper. In return, Lucas sent me not only a fax telling me how much he loved it and how warm it was, but also a photo of him wearing it. Charlie had taken a great interest in the photo. He kindly said nothing about the jumper’s design, but focused on Lucas. It was the first time he’d seen a photo of him. “Does he look like your dad? Like your dad would if he was alive, I mean.”

Lucas and my dad had been very alike. Charlie was right, I realized. I now had an idea of what my dad would have looked like if he hadn’t gone off to Canada and got killed.

I noticed Mum picking up the photo too, but she didn’t say anything to me about Lucas’s similarity to Dad. She did say something to me about the fox resembling an alien, though.

“Never mind. Practice makes perfect,” Walter said. “You could try to do a jumper for Jess next.”

“No thanks,” I’d said. My knitting days were over.

“I get offers for it every day,” Lucas said now. “It’s a work of art.”

“Art? That’s one word for it.”

I followed Lucas into his withdrawing room off the hallway. It was messier than ever.

“Drink?” he asked. “It’s nighttime for you and your body clock, isn’t it?”

I shook my head. I’d stopped drinking alcohol. “But tea would be great, thanks.”

We went into the kitchen. It was filthy, every surface covered in dirty dishes, saucepans and plates. I tried not to react, or wince, when he pulled out two grubby cups from the crowded sink. When he reached for a milk jug that I could see had something like gravy on the side, I couldn’t stop myself.

“Sorry, Lucas.” I took the cups from him and washed them out, followed by the jug, followed by the kettle, and then, for good measure, I washed out the sink too. Lucas watched it all with a half smile. He’d never taken offense when I expressed disgust or astonishment at the squalor he and his students lived in. He just took a seat at the cluttered, dirty kitchen table—my fingers itched to clean it as well—watching me with his usual amused, affectionate expression.

“It’s lovely to see you, Ella. I did miss having a maid.”

“This house needs a bulldozer, not a maid.”

“Speaking of which, how is your mother?”

“Very well, thank you,” I said, trying not to smile as I searched for a biscuit in one of the tins and found a few moldy crumbs instead.

“Still mad as ever, I suppose?”

I nodded.

“And still famous?”

“Getting more famous every day too.” It was true. In the past six years, after a chance encounter with a TV crew in a Melbourne shopping center, my mother had somehow become a household name in Australia. Walter was now her full-time manager. It was unfathomable to me. My mother had barely boiled an egg during my childhood. Now she was a celebrity TV chef.

“Charlie seems as happy as ever in Boston.”

I nodded again. Charlie the happy househusband, father of four and adored/adoring husband of Lucy, a sales representative for a medical company. They’d met when Charlie was seventeen and in the US as a Rotary exchange student. After becoming pen pals, they’d met again when they were both in their mid-twenties and Lucy was visiting Australia. They’d fallen in love, married and immediately begun having children. Their youngest was four years old, the oldest nearly eleven. Lucy worked full-time while Charlie stayed at home, in an arrangement that suited them both.

“I do enjoy his family reports,” Lucas said. “Thank you for adding me to his mailing list. The one about the children at the dentist was like a comedy sketch.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say to that. I’d stopped reading Charlie’s e-mail about his family. I was still in touch with Charlie about other things, of course. We e-mailed often, both of us carefully choosing our words, avoiding certain subjects. Charlie did all his communicating via computer, late at night, once the kids and Lucy were in bed. His family reports were e-mailed to only a few people—Walter, Mum, Jess, Lucas and me. They were his way of staying sane, he’d confessed to me once. They always had the same subject line, a play on words from Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon stories. The original began:
It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon.
Charlie’s was:
It’s been a noisy week in Boston.
I missed his stories of family life. But I couldn’t read them anymore.