We Are All Made of Stars (31 page)

I turn to look at Hugh, who is also examining the display on the walls, as if he is trying to remember what it's like to see it for the first time.

‘Is it a welcoming committee?' I ask, stopping at the face of a chubby toddler, positioned at eye level.

‘They're death masks,' Hugh tells me. ‘These are casts taken from corpses, all collected by Liston, until his death. He lost his own family, you see: wife, children, six of them, all before him. It devastated him; he felt bereft. He never recovered. His life became an obsession with commemorating those who had died. Those he knew, those he didn't. When he died, the collection went to a nephew, who carried on the tradition, which he then passed to his son.

‘Victorians were desperate to have something of their loved ones to treasure when they were gone. It's not that they weren't afraid of death, but more that they weren't afraid of acknowledging it.'

I can't take my eyes off the sleeping baby's face – the full lips, the softly closed lids. I am familiar with death, and yet somehow this image fills me with emotion that I can't understand: a pain, deep and tangible, so strong it takes my breath away for a moment. I'm grieving for the loss of an infant who was gone almost 100 years ago and also something more: a loss of something I have never had.

I turn my face away, closing my eyes, waiting until the unexpected wave of emotion subsides.

‘Don't worry,' Hugh says gently. ‘It gets a lot of people that way.'

‘It's funny,' I say. ‘Looking at that mask just made me realise how much I want a baby, Vincent's baby; how much I've always believed that we would have a family together, and be parents. And now … that feels like it's slipping away from me.'

He watches me thoughtfully, his face still and calm.

‘Maybe knowing what it is that you want, the future that you have been fighting for, is what it will take to make it happen. It's easy to admit defeat and let go of people you love, or dreams you have, because it's difficult. Fighting for them is what takes courage. Fighting for them is what matters.'

‘But you can't force a person to stay with you,' I say. ‘Sometimes you have to accept defeat.'

I follow Hugh through a drawing room, lined with portraits, past a piano topped with photographs, into another room, which lights up as we walk into it.

‘Motion-sensor lighting,' Hugh tells me. ‘It saves on the bills, but it can be a little alarming if you're doing some research and suddenly all the lights go off. And, yes, you are right, sometimes you do have to accept defeat; sometimes, but not until you've fought with your very last breath. My mum, she gave in too soon. She stopped trying too soon. Stopped trying to get better, to let my dad help, to stay in our family, to be a mother. She waved the white flag on our lives when another battle could have changed everything. She is even getting ready to die without one more fight. And it's hard to forgive her for that. So I am saying, just make sure you have fought to your dying breath for the man that you love, the children you want, the future you thought was yours.'

This room is lined with glass cabinets filled with all kinds of jewellery: rings, pendants, watches, earrings.

‘It wasn't just the Victorians that kept memento mori jewellery,' Hugh tells me, as I stray to his side and peer into one of the cabinets. ‘This collection dates back to the fifteen hundreds, but it was the Victorians who liked to incorporate relics into the design. See this watch?' Slipping on pair of white cotton gloves, he removes a simple-looking gold pocket watch. ‘The cord that attaches to the fob is made of braided hair that belonged to the owner's wife. She died during the birth of their first baby. The baby also died.' He clicks open the watch, and, set under glass on the inside of the case, there is the faintest wisp of soft blonde hair. ‘The baby's hair.'

‘There's something so moving about it,' I say. ‘I understand it, that need to hold a memory in your hand. The fear that everything else might fade if you don't.'

The next room has no windows at all but a high, vaulted glass ceiling. I've lost track of where I am in the house, but I sense this is somewhere in the middle. Every inch of wall space is lined with photographs. As I focus on the images – children sleeping, family groups, young men standing next to a chair – I gasp and cover my mouth.

Hugh doesn't need to tell me that I am looking at photographs of the recently deceased, dressed in their Sunday best, posed with their living relatives.

‘It horrifies us, and yet to them it was a miracle, a godsend,' Hugh says. ‘At last there was an affordable way for every person to have a physical memory of someone they loved and lost. It was a marvel, a last chance to keep an image for eternity. These photographs gave an enormous amount of comfort to the masses, who would never be able to own a portrait or a carved marble statue.'

For some reason, I, who have washed and dressed so many of the dead, find the photographs almost impossible to look at. My eyes skim over them and I walk away, towards the door on the other side of the room, where I hesitate, wondering what is on the other side of it.

‘Here.' Hugh opens the door for me. ‘That's more or less all of the collection. Well, there are reams of documents, books and the like, but you won't want to see those. I think after the gallery you probably need a cup of tea.'

He leads me downstairs, the lights clicking on over our heads as we descend into a basement area, and to a maze of smaller rooms, leading off narrow corridors.

The kitchen is small, modern – more of an office environment than a traditional room. There's an industrial-sized tub of Nescafé, a box of tea bags and a bowl of tiny cartons of long-life milks.

‘Are you going to go and see her, Grace?' I ask.

‘I don't know,' he says, taking two white mugs from a cupboard. There's a sort of urn on the wall that he uses for hot water.

‘I have already grieved for her. I missed her, I've loved her and hated her. I've grown up defined by her not being there. Every choice I've made is somehow influenced by her going. Her choosing to leave us. I've come to understand suicide, depression, to somehow understand what she did, or what I thought she did, and accept it. But now …' He turns his face away from me. ‘Now I just don't know. She died, in my heart. She died, and I remember her, the mum that always laughed and sang, the mum who'd spend Saturday mornings with me, making toast and drawing. I remember her. I don't know who this woman is that you have in your care. What if she isn't my mother at all? And even if she is, what good does it do either of us to grieve all over again? And don't forget, you said you delivered the letter too early. She hasn't asked to see me again; she doesn't want that. She just wanted me to know that she lied to me for years. Somehow that seems like the cruellest blow of all.'

‘Who knows what she wants or doesn't want? And anyway, this mess, it's my fault. I started this. I ran away from what was hurting me, and I hurt you instead, without thinking about it, even though I knew what was in the letter. So don't blame Grace, blame me, and think about what you want. What will help you?'

Hugh sips his tea, and for a moment I have a sense of the two of us, in this small, brightly lit room in the basement of this secret, dark house. Alone, all the lights above snuffed out by stillness, surrounded by all the mass of density that is London, pressing in on all sides.

‘Darwin ruined a lot for the Victorians,' Hugh says. ‘They had this belief, this unshakable certainty, that they would go to a better place, after death, if they lived a Christian life. And then his big idea that made God seem irrelevant shocked society to its core. It's no coincidence that after the theory of evolution came to light, the practice of spiritualism, séances, a yearning for proof of the afterlife also followed.'

With a small, sad smile, Hugh reaches into his coat pocket and takes out a folded square of tatty yellowed paper, covered in childish writing. He unfolds it and lays it on the worktop.

I realise at once that this is what was supposed to be Grace's final letter, her suicide note. No wonder he knew it by heart; it's next to his heart that he keeps it.

‘I so wanted it to be true that she wasn't gone,' he says. ‘I kept this, read it and re-read it, looking for clues – anything to prove that she hadn't meant what she said, that this wasn't really a final goodbye. I hoped for years. I lived with my father's grief, and I watched it kill him, and all I had left to remember her by was a garage full of empty vodka bottles. They're still there, you know. And when I was offered this job through my work as a historian, it seemed fitting, somehow. Almost as if I thought I might find her face amongst the masks in the hallway, or a lock of her hair inside a watch fob. But even if I didn't, I still had this. Except now it turns out that I've been cherishing a false relic. And, honestly, now I have no idea what to do.'

‘Yes, you do,' I tell him. ‘You do; you fight that last battle, the very last one. You fight till your last breath for the people that you love, and your dreams, the future that you want. And you can fight for your past, too, because it's not too late to know how much it mattered to her, as well as to you. That's what you do. You fight. We fight. We fight for the people we love.'

Dear Angelina,

You have been named after me, not that actress woman.

I am your great grandmother. You are nine days old; I am ninety-three. I held you today. Funny, angry, red little thing, you are, with great big black eyes. I thought I could see a little touch of me around your eyes, perhaps in that stubborn little chin.

This letter is for you to read when you are eighteen years old, and is to accompany a silver locket, given to me by my grandmother, and hers. It's a tradition. Goodness only knows how the world will have changed in eighteen years' time, Angelina, but when you have lived as long as I, you learn one thing, which is humans do not change. So here is my best advice to you.

Do not trust a man with unkempt facial hair.

Vote. Even if they are all hopelessly inadequate, pick the least terrible one and vote. My mother fought hard to get you that vote.

Keep your own finances, and let your husband keep his.

Study hard. A good education is worth a thousand kisses.

Wear sturdy shoes, except at weddings or parties, and your back will thank you.

Good manners cost nothing. Bad manners can cost you everything.

Your mother will remember me; she may very well say I was a terrible old dragon, but she will be joking, because she and I have loved each other as much as any batty old granny and her granddaughter ever have.

Goodnight, sweet girl,

Angelina Elizabeth Stoke

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

It seems illogical to come home from the museum, instead of going to her, but I do, because it's here in this house that it should make sense. I'd wondered why she never haunted me, why I didn't get a sense of her from time to time, and now I know.

I stand outside the house, my house, and look at it for a long time, as the rain drifts down in non-committal sheets, hazing around the street lamps. The render is old and cracked; the front yard is neglected and forlorn. I've come back to this house every single day since my mother left it. I thought that one day I would probably die in it. But now I'm not so sure. Is it a home? Or is it just some lesser version of the Liston James Museum – a mausoleum to all that I have lost?

A light clicks on in Sarah's house. Mikey's bedroom.

A moment later the window opens, and out slinks Jake, hopping deftly down from the sill and onto the porch, from where he drops silently onto the pavement, pausing briefly to sniff the air before slinking into the night, away from the two cosy identities he has made for himself, that I know of, and off into the night. He doesn't even give me a second glance.

I see some movement behind the nets in Mikey's room, and the light goes off. And then I see her face for a moment, small and white at the window, and she sees me. I must look like the sort of weirdo who hangs around outside people's houses, hoping to catch a glimpse. And perhaps that is what I am doing. Talking to Stella, that helped; she's one of those people who I seem to understand right away, and who seem to get me. But I have never felt more like I need comfort for the longest time, and it strikes me that, in a life that's been carefully constructed with acquaintances and colleagues only, there is no one I know who I can ask to give me a hug.

I am opening my gate a few seconds later when her front door opens and she appears in a white T-shirt, with bare legs, make-up free, and with her long black hair tumbling loose over her shoulders, and I am quite uncertain as to where I should direct my gaze.

‘You all right, Hugh?' She says my name as if it is an unfamiliar, foreign word, but I love the sound of it on her lips.

‘Um … not really,' I confess. ‘You know my mum, who I thought was dead? It seems rumours of her demise were greatly exaggerated.'