Windfallen, Page 30

  Lottie, dumbstruck, could only shake her head.

  "Adeline?" George's loud voice broke through the silence of the house like a gunshot. Lottie found herself involuntarily flinching, fearful already of waking her baby. "Are you there?"

  He appeared in the doorway, dark and unshaven, his customary linen trousers crumpled like old cabbage leaves. His very appearance shot Lottie through with a sense of foreboding, the sweetness and silence of the new dawn already swept away by his presence.

  Adeline, oblivious, ran to him.

  "George, how marvelous. How marvelous. Have you brought her? Is she with you?" She raised herself on tiptoe to look over his shoulder, finally stilled as she strained for the sound of further footfall.

  She stepped back, examined his face. "George?"

  Lottie, looking at the blackness of George's eyes, found herself suddenly chilled.

  "George?" Adeline's voice was quieter now, almost tremulous.

  "She's not coming, Adeline."

  "But I wrote . . . you said . . ."

  George, apparently oblivious to Lottie and the new baby, placed his arm around Adeline's waist, took her hand with the other. "You need to sit down, dearest."

  "But why? You said you would find her. I knew that after this letter she couldn't--"

  "She's not coming, Adeline."

  George sat her on the chair next to Lottie.

  Knelt down. Held both her hands.

  Adeline, wide-eyed, searched George's face and slowly saw what Lottie, unencumbered by her own desperate needs, had already seen. "What is it?"

  George closed his eyes, swallowed. "There's been an accident, darling girl."

  "Is it driving? She is such a terrible driver, George. You know you should not let her behind a wheel."

  Lottie heard the growing terror behind Adeline's gabbling and silently began to tremble, unnoticed by the two people beside her.

  "Whose car is it this time? You will sort it out, George, won't you? You always sort it out. I will get Julian to pay you back again. Is she hurt? Does she need anything?"

  George lowered his head onto Adeline's knees.

  "You shouldn't have come, George! You shouldn't have left her! Not by herself. You know she is no good by herself--that is why I sent you to get her."

  His voice, when it came, was gruff, broken. "She . . . she's dead."

  There was a lengthy pause.

  "No," said Adeline firmly.

  George's face was hidden, buried in her lap. But his hands clutched hers tighter, as if preventing her from movement.

  "No," she said again.

  Lottie struggled to hold her tears. Clamped her hand across her mouth.

  "I'm so sorry," George croaked into her skirts.

  "No," Adeline said, and then, louder, "No. No. No." And then her hands had broken out of George's own, and she was batting at his head, swatting at him in a frenzy, her gaze unseeing, her face contorted. "NO, NO, NO, NO," in an endless, determined shouting. And George was weeping and apologizing and clutching her legs, and Lottie, now lost in her own tears, her eyes blurred and stinging so that she could barely see, finally found the energy to drag herself and her baby out of the bed, heedless of the pain that was only physical, and, leaving a silent trail of blood and tears, she made her way slowly across the room and finally closed the door.

  IT WAS NOT AN ACCIDENT. THE COASTGUARD KNEW THIS because he was among those who had seen her, shouted to her. Sometime later he was one of the three men it took to pull her out. But mainly they knew because of Mrs. Colquhoun, who had been present for the whole thing and who was still suffering attacks of the vapors, almost a week later.

  George told Adeline several hours after his arrival, when both had been fortified by cognac and Adeline, wearily, said she wanted to hear everything, every detail that he knew. She asked Lottie to sit with her, and even though Lottie would have much rather hidden upstairs with her baby, she sat rigid-faced and tense with apprehension as Adeline clutched her hand and periodically, violently, shook.

  Unlike in life, in death Frances had been rather orderly. She had left Arcadia so uncharacteristically tidy that it had been easy for Marnie, who identified her, to tell she had been staying there. She had put on her awkward long skirt, the one with the willow pattern, pulled her dark hair into a neat bun, her elongated face set and resigned as she walked down the path toward the sea front. I am so sorry, she wrote in a letter. But there is an emptiness just too great to be borne. I am so sorry. Then, head held high, as if she were looking upon some distant point on the horizon, she had begun to walk, fully clothed, into the sea.

  Mrs. Colquhoun, realizing that this was no ordinary early-morning swim, had shouted--she knew that Frances had heard her, as she very briefly glanced up and over at the cliff path--but then she simply increased her pace, as if aware that it might lead to an attempt to stop her. Mrs. Colquhoun had begun to run, had run all the way to the harbormaster's house, trying to keep an eye on her all the time, watching Frances as she waded in up to her waist, her chest.

  As she got deeper, some of the waves had got larger, one almost knocking her off her feet, half knocking her bun into long, sodden strands. But she kept walking. Even as Mrs. Colquhoun, her heel broken and her voice hoarse from shouting, banged upon the front door, she kept walking, a distant figure on some invisible course through the water.

  The noise alerted two lobstermen, who had pitched out after her in a boat. By this time a small crowd of people, drawn by the noise, had assembled and were shouting at Frances to stop. There was some concern afterward that she might have thought they were angry and hastened her journey, but the coastguard said no, she was determined to do it. He had seen them like that before. You could pull them out, but you'd only find them hanging from a beam two days later.

  George had wept at this point, and Lottie had watched as Adeline held his face, as if offering absolution.

  Frances hadn't even flinched as her head went under. She just kept walking, and then one wave came, two waves, and suddenly you couldn't see her anymore. By the time the boat was far enough out in the harbor, she had been caught by the current. They found her body two days later in the estuary at Wrabness, her willow-patterned skirt wound around with entrails of weed.

  "I was to meet her for dinner, you see? But I had to stay up at Oxford. I rang her to say I'd been invited out by this fellow, and she said I should go, Adeline. She said I should go." His chest heaved, great snotty sobs wetting his clenched hands. "But I should have gone down, Adeline, I should have been there."

  "No," said Adeline, her voice distant. "I should have been there. Oh, George, what have I done?"

  IT WAS ONLY IN RETROSPECT THAT LOTTIE REALIZED THAT Adeline's accent had changed during the telling of George's story. Afterward, when she thought back, she realized that Adeline had stopped sounding French. In fact, she seemed to have no accent at all. Perhaps it was shock. Mrs. Holden used to say it could get you like that. She'd known a woman whose brother had been killed in the war and she had woken up with every hair on her head turned gray. (And not just her head, she'd added, blushing at her own audacity.)

  LOTTIE BARELY HAD TIME TO RECOVER FROM THE BIRTH before she found that she had, in effect, become a mother of two. For in the first weeks of her child's life, Adeline seemed to die a little. At first she refused to eat, wouldn't rest, walked the gardens of the house weeping at all hours of the day or night. Once she walked the entire dusty road to the top of the mountain and was brought down, dazed and sun-scorched, by the old man who ran the refreshment stall at the summit. She cried out in her sleep, on the few occasions that she slept, and had begun to look frighteningly unlike herself: her sleek hair, her porcelain complexion muddied and spoiled by grief. "Why didn't I trust her?" she would cry. "Why didn't I listen? She always understood me better than anyone."

  "It wasn't your fault. You weren't to know," Lottie would murmur, conscious as she did that her words were inadequate, mere platitudes that didn't touch the su
rface of what Adeline was feeling. Adeline's pain made her uncomfortable; it was too close to her own, a raw wound of emotion that she had almost managed to cover.

  "But why did she have to prove it to me this way?" Adeline would wail. "I didn't want to love her. I didn't want to love anyone. She should have known it was unfair to ask."

  Or perhaps Lottie was just too emotionally exhausted by the demands of her baby. Camille was a "good baby," as they were called. But then she had to be. Holding a desperate Adeline in her arms, Lottie could not always get up in time to comfort a crying newborn; when Lottie was trying to cook and clean around her grieving friend, Camille simply had to fit in with her tasks, button-eyed within her improvised sling, or sleep through the noise of rugs being beaten and kettles whistling.

  As the weeks went past, Lottie became increasingly exhausted and despairing. Julian came but couldn't quite cope with the emotional mess of it all. He signed some more money over to his wife, gave Lottie the keys to his car, and left for an art fair in Toulouse, taking the pale and silent Stephen with him. The other visitors dried up. George, having stayed the first two days and drunk himself into a coma, left with promises to return. Which he failed to keep.

  "Look after her, Lottie," he said, his eyes bloodshot and a half-established beard covering his chin. "Don't let her do anything stupid." She didn't know whether his evident fear was for her welfare or his own.

  At one point, when Adeline had cried for a whole day and a night, Lottie frantically searched her bedroom, hopeful of finding some reference to Adeline's family, someone who could come and help lift her out of her depression. She flung her way through the rows of brightly colored outfits, her nostrils filled with the scent of oil of cloves, her skin brushed by feathers, by silks and satins. It was as if Adeline, like Lottie, barely existed; apart from one theater program showing that several years ago she had appeared in a minor role in a theater in Harrogate, there was nothing--no photographs, no letters. Except for those from Frances. Lottie thrust these deep back into their box, shivering at the thought of having to be party to Frances's last, futile emotions. Finally, in the suitcase in the wardrobe, she found Adeline's passport. She rifled through it, thinking that perhaps it would reveal a family address, some clue, some help as to how to assuage her grief. Instead she came across Adeline's photograph.

  She had a different haircut, but it was unmistakably her. Except the passport called her Ada Clayton.

  THE MOURNING LASTED ONE DAY SHORT OF FOUR WEEKS. Lottie woke one day to find Adeline in the kitchen, cracking eggs into a basin. (Lottie had mentioned nothing about the passport; people's lives were best left, like sleeping dogs, undisturbed.)

  "I am going to Russia," Adeline said, not looking up.

  "Oh," said Lottie. She wanted to say, What about me? What she said was "What about the atomic bomb?"

  Dear Joe,

  No, I am sorry, but I'm not coming home. Not to Merham anyway. It's a bit complicated, but I think I may go back to London and try to get myself a job. I have been doing housekeeping for Adeline, as you know, and she has some artist friends there who are looking for someone like me and don't mind the baby. Little Camille will grow up with their children, which will be nice for her, and despite what you said, there is no reason I shouldn't support myself, after all. I will let you know when I am settled, and perhaps you will come and visit.

  Thank you for the things for the baby. It was nice of Mrs. Ansty to choose them for you. I am painting a picture of Camille, who looks very fine in the bonnet especially.

  Yours, etc.

  Three days before Lottie and Adeline were due to leave the French house, Mme Migot had come for her final kneading session of Lottie's womb. Or undignified peering at Lottie's undercarriage. It was hard to know which particular pleasure she would choose for that visit. Lottie, despite feeling rather less proprietary of her body now that it had played host to another human being, nonetheless still felt invaded by the frank pulling and prodding that the older woman employed, as if Lottie were some piece of stretched-out skinned rabbit hanging up in the market. The last time she had come, supposedly to check that Camille was feeding properly, she had, without any reference to Lottie whatsoever, reached a hand inside Lottie's loose blouse, taken hold of her breast, and, with a swift roll of finger and thumb, sent a white jet of milk spraying across the room before Lottie even had a chance to protest. Apparently satisfied, she had muttered something to Adeline and moved on without explanation to check the baby's weight.

  This time, however, she had made only cursory fumblings of Lottie's abdomen before picking up Camille with an expert grasp. She held her for some time, chuckling to her in French, checking her umbilicus, her fingers and toes, exclaiming at her in tones far softer than those she ever used toward Adeline or Lottie.

  "We're leaving," said Lottie, holding up a postcard from England. "I'm taking her home."

  Ignoring her, Mme Migot had grown quieter and, eventually, silent.

  Then she walked over to the window and studied Camille's face for some time.

  She barked something at Adeline, who had just walked into the room, clutching a map. Still apparently rooted somewhere deep in her own thoughts, she took some minutes to comprehend, and then she shook her head.

  "What now?" said Lottie irritably, fearing that she'd done something else wrong. The color of her toweling napkins had apparently been a village disgrace, the manner of their pinning a matter for Gallic hilarity.

  "She wants to know if you've been ill," said Adeline, frowning as she tried to listen to Mme Migot. "Julian's friend in the embassy says I will have to get some sort of visa to go to Russia and that it's almost impossible without diplomatic help. He thinks I should come back to England to sort it out. It's too, too annoying."

  "Of course I'm not ill. Tell her she'd look like this, too, if she had a baby keeping her up half the night."

  Adeline said something back in French and then, after a pause, shook her head. Finally, interrupted from her book yet again, she looked over and said, shrugging, "She wants to know if you have a rash."

  Lottie was about to say something rude but was silenced by the expression on the Frenchwoman's face.

  "Non, non," the woman was saying, making a sweeping motion toward her own stomach.

  "Before you had a bump, she means. She wants to know if you had a rash before you became . . . heavy?" Adeline, her attention finally captured, looked quizzically at the midwife.

  "A heat rash?" Lottie thought back. "I've had lots of heat rashes. I think. I don't cope very well with this heat."

  The midwife wasn't satisfied. She fired off more questions in urgent French, then stood looking at Lottie expectantly.

  Adeline turned. "She wants to know if you felt ill. If you had a rash when you were newly pregnant. She thinks"--she paused and said something in French to the older woman, who nodded in reply--"she wants to know if there is any possibility you could have had the rubella."

  "I don't understand." Lottie fought a sudden urge to reach out for her daughter, to pull her protectively back close to her. "I had a heat rash. When I first got here. I thought it was heat rash."

  The midwife's face softened for the first time. "Votre fillette," she said, gesturing. "Ses yeux . . ." She waved her hand in front of Camille's face, then looked up at Lottie and did it again. And again.

  "Oh, Lottie," said Adeline, her hand to her mouth. "What are we to do with you now?"

  Lottie stood very still, an unseasonal chill seeping into her bones. Her baby lay peacefully in the woman's arms, her fair hair forming a feathery halo, her seraphic face illuminated by the sun.

  She hadn't blinked.

  "I CAME BACK TO MERHAM WHEN CAMILLE WAS TEN weeks old. I wrote and told Joe, and he asked me to marry him as I stepped off the train."

  Lottie sighed, placed her hands in front of her on her knees. "He'd told everyone that the baby was his. It caused a scandal. His parents were furious. But he could be strong when it counted. And he
told them that they would be sorry if they made him choose between us."

  The last of the wine was long gone. Daisy sat, oblivious to the late hour, to the fact that her feet had gone to sleep under her.

  "I don't think his mother ever forgave me for marrying him," Lottie said, lost in some distant memory. "She certainly never got over me landing her precious son with a blind daughter. I hated her for that. I hated her for not loving Camille like I did. But I suppose, now I'm old, I can understand a little better."

  "She was just trying to protect him."

  "Yes, yes she was."

  "Does Camille know this?"

  Lottie's face closed over. "Camille knows that Joe is her father. Joe is her father." Her voice held a note of challenge. "They've always been very close. She's a daddy's girl."

  There was a brief silence.

  "What happened to Adeline?" Daisy whispered. She said it with a kind of dread, fearful of what she might hear. She had found herself weeping at the story of Frances's suicide, remembering her own darkest days just after Daniel left.

  "Adeline died almost twenty years ago. She never came back to the house. I used to keep it clean for her, just in case, but she never came. After a while she didn't even write. I don't think she could bear to be reminded of Frances. She loved her, you see? I think we all realized it even when she didn't. She died in Russia. Near St. Petersburg. Quite wealthy, she was, even without the things that Julian had given her. I liked to think she was there because she'd found Konstantin." Lottie smiled shyly, as if embarrassed by her own romanticism.

  "And then when she died, she left me Arcadia in her will. I always think she felt bad about me marrying Joe." Lottie stirred, began to gather her things around her, placing her glass on the floor by the chair. "I think she thought she let me down by disappearing when she did."

  "Why?"

  Lottie looked at her as if she were stupid. "If I'd had the house then . . . the money then, well, I wouldn't have needed to get married at all."

  INTERLUDE

  I cried for six whole days on my honeymoon. Peculiar, Mummy said afterward, for someone who had been so desperate to leave home, especially as a married woman. And more so when you think of our wonderful cruise ship, with our beautiful first-class cabin, paid for by the Bancrofts.