Elijah’s Mermaid (47 page)

By then, we all knew of the birth to come.

Two more letters followed on, both of them set several weeks apart, their content brief and businesslike, no more than polite enquiries asking after our general welfare and whether or not Pearl’s child was born. I suspected he asked for someone else though, again, no specific mention was made, except when he said how busy he was, overseeing the running of the firm in lieu of Freddie’s continuing absence, and making profuse apologies for the fact that remittances owed to Papa might be the subject of delay.

Too late did I read that last part aloud, for Papa, who was more alert that day, became distressed at his friend’s disappearance, of which until then not a word had been spoken. He fretted I might leave for London again, the great detective that I was, and it took several hours to convince him that I had no such intention. I am not proud to have told a lie, but the masterstroke to soothe his mind was when I came up with some wild fabrication about Freddie having gone travelling through Arabia and India. It was a ridiculous notion, but Freddie must have gone
somewhere
, and
if
abroad then I felt quite sure it would be to exotic realms – Freddie wearing his Turkish sleeping cap! And while I was smiling at such a thought, almost come to believe my own story true, all at once I remembered what Freddie had done and how he had ruined my mother’s life, finding myself on the verge of tears and making a silent promise never to think of the man again.

Samuel Beresford I did not want to forget. Very often, when alone in my bed, I tried to imagine him being there, such feverish, dancing, breathless scenes, even worse than Elijah’s sketches of Pearl – every one of which had been returned while we were still in Burlington Row, being hidden again in the bundle of clothes retrieved when I visited Dolphin House, and with me putting on the convincing pretence of never having discovered them. But my own secret yearning, that went unrequited. I stopped listening out for the postman’s horn, my emotions used up on other things, what with Papa’s condition worsening so and, even though she is better now, Pearl’s confinement proved a great strain on us all. I confess there were times when both she and Papa seemed to exist in other worlds, when I started to think that Kingsland House had become another asylum of sorts. And yes, I am ashamed to say, but whenever I saw my brother weep I began to think it might have been best if we’d left Pearl behind in Chiswick House.

Looking back, I suppose I was jealous, resenting Pearl – who my brother loved – who had taken my place at our mother’s breast. It was something I thought of very much when little
Angel was first born, purring and snuffling at the teat, sucking his mother’s madness out. But then, by the day of the picnic, I looked upon Pearl with affection again. How could anyone not be beguiled, to hear the infectious delight in her laugh, to see the shining in her eyes, and her lovely hair almost grown to her shoulders, though never so fair as it was before, and sometimes, when caught in a certain light, it gleamed with deeper auburn hues – though
if
there was a likeness to Osborne Black that was something never spoken of. Who would wish to break the magic spell that had caused Pearl’s transformation, the outcome of which now lay at her side, the baby boy, but six weeks old, whose nature was all serenity, who, having woken from his sleep, now cooed like the prettiest little dove and who, so his doting father insisted, had smiled for the very first time.

‘That’ll be wind.’ Trust Ellen Page to take my brother’s romantic whim and reduce it to something as prosaic as that. ‘It’ll be indigestion, or else the bowels. You’ll need to change that babby now.’

Actually, she may have been right, going by the odour then wafting round. But Elijah was adamant, lifting the baby up in his arms, exclaiming, ‘No . . . look! He’s doing it again! He’s definitely smiling. Papa shall have the final say.’

At first, Papa only nodded. His rheumy eyes were gazing down at what Elijah held so near, and then in a voice grown reedy and small – ‘The image of his great-grandfather.’

‘And bound to go breaking many hearts,’ Ellen Page was quick to add, giving what I thought a too-knowing nod. But whatever it was she meant to imply there was more than one broken heart that day.

Papa sighed. His head lolled to one side. It was something he used to do all the time – dozing off like that in the blink of an eye – and while Ellen cleared the empty plates and Pearl carried the child upstairs to feed, Elijah and I thought to go for a walk. Normally, we would take Papa, pushing him through the country lanes before the doctor was due to arrive. But that day, we did not disturb him. He looked contented and peaceful.
When I touched his forehead the skin was warm, tinged with pink from the last setting rays of the sun – and really it was not so very strange for his body to be as still as that, for an oddity of his condition was that despite how he trembled when awake, when sleeping, or when newly woken, Papa’s limbs would be rigid, as if cast in stone, cramping and painful, requiring great concentration before he could will them to move again.

So, we left him alone in the garden, and only when we came back home did we find Ellen waiting at the gate – and God forgive me, when I heard her news, I thought it was a blessing.

Later, when the doctor had gone, Elijah expressed the same sentiment. He said, ‘Lily, do you think it wicked of me . . . to say my first thought was the baby. When I knew it was Papa I felt relieved. And now I will have to bear that guilt. To think I wished dear Papa dead.’

‘You did not . . .’ I broke off, for a moment unable to go on, trying to swallow back the tears. If I cried I thought I should never stop. ‘I hardly know how we shall bear his loss, but Papa suffered for much too long. And Angel brought him joy, I know. A great-grandson to carry on his name.’

We stared a long time at each other’s eyes. And then my brother left me alone, to be with his son, to be with Pearl.

That evening, in Papa’s study, I lifted the ivory box from the desk, the one full of the ‘treasures’ we used to collect. I lifted the lid to add one more, that portrait of Gabriel as a boy. And then I went into the drawing room to sit by the bed where Papa lay, his corpse now washed by Ellen Page and dressed in that musty old-fashioned suit that he’d worn when we visited Cremorne – where Papa’s hands had trembled so.

They would not tremble any more. They were cold. They were still upon his breast, where I would place the ivory box beneath those rigid fingers, to be buried with Papa in his grave.

But before that final act, I thought to look inside once more, to remove our adoption certificate, and the yellowed old letter
from Frederick Hall. Of course, I knew very well by then that Freddie’s first Coram encounter with us had not been the shock he pretended. Even so, I was not prepared for the final discovery yet to be made – the thing I would have seen before had Papa not woken from his sleep to find me sitting at his desk, having opened a book’s marbled covers and found those papers stuffed inside.

This time, Papa would not open his eyes, or urge me to destroy those things. This time, I would read what I’d missed before, what had been hidden beneath Freddie’s letter. The reply that Papa had composed. The answer that was never sent.

Frederick – your letter comes as a great surprise, not to say an insult
.

You say I must act without delay with regard to the fate of these bastard twins, which you claim as my responsibility
.

Don’t you realise I know everything, and have done since the night of Rose’s death?

The day I laid her in the ground I wanted no more than to follow. I felt nothing but hatred in my heart when I stood there and watched your show of grief, the man who had seduced my wife and then thrown her off without a thought. Yes, she told me, Frederick. Do not think to bluff your ignorance. She told me with her dying breaths. She told me that you had her swear never to breathe a living word, owing to the great ‘affection’ in which you held her husband
.

Well, was it affection, Frederick? Or was it only avarice, the love of the money that you have made from publishing a cuckold’s work?

Can you begin to imagine the shock! To know that I had been deceived, that the child I’d longed for all those years had been fathered instead by Frederick Hall! When she begged me to raise that boy as my own I agreed because of my love for her, because Gabriel looked so much like Rose, her spirit somehow kept alive. Had he borne any stronger resemblance to you I cannot say what I would have done – but perhaps it would have been better for all to have left him with you in Burlington Row, because that is where
he went in the end, when you offered him employment there, his precious life then being lost as surely as Rose’s was before
.

Do you ever think of her today? Somehow I doubt it very much. But I do, every moment since her death. How could I leave her flesh and blood, the grandchildren she should have known, to fester in some orphanage? You may speak of Sacred Providence, but know—

Know what? There the letter had come to its end, uncompleted, unsigned, undelivered. What had Papa written in its place? Had he simply gone on with the masquerade, pretending Gabriel his own? Had there been some sort of compromise with Freddie allowed to visit us, but never more than once a year, and for us never to know the truth? And yet, Papa kept this letter – this letter he’d wanted me to burn – this letter that trembled in my hands, grown damp and spotted with my tears. My breast was racked with heaving sobs – to think of things done, and things unsaid – to think of how selfless Papa had been – to think of affections I’d misunderstood when touched by the hands of Frederick Hall. How blind I had been to the obvious signs, even now to the threads of silver hair growing in either side of Elijah’s head!

Had Papa also seen that brand, the sign of the guilt of the changeling child; one of three cuckoo eggs laid in his nest? And yet there was not one ounce of reproach that ever fell from Papa’s lips – those lips now silent, marbled blue when I leaned in to kiss them.

I placed the letter back in the box, that secret to go to Papa’s grave, my brother never to be told. And then, my long night’s vigil began, during which I told Papa many things. I told him I would never forget the kindness he had shown to me. I told him that I loved him best, and I wished his blood flowed through my veins.

PEARL

My name is written in my eyes, if you have eyes to see it there
.

From
The Water-Babies
by Charles Kingsley

When Elijah lifted the baby up, he was brimming with pride and excitement. He said, ‘Look, Papa! Look, Angel is smiling!’

Augustus was in his big bath chair with curtains of ivy draped around, and I wanted to cherish that moment for ever, as vivid as any photograph. But now I wish I could forget – how Lily stood up from the table, stooping forward to peer at the baby and say, ‘Yes, Papa . . . he really is!’

She took the old man’s hand in hers, looking into his eyes for any response, although by then it was very rare for Augustus to have any memories left, sometimes not even knowing his name. But gazing from her to Elijah he gave a strangely mournful smile. I felt quite sure that he was ‘there’. I sensed the mood in the garden change when he pulled his hand from Lily’s grasp, reaching out for the child in the basket instead. I’m sure the others thought it affection, the way his finger wavered so while straining to touch my Angel’s cheek – how it jabbed from the baby, then up to Elijah, and then away, into empty air, as if at something invisible. He kept doing that over and over again. He was gulping, dribbling, swallowing hard, and after a little time was spent in working cracked lips to form the words, he finally said in a voice so weak that we had to strain our ears to hear – ‘The image . . . of . . . his great-grandfather.’

Lily and Elijah were laughing, caught up in this little game they played. But I did not laugh with them at that. There was
something in the old man’s tone. It made my blood freeze. My flesh prickled and crawled, for I sensed he did not refer to himself. And yes, I was glad when he fell asleep, when I went on upstairs to feed the child.

Elijah came to say goodbye. He and Lily were going out for a walk. He’d been wanting to pick some flowers that he’d seen growing wild in the lanes before to weave a garland for Angel’s head, for one of a series of photographs to complement stories that Lily was writing – all based upon an orphaned babe who’d been left in a forest and raised by elves.

The Lost Children
, that’s what she called it; and every chapter written down she read to Augustus and asked for advice, even though he did little but sigh and nod. From the random snatches overheard I should once have loved to hear that tale, when I was still a child myself. But listening through an adult’s ears, I found it to be somewhat frightening, interwoven with threads of sinister threat, with its witches and ogres who hide in the woods, and caverns which lie in the deepest of oceans where mermaids are caged by monsters with tridents, their tongues cut out, their hair shorn off, never knowing the sun or its warmth again.

Whatever Lily may say on the matter, the story’s origins are clear, and Elijah’s sketches suit her themes, being dark and tangled and intricate with a melancholy wistful tone. And those works based on Angel’s photographs, which at first I was only charmed to see, now they make me fearful for my son. Those pictures are too otherworldly, you might really believe him a changeling child, so fey does my little Angel look – something half human, something half myth, too much like me, or what I had once been when I wore a crown of flowers and shells.

So, when Elijah mentioned that garland I found myself suddenly crying out, ‘I want Angel to be a normal child, not made into an object of art and illusion.’

Elijah looked at me queerly then, but only for a moment before he went on to say, ‘I’m sorry, Pearl. I understand.’

I’m not sure he does. I know that Elijah loves me. He
humours me constantly. Wherever I am he tiptoes round as if there are eggshells on the floor. He thinks I brood on morbid things. I know he fears for my sanity. But the real seed of my distress is simply the fear that
he
is obsessed. I don’t want him to be like Osborne Black, creating the same thing again and again.