Hester's Story (37 page)

P.S. I have ideas of my own about what’s wrong with you. The passage of time will tell me if I’m right and if I am, then you have my word that I will look after you. Does that give you the courage to write to me? I hope so.

Hester smiled to think of Piers protecting her reputation and keeping her secret. She wrote to Edmund at once and told him everything. As soon as he heard from her, he began sending her postcards from Amsterdam to cheer her up. She wrote back, but knew that she could never match Edmund’s sparkle and energy. She sometimes felt that every word she put down was as heavy and miserable as she was, but Edmund always ended his messages by begging her to write again, so she did.

When she was feeling particularly low, Hester would tell herself that maybe Adam
had
written and Madame Olga had intercepted the correspondence. Perhaps he was bombarding her with letters, begging her to come to him; telling her that yes, he was divorcing Virginia and that they would now be able to live together for ever and that these things never reached her because Madame Olga had looked out for them and torn them up from the very beginning. At moments when she felt particularly desperate, Hester
imagined that he might decide to get her himself. Take her away with him to live happy ever after.

While they were still at Wychwood, she used to stand at the window for hours, peering down the drive, willing the postman to appear. When she saw him, she’d run down and see if she could get to the letters before Madame Olga and sometimes she did, but there was never anything from Adam. Not once, while Hester was on the lookout.

*

There were nights when she couldn’t sleep and then she saw her, Virginia, lying next to Adam in bed. Hester imagined him wanting
her
as he made love to his wife. She went over everything that they’d ever said or done again and again till she was nearly demented. As the summer moved into autumn, she found it harder and harder to lie comfortably in bed and began to fear the birth. The pain. Madame Olga made a point of
not
dwelling on the agonies of childbirth, but her very silence terrified Hester. Madame had had no personal experience of it, but still, there were all the stories that circulate among women. She must, Hester felt sure, have a whole fund of those. She was saying nothing, Hester thought, because she knew the pain would be so bad that she daren’t tell her the truth, and this made her more scared than ever. Piers arrived for what he called ‘a conference’. The next morning, as soon as he’d left for London, Madame Olga told her what they had decided.

‘It is all arranged. Ruby is going to leave Piers’ house and come and look after you.’

‘But I don’t need looking after,’ Hester frowned. ‘Do I? I’ve got you after all.’

‘Of course, of course. I do not speak of now. I speak of nearer the time of your confinement. I think you
should go away from here, because I have a special doctor who is the one who should look after you. He is in Scotland. A place called Gullane.’

‘Scotland? Why? Why on earth do I have to go all the way there? Surely there are doctors who can deliver a baby here in Yorkshire. I don’t want to leave Wychwood.’

‘It will be good for you. Sea air. You can relax. Raymond, Dr Crawford, has assured me he will look after you as though you were his own daughter.’

‘Who is he? Where did you meet him?’

‘That is not important. He looked after me when I was sick in Paris once. He was a junior doctor then but now he is a respected obstetrician. Very well respected. In those days, I think he was in love with me a little, but of course I did not encourage him. Still, he is very kind to me always and it is good to have someone to look after you who is a personal friend.’

‘I don’t see that it’s necessary. None of it. I know why you’re doing this, Madame. You want me out of the way. You’ve already told me that you don’t want anyone to know that I’m pregnant.’

‘What do you expect us to do? Piers says the papers have phoned to see what has happened to one of the Charleroi’s principal dancers. This will get worse. The stories will grow and spread. The gossip will stop now because he has told them you are exhausted. You are resting, he says.’

‘And they’ll soon forget all about me if I’m somewhere out of the way.’ Hester shrugged her shoulders. ‘I suppose I have to do what you say. I can’t manage on my own. At least Ruby will be with me in this Scottish wilderness.’

‘This Scottish wilderness is a lovely place. Ruby tells me she used to go there for family holidays when she was a girl. Piers said it was a good omen, this
coincidence. You and Ruby will go in October and I will come to join you nearer the birth. All will be well. You will like Raymond Crawford, I am quite sure of this.’

*

When Hester’s father died at the end of June, that was, according to Madame Olga, a stroke of good fortune for them, though she didn’t express it like that when she spoke to Hester. They could tell anyone who enquired that she was in Paris and give no more details. After a while, all but her closest friends stopped enquiring about where she was.

No one asked Hester whether she wanted to go to her father’s funeral. Never mind that she hadn’t been in touch with him; never mind that she’d left his house fifteen years ago. If anyone had consulted her, she would have said yes, but her desire to go to Paris was not so much to pay her respects to someone she regarded as a stranger but a longing to see again the place where she’d spent her first years; to move through the rooms that she remembered from childhood. Perhaps, too, she could visit
Grand-mère
’s grave, and mourn her properly, as she never had at the time of her death.

Madame Olga prepared for their visit to France as though they were going on holiday. She spent many hours deciding what to wear: what jewels, what hats, and what shawls. She tossed items from the cupboard to the bed and then picked up one thing after another for careful scrutiny.

‘You will wear black, Hester? Or dark purple is good. Luckily you do not show yet. And a hat? Or a Spanish mantilla? Look, I have a piece of lace here which I have not worn for years, but it will be just
right for you. And with it you can wear my pearls. I can take them out of the bank.’

‘No, just this.’ She fingered the gold of her grandmother’s necklace.

Madame Olga sighed theatrically. ‘This necklace of yours, it is mad. You can never wear anything else round your neck because of this necklace. I have in this house amber and jade and every kind of jewel and I am keeping it all just for you. Why do you not wear those instead?’

‘I do, sometimes,’ Hester answered. ‘I hide this one under high-necked things. But I never take it off except on stage. Never.’

The Channel crossing was smooth and easy. The sun shone and the sea was like a sheet of pale grey satin. Hester stood on deck watching England growing smaller and smaller and trying hard to feel something other than completely numb. I should be sadder, she thought. I should be crying for my father, who died before I could see him again. What would I have said to him? Hester found it hard to imagine that conversation. All her feelings had gathered in the very centre of her being, concentrated on nothing other than her baby, her growing baby.

Hester’s thoughts, which should have been focused on the funeral, on wondering what she would say to her father’s second wife, Yvonne, whom she’d never met, refused to fasten on to anything. She imagined them flitting round the inside of her head like moths trapped in the glass globe of a lamp, aimless and blundering.

‘
Oh, ma petite, je suis tellement … Mais entrez, entrez, et bienvenues à toutes les deux!
’

Yvonne was a small woman with a thin mouth and eyes like currants. She wore her grey hair in a bun and was dressed from head to foot in black. Hester
couldn’t decide if this was her habitual dress or whether she was wearing it because her husband had just died. What, she couldn’t help wondering, had made her father fall in love with such a woman, especially after being married to Hester’s mother? Yvonne said, ‘I will show you where you will sleep,’ and led them up the stairs.

‘This was my grandmother’s room,’ Hester said, running her hands over the counterpane. ‘The wallpaper’s been changed. This counterpane too.
Grand-mère
had yellow walls and a satin cover on the bed. Everything’s different.’

‘You,’ said Madame Olga. ‘It is
you
who are different. Not the house. Places stay the same and we change. It is always so.’

The house was smaller than Hester remembered, and everything was shabbier. The kitchen, which she’d held in her memory for years, had a new modern sink and cooker. The apricot-coloured curtains had been replaced with a pair made of some synthetic material printed with jolly-faced kettles and saucepans. The wooden table had gone and the room was dominated by something hideous and blueish in metal and Formica.

‘Your father has arranged for money for you,’ said Yvonne, when they were sitting in the drawing room having tea.

The teacups were her mother’s. Hester recognised them and felt sorrow and regret wash over her as she drank. Madame Olga did the talking for both of them. She was the one who asked about the arrangements for the funeral tomorrow; who found out that Yvonne was the main beneficiary of Henri Prévert’s will.

‘I don’t care about the money. I don’t care about any of that,’ Hester said next morning as she and Madame Olga were dressing for the ceremony. ‘I just wanted to
come back and see the house again. That’s all. But
Grand-mère
 – she’s gone long ago. This isn’t her house. Not really. The shape is the same but the colours are different, and the smells.’

‘Smells?’ Madame Olga paused in the middle of pulling on a black cloche hat with a jet brooch pinned to the front. ‘What are these smells?’

Hester shook her head. It was too complicated to explain that when her grandmother was alive, the fragrance of cinnamon, or lemon, or rosemary or garlic haunted the air.
Grand-mère
’s violet perfume had lingered in the soft furnishings and the curtains, and had filled every corner of her bedroom. When Hester was a child, there were parquet floors in every room which smelled of the lavender and beeswax polish used to clean them.

She looked out of the window and saw the top of the black car that was to take them to the funeral. For a moment, she was dizzy. There was another car, wasn’t there? Another time. Snow on the ground and her mother about to be taken out of the house in a long, wooden box and Hester not allowed to go because she was too small. Too young. She could feel herself trembling and sat down on the bed, her vision suddenly blurred with tears.

‘You cry at last for your papa,’ said Madame Olga. ‘That is good. You have not felt it till now. It is the shock.’ She misses nothing, Hester reflected. Whatever else is going on, she notices everything about me.

‘I’m not really crying for Papa. My mother. I can remember … never mind. Let’s go down now. They’re waiting for us.’

*

As she stood beside her father’s grave, it occurred to Hester that the cemetery was a miniature town, where
the headstones were like the façades of houses. Gravel paths resembled small roads, winding between them, and summer trees and shrubs stood guard around these miniature houses of the dead. The weather was warm and she felt herself perspiring in her thin, wool coat. Madame Olga had prevailed on her to wear the black mantilla. It wasn’t worth fighting over, though she was conscious of looking out of place, like someone from a production of
Don Quixote
.

Out of the corner of her eye, Hester could see that Yvonne was crying, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief edged in lace. Madame Olga stood very straight and still. Her own gaze was fixed on
Grand-mère’
s tombstone, which was near the hole in the earth into which they would soon be lowering her father. He’s dead, Hester thought, and I should mourn him, but I can’t because I never really knew him. Everyone thinks these tears are for him and they’re not. She wanted to shout out, I’m not crying for
him
! Why should I? He sent me away when I was little more than a baby. He never loved me, not properly. I’m crying for my grandmother who died before I could say goodbye. She bit her lip and closed her eyes and prayed for the burial to be over.

While the others made their way down the neat grey paths to the gate, Hester stood by her grandmother’s grave and fought an impulse to lie down on the tomb and fling her arms around the headstone. Suddenly, she saw herself as Giselle. At the end of the ballet she’d done exactly that – draped herself over a tomb made of some kind of cardboard and pretended to weep. I know all the positions for grief by heart, she reflected, and turned to walk away. The thought of her grandmother down there under the earth tormented her. She tried to comfort herself by thinking, it’s not really her.
It’s nothing more than a skeleton. Not
Grand-mère
, who is alive in my mind. A real person.

*

Once they returned to Wychwood the days passed quietly, but for a few weeks bad dreams woke Hester almost every night. She’d lie there gasping, almost able to taste the earth on her tongue, as it was shovelled into a grave into which she’d been lowered and which was already half-full of petals from thousands of cream roses. When this nightmare came, she sat up in bed and turned on the bedside lamp and sometimes went down to the kitchen for a cup of tea, because she knew that sleep was out of the question.

One day towards the beginning of October, Hester and Madame Olga were walking in the garden. The trees were particularly beautiful, leaves covered the ground in a patchwork of gold and scarlet, and the sky was a clear, pale grey. Hester could still walk almost exactly as she used to, with her head high and her hands covering the rather small bump of her stomach. Madame Olga’s chin was buried in the enormous Persian lamb collar of her coat.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘the time has come that we must make plans for the future. Dr Crawford has introduced me to good adoption agency up there in Scotland, for afterwards.’