The Art of Inheriting Secrets Read online

  Life at last began to take on a little bit of a rhythm. Mornings, I rose early and walked the right-of-ways, following a map Dr. Mooney had given me when Samir had introduced us at Helen’s bakery. Some days I happened to run into the ragtag little group of right-of-way caretakers on their wanderings, but more often, I had the paths to myself. They gave me the chance to learn the landscape, the relationships of forest to river to field, the divisions of old and new. In one spring-green field, a white horse grazed beneath a single tree, while just beyond the hedge rose a housing estate, all modern brick and conservatory rooms off the back. Upscale and attractive but dull in comparison. I could walk across fields for literally miles, then walk through a copse of trees and find myself in a supermarket parking lot.

  I saw the people too. The uneasy mix of villager and suburban dweller; a tangle of teenagers, skinny and ragged, from the local school, smoking cigarettes and snorting over a load of posh kids getting off the bus in their green-and-white uniforms. The diversity wasn’t as broad as I was used to—mainly white, with a large helping of South Asians, some clearly from the city in their suits and high heels, some locals who’d come, as Pavi told me, with the enormous wave of immigrants from India to rebuild England after World War II. A handful of refugees from the Middle East kept mostly to themselves, though their numbers were growing, and I’d walked into a nearby village to see a shop selling Middle Eastern groceries on the main square. Last, my flat was one building over from the Chinese fish-and-chips shop, where lines ran down the street on Friday nights, and the lane grew clogged with cars of commuters stopping on their way home from a busy week. The woman who ran the place, a slip of white blouse and black trousers, ran a tai chi studio above her shop. I saw the participants trailing in and out on Saturday afternoons and Monday evenings.

  An easy place to live for the time being. And I was always more productive when I kept to routines.

  After my walk, I would write for a while or sometimes go to the library to read old newspapers on microfiche, trying to find clues about my mother, my grandmother, the mysterious Roger, anything at all. The old papers also proved to be a great source of understanding of the village itself, the ebb and flow of events, births and deaths, names repeated over the generations, rituals of importance, historical notes. I accidentally stumbled on the wedding announcement of Hortense and her husband, which led to reading about Violet and her second husband, a good-looking man who’d distinguished himself in the war. My grandfather, I thought, but I felt no connection to the photo.

  Afternoons and evenings, I met with a wide variety of people—Pavi and Rebecca and Jocasta, the garden club and the landscape historian. Every Wednesday, I met with the earl for luncheon on the protected portico, where roses grew up the posts and bees lazed over the flowers. He had taken on my education and took it very seriously. He was an excellent raconteur and loved having a captive audience.

  Every week, I left with homework and reading to do. One week, I was charged with the task of meeting all the tenant farmers, one by one. If any of them asked me to have a meal with them, I had to immediately set it up and put it on my calendar. Which I did, and every single family invited me to a meal—my Sunday luncheons and Wednesday suppers were booked for a month.

  Another week, my homework was to attend a parish council meeting so that I could begin to understand the village. It was as boring as I’d feared, and I had to keep pinching my thigh to avoid yawning. It also didn’t seem to increase my standing in the eyes of those local politicians at all. They clung to a chilly correctness, and we were all delighted when the meeting ended.

  The earl said I would have to return regularly, but I wasn’t sure that would happen.

  The reading list he gave me included some surprising choices—biographies of local statesmen, of course, but also those of American businessmen like Warren Buffett and Steve Jobs. It was taking me a long time to get through all that reading, but I did my level best. If I was going to do this thing—and I still wasn’t exactly sure what this “thing” was—I wanted to do it right.

  With Pavi’s help, I was making plans for the first picnic for the public, which would be held on the open space of lawn between the house and the gardens. I’d asked the contractors to keep the work trailers and work site on the hidden north side of the house so the lawn would be appealing.

  Pavi knew dozens of chefs, and we planned to start small—two food trucks, one offering sandwiches of various kinds and one pies and ice cream. I’d found a local band with a fiddler and a craft brewer to bring in kegs of beer for the adults. Two local moms volunteered to paint children’s faces, and when the tenants of the cottages heard, they offered to rope off a strawberry field for the locals to pick berries.

  It came together so quickly that we were aiming for the fourth Saturday in May. When I told Peter, my driver, he practically misted up.

  That was the other problem I was gnawing on—I desperately needed to learn to drive so I could make my way around the county. But the usual nerves of driving on the wrong side of the road were complicated by the fact that I had not driven since the accident that had nearly killed me. I also didn’t actually own a car. Did I buy a car and learn to drive it or learn to drive and then buy a car, and if I did that, what would I drive to learn?

  Virtually everything else seemed easier.

  The person I had not seen much of was Samir. He pleaded a heavy work schedule, but I noticed that even on the rainiest of days, he was still absent. I’d invited him to have a cup of coffee one Saturday afternoon, but I didn’t hear back for hours, and then it was curt.

  Sorry. Out of town today.

  He did, every few days or so, send me a text with an animal or bird group name. A coalition of cheetahs, one day. A puddle of platypuses. I responded in kind. An exaltation of skylarks. A charm of finches.

  I missed him. Aside from Pavi, he was my main friend in the village. I hoped that eventually we could get back to the easy connection we’d had, and to preserve the possibility, I resisted reading anything about Samir Malakar, the writer. Even if we never talked again, I would show that I could be trusted.

  So that was that. It made me sad that in trying to preserve the friendship, I’d damaged it instead. Not to mention the fact that I had to shove the memory of that kiss out of my mind a hundred times a day. An hour. It haunted me when I slept. Come back to my house.

  But there was too much on my plate to brood about any one thing. One afternoon, I took my mother’s sketchbooks to Helen Richmond, the bakery owner. We met in her garden, a sunny place with wind chimes tinkling from every corner. A bird feeder ten feet tall nourished the birds away from the pair of black cats who swished their tails in the shade beneath the table. “I made lemonade,” Helen said. “Will you have some?”

  “Of course.” It wasn’t lemonade made from a packet or a concentrate. She’d squeezed the lemons, and slices floated in the glass pitcher. When I took a sip, it was icy cold, sweet, and tart. “Perfect.”

  She nudged a bowl of strawberries my way. “I didn’t bring anything from the bakery. One doesn’t like sweets so much on warm days.”

  Around the garden were abstract mosaic pieces, copper shapes filled with stained glass. “Your work?”

  “Yes. It turned out I was a much better glassworker and sculptor than painter. Your mother was always the best painter among us.”

  From the satchel I’d brought with me, I took out a children’s book. It was a story about a band of animals, rabbits and wrens and a plucky fox, who had appeared in many of her paintings. “I thought you’d like this. It’s one of the books my mother illustrated. She won a prestigious prize for it, and I think it really captures what she did so well. The writer drew the story from the paintings rather than the other way around.”

  Helen picked it up, ran her hand over the cover. “Glorious. So like her.” With a reverence I found touching, she opened the cover and leafed through the pages, pausing here and there. “Oh, look at that! Do you recogni
ze the conservatory?”

  “What?”

  She held up the page, and there it was, the conservatory that had so captured me, whole and flourishing, with a peacock strutting through it.

  “Oh my God. Let me see!”

  I took it from her urgently, and yes, that was the conservatory. If I leafed back a page, there were the hills in the distance, and forward a page, then two, and there was the corner of the house. “It’s all Rosemere, isn’t it? I wonder if all of her work is. I mean, I’ve read this book a hundred times, and I didn’t know anything about the estate, but now I recognize it. Now”—I touched my breastbone, that place that ached so much lately—“it was probably because I subconsciously recognized the conservatory that I want so much to restore it, even though Jocasta thinks it is a poor use of funds.”

  “May I?” She held out her hand for the book, a patient smile lighting her eyes. “You’ve seen it all, but I have not.”

  “Yes, of course. I’m so sorry.” I handed it over and flopped back in my chair. “I wish I could figure out what was in her mind. I can’t understand why she never told me about all of this. Clearly, she loved it. She painted it for fifty years, over and over and over, and the grounds all around it. The animals, the flowers, the woods.”

  “Never the house?”

  “No.” I leafed through a catalog of her paintings and drawings in my imagination. “Not many buildings at all. A cottage once in a while.”

  “This one?” She held up the book to show a picture of a cozy square cottage with a thatched roof—of course—in a grove of trees. Lights burned within, casting yellow light into the dark forest. It looked like the happily-ever-after cottage in every fairy tale ever written, but now I could see the local influence, the weaving of the thatch, the local preference for beams over the windows.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s a friendly place, isn’t it? A refuge. Do you know where it is?”

  “I don’t recognize it. I’m sorry. It might not even exist anymore. A lot of those old cottages were demolished when the housing estates came in.”

  Paved paradise, Joni Mitchell sang in my mind.

  Helen flipped to the end of the book. “I’m so glad she was able to make a life with her painting. She had to fight very hard for it.”

  “Really? Her mother’s room is filled with paintings. You’d think she’d be proud of her daughter’s talent.”

  Helen lifted a shoulder. “It didn’t seem that way. But of course, by the time I knew the countess, she was—a bit mad.”

  “Someone else said that she was volatile: wonderful or terrible. Did she get dementia or something?”

  “That’s a good description, but no, I don’t know if it was dementia. She wasn’t that old—only fifties, maybe.”

  “I need to make a chart with everything in one place.” I rubbed a spot on my temple. “If it wasn’t dementia, do you think she was mentally ill?”

  “She drank, love. Heavily.”

  “Oh!” I laughed. “That explains a lot.”

  “Even though she was erratic, I adored her,” Helen said and meditatively took a sip of her lemonade. “It’s hard to explain to women your age how different things were for women then. Women were just . . . not that free to be themselves. People weren’t, honestly.

  “But your grandmother was. She wore these amazing clothes, all these Indian silks she made into the most beautiful dresses—red and turquoise, with a thousand bracelets, just like an Indian, and she had a spectacular figure, this great head of hair.” She cocked her head. “Like yours. Thick and wavy. You really look like her.”

  “Yeah, not the body. I’ve seen her slim self. Just like my mother.” I picked up a strawberry, eyed it, and sadly set it back down on a napkin. “I seem to have inherited all these curves from my father’s side of the family.”

  “You’re built like a classic English girl. Luscious.”

  I gave her a wry smile. “Thanks. I made peace with it a long time ago, but it pains a fourteen-year-old when her mother’s clothes are too small for her instead of the other way around.”

  “I’m sure.” She pointed to the berry. “Strawberries, however, will not make you fat.”

  I picked it up again, admiring the quilting of the seeds, the shimmery crimson color. “How did they get along, my mother and grandmother?”

  “Not at all well. Caroline was introverted—maybe she changed later, but—”

  “No, she was a lone wolf, for sure.”

  “That’s a good way to put it. She liked things her own way, and she didn’t like parties or any of that. She just wanted to draw and paint and read a book. And of course, the countess was that enormous personality, so it was easy to hide in the shadows.”

  I imagined my mother and her mother in that ruin of a dining room, over breakfast perhaps. Light streaming in the ceiling-high mullioned windows, paintings on the walls, the antique table gleaming. My mother young and beautiful, my eccentric grandmother in her silks, each of them disapproving of the other.

  It made me sad.

  “I’m glad I had a better relationship with my mother.”

  “You must have been a great joy to her. I can tell you loved her very much.”

  “I did.” Lifting the strawberry to my mouth, I took a bite. All strawberryness in all the universe filled my mouth, my brain, my entire being. It was exactly the right depth of juiciness, not too sloppy, not too dry, and if I had ever tasted a sweeter berry, I couldn’t remember. I closed my eyes. “Wow.” Took another bite. “Mmm.”

  Helen chuckled.

  I opened my eyes and plucked another berry from the bowl. “I feel like I’ve never tasted a strawberry before.” Still trying to savor rather than devour, I ate the second and then a third. “They’re amazing.”

  “English strawberries,” she said. “And I think you’re more like your grandmother than your mother.”

  “She liked strawberries?”

  “I don’t know. I meant your sensuality.”

  I very nearly blushed and then thought, Oh, why. I was a sensualist—no one became a foodie without that essential thing. And I couldn’t help who I was. “I wonder if I reminded my mother of Violet.”

  “Oh, surely you did. It must have felt like Violet was following her.”

  Stricken, I held a new strawberry by its stem. “How awful!”

  “I’m sorry. That’s not what I meant. Don’t pay me any attention.”

  She meant well. “Where did you buy these?”

  “Farm stand over by Haughton.”

  Of course, because everything was going to keep reminding me that I needed to learn to drive. “Too bad.”

  “They’ll be good everywhere, though. Fresh cream, a little cake.”

  “No, just the berries. Did I tell you that I’m an editor for a food magazine? And I write a regular column about a single ingredient. I’ve never done one on strawberries, and I’m very glad right now.”

  “You’ll have to share that with me.”

  “Yes.” I took a breath, sucked juice off my finger. A breeze wove through the chimes, one after another. “What I can’t figure out is what happened. Why did she leave?”

  “I was abroad when it all happened, but I do know that she’d been seeing someone just before I left. She was keeping it a secret because her brother wouldn’t have approved, but I saw them in London together, and she took me into her confidence.”

  “Her mom was dead by then?”

  Helen nodded, frowning. “You’d have to look it up, but Violet must have died in the early seventies.”

  “So she wasn’t that old.”

  “No.”

  I wanted to get it straight in my head. “And at that point, Caroline’s brother inherited the title. Roger? No one talks about him. It’s kind of strange.”

  “He was a very unpleasant man. Something was just wrong with him. He was cruel to Caroline but sly about it. She really hated him.”

  “But she kept living in the house after her mother died
.”

  “Where would she go? He held the purse strings.”

  That one thing had never occurred to me. Because I was operating on the assumption of a certain privilege women enjoyed in the modern world. I looked down at the sketchbooks, touched the cover of the one on top. “That’s really sad.”

  “At least she did get out eventually.”

  “Right. But why then, after a couple of years? When did you see her in London?”

  “I was in Greece in ’75, so it must have been—’76, ’77? Somewhere in there. She’d met a man. She didn’t say that much about him.”

  I brushed my hand in a circle over the sketchbooks, thinking.

  Helen said, “Any possibility that her lover was your father?”

  I flinched. “No. My dad was American. I was born in San Francisco.”

  “Just curious. I wondered if maybe they fled together, perhaps.”

  “Oh, but that would be the worst, wouldn’t it? If she’d been happy and then lost him so young?”

  She touched my hand. “I’m sorry. I was only speculating aloud. What else did you bring?”

  “Some of her old sketchbooks, but now I don’t really know what I’m hoping to find out.”

  “Let’s have a look, shall we?”

  One by one, I piled the sketchbooks on the table. It was a motley collection of several eras, I thought. “This seems to be the earliest,” I said, offering her the square one that contained a sketch of a bird, so gracefully rendered. The rest of the book was studies of the same sort—other birds, singing and sitting, flying and grooming. One even in a birdbath. She’d also sketched squirrels, a ladybug, and many other creatures.

  “She must have been much younger when she did these,” Helen said. “It’s a very simple form of the kind of detail work she did later.”