Читать книгу Deadly Grace - Taylor Smith - Страница 16

I don’t know where to begin to tell this story. I lie here, searching for meaning in what happened, finding none that makes any sense. At the very least, I need to lay this out in a logical sequence of events, but I’m so confused by guilt and anger I can hardly think straight.

How do I do this? How do I explain why a woman as admired as my mother had to come to the end she did? And how do I account for the sick, twisted fate that forced me, a daughter as fatally flawed as she was, to sit in judgment over her?

I want to scream out at the unfairness of it. My throat and chest ache with the pressure of unshed tears, the way a dam must ache as it holds back a flood. But I can’t indulge myself. I haven’t earned the right to cry.

One thing seems clear: if I’m going to get this all down, I’m going to have to try to muster up some kind of detachment. Treat Grace Meade as just another one of my research subjects, a minor historical figure upon whom a handful of fates turned. Ignore the emotion-laden tie that binds us even now—that soft, invisible umbilical cord that’s been wrapped around my neck since the day I was born, slowly strangling the life out of me.

And who knows? Maybe it strangled both of us. For years now, I’ve harbored the guilty feeling that my mother would have been happier if I’d never been born. That the burden of my childish needs forced her to abandon any thought of pursuing her own. That ensuring my security destroyed any chance she might have had to find a little happiness of her own.

She left her country and the life she knew to bring me here to live with my father’s parents. I can’t remember a time when my grandparents weren’t the most loving influence on my life, and I will always be grateful for the safe cocoon of their warmth. I’m certainly glad they’re not alive now to see how I’ve ended up.

In spite of my grandparents’ unswerving love and support, though, there was a sadness that permeated our home like a layer of fine dust. Now and then, it lifted a little, but inevitably it would soon settle back over us all.

My late father was Nana’s and Grandpa’s only child, and of course, no worse tragedy can befall a parent than to lose a child. Now, as I look back through adult eyes, I can see how my young life was marked by the faint shadow of grief behind their encouraging smiles. Every milestone I passed successfully must have reminded them of that other child they’d nurtured safely through the pitfalls of childhood, only to have him perish alone in a foreign land.

And my mother? His shadow seemed to hang over her, too, and I sometimes felt she could barely make me out in the gloom of those memories. When I was little, there were moments when I wanted to fly into a room and just crash into her—anything to break through, to get her to notice me. But fear or training or both held me back. I waited, watching and hoping she would turn on me the radiant, incredible smile that she bestowed like a blessing on so many others who came to love and admire her. She never did—at least, not when we were by ourselves and I could be absolutely certain that she meant it for me and me alone.

For years, I thought the problem was that I reminded her too much of my father, whose silver-framed photograph smiled down on us from the living room mantle. That my existence was a constant, aching reminder of his absence. In recent years, though, I resigned myself to the possibility that she might simply have been one of those women who didn’t enjoy motherhood. I even wonder whether she’d ever really wanted a child. She never said, but I can’t help thinking that I was an accident with which she simply coped, just as she coped with all the other setbacks and tragedies in her life. There is nothing worse than thinking your very existence is a mistake.

Mind you, I’m sure all of Havenwood would testify that she was a model parent, utterly conscientious. As a child, I adored her and lived in terror of losing her. But as I grew older, I began to realize that her life might have been so much more had she not sacrificed herself for my sake—buried herself alive in this tiny prairie town where her experience and skills would always be underutilized, her past little understood, no matter how much she was admired.

I knew—everyone knew, vaguely—how her life before coming to this country had been full of action, danger and passion, like something out of great fiction or the movies. Living on the front lines of World War II, plunged right into the action, she’d been part of one of the greatest struggles between good and evil the world has ever known. Lines were clearly drawn then, more so than at any time before or since. For my mother’s generation, there was the evil of fascism on one side and all those who opposed it on the other. As a partisan, she led a life of action and passion—and unthinkable tragedy. But when the battle for freedom was won, she retired with me, her infant daughter, to a remote and foreign place, the small hometown of the husband she’d found, then lost in the midst of that great struggle.

I can’t believe she wasn’t sometimes bored to utter despair here. Bored and lonely. And yet, to my knowledge, she never considered packing up and moving someplace else where she might at least attend a concert or a stage play from time to time, perhaps find someone—a friend, lover, or new husband—whose interests went beyond grain prices, TV shows, local gossip and the winter windchill factor. Someone to understand her and share her life.

I remember the first time it really dawned on me that my mother had once had a life beyond Havenwood. It was after both my grandparents had died; I must have been twelve or thirteen at the time. My mother and I were at home one evening, watching an old movie on television. I don’t remember which one. All I know is that it was set on one of those elegant British estates that hardly exist anymore and that the entire cast spoke like my mother. And it suddenly struck me there might actually be a place on this earth where Grace Meade didn’t stand out like a mink coat at Woolworth’s.

I remember, too, glancing over at her and being thunderstruck by the realization that she could cry.

“Mum? What’s wrong?” I asked her—panicked really, because this was so unlike her.

Her ivory linen handkerchief fluttered in an embarrassed little wave. “Oh, nothing, darling. I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s come over me.”

“What do you mean? What’s wrong?”

She hesitated, glancing at the television, but Deborah Kerr (I think that’s who it was) had given way to Tony the Tiger and a Frosted Flakes commercial. My mother’s porcelain blue eyes, brimming with tears, turned back to me, two points of color standing out on her cheekbones, which were high and smoothly defined. Although her face became a little softer and rounder as she aged, she was beautiful right up to the day she died.

“It’s silly, really,” she said. “I suppose I was just feeling a little homesick.”

“Homesick? You were?”

I was dumbstruck. The thought had never occurred to me that she might wish to be anywhere but where we were. She did have an airmail subscription to the Daily Mail and the Times of London, of course, and she kept a short-wave radio in her bedroom so that she could listen to the BBC. We had a tradition in our house that on December 25, we had to wait until after the Queen’s Christmas message before my mother would come out and join my grandparents and me in opening our gifts around the tree.

But those were just my mother’s strange little quirks. I’d never thought of her as a particularly sentimental person. She almost never spoke of her life before coming to Minnesota. Like most overconfident Americans, I simply assumed that she was thrilled to be here.

As I grew older, though, it dawned on me that her reluctance to revisit the past mightn’t be lack of sentimentality as much as her way of coping. After all, she’d endured terrible losses in those years before I was born—her parents, a fiancé, my father, her home, not to mention God knows how many friends and comrades from her period of war service.

Was it any wonder, then, that the subject of the past would be painful for her.

“Do you miss England, Mum?”

“Sometimes, yes, I suppose I do,” she confessed.

“Are you sorry you left?”

“No, not really. There’d be no point in being sorry, would there? Always remember, Jillian, once you make a decision, you must never look back.”

“You could have stayed there,” I pointed out, intrigued at the idea that I might have had an entirely different life, one in which I went to a school that looked like an old castle and wore a school uniform with a kilt, knee socks and a crested blazer. Mentally, I tried on an English accent, picturing myself as a more gangly, less pretty (obviously) version of Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet.

But my mother’s head gave a firm shake. “No, darling. Coming here was the best option at the time. Things were terribly difficult at home when the war ended. You were a tiny baby, so you can’t remember what it was like, but I remember it very well, indeed. We were living in one cramped little room in an old house outside London. It was hardly big enough for a bed and a small table. Your cradle was an old bureau drawer. We needed a flat desperately, but there were simply none to be had. So many houses had been bombed by the Germans, and with all the men coming back from the front after 1945, there was a dreadful shortage of housing. Naturally, war veterans were at the top of the waiting list, so there was no telling how long we would have to live like that. It was no way to raise a child.”

“But that’s not fair! You should have been at the top of the list, too. You served in the war. So did my father.”

“Yes, but Daddy was an American, wasn’t he?”

“That shouldn’t have made any difference. We were allies and everybody was fighting for the same side. And what about you? You fought for England behind the lines in France just the same as if you’d been in a uniform. You should have gotten the same treatment as the soldiers coming back.”

“Well, perhaps, in theory. In practice, though, it wasn’t that simple. I’d worked for a very small, very secret part of the government. Even now, you know, Whitehall never publicly acknowledges the special services, even though everyone knows they exist. In any case, dear, we were a very few, and there were so many other needs to fill. They had to establish priorities somehow, and British servicemen and their families simply came first.”

I started to renew my protest against the unfairness of it all, but my mother held up her hand. “It wasn’t only the billeting problem. Food and clothing were in short supply, too. Rationing was still in force. You needed formula, nap-pies and, oh, so many things that just weren’t to be had. Really, darling, when your grandparents wrote and invited us to come and live with them here, I knew it was for the best. As for this…” She waved a neat, manicured hand at the TV screen, where Deborah Kerr had returned, dressed in a simple but elegant little black dress very much like one my mother owned. “…this is just Mummy being very silly, that’s all.”

In my heart of hearts, I was glad she had taken up my grandparents’ offer. They’d been wonderful, loving people, and through their stories and those of so many old friends and neighbors in Havenwood, I grew up feeling linked to a father I’d never known—a father about whom my mother, frankly, could tell me frustratingly little, so short had been their time together before he was killed.

That evening, though, I began to see my mother in a whole new light. To me then, a young girl on the brink of womanhood, there was great melodrama in the notion of this brave young English widow, a war heroine in her own right, clutching a tiny baby to her bosom as she hurried from one government office to another under a relentless English rain, pleading with harried and unsympathetic clerks for lodgings that just weren’t to be had.

“What about now?” I pressed.

“What do you mean?”

“Do you ever think of going back?”

“To England? And leave you here all alone? What an absurd idea!”

“No, I mean we could both go. It’d be neat. I could see where you grew up, and where you met Dad.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that, Jillian. It’s such a long trip, you have no idea.”

“We’d fly over.”

“That would be terribly expensive. And not at all feasible. The school systems are very different and…”

“Not for good. Just for a visit. Summer vacation, maybe. You could see old friends, take me to the white cliffs of Dover. Maybe we could go to France, too, look up those cousins.”

My mother had been born in Dover to an English father and a French mother. It was that combined heritage that had made her such a prize to the British secret service when the war broke out and finally landed her behind the lines in occupied France. But that night in front of the television, she displayed no interest whatsoever in a return visit.

“It would all be very different now, Jillian. So many places were bombed during the war, including the house I grew up in and my father’s print shop. Everything’s been rebuilt and changed, I’m sure. I don’t think I should enjoy seeing that. I’d rather remember it as it was.”

“What about people?”

“People?”

“Family, say? On your father’s side—or your mother’s?”

On her bedroom bureau she had a small, pewter-framed photo of her own mother, whose beauty she’d inherited. British sapper Albert Wickham had met young Sylvie Fournier in Normandy during the First World War and had utterly lost his heart to her. They’d married after the war, but sadly, my grandmother had died in an influenza epidemic when my mother was just a toddler. My mother, like me, had grown up an only child.

“There’s no one left to speak of on my father’s side,” she said. “He only had one sister, and she died years ago, never married. On the other side—your grandmaman’s family—well, there were the uncles in France, of course, but they’re gone now. As for les cousins,” she added, her French pronunciation flawless, her nose wrinkled in distaste, “I made very sure to lose touch with them the moment I grew up. A right obnoxious bunch, they were.”

I smiled. She’d told me once about the awful teasing she’d suffered at the hands of the horrible Norman cousins with whom she’d spent her summers as a child. They were the reason my mother spoke fluent French, however, heard first at her doomed mother’s breast, then fine-tuned during those childhood summers spent with the uncles and their families. And years later, in fact, when she was sent back into France to work with the Resistance, my mother adopted Grandmaman’s name, Sylvie Fournier, as her nom de guerre.

“What about old friends?” I pressed.

A small crease appeared on her high forehead. Her hair was probably already in the process of turning from its original honey-blond to silver-white at this period of her life, although I can’t remember clearly. But that evening, I’m sure, she would have been wearing it as she invariably did, smoothed back from her face and rolled into a neat chignon at the base of her skull. When she rose in the morning, it flowed like a soft, golden storm halfway down her back, but she would never have thought of leaving it down during the day.

Her tiny pearl stud earrings matched the single strand at her neck, and she was wearing a peach twin set, I remember, the cardigan draped around her shoulders, cape style. As she pondered my question, she crossed her wrists over her chest and tugged the cardigan closer, as if she’d felt a sudden chill. As the air between us shifted with her movement, I remember, a subtle hint of her perfume, Ma Griffe, wafted from her chair to my corner of the living room sofa.

“It’s been a long time, dear,” she said finally. “The war changed everything and there’s no going back. It’s better to leave some things locked away in memories.”

In my mother’s voice that night, I imagined I heard the whispering ghosts of all the people she’d lost to the war. Her beloved father, of course, killed in 1941 by the German bomb that destroyed his printing press in Dover. I also knew, because I’d only recently dragged it out of her, that she’d once been engaged to another man, long before she met my father—long before the U.S. had even entered the war. He’d been a British naval lieutenant, but he had died early on in the war.

There had to have been countless other friends and comrades, too, from her youth and from those nearly five long years of war, most of which she’d spent working as a British special agent, first in England, then in France. English spies. French Resistants. And, of course, Joe Meade, the dashing American flyer with whom she’d fallen in love, married and conceived a child, and then lost just weeks before I was born.

I can only imagine that the spirits of all those departed souls haunted my mother—that night and to the end of her days.