Kitabı oku: «The Book of Lost and Found: Sweeping, captivating, perfect summer reading», sayfa 3
While the adults continued with their dinner, Alice and Tom escaped outside and across the dew-wet grass under cover of darkness, to where they could watch the shore for any signs of activity upon the sea. Alice had a platform that her father had built her in a tree, which formed an excellent lookout post. There they had stayed until Sir Robert, under instructions from his wife, had made his way through the garden to them and, with a smile in his voice, summoned them back inside.
For those eight weeks in Winnard Cove, Tom and Alice were inseparable. They spied for pirates, hunted crabs, built shelters from driftwood and braved the crashing cold surf to swim in the calmer waters beyond, beneath the anxious watch of Tom’s mother and Alice’s nanny. Alice was small for her age, and almost unnaturally pale – but she was strong, and fearless, braver than anyone Tom had met before. She told him that she wanted to be an adventurer like her father, the first-ever female explorer – and Tom was in no doubt that she would accomplish it. Even now he could imagine that sharp face blackened with whale fat, those small feet shod in fur-lined boots.
As is always the case with the truest childhood friendships, it seemed that they should never be parted. And Tom’s parents promised – as eager themselves to return – that they would come back the following year to Winnard Cove.
*
But one October morning later that year, Mr Stafford’s teacup fell from his hand.
EVERSLEY PERISHES IN THE FROZEN SOUTH
ran the headline. Lord Robert had plummeted to his death, falling into a crevasse hidden beneath a false surface of thin ice and snow. The body could not be recovered.
The Eversleys never returned to Winnard Cove. Neither did the Staffords. The war came. Mr Stafford, a proud patriot, signed himself up to fight in France and returned a very different man. But he was luckier than some. Archie Eversley was killed at Ypres, on one of the first days of fighting.
2
Kate
How should I describe my mother?
She was small, but very strong. Strong in a way that meant she could dance for hours on end, with faultless grace and precision, even as every muscle in her body must have burned with pain, as the blood from her poor crushed toes seeped into the wooden blocks that supported them, even as she was flung, and spun and blinded by the bright stage lights. Strong in a way that meant she was able to accept her position in the world – abandoned, parentless – and make it a part of her strength, the essential element in the June Darling fairy tale. I don’t want to describe the things that only I knew about her. Because they’re what I have left, what I can cherish. Besides, people aren’t interested in that much beyond the dancing, and the fairy tale.
You’ll have heard of my mother, I’m sure. Even people who don’t know ballet know her name – she’d attained that level of universal renown when she died. And when she died, that night when the plane spiralled out of the sky as though it were made of paper and lollipop sticks, those few left who had not known her came to hear of her. June Darling, the little dancing girl who through sheer talent had managed to escape the meagre path laid out for her.
My mother used to ridicule what she called the myth of her background. She never had it that bad, she would say. She was never neglected or maltreated, and though she may have started out with no natural family to call her own, she soon had Evie, and then me, and we were a perfect three, a tight triangle of love.
Or at least, that’s certainly how it appeared. In my more secret, shameful moments, I wondered whether Evie did in fact resent me for complicating things – for disturbing the sanctity of that bond between herself and my mother. Did I have any proof of this? Not specifically. Though I do not think it would be unfair to say that Evie never spoke to me in the way she did my mother: and with me she could be sharp, impatient, as I suspected she never had been with Mum.
I became rather obsessed with the idea of grandparents – of the sort that my school friend Georgina visited at weekends. The sort who would read to you, and make cakes with you, and take you to exhibitions. That wasn’t the relationship that Evie and I had. I didn’t call her Granny or anything like that. I called her Evie, and we spoke to one another like adults. Looking back, I am sure that she did love me, but next to all she had felt for my mother what she felt for me paled in comparison. My mother had been her saviour as much as she had been my mother’s, you see, and I think that Evie simply could not have cared for anyone as deeply.
Perhaps, too, she disliked the evidence she saw in me of my father, who she seemed to credit with having derailed Mum’s career via the pregnancy – notwithstanding the fact that Mum was old, in ballet terms, when she had me. My father had played the part of the villain well, disappearing off at the first sign of trouble. But there are two ways of looking at this. If you asked Mum, she would have told you that my father had meant little to her other than the fact that he helped to bring about me. We didn’t need him in our lives: we had one another.
My mother was christened June by the nuns who ran the institution in which she had lived from infancy. I always thought that her name had a curiously American ring to it, but – as she explained to me – it related to the month in which she had arrived. It was a good job that she turned up when she did, when the weather was balmy; if she had been left on the doorstep in February her story might well have gone no further.
Orphanages tend to get a bad write-up, but this wasn’t the Dickensian sort, and ‘institution’ suggests a level of deprivation that my mother always insisted was absent from her experience. True, there wasn’t much in the way of food or entertainment, but there were three modest-sized meals a day, there were lessons and musical sessions and excursions in the park. In comparison to some children’s experience it wasn’t a bad deal. It was also all my mother had ever known.
A couple of the older girls claimed to remember a woman. The velvet purr of an engine beneath the dormitory window had woken them in the early hours of the morning. They had clambered up to look out and had seen her approach the building carrying the bundle, and return minutes after without it. The doorbell had not rung. She had been, they would say later, as sleek and expensive-looking as the car that had driven her away, though they couldn’t agree on particulars – the colour of the hair beneath the hat, her height, her age. Yet both had been left with the impression of a great and peculiar beauty.
I once asked my mother if she had loved the nuns. She admitted that she couldn’t remember all of them individually – other than as a benevolent, omnipresent abstract, rather like the impression of God that the sisters had furnished her with. The one exception to this was Sister Rose, who didn’t stand out for any particular quirk of personality, but because she became an agent in the shaping of my mother’s future. She was the sister in charge of music lessons, which didn’t entail much beyond an elderly set of instruments, donated by various patrons and kept in a wooden chest in the gymnasium. Every Friday afternoon they would be removed and distributed with precise fairness for the girls to play on in their untutored way.
Then something rather unusual happened. When my mother was about six years old a new scheme was introduced. It was the brainchild of a wealthy patron – an anonymous philanthropist had an idea to set up a programme by which the girls might learn the joys of song and dance.
If my mother had been born a few years later, her life would have turned out very differently. Such a project could not have continued as German bombs rained fire upon the city. As it was, she got her chance.
The ballet teacher – and, as it transpired, the daughter of the philanthropist who had devised the initiative – was a woman named Evelyn Darling.
