Chapter 3

I was home the next afternoon sorting out the tea things ahead of Alastair’s visit.  I had picked up a cake on the way home.  Our sitting room has a picture window overlooking the common and I was tidying up when I thought I heard a car pull up at the front.  I looked out of the window but the car was one of my neighbours.  I was about turn back when I had this feeling of someone watching me and I looked across the road to where the common starts.  A woman was standing on the grass slope looking up at the flat.  She was about my age, perhaps a bit younger, with shoulder length blonde hair tied back into a pony tail.  She was the image of my grandmother, the same as the face in the photograph, the same high cheekbones.  She was looking straight at me, not moving.  I looked back and stepped towards the window.  For a few moments we looked at each other, as if trying to place the face of someone you once met, unmoving.  And then my father’s car did pull in and my gaze followed as he turned into my parking space at the front of the building that I had left empty for him.  When I looked back across the road again the woman had gone. 

Patrick was out and I made tea for Alastair and myself.  While I was pouring he looked at the box.  

“How do you open it?”

I sat down across the table from him and showed him how to release the lid.  He took out the bracelet and the photograph.  “I always knew about the box,” he said “ but I’ve never seen this before.  It is beautiful.  I wonder who made it?” and he peered at the bracelet, revolving it in his hands, checking the hallmark and the inscription.  He took our a clean handkerchief and gave it a polish.  

“It’s lovely.  1955, the year they got married.  It’s solid silver.  Not worth a fortune, but a really nice piece.  It polished up nicely.”

“No, it was already like that.”  

“George must have been keeping it polished.”  He held it out to me.  “Have you tried it on?”

I looked at it, shiny and wanting to be touched.  Carefully I took it from him, expecting a reaction of some sort.  But I felt nothing, just the metal against my fingers.

“Yes, but it’s a bit tight.  I won’t put it on now.”

“It’s easily adjusted,” and he reached across for it.

“No,” I hesitated.  “No, not now.”

“Something wrong?”

I was about to tell him, but I couldn’t see a way of explaining it without sounding silly.  “No, It’s OK.”

He picked up the photograph.  “I feel that I should want to know more about her,”  he touched his mother’s face with his finger, as if removing a smudge.  “But she wasn’t a big part of my life.  We had a nanny when I was small, I didn’t see much of either of them.  And George didn’t talk much about her.  I feel sad when I see her picture, but you can’t mss someone you didn’t really know.”  He pause.  “I miss the idea of a mother, but not her.”

“How did she die?  I heard there was a fire.”

“I was child.  We lived in Wheatly House; George never moved.  It had grounds, and stables, in those days; long since sold off for redevelopment.  There are houses all round now, but I remember there being open fields.  She was a keen horsewoman.  She hunted with the West Kent, and I believe when she was younger competed – hunter trails, that sort of thing.  

“I don’t remember the fire at all.  I was in the house at the time, but my room was on the other side and I slept through it all.  I remember coming down to the kitchen for breakfast the next day and being told that there had been a fire and that she had died.  And I saw the charred remains of the stable building.  Later, when the remains were cold and black and everything had been taken out, I used to go out there and try to imagine what had happened.  But you don’t think about pain when you are a child; not other people’s pain anyway.  I never thought about how she must have suffered.  

“Years later George told me what had happened.  They suspected that someone had been smoking in the stables.  I remember a stable boy who was going out with a girl from the town, I had seen them together there.  Everyone smoked in those days, but smoking in the stables was banned.  The stable boy was blamed and George got rid of him.  I don’t know what happened to him, or her, I never saw either of them again.  It seems that when the fire started Beth retreated into the tack room.  The alarm was raised straightaway and they managed to rescue all of the horses; but for some reason she had locked the door of the tack room, and although they tried they couldn’t get her out.  Over the years I imagined rescuers bravely fighting the fire, trying to get her out, trying to break down the door, being driven back by the heat.  When I was older I was sent away to school, and I had nightmares involving a fire.  She never appeared in them, there was no story, no distinct pattern, I just dreamed about fires.  And then over time the dreams stopped.”

He looked at me, and made as if to pick up my hand before changing his mind.  “I really know very little about her.  She was there in the background when I was small, but we weren’t close.  She spent her time with the horses.  I think she got on well enough with George, although I remember them a couple of times shouting at each other.  I don’t know what about, but it scared me, I thought it might be because of me.  After she died George didn’t ever want to talk about her.  He wanted to look forwards, not back.  He said to me once that meeting my mother, marrying her, was the happiest time of his life.  He could never imagine being happy like that again, and thinking back only made him sad.”

He picked up the bracelet, not really looking at it, just holding it.  “I don’t remember much closeness between them, I think they had drifted apart.  He never came close to remarrying.  It was just hm and the business; and then when I got older we became quite close.  But his work, particular working with wood, filled the spaces in his life.  

“Try it on for me.”  He held out the bracelet.  I put it on, apprehensively, fumbling to close the clasp properly.  It felt fine, fitted, not too tight.  I could turn it round on my wrist.  I was nervous, and I realised that my face had flushed, but wearing it now I felt calm.  I looked at the old photograph, still on the table.  Beth was still looking out of the picture, but she didn’t seem to be looking at me.  Her smile was neutral, her face relaxed.

“It looks good on you,” Alastair said as I unclasped the bracelet and put it back in the box.

“We still haven’t worked out how to get into the rest of the box.  Maybe there’s nothing there.”

Alastair smiled.  “That’s not in George’s nature.  George loved puzzles.  There’ll be a way in.

We started looking at the box again, trying to work out the puzzle, our tea going cold.  But the box wasn’t letting us in.  I could feel George smiling at us, telling us that we must be patient.  After a while Alastair looked at his watch.  “I should go, I’ve got to get back to Wimbledon.”  He looked back at the box, touching its surface.  “Let me know when you work it out.”