Happy birthday? Father whispered the words, Happy Birthday, hilariously, right in my ear. We played silent card games where the winner pulled gleeful faces and the loser grimaced and slumped, and nothing, not a peep, not a splutter, could be heard in the room above our heads. In between games, up and down he went, my poor father, between the silent pain of the bedroom and the secret birthday downstairs, changing his face from jollity to sympathy, from sympathy back to jollity, in the stairwell.
‘Well, you are clearly not in your right mind for work.“
The food seemed to bring me to my senses a little. “What are you doing here, Aurelius?”
‘Eat!“
I said yes.
He absorbed this new information, added it to his store of loss and pain, and when he spoke again it was with a grave firmness of purpose. “Take me to her.”
Inside was a cake. A homemade cake. And on the cake, in curly icing letters, were three words: Happy Birthday Margaret.
Would it have been easier for her if we had both died?
Aurelius stopped patting my hair, and for a long moment he stared out of the car window in the direction of the house. “My mother,” he murmured, “there.”
Judith came. “Miss Winter says would now… ?”
I was too cold to cry. Instead the combination of cold and cake set me talking. Words emerged from me, randomly, like objects disgorged by glaciers as they thaw. Nocturnal singing, a garden with eyes, sisters, a baby, a spoon. “And she even knows the house,” I babbled while Aurelius dried my hair with paper towels, “your house and Mrs. Love’s. She looked through the window and thought Mrs. Love was like a fairytale grandmother… Don’t you see what it means? ”
‘She lied to you, Aurelius! When you came to see her in your brown suit, she lied. She has admitted it.“
‘Look at you! You’re blue with cold! Quick, come with me.“ He took my arm and led me briskly off. My feet stumbled over the ground behind him until we came to a road, a car. He bundled me in. There was a slamming of doors, the hum of an engine, and then a blast of warmth around my ankles and knees. Aurelius opened a Thermos flask and poured a mug of orange tea.
Why couldn’t she love me? Why did my life mean less to her than my sister’s death? Did she blame me for it? Perhaps she was right to. I was alive now only because my sister had died. Every sight of me was a reminder of her loss.
I used to think that I loved rain, but in fact I hardly knew it. The rain I loved was genteel town rain, made soft by all the obstacles the skyline put in its path, and warmed by the rising heat of the town itself. On the moors, enraged by the wind and embittered by the chill, the rain was vicious. Needles of ice stung my face and, behind me, vessels of freezing water burst against my shoulders.
Stupefied, I walked. One foot in front of the other, again and again and again, mesmerized. No interest in where I was heading. Looking nowhere, seeing nothing, I stumbled on.
It was a dismissal.
‘She’s your aunt, Aurelius. And Emmeline is your mother.“
Back in my room I spent an hour bored, unsettled, plagued by myself. I sat at my desk, pencil in hand, but did not write; felt cold and turned the radiator up, then, too hot, took my cardigan off. I’d have liked a bath, but there was no hot water. I made cocoa and put extra sugar in it; then the sweetness nauseated me. A book? Would that do it? In the library the shelves were lined with dead words. Nothing there could help me.
‘Have you been sleeping well?“ Miss Winter wanted to know, and then,”You look a little pale. You don’t eat enough.“
There was another silence, and then he turned to me. “Take me to her, Margaret.”
Then I bumped into something.
Only because I was so cold could I bear to contemplate these memories.
If I was at the shop, my father would produce a present from beneath the desk as I came down the stairs. There would be a book or books, purchased at auction and put aside during the year. And a record or perfume or a picture. He would have wrapped them in the shop, at the desk, some quiet afternoon when I was at the post office or the library. He would have gone out one lunchtime to choose a card, alone, and he would have written in it, Love from Dad and Mother, at the desk. Alone, quite alone. He would go to the bakery for a cake, and somewhere in the shop—
‘I came to give you this,“ he said, and he reached over to the back and lifted a cake tin through the gap between the seats.
I slid the card under my pillow before she could see it. “Now would be fine,” I said, and picked up my pencil and pad.
‘No, I don’t think so.“
‘Emmeline, then?“
I drank. The tea was hot and sweet.
‘Drink!“
‘Not ill, exactly.“ How to explain? ”She was injured in the fire, Aurelius. Not only her face. Her mind.“
‘Good Lord, what a question. Of course I haven’t. Have you gone mad, girl?“
I was too cold to be startled, too cold to make my face respond to he vast form that stood before me, shrouded in tentlike drapes of green rainproof fabric. It moved, and two hands came down on my shoulders and gave me a shake.
‘Ill? Then you must take me to her. Without delay!“
In the warmth of the car, drinking hot tea and eating chicken sandwiches, I felt colder than ever. My teeth started to chatter and I shivered uncontrollably.
‘Margaret!“
‘Goodness gracious!“ Aurelius exclaimed softly as he passed me one dainty sandwich after another. ”Dear me!“
Miss Winter was telling me about something when she interrupted herself. “Are you listening to me, Miss Lea?”
I had never discovered where; it was one of the few secrets I had not fathomed—he kept a candle, which came out on this day every year, was lit, andwhich I blew out, with as good an impression of happiness as I could muster. Then we ate the cake, with tea, and settled down to quiet digestion and cataloging.
‘Have you ever had a child, Miss Winter?“
‘We have an agreement, do we not? No questions?“ And then, changing her expression, she bent forward and scrutinized me closely. ”Are you ill?“
I nodded.
‘Margaret! Margaret!“
The main gate was kept locked, I knew, and I had no wish to ask Maurice to open it for me. Instead, I headed through the garden to the farthest point from the house, where there was a door in the wall. The door, overgrown with ivy, had not been opened for a long time, and I had to pull the foliage away with my hands before I could open the latch. When the door swung toward me, there was more ivy to be pushed aside before I could step, a little disheveled, outside.
I bit into the sandwich he held out.
There came a dash of raindrops, scattering against the window, and my heart leaped. Outside. Yes, that was what I needed. And not just the garden. I needed to get away, right away. Onto the moors.
‘Bless me!“ exclaimed Aurelius. ”However did you know about that brown suit of mine? I had to pretend to be a journalist, you know.“ But then, as what I was telling him began to sink in, ”A spoon like mine, you say? And she knew the house?“
I jerked out of my reverie and fumbled for an answer. Had I been listening? I had no idea. At that moment I couldn’t have told her what she had been saying, though I’m sure that somewhere in my mind there was a place where it was all recorded. But at the point when she jerked me out of myself, I wasin a kind of no-man’s-land, a place between places. The mind plays all sorts of tricks, gets up to all kinds of things while we ourselves are slumbering in a white zone that looks for all the world like inattention to the onlooker. Lost for words, I stared at her for a minute, while she grew more and more irritated, then I plucked at the first coherent sentence that presented itself to me.
I seemed to wake up. “The thing is, Aurelius, she’s not well.”
All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes—characters even—caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you. Well, it was like that. All day I had been prey to distractions. Thoughts, memories, feelings, irrelevant fragments of my own life, playing havoc with my concentration.
Happy birthday.
‘I’m fine,“ I assured her, though I wasn’t.
Judith brought a card from my father with the breakfast tray. A picture of flowers, his habitual, vaguely worded greetings and a note. He hoped I was well. He was well. He had some books for me. Should he send them? My mother had not signed the card; he had signed it for both of them. Love from Dad and Mother. It was all wrong. I knew it and he knew it, but what could anyone do?
The next day I woke to it: today, today, today. A tolling bell only I could hear. The twilight seemed to have penetrated my soul; I felt an unearthly weariness. My birthday. My deathday.
Placing the tin on my lap, he beamed gloriously at me as he removed the lid.
Unhappy birthday. From the day I was born, grief was always present. It settled like dust upon the household. It covered everyone and everything; it invaded us with every breath we took. It shrouded us in our own separate miseries.
It was Aurelius.
I knew how it was for him. It was easier now that I was grown up than when I was a child. How much harder birthdays had been in the house. Presents hidden overnight in the shed, not from me, but from my mother, who could not bear the sight of them. The inevitable headache was her jealously guarded rite of remembrance, one that made it impossible to invite other children in the house, impossible, too, to leave her for the treat of a visit to the zoo or the park. My birthday toys were always quiet ones. Cakes were never homemade, and the leftovers had to be divested of their candles and icing before they could be put in the tin for the next day.
Was it illness that dictated my response? Was it the fact that it was my birthday? Was it my own motherlessness? These factors might have lad something to do with it, but more significant than all of them was Aurelius’s expression as he waited for my answer. There were a hundred and one reasons to say no to his demand, but faced with the ferocity of his need, they faded to nothing.
Aurelius shook his head. “But she told me—”
