“Logistics?” Edward hitched a leg up to rest on the pile of boxes and looked at me with interest.
“I do have a job, you know. And a life. Hundreds of miles away.” Whether I liked it or not. “Either you and all this material would need to move to Perth, which doesn’t seem very practical considering the input we need from the rest of the family, or I’d need to move down here permanently.”
“That’s what Nathaniel was going to ask you to do,” Edward said. “At least, he planned to. I don’t know what changed.”
“Maybe he saw just how unwelcome I was here.” Or maybe he changed his mind. Or perhaps…perhaps he had been asking me, in his way, that whole last weekend – and I just didn’t notice until it was too late. “I’m not sure I could stay, without him here.”
Edward gave me a sympathetic look. “Maybe we could come to some sort of arrangement, if you did decide to do it. Work by email in the week, when you had time around the paper, and try and get together every other weekend, or something. It would take longer…”
“But it would be better than nothing,” I agreed. “Maybe. We’ll see.” For some reason the idea of only being a part of this on a part-time basis didn’t appeal. If I took this on, it would have to be the whole thing.
I didn’t let myself acknowledge that the idea of only seeing Edward every other weekend wasn’t very appealing, either.
“What else?” Edward asked. When I hesitated, he went on, “Come on, Saskia. There’s another reason, I can tell. So spit it out.”
I looked away, taking in the mountain of information still left to wade through. “When I left, to go back to Perth…I had a plan. Ellie told me to stop running, remember? So I was going to try. I was going to find something new to work towards. A new life to live, for me. And instead…”
“You ended up back at Rosewood again,” Edward finished. “And you don’t think the memoirs could be part of that new life?”
I shook my head. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
And the thing was, I wanted to. I wanted to explain it to him; I just wasn’t sure I had the right words.
“Nathaniel said to me – before the Golden Wedding – he said he always hoped that I’d be a writer. Create my own stories. I never knew he wanted that for me. And I never told him how badly I wanted it for myself. We hadn’t talked about it since I was a child.”
“And the memoirs are his story, not yours.”
I nodded. “I’ll always be in his shadow, whatever I do as a writer. It’s okay for you – you had your own career, your own name before you ever came here. But I’ll always be Nathaniel Drury’s granddaughter first.”
“It’s not a bad shadow to be in,” Edward pointed out.
“I know.” I looked down at my hands. “And I do want to do it. I just don’t want it to be the only thing I ever do.”
“It won’t be.” Edward sounded so certain, I looked up to seek the reason for his surety in his face. “I know you, Saskia. I know you’re going to get there. Wherever you want to be.”
The last person to tell me that was Nathaniel.
I hoped to God that they were both right. Because I knew for sure I couldn’t stay where I was – outcast from my family, my home, working at a job that only filled my days, not my need for creativity, sleeping with a man I didn’t love, didn’t see a future with. I couldn’t be this person any more.
Could working on the memoirs help me become the person I wanted to be? Maybe.
I had to admit, it was worth a try.
“We should get back to work,” I said, and Edward smiled.
We’d fallen into a familiar rhythm with the job of sorting through the information for the memoirs; we’d each take a box, and try and assign each of the contents to a date, an event, at the very least a year. Documents relating to the same period of time were clipped together and annotated, as far as possible, to remind us later what we thought they were. Then we’d put the pile with the journal corresponding to the same period of time. My grandfather had been a sporadic journal keeper. For some years we had detailed entries full of description and information. For others we had nothing but a few scrawled notes, or lists.
I was still searching for the journal that covered the year they moved to Rosewood. I wasn’t entirely sure which sort I wanted it to be.
We were helped, to some degree, by the notes Nathaniel had left – pages of lined A4 paper covered in his sprawling script, detailing vague timelines that started abruptly and finished without warning and never linked to the next one. Each date or event had some scribbled notes beside them – words and sentences that would obviously have jogged Nathaniel’s memory enough for him to be able to write it up fully, but all too often meant nothing at all to us.
“Well, I think I’ve reached 1987,” Edward said, tossing a file onto the desk. “Although since I arrived here by way of 1954 and 2003, I have no idea which direction I’m going in.”
I heaved the box in my lap onto the floor, and went to perch myself on the edge of the desk. “Ellie was born in 1988,” I said. “So I’m pretty sure my parents were married in ’86 or ’87.”
“Might make it easier to figure out the year,” Edward agreed. “What date’s their anniversary?”
I was already flipping through the file before I realised that I had no idea. “They never really celebrate it,” I explained, pulling out a carefully clipped newspaper cutting. “But this should tell us.”
Even thirty or so years later, the woman in the black and white photo was very clearly my mother. Same wide eyes, same pale blonde hair swept up on top of her head under a lacy veil, same broad smile as she clutched her bouquet of flowers to her flouncy white wedding dress. What was confusing, though, was that the man standing next to her was equally obviously not my father.
My heart started to beat faster. I’d been so busy concentrating on Isabelle’s long ago secrets, that I’d forgotten she wasn’t the only one who’d objected to the memoirs.
“Hang on,” Edward said, peering over my shoulder. “That’s not…”
“‘Miss Sally Drury, daughter of Nathaniel and Isabelle Drury, was married to Mr Robert Marks, son of Harold and Sheila Marks, at St Michael’s Church on Saturday April 26th 1986.’” I read slowly, not really believing the words even as I said them. “That’s… Ellie was born in January 1988.”
“There’s more here,” Edward said, pulling a pile of envelopes from the file. “Letters from your mother, by the look of things.” He handed them to me, and I took them with shaking hands.
How had I not considered that Mum had her own secrets, too? I’d assumed she was protecting Ellie, or even herself – not wanting her daughter’s shortcomings out there in the world, in print. Not wanting to read the truth and have to believe in it. Not wanting that shame for Ellie, or her, or even me.
But how did a secret marriage, and lying to your children their whole lives, stack up against sleeping with your sister’s fiancé? Was there even a scale for secrets like ours?
The letters had all been opened, read, put back in their envelopes then taken back out to read again many times, judging by the soft feel of the envelopes and the well-worn folds of the writing paper. The stamps on the envelopes were unfamiliar, from countries I’d never even heard of in some cases. How many times had my grandfather pulled these out and read them, missing his only daughter on the other side of the world? And what was in them to explain my mother’s marriage to a man I’d never heard of? Perhaps, a small corner of my mind added, perhaps he’d read them so much because he wasn’t sure if he wanted to include this story in the memoirs.
One thing was clear: I would have to talk to my mother about this. But first, I wanted all the information I could get.
I pulled my chair closer to the desk, still reluctant to sit in what would always be Nathaniel’s chair, positioned in the bay window behind the leather-topped desk. In date order, I read my way through the letters, passing each page to Edward as I finishe
d with it. After all, there was no way to keep the story from him, even if we did decide to keep it from the rest of the world.
They started off so happy. Having a wonderful time in America! Robert has an interview for a lecturer’s position here. We’re still in New York – I’ve been exploring the city! And then, a new name. Robert’s friend, Tony, has been such a great guide. He’s British too, but studying here.
“That has to be Dad, right?” I said, passing the letter to Edward.
He scanned the page. “Looks like. What happened next?”
“They had an affair?” I guessed. Maybe that was why Mum had never wanted to know what really happened between me and Greg. Too much of a reminder of her own past.
I miss you. Robert says that maybe we can come back next year. Or the year after.
And then, the last letter.
By the time you read this, I might already be home. I can’t risk staying.
Risk. The word jumped off the page at me and I knew instantly that this was nothing like what happened between me and Greg. Whatever story I told myself about my own actions, I couldn’t hold it up against my mother’s.
By the end of the stack of letters, I was cold and my eyes were damp. There was just so much she didn’t say, even right at the end when she wrote that she was pregnant and coming home with this man who wasn’t her husband, this Tony Ryan. What had my grandparents thought then? Only a year or so after the wedding. But in everything she didn’t say, I thought I could read a glimmer of the truth. She had married the wrong man – a destructive, terrible man – and she had gotten out.
But was that after Robert Marks got her pregnant? Was Ellie actually my sister, or only a half sister? And did that make anything I had done to her any more excusable? The last, at least, I felt I could answer – no, not at all.
The lies, though. My whole life, my parents had lied to me – by omission if not in fact. My mother had a whole history I never even suspected. My father might not even be her husband at all. I felt like my whole foundation had shifted, and I wasn’t quite sure how things would resettle. Or what my family would look like once they had.
“What do you want to do?” Edward’s voice was quiet as he put down the last letter.