The Legacy (16 page)

Lipsticks and eyeshadows and blushers in the top right-hand drawer. Small dunes of loose make-up powder, shimmering underneath all the metal tubes and plastic compacts. Belts in the next, coiled like snakes. Handkerchiefs, hair clips, chiffon scarves. This drawer smells powerfully of Meredith, of her perfume, and the slightly doggy notes of the Labradors. In the bottom right drawer are boxes. I take them out, put them up where I can see them. Most are full of jewelry—dress pieces by the looks of it. One box, the biggest, shiny and dark, is full of papers and photographs.

With a prickle of excitement, I sift through the contents. Letters from Clifford and Mary; holiday postcards from my mum and dad; odd bank statements, secreted away into this secretive box for who knows what reason. I read odd snatches of each, feeling the illicit thrill of prying. Some photographs too, which I put to one side; and then I find the newspaper clippings. About Henry, of course. Local papers started the coverage.
Lady Calcott’s Grandson Missing. Search for Local Boy Intensifies
.
Clothes found in Westridge woods did not belong to missing boy
. Then the nationals joined in. Abduction fears, speculation, a mysterious hobo spotted walking the A361 with a bundle that could have been a child. Boy matching the description seen lying in a car in Devizes.
Police very concerned
. I can’t take my eyes from it. As if a hobo could have carried Henry any distance at all. Big-boned, solid Henry. We never saw any of this, Beth and I. Of course we didn’t. Nobody reads the paper when they’re eight years old, and we weren’t allowed to watch the news at the best of times.

It looks like she bought several papers, different ones every day. Did she cut these out at the time, or later, years afterwards, as a way to keep hope alive, to keep
him
alive? I had no idea it was such a big story. I hadn’t connected, until right now, the reporters milling at the gates with any kind of national infamy. Of course, I realize now why they were there, the reporters; why the story ran and ran, getting fewer and fewer column inches as the months went on, until it disappeared altogether. Children shouldn’t just vanish without trace. That’s the worst fear, worse even than finding the body, perhaps. Having no answers, having no idea. Poor Meredith. She was his grandmother, after all. She was meant to be looking after him.

I am staring, staring hard at a grainy, enlarged photo of Henry. A school photo, neat and tidy in a blazer and stripy house tie. Hair combed; toothy, decorous smile. That photo on posters in the shop window, on telegraph poles, on newspaper pages, in doctors’ waiting rooms and supermarkets and garages and pubs. No websites back then, but I remember seeing this photo all over the village. The one in the shop window was in color. It quickly faded in the sunshine, but it was bright when I first saw it.
Can I go to the shop? No! You’re to stay indoors!
I couldn’t understand why. Mum went with me in the end, and held my hand, and politely asked the reporters to let us through, to not follow us. A couple of them did anyway, took some pointless shots of us emerging from the shop with orange ice lollies. One tiny cutting from late August, 1987. A full year later. The regretful last line:
Despite an extensive police investigation, no trace of the missing boy has yet been found
.

There’s an ache in my ribs and I realize I’ve been holding my breath. As if in anticipation; as if the story could have had any other ending. I notice the rain falling faster, louder. Eddie is out in the woods. He’ll be soaked. It seems so unreal, reading about Henry in the press, reading about that summer. Unreal, and at the same time all the more real. All the more terrible. It did happen, and I was there. I put the clippings back in the box, careful not to crease them. I will keep these, I think; in the very same box, so coffin-like, that Meredith put them in twenty-three years ago.

I pick up the pile of photographs and flick through them, shaking off the shadow of the newspaper clippings. Random family portraits and holiday shots for the most part—the sort of thing Mum was after. A small black-and-white photo of Meredith and Charles on their wedding day—my grandfather Charles, that is, who was killed in World War II. Charles wasn’t in the armed forces, but he went up to London on business one week and a stray V2 found its way to the club where he was having lunch. The best shots of their wedding day are on the piano in the drawing room, in heavy silver frames, but in this little shot Meredith is bent at an odd angle, twisting to look back over her shoulder, away from Charles, as if the hem of her dress has caught on something. They are emerging from the church, coming out of the dark into the light. In profile Meredith’s face is young, painfully anxious. Her hair is very fair, eyes huge in her face. How did such a lovely girl, such a nervous young bride, ever become Meredith? The Meredith I remember, cold and hard as the marble shelves in the pantry.

Only one other photo arrests me. It’s very old, battered around the edges; the image surfaces from a sea of fox marks and fade. A young woman, perhaps in her early twenties, in a high-necked dress, hair pinned severely back; and on her lap a child in a lace dress, not more than six months old. A dark-haired baby, its face slightly smeared, ghostly, as if it wriggled just as the exposure was taken. The woman is Caroline. I recognize her from other pictures around the house, although in none of them does she look as young as this. I turn it over, read the faint stamp on the back:
Gilbert Beaufort & Son, New York City
; and hand written, in ink that has almost vanished,
1904
.

But Caroline did not marry Henry Calcott, my great-grandfather, until 1905. Mary was seized by a genealogy fad a few years back—traced the Calcott family lineage that she was so proud to have married into and sent us all a copy in our Christmas card that year. They married in 1905, and they lost a daughter before Meredith was born in 1911. I frown, turn the picture to the light and try to find any more clues within it. Caroline stares calmly back at me, her hand curled protectively around her baby. Where did this child go? How did it fall from our family tree? I slip the photo into my back pocket, begin to pick through the jewelry, hardly seeing it. A brooch pin catches my fingertip, and I sit there a while, tasting my blood.

A
fter dinner Eddie escapes from the table to watch TV. Beth and I sit among the dirty plates and bowls. She has eaten a little. Not enough, but a little. When she senses Eddie watching her, she tries harder. I steal one last potato from the bowl and lean back, feel something stiff in my back pocket.

“What’s that?” Beth asks, as I pull out the photo of our great-grandmother. She hasn’t spoken to me much since I asked her about Henry, and now her voice is slightly stiff. But I know an olive branch when I see one.

“I found it up in Meredith’s room—it’s Caroline,” I tell her, passing it over.

Beth studies the young face, the pale eyes. “Gosh, yes, so it is. I remember those eyes—even when she was ancient, they stayed that bright silver color. Do you remember?”

“No, not really.”

“Well, you were pretty small.”

“I used to be so scared of her! She hardly seemed human to me.”

“Were you really? But she never bothered us. Never paid us much attention.”

“I know. She was just so . . .
old!
” I say, and Beth chuckles.

“That she was. From another era, well and truly.”

“What else do you remember about her?” I ask. Beth leans back from the table, pushes her plate away from her. Half of her slice of quiche is still on her plate, untouched.

“I remember that look Meredith used to get on her face whenever she had to feed her, or dress her. That look of such careful neutrality. I always remember thinking she must have been having terrible thoughts, such terrible thoughts to have been so careful not to let them show on her face.”

“But what about Caroline? Do you remember anything she said, anything she did?”

“Well, let me think. I remember the time she went mad at the summer party—when was it? I can’t remember. Not long before she died. Do you remember it? With the fireworks and all the lanterns strung along the driveway to light the way up to the house?”

“God! I’d totally forgotten about that . . . I remember the fireworks, of course, and the food. But now you remind me I do remember Meredith wheeling Caroline inside, because she’d been shouting something about crows . . . what was it about? Can you remember?” I ask. Beth shakes her head.

“It wasn’t crows,” she says. And as she tells me, the scene slides into focus in my mind, as if it had always been there, waiting for Beth to point it out to me.

T
he Storton Manor summer party was an annual affair, usually held on the first Saturday in July. Sometimes we were there in time for it, sometimes not, depending on the school calendar. We always hoped to be—it was the one occasion when we wanted to take part in something of Meredith’s, because the lights and the people and the music and the dresses turned the manor into another place, another world. That year, Beth spent hours doing my hair for me. I’d been crying because my party dress had got too small for me, something we hadn’t discovered until I put it on earlier in the evening. It was too tight under the arms and the smocking pinched my skin. But there was no alternative so I had to wear it, and to cheer me up Beth braided turquoise ribbons into my hair, fifteen or twenty in total, which came together in a plume of curled ends at the back of my head.

“Last one—sit still! There. You look like a bird of paradise, Erica!” she smiled, as she knotted the last one. I tipped my head this way and that, liked the brush of the ribbons against the back of my neck.

Flaming torches marched up the driveway, reeking of paraffin and guttering in the night air. They made a sound like flags flying. There was a string quartet on the sun terrace near where long tables had been set up, draped with white cloths and loaded with ranks of shining glassware. Silver ice buckets on long legs held chilled bottles of champagne, and the waiters raised their eyebrows at me when I dipped my fingers in, filching ice cubes to suck. The food was probably wonderful, but I remember snatching a caviar blini, cramming it into my mouth and then spitting it into the nearest flowerbed. Adult conversation that we didn’t understand volleyed over our heads; gossip and hearsay bandied back and forth, oblivious of we little spies, infiltrating the crowd.

Most of our extended family, people I never see any more, attended, as well as everyone who was anyone in county society. A photographer from
Wiltshire Life
circulated, snapping the more attractive women, the more titled men. Horsey women with flat hair and big teeth, who wore garishly expensive evening gowns in shades of pink, peacock and emerald. They dug out their diamonds for the occasion—rocks glittering against freckled English skins. The whole garden was flooded with the smell of their perfumes, and later, when the dancing started, that of fresh sweat. The men wore black tie. My dad fidgeted with his collar, his cummerbund, not used to the stiff edges, the layers of fabric. Insects swirled around the lanterns like sparks from a fire. The lawns rang with voices and laughter, a steady roar that grew with the number of empty bottles. Only the fireworks silenced it, and we children stared, rapt, as the purple night sky exploded into light.

A whole crew of staff was brought in to cater the party. Wine waiters; cooks who took over the kitchen; waitresses to ferry the trays of hot canapés they produced; calm, implacable butlers who lingered indoors, politely directing people to the downstairs bathrooms and discouraging the curious from peering into the family rooms. It was one of these anonymous workers that Caroline attacked, inexplicably. She had been positioned in her chair on the veranda, near enough to the terrace to hear the music, but still within the shelter of the house. People drifted over to pay their respects, bending forward awkwardly so as not to tower over her, but they drifted away again as soon as it was polite to do so. Some of them Caroline acknowledged with a faraway nod of her head. Some she just ignored. And then a waitress went over with a smile, offered her something from a tray.

She was dark, I remember that. Very young, maybe only in her teens. Beth and I had noticed her earlier in the evening because we envied her hair. Her skin was a deep olive and she had the most luxurious black hair, hanging in a thick plait over her shoulder. It was as deep and glossy as ink. She had a neat rounded body, and a neat rounded face with dark brown eyes and apples high in her cheeks. She might have been Spanish, or Greek perhaps. Beth and I were nearby because we’d been following her. We thought her incredibly lovely. But when Caroline looked up and focused on the girl her eyes grew huge and her mouth dropped open—a damp, lipless hole in her face. I was close enough to see that she was shaking, and to see a frown of alarm pass over the waitress’s face.

“Magpie?” Caroline whispered, a ragged breath forming the word so loosely I thought I’d heard it wrong. But she said it again, more firmly. “Magpie, is that you?” The waitress shook her head and smiled, but Caroline threw up her hands with a hoarse cry. Meredith looked over at her mother, drawing down her brows.

“Are you all right, Mother?” she asked, but Caroline ignored her, continuing to stare at the dark-haired waitress with a look of pure terror on her face.