The Story She Left Behind

Chapter 39 Clara

CHAPTER 39? CLARA

Lake District, England

Charlie played his drum, oblivious to my presence in the entry of the drawing room. The beater moved rapidly, the wooden bulbs blurring in the dim light. The fire burned to embers while he sang in a language I didn’t know but sensed in my chest.

The song rose from the earth, a hum of soil and rock, of grass and tree, of flower and leaf. He faced away from me, and I knew that if I saw his face, it would be transformed. I felt like a voyeur, but I could not walk away from this sound and his voice.

I’d tucked Wynnie into bed, and she’d been asleep before I’d kissed her forehead. With the energy of the night buzzing through me, I couldn’t sleep, so I’d made my way downstairs to sit by the fire, but instead found Charlie in the drawing room.

He finished and then turned to me as if he’d known I was there all along. He smiled and the leftover aura of the song saddened the edges of his eyes.

“That was incredible,” I said softly.

“Well, thank you.” He set the drum on a side table. “You all right?” he asked.

“I think so. You?”

“Maybe?” he said. “What an odd thing how our families are tangled, and we knew nothing at all.” He shook his head. “Not an inkling.”

“Yes,” I said, walking into the room and settling down on the couch nearest to the burning fire. “There’s obviously much we don’t know about our parents. But tell me something you do know—tell me about that song.” I nestled into the corner and pulled the wool throw around my shoulders.

“It’s an old song, too ancient to give you the true origins. But it always settles me when I’m unsettled. It’s about a woman who waits for her lover to return from sea. ‘The Moorlough Shore,’ it is called.”

“Can you translate it for me?”

“It is probably maudlin and oversentimental in English. ‘Seven long years I wait for him by the Moorlough Shore.’?”

“Waiting,” I said. “Waiting and waiting. I know this feeling.” I meant to sound light and free, but instead my voice was tight.

“Oh, Clara, I don’t know what exactly to say, because that’s a horrible thing to endure.”

I pushed aside the emotions. “Tell me about this language, about the Celtic language.”

He honored the way I’d moved past the subject and sat on the other end of the couch, twisting to face me. “I’m no expert. I wish you could talk to my father.” He pulled a face. “Of course, we all wish we could talk to my father. What I know is that he’d say Irish Gaelic is one of the oldest languages. Some think it is the Adamic language.”

“Adamic?”

“First language. The language Adam spoke. The language he created to talk to God. The language all others came from, but there is scant proof of that. The idea has some advocates, and it’s a lovely idea, although ultimately unprovable.”

“An original language,” I said. “I never gave that much thought. The first language—the one all others came from.”

He moved closer so our knees touched. “Yes. And what Father would tell us is…” He closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them. “He’d tell us that every culture infuses its language with a sense of who they are as a people, as a person, as a community. It shows us what they value, what they love, what they think about, how they label the world.”

“Then for my mother to make up her own words, she felt that none of the other languages could define her life for her. If it’s true that we make a language from what we are made of, then I can say this—Mother was made of deep emotions, of land and of nature. She hated being inside unless all the windows were open, even in winter.”

“Language carries our sense of self, and it’s possible she felt that the language she knew wasn’t enough. But every language, every story, every song, is built on the ones before it. Some words migrate across countries and centuries. I see the roots of other languages in your mother’s words, and she has also made them her own.”

“I don’t know her well enough to say. It’s terrible, but I don’t know her well enough to agree or disagree with you. I wish I could, though. The mother I knew was my childhood mommy, not the woman I read about in that biography.” I paused. “But maybe we all aren’t so different. I make sense of the world through images, you through music, and my mother through language.”

“Maybe it’s all the same?”

“Yes, but no matter how alike we are, we are different in one essential way. I would never leave my daughter. Never.”

“You must have some inkling of why she left.”

“I do—but it’s what I heard you call bollocks. I’m assuming that means—”

“Bullshit.”

“Yes.”

“What are your mother’s bollocks?” He tried not to smile, but it was a futile effort.

“That I’m better off without her as a mother.”

“It’s not true?”

“No, it’s not.”

“But she thought it was.”

“Or so I am told.” I waved my hand through the air. “Enough of that. I don’t know her, obviously.”

“Clara,” he said gently, “my mum has been in my life all along, and do I actually know her? Not fully. Can we ever really know our parents?”

“But you have her. You have her here, and you can ask what you want to know. You might not get to the deep truth of her, but she’s here. Mine is not.”

“I’ve never asked you, Clara. What do you think happened to her?”

“It depends on the day or season of my life. If I’m going to settle into this day, into this night, I would say she survived, continued writing, and somehow your father has her language. Why? I don’t know.”

“Do you think it could be… I mean… when Mum mentioned Eliza. Do you think it’s her?”

“I don’t know, Charlie. I’ve hoped for so many people to be my mother that what is one more? To think that I was illustrating Mother’s books and that she might have been here and is coming here? I just can’t wish anymore for those kinds of things.” I paused and moved closer to him. “I watched your mother’s face earlier, and she truly didn’t know about the satchel.”

“You’re right,” he said. “I believe she is hurt.”

From the back of the house came laughter and Moira’s voice.

“The kitchen,” he said with a smile. “Where our family or anyone living here gathers in the mornings and evenings, where everyone gossips and has a chin-wag before they head to their cottages or rooms. Most kitchens are cut off from the house, but Mum knocked the wall open, so it feels more like a gathering place than a secluded kitchen. You’ll find Mum rolling the dough for pie as readily as the cook preparing dinner.”

“When was the last time your father was here?”

“A month before he passed, we threw a lavish party for his fifty-sixth birthday.”

“Charlie?” I leaned closer. “Have you asked your brother?”

“I have. He knew nothing of your mother or the papers. Listen…” Charlie stared off. “My brother and I are thick as thieves, two knights fighting the dragon, two boys who knew they’d conquer the world together, and if he knew anything, he would tell me. We might be very different now, but he wouldn’t lie.”

“How so different?”

“Life. Growing up.” He absently twirled the drumstick in his hand. “There have been articles written about our family in the society pages. They say that Archie and I split the personality of our father into two parts: logical and mystical. Logos and mythos. Maybe we believed that? Maybe it’s true? I’m not sure. But Archie has always been interested in the financial and political world of power. I have always been fascinated by the world of music and literature. Even so, it’s not that simple. I enjoy running the financial division of the company and I have a head for it, and there was a time when Archie played the piano and read the same adventure novels I did. But the separation grew over time. We chose different universities—I studied at Oxford and Archie at Cambridge. But that doesn’t change the core of us.”

“I’ve always wanted a sister. Or a brother.”

He placed the drumstick on the table as if just remembering he held it.

“And maybe I do have a brother or sister and just don’t know about it,” I said. “My mother’s history is a blank book and I’ve filled it with so many stories, but it’s all written in disappearing ink. If she took her life, which most assumed she did, she was trying to cure her own pain and I am devastated for her. If she ran away, she was a cruel woman and left her daughter and husband. How am I to know whether to mourn her or be angry at her if I don’t know which is true?”

“I believe you’ll find out what happened to her. She left you those words for a reason, and I don’t think it’s just to carry it on and translate her sequel. It’s for you, which means there is something in it for you.”

“But most of it is gone, Charlie. It’s a meager list now, that’s all. It won’t translate her sequel to discover if there are any secrets hidden in it for me.” Sadness swooped through my chest like birds. “I don’t think she left it for me so I could find her in the world. I think she just wants me to find her in the language. That needed to be enough.”

“Oh, Clara.” He took my hand in his, wound his fingers through mine.

The laughter and chatter from the kitchen faded now. A light flickered and swayed across the landscape as someone walked to their cottage.

“Will you play another song?” I asked.

He hesitated and then nodded. “Do you have any requests?”

“I don’t even know enough to request something. You choose. One of your favorites.”

He picked up the drum and stood in front of me, ran the stick across its hide.

I didn’t look away as his lips moved around the foreign words that carried more inside them than I understood. He closed his eyes for much of the song, and his hands seemed to have a life of their own.

He finished and again sat facing me. He wiped a tear from my cheek. “It’s a mournful one, for sure.”

“What is it about?”

“A mother.”

He placed the drum on the ground and set the beater on the table. Then he took my hand and leaned forward. I closed the last inch between us, for I wanted that kiss as much as I’d wanted any before. His lips came to life beneath mine, and for the first time in years, my body awoke to touch. His hands found their way into my hair.

I was lost in that kiss, forgetting all that brought me here. The anxiety of the past days fell away, a waterfall over a cliff.

It had been so long since I’d felt this need, this unrelenting desire. So long. I’d been waiting for this, I now understood. Waiting for this every day since he arrived at the flat with his drum case.

A door closed and I startled, returned to who I was and where I was—Wynnie’s mama in a house that held the secrets about my mother. I pulled away from Charlie and dropped my face into my hands. “I’m sorry. That was… I’m sorry.”

He placed his finger under my chin and lifted my face to his. “I’ve wanted to do that since the moment you walked through my front door.”

A door slammed, the patter of feet, and then the call: “Mama.”

I touched his cheek, and I was gone.