The Story She Left Behind

Chapter 53 Clara

CHAPTER 53? CLARA

Lake District, England

I was aware of Charlie’s presence as he entered the breakfast room before I turned to see him. Maybe it was the way Pippa’s face lit up, or possibly it was the way my body sensed him, but I took a breath to steady myself and turned. “Good morning,” I said.

“There you are,” he said, as if he’d been looking for me.

There you are.

Warmth spread through me, and I believed, for a breath, that I’d come to England just for this, for him, for the way he was looking at me right now. This felt… authentic and solid, not frantic or needy as before. But I didn’t have a record of smart choices in this arena, and I was careful, holding back the flood of feelings as best I could.

He walked to me, bent down, and kissed my cheek. He lingered long enough that Pippa smiled.

“Good morning, Son,” she said. “Sit.” She patted the chair next to her.

Pippa looked at Charlie with such love, the grief of Callum’s loss nearly palpable, as if I could reach out and touch the spongy softness of it between them.

What was very clear was that this house, land, and everything it touched, from family to water to fell, belonged heart and body to Philippa Jameson. It might not be the grand manor and acreage of Graythwaithe Hall down the road or have acres dotted with the Herdwick sheep of the Heelises’ lands, but make no mistake about it—she was the mistress of this landscape and all that rested within it.

It must pierce her heart to know that both her husband and my mother kept such a powerful secret from her.

“Mum, have you called Archie and told him… about everything?”

“Yes, luv, last night. He’s as shocked as we are.” She turned to me. “He’s very happy you solved the mystery of your mother. He’s a bit miffed Isolde deceived us, but I told him we’d give him more of the story later.” She then looked at Charlie. “And to you he said only one word I don’t understand, but I will pass it along: besotted. ”

Charlie laughed. “Oh, Brother.” Then he looked to me. “Where’s Wynnie?”

“Out with my mother.” I shook my head, shedding the cobweb tangles of the night and day before. I didn’t know who I was, not yet, but I was someone other than the woman who only a day ago saw a painting of her South Carolina house in the parlor.

“Mama!”

Wynnie ran into the room and into my arms. She smelled of pine sap, of frost, and impossibly of roses. Mother drew up behind her and kissed my cheek, lingered as if to make sure I was real and there in the breakfast room.

“Guess what, Mama? Guess what?” Wynnie jiggled left and right on the tips of her toes.

“Yes?” I asked.

“I made up a word.” She straightened her glasses. “Me! I made up a word.”

Mother laughed, and I knew the sound of it—an echo of something lost—and my heart reached for it. “She did,” Mother said. “Yes, she did, and it’s beautiful.”

“Can you tell it to us?” I asked. “Or is it a secret?”

“ Tilover ,” Wynnie said. “Do you want to know what it means?”

“I do,” I said.

“Yes!” Charlie said.

“Please,” Pippa chimed in.

Wynnie looked around the table and took a breath, lifted her chin, and declaimed: “To see only some of the world, but to feel all of it.” Her voice was so assured and grown-up that for a moment I saw the woman she would become, an object of wonder, a miraculum .

The days passed as we waited for Dad. Shadows drowned the valleys and then retreated like the tides in our backyard in South Carolina.

The geography of this place settled into me, a complexity of colors and shapes, a world reflected in a mirror-lake outside the window, a stream-carved land. I stood near the water, the russet clumps of marsh grass surrounding me, as I yearned to be enveloped by the lake, to dive to its deepest ice-carved bottom.

Mother and I walked along the paths and through the woodlands. We sipped endless cups of tea, and we cried. We talked and talked about the dailiness of our lives.

Through the past days I’d asked Mother so many questions—while we walked on woodland paths and while we ate across from each other at the dining room table, and while we listened to Charlie play music in the drawing room. She was patient with me, answering everything that bubbled up, and repeating her answers and stories as if I were a child, which in many ways I was again.

Had there been another man? Had she loved again? No, she told me. Did she ever think about coming home? Every day. Did she miss us? Every second.

“Do you want to walk to Moss Ecles with me?” she asked that bright morning, the wind and rain taking a break from their appearances. The weather in this place changed so dramatically that one might wake up in the morning to believe one had slept through an entire season.

“Whatever Moss Ecles is, yes,” I told her.

“A mile trek up the hill to a secluded and enchanting little tarn. I walk it almost daily.”

“Take me,” I said, with a deep need to see something, anything, my mother did nearly every day.

The pathway took us through trodden grasses and over muddy, pebbled trails. Over stiles and through gates, we continued upward, accompanied by the sound of our wellies splashing in the creek beds, the cry of unseen geese, and the creak of branches in the wind. The land swelled and sank as we walked. We reached a crest where a herd of sheep looked down on us, their placid faces watching in boredom from rocks beneath bare-limbed trees.

We didn’t talk but instead allowed the silence to draw us forward and together at the same time, as if the unsaid words were as important as the spoken. The last two days, I’d exhausted us both with my questions.

The stone walls led us forward until we turned a corner and I gasped at the beauty. “Oh, Mother!”

“Yes, I know.”

The tarn, the lake named after the Nordic teardrop, nestled in the pasture, a craggy outcropping of rocks on its shore. I climbed up the jagged rocks to look over the small lake with a little island in its middle. Geese flocked, and their honking was the only sound echoing across the fields and against the mountain range.

“This was Beatrix Potter’s favorite tarn,” Mother said as she joined me on the rocks. “She bought it with her husband.”

“You read her books to me when I was little,” I said. “I remember.”

A small cry of grief fell from her lips, and she reached her hand for mine. “I remember, too. I remember everything. Every moment. Every single moment with you.”

“I wish I did, too,” I told her.

“I will tell you whatever you want. I promise.”

The geese protested in loud honks, and Mother and I both laughed at their outburst, watched them skim the water as they flocked to the other side.

“You and Beatrix had a lot in common?”

She grew serious. “Yes, in some ways. Our secluded childhoods and creating languages, but she was more like you.”

“Me?”

“Your illustrations. Your strength. Your belief in yourself.”

“I don’t think that’s true, but I like that you see me that way.”

Then she told me legends of the area, from the Crier of Claife to the ghost stories of Calgarth Hall. We walked down the hill toward the hamlet of Near Sawrey, where my mother had lived her life since she’d left me. I viewed the village as a bird above the town, where whitewashed houses and slate roofs winked in the sunlight.

“Tell me more. More about your days here,” I said as we walked over a metal cattle guard.

And she did.

As we waited for Dad, I wrote snippets of the things she told me into a notebook, trying to make sense of her story, what sense there was of it to make. I found myself making a list of her years and where she’d spent them, doing what.

I deeply desired a narrative—this happened and this happened and then this happened and here is the reason. But that was a child’s dream—to make sense of the lost years.

She gave me reasons, but they could never drive out my feelings of abandonment and grief. Only her stories and truths had a chance of filling those places.

Each morning when I woke, a part of me believed I would find her gone, that after we’d informed her that her husband was on his way, she would again leave, afraid to face him above all. But each day she was still there.

Pippa, too, needed to understand who her beloved friend was, and they’d spent hours alone. Pippa and I weren’t battling for her attention; both of us needed answers that would not come in a few days’ time.

The second afternoon, Pippa found me at the end of the main hall as I stood by the Christmas tree in the foyer. “It’s beautiful,” I said, and touched a sterling silver ball with Charlie’s name and birth date etched on it.

“I had that made at his birth,” she told me. “One for each boy.”

“I cross-stitched one for Wynnie.”

“Do you believe they ever notice the small things we do for them?” she asked.

“I do. I think. I hope.” I turned to her. “I remember so many of the little things my mother did for me, but maybe that’s because I had to live off those memories. But I do and did notice.”

“I’m sorry for what happened. I really am. I can’t imagine what you have been through, and still, here you are.”

“I know it must be hard to understand that your husband kept this from you.” I spoke, hoping I wasn’t overstepping. Her tenderness made me feel I could confide in her, and I needed to acknowledge the misery she must feel. I wasn’t in this alone, and I wanted her to know I understood this. “If your husband had sent her away or called the police, I would not be here now. I would never have found her. She would have run again.”

“I’ve thought about that, too. I’m not happy he kept this from me, and somehow I also see the necessity of it. There are parts in all of us that we keep to ourselves; we need our private self, that’s true. And I can’t blame my husband for this. He was the love of my life, and I know I was the love of his. And what happened here does not take away from that.”

“Did you ever want another life?” I asked. “I think about that, about how she just up and made a new life with a new name.”

“I believe we’ve all wondered about living different lives, but that doesn’t mean we don’t love the one we have. We are given one finite life, and the alternates fade when we don’t choose them. But”—she stared off into the distance—“that doesn’t mean we don’t wonder.”

“Yes,” I said.

She smiled. Then a call came from the back hall, and she was off.

I considered making my way to the kitchen to try Nat one more time. I didn’t want to call his parents in Georgia and worry them, and I’d already called his place of work. The knot inside me that had started to form the first time I realized his gambling would destroy our lives grew tighter each day. Something wasn’t right with him, and there was no way of finding out unless he answered his phone.

Despite my best promises to myself to be careful with my heart and with his, I found my way to Charlie’s bed each night with a language that we hadn’t defined. I worried this was a charged lovemaking fueled by emotions that could never settle into something real and solid. I swung madly from anger to relief, from hurt to love, from confusion to clarity, and still each night we found each other.

One late night as we stood in the wan light of the kitchen, sneaking a cut of sponge cake and smothering it with clotted cream, I told him: “I want to be careful. I know it doesn’t seem like it, the way I come to you, but all my life I have been trying to fill this mother-shaped hole in my life.”

“I am not leaving.” He kissed me with the taste of sugar on his lips. “Do you regret this?”

“How can I? I have a tinge of guilt, that is true. I’m not being careful with our hearts or anything else. This is how I found myself married to Nat.”

“You married Nat because you were pregnant with Wynnie?”

“No! But because he was… my first.” I blushed. “And last, to be honest. Do you think less of me now?” I wanted to tease him, but I truly needed the answer.

He took me in his arms. “Less? Oh, it’s not possible to think anything but lofty thoughts of you, Clara Harrington. I am right smitten with you, and if we are making you feel guilty, we shall stop right now.” He lifted his hands in the air.

“Do not stop,” I told him. And he kissed me again.

On Sunday, Mother and I took a quiet walk down to Windermere Lake through the two hamlets of Near and Far Sawrey, along the winding road to a ferry dock. This lake was the largest of all fifteen, and Mother pointed across to a bustling town. “It’s a honeypot over there. We prefer the quiet of Sawrey.”

“A honeypot?” I asked.

“Meaning busy. Busy as a bee.”

“I love that,” I told her. “Such a good word.”

That evening, Mother, Pippa, Wynnie, and I sat around the drawing room. Charlie had gone into town to pick up the car from the repair shop, where the fender had finally been fixed after our collision with a cow during the awful day we’d driven here in the fog. I looked out the window at every sound, searching for his headlights. I yearned for him, and I tried to hide it.

Another Christmas tree had appeared in this room, and it glittered with tinsel and lights in the far corner. Dried fruit and bits and bobs of the outside world hung from its branches—nests and pinecones, bearded lichen and twigs and feathers. Two huge stuffed pheasants perched on the floor at its base. Pippa urged Wynnie to place all her treasures she’d found on the land onto the branches. She called it “Wynnie’s tree.”

“The sequel,” Mother said into the quiet.

I leaned forward and felt the questions about it I’d held tight bubble up. “Yes,” I said. “We still have it. The pages are safe in Bluffton, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Oh, dearest, I’m not worried about it. I never want to see the sequel again.”

“What?” Wynnie looked up from the book she was reading and exclaimed, “But I want to read it! I want to know what happens to Emjie.”