The Story She Left Behind

Chapter 58 Clara

The sky was as blue as the paint I’d used last night. I walked along the pavement of Hawkshead with Charlie. We were running Christmas errands for Pippa while she spent time with Isolde and Dad. So far we’d avoided talk of my leaving, of rebooking a ship, of Nat’s letter, or of finding our way to Southampton.

“What is Bluffton like?” Charlie asked as we passed under the shadow of St. Michael and All Angels church, its four-pointed tower above us on a hill.

“It’s a small town, much like this, but on the edge of a river. Technically it’s a bay, but goes by the name of the May River. It’s as rich in history and stories as this place, a land that once belonged to the Native Americans and then was gifted to Sir John Colleton by your king Charles II in the early 1700s. Savannah, Georgia, is right across the river on the back side of the town. I’ve never lived anywhere else except when I went to college in Atlanta, so I don’t know how to compare it to big-city living. Mom…” I realized I used the more tender name for her and felt a wash of comfort. I cleared my throat. “Mom and Dad once lived in Boston, but I’ve never even visited.”

“What does your hometown feel like to live in?”

“It is coastal, and it feels briny and rich with the beauty of a tidal coastline. Everything new is born in those marshes and estuaries that look like veins running through the body of our town. There are four churches—Baptist, Presbyterian, Catholic, and African Methodist. The first questions someone will ask are twofold: Who are your people? Where do you go to church?”

He laughed. “That defines an area, does it not?”

“Yes, but things are newer at home. This isn’t better or worse, I don’t believe. But compared to England, we are still finding our way as a country, and it almost tore in half during the 1800s. A lot of mending still to go. But the people? For the most part, the ones I know well and love are like all the people you have greeted while we run errands. My dearest friend, Lilia, lives there. We’ve known each other since kindergarten, and about once a day I think how I’d like her to be here, to see this.”

“You think she’d like it?”

“I think she’d love it. She’d see signs everywhere—that cloud means this, and that feather means that, and that shadow is telling us that we are doing the right thing.”

“Well, maybe we are.” He stopped in front of a small cottage on Flag Street, an overhanging portion of wall covered in slate. “Shhh. Listen. Do you hear that?”

The soft sounds of moving water. I looked around for its source and lifted my eyebrows in question.

“A stream,” he said. “A stream flowing beneath the slate.” He took a couple more steps and pointed at a break in the stones where the water rushed beneath us.

“A hidden stream beneath our feet.”

“Yes,” he said.

“We could make quite a lot of that, couldn’t we?” I asked. “All the hidden things that have been moving beneath our feet.”

“Ah, yes.” He smiled. “So, it was here they would come to wash the clothes. This was a wool town, and they’d wash here on Flag Street. Maybe we could make a clean wash of it?”

I nudged him with my hip. “Taking the metaphor one step too far.”

He threw his arm over my shoulders and lifted his chin. “St. Michael,” he said. “Up there on that swell of earth.”

“Yes?”

“Whenever you see a church named St. Michael, you’ll know they built it on top of a pagan structure.”

“Doesn’t seem quite fair.”

“Everyone builds on top of everything else,” he said. “Stories on top of myths, churches on top of pagan sites, tall towers on top of landfills.”

“Well, this town seems to have been here forever.”

“Oh no, it hasn’t. There’s an old Roman fort only a mile or so away. History marches on.”

“Yes,” I said. “And nothing stays the same.”

“Look at us,” he said. “Here we are, and less than two weeks ago, I had never laid eyes on you, and now our lives will never be the same.”

“No, they won’t.” I wanted to say more, to take his words and move into them instead of away, but I stopped in front of Hawkshead Grammar School as we moved along a back alley, juggling the greens and making our way to the butcher. “Such a hauntingly beautiful town,” I said.

“Everyone we pass,” he said. “I have a story about each of them, and they’ve known me since I was in a perambulator.”

“Yes, and the same at home, except it would have been a stroller.” I laughed. “And this has its flip side—they also know that my mother left us. It’s annoying to have pity fall on me sometimes, but they all mean well, and I know that.”

“Is your ex-husband from Bluffton also?”

“No, he arrived just as I came home from college. He was working at a bank in Savannah and living in a little place in Bluffton. We met at one of Bluffton’s finer establishments called the Crab Claw.”

“Is that similar to a social club in London?”

“Very similar.” I grinned in sarcasm. “Just add a jukebox, sawdust, and shrimp.”

He laughed, and the free sound seemed to expand large enough to encompass all that had happened these past weeks.

“We are formed of these things in our towns and cities,” I said. “The things that have made us into who we are. I have mine and you have yours. They aren’t so different.”

“Not so different as all that,” he said.

We walked and chatted while we purchased lamb flank from the butcher. We then paused in front of the theater. The hand-painted sign for Mother’s play hung a tad crookedly on the front of the wooden-slat building. The morning wireless had told us that the temperatures would hover around five degrees Celsius all day. I couldn’t quite convert that into Fahrenheit, but I was comfortable inside my wool hat and coat, beneath Charlie’s arm as he pulled me close.

“This was here,” I said while pointing at the sign for Mother’s play, “and I never knew. Think of all the things I don’t know!”

He laughed and then grew serious. “Do you know that the Lake District has the highest mountain in England and the largest lake?”

“No, I didn’t. How fascinating. Tell me more.”

“Did you know that in Penrith, right up the road, there is an ancient stone circle that is said to be a coven of witches, led by a woman they called Long Meg, and they were all turned to stone?”

“Now I do. Can you take me there?”

“Anytime,” he said. “I’ll take you anywhere.”

“More,” I said.

“Did you know that some say that they’ve seen the ghost of Uther Pendragon, the father of King Arthur, and he rides a great steed through the region?”

“Now that is something I’d like to see.”

“And did you know that I am falling in love with you?”

I held his gaze but found no words. I hadn’t been prepared for this. I hadn’t found a way to say the same myself. I didn’t doubt the growing love, it was evident and clear, but the saying of it would change everything, and then I’d have to decide whether to break our hearts or find a way toward each other.

I didn’t come to England to fall in love; I came to solve the mystery of my mother. I looked down. How could I utter words of love, how could I say yes to him when it would mean changing my life completely, upending it and for him, a life without children of his own.

Through the silence, he took me in his arms and uttered in my ear, “You don’t have to answer in kind.”

I leaned back. “What about never having a family of your own?”

“Clara, a life with you and Wynnie is a family. I don’t need a child with my hair and eyes. I need you. And Wynnie. And your love.”

“Charlie,” I said. “I’m not the traditional sort of woman you know here, or in my hometown, for that matter. It’s difficult to fit in and I doubt I would here, either. At least in Bluffton they are accustomed to my quirks and inability to be the exemplary housewife and PTA member.”

“Do you think your mother fit in? Beatrix Potter? Is there some sort of contract that states you must be a certain way to stay with me? Do you truly believe I fit in in whatever ways you imagine?”

“I look at Adelaide and at your mother, and at the women in town and in London.”

“And?”

“I’m not like them.”

“They aren’t like you.”

I couldn’t argue with him about this, make him see that although I didn’t fit the mold in Bluffton, they knew me, loved me mostly as I was. “I want so much, Charlie.”

“Well, I want a full and adventurous life, and I also want you, Clara, I want you and Wynnie and a life like no one else,” he said, and kissed me and kept me from the struggle to find my own words, for I didn’t know what to say.

After dinner that evening, we found ourselves again in the drawing room. This time, Finneas Andrews joined us for dinner, and much of the conversation was around the proper time to plant the dahlia tubers stored in the basement.

We talked about the headlines in the paper and the reports on the wireless that told of how the deaths since December 7 were greater than those in the worst week of the cholera epidemic in 1866, and the numbers were still rising. Dad looked at Charlie and again emotionally thanked him for saving us and bringing us here, when we surely would have been at great risk if we’d stayed in London.

Then Finneas told us all the story of a local farmer who believed he saw the beloved golden eagle they all thought might have gone extinct, and Wynnie begged to hike to find it.

“I’ll take you if you’re staying.” Finneas looked to me. I felt trapped by the question and answered with the truth. “We have our passports now and need to rebook our ship as soon as we can.” I looked to Dad. “You, Dad?”

“I’ve taken more than a sabbatical, ladybug. I’ve taken a leave.”

“Dad…”

“Papa!” Wynnie cried out and ran to him, snuggled near. “Aren’t you mad at Grandma?”

The room sat stunned with the outburst and question she must have held so close. Dad grinned at Wynnie and then grew serious. “I was, and maybe sometimes I will be again. But, my angel, we must forgive when we love. We forgive when we understand why.” He reached for Mother’s hand, and she took it. “For twenty-five years I have been waiting, and this is what I want. Clara, ladybug, what do you want?”

I wanted it all to mean something.

I wanted all of this to be about more than me, about more than awards for my drawings of a hedgehog. I wanted it to be about my mother, for God’s sake, and about my dad, and about Wynnie. I wanted to find out what was between Charlie and me. I wanted my life to be about art and creativity and doing exactly what I told my little class of eight-year-old artists— show me what’s inside.

What if Moira hadn’t taken that satchel out of the safe and placed it in Callum Jameson’s library? What if the fog hadn’t descended on the day we arrived in Southampton? What if what if what if.

Fate wasn’t so much in my control as I’d proudly once stated. But what I did with that fate—well, that was up to me.

My insides were a tangle of desires and needs, while one thing was clear: I would not do what Mother and Nat had done. Mother ran and left behind a language, pain, and a mystery. Nat ran to Nova Scotia for a job that would pay and a place where he could shed his mistakes, begin again, for us, he said, all for us. I didn’t believe a word of that. He was running from his mistakes as surely as my mother had from hers.

If I left here, was I running away from something meant for me or merely going home?

“What do I want?” I stood. “I want some air.”

The lake, the one I had first seen out the bedroom window when I believed I’d seen it before and forgotten it, something from another time and place, that forgotten lake now called to me.

I walked out the front door and made my way to the side of the house, where I stood on top of that hill, looking down at the glacial water. I walked the now-familiar path down the flagstone pathway, across the land, and through the pasture to Esthwaite Water. Emotions whipped inside me like the winds of a South Carolina hurricane. The spine of the fells rose above me, the skin of moss and fern, of willow and ash running along its body. The cry of the geese echoed from the place I disturbed them.

I imagined the waters in summer, feeling the relief of plunging into its glacial depths, of allowing the waters to fold over my head. The clouds layered themselves in strata and the breeze animated the leaves.

I’d illustrated this landscape for years now without knowing exactly what I’d been painting. I’d believed that everything I created on paper was a made-up land that I yearned to enter, a place where I could find myself at peace, but an imaginary peace.

In the dusk, everything fell away. The sky didn’t split open and spill its mysteries onto me instead of my mother, but I did for one brief and ineffable moment see the truth of it all: the searching, the wanting, the creating and illustrating, the buried desires and longings—all of it was life itself.

Longing means being alive.

I’d gone in search of answers to barely audible questions: What did I do wrong? Why did she leave me? I’d set out to find my mother and the truth, but the solved mystery of her disappearance answered only one question: the why of her leaving. And that why was hers alone. That wasn’t my answer.

For me, longing itself was the answer, the movement toward creativity and meaning and, yes, love.

I’d thought it all imaginary, but this reality was here all along. Mother had carried me here long before I showed up with Charlie Jameson.

So quiet—I was so very quiet, everything in me hushed and still. Here was the mystery—the lake was an antique mirror, silver and gray, the water still, the bulk of a scrubby island beyond—all while truth lifted inside me: I didn’t want to be anywhere else. I was not rushing toward the next thing.

I was ready for Charlie now. I was ready for Mother. I didn’t know exactly what had shifted or how, but there I was at the edge of a lake, my heart open for both of them. Something had been unmade in me these past weeks and was ready to be remade.

This was the sheer beauty of stillness.

Trust that stillness , my body said to me.

The lost words of my mother and the translation of her sequel were never going to answer the questions at the heart of me. The answer was in me—who I was in the world, who I loved, and how I forgave and lived and created. A pile of pages had never been the answer.

The way this place and these people felt is what I yearned for when I yearned.

They were what I wanted when I wanted.

They were what I attempted to create when I created.

I was wrong about forgiveness. I’d thought it a lion that might roar to life from the far corners, but it was quieter than that, much quieter. Forgiveness is a whisper of possibility, of openness. It was an act of restoration, an act of healing, an act of empathy.

Forgiveness, I understood, was only the beginning of what might come next, not the end of what had already happened.

A whisper of grass, and I turned to see him coming toward me. He hesitated a few steps away and I nodded: yes, come to me.

“Clara,” Charlie said when he reached my side, and I was in his arms. He held me and we gently swayed together, a willow tree. “?‘Love is most nearly itself / When here and now cease to matter.’?” He quoted Eliot, the lines Mother had taught us both.

“?‘In my beginning is my end,’?” I said.

“?‘In my end is my beginning,’?” he said, and held my face. “Here you are.”

“Yes,” I said with a great rush of truth. “Here I am.”