CHAPTER 34 #2
Near the bottom of the pile were some older pictures, in sepia, the edges crimped and frayed.
One was of a couple – they looked like husband and wife.
The man, who wore a flannel blazer and striped trousers, had a thick beard and an unruly head of hair; he was big, smiling and looked like quite a character.
Joanna took to him immediately. He seemed rather familiar too – a resemblance to another family member perhaps?
She peered closer. He had kind eyes. The woman, though, looked thin and stern.
She wore a long dress with lace at the neck, but there was no elegance about her.
Her dark hair was scraped from her face and she was glaring at the camera, oblivious to the smiles of the man by her side.
They might, Joanna supposed, be William and Edith, her great-grandparents. No way could this woman be Emmy.
Downstairs, she heard a door closing. She’d better go down and check everything was OK – in a minute.
In another photograph, the same man looked more subdued.
On this occasion he was wearing a more formal white shirt with stiff collar and necktie and some sort of morning coat.
His wife, in a high-waisted dress and wide-brimmed hat, was holding a baby wrapped in a white christening robe.
Was this Joanna’s grandfather George? At any rate, at least she knew the man and woman were husband and wife and that they’d had a baby. It was progress – of sorts.
‘Well, now,’ she murmured. The next breakthrough came with the photograph of a boy in a sailor suit and two girls dressed in knee-length dresses with lacy hems, wearing hats over their long curly hair.
The boy was clearly the man of the previous photos – already, he had the same hair – and on the back in the faintest of italic scripts, she could just make out: William, Mary and Elizabeth.
So, she’d been right. The man with the wild hair and kind eyes was her great-grandfather William and these were the two girls, his sisters, the two possible Emmys.
She continued looking through the photos and found another where the girls were a bit older, this time dressed in white ruffled high-necked blouses and long dark skirts.
She sat up straighter. How could she tell if one of them was Emmy?
Elizabeth was the older and her name was the more similar.
In 1913, the year that the Lisbon and Prague letters had been written, she would have been thirty-three.
Even if Joanna discounted the figures she’d seen in Venice and Lisbon – because there was no proof that that girl was Emmy, of course – in the letters, Joanna’s Emmy sounded younger and more eager, and anyway, Elizabeth didn’t look the artistic type.
Joanna could imagine her helping on the farm, but not painting bridges somehow.
Mary was taller, but only a year younger than her sister, and in contrast to her brother, she looked very serious.
She could be Emmy, but how could the name Mary become Emmy?
And how could someone so dour-looking write letters that bubbled over with life, love and a creative spirit? No, it was surely impossible.
Joanna had to concede: as fascinating as these photos were, so far as Emmy was concerned, she had drawn a blank.
She could still hear voices. Whoever it was had been here rather a long time.
Joanna felt a twinge of foreboding. And where had Harriet got to?
She scrambled to her feet and went down the stairs, taking the photographs with her to show Mother – just in case she could shed any light – aware that she’d let the past take over and forgotten the responsibilities of the present.
Whoever was here had come round – she checked her watch – an hour ago, five minutes after Harriet had left the house.
A coincidence? Probably not, come to think of it. Oh, dear.
‘Mother?’ she called.
They were in the kitchen and she could hear her mother giggling like a girl.
A young man with spiky black hair and a T-shirt proclaiming that Vampires Rule the World was sitting at the kitchen table, in front of him a mug of tea and a half-eaten slice of Harriet’s Dorset apple cake.
Her mother, wearing a dress of deep fuchsia and a black mohair wrap, was standing next to him, a glossy brochure in her hand. More brochures littered the tabletop.
‘Oh, hello, Joanna, darling,’ she said. And then, ‘The Rosebud is delightful,’ to the young man.
The Rosebud is delightful? It sounded like a secret code to Joanna. ‘Hello,’ she said pointedly to the man. He didn’t look like a salesman, but the brochures looked suspiciously like—
‘Cool,’ he said. And, ‘Conservatories,’ to Joanna.
‘Conservatories,’ she repeated. He had wicked blue eyes. Joanna blinked at him. Would he be safe with Mother?
‘This is my daughter Joanna,’ her mother said. ‘And this is Craig.’
Craig?
‘I’m the builder,’ he said. ‘These are some of the designs I could do for you.’
Ah. Joanna picked up one of the brochures. The Rosebud Room, so named because of the all-inclusive romantic touches. Stained-glass rosebuds, pink-stained wood, Venetian blinds of shell pink. What would Harriet say? She didn’t want to think about it. ‘We’ll let you know,’ she said.
‘Great.’ Craig took another bite of cake. Didn’t he have another job to get to? Joanna checked her watch again. Where was Harriet? And more to the point, what would she say when she got home and heard about this? If Rosebud man was still here when she got back, she’d go ballistic.
Her mother had put the kettle on for more tea and she was humming. It sounded suspiciously like ‘Gimme Gimme Gimme a Man After Midnight’.
Oh, God, thought Joanna. She’d better get him out of here. Fast.