Chapter 44 Charlie
CHAPTER 44? CHARLIE
Lake District, England
Charlie stood in the hallway and heard Wynnie’s voice from behind the closed bedroom door. He didn’t want to intrude on their privacy, but he was curious how Clara felt about the gift he’d placed in the room for her.
If he could give Clara anything, it would be the truth about how her mother’s papers found their way into his father’s library. But he couldn’t give what he didn’t have.
He’d ruffled through the gabled room on the third floor to gather the paints and easel from the makeshift studio where Mum and her friends once painted, drinking tea during the day and gin fizzes at night. It’d been years since Mum went up there, and when he’d asked her if she might allow Clara to use the supplies, she’d been thrilled.
He planned a second surprise. He wanted to bring his father’s typewriter to Clara so she might type her mother’s words. For now, it sat in a small room off his parents’ bedroom on a wide pine table overlooking Esthwaite Water. Scarred and dented by decades of family use, the table was once at the center of the kitchen before the room had been modernized in 1932. Father had it carried to the alcove of the bedroom, where someone else might have put a plush lounge chair or couch with a reading lamp.
When Charlie was a child, there were nights when he would sneak from his bed to sit in the hallway and listen to the rhythm and dance of the typewriter keys, the click and clack, the song it made in the night hours when the rest of the house was asleep. One night Father left his room to make his way to the drawing room for a draft of whiskey and found Charlie asleep against the door, lulled by the lullaby of the clicking keys.
“Son.” His father knelt and shook Charlie’s shoulder.
Charlie awoke to investigate the face of the man he wanted to know more than he wanted anything in the world. He sat straight. “I’m… sorry.”
“Were you out here spying on me?” His grin in the brass sconce’s golden light told Charlie he was amused, not annoyed.
“I like the sounds the typewriter makes,” he said.
Father carried Charlie into the room with the typewriter. He set him in the lounge chair, tucked a wool blanket around his son. “Then let’s listen together.” And he sat to type again.
Another night, years later, in a London pub, Father sat in the audience—the room clouded with cigarette smoke and full of men lifting toasts—during one of Charlie’s performances. Father told all those around him: “That’s my boy. He started playing the drums because I played the typewriter.”
Charlie rolled his eyes. “Always back to you, right, Father?”
The men bellowed with laughter, and yet Charlie knew the truth of the offhand comment. Anything that Charlie loved was partially born from all that his father loved.
All those years his father was at the typewriter, Charlie hadn’t known what Father was writing. When Charlie asked if he could read what was on the pages, the response was: “They aren’t for reading. They’re just for writing.”
It had seemed such a ridiculous notion to a young boy. All those hours writing something that no one would ever see. What a colossal waste of time, he’d once thought. Now Charlie understood the need to express oneself without feeling that anyone could weigh in with their heavy opinions and half-cocked ideas.
It was a relief to know now that all that time his father was typing tales of the life he could not speak out loud. Bronwyn, Clara’s mother, made up her own language, and Charlie’s father hid his—both having untold stories that needed to find their way out.
Sometimes his father and Clara’s mother seemed to say in unison the same thing in different ways: the internal landscape of the soul needs to belong to oneself before it can be shared with others. Some creations were for the creator and no one else. The creative act as discovery, a quest for oneself.
Clara’s mother—she’d released her one book into the world for all to analyze and pick apart, to sift through and form their expectations about her. The world used her writings as a weapon against her, placed their own projections and shadows onto her. It was no wonder she kept her words hidden in a satchel.
Thoughts and questions jumped from tree to tree in his mind like a wild bird trying to decide where to land.
The reason his father owned that satchel itched at Charlie. Yes, it could be bothering him even more because Charlie seemed to be falling for the woman’s daughter, for her voice and bright laughter, for her insight, for her bravery and her kindness, for the way she looked at her daughter and protected her without smothering her. Clara was quite extraordinary, and since the moment he’d seen her at the front door, he’d wanted to kiss her, as he’d finally done two nights ago.
Now he wanted more.