Chapter 48 Clara
CHAPTER 48? CLARA
Lake District, England
Charlie paced the small cottage. “Let me understand,” he said. “You are not my cousin, but I have called you such, and you’ve been here for over twenty-five years. You tutored me and were family to me.” I sensed the anger simmering below the surface of Charlie’s voice. “Were we only a place to hide?”
Mother stood and didn’t answer for a moment. Then she walked to the cupboard and gathered a chunk of cheddar cheese so yellow it looked like butter, along with freshly made bread. She set it on the table and passed out small white plates.
We watched her in silence until she answered Charlie. Her hands shook just enough to notice. “No, you were not just a place to hide. This is my home,” she said. “Your family and you are home. When I arrived here, I felt as if all the pieces of my life were scattered about the world and this place was a magnet, drawing everything that is me, that is of me, to one place. Even now it brings my beloved daughter and granddaughter.”
“Does Mum know?” he asked. “Does she know who you truly are and were?”
“No,” Mother said with a pained certainty. “All my life I have been trying not to inflict any more damage, and here I am doing so again. She will be hurt, that is true. But I love her like a sister, Charlie. You know that.”
“As she does you.” Charlie deliberately made his way to the small black phone in the corner of the kitchen. He dialed and then spoke quietly into it, his back turned to us.
Wynnie raised her hand as if in class; Mother and I laughed together. “May I ask something now?”
“Anything, my dear,” Mother said.
“Did you send Emjie to me?”
“You see,” I told Mother, “Wynnie latched on to Emjie after we read your book.”
Wynnie tapped my arm. “Mama, that’s not true. I met Emjie before you read me the book.”
“But you heard us talking about her.”
“No.” Wynnie was firm, and I allowed her this grace.
“How is my darling Emjie?” Mother asked Wynnie. “Does she still wear that ragged old dress of ferns?”
“She makes new ones,” Wynnie said. “Sometimes she wears real clothes, but mostly she doesn’t. No one really believes in her.”
“The eternal mystery—how do we believe in the make-believe?”
I’d heard Mother say this before; the memory was visceral and exquisitely painful. It was part of the sentence we’d translated and parcel of the life she’d lived. A farce if it meant leaving me.
“Yes,” Wynnie said with eight-year-old assurance. “Not everyone can do it.”
“You seem to believe in the mystery,” Mother said.
“I do,” Wynnie told her. Charlie hung up the phone and we glanced at each other and raised our eyebrows.
It was as if I’d walked through a portal and found myself in a land I could only imagine, one where my mother stood before me holding my daughter’s hand and talked about Emjie, as if the tangled lines of our lives had separated and been pulled back together by a tugging of time and space.
I could not stop the unfolding of it all now.
“Mother,” I said. “I have to tell you something.”
“Yes?”
“They’re gone. Most of the pages are gone.”
“Of the dictionary?”
“Yes. I’ve lost some.”
Charlie came near. “They were stolen; Clara didn’t lose them. In the journey out of London, we were robbed. Clara saved what she could.”
Mother nodded. “I left those for you, Clara, thinking they would mean something to you after I was gone. But there is no need for them now. I am here. You are here.”
With a burst of cold air, the cottage door flew open, and Pippa entered in a swath of tweed and wool and leather. “Well, well, who is having a gathering without me? Should I be hurt?” She laughed and slipped off her coat, added it to the bundle on the bench.
“Mum,” Charlie said.
“Let me.” Mother looked to Charlie. “Please.”
He nodded and pulled me closer, as if this was the way we usually were—holding on to each other in a storm.
Mother walked toward Pippa, took her hands, and spoke. “Philippa, I am Clara’s mother, Wynnie’s grandmother.”
Pippa’s brow furrowed and her head cocked as if she had heard a far-off sound. She looked at her son, at me, at Wynnie. “Isolde. I don’t understand.”
“I am Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham.”
“The author?” Pippa asked in a quiet voice.
“Yes.”
“So, you are not Isolde, Callum’s second cousin.” Pippa released Mother’s hands and stepped back, held out her palms as if forcing the truth away. “I remember the day you arrived,” Pippa said. “I remember it exactly, the sunshine of the summer afternoon, the way you touched the garden as if you’d already fallen in love with the place, the way my sons ran to you as if they already knew you. I remember it all. But it was… you aren’t the last of Callum’s family?”
My mother didn’t defend herself but bowed her head. Still, I could not take my eyes off her. I wanted to find all the women I’d imagined through the years.
Mother found the strength of her voice. “I love you. And the boys. You are my dearest friend and I’m sorry. Pippa, please hear me: nothing about our friendship or my love for Callum, Archie, Charlie, or you has ever been a lie.”
“You gave me that book. But it’s actually your book. You—”
“Yes, I found it in the local bookshop and brought it home to you. I wanted you to have some piece of me that I couldn’t share, a truth I could never tell you.”
Pippa reached for the wall to steady herself. “My God. Callum gone. You a stranger.” She seemed to sway in an unseen wind, and her hand shook as she lifted it to wipe at a tear.