—63—
After the lull, the raids started up again midweek.
Mother was too ill to move, which meant I had to sit with her on the second floor, where I listened to every falling bomb with a fear that we would be buried any moment.
Bastet sat with me, as if she knew I was terrified.
An incendiary fell in the garden across the back, and I came out the next morning to see the fence charred.
When the all clear sounded, I washed Mother’s face and hands. She rambled, unaware of where she was, sometimes in India as a child, sometimes in America, sometimes with me as a little girl. This night, she asked for the letters from her husband.
“What letters, Mother?”
“The ones he wrote to me.”
“Do you mean your husband Leland, my father? Or your husband Garvey, the artist?”
“Oh, Garvey, of course.”
I considered thoughtfully, wondering where they might be. And if I found them, would she remember that she’d asked for them? “Letters when you lived in America?”
“No,” she said, as if it were obvious. “When I came back to England.”
She often confused events, but Garvey had passed away in California of stomach cancer. Surely she would remember that. Peter, who had returned from Kabul by then, had set her up in this house.
I hesitated, unsure how to answer in a way that wouldn’t upset her.
“Mother, I’m sorry, but Garvey died before you came back to England.”
“Oh, don’t be silly. He didn’t die. I left him.”
“I don’t think so. You loved him.”
“I adored him. But when it came to Elsie or Garvey, I was always going to choose my daughter. I had to save her.”
My limbs went ice cold. “Whatever do you mean, Mother?”
“From another broken heart. I loved Tanveer, of course, who would not, but he could not make her his wife, and she was living as his mistress. I feared she would not survive another shattered heart.” She took my hand, looking right into my Elsie eyes and not seeing me.
I wondered faintly who she thought she was addressing.
“Your husband did not die?”
“No.” Her eyes, so vividly blue, filled with tears. “For the rest of his life, he begged me to return, but a mother does what she must.”
A pulse hammered loudly in my ears. Was this true? Was she imagining some other reality that had never happened, smoothing out the painful loss of her husband to make another tale?
“I shall see if I can find the letters,” I said. “Where will they be?”
“In the blue hatbox in my closet.”
With a buzzing sensation along the edges of my brain, I opened the wardrobe. On a high shelf was a stack of round hatboxes, a pale-blue one on the bottom. One by one, I took them down, stacking them on the floor by my feet, until I freed the blue one.
With trembling hands, I pulled off the lid. Within were dozens of letters. Some were from me. Some from names I didn’t recognize in America, some from friends around England and India.
And there, in a cream-colored envelope, thin, with a light sketch of a desert landscape, was a letter from Garvey Martin, Taos, New Mexico, postmarked March 3, 1930.
Some four years after he supposedly died.
I flipped it over, lifted the flap, and unfolded the paper within. One page in a clean, readable script. Dearest Violet, he wrote—
Such fury filled me that I could not even see. Dropping the letter in the box, I left it on the floor and looked for a long moment at my mother, who appeared to have fallen asleep.
How could she have lied to me for so long? And what made her do such a desperate thing?
I wanted to scream at her, fling all the letters over her body, but I also wanted to fall against her hand and wail. What a terrible sacrifice, to leave a man and a world she loved to “protect” me!
And for what? For what?
Whirling, I stomped upstairs to my studio. The nudes I’d abandoned at the start of the bombing reclined against the wall, and I grabbed one, tied on an apron and began to paint, transmuting anger into art, my fear into life.
I am alive, I told myself. With every brushstroke, I am alive. I am alive, I am alive. Tears of fury and release ran down my cheeks. I painted a furious goddess, a demented Demeter.
I have seen the world. I am a witness to it, beautiful and terrible.
I am alive.
I am going to stay alive.
November 9, 1940
London
[In Urdu]
Dear Tanveer,
Tonight, I painted for hours and hours. There were bombs early, but they haven’t returned, and I left Mother sleeping.
I have not been back down to check on her, and I know I should go, but I am incandescently angry with her, and I don’t even know if I should be.
She is most desperately ill; two days ago her physician said simply that we can only keep her comfortable now.
He has left morphine for the pain, which makes her sleep, and when she wakes, she hardly knows who she is or when she is.
She rarely knows who I am—one day I am your mother, another my father, another some invisible confessor who knows all her secrets.
Tonight, she matter-of-factly told me that her husband in America did not die. She left him, and she did it to manipulate me to come back to England from India.
I write that and my hands shake all over again. I am so furious with her. I am heartbroken for her and for myself, and for you, for us, for everything that—
Oh, it doesn’t matter. You know.
And yet, I also grieve that my mother, my beloved, beloved mother, is fading. I grieve that I may never have an actual conversation with her again. How can I be angry and grieving and love her so deeply and feel so appalled at actions that have caused me—both of us—genuine harm, all at once?
I did not return to England because of her manipulations. I would not have. So why am I so very furious with her? And how do I make peace before she dies?
I feel quite lonely. I miss Betty’s competent cheer. I am mostly alone with my mother, who is no longer really here, and she is too ill to move to Nina’s as I’d hoped to do.
Enough of my sniveling.
One small beauty is the silver comb I found in the rubble when I went to visit Betty.
I’ve enclosed a drawing. It’s quite beautiful, and I polished it to wear, thinking of the woman who lost it.
Perhaps one day I’ll be in the market and she will see it and say, “That is the comb I lost in a raid. My grandmother gave it to me!” And I will happily, in peacetime, return it to her.
Fanciful, but one never knows.
Love,
Elsie