‘Do you remember how you used to come here to play?’
Although it was bitterly cold, Martha had insisted that we walk round the garden together. We stood by the giant oak tree, inside whose vast, hollow trunk we had hidden as children. I rubbed my hand over the mossy bark.
‘Here’s where Claud and Theo and Paul carved their initials. We thought they’d last for as long as the tree. They’ve nearly disappeared.’
We walked on in silence. I felt that I was treading in the footsteps of my childhood. The barns, the fallen trees, the stone walls, the herb garden, the flat patch where there used to be a swing, the skeletal branches, emaciated shrubs. When the wind blew Martha’s jacket flat against her body, I realised how thin she’d become.
‘Are you all right, Martha?’
She stooped gracefully to pluck up a weed.
‘I have cancer, Jane.’ She held up her hand to stop me from saying anything. ‘I’ve known for a long time. It started as breast cancer, but it’s spread.’
I took her chilly hand in my own and stroked it. The wind rushed at us from over the brow of the hill.
‘What do the doctors say? What are they doing?’
‘Not much. I mean, they don’t say much, let me draw my own conclusions. And I’m not going to have chemotherapy or radiotherapy or anything, except pain relief of course. I’m sixty-seven, Jane, that’s a good time to get cancer: it advances more slowly.’ She laughed. ‘I’ll probably die of a stroke at ninety-three.’ Then, more soberly: ‘I hope so. I can’t imagine Alan managing very well on his own.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m really so sorry, Martha. I wish that there was something that I could do.’
We walked back towards the house hand in hand.
‘Martha,’ I said abruptly, ‘do you wish that the body had never been found?’
She looked at me strangely.
‘That’s not a question that makes any sense,’ she replied at last. ‘We found Natalie, and that’s that. If you mean, was I
She pushed open the back door.
‘Let me make you some tea.’
‘I’ll make it,’ I said.
‘I’m not dying yet, Jane; sit down.’
I sat at the kitchen table, and noticed that Martha had made piles of all the children’s books she had illustrated over the years. There were dozens. I started leafing through them. The pictures were familiar, of course, my own children had grown up on them, but still as wonderful as ever: funny, crowded and very colourful. She loved drawing large families: energetic grannies and harassed-looking parents and hordes of minute children with scabby knees and messy hair. There was lots of food in her illustrations — the kind of food that children love, like sticky chocolate cake, and wobbly purple jellies with bright yellow custard on top; mountains of spaghetti quivering on plates. And she loved drawing children running wild: over one double page spread a line of tiny, paunchy toddlers marched in red wellingtons; on another, children’s faces peered joyously through the branches of trees. I paused at a drawing of a small girl holding a daisy chain, while a stupendous orange sun set behind her. It was unusual for Martha to draw children on their own–usually they were outnumbering and overpowering the adults.
‘Before we found Natalie, Martha, were there ever times when you’d go a whole day without remembering her?’
It was the wrong question, I knew that, I knew the answer, yet I also knew that we had to talk about Natalie. Martha poured boiling water over the tea leaves, and lifted a large cake tin down from the cupboard.
‘What do you think?’ She put a ginger cake and knife on the table. ‘For a long time I felt guilty. Not just about her going, or dying, or whatever, though that too, of course. About our relationship.’
I waited.
Martha poured two cups of tea and sat down at the table. ‘My last memory of Natalie is of her shouting at me.’ She looked into her tea, then said, ‘No, that’s not what I mean really. My last memory is of me shouting at her. Of course we used to have lots of trivial rows, cigarettes on her breath, that sort of thing. And she would give me this slightly distant smile that she always had when she was being told off and it would make me angry. It’s the sort of row that is a part of being a parent, but this one we never made up. Sometimes I wonder if she died hating me.’ She gave a sad smile. ‘When Alan and I came back from that awful anniversary cruise and arrived at the big party, I wanted to talk to Natalie but there were so many people I had to see and I didn’t and then it was too late.’
‘Of course you blame yourself and feel guilty, Martha,’ I said, ‘and of course you shouldn’t.’
I remembered experiencing a shadow version of the same feeling when my mother died. In the weeks after her burial I’d been in an agony of loss, remembering all the times I’d criticised her, been contemptuous of her, not appreciated her, not thanked her enough, not had that final settling of accounts, when we’d somehow have reconciled ourselves to all the raggedness and imperfections in our relationship.
‘You have to remember the whole life, Martha, and not just the last weeks or days,’ I said, lamely.
‘I do. But the last quarrel somehow summed up all that was wrong with us.’ Martha looked at me steadily. ‘I’ve never said this to anyone, Jane.’
‘Said what?’
‘I’ve never told anyone about my quarrel with Natalie.’
‘What was the quarrel about?’
Martha picked up the knife and cut two slices of cake. She must have baked it for me when she heard I was coming. ‘Drink up your tea; it’ll get cold.’
I sipped obediently.
‘It was about your father and me, Jane. Our affair.’
I went on sipping my tea, but my hands felt very large and clumsy around the tea cup. Carefully, I put the cup back on the table, with an effort so that it wouldn’t spill.
‘Go on.’
‘I had had a brief affair with your father in the summer of the previous year. He and your mother were not getting on very well, and you know what Alan was like. He was away in America for much of the summer. I was lonely; all the children were growing up and I felt my life was slipping by.’ She stopped and made a sharp gesture with her hand. ‘Enough, I don’t want to make excuses for myself. I’m not proud of it, and it didn’t last long. We never told anyone. Christopher didn’t tell your mother; I never told Alan. And we were very secretive about it. We never wanted to hurt anyone.’
She took a very small, neat bite of cake.
‘Natalie found a letter Christopher had written to me. She must have gone through all my drawers. She confronted me with it: she wasn’t angry exactly, that was the funny thing, more triumphant. She said that I pretended to be so much better than Alan, and really I was just the same. She said she was going to tell your mother and Alan. She said’ — Martha’s voice was dry — ‘that it was her duty.’
Martha stopped, and the kitchen felt very still as she waited for me to speak.
‘Did she tell anybody?’
‘I don’t think so. Not that I ever knew.’
‘But she might have told Alan.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why are you telling me now, after all these years?’
Martha gave a weary shrug. ‘Perhaps because it’s a good time to uncover family secrets. Perhaps because I will die sometime soon, and I needed to confess, and I thought you might understand. Perhaps because you’re the one who’s rooting around for the truth.’
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t know what I was thinking. I tried to imagine my father with Martha, but I could only picture them as they were now: old, with papery skin and liver spots and stubborn habits. Martha turned back the pages to the drawing of the little girl and the setting sun.
‘That’s Natalie,’ she said. ‘I know it doesn’t look like Natalie, except the mouth maybe. But it’s how I always
