mine alone. Knowledge of what’s to come spreads like frostbite, up my legs.
No, it is not knowledge I feel; my leg is weeping where I bumped it, cold, sticky liquid seeping down toward my shoe.
Someone taps my shoulder. ‘Dr Bradley?’ A man is bending toward me, his beaming face near mine. He takes my hand. ‘Grace? May I call you that? It’s a pleasure to meet you. Sylvia’s told me so much about you. It really is a pleasure.’
Who is this man, speaking so loudly, so slowly? Shaking my hand so fervently? What has Sylvia told him of me? And why?
‘… It’s English I teach for a living, but history’s my passion. I like to consider myself a bit of a local history buff.’
Sylvia appears through the tent’s entrance, polystyrene cup in hand. ‘Here you are then.’
Tea. Just what I felt like. I take a sip. It is lukewarm; I can no longer be trusted with hot liquids. I have dozed off unexpectedly one too many times.
Sylvia sits in another chair. ‘Has Anthony told you about the testimonials?’ She blinks mascara-clumped eyelashes at the man. ‘Have you told her about the testimonials?’
‘Hadn’t quite got round to it,’ he says.
‘Anthony’s video-taping a collection of personal stories from local people about the history of Saffron Green. It’s to go to the Historical Society.’ She looks at me, smiles broadly, ‘He’s got a funding grant and all. He’s just been recording Mrs Baker over there.’
She continues, with his help, to explain; occasional snatches jump out from the rest: oral histories, cultural significance, millennium time capsule, people in a hundred years…
Once upon a time, people kept their stories to themselves. It didn’t occur to them that folks would find them interesting. Now everybody’s writing a memoir, competing for the worst childhood, the most violent father. Four years ago a student from a nearby technical college came to Heathview asking questions; an earnest young man with bad skin and a habit of shredding the skin around his fingernails while he listened. He brought a little tape-recorder and a microphone, and a manila folder with a sheet of questions written out by hand. He went from room to room, asking whether people would mind answering questions. He found plenty of folk only too happy to volunteer their stories, to unzip themselves and let the contents spill. Mavis Buddling, for one, kept him busy with tales of a heroic husband I knew she’d never had.
I suppose I should be glad. In my second life, after it all ended at Riverton, after the second war, I spent much of my time digging around discovering people’s stories. Finding evidence, fleshing out bare bones. How much easier it would have been if everybody came replete with a record of their personal history. But all I can think of is a million tapes of the elderly ruminating on the price of eggs thirty years ago. Are they all in a room somewhere, a huge underground bunker, shelves from floor to ceiling, tapes lined up, walls echoing with trivial memories that no one has time to hear?
There is only one person whom I wish to hear my story. One person for whom I set it down on tape. I only hope it will be worth it. That Ursula is right: that Marcus will listen and understand. That my own guilt and the story of its acquisition will somehow set him free.
The light is bright. I feel like a bird in an oven. Hot, plucked and watched. Why ever did I agree to this? Did I agree to this?
‘Can you say something so we can test the levels?’ Anthony is crouched behind a black item. A video camera, I suppose.
‘What should I say?’ A voice not my own.
‘Once again.’
‘I’m afraid I really don’t know what to say.’
‘Good,’ Anthony pulls away from the camera. ‘That’s got it.’
I smell the tent canvas, baking in the midday sun.
‘I’ve been looking forward to speaking with you,’ he says, smiling. ‘Sylvia tells me you used to work at the big house.’
‘Yes.’
‘No need to lean toward the microphone. It’ll pick you up just fine where you are.’
I had not realised I was leaning and inch backwards into the seat curve with the sense that I’ve been chastised.
‘You worked at Riverton.’ It is a statement, no answer required, yet I cannot curb my urge to comply, to specify.
‘I started in 1914 as a housemaid.’
He is embarrassed, for himself or for me I do not know. ‘Yes, well…’ He moves on swiftly. ‘You worked for Theodore Luxton?’ He says the name with some trepidation, as if by invoking Teddy’s spectre he may be tarred by his ignominy.
‘Yes.’
‘Excellent! Did you see much of him?’
He means did I hear much; can I tell him what went on behind closed doors. I fear I shall be a disappointment. ‘Not much. I was his wife’s lady’s maid at the time.’
‘You must’ve had quite a bit to do with Theodore in that case.’
‘No. Not really.’
‘But I’ve read that the servants’ hall was the hub of a household’s gossip. You must have been aware of what was going on?’
‘No.’ A lot of it came out later, of course. I read about it, along with everybody else, in the newspapers. Visits to Germany, meetings with Hitler. I never believed the worst charges. They were guilty of little more than an admiration for Hitler’s galvanisation of the working classes, his ability to grow industry. Never mind that it was off the backs of slave labour. Few people knew that then. History was yet to prove him a madman.
‘The meeting in 1936 with the German ambassador?’
‘I no longer worked at Riverton then. I left a decade earlier.’
He stops; he is disappointed, as I knew he would be. His line of questioning has been unfairly cut. Then some of his excitement is restored. ‘1926?’
‘1925.’
‘Then you must have been there when that fellow, that poet, what’s- his-name, killed himself.’
The light is making me warm. I am tired. My heart flutters a little. Or something inside my heart flutters; an artery worn so thin that a flap has come loose, is waving about, lost, in the current of my blood.
‘Yes,’ I hear myself say.
It is some consolation. ‘All right. We can talk about that instead?’
I can hear my heart now. It is pumping wetly, reluctantly.
‘Grace?’
‘She’s very pale.’
My head is light. So very tired.
‘Dr Bradley?’
‘Grace? Grace!’
Whooshing like wind through a tunnel, an angry wind that drags behind it a summer storm, rushing toward me, faster and faster. It is my past, and it is coming for me. It is everywhere; in my ears, behind my eyes, pushing my ribs…
‘Call a doctor; someone call an ambulance!’
Release. Disintegration. A million tiny particles falling through the cone of time.
‘Grace? She’s all right. You’ll be all right, Grace, you hear?’
