After Emma

It was during one of those necessary meetings, the kind that can not be avoided despite the wishes of all concerned, that the first pieces of the puzzle were discovered. This particular encounter was in honour of the birthday of the eldest of the three women. Edith's eighty-three years had not softened her sufficiently to make her gracious in the company of her daughter and granddaughter. In fact age had smoothed away the edges of politeness and removed the shroud of decency that still hung stiffly before Edith's only daughter, Josephine. Josephine was a woman aware of living in the shadow of a matriarch in whom life seemed to have an endless light. While the light flickered through various ailments and illnesses common in a woman of her age, in Edith it showed no signs of extinguishing. The last of the trio was Laura, young enough to be indifferent to age but old enough to understand that it snapped around her mother's ankles. She had no warmth of feeling for either of her el!
ders as they sat sipping tea in the living room of the old family house.

There was little conversation between them. The gas fire burnt vigorously, fighting the growing gloom. Edith's weak eyesight could not detect the dusk and they sat in almost darkness before she yanked at the cord of the lamp by her side. As Laura's eyes recoiled from the sudden brightness, images of stereotypical torture techniques came to mind. She smiled grimly to herself at the thought of her grandmother interrogating some poor victim about their promiscuity, racial background or personal hygiene.

She had not been told, or even asked to come. There was no reason for her being there apart from a sense that they had always done this. It was part of the structure of her life that she should find herself in the old Georgian house in the middle of October every year. When she had arrived her mother had been making the tea. She had watched her thin frame leaning over the sink as she swilled warm water around the pot three times, poured the water away and repeated the process twice, before carefully spooning in the tea, concentration furrowing her brow. They had greeted each other with a single word though it had been several months since their last meeting. This was not unusual. They had never shown each other much affection. They were not tactile people.

There was a smell about the house that Laura could not identify but it had always been there. It was not unpleasant, merely characteristic of her Grandmother's house. Her mother had grown up in that house with its dark panelled hallway and creaking stairs, and some relics of her youth remained in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Laura had spent some time in the house herself though she had been too young to know why or for how long. Her memories of that time were vague but the sense of uneasiness that accompanied them vivid. She tried to imagine her mother as a child but the image of the face with it's cropped greying hair and fine lines around nervous eyes would not become youthful in her mind. Even the photos she had seen seemed alien, as if they had been taken in another world, of someone to whom she had no relation. In reality, too, there was a distance between them. It was not something Laura questioned, things had never been any other way. She did not despise her mother, but nor did she care much for her.

Dislike was what predominantly characterised her feelings towards her grandmother, although this might suggest greater sentiment than really existed. Edith struck her as an obstinate and selfish woman who used cruelty to her advantage if she was so disposed. This streak of meanness that had run through the blood of Edith Banks for eighty-three years had been frustrated by her granddaughter for a quarter of that time. As a young child she had appeared immune to the snipes and insults and they had failed to extract a reaction from her since. While Laura remained stubbornly unaffected, she was neither oblivious of her grandmother's intentions, nor her mother's silence in the face of such audible contempt. With this awareness she had grown self-sufficient and while she did not hold a grudge against either, there was no love between Laura, Josephine and Edith.

That the elder mother and daughter were strained in each other's company was as solid in Laura's mind as the walls of the old house. Detachedly as she grew, she had observed that mothers and daughters did not always treat each other in this way. Such observations were filed away in Laura's mind unemotionally as she constructed her view of the world. However, her mother's weakness to the whim of Edith often incited a feeling of disgust in her. She guessed that Josephine's silence concealed a sense of panic. She could see it in her now as she repeatedly smoothed her skirt or straightened the lace doily underneath the vase on the table by her side, sitting stiffly, as always in her mother's presence. Edith was a controlling woman who had managed to secure her own way for most of her life. How much pleasure she found in bullying was not clear but she was not a woman who often experienced remorse, that feeling being usually accompanied by a sense of wrong doing, with which Edith was not familiar.

"What are you smirking at?"

"I didn't realise I was smirking. I was just thinking."

"Well you were"

"Ok, I'll stop now"

Edith's eyes bore deep into her granddaughter. "I suppose you'll be rushing off somewhere now will you? To one of your boyfriends no doubt."

"No, I'm not going anywhere this evening"

"Makes a change"

Laura refused the bait and stared vaguely at a seam in the wallpaper. Her Grandmother’s harsh words continued to scratch at the thick atmosphere in the room.

"Will you please stop fussing over that doily Josephine. Can you not sit still? You're a grown woman, for goodness sake. It's enough to drive anyone mad, your patting and poking. Just leave it alone."

Josephine shrank back into her chair and drew her long fingers into her lap where she pulled at a thread on her skirt. There was silence for a minute before she ventured to restart the conversation.

"So, have you enjoyed your birthday so far, Mother?" It was partly Josephine’s voice that made her seem pathetic in Laura’s eyes. So thin and watery, it seemed to trickle into the cracks of conversation, always receding in the face of confrontation as if dragged away by a tide.

"Yes, yes, it's all been very proper, I suppose, although that awful woman from the church insisted on coming round and boring me to tears with stories of her grandchildren. I don't know why she thinks I'm interested, I'm sure I don't give her any encouragement. But off she goes, so sanctimonious it makes you sick, about how one boy has got into some university and another girl is getting married in the summer. That's a joke! I've seen photos of her - great fat lump she is. If she is having a wedding, and I can't believe it myself, what a site she'll look walking down the isle! And to top it all off she's marrying a coloured fellow. You'd think they'd want to keep something like that quiet, not go round telling anyone who'll listen."

"Oh please! Do you think we could have a conversation without being offensive for once?” Laura sighed.

"Hark at her! It doesn't take her long to get on her high horse does it? I think I have a right to say what I like in my own house, especially on my birthday. You can leave your sensibilities at home if you don't mind, I won't be told what I can or can't say."

"Fine, but if you're going to carry on like that then I'm going to leave the room"

"Laura..." Josephine's weak attempt at defusing the situation was ignored.

"I'll say what I like. If it offends you I can't be held responsible. No doubt hanging around with the sorts you do has softened your head. Mind you, you’ve always been ungrateful. Lord knows we tried with you, not that you'd care, you just like to throw it back in our faces...that’s right have a tantrum, off you go"

Laura crossed the room causing the teacups to rattle in their saucers despite her attempts to remain composed. She resisted slamming the living room door.

The drawing room had an immediate calming effect. It was cool compared to the stuffy lounge and Laura felt her pulse return to normal as she stepped into the room. It had been used a lot by her Grandfather before he died. He had painted and written journals in there, more than likely to escape his wife. Laura had been very young then and her memories of him were few but she knew he had been kind. This had always been her favourite room in the house. An old out of tune piano stood against one of the walls with a stool covered in a very frayed and faded tapestry. She sat on the stool with her back to the piano and looked about her soaking in the details. It had become a game she had played when she had stayed in the house before. She would start at one end of the room and move her gaze to the other, slowly trying to absorb as many of the details as she could. Then she would close her eyes and test herself on what she could remember. When she got sent upstairs to her bedroom for some misdemeanour or other she would test herself again and pretend she was in the drawing room with all the comforting things that belonged to her Grandfather. She looked now at the yellow shark's tooth, the magnifying glass, the African mask, ancient books, a huge daunting portrait of a long-dead ancestor looking down at her, and felt soothed.

She moved towards the mantle-piece and picked up the shark's tooth with its marble-smooth exterior jaggedly interrupted by the sharp break where she presumed it had been ripped from a dead or at least very much disapproving shark. As she held it her attention was caught by a scruffy shoebox underneath the mahogany table in the corner of the room. The angle at which she had been sitting before had prevented her from seeing it but now it attracted her interest. Picking it up, she discovered it contained some old letters and documents, along with the odd photo. She slumped onto the rug in front of the fireplace, intrigued, and began to leaf through the contents of the box. On the whole there was nothing of great significance: a copy of her grandparents' passports, correspondence from charities and a couple of letters from people she guessed were old friends or relatives who were probably dead now. The photos were better though most were very old black and white pictures and she did not recognise many of the faces. There was one of her Grandfather behind a swing on which sat a small child, almost certainly Josephine. Happiness shone out of both of their faces.

At the bottom of the box, underneath all the letters and other documentation was what looked like a piece of card board folded in two. Laura almost over-looked it but as she tried to shuffle the papers back into some kind of order it fell open and revealed a more recent photo of two little girls. The younger of the two looked two or three years old and beamed mischievously up at the camera. Laura recognised herself immediately. The other girl, three or four years older, looked familiar. As she studied her Laura felt something similar to déja-vu, like a smell that for a split second transports you to another place, but too quickly for you to grasp where. Recognition slipped around in the forefront of her mind but evaded her possession. She felt the tear running down her cheek before she realised she was crying. She could not take her eyes off the girl with the long wavy blond hair wearing a stripy red and blue swimsuit who held her hand and smiled.

She wasn’t sure how long she had sat on the floor staring at the photo when she emerged from a trance-like state, disturbed by the deep chiming of the grandfather clock in the hall. She felt heavy as if she had been woken from sleep as she pulled herself up, the photo still in her hand. As she entered the living room her grandmother stopped mid-sentence and looked at her.

“Got over your little huff, have you?”

“Who’s this?” Laura put the photo before her mother’s eyes

“Who’s who?” Edith’s aggressive question went unanswered.

As Josephine looked closely at the photo her shoulders began to sink around her and she shrank before Laura.

“Oh, Emma…” The words were accompanied by a sigh of deflation as her face paled and her eyes filled with pain.

“Who is it, Mum?”

Josephine said nothing but stared at the girl in the photo as if lost in some inaccessible interior place.

“Be quiet now, Laura, you’re upsetting your mother. Put that away and go and put the kettle on.”

“Tell me who she is. Who is Emma?” Laura could feel herself getting upset. The sheer frustration of being denied information was aggravating the other feeling, the one she could not identify that had begun in the drawing room.

“Who is it, for God’s sake tell me” Laura got down on her knees in front of her mother’s chair so that their faces were level. She searched for a sign in her mother’s features but they remained blank. An impenetrable curtain had been dropped in front of her eyes.

“What is wrong with you? Why won’t you tell me?” Without realising she had begun to shout. She was unaware that Edith had got up out of her chair and walked softly towards her until she felt the hand on her shoulder, and the gentle voice,

“Now Laura, you heard what I said, your mother’s upset, don’t go making it worse”.

“But what’s going on?” Laura looked into Edith’s eyes and for the first time she could remember she saw that they were moist and full of something like regret.

“You go and put the kettle on and I’ll put Josephine to bed. We’ll discuss it after that.”

As Laura stared out of the kitchen window into the darkness she racked her brain, convinced that somewhere in there must be the answer to the questions that she could not quite articulate to herself. Her mind felt jumbled and her thoughts would not reach conclusions. Seeing her mother in such a state had affected her but Edith’s sudden change was just as unnerving. She shivered as she poured the steaming water into the teapot before carrying it into the living room. Edith was already back in her seat. She held the photo in her hand and looked up as Laura entered. They both tried to read each other’s expression and so neither was successful.

“Sit down, Laura. We need to have a talk. There are some things you ought to know. You don’t remember do you?”

“Remember what?”

“About your sister, Emma”

“My sister?”

“We thought you remembered. I know we don’t talk about her now, it’s too upsetting. Your mother has never got over it. I have never got over it”

“I don’t understand. The girl in the picture, Emma, is my sister? Where is she now? This doesn’t make sense, surely I’d know if I had a sister. What happened?”

“You were young at the time. You must have blocked it out. She died, Laura, she drowned.” Edith patted her sleeve in search of a handkerchief. “You were there.”

There was silence for a moment as Laura tried to take it in. Edith sat quietly looking at her. Laura felt like she was underwater, trying to make it to the surface but unable to see which way was up. Her chest tightened. She had an overwhelming need to be held but as she looked across at Edith she knew that the comfort she needed would never come from her, even with this new softer manner she had adopted. Laura thought of her mother, she could only visualise her in the trance-like state in which she had last seen her. She tried to feel something for her, pity, anger, anything, but she was numb. She was as cold as a gravestone from the ends of her toes upwards.

"You'd better tell me then."

"Yes." Edith sipped her tea. Laura noticed that her hands shook and she looked suddenly old. "We were on holiday, a couple of days in Brighton. It was nice, good weather. We had a good time. We'd gone down to the beach as usual, that's where this must have been taken." She looked down sadly at the photo in her hand. "I didn't know we still had it. Your mother destroyed most of them after it happened. Seemed the right thing at the time." She paused. "It wasn't as if the sea was rough that day, it was calm as a mill pond. It's not often like that in Brighton, but you do see it sometimes. Anyway we were having a lovely time. You and Emma had been playing with the pebbles, Josephine and I had been taking it in turns to watch you and read our books. If you looked out to sea you could see the sun glinting on the water and the pier looking hazy in the heat. I can remember it so clearly." She looked directly at Laura. "I haven't thought about that day for a long time."

"Go on."

Edith took a wheezy breath, "Emma was down on the shore throwing pebbles into the water with some other children. Then you started screaming, really screaming. We didn't know what was wrong with you. We searched for a bee sting, or a cut, or something. Perhaps you had been stung, but we couldn't find anything. Eventually we managed to calm you down, whatever it was. I looked around for Emma, more by force of habit than anything else. I just looked vaguely in the direction where she had been. It didn't occur to me that she wouldn't be there. But she wasn't. The other children had gone too, but I could see them as I scanned the beach, back with their mothers. I couldn't see Emma. We started searching and calling. You can't help thinking the worst, but you push it back, you never really think it's true." Edith looked at the photo, "Poor little Emma, we got distracted didn't we? And then we lost you." She found her handkerchief in her sleeve and dabbed at her eyes. Laura said nothing. She forced herself to breathe and watched Edith through wet lashes.

"Of course the coastguard came, and the police and ambulance. It didn't take them long to find her. She hadn't drifted far. But it was still too late."

The two women sat in silence for some time, each lost in thoughts of a story. For Edith it was one she had spent years trying to forget. For Laura it was a struggle to comprehend the grief that sucked at her and seemed to try and swallow her whole. Information swirled around her echoing in her ears, stinging her eyes. She found she couldn't categorise it in any way so that she could understand it. The order of the world had been shaken up like a paperweight snow scene and she had to wait for the snow to settle before she could read the pattern it formed.

She needed to get out of the room. The air had become too thick to breathe and Edith's presence oppressing. She did not want to be alone so she found herself dragging her leaden legs upstairs to where her mother lay. As she knocked tentatively on the bedroom door, she realised that she was afraid of how she might find her and how they would face each other in this new light. Laura entered the room and sat down on the chair by the bed. She watched her mother's pale face, wearing its mask of anxiety even in sleep, and saw that the distance between them had become vast. Josephine was unreachable. How did it feel to know you had let your daughter die? It had been a terrible accident but it did not fit together properly in Laura’s mind. She could not reconcile the idea that she had been the centre of both Josephine and Edith's concern and attention so intensely that they had neglected the other child. It caused a twofold difficulty for her: that they would care so much for her, and that she was the reason for her sister's death. The latter did not incite deep feelings of guilt. Such emotion would have seemed self-indulgent. She was not so irrational that she imagined a toddler could be to blame. However in the darkened room for an instant she glimpsed her mother's feeling of responsibility and how it had gnawed away at her from the inside out, leaving the empty shell that lay on the bed before her. Laura experienced a moment of clarity amongst the tangled mess. The contrast between such apparent love as was shown her as she screamed on the beach and how she felt herself to have been treated growing up was not unrelated to the guilt and sorrow that had shadowed her mother since the accident. In the same way her grandmother's behaviour also began to take on new meaning.

She tiptoed out of the bedroom struck by the bizarre notion that if this was a film she would plant a gentle kiss on her mother's forehead. She did not kiss her but on taking a last look felt something close to pity. Edith was still in the living room when Laura returned, her face was set but unreadable as she looked into the fire.

"Did you blame me?"

"I beg your pardon?" Edith looked up at Laura, the familiar scowl returned to her face.

"Did you blame me for Emma's death? I was causing the distraction after all."

"Don't be ridiculous. How could I blame a two year old child?"

"Be honest. That's why you've always hated me, isn't it? Because it happened while I was making a fuss, and because I lived and she didn't." Laura's tone was aggressive. She had always wanted some sort of confrontation with Edith.

"No."

"Isn't it?"

"No. I've never hated you, Laura. How can you say such a thing? If I've been hard on you it's been for your own good. Your mother was never very strong, and she fell apart after Emma died. You needed someone to take you in hand."

"Take me in hand? You gave me a miserable childhood!"

"Don't be so melodramatic."
"I don't believe you. You treated me that way because you thought I was the reason Emma died." Laura looked at her grandmother indignantly as she waited for her reply, though what reaction she was hoping for she could not be sure.

"Laura, I never blamed you. You were a baby. If anything I blame myself."

"What?"

"Well, I should have left your mother to deal with you while I watched Emma. Instead I had to interfere. And then when we discovered she was missing, I couldn't find her in time. I didn't get to her."

"There was nothing either of you could do. It's just one of those tragic accidents."

"I should have been watching. And I'm sorry if you think I've been unfair to you. Perhaps I have been. But you must understand that it was meant well. I failed one grandchild, I wasn't about to fail the other as well." Laura was surprised at the sincerity with which Edith spoke.

"What do you mean?"

"If it hadn't been for me you would have had no one to guide you. Your mother was no use. A large part of her died with Emma. I had to take on her role in many ways. I always did the best for you, whatever you think."

"How is it then, that I grew up learning how to survive alone with no love or affection?"

"You should feel lucky, you're the one that survived. Think of your poor sister"

"Why should I think of her?" Laura shouted, "I don't even remember her. I'm talking about you, Mum and me. You are both so busy acting on the back of some misplaced guilt that you have neglected the living for the memory of the dead."

Edith and Laura sat in contemplative silence. As Laura's anger receded her Grandmother's point of view became less obscure. She looked at her and saw an old woman, utterly weary. The possibility that Edith may have acted with the belief that she was doing the right thing no longer seemed so remote. Laura still wanted to be angry with her for her behaviour, but as she watched her Grandmother she felt the edges of her hostility soften as the first traces of forgiveness seeped in. She would never think her grandmother had acted fairly but she had come some way to comprehending her motives. In her mind she saw her broken mother, weak and pathetic. She had suffered and it was the suffering rather than Josephine herself that was behind the neglect of Laura. And then there was Emma, the sister she had forgotten. Her feelings shifted like unstable scales between anger towards this sister whose death had been the cause of so much grief and bad feeling, and sorrow at losing someone she had never had the chance to get to know. She felt heavy with confusion and exhausted. She could not stay in the house.

As she let herself out of the front door she knew she would not to return until the following October.


Clare Sullivan, February 2002.