The Woman In The Mirror. Rebecca James

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ to go on, blood relatives to join the dots – and she had thought so many times about what a phenomenon that would be. Imagining her mother and father was a bit like imagining her own hypothetical child, as much of a mystery and a miracle. For she had no positioning in the world, no biological foundation: she wasn’t the branch or the leaf on a tree, running deep into the earth, permanent and enduring; she was her own shrub, small and lonely, with roots barely clinging to the soil.

      Rachel had got along fine with her adoptive parents, Maggie and Greg. They had longed for a baby and been unable to have one of their own, and when they’d welcomed her at a week old, it had been the answer to their prayers. She was lucky, she knew: they’d been loving, supportive, attentive, and truthful with her, explaining her adoption as soon as she was old enough to understand. But, really, one was never old enough to understand something like that, to properly get to grips with and accept deep inside without umbrage or bitterness that you weren’t loved enough to be kept in the first place. ‘We chose you,’ Maggie used to say over and over, ‘because you were special. We adored you from the second we laid eyes on you.’ And Rachel used to take reassurance from this – that she might have been cast aside by one set of parents but at least she’d been picked up by another – until her older, more complicated years, when she had learned about the adoption process and that Maggie and Greg hadn’t selected her, she had simply been the first baby to come along. It was hard to get a baby, most childless couples wished for babies and there weren’t enough to go round, so no wonder her adoptive parents had felt she was meant to be.

      Rachel knew this was ungrateful and unhelpful, so she’d stifled the truth of her emotions and instead focused on the future, always the next thing, getting ahead, refusing to look behind. When she’d referenced her mother in the gallery speech, she’d been remembering how Maggie used to describe her as ‘bloody-minded’. It was meant, for the most part, affectionately, but in her teenage years it had caused toxic fights. Rachel’s stubbornness, her iron will, whether it concerned dating a boy or staying out or refusing to finish her studies, came from a place that neither Maggie nor Greg could trace in themselves, a place so remote and unknown that it served only to remind them what was missing. That Rachel had a family out there who were just like her, and it was their blood that was running through her veins, not the Wrights’.

      Maggie and Greg had died within a year of each other when she was eighteen, so she hadn’t had all that much of them either. At the time she’d mourned, but she never shed as many tears over them as she had over her imagined, other parents. It had seemed thankless and hurtful to pursue her heritage while Maggie and Greg were alive, but after they went there was nothing stopping her. Rachel knew she’d been born in England to English parents, and had ideas about travelling there, to some charming retreat or else a townhouse in London, and being welcomed by a woman smelling of vanilla sponge, a friendly wirehaired dog trailing at her feet. However, her ideas came to nothing and her search was short-lived: Rachel discovered inside a week that her birth mother was dead and she had no father listed. That was when she’d decided to close the door on the past. She spoke to no one about it. Nobody knew she was adopted and she preferred it that way. Keeping a lid on her feelings was a trick she’d learned early on, and it had certainly protected her since.

      The sound of the mail hitting the mat pulled her from her thoughts. She grabbed her jacket and bent to scoop up the letters to look at later, but a single white envelope drew her up short. It was one of those envelopes that made you look twice. There was nothing menacing about it, nothing especially unusual but for the UK postal address and a red stamp reading STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL.

      She picked it up and turned it over. Private documents enclosed. There was a return address, a Quakers Oatley & Sons Solicitors in Mayfair, London.

      She ran her nail along the seal and opened it.

Chapter 5

       Cornwall, 1947

      Only when the captain moves to shake my hand does his face return to the light. It is a fine, distinguished face: the product of centuries of ancestral perfection. His eyes are blue and clear, startlingly bright in comparison with the rest of him. His hair is black and has grown out of its cut, longer and more dishevelled than is the fashion for gentlemen, and there is a faint shadow of, or prelude to, a beard, although that could be the gloom hitting him from beneath. The chin is striking, square and sharp, and his mouth is wide, the lips parted slightly, with a curl that could be mistaken for a sneer. It isn’t a kind mouth.

      I notice all this before I notice the most obvious thing: his scars. I was warned about the captain’s war wounds, but I hadn’t known about his burns. His left cheek is pitted like fruit peel, the skin pulled tight towards the angle where his jaw meets his earlobe, where it melts into spilled candle wax.

      His clear, blue eyes, as they meet mine, dare me to comment. For a shameful moment I am glad of his disfiguration, for if he were flawless I might not know how to speak. There is a scent about him, of tobacco and scorched wood.

      ‘Thank you, Tom,’ he says, ‘but I will show Miss Miller to her room.’

      ‘Very well, Captain.’

      The mouth lifts then, but it isn’t quite a smile. Nonetheless I return it and follow him up to the landing. We make slow, awkward progress, and I see how much discomfort his leg causes him but also the pride that prevents him from admitting it.

      ‘Tell me,’ he starts, ‘what are your first impressions of Winterbourne?’

      ‘Well, I’ve only just arrived.’ We pass a glass case filled with stuffed birds: a hawk alights on a branch, wings wide, beak screaming. ‘But I should say what strikes me is that it’s very beautiful.’

      ‘Beautiful.’ The captain repeats the word, as if it’s foreign. ‘Winterbourne has been described as many things, but beautiful isn’t one of them.’

      ‘No? I’m surprised.’

      ‘It was built by a band of lunatics. Hardly the way to speak of one’s ancestors, but there’s the long and short of it. Too much money and too little discrimination. They thought they were recreating Notre-Dame, I’m sure. That families should be expected to live here, generations of us, hardly came into it. No – I’ve heard daunting, intimidating, bleak, desolate… but I’ve never heard beautiful.’

      ‘You don’t like your home, Captain?’

      He gives a short, hollow laugh. ‘It isn’t a question of me not liking it. Rather the other way round.’

      I frown, but before I can speak he stops at a door and draws a chain of keys from his pocket. It is necessary for him to lean against the wall to do this, wheezing slightly, and my instinct is to help him but I don’t. We are at the end of a passage. Looking back, the way we’ve come appears impossibly long, distortedly so, a carpeted corridor flickering in the glow of feeble bulbs. Ahead is a narrow staircase, presumably the servants’ access.

      ‘This is your room,’ he says, and the door creaks open.

      The first thing I notice is the smell of age, a musty scent that seems to rise from the floorboards and seep from the walls. The atmosphere is deep, as weighty as the green velvet drapes that hang from the high window. There is a wooden four-poster bed, carved ornately in the Jacobean style, its quilts piled extravagantly. Chenille rugs adorn the boards beneath my feet, and behind me, on the wall we have stepped through, is an elaborate scenic mural depicting some dark, tangled foliage. Its pattern is dizzyingly complicated, impossible to follow one twisted vine without getting lost in the knots of the others.

СКАЧАТЬ