The Wednesday Daughters Read online

  Julie was out on Lake Windermere with Robbie, remembering that afternoon at the soccer game and the hours she’d spent in the library afterward, searching the triple 0s—Generality, Knowledge, the Book—unable to find a single misshelved volume. Remembering those Christmas cookies crunching under her shoes, the smell of burning milk, and Oliver realizing she was not his mother, the poor kid throwing the good cookies onto the floor with the burnt ones, sobbing, “I hate you I hate you I hate you.”

  I hate you I hate you I hate you. Which of course he did. Of course he should, even if he didn’t understand why.

  She blinked up at the starry-bright sky above the boat and the water and Robbie lying back on one planky thing as she lay on another, their heads propped up against one side of the boat and their knees bent so their feet rested on the other. They weren’t touching or even talking. They were staring up at the stars, the two of them floating in the darkness in the middle of the lake.

  Anna Page had whispered, “Rowers do it with long, hard strokes,” as she’d urged Julie toward the pier, “or that’s what their T-shirts say—although to be honest, I’ve found they often leave whatever ‘it’ they have out on the water. But you never know, Jules. And I think this guy is for you.”

  This guy is for you. That’s what Anna Page had said when she introduced Isaac to Jamie, after showing Isaac a photo of Jamie that had turned out to be a photo of Julie. They used to joke about it when Jamie was alive. They used to joke that Isaac had married the wrong twin.

  Robbie said, “That constellation there, see the—”

  “I’m seeing someone, actually,” Julie interrupted. “I’m involved with … with someone at home.”

  He hadn’t said anything romantic; she had no reason to explain herself, no reason but the soft water and the soft night, the soft curve of Robbie’s body, his head turning toward her lying there and staring upward, feeling awkward and foolish but glad to have it out there, to have this little Anna Page–concocted romance brought to its natural end.

  “More’s the pity for me.” His tone more playful than disappointed. Then, “See the stars up there that form a sort of sprawling W? That’s Cassiopeia, the queen.”

  Turned to stone when she looked at the Gorgon’s head, Julie remembered. But since her daughter was to marry a son of Zeus, the gods took pity and hung her as a constellation.

  “She’s hanging upside down, suffering,” Robbie said. “You fancy lasses always do scald your lips on the porridge.”

  She couldn’t see that well in the darkness, but the grin was obvious in his voice.

  “How do you see them, the formations?” she asked. “They just look like random stars.”

  “Do they now?” He pointed, saying, “Start with that shiny one there. That’s Segin, where the queen’s robe touches her calf. She’s the far left star of the W. And that’s Ruchbah, her knee. Shedir, her breast.”

  “What about that one? The other end of the W?”

  “That’s Caph, or palm.”

  “Her hand.”

  “Ah, but it’s part of her chair, idn’ it? The whole of Cassiopeia was described in pre-Islamic Arabic as al-kaff, ‘the stained hand.’ ”

  “Pre-Islamic Arabic?”

  “A hand painted with henna. I haven’t a baldy how it came to mean the one star, Beta Cassiopeia alone.”

  “What else is out here?”

  “That one, then that and that.” He pointed to a series of stars. “That’s Andromeda, the daughter of that boastful but nonetheless beautiful Cassiopeia and her poor sap of a husband, Cepheus.”

  “Andromeda who was chained to a rock as a sacrifice to Cetus.”

  “The sea monster,” he agreed.

  “She was saved by Perseus, who dispatched the sea monster by driving his sword into his throat, then turned Andromeda’s suitor and his men to stone by using Medusa’s head.”

  “Bit messy in your toolbox, a severed head,” Robbie said, and he laughed that way he did, and she did, too. “You know quite a lot about the stars for a lady who doesn’t know the sky,” he said.

  “You know a lot about pre-Islamic Arabic for a man who spends his days on the lake.”

  In the silence, the only sound was the soft lap of water against the wood of the boat.

  “D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths,” she said finally. “A library staple.”

  “You know all the books in your library that well, now, do you?”

  She inhaled deeply, the fresh scent of the lake and the memory of the smooth pages in her fingers. “For Halloween one year I was Hermes, with wings taped to my shoes,” she said. “One year I was Zeus, with a tinfoil thunderbolt. I wanted to be Athena, but my mom couldn’t figure out a costume for her, so I was Artemis with bow and arrows instead.”

  He reached over and touched her hair, saying, “And surely you’d have been Aphrodite, now. All you’d have needed was a crown and a cushion of foam.”

  She could see that page in the book: the West Wind as a human figure blowing in on the pearly white of dawn at the horizon, the three graces and their golden chariot drawn by four doves. Aphrodite, the beautiful goddess of love. The year she’d asked to be Aphrodite, she’d somehow ended up as Ares, the god of war, who was tall and handsome but vain. Ares with gleaming tinfoil helmet and sword, rushing into battle, not caring who won or lost as long as plenty of blood was spilled. That year, Jamie had been Hephaestus, Ares’s brother, who was as kind as Ares was cruel. Hephaestus went with Ares, and Jamie never did need to separate herself from their sameness the way Julie did.

  “No, I never wanted to be Aphrodite,” she said to Robbie, the lie coming easily to her lips.

  From the Journals of Ally Tantry

  11.11.2009, Ambleside. We spent the morning in the studio, Graham painting and me writing as if we’d done it together all our lives. Afterward, we set off to Moss Eccles Tarn, where I sat on the rock outcropping imagining Bea and Mr. Heelis rowing, with a fishing line in the water and the two of them occasionally kissing companionably rather than passionately, the way Jim and I seem to kiss these days.

  —I’m having quite a time understanding Bea’s relationships with Heelis and Warne, I told Graham. How did Heelis live in the shadow of Warne all those years?

  —Allison! Bea protested.

  —But really, Bea, I’m not talking about your fame now. I’m talking about how you kept Mr. Warne’s umbrella at Hill Top Farm for the rest of your life.

  I told Graham,

  —Even after Bea married William Heelis, she wore Norman Warne’s ring. She writes in her journal about it slipping off her cold finger once while she and the hired men were lifting the bundled corn.

  She’d untied the threshing floor and ruined her woolen stockings, crawling on her hands and knees in the dirt. She wrote that she should have had just one consolation if she hadn’t found it: “It was a pretty, sheltered field to lie in.”

  —But she did love Heelis, Graham said.

  —Of course I did, Bea said.

  —I don’t know, I said. Perhaps he was just … convenient?

  —Allison! Bea protested.

  Convenient. Well, for all the things Jim has been to me, he wasn’t that.

  —You can’t love someone who has doubts and not see them there on some level, I said to Graham. Even if you choose not to see.

  I want to tell poor Kevin that Hope does love him, that it’s just hard to know if you’ll love someone forever when you don’t even know yourself. I can’t say that to him, though. Saying it would leave Kevin knowing my daughter means to leave him, or thinks she does. And I can’t let Hope say it, even to me. I know from watching Kath that a marriage can be over long before anyone admits it, but I also know that once you start saying aloud that a marriage might be over, it almost always is.

  I tossed a pebble into the tarn, and Graham and I watched its sad plink radiate out into perfectly concentric circles. Concentric circles—the term made me miss Brett. It made me miss all the Wednesday S
isters. They were my family, with Jim and the kids and my sister and her gang. They’d stepped in to replace as best they could the kind of family that can’t be replaced. Funny that when I married Jim, I hadn’t actually imagined my parents wouldn’t come around. Until the day Mother died, I was waiting for her to come to her senses. Even after Father died. Even then.

  —I was in love once, Graham said.

  Across the water, the sun edged toward the clouds coming in over the hills.

  —I don’t doubt that first love would haunt anyone else I might love, he said.

  He’d met her in his final term at Oxford. She was reading law, which few women did in those days. He was depressed at the time, he sees that now. His father was sick, was dying actually. He’d already lost his mother and he had nobody else.

  —I was quite inexcusably wild, he said. I drank too much and I drove too fast and I gave off as moving from one party to the next, there was no fun I wouldn’t have, when the truth was that all my life I’d been excluded from the invitation lists. It’s a small world, and my parentage was the stuff of scandal. I see that now.

  My parentage was the stuff of scandal, he said, as if I ought to know exactly what he meant.

  The crowd he traveled with were not young men his father approved of, he said, nor men whose company he much enjoyed—not that he admitted that even to himself.

  —She asked me to consider coming to Dublin with her when the term ended, he said.

  —Dublin?

  —I asked her to come home to Ainsley’s End, but that wouldn’t do for her. There seemed no compromise. She couldn’t leave her world, and I wouldn’t leave mine. I meant to inherit my father’s fortune and live out my life as a proper English gentleman.

  —If she loved you, if she’d been the right woman for you—

  —I expect if she’d wanted a mess of a man without ambition, there were enough like me for her back home, he said. Sometimes it’s those who love us most who have to turn away from watching us destroy ourselves.

  In the silence, Bea whispered,

  —Poor Mr. Wyndham. He does remind one of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, doesn’t he?

  —She saw a better me than I ever saw myself, Graham said. She used to say that. She used to say I needed to step outside myself and have a look. Wrote it in a letter, she did. After my father died, which I suppose was the reason I gave her for having to return to Ainsley’s End. A letter I didn’t answer.

  —It’s not too late, I said.

  —With my father dead, I had no reason not to go to her.

  —It’s not too late, I repeated.

  —She’s been dead for years.

  We sat together looking over the tarn where Bea and Mr. Heelis used to row companionably. It’s not too late to find love, it’s never too late, that’s what I’m forever telling Kath. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the risk of love is too high beyond those foolish early years. Maybe the best the rest of us can hope for is this. Friendship. Understanding. A companion to sit at the water’s edge and listen while the sun sets beyond the hills.

  I am not married.… If there were a “Mrs. Jeremy Fisher” she might object to snails. It is some satisfaction to be able to have as much water & mud in the house as a person likes.

  —BEATRIX POTTER, WRITING AS JEREMY FISHER IN AN UNDATED LETTER TO DREW FAYLE

  THROUGH THE WAVY-GLASSED DOORS OF THE AINSLEY’S END DINING room the next evening, geometric patterns of low hedges enclosed clusters of herbs while, through the doors opposite, soft landscape lighting illuminated a winged and flower-draped cherub standing in a large rectangular pool, a narrow stream of water shooting upward from his stone platter and falling back on itself. As Graham poured wine smelling of dark berries and sage—“Three Choirs Vineyards, England’s finest”—Anna Page remarked on the etching on the decanter. Graham turned the crystal for us to better see, the tilting wine dripping thickly behind three dragon heads like blood dripping from a predator’s mouth.

  “We’re perhaps overly fond of our family crests,” he said with a self-deprecating smile, “etching them into our crystal, needlepointing them onto chair cushions, painting them on turtle shells.”

  “Turtle shells?” Anna Page said.

  “I exaggerate. Only half of our crest found its way onto a turtle shell.”

  As Mrs. Anders cleared the remnants of our salads—“made from the last of the season’s lettuces from the estate’s kitchen garden,” she’d assured us, leaving no doubt that she’d personally bent low to find the best of the tomatoes, to harvest radishes that were softer and sweeter than the spicy American ones—I wondered how many times my mother sat in this same chair, eating meals seasoned with these same garden herbs, so many herbs waiting for the winter frost to knock them down.

  Graham, refilling our glasses already, asked Mrs. Anders to bring the second bottle he’d opened and fetch a third from the cellar. He returned to the turtle shell then, explaining that an ancestor who’d married the daughter of the explorer Sir Francis Drake had received as a wedding gift a giant green turtle shell Drake brought back from his adventures, which he’d had painted with half of Graham’s family crest and half of Drake’s. Somewhere along the way, the shell was lost. “And it had the good sense to remain lost over the centuries necessary for such a thing to become legend,” he said, “so it could be found again in the 1980s and restored, rather than tossed in the rubbish, as it might have been.”

  “A restored turtle shell,” Julie said with something akin to a giggle. Our social emergency brakes were slipping from the locked and upright position with each sip of wine. Yes, mistakes were made that night, and we prefer to blame jet lag and alcohol rather than ourselves. Jet lag had been our excuse earlier that day, too, when we’d closed the door to Mom’s cottage and all the packing up that needed to be done there, and walked to Wray Castle for the public launch to Ambleside, and spent all day exploring stores and eating scones.

  “A giant green turtle, though,” Graham said. “An ancient one.”

  Mrs. Anders returned with a second decanter and two uncorked wine bottles. She handed one to Graham and set the other on a silver wine coaster—a pierced-border coaster made by J. Hoyle & Co. in 1770, Graham said. He collected silver, with a special interest in Old Sheffield, a process of plating silver over copper used before the mid-1800s.

  “I’ve a lovely little box I meant to show you, Asha—a silver puzzle box. But it seems I’ve misplaced it somehow.”

  Anna Page studied the beautifully roasted chicken and new potatoes and vegetables Mrs. Anders had served.

  “Mom collected puzzle boxes,” I said, an unease settling over me.

  “Yes,” he said. “Did I not say that? It was a gift from your mum.”

  I took a bite of potato, starchy and tasteless, while outside, a few drops from the fountain were wind-carried beyond the turbulent small pool of the platter, splashing onto the lily pads and fall leaves mingling in the water below. Graham let Mom use his pier. He helped her make coal fires. He kept an eye on her cottage when she wasn’t here. Of course she might bring him a thank-you gift, an expensive one, because what else would you bring a man who wanted for naught? She would have seen it somewhere—a silver puzzle box—and remembered him going on and on about silver in his pompous way, and she’d have bought it as a thank-you for his help.

  He began decanting the second bottle—not British but a 1991 Silver Oak cabernet, Mom’s favorites for special occasions. Had she brought him that, too?

  “This wine comes out of a facility in Geyserville, in Sonoma Valley,” he said. “It isn’t as charming as their Napa facility, but it’s powered almost entirely by its own solar panels.”

  A man who liked to know things, and to have people know he knew. Not the kind of man Mom would have been drawn to. That’s why Anna Page had taken the box, though. She hadn’t wanted me to see that Mom had given it to this arrogant Brit.

  “You’ve toured the California wine country, then?” Julie asked him.


  Graham’s dark eyes blinked behind the wire-rims, as if the question were confusing. “Asha’s mum—Hope’s mum—was going to have me to California,” he answered. “She meant to take me up to see proper wine-making one weekend last fall when Jindas would be at his law firm’s annual retreat, but then—”

  Anna Page knocked her empty wineglass over, and Graham righted it, then filled new glasses from the second crested decanter as I sat trying to absorb his words: “to see proper wine-making one weekend”—the emphasis on “end” rather than “week.” End. End. End.

  “But then my sister died,” Julie said.

  “Was it your sister?” Graham asked. “I’m sorry. I hadn’t known who precisely it was, only that it was the daughter of her chum Linda. You would be her twin, then? I’m so sorry.”

  Mrs. Anders came in with warm rolls.

  “So you did know about Uncle Jim, then,” Anna Page said after the woman and her quiet disapproval had disappeared again.

  “About Jim?” Graham leaned back in his chair, closer to the cold fireplace behind him, a needlepointed screen of off-white peonies hiding the sooty brick.

  “Ally’s husband,” Anna Page said.

  “You mean … did I know that Allison’s husband was … she called him Jindas.”

  “And he knew about you?” Anna Page said.

  “Did Jindas know about me?” Graham looked past her to the cherub outside the window, standing lonely in his pond. “Not at first, but I do imagine Allison … well, it was awkward, wasn’t it?”

  “Awkward?” Anna Page said.

  Graham’s eyes flashed a hint of ire behind the wire-rims. “For years, everyone thinks the world is one way, that this idea of themselves is true and always has been. Then it turns out they are someone else entirely, or that’s the way it seems.”

  “That’s the way it seems,” Julie echoed.

  Graham’s eyes softened as, outside, a gust of wind scattered the cherub’s stream of water. “Yes, exactly. You do see what I mean, don’t you, Julie? The whole world looks at you differently, but you aren’t a tittle different. That isn’t what people see, though. People see the scandal of it all.”