The Chat

Mrs Wakeham did not answer the question.

Mrs Wakeham picked up her cup of green tea, instead, and turned it three small degrees on the marble side table so that the handle pointed back the way it had been pointing before she had set it down. Mrs Wakeham, Maeve had noticed in three weeks, did this with cups. Mrs Wakeham did this with the fruit bowl on the kitchen island. Mrs Wakeham did this with the salt and pepper grinders on the dining-room sideboard. Mrs Wakeham was a woman who, having put a small object down in a small wrong way, would always — eventually — turn it back.

Mrs Wakeham said, 'Don't ask me that one yet, dear. I shall answer it. I shall answer it today. I should rather you let me get to it in my own order. Will you do that.'

Maeve said nothing.

Mrs Wakeham said, very gently, 'Maeve. I am not going to hurt you. I have never been going to hurt you. I have, on the contrary, spent the last sixteen years arranging a small number of things in this house so that no harm might come to you when you arrived. If you would like the door of this room to be unlocked for you at any moment — it is, by the way, not locked — you may stand up and leave. The agency will pay you for the morning. I shall not telephone them. I shall not come after you. You will not, however, ever know why I had the photograph in the drawer, and that, my darling, would be a great pity for both of us.'

She paused.

She said, 'My darling. I should not have said that. Not yet. I am sorry.'

She put the cup down.

She turned the handle back two degrees.

She folded her hands in her lap.

—

Maeve stood in the doorway of the morning room of the Belgravia townhouse on the Tuesday in November with her right hand still on the brass door handle of the inside of the door, and Maeve thought, in the very precise way Maeve had taught herself to think about things she had not yet decided, if I leave this room I will spend the rest of my life wondering what she was going to say.

And underneath that, in a smaller harder voice — the voice Maeve had developed in the last year of her mother's life, the voice Maeve had used to negotiate the rent and to bury her mother and to phone the agency about a placement she could not afford to lose — and I cannot afford to spend the rest of my life wondering anything.

She took her hand off the door handle.

She walked across the morning room of the Belgravia townhouse, in the careful neutral steps she had practised on the front-room runner of her own bedsit in Lewisham, in front of the small wall mirror, every morning for three weeks before her first day at the agency, and she sat down on the small embroidered chair opposite Mrs Wakeham — the chair that Mrs Wakeham had told her, on her first day, had been a wedding gift in 1947 from her grandmother.

She folded her hands in her own lap.

She said, 'I am sitting down, Mrs Wakeham. I have not, however, agreed to anything else.'

Mrs Wakeham said, 'Thank you, dear.'

—

Mrs Wakeham then, in the voice she used at her dressmaker — the small unhurried voice of a woman who had not, in her life, ever needed to finish a sentence quickly — said, 'Six things, Maeve. I shall tell you six things. I have written them down upstairs. I have rehearsed them in front of the dressing-table mirror every Saturday morning for the last eleven years. I am about to be very tedious. You will forgive me. The order matters. May I.'

Maeve said, 'You may.'

Mrs Wakeham said, 'One. I was at St Brigid's. I was at St Brigid's between 1969 and 1976. I was there as a boarder. The blazer in the photograph is the blazer I wore. The red piping has been the same red piping on the St Brigid's blazer for fifty-six years. I would know it in a darkened room.'

Maeve said, 'I was day, not boarder.'

Mrs Wakeham said, 'Yes, dear. From the photograph, I had inferred you must have been. The board children kept their badges differently. Yours is sewn the way the day girls sewed theirs, on a Sunday evening, by tired mothers.'

She paused.

She said, 'Two. I was at school with your mother.'

—

Maeve's hands, in her lap, made the small involuntary movement they had made in the bedroom upstairs.

Maeve did not put them on top of one another. Maeve let them keep moving. Maeve had decided, on the way down the stairs from the bedroom that morning, that the next time her hands began to do this, Maeve would let them, and Maeve would not pretend she had not noticed.

She said, in the careful neutral voice she had practised in front of the small wall mirror in Lewisham, 'My mother was at St Brigid's.'

Mrs Wakeham said, 'Yes, dear.'

Maeve said, 'My mother never told me that.'

Mrs Wakeham said, 'No, dear. I am not surprised. I should imagine your mother told you very little about St Brigid's at all.'

She paused.

She said, 'Three. Your mother and I shared a room from the autumn of 1972 to the spring of 1975. She was a day girl turned boarder when her father — your grandfather — was posted to Aden in the army for the third time, and her mother — your grandmother — followed him out. Your mother was put in the small room at the end of the east corridor. I had been alone in that room for two terms because the girl I had been sharing with had been expelled in the May for an offence I am not, today, going to bore you with.'

She paused.

She said, 'Four. Your mother and I were, for two and a half years, the closest two people I have ever been to anyone in my life. Closer than I was to my husband. Closer than I was to my sister. Closer than I have ever been to any single other person, and there were, my dear, a great many of them.'

She did not, when she said this, look away from Maeve.

She let her face carry the line.

Her face, on the line, was the face of a woman whose dressmaker had taught her, in 1981, that the only thing more vulgar than not meaning what you said was looking as if you did not.

—

Maeve sat in the small embroidered chair, and Maeve thought, in the very precise way Maeve had been taught by her mother to think about things her mother had not told her, Mum. Mum, what did you do.

The thought arrived, this time, in a different voice from the one it had arrived in three weeks ago in Maeve's own kitchen in Lewisham. The voice was Maeve's voice. The voice had always been Maeve's voice. The voice, this morning, on the small embroidered chair of the morning room of the Belgravia townhouse, was the voice of a woman who had just understood that the question — Mum, what did you do — had not, in fact, started with Maeve. The question had started, in 1976, in a small room at the end of the east corridor at a school in Hampshire that Maeve's mother had never, in thirty-five years, mentioned by name.

She said, 'Go on, Mrs Wakeham.'

Mrs Wakeham said, 'Five. In the spring of 1975 something happened at St Brigid's that the school spent the next nine years arranging itself around the not-happening of. Your mother and I were the only two people in the school, at that time, to whom that thing happened. We left St Brigid's together in the summer of 1975. We agreed, on the train from Petersfield to Waterloo on the morning we left, that we would never speak of it to anyone — not to our families, not to our husbands, not to each other, and most particularly not, ever, to any child either of us would, in the years to come, have. We agreed this on the train. We shook hands on it in the carriage. The carriage was empty. I have not, in fifty years, broken the agreement.'

Maeve said, 'And my mother.'

Mrs Wakeham said, very gently, 'No, dear. As far as I know, she did not break it either.'

She paused.

She said, 'Six. Two years ago, in the spring of 2023, I received a letter from a man I had never heard of. The letter was very civil. The letter said that he was clearing the contents of his mother's house after her death, and he had found, in a sealed envelope at the bottom of his mother's writing desk, a single photograph and a single typed sheet, and he had, with very great reluctance, opened both. He apologised for opening them. He said that on the back of the photograph, in his mother's hand, was written Brigid's, autumn 2009. The Brennan girl. He said that on the typed sheet, in his mother's hand, was written my address in Belgravia, my full name, and a single line that read if you ever see this child, you have one last opportunity to do the right thing.'

She paused.

She said, 'The photograph in the letter was the photograph in my drawer upstairs.'

She paused.

She said, 'The dead woman was the third person at St Brigid's in 1975, dear. The third person who, your mother and I had agreed, on the train from Petersfield to Waterloo, never existed.'

—

Maeve did not, when Mrs Wakeham finished speaking, say anything.

The morning room of the Belgravia townhouse was, for a long second, very silent. The clock on the marble mantelpiece behind Mrs Wakeham made a small mechanical sound.

The clock on the marble mantelpiece of the front room of the Belgravia townhouse, Maeve had observed in three weeks, was a Knibb mantel clock from 1789 — Mrs Wakeham had told her this on the first morning Maeve had dusted it, in the small precise voice of a woman who liked it to be known that the clock was a Knibb mantel clock from 1789 — and the clock had, for the entirety of Maeve's three weeks at the house, been wound to the same particular accuracy every Friday at five o'clock by Mr Wakeham, who, every Friday at five o'clock, came in from his study, opened the glass front of the clock with a small brass key he carried on his fob, wound the clock four full turns, closed the glass front, and went back to his study without speaking to either of them.

Mr Wakeham was, this morning, not at home.

Mr Wakeham was, Maeve had been told the previous evening, in Geneva.

Mr Wakeham had been, every other Tuesday of the three weeks Maeve had been at the house, in Geneva. He goes a great deal for the bank, dear, Mrs Wakeham had said the first time, please don't keep his room aired, he likes to find it dusty when he comes home, it makes him feel he has gone somewhere worth going.

The clock made its small mechanical sound again.

Maeve said, very calmly, 'Mrs Wakeham. Was the third person at St Brigid's in 1975 my mother's friend, or yours.'

Mrs Wakeham said, 'Hers.'

Maeve said, 'And what happened to her.'

Mrs Wakeham said, 'I shall tell you. But not in this room. Not by speaking. There is a manuscript upstairs, dear, that I have been writing since the spring of 2023. The manuscript is in the second drawer of the desk in the south study. I have not, in two years, shown it to a living soul. I had not, in fact, decided whether I was going to. I had been waiting to know whether you would come, and what you would be like when you came, and whether you would be the kind of person to whom a thing of that kind could responsibly be given.'

She paused.

She said, very gently, 'You are.'

She paused.

She said, 'Will you read it, dear.'

—

Maeve sat in the small embroidered chair in the morning room of the Belgravia townhouse, with her hands quietly making in her lap the small movement she had not, today, stopped them from making, and Maeve listened, in the small precise voice that had risen up in her on the train from Lewisham that morning — the voice that had said first the kitchen, then the bedrooms, then go home and sleep, and do not, on any account, look in any drawer you have not been asked to clean — and the small precise voice said, very clearly, Maeve. Read it. Read it today. Read it before Mr Wakeham comes back from Geneva.

She said, 'I will read it.'

Mrs Wakeham said, 'Thank you, dear.'

Mrs Wakeham, very slowly, lifted her cup of green tea from the marble side table, and turned the handle back the way it had originally been pointing, and held the cup for a long moment in both of her thin expensive hands, and did not drink from it.

She said, almost to herself, in a voice that for the first time that morning was not the unhurried voice of her dressmaker —

'Your mother, dear. Your mother was the bravest person I have ever known. I think you will need to be told that, today, before you read it.'

She set the cup down.

She turned the handle two degrees back the wrong way.

She did not, this time, turn it back.

Then Mrs Wakeham stood up — slowly, with the careful particular slowness of a woman in cashmere the colour of bone who knew exactly what her knees were going to do on her — and Mrs Wakeham crossed the morning room, and Mrs Wakeham held the door open for Maeve, and Mrs Wakeham said, 'The south study, dear. Top of the stairs, second door on the right. The desk is in the alcove. The second drawer is unlocked. The manuscript is in a green ribbon. I shall be in the morning room when you come down. You shall not be interrupted. I have given the cook the day off.'

And Maeve Brennan, who had not known her mother had been at St Brigid's, who had not known that any of this had been waiting for her at the bottom of a drawer in a bedside table in a Belgravia townhouse for sixteen years, who had been telling herself, on the train from Lewisham that morning, don't get attached to it, Maeve, three hundred pounds a week is not a thing that exists in this world for women like you, it will end, it will end badly, it always does — Maeve Brennan walked up the marble staircase of the Belgravia townhouse, on the Tuesday in November, towards the second drawer of the desk in the alcove of the south study, in which had been waiting, for two years, the manuscript Mrs Wakeham had not, in two years, shown to a living soul.

The clock on the marble mantelpiece behind her made one more small mechanical sound.

She did not, this time, hear it.

* * *