17 Alma Road
The seventh section...
VII
“Does it make any difference?”
It is a question, dragged forward from all those years ago and into the present, which Owen now offers the garden, the borders, the hedges, hoping that in doing so its echo might bounce back to him as if it had being spoken by someone else entirely and in doing so permit him to consider it afresh. Whether or not he utters it aloud is a moot point.
“To us? I don’t think so.” Maddie chooses to respond in any event, either by harvesting some of that rebounded energy or by assuming the question was directed entirely at her in the first place. “But you’ve had longer to think about it.”
Owen attempts to locate the conversation with his aunt — the one where she had spoken frankly about their parents — as if it were an entry scrawled in Florence’s hand on a calendar that might have been hung on her kitchen wall: ‘conversation with Owen about A & A’. That casual? He isn’t sure.
“Five or six years, probably.”
“And?”
He pauses before answering, almost as if he is still waiting to hear the question afresh, as if it has been reverberating within him all that time.
“No, I don’t think it does make any difference. Had they died when we were older, after we had come to know them a little better, then perhaps that new knowledge might have undone something, subverted any assumptions we had made about them as we grew up. Assumptions made from the concoction of experience and innocence.”
“Perhaps what Florence said might have subverted the personas they sold to us.”
“Indeed.” Owen allows a short gap, then: “King Tut.”
“What?”
“Florence said she might as well have been talking about King Tut, her point being that we might have come to know him just about as well as we knew our parents.”
“Or better than we knew them,” Maddie suggests, “given you can read books on the great King.”
“Touché.”
From the corner of his eye Owen catches sight of a butterfly as it weaves its way down the garden, instinctively checking his watch as if that were the best way to define the season and whether the butterfly’s appearance was either early or late. Or simply ‘on time’.
“But as you said, had we been older when they died,” there is a thread of logic Maddie wishes to see through, “then aunt’s declaration might simply have confirmed what we already knew, what we’d discovered for ourselves. So again, no difference.”
“But if we hadn’t, and if she had…”
Maddie cuts him off brusquely.
“‘If’ has no value Glen; none at all.”
There is a sudden hardness in her voice, and Owen wonders how many times she might have replayed things — most especially in her own life — inserting ‘what ifs’ along the way in order to examine unexecuted alterations in its course, the arrival at a different destination.
“Sorry.”
At this point in a similar conversation conducted ten, twenty, thirty years previously, she might have placed her hand on his arm to tell him there was nothing to forgive. Yet when she had done so often it was to confess that it was she who had strayed. Even under those circumstances it had been an action which almost invariably left him feeling as if he was the trespasser.
“So, in our case Florence’s narrative changes nothing. That’s the end of it then, isn’t it? At best it’s merely colouring in; a little tonal enhancement to pen pictures of people we never really knew and who we can’t remember.” Whether it is possible for Maddie to note Owen’s glance to where he imagines her to be, a caveat is immediately forthcoming. “Generally speaking.”
An untruth or not, Owen now has a means — admittedly insubstantial and unsubstantiated — to trace the route of his conclusion back to its source. Having done so, it takes him no time at all to concede that any such revelations about their parents could be of no consequence whatsoever.
“We relied on her so much didn’t we?” Maddie presses on.
“Florence?” Owen clarifies unnecessarily, knowing his sister can be talking of no-one else.
“It was as if she took on multiple roles when we arrived: stand-in mother of course, teacher, housekeeper, but also never quite relinquishing being an aunt. Was it me, or did she manage to seamlessly switch from one to the other depending on the situation and circumstance?”
Owen’s laugh is a fond one.
“The older we became the less motherly and more ‘aunty’ she was. Don’t you think?”
“But George was different, wasn’t he? Tell me you think that too.” There is a plea in her voice which doesn’t go unnoticed.
“You mean he was always seemed to be our uncle and never anything but?”
Maddie laughs.
“Something like that.”
Owen searches for the butterfly again as he feels the pages of history turning, unable to stop himself from looking over his shoulder half expecting to find George’s face peering through the study window.
“He loved that room,” Maddie says, demonstrating that even after these few unconnected years she is still capable of finding the same wavelength as her brother.
“I think it was the only place where he was lord and master. His sanctuary — if you didn’t count the hours he spent pottering about in the garden.”
“And always conveniently just out of Florence’s vocal range.”
Their soft laughter is entirely genuine, filled with love for the couple who saved them.