17 Alma Road

The sixth section...

VI

The image of Maddie’s abstract painting now dissolved, Owen resumes his walk back towards the house and the iron bench. He allows his sense of propriety to be piqued by the uneven yew and the weeds in the borders, knowing all the while Maddie will be somewhere nearby watching him. Not put off by its current state of neglect, he assumes she has remained continuously acquainted with the place and is far too familiar with it to be distracted. For her there can be only one subject currently warranting any kind of inspection: her brother.

“What do you remember?” he asks, as if interrupting her. In the privacy of this little oasis cradled by hedges and bushes on three sides and the house on the other, it is irrelevant whether he utters the words aloud or not. Indeed, If you were to ask him how vocal he has actually been he would probably be unable to tell you.

“About what?”

Comforted she is still there, Owen is happy to carry on their conversation. He chases away the notion that soon she will not be — and for the second time.

“Oh, I don’t know. Everything.”

Maddie laughs. In its own way it is a laugh which, rather than transcend time, locates her in it, firmly and irrevocably. It is a laugh from when she was young — early twenties perhaps — and one of which he had gradually been deprived over subsequent years. Even though it cannot be so, it is the laugh of innocence.

“‘Everything’ is so big, Glen.”

He smiles at her use of his nickname then looks up at the house trying to recall the curtains that used to hang at the the landing window inset immediately above the back door and the patio.

“Why not start at the beginning then?”

Settling himself down on the bench and feeling Maddie beside him once more, he stares again at the apple trees and waits.

“The house’s beginning or ours?” she asks.

“Ours, of course. I’m not sure anyone knows the entire history of the house.”

“Really? I always assumed uncle George knew just about everything there was to know — even if he played second fiddle to Florence most of the time. I think their jousting was a public game they enjoyed playing.”

Owen wants to ask her if she has spoken with them recently, seen them from wherever she is — ridiculous though the notion may be — and for a moment wonders if he might use her as a conduit to establish what they wanted him to do with the place.

“There were many games I suspect,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

Aware that his tone betrayed more than he intended, Owen tries to rein her back.

“Oh, you know.” He pauses, hoping she does not. “Maybe later.” It is a meagre but sufficient concession. “But for now I’m interested in us, our beginnings. For example, you always maintained you remembered mum and dad, but I don’t see how you could have given you were so young. Too young. Even I have nothing more than vague and blurred images.”

“Do you think I lied about that — remembering them I mean?”

He marks the tone in her voice.

“I don’t think you ever lied about anything.” The statement sounds hollow to his ear. “Well, almost never.”

Did he say that last phrase out loud, or offer it to her in any other way?

Prompted by a sudden burst of sunlight, he undoes the buttons on his coat and recalls how Florence used to love her little ‘sun trap’.

“But I wonder”, he continues before Maddie can say anything else, “irrespective of what we actually recall, whether or not what we actually did was to concoct images of them based on the stories we were fed by Florence and George. Florence mainly. That and a few old photographs. Who’s to say if what we know — or think we know — is in fact true?”

“About the accident?”

“About any of it, I suppose.”

“Do you still see them as figments of your imagination?”

It is a notion which perplexes him somewhat, especially in the way she has phrased the question. Is she not such a figment, right here and now? If so — and if she was privy to more recent conversations with Florence and George — then why wouldn’t that ethereal possibility be extended to include their parents too?

“Figments. Ghosts. I don’t know, you choose.” He waits a moment, suddenly unsure of his ground, as if his use of the word ‘ghosts’ might have unseen consequences. “But ‘still’, Maddie? You asked if I ‘still see them’. Is that what you think, that I’ve always regarded them as somewhat mythological, like characters from a fairy story?”

“Haven’t you?” She softens her tone slightly, makes it more inclusive. “Didn’t we both? After all, what other option was there?”

How old had they been when Florence started colouring-in those first few years of their histories? Did she begin the day she and George took them into Alma Road and set them on their new adventure? Or during the days soon after when their clothes and toys and furniture started to appear and transform those two upper rooms at the front of the house? Owen is uncertain whether he remembers any of that transition. In his mind a new normal established itself without any resistance — at least none that he can recall — even if Florence spoke later on of difficult early days, nights of crying. Perhaps school helped the siblings acclimatise in turn, he first. The imposition of an external routine — and routine distractions — created scaffolding upon which they could all depend, the four of them; routines demanded they each be assigned their various roles in order for a day to pass smoothly. And if this had been so, it would have been a regime which also permitted them to assign standard notions of ‘freedom’ to weekends and school holidays, claim their collective place in a universal normality. For Florence and George that must have been as novel as it was unexpected.

At what point had he been aware — finally and irrevocably — that their parents were never coming back? Had it come to him out of the blue? Definitively or circumstantially? Or had that knowledge crept up on him with stealth? And once he understood that segment of his past — indisputably so — did he tell Maddie or did he allow her to find out on her own? He suspects that if he were to ask her she would tell him — and that if she doesn’t know she might make something up. Refraining from the interrogation of someone who, in spite of her claim and his supporting affirmation (“I don’t think you ever lied about anything”) might inadvertently end up an unreliable witness, he settles on the one episode of which he is certain.

“We have decided — your uncle and I — that you are old enough to be told the truth.”

They had been in the garden one Sunday afternoon, Florence and George sitting on the bench, he and Maddie each laying on a blanket. Owen was struggling with Shakespeare for an ‘O’ level essay; Maddie was sketching as she always did. When the spring weather was good this post-lunch congregation had become something of a ritual. They both looked up.

It seemed odd to imagine that, if they were only now being told the truth, Florence and George might have been wilfully lying to them for years. If such a possibility had previously failed to register with them, its realisation was to creep up on him gradually over subsequent years and, in time, expand to cover a wider scope than just their parents. That afternoon he had been glad to be diverted from Romeo and Juliet, struggling as he always did with the language, the poetry. Having been told there was meaning just beneath the surface, his attempt to scrape away at the veneer of words in order to get to the gold was inevitably doomed to failure. Where Owen put his book down, Maddie simply paused, pencil in mid-air.

“Not that it will probably be news anyway.” Florence corrected herself, as if simultaneously devaluing both her previous statement and the truth she intended to reveal. She glanced at George who nodded almost imperceptibly.

And so she had told them everything she could about the car accident and the nature of their parents’ death. It had been as brief and factual an exposition as she could manage. She might just has easily have been talking about the demise of some anonymous people of whom the children had heard circumstantially, like a minor filler item on The Nine O’Clock News. In many ways it was like telling a story — “once upon a time” — though one without any moral quality. A tale with very little beginning or middle, it was all ending.

There had been a pause, Florence allowing her glance to stray from the children and down the garden. George’s travelled in the opposite direction.

“But none of that is really new or surprising, is it?” He aimed his question at Owen, the senior partner.

“Not really.” Owen shook his head. “I don’t think we knew the whole of the driver’s story. Other than that…”

He looked at Maddie who was staring at her drawing.

“So.” George glanced to his wife.

“We just wanted to draw a line under it I suppose,” she offered, only now aware of the anti-climactic nature of her disclosure. “Officially. That’s all we know. There is nothing else” — another pause, this time less certain — “in case you were wondering. Or had any gaps that needed to be filled in. Away from the public account, I mean. So that we can put it to bed, as it were.”

“But what about them?” As she spoke, Maddie seemed still intent on her incomplete drawing, her hand still poised. When she looked up, Florence could see that her eyes were dry.

“Them?” Florence’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

“Augustus and Alice,” she said. In the presence of Florence and George, she had never referred to them as ‘father’ and ‘mother’. “What were they like as people?”

Owen looked at his sister. It had been a question they had informally shared, occasionally speculating as children might about characters in a story. For a moment he was drawn to the play still open in front of him. What if that had been called Augustus and Alice, or their parents called Romeo and Juliet? Would that have made any difference at all, to either their story or the play? When he and Maddie had been younger they had debated what their parents had been like, creating the kinds of profile which appealed to children of a certain age. For a while Augustus had been some kind of adventurer, Alice a model and actress. These were safe caricatures for people they didn’t know, almost as if their parents were Ken and Barbie, figures who could be put away once they had been played with. Such fabrication also felt strangely wicked and dangerous, offering them the merest frisson of subterfuge and undercover activity. And though they had gradually ceased to indulge their imaginations in this way, Florence’s relaying of the tragedy opened doors to potentially laying other ghosts to rest.

“‘Like’?” Florence was momentarily thrown.

“What did they do? What kind of people were they?”

Without needing to look towards her husband, Florence knew all eyes were on her. Maddie’s question was open-ended, flexible; Florence could do with it as she saw fit, weave whatever she chose into her answer, fact or fiction. That afternoon she wanted to keep things simple; there had been enough distractions for one day, and there was homework to finish and chores to be done. She imagined herself back in the kitchen making the supper they would eat in a few hours, and, in the light of Maddie’s request, wondered which she would rather be doing, answering her niece’s question or cooking.

“They were, I suppose, typical young people. It was ten years ago mind — to the day in fact, which is why we thought… Anyway, they weren’t at all like the young people you see out and about these days.” She glanced at George who silently encouraged her to go on. “1969 was a time of optimism I think, wouldn’t you say George? The sixties had swung all they were going to swing, and a new decade was on the horizon. Man was about to go to the moon. Everything seemed possible.” Knowing the children had subsequently seen the Apollo 11 footage she paused, half hoping Owen would ask her what it was like watching Neil Armstrong’s famous footstep. He says nothing. “I think Augustus was beginning to show signs of ambition.”

“What do you mean?” Owen sought clarification.

“Oh, I don’t think he ever cared that much about work, not really. And when you two came along — well, they had their hands full. But I think he was starting to get the hang of being a dad, and I think it had dawned on him that the more successful he was professionally, the better it would be for the family. Not that that was what made him remarkable.”

“What did?”

Florence looked at Maddie, unsurprised such a question had come from her.

“Your father? Love of life perhaps more than anything. He was an outgoing, optimistic type. Glass always half-full rather than half-empty. He was a zesty individual, wasn’t he George?”

She paused finding herself in need of a little moral support.

George obliged. “Without doubt. Zesty. Good word.”

“And Alice?” Maddie again.

Florence smiled.

“Very similar. Peas from the same pod you might say. Of course she didn’t have the same concerns about career as Augustus, but like him she too was trying to come to terms with what being a parent meant. In some ways it was a little harder for her.”

“How?”

“I think in the beginning children always harder for the woman — as you may find out one day.” Florence tried a laugh to see if she had hit the right note, but Maddie’s gaze remained unwavering. “I’m pretty sure you two were it though; I mean, there was never any talk of having a third child.”

“They were perfectly content with you.” George added, hoping his endorsement would perform some kind of trick.

“And you’ve seen the photos,” Florence continued, “so you know how handsome they were together. Cut quite a dash, as we used to say.” She allowed her mind to wander a little, to imagine herself looking at snapshots of a different couple entirely.

“Are we like them?”

Owen brought her back. It was the kind of question she wouldn’t have expected from him.

“Physically?” Florence doesn’t wait for clarification. “Yes, of course. You both have elements of them; shapes mainly. Eyes, mouth, nose. You’re more like you father Owen, and Maddie like Alice. Wouldn’t you say so, George?” Again George nods. “As for the rest of it…”

And of course it was ‘the rest of it’ in which Maddie remained most interested.

As he recalls the episode now, sitting again at the back of the waiting house, the conversation seemed to fizzle out at that point; Florence managed to avoid any further elaboration, making excuses about needing the toilet or having to do something in the kitchen. And Maddie had been content enough to let her aunt off the hook and return to her drawing. It was as if she knew that now the genii was out of the bottle the conversation could be resurrected at will. Owen likes to think that he returned to Romeo and Juliet with fresh eyes, Maddie back to her sketch satisfied. Probably neither were true.

“You spoke of them later.”

As if she has been attendant throughout Owen’s recollection, Maddie’s present-day voice intrudes and he turns to where she should be sitting.

“Of course. Don’t you remember?”

“I remember everything,” she replies with a trace of the mischievous in her voice. Her statement is much like that about always telling the truth, each in turn prompting Owen to smile at his sister’s desire for memory to be absolute, unequivocal. Accurately or not, he remembers her penchant for words like ‘always’ and ‘never’. It was a taste for the binary which for him never aligned with what he thought it meant to be an artist. If the same was true for Maddie herself, then perhaps that disconnect had been part of her problem.

“It wasn’t long after that they took us to the cemetery for the first time was it?”

“Either later that year or the year after,” Maddie confirms.

“Perhaps the conversation that afternoon and then the visit to the cemetery was all part of them demonstrating they thought we were ‘old enough’.”

“We’d always been old enough,” Maddie says somewhat cryptically. “And anyway, that wasn’t what I meant.”

“What wasn’t?”

“When I said that you spoke of them later.” She pauses, unable to keep a slight edge of frustration from her voice. “You spoke of them later. Or to Florence about them.”

“Ah. I see what you mean.”

“And?”

“Yes, of course.” Owen feels as if he is juggling something slippery. “There were lots of conversations with Florence, especially after George died; before that, she with the two of us.” He hesitates. “And - subsequently…”

Maddie laughs.

“Of course, Glen.” She waits a beat. “It’s the ‘subsequently’ I’m interested in. So, spill the beans.”

“What don’t you know?” he asks, stalling. Then, realising how stupid his question is, apologies. “Sorry. It’s just that…”

She tries to help him out.

“Why don’t you assume that if I wasn’t involved in any conversation you had ‘subsequently’ with Florence then I’m entirely ignorant of it — which seems reasonable, doesn’t it? And you should also assume that my original question to Florence — ‘what kind of people were they?’ — is still valid, unanswered. Or at least to my satisfaction.”

Owen sits back on the bench and stretches out his legs a little, crossing them at the ankles. His revised posture is strangely comforting, as is the vista down the garden. And feeling the solid house behind him offers an odd yet not unfamiliar notion of protection, as if it has ‘got his back’. Still. He senses Maddie waiting and feels cocooned.

“We talked a few times I suppose, and about all sorts of things. You’ll remember the conversations with her after George died.” He waits for confirmation but none is forthcoming. “I think she was in something of spin for a while, trying to come to terms with her own loss, the new life she was facing into. That was, what, twenty-odd years on from the conversation about the crash and when you first asked your question.”

“And all we had in between were snippets. Or that’s what I felt at least. I’d probe from time to time, but Florence kept those particular cards tight to her chest — or at least she did when I was around. And uncle George said virtually nothing.”

“He didn’t think it was his turf, I suspect.” In recalling his uncle, Owen can only conjure freeze-frame images of his slow but inevitable decline between that garden conversation in 1981 and his demise some thirty-four years later. “Augustus was Florence’s brother, after all. I suppose his memory was her responsibility.”

“And therefore one she could shape.”

Owen ponders the notion, certain that manipulation of their father’s image was exactly what Florence did do — at least until she had no reason left not too. The death of George freed her of one of those reasons, and when Owen was the only one remaining in her immediate sphere — well, there was nothing left against which she had to guard.

He wonders whether Florence’s motives were solely about protecting them — perhaps especially Maddie — from the raw truth. Or what she might have interpreted as either ‘raw’ or ‘truth’. Perhaps that had been the reason she and George had waited until he was fourteen and Maddie twelve to speak of the accident. But to not go any further? To decline to answer the question ‘what kind of people were they?’ until Maddie wasn’t there to hear the answer? The first time she told Owen what she really thought of their father — her brother — had been five years ago. Having trespassed into his fifties, Owen had proved he could look after himself; perhaps because of that she thought the truth could no longer do any real damage — either to him or her.

“I suppose there’s no harm in telling you now.” That was how Florence had begun that particular Wednesday evening. They had just finished an evening meal cooked by Owen, a one-off treat that had quickly established itself as ritual. “Not that I suppose you care much anyway. After all it’s ancient history as far as you’re concerned. I might just as well be telling you secrets about King Tut or Clement Attlee.”

“Secrets?” he had said.

“There you go, tripping up an old woman when she’s too frail to fight you off.” It was a standard ploy.

“Frail!” Owen laughed. “Show me the person who chooses to put ‘Florence’ and ‘frail’ in the same sentence and I’ll show you someone destined for the mad-house.”

She smiled, a mixture of knowing and gratitude.

“And I should have added bribery to the charge too. Coming round here plying me with your delicious sausages, those crispy chips you know I can’t resist… You’re a sly one young Owen, make no mistake.”

Once the old joke had been shared, silence settled again.

“Augustus,” she said by way of opening gambit. Just his name. “I’d ask you what you want to know, but you couldn’t tell me. Nor of the gaps that needed filling in. It’s the same story there I suppose.” She paused to marshal her troops. “The facts you have, I know that. But it’s not facts you’re after. Or they weren’t what Maddie was interested in, not really. ‘Tell me what they were like’ she asked me one day. Do you remember? As if it were that easy.”

“You don’t have to…”

“But I do.” She interrupted him. “Don’t give me that ‘don’t have to’ nonsense. And anyway, this is as much for me as it is for you. If anything, I’m the only one who’ll benefit now, meagre reward though it may be.”

“Benefit? How so?”

“Oh, relieving myself from holding on to things I suppose. Things I probably should have told you years ago. Not that there’s anything too dramatic — not in the grand scheme.” She delayed again. “Think of me cleansing myself, purging my guilt, rather than paying any kind of debt. At least that’s how I’ll look upon it. Better that way, eh?”

He made to get up and close the living room curtains but was halted by a wave of her hand. Dusk was falling rapidly, and they had reached that pivot point where the window’s reflection of the inside of the room carried as much light as that coming through from the outside. It was almost like the manifestation of a universe where two realities coexisted together, but only for a few fleeting moments.

“I don’t think I ever liked Augustus that much.” It was significant salvo. “He used to want me to call him Aggie, did I ever tell you that?” Owen shook his head. “But I refused. It may have suited some of the friends of his youth, but it didn’t work for me. And I didn’t think it suited him. Perhaps it didn’t suit me either.” She paused, and then fired her initial guns again as if she wanted to ensure she’d hit her target. “Even though he was my kith and kin, I never really liked him. I know as the older sister I was supposed to have had responsibilities as far as he was concerned, that it was partly my job to look after him, but there came a point when I couldn’t see any merit in it.”

“How old had you been?” Owen sought a triangulation point.

“I don’t know. Fifteen? Nine? Does it matter?” She let the rhetorical question settle. “He was always a little too full of himself for my liking. Especially later on. Ours was a Quaker household — or something approximating to it. Not that we were devout. Is that the right word for Quakers? Anyway, this only made Augustus’ flightiness stand out even more. Perhaps I had already been indoctrinated before he began to take shape as a person; maybe my reaction to him said as much about me… But flighty he was, to my mind at least. And then throughout his teenage years he became something else.”

Florence stopped, wanting to be prompted. Perhaps having Owen to force her on made things easier.

“Something else?”

“A chancer. A fly-boy. A bit of a spiv. Flighty was supported by flashy. Mind you,” she visibly corrected herself, somehow wanting mitigation, “he was charismatic with it. Quite the charmer. An attractive young man, without doubt. So you see how all of that — his flair and flash and magnetism — rubbed me up the wrong way. Perhaps I was jealous.”

“And were you?”

Florence made a show of considering Owen’s question, as if it was one she hadn’t asked herself over and over across the chasm of years.

“Probably. Where I became set in my ways, Augustus was busy exploring. Did you know he was an active trade unionist for a while?”

“I don’t think I did.” Owen was unable to hide his surprise.

“It was one of the things he ended up trying on for size, just to see how it fitted. Or felt. And all that CND stuff. He was a salesman too — but of nothing other than himself. Although he was only twenty-one when he met Alice I think we had hopes — your grandparents and I — that she might calm him down or straighten him out.”

Although he instinctively knew the answer, Owen couldn’t help but ask the obvious question. It was required of him to keep Florence up to the task.

“And did she?”

Florence smiled at the naïvety of the question.

“Of course not. They were as bad as each other. If anything Alice made him even worse, and for the first six or so years of their relationship — right up until you were born — they were… I don’t know. Dissolute, I suppose. Wasters, of a kind.”

“You sound angry.”

“Angry?” Florence weighed the word in her mind much in the manner as someone might take a sweet onto their tongue and roll it around to better acquaint themselves with its flavour. Or to decide whether or not they liked it. “More disappointed, I suppose. For all his faults, Augustus had a sharp and bright mind. Perhaps I also assumed he could do better for himself. For a while we hoped you and Maddie might be the spark that helped him see it.”

“Isn’t that how young people are?”

She looked at Owen as if she found his assertion the height of ignorance.

“I wasn’t. And neither were you, thank goodness. Nor was Maddie — though she had her own challenges.” Florence waited a heartbeat to see if there was any comeback on her statements. “But Augustus? Flighty, charming, political, careless, bad with money, idealistic or foolhardy (take your pick). And, perhaps most regretfully of all, dishonest.”

Owen felt a strange ambivalence towards Florence’s words; although she was talking about his father, she might have been describing anyone. King Tut, indeed. But it was not simply his ambivalence which disturbed him, nor having to interpret what she was saying; he found himself struggling to know how he should relate to such revelations. Should he have been offended at her accusations of dissolution and flightiness? And if so, would that have been on behalf of his late father or himself somehow? Or for Maddie, as if Florence’s confessions might have some posthumous impact on her?

“What do you mean dishonest? That seems an entirely different category of accusation compared to being ‘flighty’.”

“It is, it is.” Florence looked around the room. There was something almost nervous in her action, secretive almost, as if she had be caught with her hand in the cookie jar.

If Owen missed the subtlety of her involuntary gesture, it was because he had already settled on the image of her seeking out photographs that were not there — not only not on display, but never taken. He had been fifty-three years old, Florence nearly eighty-one, yet it was as if he had been transported back to that afternoon when he found himself on a rug on the lawn with Romeo and Juliet open in front of him, Maddie asking her question, and Florence — in this altered version of reality — actually answering it.

“He was engaged to be married. The year before he met your mother. He was still a child really; a twenty-year-old boy trying to find his place in the world, testing its boundaries to see how far he could push them. Rose had been four years older; a strange wan young woman who had been seduced by that charm of his before she knew it. Don’t ask me how they had been thrown together, I have no idea; but there she was one Saturday, large as life, come to tea. There may even have been sausages, who knows.” She floated her little joke towards him as if it might save one of them. Owen didn’t laugh. “Yet all the while Augustus was still busy working things out, trying to shape himself, fit into his…” She shook her head, unhappy with the fanciful turn of phrase. “And all the time he was doing that, poor Rose was becoming increasingly besotted. When he woke up one morning and saw her for what she was — or saw himself for what he wanted to be — he simply finished with her on the spot. They were two months from being married.”

“That’s dreadful.” Feeling bound to say something — yet still oddly detached from Florence’s parable — Owen settled on a platitude delivered in a moralistic tone. Once out, the words suggested something more judgemental than he’d had in mind.

“Indeed. Augustus went gallivanting off, still gaily joining the dots on his personality, while Rose wilted. If you’ll excuse the metaphor.” Florence waited for its dust to settle. “And then suddenly there was Alice.”

“And what did she say?”

“Alice?”

“Yes. About Rose.”

“She didn’t know.” Florence made no effort to sugar-coat the pill. Then she handed Owen a second one. “She never knew. Never. No-one else did. We certainly weren’t going to tell her, after all it was none of our business.”

At this, Owen stood up in a second attempt to close the curtains. This time Florence did nothing to restrain him. The pivot point of light had passed; all he could see in the window was himself and the reflection from inside the room.

“Do you think it would have made any difference?” Owen asked, still facing his other self.

“What, Alice knowing?” Florence paused just an instant to consider the question. “It might have depended how she found out, who told her; though, to the best of my knowledge, she didn’t know, and Augustus was clearly never going to tell her… Or maybe he did and I’m doing him an injustice. But I’m as certain as I can be that he didn’t. Ever. There was the odd glance he’d shoot me during conversations sometimes — conversations involving Alice — which seemed proof enough of her ignorance. They were warnings to stay away from his past. It was off-limits and, from his perspective, that’s how it was going to stay.” Taking a moment, Florence appeared to try and attach herself to somewhere in her own history, perhaps to multiple incidents in the self-same room where she sat. “ But to answer your question, I don’t think it would have made any difference at all.”

“Why not?”

Owen and Maddie had been brought up by Florence and George to value honesty above all else. Perhaps that was why Florence had been protecting them, afraid that their father’s dishonesty might trigger an unwanted reaction in them, or risk proving or disproving something else entirely. Owen wondered if, as people, they would have been changed had Florence told them their father’s secret when they had been teenagers, that afternoon in the garden.

Florence said nothing.

“I can’t see how she wouldn’t have been affected, or changed her opinion of him.” It was a mature an assessment as he had been able to summon.

“But if she loved him too much, do you still think that would have insulated her? It certainly did no such thing for poor Rose.” Florence glanced about the room, her gaze settling on the mantle and the clock sat ticking there. “I think Alice was too much like Augustus; so much so that she might actually have understood his position. Even supported him. And why should she revolt against his decision if it meant he landed in her lap?”

It was a phrase that suddenly concerned Owen.

“But it wasn’t a rebound thing? Augustus and Alice I mean.”

“Not as far as I could see.” Florence allowed the idea to permeate before refuting it. “No. They were peas from the same pod, both vaguely irresponsible, not good with money.”

“Flighty?” Owen suggested. Florence smiled.

“Indeed. But unlike my dear brother for whom Alice was the second gallop round the track, he was Alice’s one and only. She staked everything on him and, I suppose, when he looked at Alice perhaps he saw himself reflected to a suitable degree. What wasn’t there to like about that? So he reciprocated. By all accounts Alice grew up something of a spoiled only child and found in Augustus someone who seemed prepared to continue spoiling her, even if he was merely engaged in some kind of proxy self-worship. Not that either of them would have seen it that way.”

Silence intruding for a moment, Owen looked at the detritus from their after-dinner coffee on the small table in the centre of the room and wondered whether or not he shouldn’t bring the evening to a conclusion by clearing it away.

“They lived hard.” Florence’s words demolished Owen’s thought. “Though I’m not sure if ‘hard’ is the right word, you know; but they partied often, stayed out late. It was a hedonistic kind of lifestyle I suppose.”

“That doesn’t sound like it would have suited Rose,” Owen suggested.

“Indeed. And there you have it; Augustus’ justification for throwing her over. Of course I didn’t approve — not of the throwing over nor of this life he and Alice were leading. Not that my objections — had I verbalised them — would have made any difference. I suspect I had ceased to be relevant for Augustus many years before, and Alice really didn’t like me from the outset — though she could wind poor George about her little finger. In her eyes I think I stood for all those things she abhorred: like routine and obligation and duty. Which, I suppose, made their having you — and then Maddie — all the more surprising. It was…”

“An accident?”

“I was going to say out of character, but you may be right. In any event, they did have you and that was that. The first year was particularly rough. Alice didn’t need to confide as much to me, it was blatantly obvious. But then things began to change. I don’t think either she or Augustus were much altered — not deep down — but suddenly there was a new perspective, a chink of light. And then…”

Later, when Owen was at the kitchen sink, Florence walked over and placed a hand on his shoulder.

“I hope you didn’t mind all that.” she said.

“Your telling of the story?”

“Me unburdening myself.”

“Did it help you?”

“Who knows.” She offered him a weak smile. “When will I next have the honour of your company?”

He turned to face her square on.

“I’m away most of next week. When I get back, maybe at the weekend?”

Florence nodded.

“Let yourself out, won’t you?”