“Pay attention, Manders,” she said, gesturing for me to light a match for her cigarette. “Look around you at these people. Look at what’s become of them when I come to call. Rich old families—centuries old, some of them. My family is younger than theirs, and so is my money. The lesson is that we have money now, but we have no idea what will happen to us in ten years, or twenty.” She took a puff of the cigarette as I shook out the match. “I have no intention of letting anything of the sort happen to my son, or to his children. You can never have too much money. Perhaps that makes me avaricious; I suppose it does.” She took another drag and regarded me. “If my sister had had a little more avarice when she married and had Alex, you wouldn’t be in the situation you’re in now.”
Another of her stings, but it was true. I thought of her words now as I sat on a different train months later, this one traveling from London to Hertford. Alex’s mother had gone against her parents’ wishes and married an unsuitable man—she’d lived in a state of happiness and limited funds as her husband had begun to see success, until both had died unexpectedly when Alex was young, leaving him orphaned. The subsequent years had drained the little money they had left, and now it was gone.
I stared out the window of the third-class car, unseeing. I was back in England, just as I’d dreaded. I’d been given two days off, enough time to travel up to see Mother in Hertford, stay the night, and return to London, where Dottie was spending the time arranging for the delivery of her looted pieces and seeing them on to Wych Elm House.
Dottie must know all about Mother; I assumed it, though we had never spoken of it. She would make it a point to know everything about me. She could not possibly have approved of someone like me marrying into her precious family—someone who did not even know who her father was, whose mother was committed to a hospital for the insane. And yet, for all her poking and prying at me in her moods, she never threw those particular flaws in my face. She was strangely tolerant of the fact that my mother was incurably mad, that I needed days off to visit her in the hospital whose fees I paid from my salary. I asked no questions and took the reprieve of silence, since Mother was a topic I had no wish to dissect under Dottie’s blunt lens.
“She’s doing well today,” the nurse said to me as she led me to the visiting room. “We’re being ordered around like a set of ladies’ maids.” She gave me a smile.
I smiled politely back. So it was to be Mother’s Lady of the Manor mood, as I called it. I’d seen it many times. It was puzzling and sometimes irritating, but at least it was one of her calmer phases.
Mother sat in a wicker chair in the visiting room, staring out the window at the garden. She wore a gingham dress and soft slippers, her long hair tied in a loose braid down her back. She’d been given a robe, presumably because she’d complained of cold at some now-forgotten moment, and she’d left it crumpled on the floor at her feet. She was forty-six by my last count, but her skin looked younger, and her slumped shoulders and her narrow, fidgeting hands looked older. She turned her large brown eyes to me as I came in the room.
“Here’s your visitor,” the nurse said to her as I put down my handbag and lowered myself into the chair across from her.
“How lovely,” Mother said.
The hospital was situated in a former private estate, on a green hill in the countryside. It had pretty grounds and rustic shutters on the windows. The view was of the rolling countryside falling away, dotted with trees, hedgerows, and fences. The nurses spoke softly and did not shout. There were no locks, restraints, or cold-water baths. I could have put her somewhere cheaper, but instead I used most of my money to keep her here, where she’d been since I was eighteen.
She gave me a smile now, polite and frozen. Her skin was flawless, translucent in the light coming through the window. As so often happened, she did not recognize me.
“I’m your daughter,” I said gently to her as the nurse left the room.
Something flickered briefly across her face, tightened the skin between her eyes, and was gone again. “Please have some tea,” she said graciously. “I’ve asked the maids to bring it.”
I did not need to look around the visiting room to see there was no tea and there were no maids. “That’s very kind,” I said. “I’m sorry I’ve been away for a while.”
“Have you?” said Mother. “How very interesting.”