“I promise, Maman.”
I hadn’t been to Fairbridge since Grandfather fetched me from Mille Mots and brought me to Scotland, those four years ago. We hadn’t stayed long—enough for Grandfather to settle some of Father’s business affairs, to buy an ecstatic supply of Horlicks, and to set me packing up my childhood into a single trunk. By the time I’d set aside my full mourning, we were on our way to Portugal.
Not that I had much of a say in it, but I’d told Luc it was because there was nothing left for me in Perthshire. Really, though, it was another lie. I hadn’t been back home in all that time because I was afraid. Afraid I wouldn’t be able to walk through the house without remembering.
And I did. How could I help it? Every chair I sat in had once held my mother or father. Every rug bore the ghost of their footprints. I drew a finger over the edges of the straight-backed sofas, the inlaid tables, the high, airy bookcases. All modern furniture that Mother brought into the house “to breathe life into things.” The only things Father brought were his heavy desk, burnished black at the edges where he’d rest his elbows while he drew, and the armchair in the corner of his study that he kept just for me, for those moments when I wanted to be near him and his quiet.
But memory can be a fickle thing. Life at Fairbridge wasn’t as warm as my nostalgia. The hallways looked darker than I remembered, the curtains more stifling, the air lethargic. Everything, from the rugs to the furniture to the damask wallpaper, was so neat and solid, things meant to last longer than fashion. All of Mother’s airy modern furniture looked as out of place as she had been. On Father’s desk there was a ring from his ever-present whisky glass. I walked the hallways, past walnut tables and plush stools, wondering how I once found it all beautiful. How had I ever breathed here?
The curiosity room had been left to grow dusty. I pulled back the curtains and blew on the shelves until the air shimmered with motes. Now that I’d traveled so much, I saw many of the items for what they really were. Some were inauthentic, tourists’ fare, the sort of claptrap things sold at train stations and bazaars for people to send home to their granddaughters. Others I now recognized as commonplace—curved acacia seed pods, flamingo feathers, the tiny snail shells that littered the banks of the Senegal River. This room that awed me and comforted me as a child was now little more than a collection of junk. Years ago it had given me a peek of faraway places; now I’d actually been there and seen so much more.
Grandfather felt it, too. I found him in the hallway, fingers laced behind his back, staring at the wall of paintings. “It feels different.” He sighed. “I suppose enough time had passed.”
Though the house was his, he’d spent so little time in it during my childhood. I remembered occasional visits from a near stranger. I was prodded and instructed to call him “Grandfather Muir,” but I scarcely recognized him. On those visits, he spent more time pacing the grounds and sleeping than he did sitting next to me and talking. I knew him now, knew that shyness kept him tongue-tied and that those solitary rambles were where he worked through theories in his head.
“It has been four years, after all.”
Eyes still on the wall, he said, “Forty-seven.”
“Forty-seven?”
The painting he stared at was of a man at a desk, young but wrapped in a jewel-red paisley shawl as he read. Curls of pencil shavings caught in his cuffs and ink stained his fingertips. In the window behind him was a dusty, treeless street.
“Your grandmother painted that. We were in Tangier, newly married.”
“My grandmother?”
He smiled, sadly. “You come by it honestly. She amazed me.”
“She painted others?”
“Many. She sold four of them, you know.” He touched the signature, tucked against the leg of the desk. “She always signed her paintings ‘Alasdair’ instead of ‘Alice,’ so that no one would know she was a woman.”
I looked down the hallway, at paintings I’d grown up seeing yet not really seeing. In each, the little “Alasdair M.” hidden somewhere within the picture. Desert-swept landscapes, crowded marketplaces, doe-eyed women in scarves and veils. All of the things that I’d tried to paint and draw myself. She’d captured Africa.
“You were traveling, even then.”
“A little. Not as much as we wished. She liked Tangier best.”
“That’s what she painted here?”
He traced the curved window in the painting, over the shoulder of his younger self. “We stayed in an old monastery. Alice loved the quiet, the lingering smell of candles, the rusting bell high in the chapel tower. She used to say she could still hear the hymns caught in the stone.”
Some of that mysticism, that hazy overlay of history, infused her paintings. I smiled.
“But when Alice found that she was expecting, she asked to come back to Fairbridge. She teased that she wanted her baby born under a Scottish rain, but I knew she was scared. Almost as if she knew. I lost her when Maud was born. She didn’t have the chance to hold her baby.”
“But you did.” I took his arm and led him backwards to a stool.
“I didn’t know what I was doing.” He ran fingers through his thin hair. “I filled the house with nurses and nannies, tutors and governesses, dancing and drawing masters.” He sighed, as if it wasn’t enough. “Maud saw more of them than of me.”
“She knew you cared.” It seemed to be the right thing to say.
He shrugged. “She was willful and stubborn. She hated that I spent more time with my books than with anything else.”
I’d followed him down the Senegal River. I knew how focused he could be on his books and notes, as focused as Mother always was on her regrets and lost dreams. I also knew that he loved me. Mother had left me behind; Grandfather always kept me by his side.
I had wasted so many years wishing Mother would come back and that Father would step out from his study. So many years wishing I had a real family. And here, in this thoughtful, slightly absentminded old man, I’d found it. I no longer scanned passing faces, hoping to see hers. I had his.
“I always worried that I didn’t do right by Maud.” He rubbed the sun on the back of his hand with a thumb. “I thought to teach her the comforts of home. But she left anyway.”
“She wasn’t happy,” I said. I knew that. All of her dismissals when Miss May brought me down to recite my lessons. All of her sighing over empty easels she’d never fill. Her icy disregard of Father, the house, our “dreary convention.” “She chose one life and then wanted another.”
I refused to do the same. When I chose, I wanted it to be for good. I didn’t want to live a life tinged with regret.
“I just want you to know that I did my best.” He turned from the painting then. “I never loved her as much as she wanted to be loved. I failed her and, because of that, failed you.”
I thought of countless little affections, things he probably did without thinking. Leaving me the underripe apricots, my favorites. Sitting in the shadows to give me the best view from the window. Bringing back any English novel that turned up in the booksellers’ stands. Never asking about the sudden floods of tears that came on rare occasions, but always having a cup of tea waiting at the end. Knowing, at any moment, when I needed him most.
“Grandfather,” I said, “you didn’t fail.”
He shrugged. “I was given two little girls. Both needed a mother, not a restless scholar. Maud, I kept here in Perthshire, where we both stagnated in this house, where we both spent far too long resenting one another. You, I uprooted and dragged off across the deserts.”
“And gave me the world.” I dropped a kiss on top of his head. Again, he needed a haircut. “Look at how I’ve grown, Grandfather. I can speak three languages. I can barter just as well for a mule or a handful of olives. I can row and hike and argue with any phonologist.” I tightened my hands on the back of his chair. “Once I was vulnerable; I’ll never let anyone be stronger than me again.”
“No, my girl.” He reached over his shoulder and caught my hand. “I don’t believe you will.”
