Free A Brief History of Montmaray by Michelle Cooper Page B

Toby whispered consolingly one evening to Veronica and me. We were all huddled under the covers of her bed (Henry was there too, but asleep). It was nearly summer by then, but Uncle John was on one of his rampages downstairs, so we’d decided we were better off invisible under a blanket. ‘It must take such a long time to buy carpets and furniture and all of that,’ Toby added. ‘I expect she’s awfully busy.’
    ‘She probably wants it to be all nice before she asks you to visit,’ I told Veronica. ‘You could take some of her things in your trunk when you go. The little things – the jade elephant and–’
    ‘No,’ said Veronica firmly. ‘She doesn’t care about any of this any more. About any of us. ’ Then she turned over on her side, and Toby and I looked at each other and silently vowed not to mention Isabella again, at least not in Veronica’s presence. And as the months passed, this became easier and easier. We exhausted the subject of where Isabella might be (I thought Spain, Toby said Paris) and what she might be doing (being a mannequin for Schiaparelli, decorating rich people’s houses, learning to fly an aeroplane). We were too young then to understand what I now can guess – that back in Society, where she belonged, she’d found another lover. Perhaps he’d even been one of her former suitors (I imagine she’d had plenty of those), someone who’d waited patiently for her all those years. And when she’d protested that really, she was married now, he’d pointed out that she deserved better than life on an isolated island, in a crumbling castle full of someone else’s children (this was a year or two after my parents died and although Toby and I were fairly well behaved, Henry was still a toddler and given to throwing monstrous tantrums). Perhaps he was rich – perhaps he’d promised her exquisite gowns and diamond necklaces and champagne. Or perhaps he was good-hearted but poor, charming but middle-class, and she’d never really stopped loving him, had only married into the FitzOsbornes because her family had insisted on a properly aristocratic match...
    It’s odd, actually, how vivid my recollections of Isabella are, when my own mother is such a blur to me. I was six when she died. I know that she was named Jane, that she was the only child of an impoverished Viscount, that she played the piano, wore spectacles and enjoyed the poetry of Wordsworth. But this is secondhand information, gathered from the few personal possessions she left behind. I ought to remember more. After all, I can recall other, earlier events quite clearly: the croquet mallet incident; Nanny Mackinnon forcing me into a scratchy pink frock for Henry’s christening; George rowing us out past South Head one spring morning to see the milky-blue swirls of a plankton bloom spreading across the bay. But as for my mother – I have no idea what her smile was like (she looks shy or solemn in photographs, even her wedding portrait) or what scent she wore or even the exact colour of her eyes. I don’t know whether she wrote poems or was frightened of the dark or missed her parents (they had both died by her twenty-first birthday). I haven’t had any success asking the others about her, either. Toby just changes the subject and Veronica is uncharacteristically vague. A few weeks ago, for instance, I was struggling with a handful of hairpins that would not stay in and I asked her whether Mother’s hair had been the same.
    ‘Oh, it was sort of ... wavy,’ Veronica said. ‘Or wait – perhaps she put curlers in it at night? I think it was brown, no, more a darkish blonde. She kept it cut short, I recall, although it may just have been that she tucked it up under her hats...’
    Even Alice and Mary, while agreeing that my mother was ‘lovely’, are frustratingly short on details. I think it’s simply that Isabella was so beautiful and vivacious, so utterly dazzling, that my mother faded into the background.
    I do take