Audrey Niffenegger - Her Fearful Symmetry

“Like Mom.”

“Then why are you crying?”

“I’ve never seen a ghost before. I mean, you know, she’s dead .”

“Yes. I know.” He led her into the kitchen. She sat at the table, and he began to make tea. Valentina blew her nose on a paper towel. Robert said, “Did you have the impression that she was trying to appear to you? Or what happened, exactly?”

Valentina shook her head. “I think when I first saw her she was sitting in the window seat looking out. It wasn’t like she was especially trying to make me see her. When she noticed I was looking at her she came over to me and then I got scared and she disappeared.” Valentina paused. “Actually, what I think it was, I don’t think I was totally awake.”

“Oh,” Robert said. “So you dreamed her?”

“No-I don’t think so. But maybe it’s like-you know how when you try to remember something, and you can’t think of it, and then later when you’re not trying to think about it any more it just pops into your head?”

“Yes?”

“Maybe I saw her because I forgot I couldn’t see her.”

Robert laughed. “I’ll have to try that. Of course, she’s not speaking to me lately, so I don’t imagine she’ll appear. How did she seem? Was she angry with you?”

“Angry? No, she was trying to tell me something, but it wasn’t like she was mad or anything.”

The kettle boiled and Robert poured water into the teapot. He said, “Don’t you and Julia talk to her?”

“Sometimes. But she doesn’t want to answer the questions we want to ask.”

Robert smiled and put the tea things on the table. “Perhaps if you let Elspeth do the asking you’ll eventually find out whatever it is you want to know.” He sat down across from Valentina.

“Maybe. I wish you’d just tell us.”

“Tell you what?”

“Whatever it is-we’re not exactly sure, but there’s some big secret about Elspeth and Mom. I mean, they were twins, and then they never spoke to each other again. What was that about?”

“I’m sure I couldn’t say.”

“Couldn’t, or wouldn’t?” Valentina said irritably.

“Couldn’t. I have no idea why Elspeth and Edie parted ways. It happened long before I met Elspeth, and she hardly ever mentioned your mother.” He poured out the tea.

Valentina watched steam rise from her mug.

Robert said, “Why do you need to know? Your mother doesn’t want to tell you, and Elspeth took great care not to leave anything behind that might cause anxiety. Of course, that’s assuming that there actually is a secret.”

“Mom is afraid we’ll find out.”

“Isn’t that a good reason to leave it be ?” He said this more vehemently than he meant to; Valentina looked startled. “Listen,” Robert said more quietly, “sometimes when you finally find out, you realise that you were much better off not knowing.”

Valentina frowned. “How would you know? And besides, you’re a historian. You spend all your time finding out stuff about other people.”

“Valentina, it’s one thing to research the Victorians, it’s completely different when you unearth your own family skeletons.”

She didn’t reply.

“Here. I’ll give you a cautionary tale.” Robert drank some of his tea, and experienced a qualm. Do I really want to tell her this? But she was looking at him expectantly. He said, “When I was fifteen, my mother suddenly came into a great deal of money. ‘Who gave you the money, Mum?’ I asked her. ‘Oh, my Great Aunt Pru died and left it to me,’ she said. Now, I come from a family with a prodigious quantity of aunts, but I had never heard of this one; my mother’s family could trace itself back to the Crusades but they didn’t any of them have a bean. But that was her story, and she stuck to it.

“Then, about two weeks later, I was watching television and they were interviewing a new cabinet minister-and it was my father. He had a different name, but there he was. ‘Mum,’ I said, ‘come and look at this.’ We both sat there watching him do this interview, looking terribly smarmy and respectable.”

Valentina knew what was coming. “So, the money came from your father?”

“Yes. He had finally got to a point in his career where she could ruin him quite spectacularly if she went to the tabloids. ‘Cabinet Minister’s Double Life’ would have been the headline, I suppose. So he paid up and I never saw him again. Except on TV, of course.”

Valentina understood something she had been afraid to ask. “So that’s why you don’t have a job?”

“Yeee-ss,” Robert said. “Though eventually, when I’m done with my dissertation, I’d like to teach, I think.” He sighed. “I would rather have gone on being poor and seeing my father now and then.”

“I thought you didn’t like him.”

“Well, he didn’t care much for children, and I had just got to the age where we might have developed an actual understanding-but it was all a sham, anyway.”

“Oh.” Valentina thought she ought to say something. “I’m sorry.”

Robert smiled at her. “You’re sounding more English by the day. No need to be sorry.” They heard Julia’s footsteps in the kitchen above them. “Should you go upstairs?”

“In a while.”

“Would you like some breakfast, then?”

“Sure.”

Robert collected eggs, bacon, butter and various other items from the fridge. “How do you like your eggs?”

“Fried?”

While the bacon and eggs cooked he set out plates and cutlery, jam and juice; he made toast. Valentina watched him, comforted by his efficiency and delighted by the novelty of having a man serve her breakfast while he pretended not to notice that she was wearing pyjamas.

Robert slid the food onto their plates and sat down. They began to eat. Upstairs, Julia stomped across the kitchen. “Somebody’s not happy,” Robert said.

“I don’t care.”

“Ah, well,” he said.

“I wish I could just leave,” Valentina said.

But you just got here. Robert said, “Why don’t you, then?”

Valentina sensed that he was- what? Offended? She said hastily, “I don’t mean you-I mean Julia. She thinks she owns me. She’s, like, a total dictator about it.”

Robert hesitated, then said, “At the end of the year, you can sell the flat and do what you like.”

Valentina shook her head. “Julia won’t sell it. Julia won’t do anything that would let me be independent. I’m stuck.”

“You could go to Xavier Roche and ask him to divide the estate. There’s enough money in the trusts that Julia could keep the flat and you could take your share in cash,” Robert said.

Valentina brightened. “I could do that?”

“It’s provided for in the will. Didn’t you read it?”

“We did,” Valentina said vaguely, “but I wasn’t paying attention to the small print.”

“Elspeth said she regrets having stipulated that you both live here for a year. She’s rather worried about you.”

“When did she say that?” Valentina asked.

“Last week.”

“Too late.”

“Yes,” Robert said. “I think that watching you and Julia come un-glued is too much like whatever happened to her and Edie.”

Valentina finished her eggs and wiped her mouth. “I wish she’d tell us.”

Robert said, “I think she would-I think it’s your mother who doesn’t want you to know.”

“What would you do if you were me?”

Robert smiled and ran his eyes over her pyjamas. “All sorts of things,” he said. “Shall I list them?”

“No-you know what I mean.” She blushed.

He sighed. “I would make friends with Elspeth.”

“Oh.” She thought about this. “I’m frightened of her.”