21 November 2002
Late November always had such a haunting melancholic feel about it; the best of the autumn gone, the glory of the leaves only a memory when the wind rattled the skeletal branches of the trees. Did trees have memories, Amber wondered as she looked through the window and out into the parkland of Denham Place. Did they, like her, remember the urgent joy of spring with all its budding promise? Did they still feel in the dreary grey an echo of the heavy, heady, sensual warmth that had been summer? A reminiscent smile touched her lips, thinner now than they had been when she had been in her own summer, but her smile still lifted her high cheekbones and shone in the faded beauty of her eyes. Spring and summer; they had been so long ago for her, and autumn too, patterned with its rich colours as vibrant as her beloved silk.
Winter held her now, bare and sometimes bleak but still beautiful.
There had been frost during the night, riming the grass, showing the tracks of the muntjac deer her own grandmother had installed at Denham. She had been dreaming of Blanche recently, and all those others whom she knew would be waiting for her. Time passed so slowly now and she grew impatient to be with them.
But not today.
‘Are you really ninety years old today?’
The solemn question, from her youngest-but-two great-great-grandchild, made her smile and place her hand on his dark head.
‘Yes,’ she told him. ‘I really am.’
‘Harry! I’m sorry, Great-grandmother. He didn’t wake you, did he?’
‘No, dear. Don’t worry.’
The young woman – the wife of one of Amber’s great-grandsons – looked harassed and tense. Amber felt sorry for her. They didn’t have an easy time of it, the young women of this modern age.
She had lived almost a whole century, a time during which there had been so many changes. Did her great-granddaughter-in-law, who complained about the demands made on her by her husband’s political career, realise that when she, Amber, had been born women had not even had the vote? Did she care? Would Amber have cared in her place?
Ninety years. An eternity. Amber suspected that many of her relatives who had come here today to celebrate the event with her would think so, anyway.
Yet to her in some ways it was no longer than the length of a small sigh, a single breath in the heartbeat of time.
Life was no more than a clever game of smoke and mirrors, which now, at this stage of her life, had become so transparent for her that the past, and those with whom she had shared it, had become as accessible as a series of open doors through which she could walk freely. No longer did her memories come only as shadows in her dreams. They were as real as she was herself, sharing her joy now in what they had played a part in creating. She could hear her father’s great shout of laughter and feel the bear hug of joy with which he would hold his great-great-great-grandchild.
Amber had asked for her chair to be placed where she could both see the room and look out of the window so that she could view both the past and the present.
She had always loved Denham, and the house in turn loved her. They shared secrets that were theirs alone.
As though she were there in the room, Amber could almost feel the icy disapproval of her grandmother, whose pearls were now ornamenting the slender neck of her eldest great-grandchild, Natasha, to whom Amber had given them, in part because her looks reminded her so much of Blanche. Natasha’s looks might be Blanche’s, but her nature was not, and with a shudder Amber prayed that her life would not turn out like Blanche’s either.
So many memories: some of them of things that had brought her great joy and others that had brought her unbearable pain, but all of them precious in their own way.
The November day was bright, with that sharp sunshine that late autumn sometimes brings. The cake had been brought in and so had the champagne.
The house was older than she by two hundred years, and the room settled easily into the expectant silence – it had witnessed many celebrations, after all, some public and some very private. A small smile touched her mouth; a very private memory revived. She could almost feel the warmth of the gust of laughter of the man who had made that memory with her.
Her gaze went to the painting newly hung for the occasion.
The Silk Merchant’s Daughter had been on loan to one high-profile gallery after another for so many decades now that seeing it again was like welcoming home an old friend. But silk merchant’s daughter that she was, the girl in the painting didn’t look at her; she was too absorbed in the roll of silk she was coveting.
Silk. As a young woman she had thought she had known all there was to know, both about the fabric and life itself, but all she had understood had been what was on the surface. She had been ignorant then of what was beneath; of the weft and warp of the tightly woven pattern that was the fabric of human life.
In the shadows those she had loved pressed closer, their presence felt only by her.
The honour of giving the toast fell to the great-grandchild whose birthday fell on the same day as her own and who today would be seventeen.
Seventeen.
The room shimmered with the painful jolt to her heart. Some years remained burned in the memory for ever by the acid sharpness of their pain. The year that had begun with her own seventeenth birthday had been one of them. The arthritic hands she had folded in her lap beneath one of the special handmade padded silk throws that accompanied her everywhere trembled. She looked towards the window, her gaze bright with the sharp clarity of her memories.
Cheshire, Late November 1929
In less than an hour’s time Amber was to go downstairs to her grandmother’s study to receive the very special birthday gift her grandmother had promised her. Seventeen! She was almost a woman now. Grown up at last.
The fever of her anticipation had Amber dancing rather than walking across her bedroom. She knew what the ‘very special gift’ was, of course. How could she not?
Art school – where she would begin the training that would ultimately enable her to follow in her father’s footsteps. It was all she had wanted for as long as she could remember, and now at last her dreams could start to come true. And not just her dreams.
There had been cards at breakfast from her grandmother and her cousin, Greg; from Jay, her grandmother’s estate manager; from the household servants; from the manager of the family-owned silk mill in Macclesfield, and from Beth, her best friend at school. But, as had been the case for the past four years, there was no card from those she loved the most. Her parents.
Her emotions, mercurial today and unfamiliarly intense, turned her mood from excitement to sorrow as swiftly as the wind turned the November sky beyond the windows of her bedroom from clear autumn blue to grey.
On the desk that had been her mother’s, and in which she kept her sketchbooks, there was a photograph of Amber with her parents, taken on her twelfth birthday, just three weeks before their deaths. In it, they were all smiling, her father’s arm around her mother. Her mother was looking at her father with sheer adoration and he was looking back at her. Amber was standing in front of them, her mother’s arm sheltering her, her father’s free hand holding hers.
They had been so happy, the three of them – not wanting or needing