Swan River by David Reynolds Read Free Book Online Page B

time. She had died in 1942; my mother had known her too, and despite her reluctance to criticise anyone, I knew she had found her bossy and hard to get close to. My father had been very fond of her. After Tom left, and Ernest and George moved away, she had brought him up with the help of her own father; but my father had also found her bossy, a trait he put down to her having had to look after a family from the age of fourteen. He had once told me she was ‘beautiful but tough’. Judging by the photo of her that he kept on his desk, I wouldn’t have called her beautiful; Sabrina, Diana Dors and Marilyn Monroe, the blondes on my bubble-gum cards, were beautiful. ‘Bossy, elegant and tough. Dad thinks she was beautiful.’
    â€˜Tough?’ No women we knew were tough. A few were beautiful, some were elegant, plenty were bossy.
    â€˜That’s what Dad said. She took charge of her brothers and the house and the servants after her mum died, when she was fourteen. S’pose that’s tough.’
    â€˜And what was Old Tom like?’
    â€˜Don’t know, except he drank too much. My father said he was tall and handsome…and he had a long moustache.’
    â€˜Have you seen any photographs of him?’
    â€˜No. Don’t think there are any.’
    I sat down on the floor and leaned against the wall – and remembered something I’d forgotten. ‘Dad took me to a film ages ago. He wanted to see it because whoever wrote it was someone he liked. It was an old film. It was called ‘Viva Sonata’ or something, and it was all about Mexicans – you know, with big hats and moustaches. Anyway, halfway through, Dad whispered to me that this man, the main man, looked like his father, so on the way out I looked to see what his name was. He was called Marlon something.’
    â€˜Marlon!’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Funny name. What did he look like?’
    â€˜Ordinary. Couldn’t see him very well; he had a huge moustache and a hat. He had long, narrow eyes and looked cross all the time, never smiled, not properly.’
    â€˜But I bet Old Tom smiled sometimes.’ She was lying on her front and staring at the family tree again. I stood up and kicked a tennis ball gently against the skirting board, back and forth.
    Suddenly, she said, ‘Except for the servants, there were two non-blood relatives living in that house, Old Tom and La Frascetti.’ I went on kicking, but thought about it. ‘With six blood relatives, including your dad and his sister.’
    It seemed strange; it would have been like my father living with my mother’s family. My father would have found that impossible. I could tell he didn’t even like my grandmother and my aunt, found them snobbish and a bit stupid.
    â€˜Two outsiders,’ Deborah was leaning on her elbows looking up at me.
    The tennis ball went under my bed. Thinking about Tom living with Sis’s father and brothers, and even with her brother’s wife, I slithered under to fetch it. ‘Maybe that’s why Tom got drunk so much, got fed up with all the other people in the house?’ I rolled out and brushed dust off my sweater.

4
    Aristotle’s View of History
    A week later Deborah and I were in my room again. We were poring over my grandmother Sis’s diary for 1886. My father had lent it to me; he had others, but why didn’t I try this one to see if I found it interesting? It was a beige, cloth-bound book, quite worn; stiff brown cardboard showed through at the corners where the cloth had frayed. The endpapers were marbled, navy blue and wine red. The pages were stiff and very white, and crackled when I turned them.
    It wasn’t a diary in the sense of having dates printed in it. It had nothing printed in it. On the first page, written in large, sloping letters, in black ink, were the words ‘Amelia Thompson My Book 1886’. After that there was a page for every day, with