Half-Remembered
A/N: Written for my darling HeavyRotation's birthday!
I don't own anything.
She is happy – how can she not be happy, when she has all that she has ever wanted? She is married to the love of her life (after he returned to her after so many years, honourably discharged from the Army after the conclusion of the Boer War), has a beautiful son, and lives in a cosy little townhouse in London with her family. How can she be unhappy?
But there are things that perplex her – like how they never seem to age, even as the years pass; how sometimes (only sometimes) a Starling perches on her windowsill, head cocked as he looks at her peculiarly. (Sometimes she hears him speak to her.) Once, only once, she thought she saw a Star smile at her, thought a Statue waved to her.
And then there are her husband's drawings, which, in the right light look alive (a landscape she once walked through, a seashore they once visited, though he claims they are all figments of his imagination), and then there are the People. They receive letters, long, personal letters, from those they have never met, but whose names provoke a hazy remembrance of other days, other lives. But how can it be? She knows what has happened in her life... but she cannot explain these things.
A woman named Nefret Emerson is the most persistent writer, and certainly the most well-travelled of their correspondents.
'Dear Miss Poppins,
Ramses and I hope that this letter finds you well. Egypt is quite hot, as always. We miss your skills at copying, we miss you...'
And letters come from America too, only once a year or so. Their writer, Elizabeth Bellamy, is distracted in her correspondence, its content jumping all over the place.
'Miss Poppins,
It is quite often that I wish you were here in America with me, that you could be governess to my daughter Lucy as you were to me...'
These letters bring back half-forgotten faces, though faint, as at a distance. To Bert, some of the names mean nothing, but others (Jane Banks, Nefret Emerson) provoke a thoughtful gaze into middle distance, though he always eventually shakes his head and goes on his way.
Sometimes she sits up in the moonlight, in the attic of their home, and stares out the window to the sky, to the moon, which she can only just glimpse through the tops of the trees. She tries to remember these things she half-forgets, but she cannot, she cannot grasp these slivers of memories.
She knows they are important, knows that she must remember, but she cannot. Sometimes, in certain places (the attic, the Park) she feels as though she might, but the past is glanced only quickly and incompletely, and always through a veil.
Her husband is unbothered by her recollections, he knows not that she spends night after night up in the attic, desperate to capture something that may not even have taken place.
'They're just dreams, love,' her husband soothes her when he does catch her out of bed, thinking and wondering and wishing she might remember. She nods and smiles and accompanies him back to bed, but she knows the truth. She knows they are not dreams, knows that this had happened to her, to them... but how? She has memories of the years that may coincide with her lost years. She knows she cannot have lived both times, both lives – but which life was the life she lived?