Chapter Twelve
December 1962
The crayon dropped to the table with a tap and a long roll. Robert uncurled his fingers to grasp it, but as was usual, his mind moved much more quickly than his hands and the red crayon continued to roll away from them both, the little girl beside him laughing, her golden curls bouncing.
"Donk!" she drew out his name, complaining good-naturedly. "Fetch it! I haven't yet finished!"
He told his arm to move, drawing up his forearm, and then his elbow, and then moving at his shoulder, but too slowly, for the high-pitched peels of laughter accompanied his movements, his mind registering that the children surrounding him thought it was a joke.
He imagined himself like the Tin Man character in that picture he'd seen years ago, The Wizard of Oz, in need of an oil can. He remembered that, remembered the delight of Cora and Caroline when he acquiesced to taking them to see it. He remembered it was before the world went completely mad, before the blitz, before George enlisted. He remembered the newsreel shown before the film, a man pouring out his sugar rations at tea selecting only one lump, the narrator announcing gaily that "it's the little things of life today" that help our troops. He remembered the weight of Cora's gloved hand in his own, warming the dark theatre. He remembered a fourteen year old Caroline eyeing them playfully, jesting that she was the strictest of chaperones, "so don't get carried away, you two." And he remembered Cora laughing.
But the little girl who stretched her arm across him now, reaching for the little red crayon? He couldn't remember her name. Or who she was. And his chest felt colder at the loss.
The steam floated from her cup, swirling up and dancing with the sound of the crackling fire of the library and the laughter of the small children at the table with Donk. Sybbie watched them smile, coloring their little pictures, Donk teasing them with little grins. Next to her, Coco and Grace sat on the red sofa, Grace saying something more to her daughter about school and her inevitable return after the Christmas holiday. Coco rolled her eyes, but listened in a way that was not unlike George, and it made Sybbie smile.
"And when do yours return, Sybbie?" Aunt Mary was stirring the sugar in her tea. "Do they have much of the same calendar in Atlanta?"
"Yes, Aunt Mary," she always made small jabs about America – every December, every year since Sybbie had moved. "The Gregorian calendar is quite popular now."
Aunt Mary smirked into her teacup. "That isn't what I meant."
"I know." Sybbie smirked, too.
"She wishes we were all living in 1925 again. All under the same roof."
Sybbie nodded at her father, agreeing, most everyone around them smiling.
"Not 1925." They all looked at Caroline. She wasn't laughing. "I wasn't born until 1926."
They all laughed again, and Sybbie saw Aunt Mary lean toward her daughter, saying something quietly to her; Sybbie took another sip of tea. Still too hot.
"Where did you go yesterday? With Mary and your dad?" Grace asked from the other side of Coco. "George said he looked for you to help plan Christmas luncheon, and you were all missing."
"Dad drove us out to the lake, to see a little memorial."
"A memorial? To what?"
Sybbie lowered her cup. "To a baby. Apparently before the Great War, Donk and Granny –"
"- We don't need to talk about it." Aunt Mary nodded at her from the opposite sofa, and then directed her to where Donk drew pictures with the children. "It's not to be spoken of."
But Coco had heard her. "A baby?" she whispered to Sybbie.
"An unborn baby," she whispered back with a frown.
Coco frowned too, and looked to Donk.
Another sip of tea, and this time, it was right. "Co, has Donk seen all of the photos you've chosen? For the article."
"Most of them," she answered. "Daddy said the newspaper will end up choosing the ones they like best.
"And you have to give them the names of the people in them? For the captions, I mean."
But Coco shrugged. "I suppose so? I don't really know. Gran just asked me to choose. She said she was too busy to do it."
That sounded like Aunt Mary.
"Can I see them? Actually can I see all the photos you've found? It may be a good idea to record who's in them, especially since none of us really know."
"And how will you do that?"
Sybbie looked across at Aunt Mary. "By asking Donk," she narrowed her gaze. "Why?"
"Only that it may fluster him." Her voice sounded strained and vaguely conspiratorial, as if she didn't want anyone to hear her at all. "I don't want him to feel as if he can't remember."
"But we asked him yesterday," Coco offered. "He enjoyed it."
"He enjoys it until he doesn't, Co. And the thing is, it's hard to predict the point at which he doesn't."
Sybbie blinked and shook her head. "Aunt Mary, that doesn't make any sense."
But Aunt Mary drew in a breath, a breath that Sybbie knew meant she was preparing for battle. "I don't think it's fair."
"But if we don't, how will we know who's in the photographs?"
"We all recognize the important people."
Even Grace made a small noise at that, and Sybbie looked down into her tea. She could hear Donk still speaking with the laughing children; she could hear her father and Caroline lost in a conversation of their own. And so she blurted it. "I'm going to give the letters to Donk."
"What?"
"They were Granny's, and I think he has a right to them."
Aunt Mary's teacup rattled when she put it on the side table beside her. "I'm not sure why you want to stir up old feelings."
"I don't. I'm not. I'm not doing it for any reason beyond the fact that they should be his. The photos are his. I don't know why we're shielding him from any of it."
"I'm not shielding him from the photographs. I'm simply saying I don't feel it kind to remind him that everyone in those photos are gone." Mary stood and smoothed out her dark green skirt; tall, thin, and imperious, Sybbie had learned long ago when Aunt Mary deemed a conversation over. "Don't give him the letters. They were my mama's. They are not his, and they are certainly not yours to do with them as you wish."
Sybbie noticed that everyone was now listening and watching as Aunt Mary left the library, Coco especially on edge beside her.
"What was that?"
Sybbie looked across at her father. "Nothing," she lied.
"Oh, that's just Mary. She's been that way since she could talk." Donk lowered a blue crayon he held, and the group chuckled amongst themselves.
But Sybbie did not. Something itched in the back of her mind, something unsettled and guilt – like a stone – weighed a bit in her chest. She stood and went over to her grandfather, standing over him as he sat in the chair. She watched the way his shaky hand finished the bluebird he drew, looked at the way it could not easily hold the little crayon, the lines of his bird messy and mere suggestions. A Monet.
"Donk? Do you remember the pictures from yesterday?"
His eyes looked up, and she watched him blink in confusion. "What pictures?"
"I mean the photographs that we were all looking at. Like the one of you and Granny in Egypt, where Granny is pregnant with Aunt Edith?" She smiled.
He chuckled once. "And the one of Cora at her first shoot. Yes. I can be relied upon to remember as far back as yesterday."
"How would you feel if you and I sat down together, and we looked at more? I want to record their names. That is, the people in the photos I don't know." She shrugged, and she picked a small fluff from Donk's cardigan. "I want you to help me."
Donk looked back down at his bird, adding a mark. "That should be fine."
She nodded, smiling at his nonchalance. "Aunt Mary may try and stop us. She doesn't seem to enjoy delving into the past."
"She's like her mother."
Sybbie furrowed her brow, Uncle Henry's remark from two nights ago ringing in her ears. "How do you mean? Did Granny not enjoy historical things?"
He grunted a bit, his fine white hair softly moving when he shook his head. "Mary feels things deeply, like Cora."
"You could fool me."
Donk laughed. "She does. They both did. Though neither of them could ever seem to allow the feelings. Mary tends to get flustered and change the subject. Your grandmother would make a joke," He drew a smile on the bird's beak, and the children laughed, "and then change the subject."
"But Granny was so warm, so sweet, always smiling and hugging. Always holding your hand."
"And yet I can count on one hand the number of times she told me, in words, that she loved me." He offered the crayon to the girl next to him, who smiled broadly, her golden curls bouncing. Sybbie blinked down at him, her chest feeling a bit like it had been hollowed out. "I will help you with the photographs, if you help me."
Sybbie took in a breath. "Oh dear. I fear I may regret this."
Donk maneuvered a trembling finger and beckoned her closer. Sybbie cautiously leaned down. "Who is this child?"
Instead of feeling panic or alarm, Sybbie found herself laughing, a guffaw, and she shook her head. "Seraphina, Donk. Marigold's youngest."
"Ah," Donk smiled, and he put a hand on the top of the girl's head. "That explains why she looks like Edith did."
Sybbie smiled, the thought taking the hollowness she felt earlier and filling it with warmth.
. . .
Sybbie took the letters from the bag she'd shoved them in and looked around her room. She'd returned upstairs with Donk, helping him up to nap, and then she'd stolen away to her own room, seeking quiet and solitude. She found that while she had acquired solitude, her thoughts were far from quiet. She stared at the bundle of letters in her hand, letting her thoughts drift.
These letters. The miscarriages. The little yellow train ticket that meant Donk and Granny loved one another. She had known none of it. None. But how did that make any sense? How was it that every happy childhood memory seemed to reside inside the walls of this Abbey; every childhood memory seemed to include her grandparents; every single memory from nearly the first decade of her life was attached to this world, and yet she hardly knew it. How was it that there was so much that she didn't know?
She thought of the way Donk had spoken to her yesterday when she asked about the ticket. His eyes had been clearer, somehow. His voice had been stronger. Amidst the chaos of the present – with nearly his whole family here for the holidays, with the house opening, with the paper coming in to take photos and exploit the story of how much he loved Granny – Donk's anchor was firmly in the past; it was as if his presence in this life ended when Granny's did, and Sybbie's heart ached at her understanding of that. It ached further when she realized that in spite of her pain, she accepted it. Oh, Donk.
Donk was old. He missed Granny.
And his family had not respected that.
George, and Aunt Mary, and Coco, and Dad … even Sybbie, she realized that they'd not been kind to him, to Donk. Not in the way that he needed them to be.
It wasn't he who went through Granny's things. It was them. It wasn't he who read Granny's old letters. It was them. It wasn't he who showed Sybbie the two little markers covered in ice and snow, the two little places where he and Granny had marked with love a spot to remember a child that would never be. It was them. It was them. It had all been them; he had just been a periphery figure, a tangential character in a story that they had tried to tell themselves, but didn't know how. But how could they, when the story was always about him?
She left the room, crossed to the other corridor, then walked down the length of the gallery and counted in her head the number of paces from the corner to Granny's room: sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. It was an old habit, one formed as a little child playing on the gallery: a pirate game, Granny merrily supplying the treasure: a small brooch, a ruby-studded hat pin, a pearl bracelet. The consequences of her actions eventually manifested itself in a household-wide treasure hunt, and Sybbie grinned to herself. The memory warmed her through as she turned the knob and entered the space of the room.
She had to hand it to them; the room did look marvelous. The new peachy-gold duvet shimmered brightly in the afternoon sunlight; the little glass bottles that adorned Granny's dressing table all sparkled, freshly dusted and polished; the stack of four books on the window seat looked new and cared for. Yes, the room looked marvelous, but this wasn't Granny's room. And if they were to open the house, if they were to interview and share with strangers the intimacy between Donk and Granny - an intimacy that Sybbie was only now just beginning to understand clearly - then Granny's room would be Granny's room. And Donk would have a say.
Sybbie put the letters down on the chest of drawers. She balled her fists and placed them at her hips, scanning her eyes around the room, wondering what to dismantle first. She would need the trunks they'd packed away, some of them were in Donk's dressing room there. She'd need the books and the papers and the little trinkets that Granny kept on her tabletops. She'd need the picture of her own mother that lived on the mantel in this room.
"Oh. It's you. I was looking for Co."
Sybbie looked over her shoulder and found George in the threshold. "Yes, it's me." She turned back. "Do you think you can help me move the trunks back in?"
"Theoretically," George came inside the room; Sybbie could feel him draw nearer. "Though I would need to know why."
She laughed, "I'm going to ask Donk what he wants."
"Wants?"
She looked at her cousin. "The house opening is a given, yes? And you've all said that opening this room has irritated him. But has it? We've been tiptoeing around him, George, trying not to upset him," she shrugged. "But it doesn't upset him. I think that maybe we didn't want to upset ourselves."
"Sybbie —"
"— He doesn't want the public to see her space, but in that he has no choice. He at least deserves the authority to tell us how to arrange it. Which of things to keep here. The photographs to use for the article."
George didn't respond, only blinked, but Sybbie could see he understood. She looked away from him and back to the other side of the room; she looked at the picture Aunt Mary had hung on the wall. Granny. The pencil and charcoal sketch of her grandmother, beautiful and young, peering at her with those pale eyes.
She stepped to the wall, stretched, and took it from the nail. "Granny hated that," Sybbie muttered aloud, and smiled.
"And what's this?"
She turned around and saw that George held the bundle of letters, the green ribbon tickling over his thumb. Sybbie leaned the portrait of Granny against the bed. "Letters from Granny's Aunt Ruth. One or two from great-grandmama."
"Oh, they're old."
Sybbie laughed, "Yes, they are old. Terribly clever, Georgie." She saw him as he began to untie the letters, taking one and opening it. "But don't open them. I'm giving them to Donk."
"Have you read them?"
Sybbie sighed, "Yes. And honestly now I wish I hadn't. They paint Granny in a much different light than we knew her." Sybbie walked through the bedroom and to Donk's old dressing room, opening the dividing doors and switching on the light. She felt as George followed her in.
"What do you mean?"
She silently counted the boxes and trunks in this room, took note of the wooden wardrobe, and then glanced over her shoulder at her cousin. "Were there blankets in here? I want to keep things as organized as possible."
"Yes, but Sybbie," he gestured for her to continue. "The letters?"
"Well, they make it seem like she had to be convinced to have children."
George scrunched his face and leaned against the doorframe as Sybbie opened the wardrobe. The smell of mothballs immediately burned her nostrils.
"That doesn't make any sense, Syb."
"I know," she whipped around again and shook her head at him, agreeing. "Granny was always so fond of children and babies. Do you remember when you and Grace told her you were pregnant?"
George smiled at the memory. "She said she was going to pray for twins."
Sybbie laughed. "Exactly. Children aren't for everyone, but they certainly were for her." She tiptoed and peered on a high shelf. A little locked box. She left it alone. "Anyway, the way it comes across in the letters . . . it's almost as if she wasn't getting pregnant in spite of herself. Her aunt actually said that Granny was hurting the family by refusing."
"But didn't she have a difficult time?"
Sybbie shrugged, for she had no idea. She turned back to the wardrobe and pulled from it an old overcoat. "I suppose that makes sense. She apparently had miscarriages."
"No, I mean, she had trouble conceiving. Mummy's told me that before, or at least that Granny gave her the name of a doctor. Part of the reason I'm here." Sybbie glanced at him, and raised her brows. "Jack, too, actually. Besides, I don't think I blame her really, for not wanting to get pregnant right out of the shoot."
Sybbie pulled another thick cloth and shook it out: another coat. "You're one to talk. Grace fell pregnant on your honeymoon."
"That's different."
"Different how? There wasn't any entail to settle?"
"Grace and I loved one another when we married." George walked around the boxes and trunks between them and reached around Sybbie, pulling down a flannel and wrinkling his nose at the smell. "I should think it painful to have a child with someone who doesn't love you the way you love them."
"Oh," Sybbie looked at her cousin, dust now flying around them and her eyes watering from the smells. She grinned at him, and felt full, as if that sketched portrait of her in the next room had blossomed in color. She loved Donk, and she was waiting for Donk to love her, too. "That does sound like Granny," she affirmed quietly, and she watched as he turned toward the trunks with the flannel he carried, moving toward the one closest to the door and sighing deeply.
He was right, as George typically was. Rational and kind, optimistic, moving through difficulty like a beacon from a lighthouse in a storm. He was really a lot like Granny in so many ways. It wasn't lost on her, too, that Donk now relied on George. They all relied on George. It was in much the same way that Donk had relied on Granny. They were the only two Crawleys who could truly navigate change.
"Georgie?" He looked up at her, and Sybbie's heart beat harder at the twinkle in his blue eyes. "I'm sorry you've had to do so much on your own. Truly."
But her milk-and-honey cousin only smiled up at her, brightening the room. "I'm going to be the Earl, Syb. It's my job." He rested the flannel on top of the chest and motioned for Sybbie to come nearer. "Right. Now come on. The newspaper comes in two days and Donk moves slowly. I hope you know what you're getting us all into."
Sybbie smiled. "I do."
He slowly sat upright in his bed, and looked around him. For a moment he didn't recognize where he was. He had expected the earthy toned walls, the large wardrobe, the marble mantel in the left corner, the little red lamps he kept by his narrow bed. Instead the walls were navy, there was no wardrobe, and there were no little red lamps on the clear case he kept his snuff boxes in.
The dream had been a painful one. He hardly dreamt anymore; awake was too dreamlike nowadays, floating from moment to moment with glimpses of clarity in between them. But he had had a dream as he napped. It was of her.
She was impossibly young, peering up at him. Her eyes were bright and teary, her lips and tip of her nose were reddened from crying.
"I wanted to be with you," he had said to her, and he felt, as clearly as he felt the bedclothes, his cardigan, the cold of the bedroom, he felt her dark head rest against his chest, her shoulders shuddering as he held her ever closer to him.
Even now he could feel her, sense her there with him, and he swore he could smell her jasmine perfume on his clothes.
"Cora?" he ventured aloud, and his tired face stung with embarrassment. There was no one to see him in here, but it was him — himself — he felt ashamed of. What was happening to him?
Robert forced a too-cold hand to move out into the shaded light of his room, out toward the small curio, and his thumb vaguely felt the glass top. His fingers fumbled further, stretching themselves to find it, the dexterity he'd had again in his dream completely disappeared. At last, the knobbed knuckle of his index finger brushed it, and he clumsily gathered it into his palm: the little ticket.
"I wonder if you felt you couldn't say because of me." He moved his lips, making his words barely audible, but spoken none the same. He wanted to say these things to her, things he wished he said years and years and years — a lifetime — ago. "How desperately I loved you."
He brushed the ticket with his thumb, and then drawing air into his shallow lungs, he nested it inside the pocket of his cardigan.
There was a quick knock-knock at the door, and Robert took his handkerchief from his other pocket and dabbed at his perpetually watering eyes. "Shirley."
"Lord Grantham?" Her round face peered about the door and then she entered, smiling. "It's half past two. As you asked."
"Yes, thank you." Robert forced his legs to move over the edge of the mattress, and they did so with minimal stiffness.
"Miss Sybbie was asking for you," Shirley crouched down before him and helped his stockinged feet into his shoes. She peered up at him with a gleam in her gray eyes. "Says she has a plan."
Robert felt the laughter start in his chest, and chuckled from in his throat. "My womenfolk always have plans."