The Memory of Lost Senses Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS

  OF JUDITH KINGHORN

  The Memory of Lost Senses

  “A perfect summer read, this is a must for fans of Downton Abbey.”

  —WeightWatchers Magazine (UK)

  “Mysterious, evocative, and deeply sensual, The Memory of Lost Senses brings to life a lost era, a golden dream before it comes to an end. In its portrayal of how we change the past, and how we can lose it, the novel delves through fascinating layers and explores the real nature of truth. This moving story is not to be missed.”

  —Simone St. James, RITA Award–winning author of The Haunting of Maddy Clare and An Inquiry into Love and Death

  “Exquisite . . . a sensual and visual feast of a story, and a powerful follow-up to last year’s enthralling debut, The Last Summer . . . a mesmerizing book of finely wrought words. The evocative tale of an elderly woman for whom the past is both a comfort and a tyranny, a place that holds unutterably beautiful memories, and painful events that torment and haunt. . . . Thoughtful, delicately crafted, and imaginative, The Memory of Lost Senses is a page-turning, atmospheric mystery story but with a powerful, all-consuming love affair burning deep at its core to direct the action . . . and steal our hearts.”

  —Lancashire Evening Post (UK)

  The Last Summer

  “Well-drawn characters combined with flawless writing make Kinghorn’s debut a triumph. This story kept me up for many nights in a row, and I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough. Un-put-downable and relentlessly intriguing, this is a tale for the ages. I expect it’s not the last we’ll hear from this talented storyteller; at least, I hope not!”

  —Dish Magazine

  “A glorious read, highly recommended.”

  —The Bookseller (UK)

  “Don’t miss The Last Summer by Judith Kinghorn. [An] epic and enthralling love story set against the backdrop of the Great War.”

  —Woman and Home (UK)

  “The year is 1914, and love and war are about to transform privileged sixteen-year-old Clarissa’s charmed existence forever. This sumptuous romance is made for fans of Downton.”

  —The Lady (UK)

  “The Last Summer is irresistible: a captivating story of love and family against the backdrop of World War I and its aftermath. I stayed up late reading, hooked on its sensuous prose, elegant settings, and fascinating characters.”

  —Margaret Wurtele, author of The Golden Hour

  “Impeccably written and well researched, this is an atmospheric and haunting read. It takes the reader from languorous summer days by the lake on a country estate to the horror of the trenches with equal aplomb. . . . Judith Kinghorn skillfully navigates our journey through love and loss . . . the perfect balance of romance and grit by a great new writer. Don’t miss it!”

  —Deborah Swift, author of The Gilded Lily and The Lady’s Slipper

  “Judith Kinghorn has beautifully captured the thoughts and feelings of a particular group in a lost generation. From an historical perspective, Kinghorn has clearly done her research, which is illustrated in the small details that capture the war and postwar periods, making The Last Summer entirely believable and often shocking. . . . Despite the themes of loss, grief, and change, The Last Summer is above all a wonderful and heartbreaking love story . . . highly recommended!”

  —One More Page (UK)

  “An enchanting story of love and war, and the years beyond.”

  —Penny Vincenzi, bestselling author of Wicked Pleasures

  “A sumptuous, absorbing tale of love in time of war. Judith Kinghorn’s novel brilliantly illuminates the experiences of a generation of blighted youth.”

  —Rachel Hore, Sunday Times bestselling author of A Place of Secrets

  Also by Judith Kinghorn

  The Last Summer

  THE

  MEMORY OF

  LOST SENSES

  JUDITH KINGHORN

  New American Library

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014

  USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC. This is an authorized reprint of an ebook edition published by Headline Publishing Group. For information address Headline Publishing Group, a Hachette UK Company, 338 Euston Road, London NW1 3BH.

  Copyright © Judith Kinghorn, 2013

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Kinghorn, Judith.

  The memory of lost senses/Judith Kinghorn.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-101-63730-2

  1. Women—England—Fiction. 2. Country life—England—Fiction.

  3. Friendship—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6111.I59M46 2014

  823'.92—dc23 2013032008

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  FOR MAX AND BELLA.

  IN MEMORIAM

  JME SHEPHERD 1895–1917

  “Rome, before 1870, was seductive beyond resistance . . . shadows breathed and glowed, full of soft forms felt by lost senses.”

  —Henry James

  “If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.”

  —Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

  Contents

  Praise

  Also by Judith Kinghorn

  Title page

  Copyright page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Prologue

  BOOK ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  BOOK TWO

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter T
wenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  About the Author

  Readers Guide

  A CONVERSATION WITH JUDITH KINGHORN

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  Excerpt from The Last Summer

  Sometimes it’s easy to be blind, to run into the blackness and know you are heading in the right direction. Know that beyond the dark is light, and that behind you all is dark. Know that your destination—wherever it may be—will be infinitely better than your point of departure. This is how it was that night.

  And though the girl already knew about the need to take flight, she had not anticipated her own escape, had never been out in the dead of night, the witching hour, grazing dripping brick and corrugated iron, the backsides of tenements and factories and warehouses; clambering over ramshackle fences, sidestepping rat-infested ditches and sewers.

  But fear of the night—its otherworldliness—was nothing compared to what had just taken place at home.

  At the end of the alleyway the woman finally stopped, released the girl’s hand and dropped the bag to the ground. The girl was still whimpering, and shaking; shaking so violently she thought her legs might give way, thought she might fall to the sodden ground and be swallowed up by Hell and Damnation. Her feet were numb, her shoes and the hem of her dress caked in wet mud from cutting through the market gardens. She could smell the river, its stench permeating the fog, and knew they were close. But she must not make a sound. No, no sound. She had been told that, and slapped.

  And so she tried to hold in her sobs, her breath, and kept her hand—its congealing stickiness—clasped over her mouth, her eyes fixed on the blurred shape of the woman beside her, now pulling a shawl back over her head. Ahead of them, a solitary hansom cab creaked westwards, wheels spraying, lamp swaying.

  “Was he . . . is he . . . dead?” the girl whispered.

  The woman made no reply. She watched the yellow light fade, picked up the bag, and led the girl on across the highway, into the blackness, into the night.

  Prologue

  England 1923

  The photograph had been torn in two and later repaired. Now, a crinkled line of severance ran through the background pine trees, the top of the tented gazebo and the statue by the gate to the sunken garden, decapitating the marble lady. But the image continued to exude the effulgence of that day, and Sylvia squinted as she brought it closer, glancing along the lineup and then at herself: eyes closed, hand raised, as though about to sneeze, or laugh, or speak; the only one to have moved. I was nervous, she thought, remembering, not used to having my photograph taken . . . not used to posing.

  She lifted the magnifying glass, leveling it over the figure seated at the center: a broad hat shading the eyes, the memory of a smile about the mouth, the dated costume, out of time—even then. Accustomed to scrutiny, impervious to the occasion, she thought. But she could hardly bear to think the name. She was still in shock.

  She sat back in her chair, closing her eyes, already moving through shadows toward brightness and warmth, and the sound of a band and the hullabaloo of children drifting up from a village green, and that day, that day, that day.

  But something else tugged at the edge of her senses. Another memory, faded almost to white and worn thin as gossamer with time. And emerging from it, into it, a familiar dark-haired young man, standing by a fountain in the sun-drenched piazza of a foreign city. As he moves toward her she feels the incandescence of the stone surrounding her, the weight of it upon her, and one name, on their lips, about to be spoken, about to be broken.

  “My dear,” he says, reaching out to take her hand, “your note has me quite bamboozled . . .”

  He holds her gloved hand in his. His dark eyes are serious, searching; his brow is furrowed. He is indeed perplexed. But there is no turning back, she must tell him, she must tell him everything. And so she releases the appalling words in whispers, and as he leans toward her she can smell turpentine and stale sweat. When he steps away from her he raises a paint-smudged hand to his forehead, and she can feel his pain. But it had to be done. She had no choice.

  “I had no choice,” she said, opening her eyes, coming back to now. “He needed to know . . . needed to know the . . .”

  She had been going to say truth. But it would have been a lie.

  BOOK ONE

  England 1911

  Chapter One

  Within weeks letters would be burned, pages torn, photographs ripped in two. Names would be banished, memories abandoned and history rewritten, again. Within weeks promises would be broken and hearts made fit to bleed.

  But for now there was little movement or sound.

  The countryside languished, golden and fading and imbued with the lassitude of weeks of unwavering heat. High above, the cerulean sky remained unmoved. It had been there early. Stretching itself from treetop to treetop, resolute, unbroken, never touching parched earth. Only the ratter-tat-tat of a woodpecker interrupted the wood pigeon’s lullaby coo.

  It was shortly before noon.

  Sylvia would remember this—the time of her arrival—ever after, because she would later write it down, along with the words and events of that day, and the rest. She would for years to come ponder upon whether she could have, should have, done things differently. But when she stepped down from the vehicle her heart knew only love.

  As the wagonette disappeared back down the curving driveway she gazed up at the house, smiling. It was typical of Cora to have played it down. Now, I shall be able to imagine her here, she thought, lingering beyond the shadow of the building. Ahead of her, the front door and glazed inner door stood open. It was fine weather and they were expecting her. But still, it seemed a tad foolhardy, reckless even, to her. Anyone at all could walk in.

  The hallway was dark and cool, the place silent, and as she put down her bag she called out, “Hello-o! It is I, Sylvia . . . anyone home?” She immediately recognized the long ornately carved table next to her and, placing her fingertips upon it, reassured by familiarity, she moved along its length. A red leather frame—next to a large earthenware bowl containing an assortment of calling cards—read, “OUT.” A folded newspaper and yet-to-be-opened letters lay on a silver tray beneath an oversized and, to her mind, rather haphazard arrangement of flora. She glanced through the letters—brown envelopes, all bills—then lifted her hand and tugged at a large open bloom, pulling it free from the tangle of waterlogged bark and stems, plunging it back into the center of the vase. Raising her eyes to the wall, she gasped. It was not a painting she recollected having seen before, and was surely inappropriate to have hanging in an entrance hall, or anywhere else, she thought, turning away.

  Opposite her, a settee of gilt and pink velvet she remembered from Rome made her smile. And above it, the zebra’s head, mounted high upon the wall. But hadn’t Cora said she loathed the thing? Would never have it in any of her homes?

  She walked on, glancing through open doorways into tall sunlit rooms, revealing more familiar polished mahogany—magnificent antiques, glinting crystal and objets d’art. She smiled at Gio and Louis—Cora’s two beloved pugs, stuffed by a renowned Parisian taxidermist and now sitting either side of an ottoman, staring glassy-eyed at the empty hearth—half expecting the little things to scramble to their feet and clip-clap across the ebonized floorboards to greet her once more. Oh, but it was marvelous to be in a place where one could immediately connect with so much of it. Almost like coming home, she thought. And yet it was queer to see it all again, together, here, in this place. Cora’s world could never have fitted into any cottage. “A cottage indeed!” she said, shaking her head. Cora was a collector, a traveler, and her new home was testament to this. Each of her homes—her apartments in Paris and Rome, her chaˆteau in the Loire—had surely been testament to this. And thou
gh Cora had never planned to return, had vowed she would die in Rome, circumstances—tragic as they were—had dictated otherwise, and Sylvia had secretly been pleased. For Cora was finally back in England, and back for good.

  A young male voice broke through the silence and she turned.

  “You must be Sylvia,” he said. “I’m Jack.”

  Jack. So this was he. Ah yes, she could see the resemblance.

  He smiled, stretched out his hand to her, and as she took hold of it she said, “What a pleasure to meet you at last.”

  He told her that they had been expecting her a little earlier. And she explained that she had taken the later train in order to avoid the day-trippers. She did not tell him that this plan had failed, that the train had been chockablock with families bound for the coast.

  Unused to children, their eyes and their noise, she had sat in a tight huddle on board the train, her notebook and pencil in her lap. She had pretended to be busy, keeping her mouth shut, restricting her breathing to her nose. In her notebook she wrote the word miasma, then doodled around it in small squares and boxes, interlinking and overlapping. Until the word itself was covered. When the child dropped the ice cream at her feet, splattering her shoes and the hem of her skirt, she simply smiled. And when a nursing mother unbuttoned her blouse and exposed her breast to feed a screaming infant, she smiled again, and then looked away.

  “All tickety-boo? Cotton was still there, I presume.”

  “Yes, Mr. Cotton was there, waiting on the platform as arranged.”

  When she stepped off the train, with her small leather satchel and portmanteau, she had stood for a while with her eyes closed. She had seen the man at the end of the platform, knew from Cora’s description that it was Cotton, but she needed a moment—just a moment—to herself. She had allowed him to take her bag but not the satchel. She had hung on to that.