She laughed. ‘Your mother is just like any vicar’s wife,’ she said. ‘She is just dogmatic. Francis truly believes that he will discover the meaning of life and God. Many think the new cine cameras are a sin against God, but Francis says they just capture a simple truth and that they see everything.’
‘Oh,’ I said and nothing more, for I knew little of such things. I looked back to the page of my book, the lines of text now making little sense.
I thought of the plainly dressed man with the lingering stare, and then of the torn leaflet in my pocket. It was the leaflet that Francis had forced upon me, the one I was supposed to give to Iris, but my mother had ripped it up in front of me, leaving me to rescue the severed halves from the breakfast crumbs.
‘Why do you not read the political books?’ I asked.
She looked up again, as if I had disturbed her.
‘The political books,’ I said, ‘the ones in the library that are bound in leather – you said that you do not read them.’
‘No,’ she replied. ‘That kind of thing is not to my taste.’
‘Don’t you think that women as a class must be the best judges of their own interests?’ I said, pleased that I had remembered the bold sentences from the leaflet.
Iris wrinkled her brow. ‘I did not mean that politics itself is not to my taste,’ she said, ‘just those particular books. I did read them once but I don’t read them now. You see, those books are written by men like my father. They are authored by men my father admires, Lord Salisbury and Lord Curzon and the like, men just like him. There are things in those books that I do not agree with, so I would not read them again.’
I felt my face warm and my eyes dropped back to my novel.
Then she added, ‘Although I do admire Grace Elliot-Palmer’s work and all that she is striving for.’
‘Who?’ I said but then felt foolish as I realised she spoke of the woman I had met in the church hall. Iris must have realised that I had just memorised one of Mrs Elliot-Palmer’s leaflets as she was already familiar with her struggle. I had hoped to impress her with my knowledge but instead I felt like an idiot.
‘Nell,’ Iris said folding the book shut on her lap. ‘I know you are probably part of Mrs Elliot-Palmer’s army, but I really think we can be friends.’ I remembered that she had suggested friendship when we had last sat in the library together and how I had felt a strange little jump deep inside me when she had spoken. Yet now I felt that she was talking down to me and the words fell flat.
I stood up and went over to the silver-framed photographs on the desk, taking up the romantic portrait with the bouquet. On my first visit to Haughten Hall I had thought that it reminded me of another picture that I had seen before, although I could not think where, but now I thought that it must be similar to the colourful picture plates I had seen in the poetry books at school, where all the women had pure white complexions and loose hair, and gazed at flowers.
‘Your father clearly adores you,’ I said, copying Francis’s words, ‘or he would not think of you in this way. If you feel so strongly about what Mrs Elliot-Palmer is striving for, surely you could—’
‘Oh, that is not me,’ she said, pointing to the photograph in my hands.
‘What?’ I said. ‘What do you mean?’
‘The photograph you are looking at is not of me,’ she said. ‘It is my mother.’
‘Your mother?’ I echoed. I looked back to the photograph and then to Iris again. There was little to tell her apart from the woman in the photograph. The fair hair fell in the same way about the face, with little curls at the temples, but on the photograph it seemed lighter and wispier as if caught in a breeze. The face was certainly the same shape but the eyes in the photograph were cast downwards at the bouquet and I could not guess at their shape and colour.
I put the photograph down quickly.
‘These too,’ Iris said, waving her hand around the oil paintings that hung on every wall. ‘They are all of my mother – all the paintings and photographs.’
I looked to the paintings again, squinting up at the girl with long, golden hair and loose, romantic gowns – the one who led the white horse, peered at her reflection in the stream and posed with doves, mirrors and blossoms. Until now, the girl in the paintings had been the one that I expected to see, but there was something about the whimsical mood of the paintings that made them feel almost timeless and now I realised that they could have been painted in the last century. The girl in the paintings wore her hair in the same way as Iris and must have been close to her age. As I looked from frame to frame, I saw the same face looking down from each, but it was not the face of Iris Caldwell. During my last visit I had noticed differences between the oil-painted girl and the one who sat in front of me but I had put this down to the clumsiness of the artist, and how he had not been able to capture what I saw in Iris – the strange familiarity I could not put my finger on.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said for I did not know what else to say and knew only that her mother was dead.
‘Don’t be,’ she said, looking amused. ‘I never knew my mother. She died giving birth to me. People do say that I look so much like her.’
‘You do,’ I said, quietly looking to the paintings of the girl by the stream in front of Haughten Hall with the dappled reflections of the irises, and the girl with the white horse. ‘So much about you is the same.’
‘Iris was my mother’s name too,’ she said.
‘Oh!’ I said quietly but no more words would come.
‘You seem shocked, Nell,’ she said, laughing. ‘You must know it was quite common in Victorian times for a child to take the name of a mourned relative.’
‘Only the name of a dead sibling,’ I said, ‘not the mother.’
‘Well, my father says that the name ties us both to Haughten Hall. You see the stream in the foreground of that painting?’ she said stretching out her hand. ‘My mother was named after the yellow flag irises that grow around the ford. This was her family’s home – she was named after the irises, and me after her.’
‘Well, your father must have adored her,’ I said, trying to recover my train of thought, ‘as he does you.’ It was the sentence I had begun only minutes before, but now I could not remember how I had intended to finish it or what I was going to ask of her because what she had said about the photographs and paintings had shocked me. ‘Your father adores you…’ I said again, ‘and—’
‘Oh, is that for me?’ she said. I realised that I was holding the torn leaflet with the angel on the front, the halves slipping over each other where my mother had torn it.
‘Yes,’ I said, and then, ‘No – I mean it is not from me. It is for you from Francis Elliot-Palmer, but it was my mother who tore it.’
‘Oh,’ she said, taking the leaflet, ‘but Francis must know that I have seen this before, for I spoke with him at the last ball at Chaverly House.’
‘He thought that your father might listen to you,’ I said. ‘If only you would speak to him. You could ask him…’ But the speech I had imagined myself giving stuck in my throat and my voice sounded weak.
I thought of Iris’s life – of the horse she could not ride without being led, of the hair that she wore loose like a child and the dresses that still showed her ankles. I thought too of Francis Elliot-Palmer, the man she seemed in awe of but was forbidden from marrying, and of her father, the man who gave her everything she wanted but whose raised hand she shrank from. I thought of her mother, a woman she had never known, and of Iris herself, the daughter who lived in her shadow.