An Unreliable Witness
We forget most what we most refuse to know
The oldest at Gethsemane was a woman named Mrs Aldous, who was said to have worked for the Vanes since before the war.
She received me in the kitchen, where she used to prepare, she told me, meals for a household that no longer existed.
In those days, she said, the family would gather every Sunday, and Sir Edmund's father would read aloud from the very Bible I had found.
Old Mr Vane, the grandfather, is reported to have been a hard man, generous in public and behind closed doors.
He would summon the staff at midnight, she remembered, simply to prove that he could.
I noticed that she spoke of the grandfather with would, the tense of habit, but of one particular night with a sudden, hesitant used to.
There used to be another , she said, a young man who kept Mr Vane's papers, though she could no longer his face.
He is said to have left the house very suddenly, one winter, and was never spoken of again.
Memory, I reminded myself, is not a recording but a story we tell ourselves until we believe it.
Mrs Aldous would pause between sentences, as though checking each one against a version she had long ago agreed to keep.
When I asked about Thomas Reed, her hands went still over the teapot.
Reed, she said at last, used to be the gardener here, a gentle man who was said to have taken his own life in the winter of the great .
But the way she said it, the careful , the borrowed rumour, told me she did not believe her own .
People reach for is said to have when they wish to report a truth without owning it.
I asked her whether she had known Reed well, and she replied that nobody had really known anyone in that house.
It was, I thought, the single most honest thing she had said.
She used to bring Reed his supper in the garden , she admitted, when Mr Vane forbade him the house.
And once, on the night he was said to have died, she had heard two voices in the study, though only one man was ever found.
Whose was the second voice, I asked, and she looked at me as if I had struck her.
She did not remember, she said; it had been so long, and memory, she added, plays such cruel tricks.
Yet I have noticed that people forget most completely the things they have worked hardest not to know.
Mrs Aldous was not lying to me; she was lying to herself, and had been for fifty years.
The unreliable witness, I have found, is rarely a ; more often she is simply someone who could not to remember.
Before I left, she caught my sleeve and said that the young , whoever he was, is thought to have gone on to some quiet .
Something in the way she looked at me made the kitchen suddenly very cold.
She used to wonder, she said, whether he ever thought of them, or whether he had made himself forget, as she had.
I assured her that memory forgives no one, and I heard my own voice tremble as I said it.
Walking back through the garden, past the where Reed had eaten his suppers, I found I could not remember why I had come.