‘I was with friends,’ she said, feeling herself wilt under her mother’s gaze.
‘Really,’ replied Sylvia tightly.
A sliver of moonlight shone in through the skylight window, and for a moment Jennifer thought her mother looked like the wicked queen from some wintry fantasy land. Her skin was as white as alabaster, her expression frozen in quiet contempt. She was waiting for the tension in the room to rise. Jennifer knew the script. Her mother would lift her fingers to her temples. Her voice would start to tremble with rage, climbing in pitch; her nostrils would flare and her eyes blaze.
Sylvia Wyatt was quite terrifying when she was angry – and from a young age, Jennifer had worked out that the best way to deal with it was to avoid her mother’s fits entirely, either by not upsetting her in the first place, or by getting out of the way of her fury.
Now, however, Sylvia released her arms and her expression softened.
‘You wanted to interview me for your documentary,’ she said finally.
‘Yes,’ replied Jennifer cautiously. She had mentioned the subject a couple of times over the past few weeks. On both occasions it was when her mother had seemed most relaxed and happy; once after a victorious game of tennis, another time when a particularly flattering photograph of her had appeared in one of Savannah’s society magazines.
‘Why don’t we do it now? Your father has gone to a party at Matthew and Brooke Lane’s house, but I had a headache and decided to come home.’
Jennifer frowned in puzzlement, but her mother pretended not to notice.
‘Come with me,’ she instructed.
Jennifer followed her up the long sweep of staircase. Her camcorder was on her dressing table, so she grabbed it and caught up with her mother, who had gone up to the next floor, to a part of the house used only for storage. They went into a room in the far wing that contained Sylvia’s winter clothes. The weather in Savannah rarely dipped below ten degrees even on dark December evenings, but it was here that she kept her riding boots and cashmere coats, the heavy wool dresses she would take on trips to Europe, her fur stoles and leather gloves, an Aladdin’s cave of feminine treasures that David Wyatt rarely ventured into.
The room was in the eaves of the house. It was dark up here, with only a small light on the ceiling. There was a window seat at one end, underneath an arched panel of glass that looked out on to the swimming pool, shining turquoise in the night. Jennifer crossed the room to sit down as Sylvia picked up a hat box and opened it. Jennifer could barely see its contents; it appeared to be full of papers and knick-knacks, the sort of memory box that people kept for no reason other than nostalgia. It surprised her, as her mother had never appeared the sentimental sort.
Sylvia pulled out a book of the small, glossy hardback variety, with the words Charleston Design on the cover.
‘You want to know about me, about my life, about my hopes and dreams for my child?’ she asked, clutching it to her chest. ‘This book was my bible. I found it in a thrift store in Alabama, when I was a couple of years younger than you are now. No idea how it got there. Not much call for interior design in my home town, I can tell you. But the world inside this book . . . It was a million miles away from the place I grew up.’
Jennifer was taken aback by this personal revelation. She knew very little about her mother’s background and family. Jennifer’s grandparents had died before she was born, and there was a sister, Donna, whom Jennifer had apparently met, though her memories of her were so faint, she wondered if she had only imagined them. Donna was alluded to infrequently, a cautionary tale that involved drink and multiple partners and drifting around the world, but very little information had ever been revealed beyond the fact that Sylvia had grown up on a farm in Alabama and was to all intents and purposes an orphan.
‘This book brought me to Charleston. I came to learn about design and I fell in love with the city and the art of making things beautiful. And then I fell in love with Ethan Jamieson.’
She opened the book carefully, pulled out a loose photograph from within its pages and handed it to Jennifer. It was an old black-and-white snap, poorly developed and faded at the edges. But despite the quality of the picture, there was no denying the beauty of the subject.
‘Is this him?’ asked Jennifer quietly, too transfixed to even pick up her camcorder. He had dark hair and piercing eyes that reminded her a little of Jim.
Sylvia nodded and took the photo back.
‘I was twenty years old when I met him. I was living the life,’ she said with a soft, nostalgic smile. ‘I had an apartment above an antique store on King Street. I was young, pretty. There were a lot of offers of dates and nights out, and I enjoyed the attention. I’d met your father by this point too; we’d been on a couple of dates and I liked him.’
Jennifer knew that her father and mother had met at a party in Charleston over Christmas, but not even her father had elaborated on those scant details.
‘Ethan was exciting,’ she said with what sounded almost like disapproval. ‘Not just the best-looking guy in the room, maybe the most handsome man in the whole of Charleston. He was twenty-two, just graduated from Brown. He was a photographer and an incredibly talented one. Charleston was still segregated at this point. Legislation had been passed but it was slow to move, so Ethan was out there doing his bit for racial equality. He drank in bars that the coloured folk used to drink in, took pictures of the racial divides that still existed in the city and exhibited them in New York, Washington to show the ruling elite what was still going on. He was exotic, dynamic, and I loved his passion. In comparison, your father seemed a little dull and ordinary and I stopped taking his calls.’
Sylvia paused as if she were composing herself. Jennifer could only clutch her camcorder and stare at her. She couldn’t remember a time when her mother had spoken so openly or expansively and wondered how difficult it must be for her.
‘We dated for three months, Ethan and I. And then we didn’t. It turns out he had a girlfriend in Washington the whole time,’ she said, her voice returning to its usual brisk efficiency. ‘The joke, unfortunately, was on me, although a few weeks later I ran into your father again. I didn’t deserve a second chance but he gave me one. He moved back to Savannah, I came with him and we were married twelve months later.’
‘Did you ever see Ethan again?’ asked Jennifer quietly.
‘I read a story in the paper a few years ago. “Charleston war photographer dies”. It was Ethan. I looked into it on the internet. I thought maybe a bomb in Sudan or Iraq might have killed him. But he drank himself to death. He died alone, a divorced, penniless alcoholic in Mount Pleasant.’
Sylvia walked slowly towards her daughter, and for a moment Jennifer’s heart was hammering as she wondered what she was going to do. But she just sat down next to her.
‘My point,’ she said in the most steady and even voice, ‘is that the exciting option is not always the right one, however it might seem at the time. My point is that love, lust,’ she added with emphasis, ‘can be more intoxicating than liquor, and like alcohol, it can make us choose unwisely.’
Her face became steely. ‘I keep a photo of Ethan to remind myself of that. To remind myself how things could have been. How things could have turned out for me and my child.’
She touched Jennifer tenderly on the arm.