The House At Riverton by Kate Morton
Summer 1924 - On the eve of a glittering society party, by the lake of a grand English country house, a young poet takes his life. The only witnesses, sisters Hannah and Emmeline Hartford, will never speak to each other again.
Winter 1999 - Grace Bradley, ninety-eight, one-time housemaid of Riverton Manor, is visited by a young director making a film about the poet's suicide. Ghosts awaken and old memories - long consigned to the dark reaches of Grace's mind - begin to sneak back through the cracks. A shocking secret threatens to emerge, something history has forgotten but Grace never could.
Set as the war-shattered Edwardian summer surrenders to the decadent twenties, The House at Riverton is a thrilling mystery and a compelling love story.
In the author’s note at the end of the book Kate Morton says her interests are the “the haunting of the present by the past; the insistence of family secrets; return of the repressed; the centrality of inheritance (material, psychological and physical); haunted houses (particularly haunting of a metaphorical nature); ... the entrapment of women (whether physical or social) ... the unreliability of memory and the partial nature of history; mysteries and the unseen; ...” (472-3) I enjoy reading books with these themes.
Following are some quotes that caught my eye.
Photographs - 98 year old Grace is looking at photographs that were bringing back memories she had suppressed for decades. “It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to evaporate with the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down, before they knew their ending." (201) jht - Most of the time photographs bring back happy memories. That's what I experience as I scan and deal with family photos. I "know the ending" for many of the people and their stories. I am thankful that the happy endings outweigh the sad endings.
Turning Points - Grace, at 98, is reflecting on the past and turning points. “Wars make history seem deceptively simple. They provide clear turning points, easy distinctions: before and after, winner and loser, right and wrong. True history, the past, is not like that. It isn’t flat or linear. It has no outline. It is slippery, like liquid; infinite and unknowable, like space. And it is changeable: just when you think you see a pattern, perspective shifts, an alternative version is proffered, a long-forgotten memory resurfaces. ... In real life turning points are sneaky. They pass by unlabeled and unheeded. ... Turning points are only uncovered later, by historians who seek to bring order to a lifetime of tangled moments.” (271) When we get older we are able to look back and see those turning points - events and choices that weren't so clear to us at the time. Perhaps that's why older people are so eager to share advice with the younger generations. There's a desire to help others recognize the turning points and their consequences.
Books & reading - This passage reminded me of conversations we've had about books and reading (theme for the stories for our Family Memories Book in 2013). When Grace was a young maid at Riverton, she went to a peddler's shop to purchase a book. At Riverton it was forbidden for the maids to have books. "Now I allowed myself to pore over its cover, to run my fingers across the leather binding and trace the cursive indentation of the letters that spelled along the spine, The Valley of Fear. I whispered the thrilling words to myself, then lifted the book to my nose and breathed the ink from its pages. The scent of possibilities.” (115) jht - Books are filled with possibilities. As wonderful as ebooks are, will they ever have the same appeal as the feeling of holding a beloved book with well worn and well marked pages. Or opening a brand new book with the smell of the paper and ink and the feel of new paper pages?
People's stories - Grace, age 98, talking after her job after service at Riverton and after World War II –“I spent much of my time digging around discovering people’s stories. Finding evidence, fleshing out bare bones. How much easier it would have been if everybody came replete with a record of their personal history. But all I can think of is a million tapes of the elderly ruminating on the price of eggs thirty years ago. Are they all in a room somewhere, a huge underground bunker, shelves from floor to ceiling, tapes lined up, walls echoing with trivial memories that no one has time to hear?” (303) This makes me think of the many bins of family scrapbooks and personal journals in our garage. If we save them, will anyone ever have the desire, or the time, to go through them? We'd better get busy on an abbreviated and more accessible story of our lives.
Additional posts on Kate Morton books
The Secret Keeper
The Distant Hours
The Forgotten Garden
Kate Morton's website
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