Esther

The thing is, when you start researching family history, like it or not, you often find that you end up knowing far more about your ancestors than you do your close family. Not that my own family is particularly close, for various reasons best not explored.

I’m sorry, I should introduce myself. My name is Bailey, Robert Bailey, and the story I am about to tell is, quite frankly, weird … if not disturbing.

As I said, my immediate family is not very close, stemming from the fact that my father was illegitimate with all the stigma that attracted at the time and the consequent alienation of family relationships. Added to which, my maternal grandfather was practically comatose all the time that I knew him, the product, I was told, of an ‘accident’ down the mines. So, there were very few stories emanating from either of these sources. 

Apart from my parents, I was closest to my maternal grandmother, and she had led a very hard life losing two sons in infancy, giving birth to a mentally retarded daughter before having my mother and then losing her husband to his own mental illness. Consequently, and perhaps understandably, she did not like to talk about her early life either. In fact, I only found out about the two infant deaths through the discovery of a couple of dog-eared birth certificates when rooting about in a box of keep-sakes, and gran just brushed the questions aside. But, all that said, my brother and I had a very happy childhood despite the lack of any historical context of which, as children, we would not have been concerned about anyway.

It’s only in later life when questions start to beg an answer that you begin to wonder. That is probably the reason that I began family research - to find out who I am, what I am - which, for the record, and in my wildest imagination, is a wannabe musician and so-far failed writer. Both of which traits run contrary to anything I’m aware of in the few family members of which I know anything. Which is probably quite by-the-by, but demonstrates at least a modicum of creativity and sensitivity on my part which possibly played a great part in the outcome of events that form the core of this story.

It was when gran died that the skeletons started falling out of the wardrobe. No. That’s perhaps too dramatic, but it’s certainly when history started to catch up. The catalyst was an old photograph album, one of those leather-bound, brass-clad affairs with a lockable clasp, full of Victorian and Edwardian images of people about whom I knew absolutely nothing. It was amongst a horde of stuff we discovered in an old trunk lodged at the back of the ‘glory hole’ in gran’s back bedroom. Mother couldn’t really throw any light on it, but I assumed it to have been photographs of gran’s side of the family - physical resemblances were everywhere.

Anyway, the upshot was that I fell hopelessly in love with Esther. 

‘Esther’ was the only photograph that actually bore a name. And I do not mean ‘fell in love’ as in fell in love with the photographic artistry of the image, which was superb, but actually became besotted in the physically stomach-churning sense of first love, made all the more poignant by the distance in years. I could not stop myself turning back to that image again and again.

In the photograph, Esther was a young girl, just entering the first bloom of womanhood. I would guess she would have been aged sixteen or thereabouts. She was dressed in understated Edwardian fashion which nevertheless highlighted her beauty. Her hair was styled in the circular coif common at that time. The sort of hair-do that, quite frankly, looks faintly ridiculous in photographs of other women of the period. On Esther it looked completely natural, as if it belonged, with a soft, sensuous wayward curl that you felt you could run your hands through. 

It was a studio portrait, with the usual painted landscape backdrop and casually arranged props amongst which Esther posed, quite self-assured and confident. A hand rested on a fence post, whilst she looked directly into the camera with faintly mischievous eyes and an enigmatic smile playing on her lips. She was not a beautiful woman in the classical sense of the word. Young and pretty, she seemed to be unfettered by the cares of life but her looks would not have stopped carriages in the street. Still, there was something about her poise, the coquettish tilt of the head and the slightly challenging gaze into camera that made my heart somersault.

I had to find out who she was, and what had become of her. I only knew three of gran’s siblings, all of whom were long gone. It was ‘uncle’ George who actually enthused me with grown-up reading material through his extensive personal library, so perhaps that is where my inquisitive nature came from. I don’t remember any of them ever mentioning - even in passing - any other siblings, although there must have been some: Victorian families were large.

It was only when I tracked down my grandmother’s parents that the pieces started falling into place. It should have been fairly easy to do that on the online genealogy sites, but their family name had been misrepresented on various transcriptions of the census returns for at least two generations, making research difficult. Anyway, when I finally tracked them down through a more or less educated guess, it turns out that Esther was my great aunt, gran’s younger sister by some years. Which should have put an instant stop to any untoward feelings, but it didn’t. If anything, those feelings grew steadily stronger now that I could solidify an identity and mentally transform a paper image into recognisable flesh and blood.

It was an image that lived with me day and night: it was the first thing I turned to in the morning, it was the last thing I looked at at night. I dreamed about her. In my dreams she was every bit as desirable as my waking thoughts imagined; we ran the full course of courtship from first moments to first kiss to first tentative fumblings. We cavorted as lovers do, we indulged in practices that would probably have appalled her family. Love and lust knew no bounds. 

And then I would wake and endure the loneliness that a hundred years’ distance brings with it, until it was time to dream again and enjoy the embrace of a woman I would never know. In short, I went slightly insane and suffered a mental breakdown. It was only when the family intervened that I was persuaded to come to my senses. It did nothing to cure the aching void that remained, however, since I could find out nothing about Esther, the vicarious love of my life.

And then, quite out of the blue, through one of the genealogy websites I received a message from a distant relative, the great-grand-daughter of one of Esther’s younger sisters who had also been researching and experiencing the same difficulties. But she had the holy grail of genealogical research - direct knowledge of Esther’s circumstances through her great-grandmother’s recollections in a scribbled journal. Esther seems never to have married, which I have to admit both filled me with sadness and joy at the same time. She apparently endured a period of melancholia during her younger years suffering a mental breakdown as a consequence - probably as a result of an illicit relationship, so my correspondent told me the journal insinuated. 

She also sent me a photograph of Esther obviously taken a few years after the image I held. It had been taken in the same studio - the painted backdrop was identical - but this time she bore a much more wistful air with haunted eyes. And she was not alone. Holding onto her hand was a little boy, and my blood ran cold when I saw him. That little boy was the spitting image of myself at around his age. The spitting image.