The Pieces of Ourselves

by Maggie Harcourt

  Every second of it feels like a homecoming. One that’s a hundred years overdue.

  When his grandfather stops to speak to Barney, Hal doesn’t. He turns his head to say something to them both and then walks right on, only stopping when he reaches me.

  “Hello,” he says, and his voice fills my head and my heart and drives away all the shadows.

  “Hello.”

  The world melts away as we stand there, a breath apart from each other.

  “Are you ready?” Hal slips his hand into mine, pulling me closer to him.

  “Are you?”

  His grandfather is waiting at the library door, laughing with Barney as they chat about hotels, about the weather – about small-talk things that are nowhere near as big as this. He watches us as we walk across the lobby, and I can see more than Albie in him. I can see him in Hal and Hal in him.

  “You must be Flora,” he says, holding out a hand when we reach him; taking mine in his and folding both his hands around it. “My grandson has told me a lot about you.”

  “I am. And you should know, Hal talks about you a lot,” I tell him, glancing back at Hal. He’s fidgeting nervously with the edge of his sleeve. His eyes are careful, his whole face cautious – does he think I won’t know what to say or what to do? I lean closer, dropping my voice to a whisper. “We met before – you won’t remember, it was only for a minute…”

  “Ah, yes. We did. Hal told me. I’m afraid I don’t – you’ll have to forgive me. My memory…” He shakes his head, but his eyes glitter. “It isn’t quite what it was.” His hands are still clasped around mine, warm and dry, surprisingly soft. “But he also tells me that you’ve solved our family puzzle.”

  “Me? No, I just helped. It was mostly Hal.”

  “Bollocks it was,” snorts Hal – and then clamps his hand over his mouth, turning red. “Sorry, Pa.”

  But his grandfather just laughs. “Perhaps you’d like to show us what you’ve found…”

  Barney opens the library door.

  We talk him through all of it. The house, the war, the names…everything. He stops when he sees the portrait, and his fingers grab for the edge of the table as though he needs to steady himself. Behind him, Hal looks at me, then at him.

  “That’s him all right,” he says after a long pause, studying the photo. “That’s my grandfather – your great-great-grandfather, Hal.” He presses a hand to his chest. “I never knew. All my childhood he told me that story, and he never once let me know it was him.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t,” I say quietly. “Maybe Albie Holmwood really did die in the war, as far as he was concerned. Or maybe talking about it like it happened to someone else was the only way he could talk about it at all? Maybe he was trying to protect himself.”

  “Protect himself from his memories, you mean?” Pa blinks, turning his head ever so slightly towards me. “Yes, perhaps…I think we could all understand that.” He reaches a hand towards the photo frame, his outstretched fingers almost touching the glass. “Extraordinary,” Pa mutters, shaking his head. “I never knew.” He takes the picture in his hands, lifting it up and looking into it, at the face of his own grandfather – familiar and a stranger, and a puzzle solved.

  He sets the picture down, reaching into the pocket of his jacket without ever taking his eyes off the frame, and pulls out another photo – smaller, and with creases across it. In it, a little boy is sitting on the floor in front of a much older man – his grandfather. The man’s face is wrinkled, heavier with age – but still clearly recognizable as Albie, or Bertie, or whatever label he had chosen to wear. “My grandfather,” says Pa, nodding…and then, resting a finger on the boy’s face, “and myself.”

  He lays the photo down on the table in front of the other picture, and eases himself down into the nearest chair.

  I clear my throat and reach for the Hopwood Home folder on the table. “There was one more letter. It was in the top of the case.” I open the folder and pull out an envelope. “And it’s never been opened.” I hold it out to Pa. “It’s addressed to Iris, but we thought perhaps you might want it.”

  “Never been opened,” he says quietly. When he takes it, his hands shake – they shake so hard that he almost drops it again. He turns the envelope over in his hands, running a finger along the writing on the front – a gesture so familiar because I’ve seen Hal do it on every single letter we read.

  Albie, Pa, Hal.

  All of them are here.

  “I can’t think of a better time or a better place to open it, can you?” He looks around for something to open it with.

  Hal’s there, already beside him. “Are you sure?”

  “Quite sure. Here. Now. I don’t suppose anyone has a…ah, thank you.” He smiles as Barney hands him a silver letter-opener. “I don’t think my eyes will be up to it, I’m afraid,” he says – but I don’t think that’s true. “Hal, would you?”

  “Of course, Pa.”

  Hal slides the letter from the envelope – the last letter, for the last time.

  This is how the story ends.

  My dearest Iris,

  Faraday tells me you are married to a good man, that you have built a new life for yourself in Yorkshire, and that you are happy. He also tells me that you are expecting a child. You may wonder why I have never tried to find you, and the truth is that for so long, I was so very lost that I could not even find myself. I believe the man who went to war died there for a time, and it was only with love and care from others that he began to come alive again. By then, you had – and rightly, for I wish you nothing but happiness – taken a different path from the one we imagined we would walk. Should you one day read this, I hope you will allow me to congratulate you and to give both you and your family, however large or small it may be, my most sincere and heartfelt hopes for the future.

  Among the papers you left with Faraday, I found an instruction that should either I or any of my belongings return, any letters of yours that survived the war should be burned. Per your request, I have burned the greater part of those few I had managed to keep with me – all but the most precious, and I hope that you will trust and permit me to keep these small tokens for myself as a reminder not just of you, but of who I once was. As for mine to you, I leave them – as you have – here, where they belong. Should you ever choose to claim them, they will be waiting for you.

  I wish you well, my Iris. May your path hold nothing but joy.

  Ever yours,

  AH.

  The library is absolutely silent as Albie’s last words fade away. Shaking his head, Hal places the envelope on the folder.

  “I can’t believe it was in your attic. How did that happen?” He reaches for me, his fingers twisting through mine; both our hands locked together as he pulls me away from the table to the relative safety of the bookshelves and Barney offers round glasses of champagne from a tray that has magically appeared.

  “I don’t know – I guess it just ended up getting put up there at some point. Maybe Albie couldn’t get back into the main house, but he could get to the estate cottage, and he wanted to just leave everything behind, start over? Or maybe it’s because that was their place?”

  Charlie clears his throat loudly. Everyone’s turning to look at him, and I realize he’s waiting to say something.

  “Actually, there’s one more thing,” he says – and then I see Felix and Philippe carrying something in from the lobby. A box, and what looks like a big book.

  No. Not a big book. An album. An old photo album.

  One of our old photo albums.

  “What’s going on?” Hal’s breath is warm in my ear.

  “I don’t know.” I shake my head and pull a face at Charlie. He pretends he hasn’t seen me, but he can’t hide the twitch of a smile at the side of his mouth.

  My brother is up to something,

  “If I can have your attention for just a minute,” he says, clearly enjoying himself, “there’s one more thing we need to do.” He takes the box
from Felix with one hand, reaching into it with the other. “And that’s to introduce you to Iris.”

  What?

  He lifts a frame out of the box and sets it down on the table, right next to Albie’s. It’s very small, the picture so dark that I can’t even see it from here.

  “While we were sorting everything back into the case, we found a pocket where Albie had put a photograph of her – probably the one he took with him to France – and this.” He drops the box and moves his hands apart, and suddenly he’s holding what looks like a piece of blue-grey string, plaited and tied into a loop. A string or…

  “Is that the ribbon?” Hal whispers to me, and I can feel his heart beating against my shoulder as we turn to look at each other. “Her hair ribbon, from the dance?”

  “He kept it all that time – and then he left it here.”

  Oh, my heart. He came back and he left it here, along with all the other pieces of them. Where they belonged.

  “Do you want to know what she looked like?” Hal nudges me forward and before he’s even finished speaking I’m across the floor and straining to see past everybody else who has crowded around the table to see her face in the frame.

  There she is – the picture darkened by age, but clear enough. Long dark hair pinned back, dark eyes and wide lips. She’s pretty, and seeing their photos side by side, the two of them reunited after all this time, I can picture the two of them dancing, laughing, smiling, walking through the gardens and the corridors. I can picture the life they could – should – have had.

  “What’s the album for?” I point to the book as Philippe passes it to Charlie.

  “Oh, that’s the best part,” he says, thumbing through the pages. He stops about halfway through, holding it closed against his chest with his finger tucked between the covers to mark the page. “I thought she looked familiar, so we did a little digging to get to the bottom of this once and for all. Come take a look.”

  He opens it, turning it to face outwards.

  On the left-hand page is another photograph, almost as old, held in place by ornate cardboard corners. It’s a picture of a family: a man, a woman and two young children – one a baby in the woman’s arms, one little more than a toddler. The adults are both looking at the camera – but I can only see her.

  It’s the same person.

  It’s Iris.

  And that’s my grandmother’s old photo album.

  My mouth moves, but no sound comes out. My hand tightens around Hal’s, but I can’t move.

  What is my grandmother doing with a photo of Iris?

  “This,” Charlie says, pointing to the man in the picture, “is Jack Clark. He came from Yorkshire, fought in the Great War and afterwards he went back to the village where he was born. He met a girl who’d moved there to work, and they married and had a family. This –” he taps the picture again, this time pointing at the toddler – “is Sibyl Clark. She grew up, married a man called Alec Downing and had a daughter, Emily.”

  Oh my god.

  The world spins and the air in the room thins.

  Hal is already staring at me, already there too.

  “That’s not possible. It’s just not. How?”

  Emily Downing was my grandmother.

  Which means Iris Campbell, our Iris, Albie’s Iris…was my great-great-grandmother.

  Iris and Albie, Flora and Hal.

  Not just their story.

  Ours.

  Hal’s mouth is open and his eyes are wide – and everyone is suddenly talking all at once…and I have to check, but yes, the noise is definitely outside my head and not inside it. It’s not me.

  Coincidence on coincidence on coincidence.

  When there’s that many, it starts to feel like maybe it’s something else.

  All the pieces that had to move, all the stars that had to align; all the paths that had to cross, to join, to meet…

  All to find them, out in the dark; to find us.

  “Are you okay?” Hal’s voice cuts through the rest of the noise. Of course it does, because he’s in my head. But when I look at him, he’s as pale as I feel.

  I just point at the door. It’s all I can manage.

  He glances back over his shoulder at his grandfather, who’s dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief and now busily examining the photo album with Charlie and Felix. “I think maybe that’s a really good idea. Come on.”

  His hand and mine entwined, his past and mine entwined, we slip out of the library, out through the quiet lobby and into the gardens and, without saying it or even really thinking it, we head for the maze, one hand on the hedge, letting it lead us further and further into the heart of it.

  Their photos, their letters, didn’t tell their story – they needed us to finish it. Not to end it, but to complete it. To bring together all the parts and all the pieces of it – of them. To solve the puzzle that was each of them and both of them. And solving that meant I got to solve me too. Or to start to, at least.

  One hand on the hedge, one hand in Hal’s.

  Maybe it takes a lifetime to solve a person, maybe more. It took more than that to solve Albie. Maybe we’re not even meant to be solved in the end. There are no right or wrong answers. We are not simply one thing or another; not two halves that never quite touch. We are not written in the binary code of ones and zeroes, on or off, up or down, black or white. Manic or depressed.

  Maybe we’re all the whole of a compass, complete – and we deserve to be remembered that way.

  Him, them…

  Me.

  And that? That’s enough. How could it not be?

  I let my hand drop from the hedge. I don’t need to keep it there any longer.

  Hal looks nervous. “We’re not going to get lost, are we?”

  I shake my head and lace my fingers more tightly through his, pulling him closer.

  “It’ll be okay,” I say. “I think I know where I’m going now.”

  I never intended to learn so much about the First World War. I never intended to write about it at all, really. I set out to write a story about a girl with a history…and then real history came and got involved. It does that.

  The Pieces of Ourselves started as an idea about a girl running away, colliding with a boy running towards, and how that meeting might change them both. In Hal’s case, it’s the past he’s running towards, hiding from his present in it. Flora, meanwhile, is running from her past self – or an image of it that she needs to learn to see more clearly.

  I’ve been in Flora’s position, and I know how it feels. I have tried to draw from some of my own experiences in writing her. That’s why she means so much to me, and why it was so important to tell her story with honesty and with hope – because there is always room for both.

  I have no experience of war (and definitely not of the First World War) to draw from, so for Albie’s story I have relied on reading and research. I read a lot about shell shock – which we would now broadly recognize as a kind of PTSD – its effects…and its so-called treatments, which were for the vast majority of patients ineffective or even downright cruel. As someone who has needed a little help and support with their mental health several times over the years, it was hard and often heartbreaking reading. The condition was not well understood, and many never received the right kind of help, or any at all.

  But today, for those of us – like Flora, like myself and like so many others – who need a similar sort of understanding from time to time, we are much more likely to find it. Every conversation we have about mental health helps to normalize it, to increase our knowledge of it. Most of all, there is help – which can now come in a wide range of forms.

  Flora’s mental health is not her story: it affects her story, but it’s only one small part of it. She’s so much more than just that. We all are.

  Many people have contributed to this book and made it possible – some in small or surprising ways, others in much bigger, more obvious ones. But without them, it simply would not exist.

/>   My deepest thanks go to my editor at Usborne: Stephanie King, who with her patience, careful reading and feedback, her support and her guidance, has taken Flora’s story and turned it into something far better than I could ever have imagined. Whenever I got lost in the middle of it all, the light at the end of the tunnel was always Stephanie, waving a flare. If this book has a heart, it is hers.

  Rebecca Hill, who listened to what was at first a very vague idea and helped to shape it into something that could honestly be called a story worth telling.

  Juliet Mushens – for knowing exactly what’s needed and when, always. Liza DeBlock, for a level of admin efficiency that shows the rest of us up. (Or me, anyway.)

  Stevie Hopwood, for unending enthusiasm and ideas. The Hopwood couldn’t have been named after a better person.

  Sarah Stewart for her copyediting skills, and Anne Finnis and Gareth Collinson for their eagle-eyed proofreading.

  Sarah Cronin for interior design, and Will Steele for a gorgeous cover.

  All the team at Usborne for all their work in turning ideas into actual books on shelves.

  Gemma Varnom, whose messages and emotional support made all the difference when things got the better of me. Without her kindness and generosity of spirit, writing this book would have been a much colder and darker experience.

  My family, who have lived inside this book almost as much as I have over the last few years – and now know more about both the First World War and its aftermath than I imagine they ever expected to.

  Dale Dennehy, Garden & Park Manager of Dyrham Park National Trust property near Bath, who gave me a guided tour of the grounds as part of a research trip for a different book. That one never quite happened, but what I learned during that visit planted a seed that grew into a different story: this one.

  I read a lot of books about the Somme and the life of a soldier in the First World War, but the one I found myself returning to was by John Lewis-Stempel, Where Poppies Blow: The British Soldier, Nature, The Great War, with its deeply moving, human perspective on life on the Western Front.

  Although the Hopwood Home hotel and Hopwood-in-the-Hollows are fictional (as are Fallowmill and other houses mentioned in the book), the concept of the Thankful Village is real. The loss of life after the First World War was so extreme, so widespread, that towns and villages whose sons all returned from the war were the exception and not the rule.