Touchstone Season One- Complete Box Set

by Andy Conway

  “Course you can, miss.”

  “Why are the children here? I thought they were all evacuated, but I see them everywhere.”

  “Ah, we thought about it. Lots of them did send the children away, but then nothing happened for months. Most of them came back. And some of them weren’t all treated well out there in the country. Terrible, really.”

  Winnie pushed her plate away and wiped Olive’s face with her handkerchief, spitting on it and roughly smearing the girl’s gagging face. She wriggled free and ran off to play among the pews.

  “And can I ask you a question too, miss, if you don’t mind?”

  “Of course,” said Rachel. “Fire away.”

  Winnie looked nonplussed. Rachel laughed and covered her mouth.

  “I’m sorry. It’s a thing we say where I come from. It means yes, go ahead.”

  “Why have you come here? Was it to get away from the Blitz? If so, you’ve jumped out of the frying pan and right into the fire, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

  Rachel thought about how to answer. “No, it wasn’t that. I’m not running away from anything. I came here for a reason, but I can’t fully go into it.”

  Winnie leaned in and whispered. “Are you in the... you know... like Lieutenant Eckersley?”

  “The what?”

  Winnie shook her head and blushed. “I’m sorry. I misunderstood. It’s nothing.”

  She launched into chatter with the woman next to her, leaving Rachel to finish her food. People all around were using their bread to wipe their plates clean. You almost didn’t have to wash the crockery. What had she meant? What exactly was Charlie in?

  Amy Parker slumped over her plate of food again. She nudged awake and looked round for her daughter, seeing her off playing. There was still food on her plate and she ate it guiltily.

  “This Amy Parker,” said Rachel. “Where does she live?”

  Winnie looked at Amy and back at Rachel, then leaned in close, half covering her mouth. “Down Newport Road way. It’s a few streets from our house and it’s officially Moseley, but, you know, it’s only Balsall Heath. It shouldn’t really have the same postcode.”

  Rachel cringed. It was the kind of snobbishness she’d encountered all her life. Winnie looked down her nose at the world and didn’t realize one day it would be everyone looking down their nose at her daughter, her grandson and her great-granddaughter. Her own family would end up on the wrong side of those invisible tracks that divided the worthy from the riff-raff.

  “Your accent is interesting,” said Rachel. “You talk very posh, but it slips occasionally.”

  Winnie glowered, raiding herself a few inches in her seat. “I’m not one for putting on airs and graces, if you please.”

  “I didn’t mean to offend, Winnie. I’m not from here and I take an interest in accents, how people talk, that’s all, so I notice little differences in speech patterns. I was just observing.”

  Winnie thought about it, as if she was deciding that Rachel’s observation was just exactly how a linguist might view the world and that she hadn’t been mocking her at all.

  “Well, one likes to talk one’s best. Make an effort.”

  Olive and Maddy were playing together in the pews, Olive stroking the girl’s rag doll.

  Rachel shot up from her seat, as if the girls were playing on the edge of a precipice. “Do you let them play together?”

  Winnie tutted, but shrugged. “Between you and I, miss, my mother takes a very dim view of the likes of her, but to tell you the truth, I don’t always see what the fuss is about. We’re supposed to pull together, aren’t we? We’re all the same to Hitler.”

  Olive took Maddy’s hand and was about to lead her away.

  “All the same,” said Rachel, “I think you should keep those girls apart.”

  “I’m surprised, to hear that kind of thing from you, miss. It’s more like my mother to say something like that. I didn’t have you down as a snob.”

  Rachel looked at her empty plate, shamefaced, but was relieved when Winnie got up and walked over parquet floor to retrieve Olive.

  Down the end of the row of tables, Amy Parker watched her daughter left alone to sit in the mahogany pews, fenced off, with only a rag doll for company.

  — 13 —

  AFTER DINNER, WINNIE left Rachel to man the Multipot while she disappeared in the scullery just behind to wash the dirty plates and cutlery.

  Amy Parker came over to staff the tea urn again.

  “Thank you for stepping in for me,” she said. “I had to go find my girl. I do get worried when she runs off. They have such an attraction to bomb sites.”

  Maddy sat on a chair, talking to her rag doll. Olive had disappeared with her mother.

  “Now, Winnie showed me how to do this,” Rachel said, “but let me have another go. You can tell me if I do it wrong.”

  Amy watched as she prepared the Multipot, and Rachel wondered why she was so eager to please. This woman was her enemy. But she had felt such shame. A little thing like that – not letting the children play together – she had no stomach for it. How could she possibly imagine she could ever do something as bad as murder her, or her girl? It was a fool’s errand. The only thing she could do was find out exactly how Amy Parker’s daughter collided with her own timeline and try to stop it.

  Perhaps Maddy became lifelong friends with Olive and influenced her to marry a different man, so that Rachel’s father was never born. But no, she’d seen her father. He was alive and exactly the same, living in the same house, but without a daughter called Rachel. So it wasn’t that. Maddy, this innocent girl with only a ragdoll for a friend, would cancel out Rachel’s existence some other way.

  “How do you know Charlie?” she asked, filling the enamel dish with tea leaves.

  “Oh, I’m not sure, really. He introduced himself to me a few years ago in Moseley village, said he remembered me from a dance he put on. Quite a forward chap. Very friendly, though. There aren’t many men who’ll just walk up to a woman and say hello, especially a woman with a baby.”

  “He’s a very considerate man.”

  “You’re his cousin, aren’t you?”

  Say as little as possible. He hadn’t briefed her fully. If she gave details, it might conflict with something he’d already said.

  “That’s right. Do you have any family here?”

  Amy looked at the floor. “Only Maddy.”

  Should she mention Danny? The boy who’d saved her life back in 1912. She wondered for a moment if she’d still remember him, but how could you forget a thing like that? Her father trying to kill her before being carted off to the insane asylum. The boy who saved her life and disappeared.

  “What do you think of Winnie?” she asked instead.

  “Oh, I don’t really know her all that well. I don’t really have many friends here.”

  Rachel didn’t ask why. She knew why. “Have you ever thought of moving elsewhere?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Oh, no reason. It’s just... People stay where they were born, out of habit. But there’s a whole world out there. People up sticks and start a new life all the time. You can go anywhere.”

  Phoney, she thought. When you got your place at university, you couldn’t even leave your Dad’s house. You couldn’t leave Moseley, let alone Birmingham.

  “It’s not so easy,” said Amy, as if she’d read Rachel’s mind.

  “No, I guess not. But is there anything keeping you here?”

  Amy looked off into the distance and seemed lost for a moment. “There’s nothing here for me. Only her.”

  Maddy was asleep, sitting upright on the chair, head slumped to one side, her rag doll flopped on her legs.

  Amy yawned and covered her mouth.

  “You look awful tired,” said Rachel.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

  “Can’t you grab an hour here? Go and sleep on a pew.”

  “No, there’s work
to do.”

  “I can do this. I know what to do now. Go and have a sleep.”

  Again, so eager to please, to make amends, to this woman who stole everything from you.

  “If you think it’s all right?”

  “I’ll keep watch.”

  Amy picked Maddy gently from the chair and carried her through the sea of camp beds to the pews, where she bedded down.

  Rachel made another urn of tea up and distributed the twenty or more mugs to the dazed survivors and the volunteers. An auxiliary nurse was running a dressing station, officials with clipboards were taking details and arranging emergency accommodation. She had seen the old films about the Blitz but nothing had brought home the grim horror of this – blank eyed survivors who had lost everything, their homes and their families, and sat with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

  Wasn’t she the same? She wondered if the trauma of losing her entire life was comparable to this. It seemed trivial by comparison, because no one in her family was dead, they were only dead to her. In fact, it was almost as if she was the one who was dead. Walking dead. A ghost that couldn’t move on, desperately finding a way to get back, and refusing to believe there wasn’t a way.

  Might it not begin to show in her, like it was for these poor people? The catatonic gaze, the nervous twitch, the stutter, weeping without realizing, jumping out your skin when someone dropped a tin cup or a chair scraped the floor. Might she go quietly mad herself and not see it?

  She dispensed tin cups of hope as the light faded through the stained glass windows, wondering if she was making any kind of difference at all. Winnie had seemed to think it the most important job of the war, handing out cups of tea, but she felt utterly useless.

  The sullen dusk closed in and she wondered how soon it would be before the Germans came again.

  — 14 —

  CHARLIE WALKED IN, his shoulders slumped, face grey and crumpled like an old paper bag. He scanned the church and as their eyes met. He smiled and stood tall. Affection soared in her heart. She felt safer with Charlie around and, she realized suddenly, he was all she had.

  Amy Parker raised herself from her pew and jolted awake. She looked around in panic for her daughter, for just that first moment, and then when she saw she was close by and safe, she looked around the church for what she had to do.

  Charlie marched over, sweeping his cap off his head and running his fingers through his Brylcreemed hair. “I hope you’ve been all right here. I feel terrible leaving you here like this, but there was so much to do.”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I’ve been making tea. Lots of tea.”

  “I could murder one right now.”

  “Then you’ve come to the right place.”

  She took a tin mug, poured some milk from a pewter jug and sweet tea from the urn tap. He took it and gulped sweet relief.

  “Oh, that’s heavenly.”

  “Winnie thinks it’s going to win the war.”

  “She might be right.”

  Amy came over. “Sorry for sleeping so long.”

  “That’s all right. You looked like you needed it.”

  “I’ll take over here now.”

  “That’s good,” said Charlie. “I have to take Rachel away now.”

  He pointed to the rear of the church and an open arched door through which she could see stone steps. He walked through and began to climb. She looked back at Amy Parker and her daughter, Maddy, wondering how she could ever solve that problem. Planting the seed of moving out of Moseley seemed such a forlorn hope now: a seed that would never take root and grow.

  She followed Charlie, climbing a stone spiral staircase, her legs leaden when she reached the top and emerged to dark sky.

  The church tower. She was on the tower that looked out over Moseley village. She stepped towards the battlement edge and peered over, surprised that she could see for a mile or two in every direction, even in the blackness.

  “This is amazing. I’ve never been up here before. I’ve never actually been in this church.”

  Charlie frowned and she realized how strange that might sound to him; that perhaps most local people here still went to church every Sunday. But he turned to the ARP warden who was standing there and said quickly, “She’s visiting from London, Gilbert. Never been to Moseley before.”

  Gilbert smiled kindly and tipped his tin helmet. He looked about seventy and it made her think of the Dad’s Army repeats that her dad laughed at so much. This man would be already dead in her time, even if he’d survived the war. Was Charlie also dead in her present? He was only a few years older than her here, but he’d be almost ninety in her present. Not that it was really her present, now that she’d been erased from it.

  “You go and have a break, Gilbert,” said Charlie. “I’ll watch here. There’s a nice cup of tea waiting for you.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Gilbert said, saluting and heading for the steps, groaning as he descended.

  Clouds of smoke hung in the dusk all over the city.

  “We took a hell of a battering last night. Hard to believe there’s anything still standing.”

  “I feel terribly guilty now,” she said, “that you’re wasting time looking after me, when all of this is happening. My need seems so trivial.”

  He moved towards her and she thought he might embrace her, but he put his gloved hands on the battlements and looked out beside her.

  “Well, you’ve lost everything too,” he said. “Just like those poor people down there. But there’s no emergency committee for you, no auxiliary force to patch you up and put your life back together. I’m afraid all you’ve got is me.”

  “It’s more than I could have hoped for,” she said. “I came back through in a blind panic and all I could think of was...”

  She swallowed her words, ashamed. How could she tell this kind man that she’d thought of killing a woman?

  “What?” he asked. “Tell me.”

  She shook her head and gazed out over the bombed city, blurred.

  “I hope you’ve changed your mind,” he said. “That’s not the answer.”

  “That’s why you introduced me to her, wasn’t it?” she said. “You left me with her for the day, so I’d get to know her, so she’d be a real person for me.”

  “It’s much harder to kill someone when you know them.”

  “Do you think I could ever do that?” she asked, and it was almost as if she were asking him to assess her capacity for murder; almost as if she hoped he might say yes.

  “You don’t have it in you. I think. But, to be honest, my job is all about training the most unlikely people to find that killer in themselves.”

  She turned to him, curious now. “Charlie, are you some kind of secret agent?”

  It was his turn to look away now. “Whatever makes you think that?”

  “Winnie sort of said she thought I might be one too, but she stopped herself.”

  He sighed. “Bloody hell. It’s not very secret if people blab about it to their family.”

  “Or to women they only met yesterday.”

  He grinned. “You forget I’ve known you longer than that, Rachel.”

  “So you are. Is Winnie one too?”

  “No. But...’ He paused, as if considering whether he should tell her.

  “Go on, Charlie. I’m not even from this time. And if it’s intelligence about the war you need, then I’m pretty much perfect for it. I know how it’s going to end.”

  “Do we win?”

  He looked so forlorn that she laughed. “Of course we win.”

  “Oh, thank God,” he cried, and let out a huge sigh, his forehead slumping to hit the stone between his gloved fingers.

  She reached over and stroked his back. The weight of the war had fallen from his shoulders with just a few words and she wondered why she hadn’t told him before.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought you knew. I’ve been amazed to see everyone so pessimistic.”

  He lur
ched up. There were tears in his eyes. “We’re waiting for Hitler to invade, any day now.”

  “He won’t,” she said, soothing. “I know it looks like that now, but it won’t happen. We’re going to beat them. The only Jerries setting foot on British soil will be the pilots we shoot down. We’re going to go right back over to France and kick them out, and then we’re going to march on Germany. Hitler will be dead in five years and Berlin will be in ruins. We’re going to win this war. You’ll see.”

  He pulled her close and embraced her. She was startled for a moment, then thought, this is his own VE Day. Everyone else would have to go through another five years of war before this. At least she had given him this one thing. This certainty. She patted the back of his head. There, there, it’s going to be all right. It’s a lovely day tomorrow.

  He stepped back, embarrassed, and straightened himself. “I’m sorry. It’s just such an immense relief.”

  “I know,” she said. “I should have told you sooner.”

  He gazed into her eyes with a new thought, and she wondered what the hell he was seeing.

  “Rachel, I have an idea,” he said. “You’re right. You’re perfect for this.”

  “For what?”

  He didn’t answer. An eerie wail split the sky, joined by others near and far, a terrifying cacophony, the insane scream of night demons taking flight.

  The air raid siren.

  She’d heard the sound on TV so many times but here, as it keened on the winter air and burned her ears, it sounded so much more dangerous, frightening, thrilling. How did they hear it and not run screaming? How did they hear it and remain so calm, still strolling about their way?

  Gilbert climbed back up the steps from the church below, groaning slightly as he shifted his weight, a steaming mug of tea in his hand.

  “They’re going into the shelter now, sir,” he said.

  She looked over the battlements at the graveyard below. A stream of people headed for the rear gate, passing the touchstone that could send her back from this. All she had to do was walk down there and touch it and return instantly to a world where nightfall didn’t bring planes to fill the sky, drop their bombs and kill so many at random. All she had to do was sit on that gravestone and touch a certain spot and be back home in her own time. But she wanted to stay here, as long as she could. Better this life where you lived in daily fear of death than a life where you no longer existed.