by Rachel Hore
‘Luke told you then. It was nothing important. This big shot in a sports car drove up, just to turn round, I think, but he saw me sitting there and he wanted to know what I was doing. His English was pretty poor, but I could tell he wasn’t happy.’
‘Did you tell him we were inside?’
She shook her head. ‘No. I said I was a tourist and I was resting because I’d hurt my foot.’ She chuckled. ‘He offered me a lift, like I was going to accept. He started turning the car, then he stopped and pointed towards the house and said it was a bad place. “Bad place,” he kept saying.’
‘You didn’t tell me any of that.’
‘Didn’t I? I suppose I was cross that you were so long, and then there was all that drama with the stupid tin you found. Oh, Briony, don’t frown. Well, what was I supposed to think, you and Luke going off on your own together.’
‘Aruna! It wasn’t anything like that. We both wanted to see the house, that’s all. I’d never had gone if I’d thought you’d be worried.’
‘It wasn’t just then, was it? What about at Westbury Hall? Luke seems to have become obsessed with the place and that wretched garden.’ Briony didn’t know whether Aruna meant Luke was interested solely in the place or whether she was hinting something else. She couldn’t confront her to ask. She was frightened of ruining their friendship. She chose deliberately to assume it was the place that Aruna meant.
‘There’s a link between the Villa Teresa and Westbury, that’s probably what interests him. The fact of the two gardens, maybe. And Paul and Sarah.’
‘Those bloody letters. I wish you’d never been given them. They’ve stirred everything up.’
‘It’s to do with my family, Aruna. Nothing you have to worry about.’
‘All I know,’ Aruna said slowly, ‘is that things with Luke have not been the same since our holiday.’ The implication, from the accusing look on her pointed face, was that Briony was somehow to blame.
On the way to the tube station Briony’s feelings of desolation grew. It was so unfair. She and Aruna had hugged as they parted, but Briony sensed a lack of warmth. Aruna was angry, angry at the situation as much as with her. She wished she could feel angry in return, for the false allegations Aruna hinted at, for the dismissal of what was important to Briony, but instead she felt desperately sad and hurt. Did Aruna think so little of their friendship that she’d lost all trust in Briony without finding out whether Briony really had betrayed her? She touched her card to the ticket barrier and paced the platform before stepping onto a train south, where she slumped down onto a seat amid chattering, laughing people on their way home from evenings out.
I feel old, she thought, in the face of their energetic youthfulness.
Aruna had been her friend for fifteen years, the closest she’d had. They were quite unlike, but each in turn made up for the other’s differences. Aruna was fun, darting and colourful as a little dragonfly, flitting about with new ideas, finding new ways for them to enjoy life. Briony had been the steady one, comforting Aruna when things went wrong, when she’d been dumped. Aruna had been betrayed by men more than once, deeply hurt. Briony wished, desperately, that she could sort things out between Luke and Aruna, but she didn’t know how, only that she must keep away from Luke, possibly from both of them. She’d email Luke the transcripts of the letters, but not encourage further communication.
Her heart felt heavy as she unlocked the front door of her flat and pushed it shut behind her. Her nose wrinkled at a mouldy smell from a basket of washing that she’d pulled out of the machine and forgotten to hang up. A pile of junk mail lay slewed across the hallway. It was one of those nights when home felt very lonely.
She made a mug of green tea and stood sipping it and staring out of the living room window at the row of old houses opposite, where other lives went on. They’d had a street party once, for a royal jubilee. For several days afterwards people had smiled at one another as they passed, said hello, but then life reverted to how it had been before. Or so it was for Briony, who was out so much of the time. Her downstairs neighbours, a middle-aged childless couple, had come up for drinks the previous Christmas, but they lived busy working lives, too, and she rarely saw them.
She finished the tea and, fancying something sweet, remembered a bar of chocolate she’d brought home, but when she padded across to the kitchen and reached into her bag for it, her hand closed instead round the parcel. With a pair of kitchen scissors she began to slice through the parcel tape, cursing its thickness. Inside she found not a fat hardback book, but an old box of similar size and shape. It was a large cigar box made of some light, pale-coloured wood. There was a small cheap envelope taped to it addressed to her and she pulled it off, opened it and leaned on the work surface to read the letter inside.
She reached the end with growing astonishment, and quickly scanned it again.
Dear Dr Wood, it ran, in rounded, feminine handwriting.
You wrote to someone who wrote to my dad, Mr Derek Jenkins, but he is 87 now and his hands are very shaky, so he asked me to write to you for him and send you this box. I didn’t know he had them, but he says he got them a long time ago and meant to give them back, but he never saw her again. He says if you can find out what happened to Sarah Bailey maybe her family would want them, but they’re no good to him and it would be a weight off of his mind if you had them.
Yours truly,
Lindsay Sweet (Mrs)
The woman who had interviewed Derek Jenkins, the Baileys’ evacuee, had received Briony’s letter after all and passed it on to him! Briony opened the box and drew a sharp breath, suspecting at once what it was she had.
The box was packed tightly with piles of neatly tied letters, many still in their envelopes. She slid one from the top of its pile and read on the front: Miss S. Bailey, Flint Cottage. She pulled the letter out and read the signature at the end. Paul. They were Paul’s letters to Sarah and there were dozens of them! But how did the evacuee come by them?
She hastened with the box over to the sofa and sat down with it on her lap. Drawing out a pile eagerly, she unpicked the strand of wool that bound them, took the one on top and unfolded it from its envelope. The handwriting was in a thick pencil, difficult to read, so she reached for the switch on the table lamp next to her and shifted into the circle of light.
My Dearest Sarah, it began. Briony’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Dearest’? The relationship had changed. With growing excitement she began to read the words that followed.
Thirty-one
1941–1942
The North Devon seaside town was embraced by high cliffs, and the window of Paul’s hotel room looked out onto the small harbour so that the bright clinks of wind in the rigging attended his falling asleep and his awakening. If he woke in the night he liked to lie and listen, for he found it soothing. When winter storms raged, spray spattered the windows. Paul had never lived by the sea before. He was exhilarated by it, by the waves pounding the hard sand as he ran assault courses on the beach, by swimming in the freezing tidal pools. All this was part of the training. At other times he loved to watch grimy boats unload coal or the morning’s catch to the sad cries of the gulls which glided overhead or swooped to squabble over shiny corpses of discarded fish.
The work they were given was gruelling, even by the standards of heavy gardening. Worse, it was boring and frustrating, more so than he’d predicted. It took a while to learn the knack of using the pick and shovel efficiently to dig trenches. Then there was mixing and laying concrete before erecting Nissan huts on the cliffs. The boots they issued him were too big – the joke circulating that they were left over from the Great War turned out to be true – but Paul learned to stuff the toes with newsprint and his callouses eventually hardened over.
His roommate, Wolfgang Horst, quickly became a friend. Horst was Jewish, a fellow countryman four years younger than him who’d been dispatched to a British foster home by his far-sighted parents five years before. He’d attended a Midlands university and
spoke fluent English. Horst had often visited Hamburg as a boy, for his grandmother had lived there, and he and Paul sometimes reminisced in a mixture of English and German, though they found it unbearably sad to talk of home. Horst had no idea where his parents were now, or his grandmother. He wrote regularly to his little sister, who was at boarding school in Shrewsbury, and if he was granted leave he went to visit her either there or at the home of the teacher and his wife with whom she stayed during school holidays.
Paul wrote to Sarah every week. He sent her a postcard of the lighthouse, which was an unusual building because it was set into a disused church on the clifftop above the town. There was so much to tell her about daily life and he found the writing came easily to him. Horst is trying to teach me the violin, but I’m afraid he is wasting his time. The seagulls think I am one of them because of the noise I make.
He thought of her in quiet moments, trying to keep her face in his mind. He had never been in love before like this. He hadn’t met many girls in Hamburg, but at the university there had been a self-possessed young woman named Gisela, with thick fair hair cut into a bob and dancing dark blue eyes. She had let him take her out a few times and for a whole term they sat together in lectures, but then the trouble happened with his father and she started to avoid him. Sometimes Paul had used to wonder whether otherwise it might have gone further. He’d been fascinated by Gisela’s determination to succeed, her eager way of turning questions inside out to make one see a problem differently, not to mention her handsome, sturdy figure. She was a talented artist, could draw neat, detailed pictures of flowers and trees. He, on the other hand, knew best how to grow them.
It was Horst who awoke in Paul a love of music, for he’d brought with him his treasured violin, and many evenings he’d rehearse with the camp orchestra. Paul often attended the concerts in the village hall or, on one occasion, in the foyer of a grand hotel out in the countryside.
There were lectures, too, because many in the camp were older men, distinguished professionals in their pre-war lives: lawyers, doctors, university professors, writers. Once, he found himself volunteering to give a talk about growing flowers for cutting, and as he explained how spikes of gladioli, though unfashionable, were invaluable as they remained fresh in a vase for several days, he felt his love of growing things flood back. If he’d had with him some of the botanical slides he’d collected in Hamburg then he’d have delivered a more academic lecture about the wonder of plants, but he had neither the resources nor the time to research or to produce his own drawings.
Six weeks passed, two months. Christmas had not been a religious festival for the large Jewish element of the camp, but was nevertheless celebrated by a performance of Cinderella. Come January, work was hampered by the freezing winter weather, but eventually, in early February, Paul and Horst’s company was told they were sufficiently prepared to be sent on their first mission.
‘Clearing rubble, so the corporal says. I want to go and fight,’ Horst said fiercely as he wrapped his precious photograph of his parents in newspaper and fitted it into his haversack.
‘I do, too,’ Paul said from the window. He’d miss this view. ‘Maybe one day they will trust us enough. At least in the meantime we’ll be doing something to help, and London will feel more like the centre of things.’ And, he hoped, he’d be able to see more of Sarah. That would a great advantage.
Three weeks later, Paul felt less optimistic as he wheeled his heavy barrow along the plank towards the truck and began to shovel its contents into the dumper. The dust this raised set him off on another coughing fit, but he carried on, trying to ignore the cough, just as he tried to ignore the boneshaking pounding of Horst’s pneumatic drill. Thankfully, after he threw in the last shovelful, the corporal shouted for a break and he hurried to join the queue for hot drinks at the nearby van.
It felt as though they’d been here for ever. The work involved clearing rubble from the bombed areas around the docks; grim work, ‘stone-breaking’ as Horst called it, ‘old-fashioned hard labour for convicts’, but he spoke with a flash of humour. After all, as Paul remembered Sarah saying, most people in this war were having to do what they didn’t want. Their lives had been interrupted. Nobody dared speak about the future. Getting through the present was all they could do. He thought about this as he drank the thin hot soup a woman had served him and cupped his palm protectively round his cigarette. In order to fight for freedom, everyone was having temporarily to give it up, that’s how he should see it. There was no choice. It was so frustrating, though, to be stuck here shovelling concrete when the fighting was elsewhere.
The corporal shouted for them to return to work. Paul seized a sledgehammer and clambered back over the hills of shattered concrete, plasterboard, twisted girders and brick that he’d been mining, sinking some of his frustrations into the blow he delivered to a ruined flight of steps.
Paul had been astonished when they’d first arrived in what Corporal Brady told them had once been a street of houses. Most of them had been obliterated and the road was cracked and cratered. Only a few jagged elevations remained, reaching up defiantly, the shapes of windows and electric wires hanging like torn tendons, indicating their identities. God knows what it had been like for the rescue teams in the immediate aftermath of the bombs. He didn’t like to think about that. It was bad enough now, turning over a girder to find the pieces of a little girl’s doll, an engagement diary or a photograph in a smashed frame, precious belongings of the people who’d once lived there. Anything deemed valuable in any way was handed in, though whether its owner would be found alive to reclaim it was a different matter.
He’d heard that another team had uncovered something more gruesome the week before when they’d lifted up a broken dining table, but his lot had found nothing like that, though they knew to be prepared.
As Paul worked, a sharp wind blew up, stirring the dust and muffling the others’ voices. What with the mist, the sullen sky overhead and the deadened sound, he was disoriented and reminded for a strange moment of that fierce winter in Norfolk, the Christmas when the Baileys had arrived in Westbury. How the snow had changed everything, making the world alien and forbidding. The moment passed, but as he filled a basket with the crumbling lumps he’d split he was left with the lingering memory of Sarah.
He had a day’s leave starting this evening and he’d be meeting her at Liverpool Street train station. Usually if she came to the city she’d stay with her aunt, but tonight would be different. The thought of seeing her gave him renewed energy and he began to dig again almost cheerfully, suddenly not minding the cutting wind or the dust or the pain in his left forefinger where he’d wrenched it on a loop of wire the day before.
Paul’s heart filled with love and desire as he saw Sarah in the dim, evening glow of the station, alighting from the train, smart in a soft felt hat and belted coat, purposeful in her movements as she turned to help down an elegant old lady with her suitcase and summoned a porter to her. Then she spotted Paul and hurried towards him, her face open and alive. They clung together briefly and the warm, solid reality of her, her flowery scent, the sparkle of her kind eyes, made everything feel all right. They looked one another up and down and laughed.
‘Still the same Sarah?’ he teased. It was what he always asked.
‘Same as ever.’ Her habitual answer.
‘And I too.’ His anxiety was quelled, but not the thrill of nervous excitement.
He took her small case from her and waited while she located her ticket. ‘The journey was fine,’ she said in answer to his question as they walked together to the barrier. ‘That lady you saw me helping got on at Ipswich. She’s off to meet the man her parents wouldn’t let her marry forty years ago! She hasn’t seen him all that time, just think of that! It’s the war, you see. It brings people together as well as driving them apart.’
Paul smiled at her cheerfulness, but saw she was on edge, too. He steered her to the station café where, they agreed, they would sit in the
warm fug to drink tea and discuss their plans for the evening. Inside it was so full, the windows had misted up. It smelled of frying and wet wool. Someone was leaving and they pounced on the table. Paul watched her bright face as she enquired of the waitress about cake, and with his eyes he traced the strong lines of her features, the pale shine of her wavy, shoulder-length hair, her wide-spaced gaze. It was impossible to see her without being assured of her honesty and reliability. She was his lodestone in a world in which he had lost his bearings. When she removed her gloves he captured her hands, touched to see that they were as calloused as his. He stroked her fingers tenderly.
‘You work too hard.’
‘So do you,’ she laughed. ‘You look so strong now. Stronger than ever, I mean.’
‘The work is not so bad.’ He’d decided not to complain. Their short time together mustn’t be wasted. ‘You look so well, a healthy colour. Tell me, how are your mother and sister?’
‘Oh, they send their regards.’
‘Even Diane?’
‘Of course.’
He laughed. It was a joke between them that Diane didn’t approve of him. Sarah insisted that this was nonsense. Paul suspected that she was wrong and she knew it.
‘How is she, Diane?’ he asked in a low voice, but at that moment the waitress arrived with a tray and began to lay out a piping hot teapot, cups and saucers and a plate of rather small and unappealing rock buns.
When she’d gone, Sarah said, ‘Let’s not talk about her now. Where are we going this evening?’
‘There’s a good little Italian place I know near Soho Square. I thought we could dine there. Then, well, I hope it’ll be all right, a friend gave me the name of a hotel in Kensington. The proprietress is a good sort, he says, very discreet.’
‘Oh, Paul.’ Sarah’s face was ashen. ‘You didn’t say anything to your pal about me?’