Last Letter Home

by Rachel Hore

  ‘Why don’t I make the tea?’ she said, following and taking the kettle from her, and for once Lavender let her, though only to turn her attention to the biscuit tin instead, laying fingers of shortbread out on a plate.

  ‘Sorry it’s not home-made. I don’t know where the time has gone this week.’ She did sound forlorn, Briony noticed with concern. Lavender pulled out a chair and sat down at the table, massaging her temples with finger and thumb. Briony brought the mugs of tea over and sat opposite.

  ‘How are you, darling?’ Lavender asked, trying to be bright.

  ‘Not too bad. It’s you that seems a little tired.’

  ‘Don’t worry about me, it’s been a long week, that’s all.’ They sipped their tea and nibbled biscuits in companionable silence. Briony felt more relaxed than she expected, glad that she’d come. It was home, after all, somewhere you came back to when things had gone wrong in the big wide world and you felt alone.

  ‘I think I’m basically all right,’ she told Lavender. ‘Just suffering from lack of sleep. Oh, and a bit upset about something.’ There, she’d done it now, but there was a softness about Lavender today that invited confidences. Her stepmother raised her eyebrows and nursed her mug, waiting for her to go on.

  ‘A friend of mine . . .’ And before she knew it she was telling Lavender about Aruna and how upsetting the break-up with Luke had been to witness. ‘The trouble is,’ she confided, ‘I’m worried that I might be part of the reason for the break-up and it’s not because of anything I’ve actually done.’ She explained that Luke appeared to be drawn to her.

  ‘But if it’s his fault, then should you feel guilty?’

  ‘I don’t know, I just do. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so friendly with him. Perhaps it encouraged him without realizing.’

  ‘That’s what my parents’ generation would have said, Briony. I’m sure it wasn’t your fault at all. These things happen in my experience. If their relationship is meant to be then it will mend. Maybe it will help if you stay out of their way for a while. Only they can work out if they want to be together.’

  ‘Yes.’ Briony imagined that Lavender was right, but then Lavender said something very shrewd.

  ‘But perhaps you don’t want it to mend.’

  She stared at her stepmother. ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Briony, love.’ Lavender put out her hand and touched her stepdaughter’s fingers. ‘It’s the way you look, dear, when you talk about this boy.’

  ‘He’s my age, Lavender, hardly a boy.’

  ‘Man then. Don’t interrupt. You like him, don’t you? I can see it in your eyes. He’s someone special.’

  For a moment Briony stared at her stepmother, her thoughts spinning like wheels on a fruit machine. Which stopped suddenly like an answer falling into place. ‘What if I do?’ she said bluntly. ‘I would never steal my best friend’s boyfriend, don’t you see.’

  Lavender sighed. ‘Of course you wouldn’t,’ she said softly. ‘Not on purpose. But maybe you won’t have to. I’m a great believer in things happening as they’re meant to. After all, look at your father and me. We’d both lost people we loved deeply. You know, I thought I’d never learn to trust a man again. Then along came your father, the most trustworthy man I’ve ever met, and I’m lucky enough to have him.’

  Lavender really loved her father. Briony knew this, of course, but seeing the soft light in the other woman’s eyes, she felt a sudden rush of warmth towards her that she’d never felt before.

  ‘And he’s lucky to have you.’ She smiled at Lavender’s pleasure. ‘Perhaps I’ll keep out of their way as much as possible, then,’ she sighed. Though that might not, she privately acknowledged, prove easy to do.

  ‘Did Grandpa Andrews really never talk about any of this, Dad?’

  ‘He died so long ago, but I don’t remember him doing so. He certainly didn’t want to be interviewed about it for the paper.’ Martin finished poking sticks into the wood burner and hauled himself back into his chair.

  With the leaping firelight making the cut-glass wall lights sparkle, her father and stepmother’s living room was a welcoming place of a winter’s evening, especially with Lavender’s mushroom risotto and an apple crumble lining the stomach. Briony stroked the fluffy tabby cat that lay stretched on the sofa between her and Lavender, flexing its claws in its sleep.

  On the coffee table lay the contents of the box of memories, which she had been going through with her father and Lavender, showing them Sarah and Paul’s letters and telling them everything that she’d learned. Of course, Dad had already heard her account of visiting Norfolk and meeting the Andrews and the other Westbury people, but not anything about the letters from Paul. He’d looked through them with amazement.

  ‘That is quite a love story you’ve uncovered,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. I want to know what happened to them. It’s so frustrating not to be able to find out.’

  ‘Paul and Sarah,’ he said softly. ‘Let’s go over what we last know of them again. Paul, we’ve left in the Villa Teresa in Tuana late in 1943. Harry was with him and so was Ivor Richards. Harry obviously returned from Italy alive.’

  ‘So did Ivor, but we don’t know about Paul. The records are blank.’

  ‘Surely they’d say whether he died in service or was demobbed.’

  ‘Neither. I can’t say definitively, but I’m fairly sure I’ve searched in the right places.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So the last thing we know about Paul is this.’ Briony passed her father the note from Paul that she’d found in Harry’s memory box.

  ‘Dearest Sarah . . .’ Her father read it aloud. He turned the scrap of paper over, but the reverse was blank apart from the black smudge that had come through from the front. He shook his head and passed it to Lavender. ‘OK, so it seemed that Paul survived and expected to meet up with Sarah. Except it seems that she didn’t receive this note that was supposed to have been delivered by Harry.’

  ‘So perhaps she never knew he was coming back. Never saw him again.’

  ‘It would rather suggest it. I’m sorry, love, I know how much you have invested in this.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t Harry have delivered it?’ she wondered.

  ‘What are the options?’ Her father’s old journalistic skills were coming into play. ‘One, Harry didn’t meet up with her for some reason. Two, he forgot to give it to her. Three, he didn’t want to give it to her.’

  ‘Why would that be the case?’

  ‘Maybe your father thinks Harry was in love with her,’ Lavender spelled out.

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Yes.’ Briony knotted her brows as she considered this. Nothing in the letters had made her think that. ‘Perhaps Ivor leaned on him,’ it occurred to her suddenly. ‘Ordered Harry not to give it to her.’ She tried to imagine a situation in which this might have happened, but it didn’t seem possible. Harry had sounded more sympathetic about Sarah to Paul than to Ivor.

  ‘Oh, this wears my brain out,’ she sighed.

  Her father had brought downstairs the oldest of her mother’s photo albums and she began to turn the thick black pages. It was sad, she thought, that there were no photographs of her grandparents’ wedding and she wondered why. There were plenty of their daughter, though, Briony’s mother. Jean, a tiny bundle, her face peeping out of the folds of a knitted shawl, her mother with her calm face and a halo of fair hair gazing down fondly at her. Crawling, her chubby face one big gap-toothed smile; a toddler with a ribbon tied in her unruly fair hair; with her father at three or four, paddling in the sea. Jean always looked so happy in these photographs, knowing she was precious and loved. That was the kind of person she grew up to be, too, Briony’s beloved mother. Briony blinked furiously as distant memories began to flood in. Being taken to view a litter of squirming spaniel puppies in a neighbour’s kitchen and her joy when her mother said they were to have one. The scent of hot damp linen as her mother ironed sheets in the steam-filled kitche
n with The Archers on the radio.

  ‘Briony?’

  Briony started and looked up at her stepmother.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Mmm. Just thinking.’ She closed the album, realizing that it might be difficult for Lavender if they dwelled so much on Briony’s mother. That must be why she appeared a little wan. Instead she selected one of the old wartime photographs from the box. Her grandfather was recognizable despite the way he screwed his face up against the light. Paul, she supposed, was next to him, a tall dark-haired man with dancing eyes, and that was Ivor, lighter in build and classically handsome with fair hair and regular features, his moulded lips unsmiling. She’d no idea who the other three men were. The Three Stooges, it said on the back, which simply wasn’t helpful.

  It was when she was getting ready for bed that it struck her to investigate the drawer underneath, to see if there was anything further that was relevant to her search. She knelt to edge it open, but there was only the box of her mother’s old school books. She pushed the drawer back, then slipped in under the duvet, her feet finding the comforting warmth of the hot-water bottle her stepmother had left there. Dear Lavender. Lying there in the quiet darkness, thoughts of Aruna and Luke returned to haunt her. Perhaps she should have texted Aruna to ask if she was all right, but Lavender might have a point, that she should leave well alone. Would Aruna expect it, though? Briony brooded over the previous night’s events, and remembered again the guidebook that she’d found in Aruna’s flat. Why had Aruna been looking at it? And it came to her that the answer to the mystery lay in Italy. What had happened in Tuana, in the Villa Teresa, where Paul had last been heard of?

  The wartime film footage Mariella had given her! Briony slid out of bed with a shiver, pulled her laptop out of its case and returned to bed with it, hoping that tidy Lavender hadn’t switched off the house wifi. No, its symbol above the toolbar glowed steady. The internet drop-file she wanted came up easily and soon she was watching the images that she’d first seen in that stuffy living room on an Italian summer evening. The stricken plane wheeling in the sky, the devastation of the war-torn valley, then in through the gates of the Villa Teresa, through the ruined garden, to where the two men were unloading boxes from a truck. She froze a frame to study their faces, then let it run on to the soldiers playing cards, concluding that three of the cheerful faces were the ‘Stooges’ from the photo in her grandfather’s box. Finally, the pale walls and tiled roof of the villa itself came into view and – who was that? She stopped the film and edged it back a tiny bit. There, in the window. She reached and switched off the bedside light so that the image gleamed more sharply. Could that be Ivor, standing at the window, watchful expression, hands on hips? The face was in shadow, but the man’s jacket was buttoned up smartly and he bore himself proudly. Possibly it was him, she reckoned, and moved on. Now, the busy hoe and the gardener working it, the shock again that this was Harry, the springy hair, laughing eyes and tanned narrow face, so like her brother Will’s. Definitely her grandfather. But where then was Paul?

  The picture flew away in its ragged tail of ribbon and the screen darkened. Once more Briony slid the marker back to the scene where the truck was being unloaded, but though she examined each face again, and those of the card-players, there was no sign of Paul. Perhaps he hadn’t been around that day, or – why hadn’t she thought of this before? – perhaps he was the cameraman! There had been another occasion when he had been taking the picture, when was that? As she shut down her laptop, laid it on the bedside table and settled down under the duvet, she remembered being with Robyn Clare in her lovely apartment in Westbury Hall studying the photograph of the household in 1939. She’d looked for Paul then in the line-up of family and servants, but Robyn believed that he had taken the picture and could not therefore be in it.

  As she lay waiting to fall asleep, Briony remembered the last letter of Paul’s that she’d read. It alluded to something terrible that had happened that meant he and Ivor were in trouble. She wondered again what it could possibly be.

  Forty

  April 1944

  The spring brought hope after the long winter in the mountains. Only rarely now did a rime of frost glitter on the mud when Paul stepped out in the early mornings, and this quickly melted away under the fierce young sun. He and Harry and Private Sullivan, one of the Three Stooges, so-called because they’d been billeted together in Naples and since proved inseparable, had started to dig up a plot of land in a sheltered area in the back garden of the villa to grow vegetables, though so far there wasn’t much available to plant. He had been watching Harry with some concern, but the man had only suffered one further serious bout of fever, soon after Christmas, and periods of gentle activity in the warming air seemed to be doing him good.

  They were two of a dozen men living at the Villa Teresa under Ivor Richards’ iron control. A rock-steady Scot named Sergeant John Fulmer commanded another six down in Tuana itself, occupying the Town Hall, where they’d turned the big reception room with its solemn portraits of past dignitaries into an ops room and dormitory, much to the chagrin of the current mayor, a retired bank manager with a distinguished wave of iron-grey hair and a proud, Roman face. His officials were now beset by people from all around with lists of insoluble problems and there was only one small office in which to receive them and nowhere to hold meetings or entertain. Still, the presence of the soldiers at least meant the town received shipments of food and other supplies, though these had been irregular over the hard winter, so it was difficult to do more than grumble.

  On this particular April day, Paul and Harry used the last of the petrol to drive a truck down to Tuana. Supplies from Naples had arrived the night before, a welcome relief now that the weather had improved and some of the roads and bridges had been repaired. They assisted in distribution of foodstuffs to the eager, jostling local women, entrusted medical supplies to the nuns at the convent, as there was no doctor now living in the town, and handed out sacks of seed and animal feed to farmers or their widows, with the guidance of local officials.

  There was a local boy Paul had seen before, who was fascinated by the British soldiers, and whom the mayor had introduced as his grandson. ‘I help, I help,’ Antonio said today, his dark eyes flashing. He was fifteen, a tall, athletic, good-looking boy. His father, the mayor’s son-in-law, had been taken prisoner by the British, but his family appeared sure that he would eventually return safely. ‘I want to fight la Germania,’ the boy explained, ‘but they say too young, too young. So I help you, yes?’ He lorded it over the women and children who scrambled for tins and dried goods, upbraiding them if they tried to take too much, which made Paul smile as he ticked items off a list. Inevitably, Antonio would manage to scrounge a few extra items for himself as payment. It was difficult, very difficult, to deny him.

  Paul and Harry replenished their petrol tank and packed their truck with the troop’s own allocation of rations.

  ‘Was there any post?’ Paul asked hopefully of the driver of one of the lorries, a burly Cockney corporal, as he finished unloading goods into one of the storage barns.

  ‘Post? What’s that, gov, when it’s at home?’ With a grin that split his chubby face, he went round to the driver’s door, reached behind his seat and brought out a grubby, bulging pouch. Paul seized it, eyes gleaming, carried it along to the Town Hall and tipped the contents out onto a desk. Soldiers crowded round to help sort the parcels and letters, cheered by the sight of these links with home. Paul’s heart leaped as he picked out an envelope addressed to himself in a certain familiar handwriting and slipped it into his breast pocket. Harry, he saw, did the same with another, then they stuffed a dozen more letters and packages for the men at the villa back into the bag to take with them.

  Outside, they waited as five handcuffed German prisoners were led out of the tiny jail and loaded into one of the lorries. Then the air filled with shouts of farewell as the convoy of vehicles moved on its way back to Naples. Paul gave a coin an
d a wink to Antonio, then he and Harry climbed back into their own truck.

  All the way up the winding lane to the villa, Paul thought of the letter in his pocket, wondering what Sarah would have to say. It was two months since the last one had got through and he hoped that she’d had his reply. Beside him he was aware of Harry taking his own letter out, reading it quietly, then folding it and replacing it again, an uncertain expression on his face.

  ‘Who’s it from?’ he asked.

  ‘Jennifer,’ came the reply, but when Paul asked if there was any news, Harry ignored him, instead shouting out a warning of a particularly large hole in the road.

  When they arrived back at the villa, Paul left the Stooges to unpack the truck and, whistling to himself, strolled round to the back garden, where he sat on an old tree trunk, tucked a lighted cigarette between his lips and slit open the letter.

  He’d read it through quickly and was thinking about its contents when he heard someone emerge from a door behind. It was Ivor. Paul rose to his feet at once, wary, but the captain had not come to give him an order.

  ‘News from home? Who’s that from then?’ There had been nothing in the post for Ivor, not even from his mother. Paul almost felt sorry for him.

  He folded the letter and said uncertainly, ‘It’s from Sarah. She’s the only one who writes to me.’ That wasn’t quite true. Very occasionally a postcard from Horst, his chum from Pioneer days, arrived, but he hadn’t heard from Horst for several months now and didn’t like to think about why.

  ‘I suppose that must be the case, yes,’ Ivor said, frowning. Paul did not like the frown, nor the expression of dislike in the other man’s eyes. ‘She writes to me sometimes, of course. What does she have to say? No, don’t worry if it’s private.’

  It was private, of course, but maybe it was simply news from home that Ivor craved, and it was unkind to deny him that. ‘Sarah is well, that is the best thing,’ he said, tucking the envelope into his pocket. He would carry it with him for a while, then wrap it up in oilcloth with the others in his kit, a precious packet he’d managed so far to keep dry. ‘She is a little worried about her sister, who has not been so good.’ Sarah had not mentioned the nature of the illness, merely that Diane had been low in spirits, but becoming a little brighter. That was good. Perhaps she’d recovered from that terrible business with the baby, which Sarah had confided in him about. He sensed from the letter, though, that they were all more cheerful at home now that the war had turned in the Allies’ favour.