by Jill Rowan
She ushered me in, talking as we went. ‘I had to call the police and report you as a missing person. They’ve been searching for you, your picture’s been in the papers, everything. I’ve been so worried. You were caught on CCTV on the bus going to Rillsend – what on earth did you go there for? And then there was no trace of you there and no one had seen you. It’s like you disappeared into thin air.’
‘But I did go to Rillsend – I was there,’ I said. ‘Only there was so much snow and I got lost, and then…’ I trailed off as she stared at me.
‘Snow? There wasn’t any snow. It’s just been cold and wet the whole time.’
‘Well…it had snowed a lot there,’ I said. ‘And then there was this boy, Edward, who’d fallen off his horse and I got him home and then I stayed with the family until the thaw,’ I added in a breathless rush.
She sighed heavily and sat down on the sofa. ‘Tilly, Rillsend’s just four miles away. How could it have snowed there and not here? I don’t think it’s been cold enough for snow. Look, if you’re in trouble, if you’ve got into drugs or something, just tell me and we’ll get you some help, or get it sorted somehow. But don’t lie to me. I can’t cope with that, not after this last few days. I thought you were lying dead somewhere, for God’s sake. I thought –’ She put her head in her hands. I watched, feeling terrible. This was my fault, but I didn’t know how to make it right. I couldn’t believe she cared that much about me.
A few minutes later the police arrived and I got a similar reaction.
‘You got off the bus at Rillsend,’ the male officer said. ‘Now where did you go after that?’
‘I’ve already said. I got lost, and then there was this boy who’d fallen off his horse, and –’
‘What was the boy’s name?’
‘Edward.’
‘Surname?’
‘I never asked. I mean, I didn’t think to ask.’
‘What about the address, love?’ the female officer asked.
‘Well it was a farm – a sheep farm. I helped out with the sheep, until the thaw, and then Ben took me back to the bus stop.’
‘Ben – but no surname. Hmm.’
‘Yes. And his wife’s name was Edie. They were very kind to me. Well, except for Ruby, but she was just jealous…’
My auntie made a choking sound, and everyone turned to look at her. She stared at me with an odd expression on her face. ‘Did you say Ruby? Were there any other brothers and sisters?’
I nodded eagerly. ‘Tom and Vera, but they’re only young. Edward’s the oldest. He’s eighteen.’
She put her hands to her cheeks. ‘And you said their parents were Edie and Ben? Edith and Benjamin…’ she murmured, almost to herself.
‘You know these people, Ms Turnbull?’ the male officer asked.
I watched, puzzled, as she seemed to pull herself together and take a deep breath before she said, ‘Well… um… we do have relatives with those names. They had… they have a hill farm near Rillsend.’ She stared hard at me as she spoke.
‘But Rillsend is all built up – there’s no farms there,’ the female officer said with a frown.
My auntie didn’t take her eyes away from me, and I wilted slightly under the intensity of her gaze. ‘Oh it’s a little way out,’ she said to the officers. ‘It’s possible Tilly’s mobile was out of range.’
It took a while, but somehow she managed to persuade the disbelieving officers that I’d somehow been stranded with relatives. They left the house still looking highly sceptical, but as I was obviously safe and well it seemed they were willing to give me the benefit of the doubt.
When we were finally alone in the house, Auntie Cheryl sat opposite me in the living room, her expression grim. ‘Okay, so how did you know?’ she asked.
‘Know what?’
‘You saw my research, is that it? You thought it would make a good story?’
‘What story? It’s true. Why did you tell the police you believed me if you think I made it up?’
She sighed. ‘I got a bit caught up with my own imagination there. I didn’t see how you could know, but after all, we do live in the same house. It’s all there on my laptop.’
‘I haven’t been on your laptop. Why would I?’ I said, some of my anger returning.
‘Okay then, tell me the whole story,’ she said, her voice still hard.
As I outlined the sequence of events, carefully omitting my feelings for Edward, her expression softened slowly. She asked me to describe the house and the farm, and Edie and Ben in particular, and when I ended with my bus ride back into a snow-free Nimbury, she sat shaking her head in silent astonishment.
‘So who are they?’ I asked at last. ‘Are they relatives, like you told the police?’
She nodded. ‘Edith and Benjamin Tingey were your great, great, great grandparents.’
I sat up straight. ‘Grandparents! But…’ I began to tremble. ‘Does this mean I’m descended from Edward? He’s my great, great grandfather?’ I dreaded the answer.
‘Oh no, of course not. Your great, great grandmother was Ruby Jenks.’
‘Ruby!’
‘She married a Sam Jenks. He was a chauffeur. They had three children, and her daughter, June, had a son, Harold, just after the second world war. Harold married Lily Groves and they had a son, Graham – your dad – in 1973, and I was born ten years later. It’s impossible and incredible, but everything you say rings true.’
‘But… what about Edward? Why did you say “of course not”? I asked, my voice wobbling.
‘Well, he was killed in 1914 in the first world war, at the Battle of the Marne.’
A jolt of horror passed through me. ‘How do you know?’ I whispered.
‘It’s something I’ve been interested in for a while: family history. There’s just you and me left, you know, so I’ve been researching our ancestors online. I’ve got some pictures and records, too, that your grandparents left to me.’
‘Was Edward married? Did he marry Beryl Partridge? Did they have any children?’
Auntie Cheryl was shaking her head. ‘It’s very sad, but he was only nineteen when he died. He didn’t have a chance to get married. There was a girl he was fond of, though. It’s in the family records.’
I couldn’t control my expression; the thought of Edward’s death was devastating. So I’d saved his life just for him to die a horrible death in the trenches of the first world war?
‘Are you all right?’ she asked. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t think – you were only just there. He’s still very real to you.’
I nodded, holding back tears with difficulty. ‘Can I see the records?’
‘We’ll dig them out later, but I think we should have a talk about what happened. Did you mean to run away for good?’
I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry. I was just feeling so miserable.’
She sighed. ‘I know you haven’t been happy here. We haven’t really talked, have we? I suppose a lot of it’s my fault.’
‘You didn’t want me, did you?’ I said, unable to keep the bitterness out of my voice, even though I was trying to be conciliatory.
She looked at me in silence for a moment. ‘The truth is I knew nothing about you. Graham and me, there was too big an age difference between us, and he emigrated to Australia when I was only ten. We didn’t keep in touch, especially after Mum and Dad were gone. His girlfriend let me know when he died, but she didn’t mention you at all. It was a big shock when Australian social services contacted me.’
‘Did you just take me out of duty? Or because they told you you’d be a bad person if you didn’t?’
She chewed her lip. ‘No, it wasn’t quite like that. I was pretty excited to hear about you, actually, but scared too. I wasn’t sure if I could handle it, but I couldn’t bear to think of you on your own.’ She leaned towards me. ‘You do know they’d never have let you stay on at the homestead alone, don’t you?’
I hung my head slightly, and then nodded. ‘I know. I don’t know why I s
aid that. I just miss home so much.’
She reached out and squeezed my arm. ‘I want to make it better for you, but I’ve had a hard time working out how. Can I give you a hug? I’ve wanted to, but I’m not your mum, so…’
It was all the encouragement I needed at that moment. I just fell into her arms and burst into tears. I cried for a long time, for the mum I’d lost, for the dad I’d never known, but most of all for Edward, who thought he was going to be a farmer but who died a soldier aged just nineteen.
‘So Ruby got married just two years after I was there,’ I said. I held the creased marriage certificate in my hands. ‘It’s a shame you don’t have a photo.’ Not that I was especially keen to see a picture of Ruby in her wedding dress, but it would have been good to see Edie and Ben, and Tom and Vera.
‘There weren’t so many cameras about in those days, as I expect you noticed,’ Auntie Cheryl said with a smile.
‘I wish we had got on, Ruby and me. It would have been amazing to have been friends with my great, great, grandmother, and she wouldn’t have...’ I paused. I still hadn’t mentioned how I felt about Edward, and what Ruby had done with my drawing. ‘Did she get to be a teacher in the end?’ I asked. ‘It just says ‘spinster’ on here.’
‘No, she didn’t. She was a housewife and mother after leaving service. Sam Jenks would have had an above average income as a chauffeur though, so she wasn’t as badly off as all that.’
Auntie Cheryl rummaged in the box of records and took out a scrap of folded paper that was stained and yellow with age. ‘Edward had this on him when he died,’ she said. ‘They gave it to Edie in his final effects.’
I took the paper, my heart thumping. It showed signs of having been crumpled and then smoothed out and folded into a small square. It was almost worn through on the folds, and the stains obscured some of the faint pencil drawing, but I could just make it out. It was my sketch of the horse and the couple kissing, and there at the bottom were the words: I have known you all my life.
The car drew up at the end of a cul-de-sac in a new housing estate. ‘I don’t get it,’ I said, staring about me in confusion.
‘Come on, I’ll show you,’ my auntie said.
We got out of the car and she led me back down the road. ‘See that back garden?’ she said, pointing. ‘That’s where the farmhouse used to be.’
I peered through the jungle of shrubs and plants, failing to spot anything familiar, and then I pivoted around, trying to imagine this neat piece of suburbia as Edie and Ben’s farmland, but it was impossible.
‘No wonder the police didn’t believe me,’ I said with a small smile.
She laughed. ‘Exactly. Now let’s look for your bus stop.’
We drove back down the hill and through a few more streets filled with bungalows and tidy front lawns, until we eventually arrived at a place that looked slightly familiar. ‘I recognise that corner,’ I said, and Auntie Cheryl parked as close as she could. It looked very different, with houses clustered around a busy main road, but the bus stop itself was in the same spot, and the dry stone wall beside it had barely altered.
I leant back in my seat with a sigh, watching the cars and pedestrians passing. It was hard to believe this was once an almost empty lane. ‘So how did I get into the past?’ I said. ‘It was modern buses I was on, I know that for sure. And you said the police found me on the CCTV.’
‘Seems like it was just you who went into the past, not the bus. You just happened to be on it.’
I sighed. ‘We’re never going to make sense of it, are we?’
‘Do you need to?’ she asked, patting me on the arm. She hadn’t asked questions, but I think she’d guessed about Edward after all. For one thing, she’d let me keep the drawing.
‘It feels like I saved Edward’s life for nothing. For him to die just a year and a half later. It was all so… meaningless.’
‘Was it, though?’ she said softly. ‘It meant something to you, I think. And maybe to him, too.’
I looked across at her, and she met my gaze in silence. Perhaps she was right. Even though Edward’s death was such a waste, my time with him had been special.
When we got back to the house, she said, ‘Do you feel up to looking at the rest of the records?’
I nodded, but my stomach knotted slightly as we took out the box again. I’d been too upset to look at anything else yesterday, and now I wondered if there were any more shocks to come.
‘Is there anything about Ruby?’ I asked. ‘We had unfinished business. She… well, I wish I could understand her.’
‘There are a few pictures of her in her later years,’ Auntie Cheryl said, shuffling through the papers. ‘Here we are, this is one of her with her daughter and baby Harold in about 1950. Oh and here’s one of her and Sam in their garden in the sixties. She died a few years after that, in 1970.’
I took the photos, and stared at the older woman Ruby had become. She looked surprisingly serene considering she never achieved her ambition to become a teacher. I wished I could have told her how much I sympathised with her situation, but she never gave me a chance.
Still, I was glad she looked happy. I peered more closely at her daughter and grandson, my great grandmother and the grandfather I never knew.
‘Oh, and here’s something I’d forgotten about that might interest you,’ Cheryl said, taking a letter out of the box. ‘It’s to do with Edward,’ she added, giving me a look of concerned sympathy.
I took the letter from her with a touch of apprehension. ‘There aren’t any from Edward?’
She shook her head. ‘No, that’s all there is.’
I opened the letter. The paper was thin, almost transparent, but it had still survived for almost a hundred years. It had a British Forces address in France written in the top right corner and it was dated September 1914.
Dear Ruby, it began, I can’t even begin to tell you how sorry I am about Edward. I know you and your family are going to miss him so much. At least you know he died fighting for his country, and maybe that is a small comfort.
You asked me to tell you everything I know about his death.
He was brought into my hospital with a severe stomach wound. He was still conscious and asking for me as he remembered I’d been assigned here. I found him in a very bad way, but he was still able to talk, and he wanted me to pass on to you how much he loved you all. He asked me to look for a picture he always carried, so I managed to find it in his wallet and handed it to him. Oh Ruby, it was that drawing you told me about. You remember? The one you nearly threw away. He looked at it for a long time, and then he sighed and closed his eyes and seemed at peace. And he was gone.
You did the right thing in giving it to him after all. I know you were angry at the time, but he must have loved her, and I don’t think he and I were as suited as you always thought. Besides, the war has changed everything for us all, hasn’t it? I’m not the same farmer’s daughter that I was last year. Nursing out here has taught me too many horrible truths for that.
Always remember that Edward died at peace, and that’s down to you.
I’ll come and visit you and your mam and da when I’m home on leave in a couple of months’ time.
My very best wishes, dear Ruby,
Beryl.