“I couldn’t sleep,” Mary said as she came into the room.
“Oh?”
“I was worried about you.”
“Worried about me?” Mena laughed to herself. “Whatever for?”
Mary approached the window and sat opposite Mena on the edge of the bed. “You’ve hardly said a word all evening. Now I find you sitting up in your chair. You can’t sleep either?”
“I’m not tired.”
“Is it because Edward and I are getting married?”
Mena looked out the window and the moon seemed to reflect her melancholy.
“It is, isn’t it?” Mary said. She squatted beside the chair, between Mena and the moon. “It won’t change anything, Mena.”
Without looking at Mary, Mena got up and jumped onto her bed. “It will. It will,” she said. “It will change everything and I’ll be left here alone with Mother!” She was under the covers before Mary had the chance to stand up again and from beneath them she heard her sister laugh in that gentle way that always told her what a silly little girl she was being.
“You can come and stay with us whenever you like,” Mary said. “You know that.”
Mena felt the bedcovers slide back over her face. She did nothing to stop them.
“It won’t be half as bad as you think,” Mary added.
Mena was back in the moonlit room, staring into her sister’s eyes. She felt a soft hand brush a tear from her cheek.
“How long have you known?” Mena said.
“About a month. Edward had been in Italy until the end of summer. They lost Major-General Hopkinson in the fight and I think Edward and his unit must have had it pretty rough. In November most of the division were sent home. He wrote and said he needed to see me, but he couldn’t get away so I pulled a few strings and went to him. He came here today so he could ask Pop.”
“Why didn’t you tell me, or write to Mother?”
“Some things are private,” Mary said. “Even between us. And I wanted it to be a surprise.” She laughed. “I’m sure Mother’s been waiting for Edward to propose to me longer than I have. I wanted to see her face. Can you understand that? Can you forgive me?”
Mena sat up and threw her arms around Mary. “It’s me who needs forgiveness. I’ve been selfish and I’m sorry. I didn’t even offer my congratulations. I wish you both every happiness, of course I do.”
“Friends again then?”
Mena nodded.
“Anyway,” Mary said. “The way things are it’s not likely to happen any time soon. You’ll feel different by the time the war’s over, I’m sure.”
Mena smiled at last. “Maybe I’ll have my own husband by then,” she said. “Someone to carry me away.”
“Maybe you will. But you’re too young to worry about all that, aren’t you?”
Mena didn’t think so.
Chapter Five
Jefferson Tayte was in England on a train heading north out of London’s St Pancras station. He hadn’t expected to be back again so soon, but he was glad to be there without really knowing why. Perhaps it was that he felt some connection through what little he knew about his mother, or maybe it was just because it meant that he’d survived the flight. He’d called his client to let her know he’d arrived safely and now he had his phone pressed to his ear again, trying hard to follow his own conversation over the noise around him. It was Saturday afternoon and he was sharing the carriage with a host of jubilant football fans returning from what was evidently a win for the away team.
“Toulouse?” he said. He wasn’t sure he’d heard right. “What’s Marcus doing in France?”
He listened to the answer with one finger pressed to his other ear to block out the chant that had just started up further along the carriage. He thought that must be why he couldn’t reach his friend on his cellphone - Marcus didn’t want to pay extra for international calls.
“What was that, Emmy?” he said. “Research?”
He listened as Marcus’s wife told him that her husband had been so wrapped up in his latest project that she’d hardly seen him lately. Tayte understood that lifestyle only too well.
“Okay, he said. “Well, I’ll try and call again. I just wanted to thank him for helping me out the other week. I know he must have called in a few favours at the GRO to speed things up with the documents. I thought it would be great to see you both before I head home.” He paused, listening. “Yeah, I know. It has been far too long.”
He said goodbye and put his phone back in his jacket, wondering whose family history his good friend Marcus Brown was working on in France. He was curious, but as Marcus was incommunicado there wasn’t much he could do about it.
“American?”
The man sitting too snuggly in the aisle seat next to Tayte pulled him from his thoughts and Tayte smiled and nodded back. The man’s wife and daughter were sitting opposite them: wife reading a book, daughter buried in a handheld video game with the earphones thankfully plugged in. Judging from the Harrod’s bag on the table and the other assorted bags at their feet they were returning from a shopping trip.
The man put his newspaper down. “Don’t mind this rabble,” he said, indicating the white and red football shirts that lined the carriage. “We’ve had a win, that’s all. Sheffield United that is. So are you on holiday? Vacation?”
Tayte was still a little wired from the flight and he wasn’t really in the mood to open his life up to a stranger on a train, but he didn’t want to be rude. “I’m kind of here on family business,” he said, being deliberately vague about his profession as a family historian then realising that the man must have thought he meant he was going to a funeral.
“Oh,” the man said. “I see. Well, I’m sorry to hear that.”
The man went back to his newspaper then and Tayte turned away and looked out the window. Beyond the dim reflection of his dark, unshaved face the view was bleak. It had been raining when they set out from London and now that they had cleared the city, wet snow was falling and sticking to the glass. He watched the snowflakes spatter and race across the window and he thought about the girl again. He’d been thinking about her since he’d left DC, often rolling her name around in his head: Philomena Lasseter. He liked the way it sounded. He’d gone over his limited research several times on the plane until the details on her birth certificate were fixed in his memory. It had helped take his mind off the flight, even if he’d been unable to learn anything more from it. Now he was in England though, he hoped that was soon going to change.
He turned his thoughts back to the phone call he’d just made, thinking about Marcus and the old days. Although they kept in touch, Tayte hadn’t seen him in years and he regretted not seeing him on his last visit. The assignment in Cornwall had kept him so busy though that he hadn’t had time to give Marcus much thought, let alone do anything about it. He planned to rectify that this time around and he hoped Marcus would be back from France before he had to return home.
They had first met soon after Tayte left high school and became interested in genealogy - not long after he’d found out that he’d been adopted, which had brought about a sudden, unrelenting need to learn the tools of the trade he’d been in ever since. Marcus Brown was the teacher and Tayte was the hungry pupil, and no one had helped him more; although he often thought that if someone like Marcus couldn’t find out who he was, what chance did he have? No one was better qualified than the estimable Marcus Brown and yet neither of them, their skills combined, had even come close. It served to remind Tayte how hopeless it was to keep trying, but every time he voiced such thoughts his friend would remind him of one simple truth. He could hear Marcus telling him it for the first time - could picture him pulling at his goatee as he often did when he had anything thought provoking to say.
“They say there’s only one certainty in life, Jefferson. Know what it is?”
Tayte had been twenty-three years old and he knew well enough. “Death,” he’d said.
“That’s right, but
it’s not the only certainty, is it?”
“It’s not?”
“No,” Marcus said. “The other certainty is that wherever you want to go, whatever you want to be or do, or find in your case, you will certainly never get there if you give up. Now pick your chin up off the floor and stop feeling sorry for yourself. You’ve got work to do.”
Sometimes Tayte wished Marcus hadn’t told him that. Sometimes he’d wanted to give up, or thought he had. But in the end he knew Marcus was right and he wanted to pick up the pieces again. It just seemed that they had exhausted every angle over the years and right now he had no new angle to explore.
He pictured the photograph of his mother that he’d been given at the reading of his adoptive parents’ will. He recalled the address in South America that was written on the back: the Catholic mission in San Rafael, Sinaloa where she’d left him, and how it had led him to Mexico and Sister Manriquez. He’d been fortunate that she was still there after the seventeen years that had passed since she’d taken him in from a mother who had refused to impart any information about herself.
“For the child’s own protection,” his mother had said with an English accent - or so the Sister had told him.
She recalled little else from that fleeting visit, her focus drawn as it was to the crying bundle in her arms as she took it and watched his mother leave. She’d been alone - just her and an open top jeep that Sister Manriquez had told him she’d sped off in just as quickly as she’d arrived, leaving her with the baby - with him - in her arms. He supposed his mother was running from something or someone, but from what or whom he had no idea. He’d spent weeks in that area, looking around and asking questions, knowing how futile it was.
Tayte shook his head and scoffed. He checked his watch and the glowing red LED digits told him he’d be in Leicester in around forty-five minutes; too much time to spend in a past he’d rather not revisit just now. He reached between his knees into his briefcase and his hand fell onto a bag of Hershey’s chocolate miniatures. He’d bought two bags at the airport on the way out for courage and one of them was already long gone despite the promise he’d made to himself to cut back. He wasn’t going to open this bag, though. He planned to save it for the return flight and only if he really needed it, unless some other emergency came along.
He found the book he was looking for - the copy of Madame Bovary he’d brought with him - thinking he had time for some light reading before the train arrived in Leicester. He’d started it on the plane and he wanted to read it because he knew the girl had. He was using the nametape as a bookmark, too. He slipped it out from the pages and read the name again, smoothing his thumb over the stitching as he did so, wondering again as he slouched in his seat who Danielson was and what part, if any, he had played in Philomena’s story and the arrival of her suitcase at Eliza Gray’s home all these years later.
Chapter Six
May 1944.
Mena Lasseter had a red bicycle with a silver bell and a basket over the front wheel. It had been Mary’s once, back when it was yellow and Mena was too small to reach the pedals; when she would sit with her feet on the bar and her hands locked around her sister for support. She was on her way back through the village at last, just passing St Peter’s church by the low brick wall that retained all the old headstones. She wore a cream cardigan over a sage-green, button-through dress that kept riding up on the breeze, but she didn’t care. It was a glorious Friday afternoon and although the air was cool, the late spring sun felt warm on her face and the gardens and fields in and around Oadby were bursting with colour.
She glanced up at the clock that was set high into the church’s prominent spire and instantly sped up. Joan Cartwright is such a gossip, she thought, grinning in spite of the fact that she knew she was going to be late for tea and more importantly that her mother would not be happy. She turned the corner too fast and had to tring her bell at an elderly woman in a raincoat who had just stepped out to cross the road.
“Sorry, Mrs Andrews!” Mena called, not waiting for a response, pedalling faster now that the road had straightened again and she could see the allotments that marked the edge of the village.
Mena had been with her best friend Joan Cartwright all afternoon and Joan’s particular brand of gossip had a way of making Mena forget all purpose, especially as the subject matter today concerned the American soldiers who were currently pouring into Leicester. Some of their town friends, of Joan’s acquaintance more than Mena’s, had even been on dates already. One of them, Alice, whom Mena did know, had been locked in her bedroom to keep her from fraternising with the GIs, who were generally thought to be dangerous. Mena was surprised that her own mother hadn’t done the same thing, but she supposed there was little point given that, unless she was fire-watching, she wasn’t allowed out after tea anyway, which was all the more reason for her present haste.
Her brakes made a rubbery squeal that shook the bicycle as she pulled up and turned off the road onto a shortcut she knew. A track led through the allotments to a bridle path, which cut along the edge of the fields that the Lasseter house backed onto. She would be very late by the time she arrived home and she knew it, but there was something about the day that made her worry less and smile more. Perhaps it was the myriad wild flowers and the blossom that hung like candyfloss in the trees, or the recently mown gardens whose borders were crowded with brightly coloured tulips and hyacinths. She sucked in the giddy scent of it all, enriched as it was by evening’s onset, and felt as carefree as spring itself. She thought to pick some bluebells by way of a peace offering for her mother, but that would have made her later still so she pushed on.
She was out of breath by the time she reached the gate at the bottom of the garden. She nudged through and pedalled hard down the brick pathway that wound through the lawns, past the Anderson shelter to her right and the old well to her left that was now no more than a garden ornament. When she arrived in the yard beside the house, she jumped off her bicycle before it had stopped and left the pedals spinning by the coal-shed as she burst in through the back door.
“Sorry, I’m late!” she called, still panting. There was the smell of old chip-fat on the air, which made her stomach groan, and there were dirty pans in the sink. She removed her shoes and hurried into the dining room where the Lasseters always had their tea. She opened the door and began her excuses. “I was just -”
Her words trailed off when she saw that the room was empty. Then laughter drew her away and she crossed the hall to the sitting room, aware now that she was so late she’d missed the meal altogether. Her mother looked unhappy to see her, but Pop’s smile made up for it. Edward Buckley was there so that would save her, she thought. The 1st Airborne had been billeted all over Leicestershire, awaiting orders. Edward had a few days furlough and was staying with the family in the hope that Mary would soon be home. There was someone else with him: a young man, also in military garb. He rose with Edward as she entered and then both men sat down again as she closed the door.
Mena cast a smile into the room, avoiding eye contact with her mother. Pop spoke first.
“Couldn’t you find Mr Gibbons?”
Mena faltered in her reply. She’d been sent out early that afternoon with a prescription for old Fred Gibbons in Wigston. She often ran such errands for her father - doing her bit.
“I was -” she began.
Then she saw the dubious squint in her mother’s eyes and turned to Pop again who winked at her and she caught on.
“He wasn’t home,” she said, and in her mind she crossed her chest for the lie. “I had to ride all over the place. It was such a nice day and I suppose he must have -”
“Enough, enough,” Margaret said. “Did you find him or not?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Then sit down. You can have supper later. We have a guest.” Margaret’s smile returned. “This is Mr Danielson,” she added. “He’s from America.”
“Folks just call me Danny on account of my surname,�
�� their guest said with an accent that seemed to flatten the vowels and draw them out as he spoke, or so Mena thought.
He was perched on the edge of the settee, like he was uncomfortable with the idea of getting too relaxed. His rank insignia was that of Staff Sergeant and he wore his Class A uniform: gleaming russet-brown shoes and a sharp edged, olive-drab, four button tunic and trousers with a khaki tie in the neck. The jacket carried a number of badges and brass buttons, the most notable of which was an ‘Airborne’ insignia on the left arm with the letters AA sitting boldly beneath it.
Between his hands was a flat-folded forage cap that had a parachute emblem on the side. He was pressing it between his fingers, turning it over every now and then. He looked at least twenty, Mena thought, and she liked his close-trimmed hairstyle, which was so blonde it was almost white. He had a pronounced jaw-line that looked unbreakable, she thought, and his blue eyes were the kind that held your attention. At least, they held Mena’s.
Margaret’s smile broadened. “Danny’s a friend of Edward’s,” she said. “He thought it would be nice to bring him home for tea to meet an English family. Apparently everyone’s doing it.”
“Brought fresh eggs with him too,” Pop said, smiling through his pipe.
Margaret cleared her throat and to Mena she said, “Yes, well I’m afraid the twins have eaten yours, dear.”
Mena was starving. Real eggs and home cooked chips. She sighed through her nose and smiled awkwardly. Then she sat in the chair opposite her mother and turned to face Edward.
“Hello Eddie,” she said. “Anything from Mary yet?”
“She’ll be home first thing,” Edward replied, beaming. “I don’t know how I shall sleep tonight.”
Mena tilted her head towards their guest and began to stare. “Mena Lasseter,” she announced, suddenly finding that her mouth was dry. “I’m pleased to meet you.”
JT02 - To The Grave Page 4