The Present

by Charlotte Phillips

  At least today the bonkers Christmas weather had decided to hold off on the serious snow. Instead, sleet seemed to be on the agenda. It pattered against the windscreen and slewed through the headlight beams in the dull light of the late morning, and she couldn’t help being glad that she wasn’t trusting the Mini in it. She glanced sideways at Jack. She really couldn’t even contemplate spending Christmas anywhere but at home.

  ‘You’re still going away,’ she said. ‘I mean not today, but you are still ducking out on Christmas, aren’t you?’

  ‘Too right I am.’

  ‘It just seems completely out there to me,’ she said. ‘Going away alone for Christmas, I mean. I couldn’t think of anywhere I’d rather be at Christmas than at home. Why don’t you think about staying?’ She watched him carefully. ‘You have to take that step sometime, right?’

  ‘Do I?’

  She noticed he kept his eyes fixed on the road ahead.

  ‘Don’t you want to?’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘When you’ve done it once, it will get easier, won’t it? The firsts are always the most difficult after you lose someone, that’s what everyone says. First birthday, first Christmas. They are like milestones that you have to go through to get back to some kind of normal.’

  ‘That’s exactly the thing, though. I haven’t a bloody clue what a normal Christmas day looks like now. Normal Christmas day included everyone rocking up to my mother’s, stupid family in-jokes, a trip to the pub, TV afterwards. Going to my parents’ place now, it’s like no one knows how to act. I can’t take that. I’ve got my own thing going on.’

  She felt a pang of sympathy so strong it made her chest feel tight.

  ‘The past is really important, but living in it is a really bad move. How are you ever meant to move forwards? You’ll be forever stuck in this loop where you’re taking time out from reality. What about family and settling down? What about if you meet someone who you want to settle down with instead of never dating the same girl more than a couple of times?’

  ‘Yeah, well, I’m not sure I’m cut out for some long-term heavy relationship, so it really doesn’t matter. What is the point, when you’ve always got this time limit hanging over your head?’

  ‘So what, you’re going to live some kind of half-life, and never look ahead just in case something else goes wrong? That’s really going to be your long-term approach, is it?’

  He did actually glance sideways at her this time.

  ‘This from the woman who has her life mapped out year on year to the age of seventy.’

  ‘I do not have it mapped out,’ she protested. ‘I just like to be organised. I like to be able to count on things not disappearing into thin air. That’s not the same thing at all.’

  ‘You’ve got all your major events scheduled in. You know way in advance when stuff’s meant to happen. That’s beyond organised. That’s freaky.’

  She was silent for a moment, thinking it over.

  ‘To be fair, when you put it like that it does sound a bit extreme. But I’ve never thought of it like that at all.’

  ‘What is it that makes someone want to know what’s coming? Don’t you think it leaves you open to crashing and burning when things go off course?’

  ‘In my experience things go off course because they’re not properly organised, or because someone hasn’t taken their responsibilities seriously.’ She paused. ‘No offence,’ she added, just in case he was. She had always found it comforting, knowing that the rug was not about to be jerked out from under her at any point, because her future was tied up with someone else’s, and it was the two of them against the world.

  ‘Gran has been my linchpin. I’ve always been able to rely on her, always been able to go back to that. My mother, for all her living it up and happy-go-lucky exterior, is never actually happy. She’d tell you, if you asked her, that she’s a free spirit, but she’s really trapped in this endless circle of dissatisfaction. She always thinks there’s more out there than what she has, always thinks the grass is greener. She just rejects family life and responsibility by calling it boring. She drifts back every now and again when whatever job or relationship it is this time has gone pear-shaped, and then she stays for a little while. When I was little I used to get excited every single time; I used to think this was it, she would stay put. And then it was like the novelty, of being a mother or part of a family, wore off. She’s been in pursuit of happiness for years and she’s never found it. Because if she had, she’d stay put in that situation for longer than five minutes.’

  ‘Maybe for her the happiness is in the pursuit.’

  Well, she would have expected him to say something like that, since he was obviously all about the chase in his relationships.

  ‘So,’ she said, looking down at the printed sheet of paper in front of her. ‘I tracked down the list of personnel, and there was a Flight Lieutenant J Whitbourn-Marsh at Hunsdon Airbase in 1944. It had to be him. Gran’s J. So I thought, what if his family home was in Ware and he never properly moved away?’ She sighed. ‘But then I checked the telephone directory, and there’s no listing for a Whitbourn-Marsh in Byron Avenue, Ware.’

  ‘You really think it could be him, then? The guy in the paper?’

  ‘Well, the photo was taken six months back, and he’d have to be somewhere around ninety, right? I mean, I’d love it if I could find him, of course I would, but even if I can just find out what happened to him it would be something. And maybe if his family lives in Byron Avenue, Ware, maybe his kids or something, or even if he was there but moved away, I’m sure I could find someone who would remember him.’ She rubbed her eyes slowly. ‘It all sounds insane, really. You think I’m clutching at straws? I don’t even have a house number.’

  ‘What the hell, we’ll just ring all the doorbells until we get the right one,’ he said.

  Half an hour later and he pulled the car up at a corner, right next to the street sign: Byron Avenue. Silence while they both stared.

  ‘Yeah, I was kind of hoping it would turn out to be a cul-de-sac,’ Lucy said eventually. ‘A small cul-de-sac. Maybe with three houses.’

  The road stretched ahead, and Jack pulled back out and cruised slowly down it. Forty houses. Fifty. Hope plummeted as the number rose. Eventually he parked at the end of the road.

  ‘This is going to take for ever,’ she said.

  ‘He’s over ninety years old, and he probably gives his neighbours tons of veg. We knock on enough doors, and someone’s bound to know him, right? You take that side of the road, and I’ll take this.’

  The first two doors she tried without even getting an answer. The first person who answered looked at her as if she might be mad. Perhaps she was. Hope was fading by the minute. What on earth had she been thinking, coming all this way without even a house number? She couldn’t stop her eyes wandering back to Jack again and again on the opposite side of the road. Knocking on strangers’ doors now for her, in the freezing cold, refusing to give up. Nothing was a negative with him. He had never once knocked her back. He pushed her forward. She had come so much further with him in this than she would have done alone. As she watched, she heard him thank someone, and then he was heading across the road towards her.

  ‘Number twenty-nine,’ he said, smiling at her.

  She stared at him, not daring to believe it.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Lives with his granddaughter, apparently. Big voice in the Neighbourhood Watch. So I’d say he’s definitely still with us.’

  He headed down the street, realised she was still standing there, and walked back to her.

  ‘I can’t believe we’ve found him,’ she said, looking up at him, suddenly nervous.

  He grabbed her hand and tugged her forward.

  ‘Come on,’ he said.

  Number twenty-nine was a little over halfway down the tree-lined street. A semi-detached place in a warm red brick. Set back a little from the road, it had a paved driveway and wide bay windows top
and bottom on the right-hand side. There was an enclosed porch, and the brass knocker beneath a Christmas wreath on the door was freezing cold to the touch of her fingers.

  There was a slant of late morning winter sunshine across the path, and her breath misted in the cold air. When the door was opened, not by a ninety-something dapper man, fit for his age and with a shock of white hair, but by a young woman with dark curly hair, the stab of disappointment in her gut told her she was really holding out for the fairy tale here. For heaven’s sake, she was a journalist: she really needed to keep a level of objectivity going. She smiled a professional smile at the woman.

  ‘Hello, my name is Lucy Jackson. I’m sorry to just turn up unannounced.’

  The woman raised an eyebrow that said the impression she was getting was doorstep salesperson, so Lucy swept on as fast as she could.

  ‘I normally would have written to you or called instead of just rocking up on your doorstep a few days before Christmas, but I’m trying to find a J Whitbourn-Marsh, and I only had the name of the street. He’d be in his nineties now, I guess. My grandmother knew him during the war and she’s been ill recently, so I’ve tried to track him down for her. I know the chances are slim but …’ She trailed away, feeling awkward. What would she think if someone turned up on her doorstep out of the blue with a story like this? She pulled out the photograph of Gran on the farm in her Land Girl uniform, and handed it over to demonstrate that she wasn’t a time-waster.

  The woman took it, looked down at it, and smiled.

  ‘You need to talk to Gramp,’ she said. ‘He won’t mind one bit, he can talk for England. You’re lucky to catch him though, it’s the golf club Christmas lunch today, so he’ll be out of here in the next half hour or so. Come on in.’

  Lucy walked into the house in a daze, vaguely aware of Jack next to her. He was alive and well enough to be heading out to a Christmas lunch? Could this even be real? Her heart was thundering in her chest. Could she really just have found him? Just have knocked on the right door, and there he was?

  He was sitting in a chair by the window.

  Was this him? Was she looking at him? Her heart was beating at freight train speed. He was tall and broad-shouldered. His hair was white, and he had the crinkly blue eyes she remembered from the photograph. He wore a shirt and tie under a cardigan and trousers. Her own grandfather had been the same – always smart whether he was going anywhere or not. She smiled at him.

  ‘My name’s Lucy. This is my friend Jack. I know it’s all a bit out of the blue, just before Christmas and everything, but I’ve been looking for someone my grandmother knew years ago. Olive Jackson.’ No recognition. She tried again, ‘Olive Bratton as she was then. I think you knew each other during the war.’

  If she’d been hoping for a rush of delighted recollection, she’d really pitched it wrong. Davina McCall made it all look so damned easy. He smiled politely in a haven’t-a-clue-who-you-mean kind of way, and so she brought in the big guns. He’d either know these or he wouldn’t.

  ‘I’ve been going through her things because she’s not been well, and I’ve been sorting through her house, and I found these.’ She pulled the box of tree decorations out and put it carefully on the table between them. He looked at it.

  ‘Of course I remember her,’ he said.

  Her hand found its way to her mouth. They’d found him. All the hassle, all the looking, all the stress and arguments with Rod, it had all been worth it, because they’d found him.

  ‘You sent her these?’ she said. ‘It was you?’

  He was looking at the box of decorations in delighted wonder.

  ‘I delivered them,’ he said. ‘I didn’t send them.’ When he looked up from the box, his smile was wistful. ‘They were a family heirloom. We hung them on the Christmas tree when I was a small child. I honestly never thought I’d see them again.’

  ‘You delivered them,’ she repeated.

  ‘For my older brother, James,’ he said. He pulled himself to his feet using the arms of the chair, and chose a framed photograph from the many that crowded the mantelpiece. Eased himself back down into his chair with a sigh. ‘I was only twelve when the war started. He was twenty, and he joined up the first moment he could. His friends went too. I wanted to go very much, but I was too young to enlist.’ He handed her the simple wooden frame, and she looked down. Looked at James. The face of the man who had loved Gran all those years ago, who had felt those things for her. The black-and-white picture had a slight yellow tone. He was in RAF uniform, with dark hair that curled a little from beneath the hat. Dark eyes. He had an almost-cheeky smile that lit his eyes, as if he was someone who laughed easily.

  Her heart was sinking.

  ‘You’re not him.’ she said.

  ‘I’m not. My name is Joseph. May I?’

  She pulled her gaze away from the picture and looked up at him. His hand was poised above the box of decorations.

  ‘Of course, please.’ She opened the lid and turned the box around for him to get a better view.

  He smiled.

  ‘Thank you.’ He took one out. The tiny top hat. He turned it in his fingers with a delighted laugh and held it up. ‘This one was always my favourite when I was very little. I would take it off the tree at my grandparents’ house and look at it. When my grandmother died, it was passed on to James to keep until he married.’

  He put it carefully back in the box and settled back in his seat.

  ‘He came home, it must have been around November. It was 1944. We didn’t see much of him even though we actually lived in Hertfordshire and he was based not far away at Hunsdon. It wasn’t like having a normal job, of course – he couldn’t just nip home for dinner every night. But he had a bit of leave, and he came back to see us. And while he was home he took me aside and he gave me a task to do. Very important, he said it was.’

  Lucy could not recall ever being more enthralled by a story, and it wasn’t as if she didn’t listen to human interest anecdotes for a living. She wanted to hurry him up, but at the same time she didn’t dare interrupt him.

  ‘He told me all about your grandmother. Olive, isn’t it? Said he’d met someone special, she was working on the land, and he’d met her at one of the dances.’ He frowned. ‘She was courting someone else before the war as I recall, and James wasn’t happy for that. He’d asked her to wait for him.’

  ‘What was it he asked you to do?’

  ‘I was to deliver one of these trinkets every day in the run-up to Christmas that year.’ He nodded at the box. ‘It was quite a task; I had to get the bus to the farm hostel, and it was a long walk after that as I remember it, up a steep lane in the winter weather. I didn’t mind at all, though, I would have done anything for him. James gave me the bus fare.’

  ‘I thought you were him,’ Lucy said. ‘When your granddaughter showed us in here today and I saw you, that was what I thought, that we’d found him.’

  He smiled at her kindly.

  ‘He was killed in action, in February 1945.’

  The room was silent. There was a clock in the middle of the mantel, and she could hear it.

  She took a breath. Her heart twisted in her chest. After everything, after all the looking and all the dreaming, this was where it ended then. There had been no Christmas happy-ever-after for Gran, because James had never come back.

  ‘I knew it,’ she whispered.

  She felt oddly close to tears, and swallowed hard to make the burning sensation at the back of her throat go away. Perhaps Jack sensed it, because he put an arm around her shoulders and squeezed her gently. She leaned into him a little. He was there for her. It dawned on her how much that meant to her, how happy it made her feel, and how wrong it was to be feeling that. Her relationship with Rod had been so grounding, and now it felt as if sand was shifting beneath her feet when it came to him. She made herself sit back up a little, out of his personal space.

  ‘I think I always knew,’ she said. ‘The notes he sent to her, they are jus
t so heartfelt, and she kept the gifts all these years. She never talked about him, and just got on with her life as if he never existed at all. She didn’t seem to have ever heard anything else from him. I looked everywhere, but there were no letters, no photographs that I could find. He had to have died. It was like a dead end. I knew it. I just wanted to believe something else.’

  Deep sadness for Gran churned sickly in her stomach. To have had something so deep and special, and to have lost it after such a short time.

  Joseph leaned forward and gently squeezed her hand.

  ‘I’m sorry. Giving you that news is not easy. It is never easy, even after all these years. Still there is a gap, still he is missed.’ He smiled at her. ‘I wrote to Olive at the hostel after we found out that James had died. I came around to wondering whether anyone would even tell her otherwise. How would she know? They weren’t married or related. Would she have found out what happened? She never wrote back to me.’

  She never wrote back, she just carried on. What choice had she had? Her mind flashed to her grandfather; it had been many years after the war that they had eventually married. Her mother was a late baby, especially for the trends of the time. Was this the reason? Was it that Gran had needed the time to come to terms with losing James before she made a start on a new life?

  ‘Could I ask you something?’ she asked Joseph, just before they left.

  ‘Of course.’

  She picked up the photograph of James in its wooden frame.

  ‘Could I possibly photograph this? I honestly don’t think my gran has one. I certainly haven’t found one, and I’ve been through all her belongings in the last week or two. I think it might mean a lot to her to have a picture of him to keep.’

  She held her phone on her lap on the journey back to Canterbury, open at the photograph. Kept it open on the table next to her while they stopped for coffee and food that she could only pick at. James smiled up at her, handsome in his uniform, his smile slightly lopsided, his eyes alight.