by S Block
Alison had learned from experience not to rush Boris on their nightly sojourns. She enjoyed watching him root around the hedgerows, picking up scents that were beyond the detection – or interest – of any human.
This is his time as much as mine. He likes to sniff God knows what. I don’t. He barely registers I’m with him, and that’s how it should be. I’m only really here to make sure he gets home safely.
‘Remember when there were hardly any cars on the roads, boy, and I used to let you out of the front door to go off by yourself for hours?’
It was Alison’s habit to chat to her dog at home and as they walked round. It didn’t feel odd to her in the slightest. Nor did it bother her in the least that Boris – a dog – didn’t understand a word she said except ‘walk’ and ‘food’. He seemed as if he understood her, and over time that’s all she felt she needed by way of company. He was undeniably affectionate towards her when he wanted to be, without being cloying. Alison regarded Boris like an ideal relative who offered company without imposition, who didn’t inflict his opinions on her, ate what he was given, did what he was told around the house, and went to bed on order. Furthermore, Boris would quite likely give his life to defend her if ever the need arose, and Alison couldn’t say that about anyone else.
As they continued along the lane, the dark silhouettes of blacked-out houses gave way to dark silhouettes of trees, among which small pinpricks of light were visible. Alison chatted away as they walked. Away from the houses of Great Paxford, she felt no compulsion to moderate her volume. On a recent nocturnal outing around the village she had been barked at by an ARP warden to keep her voice down, which had amused her.
‘Do you seriously imagine my voice can draw fire from a German bomber flying thousands of feet overhead? Do your job, man, by all means. And thank you very much. But there’s really no need to be ridiculously officious about it.’
While keeping to the road, Alison’s curiosity drew her towards the nearest of the flickering sources of light within the trees. Keeping her distance, she peered through the black trunks for a closer look. In the gloom, she could make out figures of men and women sitting and lying around a small fire, talking quietly and eating, the yellow flames flicking fragments of light onto their faces. Anxious not to be seen, or for Boris to suddenly get spooked and give her away, Alison moved on, passing more encampments that were revealed either by small fires, or low, unintelligible murmurs emerging from the darkness. Alison found it difficult to imagine making this walk every night, leaving behind homes and possessions, not knowing whether they would still exist upon their return. She could not help but be immensely sympathetic towards these men, women and children forced to abandon everything and flee into the countryside every night to escape the Luftwaffe. As she crept away, she wondered what might be done to help these poor unfortunates.
The lane that Alison had taken looped back into Great Paxford, and she and Boris soon found themselves padding along the High Street, past Brindsley’s, from where they heard baby Vivian crying for attention. She no sooner started than stopped.
Miriam at the ready, no doubt. Day and night.
‘That child will want for nothing in this world,’ she whispered to Boris. ‘Mark my words . . .’
Alison interpreted his silence as tacit agreement with anything she said.
They walked past the dark silhouettes of blacked-out houses on either side of the road, not a light beam emerging from any of them, their inhabitants most likely asleep. After a hundred yards, they turned left down a small side street that eventually opened on to the village green. The nettle patches on the left-hand side were the favourite toilet area for most of the dogs in the village, and Boris was no different. Once he had relieved himself they would make their way home.
As Boris sniffed around for the best place to go, Alison looked around the moonlit green, trying to maintain a sense of decorum and not to intrude on her dog’s private business.
It had been a long day and Alison felt tired. Bookkeeping may not be the most complicated element of the accountancy process, but it required an almost superhuman diligence that put a strain on her eyes and brain. One missed or misplaced digit and Alison could lose a client, swiftly followed by her reputation. Her livelihood was entirely dependent on her powers of concentration, and they were harder to sustain the older she became. As Boris rustled around in the grass and nettles, Alison slowly looked towards the dark horizon, the point that most relaxed her eyes. It was then that she saw Frances. Or so she thought.
It can’t be Frances. Why would Frances be out in the middle of the night? Why would she be sitting on a bench by herself out here? Why would anyone?
Alison’s eyes were perfectly calibrated to the dark. The figure, sitting about a hundred yards away, had the shape of Frances, and sat as Frances customarily sat, with her back straight and her hands folded in her lap. She was also looking towards the horizon.
Alison was immediately caught in two minds: to yank Boris gently out of the nettles and return the way they had come, without drawing Frances’s attention, or to approach her once good friend? Her sense of self-preservation propelled her towards the first option, but her curiosity pushed her towards the second. It was a position in which Alison found herself on many occasions, and self-preservation frequently won out. But not this time.
There must be something terribly wrong for her to be out here alone like this.
Alison gently pulled Boris from the nettles and quietly approached the still figure of Frances sitting on a park bench with her back to Alison.
Perhaps she came out for a walk and has fallen asleep? Surely too cold.
When she was within ten feet of Frances, Alison stopped and peered at the woman with whom she had once been so close. The face of her former friend was partially visible from the side, and Alison saw a glint of moonlight on her cheek, which she couldn’t account for. Alison then realised it was moonlight refracted through a tear. All thought of retreat evaporated.
‘Frances?’
Frances turned and saw the dim outlines of Alison and Boris standing just behind her. Their appearance was so unexpected and incongruous that for a moment Frances simply stared at them through the gloom.
‘Is everything all right?’
In almost any other circumstance Frances would have swiftly wiped the tears from her face and bluffed her way through an awkwardly vulnerable moment. But sitting on a bench on the green facing Alison in the middle of the night, bluff was impossible. With Noah missing for a second day, and now a second night, Frances had no defences to raise against Alison’s enquiry. Nor against Alison herself, a woman she had been on her way to visit when Claire had come running with news of Noah’s disappearance.
‘I’m afraid not,’ Frances eventually managed.
Alison immediately recognised Frances was in trouble and – setting aside everything that had passed between them in recent weeks – sat on the bench beside her. Realising they weren’t walking straight home as they usually would, Boris stretched out in the cool grass by Alison’s feet, and closed his eyes.
The two women sat in silence for a few moments before Frances turned to look at Alison.
‘Noah’s gone missing.’
Alison had been feeling a little weary after all that walking, but was suddenly alert.
‘What do you mean?’
‘He ran away from the boarding school I sent him to. Two days ago. There’s been no sighting of him since.’
Having fallen out of favour with Frances, Alison was ignorant of any of what Frances now told her.
‘I had no idea you were sending him to a boarding school. I assumed—’
‘It was Peter’s wish.’
‘Peter?’
Frances realised how little Alison knew about the scandal surrounding her husband’s death. She knew Peter had died alongside his company accountant, Helen. But she knew nothing of their secret relationship spanning ten years, of which Noah had been the product.
‘Noah is Peter’s son by another woman, Alison. By Helen, in fact. The woman whose role you took over at the factory.’
Alison sat back on the bench, dumbfounded.
‘I agreed to take him in after his grandfather pleaded with me to give him sanctuary from the bombing in Liverpool. I can’t tell you how much I loathed the idea. Until I saw the child looking at me through the window of the taxi they had taken from Crewe station to Great Paxford. He looked as lost as I felt. I sensed an instant connection.’
‘Through Peter.’
‘Well . . . how Peter’s sudden, terrible absence left each of us feeling.’
‘No. I meant—’
‘Yes, Alison. I know what you meant. Because he’s Peter’s flesh and blood. I cannot deny that is part of my fascination with the child. I cannot help but see many of Peter’s features in him – both physical and psychological.’ Frances paused, and hung her head, covering her eyes with her right hand.
Alison took her left hand in hers and held it. She felt Frances’s fingers curl tightly around her own.
We live cheek by jowl with one another, yet how is it possible to know so little of each other’s lives? What an extraordinary thing she has done in taking on this child. Would I – could I – have done the same?
Frances’s hand felt freezing cold. Despite wearing her winter coat, she was shivering.
‘How long have you been out here?’ Alison asked.
‘I left Sarah and Claire at the house in case of news. I had to get out to clear my head and think through any possibility I may have missed. It occurred to me early on that Noah might try and find his way back to his grandparents in Liverpool, but the police told me they had found letters in Noah’s belongings at the school from his grandfather, informing him that they were moving up to Scotland, to live with his brother, out of harm’s way. The police also interviewed other boys at the school and discovered Noah wasn’t having as smooth an acclimatisation as the headmaster had led me to believe. Not by a long chalk.’
‘The police contacted the grandfather’s brother?’
Frances nodded.
‘There’s been no contact with the child. His grandparents are beside themselves. He is a much-loved little boy. But how—’
Frances stopped before she could complete the sentence. She swallowed back her deepest fear and continued.
‘How can an eight-year-old survive outside for two days and two nights, without food or shelter?’
‘Might he have returned to Liverpool?’
‘That would be worse. The raids are almost nightly now. I cannot tell you the horrific scenarios my mind has been conjuring since I was told he had run away.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘What if he attempts to traverse countryside where exposure and terrain are more dangerous? What if he’s slipped or fallen or injured himself in some way and is unable to attract help? What if he’s tried to cross a stream or river and misjudged the depth and speed of the water, or loses his footing, or—’
‘Frances, stop.’
Alison’s voice was calmly insistent. It had the desired effect, and Frances stopped mid-sentence.
Alison couldn’t answer any of these questions, and had no interest in offering glib reassurance. Frances would dismiss any attempt at mollification. A little boy had run away from school in a region of the country under heavy bombardment from the German air force. The situation couldn’t be worse, and both knew it. If Alison couldn’t answer her old friend’s deepest concerns she could at least help her to control them. She put her arm around Frances’s shoulders and held her tightly.
‘You don’t know what’s happened. And until he’s found, you won’t. In the meantime, your mind will race to the worst possible outcomes, especially after what happened with Peter. You’re preparing for the worst news, and that’s to be expected. But, and I must stress this, that doesn’t mean any of the scenarios you’ve described have occurred.’
‘Then why have there been no sightings? Why hasn’t he been handed in to the authorities? Surely, if he’s unhurt and well someone would have come across him?’
‘Again, I don’t know, and neither do you.’
Frances looked searchingly into Alison’s eyes. Alison had seen a similar expression on her face in the long, sad days following Peter’s death. Similar, but not identical. With Peter, Frances had been stupefied by events in which she had no involvement. That wasn’t the case now. With Noah, Alison could see that Frances was additionally being consumed by the guilt she felt at sending Noah away.
In that moment, what enmity had formed between Alison and Frances like a brick wall after the factory’s collapse suddenly seemed to crumble and fall away. Sitting side by side they were two old friends once more – one desperately needing help, the other willing to offer as much as she could under the circumstances.
Before Alison could see them she felt the first tentative drops of a larger downpour start to fall on and around them. Boris opened his eyes with irritation. Alison stood up from the bench and looked down at Frances.
‘Let’s get you home,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘Before you catch your death.’
Chapter 41
Before collecting Will from the hospital, Erica had prepared the house for the arrival of a man who found mobility difficult and was likely to spend his remaining days in bed. She had managed to find a wheelchair in the event Will wanted to be moved to another part of the house, or possibly into the small garden, but she wasn’t optimistic it would be used much, if at all. Both Kate and Laura declared they would push their father wherever he wanted to go, which, Erica explained patiently, rather missed the point.
‘It’s unlikely he’ll either want to go anywhere, or be in a fit state to.’
Both girls were bright, and Erica knew they understood that with cancer attacking his lungs and brain, their father was coming home to die. Nevertheless, she had begun to wonder if their determination to offer Will a range of distractions was more to distract themselves from the inevitable than to help Will. She had tried to emphasise the point in the front room on the morning she was due to collect him.
‘To all intents and purposes, this room is the extent of your father’s world now. Asleep or awake, this is the extent of his physical life. I need you to understand that.’
The girls nodded in silence. Erica pointed to the armchair.
‘If he wants to come out of bed and sit down, he will sit there.’
She pointed to the camp bed they had set up alongside the single bed Will would lie in, which they had brought down from Laura’s room. Laura would now be sleeping in her parents’ bed upstairs.
‘At night, I will sleep here so I can be on hand if he needs anything.’
‘Why don’t we take it in turns?’ suggested Kate. ‘It seems very gruelling for you to have your sleep disturbed night after night, which is probably what’s going to happen.’
Erica recognised in Kate’s offer just how brief her marriage to Jack had been. He had been killed training to be a fighter pilot. They’d had no chance for their nascent love to deepen and mature to the stage where sitting beside your suffering partner night after night was viewed not as a chore, but as an almost sacred act of devotion.
Kate and Jack had fallen in love extremely quickly. When they first declared their intention to marry, Erica and Will had gone along with it, while wondering in private if it was really love they were experiencing, or simply a heightened sense of romantic mania suffused with lust, brought on by the hostilities of war . . . Both Erica and Will had experienced something similar during the Great War. Suddenly, even the most average-looking chap was transformed into a fit, clean-cut, rather glamorous young man of action, blasé about what lay ahead, arrogantly proclaiming that whatever it was, he – regardless what he might have been before war had been declared – would be its match. Young women fell hook, line and sinker for the transformation, and marriage was the only respectable option. With some foreboding, Erica and
Will had recognised the same dynamic this time round, in accelerated relationships striking up around them. As much as they recognised it in the way Kate had fallen for Jack, they knew there was little they could do to alter their chosen course. The young will have their own lives. And sometimes, tragically, their own deaths too.
‘I won’t find it gruelling if your father has cause to wake me in the night. I might even hope for it, as long as he isn’t in pain or discomfort. It will give me more time with him.’
Erica knew it sounded selfish, and she half-expected the girls to ask her to share the experience. But despite their young age they seemed to understand that their parents’ relationship existed at a depth they couldn’t completely appreciate, and made no more of it.
Erica had everything planned out. After his long-anticipated arrival, she didn’t want it to take long for the household to fall into a daily routine around Will’s care. Medication and meals would be taken according to a strict timetable, while the rest of the day would be given over to keeping him comfortable. Will would sleep a great deal, and during daylight his daughters would take it in turns to sit in the armchair at his bedside, watch over him and simply sit with him for as long as he was there.
To reduce the physical stress that speaking seemed to cause him, Erica had decided that Will could communicate urgent needs by writing down single words on a pad. ‘FOOD’ if he was hungry. ‘LOO’ if he needed to use the toilet. ‘READ’ if he wanted one of the girls to read to him. And so on.