The Girl on the Beach

by Mary Nichols

  ‘A glass of sherry will be just fine,’ Stuart said. His wife sat on the end of the sofa, trying to smile, but Donald could tell she was wound up like a spring, twisting her gloved hands together, touching her hair, then opening and closing the clasp on her handbag.

  ‘Have you come all the way down from Scotland today?’ he asked.

  ‘No, we’ve been in London for a few days.’

  ‘No news of your daughter, then? I’m sorry I couldn’t help you.’

  ‘Oh, but you have,’ Stuart said. ‘You put us in touch with Mr Austen and he has been doing some probing on our behalf and what he has discovered is astonishing.’

  ‘Really?’ He heard his wife call him from the kitchen and excused himself to go to her. She was basting the tiny joint of brisket. ‘Ought we ask them to lunch?’ she whispered. ‘I was going to have this hot today and finish it up cold tomorrow, but I could stretch it to four. We’d have to have something else tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll ask them. Put that back in the oven to finish off and come and join us for a sherry.’

  She followed him back into the sitting room and took her place beside Angela. Donald poured and handed round the sherry. ‘Not the best, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘But it’s drinkable. Just about. You were saying …’ This prompt was addressed to Stuart.

  ‘Mr Austen showed us your daughter-in-law’s grave,’ Stuart said.

  ‘Only it isn’t your daughter-in-law,’ Angela cried out, twisting her handkerchief into a knot. ‘It’s our Rosie.’

  Donald stared at her, then turned to Mr Summers who was the calmer of the two. ‘Ted Austen said that?’

  ‘Yes, he did. He said Julie had left her baby in the care of Rosie, and when the house got a direct hit, everyone thought Rosie was Julie.’

  ‘But that’s impossible!’ Hilda said. ‘Do you think we wouldn’t know our own daughter-in-law and grandson? Tell them, Don.’

  Donald squirmed. ‘How sure is he of that?’

  ‘Very sure,’ Stuart said. ‘He told us he had seen Julie recently and she was alive and well.’

  Hilda gave a gasp and spilt her sherry all down her blouse. ‘He’s lying,’ she said, ineffectually dabbing at it with a handkerchief. ‘Excuse me. I must go and change.’ She hurried from the room, leaving the others facing each other.

  There was silence for a time, then Stuart said, ‘Do you think the man is lying, Mr Walker?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But unlike your wife you are prepared to concede the possibility of a mistake. Austen said you knew it was Rosie in the coffin but you chose not to say so.’

  ‘Rubbish. Why on earth would I do that?’

  ‘According to him, because you never felt the girl was good enough for your son and it was a way of freeing him from her.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous nonsense.’

  ‘But you did identify the body.’

  ‘I looked at a mangled corpse, whose features were unrecognisable. She was the same build and colouring as Julie and she was cradling George in her arms, protecting him. Perhaps I should have looked more closely at the body and questioned the circumstances, but it never occurred to me that the baby would be with anyone else.’

  Angela gave a huge intake of breath, then burst into tears. ‘It is her,’ she sobbed. ‘It is our Rosie. The man wasn’t lying.’

  Hilda came back into the room in a fresh blouse and looked round at the little tableau. Mrs Summers was weeping uncontrollably, Mr Summers was trying to comfort her and looking grim and her husband seemed bewildered and embarrassed.

  ‘It seems I might have made a mistake, Hilda,’ he told her. ‘I might have incorrectly identified Julie.’

  ‘How could you? You told me, told Harry too, that there wasn’t a mark on her and she looked peaceful.’

  ‘I lied to spare you both,’ he said quietly.

  She collapsed into the nearest chair and stared up at him. ‘Then what happened to Julie?’

  ‘According to Austen, she’s alive,’ Stuart put in. ‘He said he’d seen her.’

  ‘Oh, my God, what’s Harry going to say about this?’ Hilda asked. ‘We can’t tell him, we simply can’t. There’s Pam—’ She stopped suddenly.

  ‘My son has married again,’ Donald told his visitors. ‘They have twins, a boy and a girl.’

  ‘Pam’s a lovely girl too,’ Hilda put in. ‘We are all very fond of her, and the babies are adorable. I wish you had never come here. You should have left well alone.’

  ‘And left our daughter in the wrong grave?’ Angela exclaimed. ‘No, I don’t think so, Mrs Walker.’

  ‘You’re not thinking of having her exhumed?’ Hilda was rapidly becoming as distraught as Angela. ‘Our grandson is in that grave too. We can’t allow it.’

  ‘We will have to see what your son says about it,’ Stuart put in. ‘It affects him more than anyone.’

  ‘I think we need to meet the person claiming to be Julie before we do anything,’ Donald said. ‘Certainly before we say anything to Harry. Does anyone know where she is?’

  ‘Ted Austen said he’d find her for us.’

  ‘And if she isn’t Julie?’

  ‘Then we will just have to accept that our daughter is still missing,’ Stuart said.

  ‘Oh my, the beef!’ Hilda dashed from the room in the direction of the kitchen, just in time to rescue the joint from becoming uneatable.

  It seemed to be the signal for Mr and Mrs Summers to leave. They both stood up.

  ‘Will you stay and have a bite of lunch with us?’ Donald asked.

  ‘No, thank you.’ Stuart spoke for both of them. ‘We’ll go straight back to London to see Austen again. If we have anything to report, we’ll come back to you.’

  ‘Very well. You can contact me by telephone at the factory. We don’t have one here.’ He found a piece of paper and a pencil in the writing desk in the alcove of the fireplace and scribbled down the number. ‘We’ll say nothing to Harry in the meantime. No sense in upsetting him for nothing.’

  He saw them to the door, then went to the kitchen where Hilda was putting some cabbage on to cook while she made the gravy. ‘They’ve gone,’ he said. ‘They didn’t want to stay for lunch.’

  ‘Good. I’m glad. Quite apart from the fact that the joint has shrunk to almost nothing and the potatoes are a bit too crisp to offer guests, I wouldn’t have known what to say to them. They’re obviously deranged, particularly Mrs Summers. I’m sorry for them but that doesn’t alter the fact that what they’ve been saying is too far-fetched to be true.’ She looked up at her husband who was looking doubtful. ‘It is, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know. It could be. If I made a mistake …’

  ‘Don!’

  ‘Well, it’s possible.’

  ‘Don’t you dare say a word to Harry.’

  ‘Of course not. We’ll wait until we have proof.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  It cost Ted a box of chocolates, two pairs of nylons, a bottle of Evening in Paris and an evening at the cinema to find out where Julie was. The young WAAF at Manston had been up for a bit of fun too, so he hadn’t rushed off when he had the information he needed. There was no hurry. Eve Seaton had been sent to hospital in Oxfordshire. ‘She’s not right in the head,’ the girl had said, as they walked back to camp from Ramsgate in the dark. ‘I heard she got caught in a buzz bomb raid and now she thinks she’s someone else. Queen of Sheba, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘What will happen to her?’

  ‘I dunno, do I? Either she’ll be discharged as unfit for service or she’ll get well and come back here. Why are you interested in her anyway?’

  ‘She’s a childhood friend I lost touch with during the Blitz.’

  ‘Oh, so you’re making use of me to find a lost love.’

  ‘No, it’s not like that at all. I promised her family I’d find her. She hasn’t written home in ages. But they can wait, I’d much rather be with you.’ He demonstrated that by drawing her into an empty a
ir-raid shelter and getting inside her bloomers.

  He’d seen her once more after that, but as the money Summers had given him had run out, he had stood her up and gone back to London. Julie was, for the moment, out of reach, but there was more than one way to skin a cat.

  St Hugh’s was an all-female college which had been taken over by the War Office as a military hospital, and its lovely lawns had been covered with brick huts used for wards. Sitting up in bed being subjected to innumerable interrogations and test after test was more than frustrating, especially when all Julie had on her mind was finding Harry. Traumatic amnesia was not uncommon, she was told, especially in wartime, but it didn’t usually last so long. The doctors and specialists who came to see her were intrigued and questioned her over and over again. She wondered if they were trying to make her slip up so they could reveal her as a fraud. All that did was make her angry. ‘I did have glimpses of the past,’ she told them over and over again. ‘But I couldn’t hold onto them. They were just pictures in my brain.’

  ‘What kind of pictures?’

  So she went through it all again: a beach and the sea, a long shiny corridor, children playing in a garden, the demonstration of the bouncing bomb she had seen at the cinema, odd words that resonated.

  ‘But you say you only had one child.’

  ‘I think the children were my charges when I was in service before I married, or maybe children from the Coram home. I often used to look after the younger ones.’

  ‘They were important to you?’

  ‘Yes. I love children. I was overjoyed when I had one of my own.’

  ‘Were you always claustrophobic?’

  ‘Yes. I think it was because I was shut in a cupboard as a punishment when I was in the orphanage.’

  ‘But you happily travel on the Underground.’

  ‘Not happily. I have to grit my teeth every time I do it and I’m always glad to get above ground again. And I hated the Anderson shelter.’

  ‘So you let someone else take your child to the shelter.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that. I’ve told you.’

  ‘Tell us again.’ It went on and on until, in desperation, she said, ‘When are you going to let me go? There’s nothing wrong with me and you have other people who need your help far more than I do.’ They were bringing casualties back from Normandy in increasing numbers. Julie saw them arriving, some of them in a very bad way and it set her thinking of Alec. A letter from him had been forwarded to her soon after her arrival at the hospital. It had been written shortly after his return to his unit.

  ‘Sorry, if I worried you,’ he had written. ‘I had a few adventures, but I’m back with my unit where I belong. At least for the time being. Where I really belong is in your arms, and the minute I get leave, I shall be home to claim them. I think we should be married straight away. I don’t think this scrap is going to be over quickly, so there’s no sense in waiting. Florrie and Matt were right to say you should grab your happiness while you can. Do you agree? The war will be over one day, and pray God that won’t be too long, then we can settle down and bring our children up in peace. I know we will be happy together because there can never be anyone else for me but you.’

  There was more of a loving nature, but it only added to her dilemma. What would he say when he learnt she already had a husband, one she had promised to love, honour and obey until death parted them? Was it possible to love two men at the same time? She would not know the answer to that unless she came face to face with Harry again. ‘Let me go,’ she pleaded.

  In the end one of them said he would write a paper on her case for The Lancet and might need to speak to her again, to which she replied, ‘You know where to find me. I’m not going to run away.’

  Two weeks after her arrival there, they gave her a travel warrant back to Manston and let her go. She hoped SO Murray had discovered where Harry was and was prepared to give her leave to go to him. Telling him she was alive when he thought her dead was not something she could put into a letter.

  Alec arrived back at Brize Norton and was transferred to St Hugh’s the day after Julie left. He had been picked up off the Caen street by stretcher-bearers braving a hail of bullets to do so and been carried to safety, then given a very bumpy ambulance ride back to the regimental aid post in the brickfields. He hadn’t at first noticed any pain, but that ride along a road potholed by shellfire set his body on fire and he had to bite his lip to stop himself crying out. Even so, he couldn’t prevent a moan or two escaping when the vehicle jolted into a particularly deep hole. At the forward aid post they gave him morphine, dressed his wound and sent him on again to Ranville. At the field hospital there they dug a lump of shrapnel out of his shoulder under anaesthetic, and a few days later he was shipped back to England, his war over for the time being.

  He was unsure whether to be glad or sorry. He had been pulled out of the battle and spared the rest of the carnage, but he had left his men behind, left them to fight on. He wanted to be with them, to live or die alongside them, to be in at the kill when the enemy was finally defeated. But perhaps he would be; the battalion was due to be relieved and brought back to train for the next phase of the war and he might make a full recovery and rejoin them then. If they all survived. They had managed it so far, but how long before their luck ran out? He felt as if he had deserted them.

  On the other hand, he was in England and that meant seeing Eve and his family and being able to sleep and eat from a plate instead of a mess tin, and then sleeping some more. He remembered asking if anyone had informed his family where he was before drifting off again. The answer must have been yes, because his mother arrived one afternoon to see him.

  She brought him grapes off the vine that grew in the greenhouse on the farm garden. Fat and juicy, they brought home to him that there was life away from the noise and stench of battle and that life was waiting for him at the end of the conflict, a life to look forward to.

  ‘How are you, Ma?’ he asked, studying her face. She looked worn, there were dark rings round her eyes and her hair seemed greyer than he remembered, yet it had only been a couple of months since he had last been home on leave.

  ‘I’m fine. How are you?’

  ‘Coming along nicely. It’s not a bad wound but it’s damaged the muscle, so I’m going to need physiotherapy when it’s healed. It could have been much worse.’

  ‘Yes, you could have been killed and I thank God you were not. When they told us you were missing believed killed it was terrible. We didn’t know whether to hope or not. Of course, we kept telling each other you would turn up, but sometimes we got very low. We couldn’t see how you could survive being shot down over the sea.’

  ‘Shot down over the sea? Is that what they told you?’

  ‘Yes, the plane you were in didn’t make it back. We thought it had gone down on the outward journey, not the return.’

  ‘Poor you. I’m sorry you were so worried.’

  ‘Florrie took it badly and so did Eve.’

  ‘Have you seen Eve?’

  ‘Not recently. She was coming to see us but something happened …’ She stopped, wondering how much to tell him.

  ‘What happened?’ When she did not immediately answer, he added, ‘Come on, Ma, out with it.’

  ‘She was on a train that got hit by a doodlebug …’

  He caught his breath in shock. ‘She’s not … not dead?’

  ‘No, she’s not dead, she wasn’t even hurt. She just disappeared. Florrie said …’ Again she paused.

  ‘What?’ He pulled himself into a sitting position, ignoring the stab of pain the movement caused. ‘Why are you so reluctant to tell me?’

  ‘Because Eve ought to tell you herself, not me. In any case I don’t know all the details.’

  ‘But you’ll tell me all you know, even if I have to wring it out of you. Come on, Ma, don’t leave me hanging like this.’

  Maggie took a deep breath and launched into a garbled account of what had happened, ending, ‘S
he was in hospital here for a couple of weeks, then they sent her back to Manston …’

  ‘Is she there now?’

  ‘I don’t know. Florrie seemed to think they would give her leave to sort things out, but I’ve no idea if they did. We didn’t want to say anything to you while you were fighting in France in case it upset you.’

  He fell back against the pillows. ‘Damn this shoulder! Damn this bloody war!’

  ‘Alec, language!’

  He smiled wryly. It was typical of his mother to tick him off about his language in the middle of a conversation that had the power to ruin his life. ‘I’ve got to get out of here, got to find her. I can’t let her go—’

  She put a hand over his. ‘Calm down, son; you can’t do anything until you’ve recovered and you won’t do that getting all het up. I’m sure Eve will sort things out herself. Florrie said she would, but it might take time. You must be patient and concentrate on getting better.’

  A bell signalled the end of visiting hours and she stood up to leave. ‘I’ll come again when I can. Maybe your dad will come with me.’ She bent to kiss his cheek. ‘When you’re well they’ll let you come home to convalesce, I’m sure.’

  He was not as sure as she was and watched her walk down the ward and disappear through the door. The language he used when she could no longer hear him would have shocked her to the core. He tried to get out of bed and had almost succeeded when a nurse saw what he was up to and stopped him. ‘Come, Sergeant, back into bed with you. If you need anything fetched, I’ll fetch it.’

  But she couldn’t fetch Eve, could she?

  * * *

  ‘According to Mr Austen, Julie Walker is a sergeant in the WAAFs stationed in Kent. He went to speak to her, and though he confirmed she was based there, he did not see her because she is in hospital being treated for injuries she received in a doodlebug raid. He says he’ll go back when she returns to the station and will bring her to us. He wants more money.’