by Kate Morton
She glanced as she did so at the handwritten card that had come with the basket. Mrs Hammett’s steady pen, wishing them welcome and extending an invitation to dinner at The Swan in the village on Friday night. Bea had been the one to remove the card from its envelope and was so taken with the idea of seeing the place where her parents had spent their honeymoon that it would have been unwise to say no. Strange to go back, though, especially without Alan. Twelve years now since they’d stayed in that tiny room with its pale, yellow-striped wallpaper, its leadlight window and view across the fields towards the river. There’d been a beautiful pair of teasel pods in a cracked vase on the chimney hearth, she remembered, and gorse that made the room smell of coconuts.
The kettle shrilled and Juliet called out to Bea to put her recorder aside and make the tea.
Huffing and flouncing ensued, but eventually a pot of tea arrived at the table where the rest of them had gathered to eat the sandwiches.
Juliet was tired. They all were. They’d spent the entire day on a packed train crawling west from London. Their provisions had been gone before they reached Reading; the journey afterwards had been exceedingly long.
Poor little Tip, beside her at the table, had deep, dark bags beneath his eyes and had hardly touched his sandwich. He’d slumped, cheek resting in the palm of his hand.
Juliet leaned close enough that she could smell the oiliness of his little-boy scalp. ‘How are you holding up, Tippy Toes?’
He opened his mouth as if about to speak but yawned instead.
‘Time to visit Mrs Marvel’s garden party?’
He nodded slowly, his curtain of straight hair shifting back and forth.
‘Come on, then,’ she said. ‘Let’s get you to bed.’
He was asleep before she’d even started to describe the garden in her story. They were still on the path, about to reach the gate, when his weight settled against her and Juliet knew that she’d lost him.
She allowed herself to close her eyes, matching her breathing to his, relishing the solidity of his small, warm body; the simple fact of him; his fluttering exhalations tickling her cheek.
A light breeze drifted through the open window and she could easily have fallen asleep herself if not for the sporadic punctuations of gleeful laughter and noisy thumps emanating from downstairs. Juliet managed to ignore them until the fun degenerated, predictably enough, into a spat of sibling discord, and she was forced to disentangle herself from Tip and make her way back down to the kitchen. She dispatched the older two to bed and, alone at last, took stock.
The representative from the AHA who’d given her the key had done so with an air of defensive apology. The house hadn’t been lived in for at least a year, not since the war started. Someone had made an effort to tidy things up, but there were certain telltale signs. The fireplace, for instance, had a significant amount of foliage protruding from its chimney, and the noises that fell from its dark cavern when she tugged at the tendrils made it clear that something was in habitation. It was summer, though, so Juliet reckoned it a problem for another time. Besides, as the AHA fellow had blustered when a swallow flew at them from the top of the pantry, there was a war on and it didn’t do to make a fuss.
Upstairs, the bathroom was basic, but the rings in the tub could be cleaned, as could the mouldy floor tiles. Mrs Hammett had mentioned to Juliet on the phone that although the old woman who’d owned the house had loved it dearly, she hadn’t had a lot to spend on it towards the end. And she’d been ‘very picky about tenants’, so for long stretches of time the house had stood empty. Yes, they had some work ahead of them, that much was certain, but the occupation would be useful. It would encourage the children to feel at home, give them a sense of possession and belonging.
They were all asleep now, despite the brightness of the long summer evening, and Juliet leaned against the doorway to the larger bedroom at the back of the house. The frown that had set up on Bea’s face some months before was gone. Her arms, long and slender, lay beside her atop the sheet. When she was born, the nurse had unfurled those arms and legs and declared her a runner, but Juliet had taken one look at the fine, pale fingers – spellbindingly perfect – and known that her daughter would be a musician.
Juliet had a flash of memory, the two of them holding hands as they crossed Russell Square. Bea, at four, talking earnestly, her eyes wide, her expression avid, as she made elegant, fawn-like leaps to keep up. She’d been a lovely child – engaged and engaging, quiet, but not shy. This intense changeling who had taken her place was a stranger.
Freddy, by contrast, was reassuringly familiar. His chest was bare and broad, and his shirt had been flung inside out onto the floor beside his bed. He lay with legs akimbo, as if he’d been wrestling the sheets. There was no hope in straightening them and Juliet didn’t try. Unlike Bea, he’d been scarlet and compact when born. ‘Good God, you’ve given birth to a small red man,’ Alan had said, peering wonderingly at the bundle in Juliet’s arms, ‘a very angry little red man.’ Thus had Freddy been known as Red ever since. His passions had not subsided. He had only to feel in order for those feelings to be known. He was dramatic, charming, fun and funny. He was hard work; sunshine in human form; thunderous.
Juliet stood at last above little Tip, curled up now in a nest of pillows on the floor beside his bed, as was his recent habit. His sweaty head had cast a damp ring on the white pillowcase, and fine blond hair was pasted slick on either side of his ear. (All of her children ran hot. It came from Alan’s side.)
Juliet lifted the sheet and draped it across Tip’s narrow chest. She tucked it gently on either side and smoothed the centre, hesitating for a moment with her flattened palm over his heart.
Was it only because he was her youngest that Juliet worried especially about Tip? Or was it something else – an innate, gossamer frailty she sensed in him; the fear that she could not protect him, that she would not be able to mend him if he broke.
‘Don’t slide down the rabbit hole,’ the Alan in her mind said cheerily. ‘The way down’s a breeze, but climbing back’s a battle.’
And he was right. She was being maudlin. Tip was fine. He was perfectly fine.
With a final glance at her sleeping three, Juliet pulled the door behind her.
The room she’d taken for herself was the smaller one in the middle. She’d always liked small spaces – something to do with the womb, no doubt. There was no desk as such, but a walnut dressing table beneath the window that Juliet had requisitioned for her typewriter. The arrangement wasn’t fancy but it was serviceable, and what more did she need?
Juliet sat on the end of the iron-framed bed with its faded patchwork quilt. There was a painting on the other wall, a deep wooded grove with a neon rhododendron in its foreground. The frame was suspended from a nail by a piece of rusty wire that seemed unequal to the task. Something made scurrying noises in the ceiling cavity above and the painting moved lightly against the wall.
Stillness and silence returned and Juliet released a breath that she hadn’t realised she’d been holding. She had longed for the children to go to sleep, finally to have some time for herself; now, though, she missed the certainty of their noise, their essential confidence. The house was quiet. It was unfamiliar. Juliet was quite alone.
She opened her suitcase bedside her. The leather was worn at the corners, but it was a faithful friend, harking back to her days in repertory theatre, and she was glad to have it. Her fingers traced a thoughtful line between two small piles of folded dresses and blouses, and she considered unpacking.
Instead, she dug out the slender bottle from where it was wedged beneath the clothing and took it downstairs.
Fetching a glass tumbler from the kitchen, she headed outside.
The air in the walled garden was warm, the light bluish. It was one of those long summer evenings when the day becomes fixed in transition.
There was a gate in the stone wall leading out to the dusty strip that the man from the AHA had called ‘the c
oach way’. Juliet followed the path and spied a garden table set up in the gap between two willows on the grassy knoll. Beyond it, a strip of water tripped cheerfully in the gully. Not as wide as the river; a tributary, she supposed. She set the glass down on the table’s iron top and poured the whisky carefully, eyeing the mid-line. When she reached it, she dropped another generous slug.
‘Bottoms up,’ she said to the dusk.
That initial long slow sip was a balm. Juliet’s eyes closed and for the first time in hours she let her thoughts settle on Alan.
She wondered what he’d think if he knew that she and the children were here. He’d liked this place well enough, but not as she had. Her affection for the small Thames-side village, more specifically the twin-gabled house on its edge, had always amused him. He’d called her a romantic, emphasising the capital ‘R’.
Perhaps she was. She certainly wasn’t the lowercase sort. Even with Alan away in France, Juliet had resisted the urge to shower him with ostentatious declarations of love. There was no need – he knew how she felt – and to allow absence and war to induce hyperbole, to trick her into a sentimentality she’d have been embarrassed to employ if they were speaking face to face, was to admit a lack of faith. Did she love him more because Britain was at war with Germany? Had she loved him less when he was whistling in the kitchen, apron round his middle as he fried their fish for dinner?
No. Stubbornly, resolutely, certainly, no.
And so, instead of reams of wartime promises and affirmations, they honoured one another by sticking to the truth.
The most recent letter she’d received was in her pocket, but Juliet didn’t take it out now. Instead, she collected the whisky bottle and followed the grassy track towards the river.
Alan’s letter had become a totem of sorts, an integral part of this journey that she’d embarked upon. She’d had it with her in the shelter that night, tucked inside the copy of David Copperfield she’d been rereading. While the old duck from number thirty-four clacked her knitting needles and hummed ‘We’ll Meet Again’, and the four Whitfield boys tripped over people’s feet and honked like geese, Juliet had read again Alan’s account of the scene at Dunkirk, heavily redacted, but striking nonetheless. He’d described the men on the beach, and the journey to make it that far; the villagers they’d passed on their way, small children and elderly women with bowed legs, wagons piled high with suitcases and birdcages and knitted blankets. All of them fleeing the misery and destruction, but with nowhere safe to run.
‘I came across a young boy with a bleeding leg,’ he’d written. ‘He was sitting on a broken fence and the look in his eyes conveyed that awful point beyond panic, the terrible acceptance that this was now his lot. I asked him his name, and whether he needed help, where his family were, and after a time he answered me in soft French. He didn’t know, he said, he didn’t know. The poor lad couldn’t walk and his cheeks were stained with tears and I couldn’t just leave him there, all alone. He reminded me of Tip. Older, but with the same seriousness of spirit as our little one. He hopped on my back in the end, with no complaint or query, and I carried him to the beach.’
Juliet reached the wooden jetty, and even through the twilight she could see that it had deteriorated in the twelve years since she and Alan had sat on its end drinking tea from Mrs Hammett’s thermos. She closed her eyes briefly and let the noise of the river surround her. Its constancy was heartening: no matter what else was happening in the world, regardless of human folly or individual torment, the river kept flowing.
She opened her eyes and let her gaze roam across the dense copse of trees beyond, hunkered down for the night. She wouldn’t go beyond this point. The children would be frightened if they woke and found her gone.
Turning to look back in the direction from which she’d come, above the soft curved darkness of the Birchwood Manor garden, she could just make out a silhouette of sharper lines, the rise of the twin gables and punctuating columns of the eight chimneys.
She sat herself against the trunk of a nearby willow, positioning the whisky bottle in a clump of grass at her feet.
Juliet felt a wave of excitement, dampened almost at once by the circumstances that had brought her here.
The idea to come back to this place, twelve years after she’d discovered it, had arrived fully formed. They’d clambered from the shelter at the sound of the all-clear and Juliet’s thoughts had been on other things.
The smell was the first indication that things were awry – smoke and smoulder, dust and unhappiness – and then they’d emerged into the haze and an uncanny brightness. It had taken a moment to realise that their house was gone and that dawn streamed now through a gap in the row of terraces.
Juliet hadn’t realised that she’d dropped her bag until she saw her things on the ground at her feet amongst the rubble. The pages of David Copperfield were fluttering where the volume had landed open, the old postcard she’d been using as a bookmark lying beside it. Later, there would be a thousand small details to organise and worry about, but in that moment, as she reached to retrieve the postcard and the picture of The Swan on its front came into focus, and her children’s panicked voices piped in and out of earshot, and the immensity of what was happening to them rose like a hot cloud around her, there’d been only one cool thought.
A feeling so strong had risen from that place where memories are stored, and with it an idea that hadn’t then seemed crazy at all but clear and certain. Juliet had known simply that she had to get the children to safety. The imperative had been instinctive, animal; it was all that she could focus on, and the sepia image on the postcard, a gift from Alan, a reminder of their honeymoon, had made it seem that he was standing beside her, holding her hand. And the relief, after missing him so long, after worrying and wondering while he was far away, unreachable, unable to help, had been overwhelming. As she picked her way across the rubble to take Tip’s hand, she’d felt a surge of exhilaration, because she’d known exactly what she must do next.
It had occurred to her afterwards that the flash of certainty might actually have been a symptom of madness, brought on by shock, but over the following days, as they slept on the floors of friends and acquired a motley collection of new essentials, she’d settled on the idea. The school was closed and children were leaving London in droves. But Juliet couldn’t imagine sending her three off alone. It was possible that the older two might have leapt at the chance of adventure – Bea especially relishing the independence and opportunity to live with anyone but her mother – but not Tip, not her little bird.
It had taken days after the bombing before he’d let her out of his sight, watching her every move with wide, worried eyes so that Juliet’s jaw ached by evening with the effort of having to keep a bright face on things. Finally, though, with much love and the clever deployment of new rocks for his collection, she’d been able to reassure him sufficiently to earn an hour or so to herself.
She’d left the three of them with Alan’s best friend, Jeremy, a playwright of some note upon whose Bloomsbury floor they were currently sleeping, and had used the phone box on Gower Street to telephone The Swan; Mrs Hammett herself had picked up at the faraway end of the whistling line. The older woman had remembered her with genuine delight when Juliet explained about the honeymoon, and promised to ask around the village when she mentioned her intention to bring her children to the country. The following day, when Juliet telephoned back, Mrs Hammett had told her that there was one house vacant and available to lease. ‘A bit rundown, but you could do worse. There’s no electricity, but with the blackout I suppose that’s neither here nor there. The rent is fair and there’s nothing else for love nor money, what with the evacuees taking up every spare room this side of London.’
Juliet had asked where it was in relation to The Swan, and when Mrs Hammett described the location, she’d felt a thrill up her spine. She’d known exactly which house; she hadn’t needed to think it through. She’d told Mrs Hammett that they’d take it and
made brief arrangements to wire a deposit of the first month’s rent to the group that was handling the lease. She replaced the receiver and stood for a moment inside the phone box. Beyond the glass, the fast-moving clouds of the morning had gathered and darkened, and people were walking faster than usual, arms folded across their bodies, heads down against the sudden chill.
Until that point Juliet had kept her plans to herself. It wouldn’t have taken much to talk her out of it and she hadn’t wanted that to happen. But now, having come this far, there were certain things that would need to be done. Mr Tallisker, for one, would have to be told. He was her boss, the editor at the newspaper where she worked, and her absence would therefore be noticed.
She went straight to the offices on Fleet Street, arriving minutes after the rain began to fall. In the bathroom on the first floor she did what she could with her damp hair, fluffing her blouse backwards and forwards in an attempt to dry it. Her face was drawn, she noticed, and pale. In lieu of lipstick she gave her lips a pinch, rubbed them together, smiled at her reflection. The effect was unconvincing.
Sure enough: ‘Good God,’ said Mr Tallisker when his secretary had left them. ‘Things are grim.’ He gathered his eyebrows as she told him what she intended to do, leaning back in his leather chair, arms crossed. ‘Birchwood,’ he said at last, from the other side of the vast paper-strewn desk. ‘Berkshire, is it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not a lot of theatre.’
‘No, but I plan to come back to London every fortnight – every week if necessary – and file my reviews that way.’
He made a noise that did not signal encouragement and Juliet felt her imagined future slipping away. His voice when he spoke again was unreadable. ‘I was sorry to hear about things.’