by Sam Angus
Lyla closed her eyes. After a while she shivered and drew her legs up and wrapped her arms about them and rocked herself to and fro. This was where she’d sat all that long night. Why? Lyla, her eyes still shut, cast herself back. She’d taken herself to bed when Mop had left, and then she’d woken some time during the night and gone to Mop’s bedroom and found no one there. She’d felt her way along the corridor and down the stairs, her fingers skimming the dado rail as she’d called out to her mother. She’d gone to the drawing room and there’d been no Mop.
She’d waited and waited in this very chair, waited and watched through the window, and in the end, terrified, she’d picked up the telephone and dialled the only number a very young child might know by heart.
The police had come and someone had put her on his knee. Someone big with hairy ears, and he’d asked, Where was her father? Where was her mother?
Remembering, Lyla winced and rocked herself to and fro.
She’d pulled away from Hairy Ears and thrown herself to the carpet, and there, crumpled on the floor, she’d sobbed. ‘She goes out . . . She leaves me here . . . and if I wake, sometimes she’s here, sometimes she’s not . . .’
They’d looked from one to another.
A neighbour had been woken and then it was the neighbour perhaps who’d sent for Winnie, for Winnie had come, an overcoat over her pink dressing gown, blue rollers in her hair.
‘The child’s always on her own. Night after night,’ Winnie had told the police.
She’d helped them trace Father to some underground part of Whitehall where things of the most secret nature were discussed through all the hours of the night, and then Winnie had returned Lyla to her bed and, as dawn broke, Father had been there at her bedside. He’d lifted her kicking and screaming from the bed and stepped out into the corridor. Mop’s door had been open and Lyla had clutched at it, calling to her, but Father had walked swiftly on. Lyla remembered how he’d tucked a blanket round her in the seat of the Austin, his face drawn and haggard in the grey light of a London morning.
Lyla opened her eyes and saw the garden of Lisson Square. She shivered again and unfurled herself from the chair and looked about, and everything was as it always had been – the trinkets and the gilded frames and whatnots – only now everything was corroded and tinny to her eyes, and it was only the cobwebs that caught the evening sun.
She must leave, she must get out of this house, but an envelope on the floor by the door drew her eye. She saw the childish, careful block capitals. Trembling, she bent and took it up and slowly opened it:
Everyone has written home for their skates, so please, please will you send mine. I’m all right at ice skating and it’s easier to make friends if you can be good at something . . .
Suddenly she was frantic, on her knees in the empty house, scrabbling through the mail, clutching up twenty – perhaps thirty – letters to her lap, tearing at them and reading, in painful, heart-wrenching snatches the words of the child she’d been, feeling once again through them the thousand hurts and slights, the hopes and fears and knowing, through the words she’d written, a longing for love so intense that even now it could rush up in her and take her by the throat.
PLEASE, PLEASE, DON’T FORGET ABOUT ME. DON’T LEAVE ME HERE FOREVER.
Somewhere upstairs a pigeon must have been trapped, for there was a flapping and the sound of glass breaking. When the light faded Lyla simply lay down, amidst the dusty envelopes, and drew her coat over her, for the electricity had long since been cut off and she had nowhere else to go.
79
BRITISH FIGHTER PLANES
In the morning Lyla struggled to her feet. She must find something to eat, she must find a change of clothes. She should return to Furlongs, for Ada was growing weak and old, her strength sapped surely by fear for Father. Lyla walked stiffly, for her sleep had been fitful and uncomfortable, to the drawing room and rifled through her bag to find what money was left. She must call Speck and make arrangements to collect some cash at a London bank.
As she looked for her purse, her finger snagged on the catch of the rosewood box. She winced and withdrew her hand, then paused, for the box had sprung open. She glimpsed white paper. She snatched the box from the bag and lifted it and out tumbled, on to the table amidst the withered tulips and half-empty glasses of that dreadful night, a host of tiny paper planes, Spitfires and Hurricanes, Vickers Wellingtons and Lancaster Bombers. Every letter Father had ever sent, from every desert and far-off place, turned by Solomon’s sorcery into paper planes. Someone had saved them all, fetched them from the damson tree and kept them for Lyla for when she was ready to read them.
Lyla’s fingers hovered over the small paper planes, so light and delicate they were songbirds come from far away, only to be cast aside by a child more fragile still than they.
Lyla gathered them up and clasped them in her arms and sank into the chair at the window. She took first one and read, took another and another, and read and read on with pain and joy, with tears and smiles, till each letter was unfolded, the words of each unfurled, all the tenderness of them settling inside her like warmth and light. She read and read again, taking up first one and then another, reading and re-reading till she was washed through with tears.
One last letter lay at the bottom, flat and unfolded.
Campo Concentramiento 53
Sforzacosta
Italy
Dear Lyla,
If we meet again, we’ll meet as strangers, for you’ll be so much changed. One day, when all this is over, and you are old enough, there is much I have to tell you. I miss so many things, but what I most miss is you. Dear Lyla, remain whole-hearted. Don’t let anything or anyone take from you the parts of you that are most you.
We, all of us, are feeling stronger now the spring is coming. The sun is a great help for we have been so cold, so hungry – but we get parcels now and again from the Red Cross and it is marvellous what one can find in them. There is a gate made of wood, the height of two men, flanked by windowless buildings and steel spikes and then two fences draped with barbed wire. I can see it from the small, high window of our cell. The guards are slack and dozy, drinking at their posts. I observe their comings and goings from the little window. They have lost heart for this war, the Italians, if their heart was ever in it at all.
This may be my last letter for a while. If I make it out of here, my journey could be long and dangerous. I will have little to help me on my way bar some Ambrosia rice and other most amusing but helpful things sent by the Red Cross.
I plan to take the long way home, so to speak. Pray for me.
If I make it back, perhaps one day you’ll see I did the only thing I could. Either way, whatever you think of me,
I will always, always be your Father
80
LORD NORTH STREET
Lyla replaced the key beneath the winter jasmine.
She telephoned Speck and asked for money to be arranged and was told that Ada had had a minor stroke. Come back as soon as you can, Speck told her.
Where did my Father live? What was his regiment? Ah, as it happens, I do have that information.
Father. Father, who’d once pretended to have an affair for the sake of Mop’s reputation, what home had he made for himself then? For Lyla didn’t recall being taken there. Try the Records Office too, Speck told her. Start there.
Lyla replaced the receiver in its cradle.
At the Records Office there were long queues, long waits. Father was not among the lists of wounded, nor of the dead. Try his barracks, she was told, and at the barracks they said to Lyla, Ah yes, others have been asking after Lovell Spence too. We are following leads and searching; we have not given up hope. Lyla discovered that the camp at Hasufa had indeed been closed after El Alamein, the Germans, had indeed moved their prisoners on, some to Germany and some to Northern Italy. Yes, Lyla, told the officer, he was in Italy, at Sforzacosta. How did she know? the officer asked, and Lyla showed him Father’s letter. That is helpful, she
was told. We shall keep searching but you should also try Baker Street, go to the office in Baker Street – he worked for them too, and they might well know more.
Lyla saw the sheep in Hyde Park, the people eating off check oilskin tablecloths in cafes, advertisements for Elastoplast, the hansom cabs still on Park Lane.
Next day, at the Baker Street offices, Lyla found a secretary packing away files into cardboard boxes, disbanding the small office, but she knew no more than Lyla did.
The camp at Hasufa was closed, Lyla was told once again. After that the trail goes cold. Some perhaps were sent to Germany and some to Italy but Lovell Spence was a special case. The enemy would have hung on to him, you know; they knew how valuable he was to us, a clever man, Lovell Spence. Lyla told her he’d been at Sforzacosta.
We did know that. The secretary pursed her lips and paused. In fact, there was a breakout, shots were fired. We are concerned. We’d like him back; we have people searching for him. The others – those who got away – headed, we think, for the Adriatic, but that would have been dangerous for it was still in German hands.
Lyla thanked the secretary and made her way to the address Speck had given her in Lord North Street. The doorman showed her in. Father had never spent much time in this apartment. How lonely he must’ve been in this cheerless place, forced out of sweet Lisson Square by a divorce he’d never wanted, his name in the courts and in the press.
There was a desk, a single chair and bookshelves. Lyla ran her fingers along their dusty spines. No histories or manuals. Novels, more novels, plays and poetry. Dickens and Shakespeare. Lyla smiled.
She pushed the door to the bedroom and saw a desk, and on it a photograph of herself taken in the garden at Lisson Square. She was on Father’s shoulders and Mother was beside them.
When she went back down, the doorman was waiting for her. He’d remembered, he told her, that someone else had come asking for him – he couldn’t remember who – a solicitor perhaps. Did Lyla know that there was to be an exhibition, that woman, a show of her paintings? He handed Lyla the Evening Standard. You could ask her, he suggested. She might know; she was his wife once.
Lyla took it and read. Swiftly she folded it and handed it back. She lifted her head. Mother had come to Britain, not to see Lyla, but to celebrate the opening of a new exhibition in Albemarle Street.
Lyla thanked the doorman, left the apartment and made her way through gathering crowds to Albemarle Street. There she peered through the narrow bow-front window. Mop might be there.
Lyla drew back and waited a while. She saw that the gallery owner was watching her to see if she’d come in or if he should shut up shop. Lyla slunk quietly in and walked in a trance through the two small rooms and saw the dark, angry works, all greens and blacks, and occasional whites, jagged and unsettling as loose teeth or broken bones.
At the back of the gallery, however, a small figure drawing in crayon drew her eye, and as Lyla approached, she saw beneath it the words Not for Sale.
Lyla caught her breath. She saw herself in that drawing, herself as a young child, perhaps five or six, standing on tiptoe, holding a palette towards the onlooker, her eyes earnest and upwards-looking. Lyla paused, seeing all the trust and the love in the child’s eyes, then she turned on her heel and marched out.
Lyla woke on the morning of May the 8th to the news that war would end in Europe. The newsstands reported that at Eisenhower’s headquarters at 2.41 a.m., Germany had unconditionally surrendered all land, air and sea forces in Europe to the Allies.
There could be a brief period of rejoicing.
Everywhere people were huddled around wireless sets, the shops were filling with buttonholes and flags, and ladders emerged from buildings, appearing from nowhere as if they’d been always there these five long years, waiting in readiness for the time that would surely come for flags and pennants and bunting to be hung from the rooftops.
In Trafalgar Square, people splashed in the fountains, some children rode the lions, while others atop their fathers’ shoulders waved flags. Lyla saw a young girl, her hair tied in a red-white-and-blue ribbon on the top of her head. She watched the girl and thought of the photograph she’d seen, and how she too had once sat on a father’s shoulders.
Huge crowds had gathered everywhere and you couldn’t put a pin between the people on the streets. Lyla was caught up in the surge towards the palace and heard the clamouring at the gates for all the comings and goings of the king and the princess and the prime minister. Lines of loudspeakers were being rigged along the roads for the announcements and for the street parties that would come later.
She heard Churchill’s voice: ‘Advance, Britannia! Long live the cause of freedom. God save the King.’
The bells pealed out all over London from every tower and spire. The traffic was at a standstill; there was kissing and singing and smiles and tears. Someone somewhere was playing an accordion, and Lyla was swept up into a conga line, then twirled and kissed.
Suddenly, violently, Lyla wanted to be at Furlongs with those with whom she’d spent the war, with Cat and with Ada. She broke away from the crowds into Green Park and began to run, across Hyde Park, through Lancaster Gate running and running, till she reached Paddington Station.
81
RIBBONS AND FLAGS
Lyla finally reached Furlongs in the late afternoon of the following day.
Everything was much as it had been when she’d first come: the elms and the bracken, the boathouse at Shearwater, the primroses and the sheep.
But then she saw a sheep that was red and she rubbed her eyes and looked away. She paused, then looked back again, and saw that, indeed, several were red, that, indeed, others were blue, that others were still white and she smiled.
The house came into view. From every window and from every tower and turret hung Ada’s homemade Union Jacks, and there were ribbons and draperies, and every marble goddess on the pediment wore a blue bra and red knickers, and Violet at the maharajah’s window wore bunting about her neck. On the lintel of the door perched a row of doves, most huffy that they had somehow turned red. Lyla saw others that had been coloured blue, and it appeared they were painfully embarrassed by the colour they now found themselves to be, for they had taken themselves off in shame to the weather vane. Only the doves that were still white remained on the clock tower where they should be.
Lyla grinned. Dear Aunt Ada. Where was she? How was she?
She found Tawny first at the foot of an immense bonfire. He greeted her, with his habitual reticence, raising a hand to his victory rosette.
‘They died for something, my boys.’
‘They did,’ said Lyla, hugging him. Then she pulled back and whispered, ‘Ada?’
He bowed his head. ‘Another stroke.’ He shook his head sadly.
Another stroke? Lyla had only been away three days.
She went to find Solomon.
‘Miss Lyla . . .’ he began, but his words seemed to turn to wood in his mouth and he, who’d always been so correct, who’d held himself in such reserve, bent his head to hide his tears.
Lyla remembered his moustache, how he’d used to try to make her smile, how all those years he’d always been at Ada’s side, and she remembered Father’s letters too, and she took his hands in hers.
‘The letters, Solomon. Thank you.’
‘It was Miss Lively who climbed the tree to fetch them down again,’ he replied, gesturing apologetically to his legs. ‘She always said we must keep them and wait till you were ready to read them.’
Lyla smiled. Dear Cat. ‘Thank you, Solomon.’
‘It was for him I did it too. There is nothing I would not do for Captain Lovell, miss. Did you hear anything of him in London?’
Lyla shook her head.
They left the conversation there, and together went in search of Ada.
They found her at last, being pushed about the park by Cat. She was sitting in a homemade sort of contraption – a tapestry wingback chair – to the bas
e of which Tawny, perhaps, had fixed the wheels of his barrow and to the back a handle. On Ada’s lap was a pair of secateurs.
Cat greeted Lyla with a hug, before she and Solomon left Lyla to be alone with her aunt.
Ada waggled the fingers of her right hand at all the adjustments to the facade of the house and to the bonfire that stood in front of it and, with great effort, whispered, ‘A final fling, d’you see?’
Lyla paled.
‘The girls . . . they’re orf. New school ready, prefabricated . . .’ Ada’s words were halting and slow. ‘Went up in a jiffy, like a mushroom – they do that these days, put things up overnight, not like this old place . . . progress, yes . . . take me to the roses . . . legs, d’you see, won’t hold me up, want to see my roses –’
They went about the roses and after a while Ada said, ‘I liked having ’em here, you know, the girls. Bonfire tonight for ’em . . . For them – and for England.’
‘I couldn’t find anything,’ said Lyla eventually. ‘They don’t know if he got out, if he was hit . . .’ Then with a rush of anger she asked Ada, ‘Why didn’t you say? Why didn’t you make me see? There were so many things I didn’t see.’
‘How could you see? One sees things only . . . only when one is ready,’ croaked Ada. ‘Besides, you are young and much can happen . . . There is time. There are things in hand – people searching – Whitehall, Baker Street, Speck, Mr Lively – yes, yes, people searching . . .’ She hesitated, visibly exhausted. But then her face brightened and she added, ‘The long reach of your old great aunt,’ she added.
Lyla smiled, for the fine, indomitable spirit, the fight and the hope, was even now in Ada. She smiled too to think that Cat’s father too should be searching for Father.
That night all the people from Ladywood came to Ada’s victory fire, as did all the staff of Garden Hill for Girls, and all the girls, and Cedric and Solomon. Prudence handed out hot soup and they sang the National Anthem. Ada was wheeled forward to light the branches of the bonfire. A great sheet of flame shot up into the darkening sky and everyone clapped and Violet whinnied from an upstairs window, for she had never seen such things. They laughed and linked hands – staff and girls, Solomon, Cedric and Prudence – and sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Lyla and Cat stood together watching the flames of the bonfire light up the park and sky.