Letters to the Lost

by Iona Grey

  The old man gave another grunt. He was staring out of the window, his face softened. ‘You’ve just reminded me of something Nancy said to me once, years ago. She said she came to that house when she had nowhere else to go. So maybe it ain’t so bad after all, what this one done.’ He chuckled quietly. ‘It’s just history repeating itself.’

  As soon as Will opened the front door the cold wrapped itself around him and the damp settled like a smothering hand over his nose and mouth. No wonder she was ill, living like this for God knows how long. The afternoon was turning into evening and he flicked the light-switch at the bottom of the stairs with more hope than expectation. The gloom remained undisturbed, and he wondered how she’d managed without heating and light; without the means to cook or boil a kettle. He remembered when he’d seen her at the leisure centre, feeding coins into the machine to buy cheap coffee and he almost groaned out loud into the silence. If only she’d let him help her then. He just hoped it wasn’t too late to make up for it now.

  ‘It’s only me,’ he said as he went upstairs. ‘I’m back.’

  She was still there. Improbable though it was, he’d half expected to find that she’d bolted, like she had the last two times he’d seen her. She was quiet now, and still. His heart squeezed with fear as he went over to the bed and gently smoothed back her damp hair to lay a hand on her forehead. It was radiator-hot. She was asleep, that was all.

  He looked around the room. At this hour of a winter February day it was at its most dismal. The only colour came from the pink bedcover, but the place was tidy enough. His gaze flickered to the dressing table, then the nightstand. His own experience of drugs was limited to a few lumpy cigarettes at college balls during his first year at Oxford so he was a little hazy about the practicalities of drug taking, but there didn’t seem to be any evidence of it here. No hypodermics or charred teaspoons, not so much as a cigarette lighter. He felt a rush of relief, though he wasn’t quite sure why.

  Sirens were part of the everyday soundscape of city life, so it wasn’t until the ambulance had turned into Greenfields Lane and the wail was echoing off the buildings on either side that he noticed it. The flat, colourless half-light that filled the room was suddenly broken up by flashes of blue sliding across the walls. He went back to stand over the bed.

  ‘The ambulance is here now. You’ll be in safe hands.’

  In a moment the professionals would come in and take over, and he’d be surplus to requirement. The thought should have been comforting but it made him feel oddly bereft. He gazed down at her ashen face against the pillow, wanting to imprint her features on his memory before he had to say goodbye. To his surprise her blue-tinged eyelids flickered open. Her eyes were dark and glittering with fever.

  ‘Don’t go,’ she whispered, so softly that he might have thought he’d been mistaken if she hadn’t stretched out her hand. He took it. Her fingers were hot and dry and small.

  ‘I won’t. I’m right here.’

  There were voices downstairs. A woman’s voice called, ‘Hello? Anyone there?’ The girl’s grip tightened on his hand.

  ‘Up here.’

  And then they were there, a man and a woman in green all-in-one suits, filling the room with efficiency and crackling radio static and kindness and the scent of outside air and antiseptic. The space was too small. Will retreated. His fingers tingled where she’d held them.

  He waited downstairs. While the male paramedic stayed upstairs, asking the girl questions in a cheerful, encouraging voice, his colleague came down to talk to Will. Once she’d taken down his details she looked around with a visible shudder. ‘There’s something wrong with the world when kids end up living in places like this. No wonder the poor girl’s ill.’

  ‘Where will you take her?’

  ‘Most likely the Royal Free. It looks like she’ll need to be on IV antibiotics for a while.’

  ‘What do you think’s wrong with her?’

  The paramedic shrugged, tucking her pen back into the pocket of her overalls. ‘Probably started off as good old winter ’flu and thanks to this place she’s got a nasty dose of pneumonia on top of that. Just as well you found her when you did.’

  They brought her down in a stretcher chair. Swaddled in blankets, her face covered with an oxygen mask she looked impossibly fragile. Will wrestled the damp-swollen front door open as wide as possible to allow them to get through. As they passed, her eyes found his. They stayed there, unblinking, as if she was holding on to him to stop herself falling. He walked alongside her, keeping that contact until they reached the ambulance.

  The male paramedic opened the doors. ‘Here you are Jess, love – your carriage awaits. Or should I call you Cinderella?’ he joked. Her eyes were still fixed on Will’s.

  ‘This is as far as I go for now,’ he said. ‘Take good care of yourself for me.’

  After her incoherence earlier, he wasn’t sure how aware she was of what was going on. But when he said this she gave a little nod, and her eyes suddenly filled with inexplicable tears.

  The doors shut and the ambulance moved away, lights circling crazily, its siren beginning its long, crescendoing wail like the saxophone note at the start of Rhapsody in Blue. Will watched it go. And for once in his life he felt like he’d done something useful. Something good.

  22

  1943

  Stella’s bruise spread and blossomed like an exotic flower.

  The flesh across her cheekbone puffed up until it was tight and shiny, and the swelling pushed her eye half-closed. She tried to cover it up with face powder and pin on the hat Ada had given her at an angle to hide it, but ended up looking more alarming than ever. And so, unable to face the curious stares of strangers and questions from people she knew, she stayed in the house.

  Nancy didn’t call round again. The question of whether she had letters to give her from Dan beat around in Stella’s brain like a bird trapped in a sealed room, sometimes quite frenziedly, at other times with an exhausted hopelessness. Confined to the gloomy rooms of the Vicarage in those still, hot late-summer days it felt like she’d shrunk into some small space inside herself. Like in the worst days of the Blitz, when they’d got used to retreating to the shelter in the cellar while destruction rained down from the sky, emerging when the All Clear sounded to assess the damage. Now she wondered if it would ever feel like the danger had passed. If she’d ever feel safe again.

  Charles never once referred to what she privately thought of as ‘the indecent act’, but his attitude towards her underwent something of a transformation. Over the few remaining days before his departure he showed her great solicitude – tenderness, even – though the effort this cost him was obvious. It was as if he was determined to rewrite their marriage; as if he believed that by putting on a convincing display of normality he might persuade her she’d imagined everything that had gone before. Also, she couldn’t quite escape the feeling that he was almost pleased with himself. As if he’d claimed her at last. As if he’d proved something.

  He prayed more than ever. A kind of earnestness had replaced the despair she’d sensed in him before he’d gone away. He wanted her to pray with him, and asked her to kneel beside him on the floor before getting into bed at night. Clasping her hand painfully tight he begged God to deliver them from base, human desires and temptations of the flesh, as if she had been the one to defile him.

  Much of his time was taken up with preparing a sermon for his final Sunday service. Its theme, he told her gravely over breakfast on Sunday morning, was love and forgiveness. It was more important than ever in a time of war, he said. He was using St Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians as the reading.

  ‘The one we had at our wedding,’ Stella remarked dully. Peter Underwood had read it.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Charles said vaguely. ‘I’d forgotten that.’

  On Sunday both of them seemed to accept without saying anything that she wouldn’t be going to church; her face was still too much of a mess. Clearing away the breakfast things she
wondered what he’d say to the people who asked where she was. When she heard him leave she sank down into a chair at the table and dropped her head into her hands.

  It was only ten o’clock in the morning but she felt inexpressibly tired, and the prospect of getting up and carrying on – with the washing up, making the bed, breathing, living without Dan – was utterly overwhelming. After a while her cheek began to throb where it was pressed against her folded arms, so she twisted her head round to the other side.

  And that was when she saw him.

  Maybe she’d fallen asleep and was dreaming. Or hallucinating. Or maybe her mind had simply lost its reason and conjured up the thing that she most desired, like a mirage of an oasis appearing before weary desert wanderers. His hands were cupped against the kitchen window as he peered in. She sat up and blinked stupidly, and was trying to decide which of the three possibilities was the real one when he saw her. His hands flattened against the glass.

  ‘Stella!’

  In an instant she was out of her seat, throwing herself across the kitchen towards the back door. She hadn’t got round to unlocking it from last night and her hands were shaking so much she could barely slide the bolt back. But then the door was open and he was there, in front of her, pulling her roughly into his arms, kissing her mouth, her eyes,her bruised and swollen cheek.

  ‘Christ Stella, what happened? Did he do this to you?’

  She didn’t want to talk about it; not at that moment when there were so many other, more important questions to ask. Not when she could spend those precious moments kissing him. Her fists closed around the collar of his tunic and she pulled him downwards so that his mouth covered hers again, kissing him as if her life depended on it. Like she was breathing his oxygen into her own starved lungs.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ It was gasped between kisses.

  ‘I wrote . . . Didn’t you get the letter from Nancy?’

  She shook her head as kisses rained on her face.

  ‘Flak farm. A week.’

  ‘What’s . . . a flak farm?’

  ‘Where they send you to stop you cracking up . . . when things get too much. Some god-awful country manor house . . . with a butler and Red Cross girls all over the place. I left.’

  Gently she pulled away and looked at him properly for the first time. There were lines etched around his mouth that hadn’t been there before and hollows in his cheeks. ‘My God, Dan – are you all right?’

  He exhaled shakily. ‘I’m good now I’ve seen you. That’s all I needed, to know that you’re here and you’re OK. Except that you’re not. Tell me what happened.’

  They’d been standing in the sunless lobby between the back door and the scullery – almost the same place in which he’d kissed her last time – but now she turned and went back to the kitchen. ‘Let me make you a cup of tea. We’re safe for half an hour.’

  ‘Forget the tea.’ He was right behind her, taking hold of her shoulders and twisting her round to face him. ‘He did it, didn’t he? Jesus Christ Almighty . . . Come with me, Stella. Come with me now. I can’t leave you here.’

  She cut him off. ‘That would make things much worse in the long run. He’s leaving the day after tomorrow, and it’ll be months – years perhaps – before he’s back. I can stick it out for two more days. It won’t happen again.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I tried to tell him that I knew he – that I knew about him and Peter. He was drunk, and angry. He denied it. He wanted to prove – I don’t know – that he was a proper man, or something.’

  ‘Goddammit Stella . . .’ He let her go and took a few steps back, rubbing a hand over his face as the implications of her words sank in. ‘Jesus. Jesus.’

  ‘It’s all right. It’s over now. And you’re here . . .’ She still couldn’t be certain she wasn’t dreaming. ‘How long have you got?’

  ‘I’m back on duty Thursday.’

  Thursday. She thought quickly. Charles was leaving on Tuesday, but not until the afternoon. He had to be at Waterloo at five o’clock.

  ‘That gives us Tuesday night and all of Wednesday.’ Not enough, never enough, but a gift nonetheless. Their eyes met across the table. ‘Where?’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll find somewhere.’

  *

  Leaving her was like cutting off his own arm. The shadows were back in her eyes as she stood at the back door of that great bleak tomb of a house and watched him walk down the path to the gate.

  The sound of singing drifted over from the ugly Victorian brick church across the road. He recognized the hymn: Love Divine, All Loves Excelling. Hatred blackened his heart. What did that bastard know about love? He imagined slipping in through the arched doors and striding right down the aisle to land a punch right in his face in front of his blind, adoring congregation. It took just about every ounce of willpower to keep walking.

  He had no sense of where he was going, his head too full to take in any detail of the streets he passed along. His thoughts were not distinct from one another but a dark mass, a swarm of bees. He could hear Louis Johnson’s voice calmly telling him to keep going forward, just like he did in dense cloud cover at twenty thousand feet, though Johnson had been hit in the chest by a twenty-millimetre shell on the Hanover mission and had died somewhere over the English Channel on the return to base.

  The small of his back was wet with sweat. He felt slightly dizzy, like he hadn’t slept for days, though they’d given them tablets at the flak farm that knocked them out for ten hours straight. Fitcham Park it was called. It was some big fancy pants Neo-Palladian pile in the country that was supposed to supply the battle-weary officer with every comfort he might desire.

  It had given Dan the creeps. The library-like silence that weighted the air in the huge rooms felt unnatural, and meant that the noises inside his head – the constant roar of engines, Louis Johnson’s voice – were all the louder. The smiles of the Red Cross girls had been painted on a little too brightly, and the empty days which they were supposed to fill playing croquet or shooting skeets gave him too much time to think. About Hamburg’s burning schools and burning houses. About Louis Johnson with his flying suit all dark and glistening with blood, his baby boy without a father. About Stella. He knew that seeing her for five minutes would do him more good than five weeks at Fitcham Park.

  Leaving had just been a matter of signing out; the Red Cross girl on the desk had expressed regret but hadn’t tried to stop him. Adelman and Morgan had been more difficult to get past, but since neither of them had been sober since they’d arrived their objections were half-hearted. He’d caught the train to London and spent last night in the only hotel he could find with a room available; a tall, narrow building on Greek Street, that got progressively dingier and more down at heel on each successive floor.

  He stopped at a crossroads now, totally disorientated. He had no idea where he was, nor how to get back into the city, though it occurred to him that he didn’t particularly want to go back there, either to the crowded streets or the depressing hotel room. The day stretched ahead of him and he felt the familiar panic begin to rise, filling his legs with sand.

  A bus was swaying up the road. On impulse he stuck out his hand and swung onto the platform at the back, then climbed the narrow stairs to the top deck.

  ‘Where to, sweetheart?’

  The woman with the ticket machine was blonde and stout and matronly. She smiled at Dan with great kindness, which told him how rough he must look.

  ‘I don’t care. Anywhere.’

  It was warm. The sun on his cheek and the rocking and swaying of the vehicle were soporific and soothed him into a welcome half-doze. The branches of trees brushed against the windows and the streets were Sunday quiet. They passed people spilling out of a church into the sunshine and it made him think of Charles goddamn Thorne, which jolted him awake again.

  He sighed and felt in his pockets for cigarettes before remembering he’d smoked the last one instead of having breakfast
. Dammit. He turned to look out of the window, the brief spell of tranquillity broken. They were passing between rows of pretty Edwardian villas but a little further along the street, beyond a grassy gap where a house must once have stood, he could see a row of shops. He got to his feet and staggered down the steps.

  As the bus lumbered away he found himself standing on a neat high street. There was a butcher’s shop, its blinds pulled down and a sign saying ‘Closed’ hanging on the door. Next to it was a dress shop called Uptown Fashions with a headless, handless mannequin in the window, wearing a grey dress of notable ugliness. Beyond that was a greengrocer, a tiny drugstore and – right at the end – a newsagent and tobacconist’s.

  It was closed.

  Of course. Sunday. A great surge of frustrated fury rose up inside him and he grasped the brass handle on the door and shook it roughly before falling forward against the glass, resting his hands and his forehead on its cool surface. A mosaic of hand-written cards was stuck behind the glass, making it difficult to see anything inside. LOST: BLACK AND WHITE CAT, he read on one of the cards. The paper was yellowed, the ink faded – along with any hope of recovering the cat, Dan imagined. He glanced at the other cards, all of which seemed to be of a similar vintage: Daily Help Wanted by Gentleman, Weston Park, Lunch Provided. SEWING BEE, Tuesdays 10 am – 12 noon, All Saints Church Hall, all welcome. HOUSE FOR SALE: 4 Greenfields Lane, Church End. Contact J. B. Furnivall Solicitors, Highgate 8369.

  His pointless anger spent, he was about to turn away but something made him look back and read the last card again. Then he felt in his pockets and dug out the bus ticket he’d just bought. On the back, very small, he wrote the name and telephone number of the solicitor, as out of the chaos of his raging thoughts, a plan began to emerge.

  J. B. Furnivall’s office was on the ground floor of his home, a handsome Georgian townhouse on a leafy square. At five minutes to two on Monday afternoon, Dan was shown into the waiting room by his secretary. She had the solid proportions and stately profile of a ship’s figurehead and Dan assumed she was the person he’d spoken to that morning, who’d made out that it was both hugely inconvenient and nigh-on impossible to grant Dan an appointment at such short notice. Mr Furnivall was engaged with other business, she informed him now, gesturing to a row of hard chairs lined up against the wall. Dan waited, trying to ignore the smell of mutton that hung greasily in the air and mentally recreating the room as it must have been before partition walls had cut through cornices and mouldings to divide the space. Eventually Mr Furnivall appeared. It was quite obvious that the only business he’d been engaged with was lunch.