by Iona Grey
‘I hope you’re not shocked by the state of the place,’ Jess said as she came back through from the dining room. ‘We’ve cleaned it up as best we could, but it can’t have been touched for years.’
‘It hasn’t.’ Stella let out a breath of laughter, her gaze falling on the crumbling velvet sofa. ‘It’s all just exactly the same. Nancy never was the domesticated type.’
‘The council had cleared out a lot of her belongings when they took charge of the place, but they kept the things they thought might be of personal value. There wasn’t an awful lot here, to be honest. A lot of it had been taken when she moved into the home, but we thought that maybe you might like to take what was left. For Vivien . . . ?’
‘Yes. I’ll ask her.’ It was a thoughtful offer, though Vivien had never shown any interest in her real mother and, given her taste for designer trappings and expensive décor, Stella couldn’t think that there would be anything from here that would find a place in her carefully styled home. ‘How kind of you to think of that.’
‘Would you like to go upstairs?’ Will asked.
‘Oh . . . I’m not sure . . . Really, there’s no need.’ Now the time had come, her chest felt tight, as if the thin walls that held her emotions in check might suddenly break. The violet-strewn room was so vivid in her memory, she wasn’t sure she could bear to have the image overlaid by something different. But Jess was taking her arm, leading her gently towards the stairs.
‘Actually, there is really. Some of the things they kept were yours. One of the rooms was locked. We didn’t know what was behind the door, but the council must have opened it when they took over. They found the missing letters in there, lots and lots of them. They’d been pushed under the door – that’s what Nancy must have done whenever one arrived. They’re up here, waiting for you. Come and see.’
And so, slowly, carefully, they filed up the stairs. Jess led the way and opened the door into the bedroom that had been shut and locked for almost seventy years.
‘Oh . . .’ Stella pressed her hands to her mouth as she turned to take it all in, though there was really no need. All was as it had been. The afternoon sun sloped across walls strewn with faded violets and lay in honeyed pools on the old brass bed. On the bedside table the pile of letters waited for her.
‘It was a bit of a mess, as you can imagine, having been shut up for so long,’ Will was explaining from the doorway. ‘Lots of soot had fallen down the chimney and there were cobwebs like ships’ rigging. We think a bird must have built a nest in the chimney because the floor was covered in straw.’
Packing straw, she thought, remembering Mrs Nichols’ gift and stifling a gasp of laughter. The bed creaked as she lowered herself onto it, stroking her hand wonderingly over the sheets she had brought from the Vicarage in her suitcase. Dazedly she shook her head.
‘I feel like I’ve come home. Like he’s here.’
There was the tiniest pause. And then, taking in a breath Will stepped forwards and opened the laptop computer he was carrying.
‘Well, actually . . . in a manner of speaking . . . he is.’
*
The sun slipped down the wall to the floor. The violets in the corners of the room retreated into the shadows. They talked.
In the corner of the computer screen there was a small box in which she could see herself, the image that Dan would see on his screen. She looked old, but she didn’t feel it. The years rolled back and she was the girl she’d been back then; shy, a little uncertain, enchanted by him.
Illness and age had altered her golden boy. The unruly mane of tawny hair was almost gone and his skin had the pallor of sickness, but he was there in the gestures she remembered so well, the quirk of his smile and the pitch of his voice. The things he said. The way he made her feel.
He was there.
He had married, he told her. He had married Louis Johnson’s widow, Jean, when her boy was fourteen years old and beginning to be a handful. ‘She figured he needed a father, and I figured I owed it to Louis. It was a happy enough marriage. We didn’t have any babies of our own, which I guess she would have liked, but Jimmy was a good kid. He has a son called Joe, who fixed this whole thing up with your Will. He’s great. He works as a stunt driver in the movies.’
‘Is he married?’
‘No . . . but he has a great partner. Called Ryan.’
Across the thousands of miles that separated them their eyes met and held and they smiled, both thinking of Charles. ‘Things have changed,’ she said softly. ‘The world is a better, more tolerant place these days. Did we help to make it better, do you think?’
He sighed and shifted his position on the bank of pillows. Pain flickered across his face and she felt her heart twist. ‘I’d like to think we did, because otherwise what was it all for? What did those men die for – Louis and Joey Harper and all the others? Wasn’t it so people could live the lives they wanted to have and be the people they were meant to be?’
‘Sometimes I think we were unlucky, being born at the time we were,’ Stella said. ‘I look out there and see Jess and Will, and it seems so simple for them. They love each other. They’ll have a life together; a home and children – simple, wonderful things. I envy them that. But then I remember how lucky we were too, to have met at all. If it hadn’t been for the war I would never have known you. I could never have become the person you made me. I would have lived a smaller, narrower life if I hadn’t loved you.’
‘Jeez, Stella . . .’ She had heard him say those words before, in that exact same weary, ragged way, as if he was drawing them right out from his soul. The deliciousness of hearing them again made her shiver. ‘Just one more time. What I wouldn’t give to see you one more time; properly, so I could touch you. They won’t let me fly, you know. I’ve tried every airline and not a single one will have me on board.’ He shook his head. ‘Insurance risk, they say; I might die in the air. It would be funny if it wasn’t so goddamned infuriating. We died in our thousands in the skies over Europe back then. They sent us up there to die. No one ever mentioned insurance risk.’
She was laughing, and crying, and melting inside. ‘I’ll come. To you. I’ll get a flight as soon as I can.’
He was tired now, she could see it in every line of his face, in the opaqueness of his eyes. Tired and in pain. His smile was slow and sad and relieved and beautiful.
‘Good. I’ll wait for you.’
She sat, for a little while after the screen had reverted to its view of an improbably featureless hill, and thought. Her head was full of his voice and the things that he’d said. She wanted time to just hold those things there, and cherish them.
In the garden below the window Will was working, hacking into the overgrown shrubbery that had swallowed up the lawn. It had been hot before, and he had taken his shirt off. She watched him now, noticing how the muscles moved beneath his skin, remembering how it felt to be quick and strong and young. And suddenly it was as if she had fallen through time, and she was walking across the garden to Dan, who was pushing a lawnmower, a sheen of sweat like gold-dust on his sun-warmed skin, a cigarette wedged in the corner of his mouth.
Time. It stretched and contracted. Jess appeared and the boy on the lawn turned and was Will again. She watched him loop his arm around her and kiss the top of her head. They looked beautiful together, she thought with a sharp lurch of emotion. Not only because they were both young and attractive, but because they were so transparently in love. It transformed them; set them slightly apart and made them seem invincible. She wondered if they knew how precious it was, to have the whole joyous adventure of their life together ahead of them? And then she caught a glimpse of the rapt expression on Will’s face as he smiled at Jess, and she knew that they did, and that they would be all right.
She took a step back from the window, but the movement must have caught his eye and he looked up. Seeing her there he raised his hand, questions written across his open face.
She smiled and raised a hand in return. T
hen she gathered up her precious letters and left the violet-scattered bedroom to go and ask if they would be so good as to help her book a flight to America.
Epilogue
The wide sky is a deep, glowing indigo. The stars are beginning to fade and there is a thread of pinky gold where it meets the more opaque blue of the sea, showing that a new day will soon begin.
The house is on the beach, exactly as he said it would be. The rooms are big and airy, one leading into the other, in a way that makes you feel like you can breathe and spread and relax, and there are whole walls of glass looking out over the sweep of pale sand and the ocean. In the living room, huge sofas are placed around the fireplace.
On the floor there is a white fur rug.
Dan’s family had been there to greet her, to welcome this elderly English stranger who knew their father and grandfather even before they did, and who has flown across the Atlantic to be with him at the end. For a while the house had been filled with people, and voices, and a curious atmosphere of tender joy that was almost like a celebration. Then, with infinite kindness and tact, everyone melted away and left the two of them alone. Again. The circle is complete.
Photographs lie scattered across the bed, like bleached autumn leaves. Last night she lay beside him and they studied them together, marvelling at their own youthful beauty, gilded and warmed back into being in the soft glow of the lamp. The photograph he’d taken of her in the ruins of St Clements is creased and torn at the edges, but it brought the moment back with a clarity that made her feel breathless; the throbbing thirst of her first hangover, the anguish over a lost watch (whatever happened to that? She hasn’t seen it for years), the uncomfortable awareness of the American stranger. The expression on that girl’s face is closed and self-absorbed. She can’t see what lies ahead.
How different it would all have been if she could. How many different choices she would have made.
But it is over now. The time for choosing is past.
The pale strip of sky on the horizon is spreading upwards; water bleeding into ink, diluting the darkness. The chest against which her cheek rests is still, and the hand she holds beginning to lose its warmth.
But she holds on.
In a little while she will let go. She will get up, alert the hovering nurses and find Joe and Ryan. In a little while. But for now the sun is rising and the sky is turning pink and gold, and she is with him. And they are both at peace.
Acknowledgements
There are many people who helped Letters to the Lost on its journey from head to printed page and to whom I owe thanks for the encouragement and support they gave me as I wrote it. Chief amongst these are my fabulous friends Abby Green (whose perfectly timed parcel in the post provided a spark of inspiration and gave me the boost I needed to start the story), Sally Bowden, Sharon Kendrick, Heidi Rice, Fiona Harper, Scarlet Wilson and Julie Cohen (with thanks for her invaluable research assistance). Before I started writing the book I was lucky enough to get to know the wonderful Lucinda Riley, and I am indebted to her for her advice and friendship: the former made it easier to write, and the latter made the process much more enjoyable.
I couldn’t send this book out into the world without saying a special thank you to the inestimable, irreplaceable Penny Jordan, without whom I may never have written a word, and whom I think of with gratitude and love every time I sit down at my computer. Heartfelt thanks also go to Lucy Gilmour, whose wisdom and insight have guided me on the road from aspiring to published writer, and to Susanna Kearsley, whose generosity played a big part in the book’s journey to publication when she introduced me to Becky Ritchie of Curtis Brown at an RNA party (thank you, RNA!). Becky was its first reader and its greatest champion, and I’m incredibly fortunate to have her as my agent. I feel honoured to be a CB author, and sincere thanks go to Rachel Clements, Sophie Harris and Alice Lutyens for all they’ve done to send Letters out into the world. And to Deborah Schneider of Gelfman Schneider, who wrote me an email that actually made me shout with happiness. Thank you!
After the solitary months of writing, one of the best bits about actually selling a book is suddenly becoming part of a team. I’m hugely grateful to the warm, wonderful and welcoming people at Simon & Schuster UK and St Martins Press in the US; especially to Clare Hey and Anne Brewer for their thorough but sensitive editing, their patience and positivity, and for long email exchanges in which we discussed Dan and Stella, Will and Jess like they were people we all knew.
Final thanks go to my family. To my mum, Helen, who proved an excellent research assistant, calling upon her more senior friends for first-hand information about whether hotels did room service in the early 1940s and how houses were bought and sold in wartime. To my husband, John, for always, always believing it was just a matter of time until the book got published and never minding how long it took, and my daughters, Poppy, Rosie and Ella, for being patient about research trips thinly disguised as family holidays, and understanding that wearing pyjamas all day and messing about on the internet is work when I do it, but not when they do. (Sorrythanksloveyou xxx.)
An Interview with Iona Grey
Letters to the Lost is a big sweeping love story. What came first: the characters or the storyline?
Actually, the title came first! For some time I had been working on a completely different novel, set in the early years of the twentieth century, and one day after lunch I was making my way upstairs to my study in the attic (reluctantly: to say it wasn’t going well would be an understatement) when I passed my daughter’s room and glimpsed a letter lying open on her desk. Instantly curious as to whom it could be from, I continued on my way but as I sat down at my keyboard the phrase ‘Letters from the Lost’ drifted into my head.
I still have the piece of paper that I began to make notes on that afternoon. At the top it says (ungrammatically) ‘Who are the letters to? Who are they from?’ In the dusty filing cabinet at the back of my mind I had an idea about an ordinary house, empty and long-abandoned, and I knew that the letters would arrive there. I think all the chaos and upheaval of London in wartime made it feel very possible that the house could have belonged to someone from that time who had planned a future there. A future that, for whatever reason, hadn’t happened as hoped. Those were the seeds from which the present and the past storylines grew.
What is it about letters that so appealed to you?
There’s just something immediately intriguing about a letter – as the one on my daughter’s desk proved! Especially in the twenty-first century when communication is mostly done by text and email, a handwritten letter is inescapably significant: special, and suggestive of words and emotions too important to be trusted to technology. Texts are dashed off in seconds, emails in minutes, whereas a letter takes time and involves planning; the purchase of paper, envelopes, stamps, and the unhurried ritual of setting out the address and date at the top of the page. A letter bears the personality of the sender in every stroke of ink, and it can be folded away and kept somewhere secret, to be rediscovered a lifetime later.
We switch between 1943 and seventy years later. What was is about those periods that drew you to write about them?
I feel helplessly drawn towards the Second World War as a setting, I think because I grew up with wartime stories. Born in the 1970s, mine is the generation whose parents and grandparents had lived through it and were beginning to filter their memories and experiences into children’s fiction. I remember the scramble to be next in line for Judith Kerr’s When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit and Noel Streatfeild’s When The Siren Wailed from the library cupboard in my primary school, and my great excitement when Carrie’s War by Nina Bawden (my favourite book) was adapted for a TV series. As I got older I continued to seek out books set in this era, so it was instinctive to place my own story during the war.
The 2011 bit was a balancing act: I knew I had to have a modern enough setting to make all the technology the story uses to be possible (there’s much internet searching for historical
records, as well as email and skype) but I was aware of Dan and Stella’s advancing years!
If you could travel back in time to London during the Blitz what would you most want to see? Do you think you would recognise the city from your research, given how much it has changed?
What a great question! I think more than anything, I’d like to experience the atmosphere and the mood of the people. Today we use the term ‘Blitz Spirit’ quite casually to refer to cheerfulness in adversity if the train we’re travelling on breaks down, or when one of those rare heavy snowfalls makes everything grind to a halt, but I don’t think anyone who wasn’t alive during the war can possibly appreciate its true meaning: the relentless, understated courage required by everyone to simply keep going, through privations and separations and fear. I was captivated and moved by all the photographs I came across during my research, of people picking their way through rubble to go about their everyday business, smiling as they bedded down with their children on the platforms in the underground for the night, drinking tea amidst smouldering ruins. It’s humbling to remember that they weren’t just coping with such conditions for a few inconvenient days or weeks, but indefinitely, all the time.
In twenty-first-century Britain the threat to our lives from enemy attack is – in real terms – relatively low, and yet we live in an atmosphere of anxiety and high alert. I’m fascinated by the way the country, and in the Blitzed cities in particular, continued to function with apparent normality during those six long years between 1939 and 1945. To us Keep Calm and Carry On is a slogan that appears on mugs and tea towels, but to millions of ordinary people it was a basic principle of survival, when they didn’t know when – or how – the war would end.
The Second World War was a time of increased opportunity for women with many working outside the home for the first time, yet Stella remains very much within the domestic sphere. Was that a deliberate decision?