Izzy's War

by Isla Dewar

  ‘I loved the passion,’ he said.

  Izzy snorted, a slightly embarrassed laugh. ‘My father’s dead.’

  Jimmy said he knew.

  ‘I never made friends with him after that fight. I never said sorry. He said he’d pray for me and I said, “Don’t bother.” These were the last words I said to him.’

  ‘I’m sure he would have forgiven you. I’m sure he’d have loved his grandchild.’

  ‘I like to think that, too,’ said Izzy. ‘Sometimes I try to remember his face. I shut my eyes and try to conjure it up. Mostly I manage. But his eyes, I can’t get his eyes. I can’t remember what colour they were.’

  Jimmy said, ‘They were blue.’

  It was dark when they arrived. They turned into a long bumpy drive, fenced on either side and after miles drew up at a ranch house. It was a long, two-storeyed building, a veranda outside. All the lights were on. Izzy climbed out of the car, stretched and looked about. She breathed in, let the air slip over her tongue. ‘Snow,’ she said. ‘I was right, snow’s coming.’

  ‘Sometimes it comes early,’ he said. ‘Sometimes the temperature slips to minus thirty overnight. It gets cold. It snows.’

  He took her case, lifted Sam from her arms and strode inside. He left the door open, thinking she’d follow. But she hesitated, suddenly shy, overwhelmed, the old reticent Izzy. Alone, in the dark, in a new place and fearful of the new faces she had to meet.

  She heard the cries of welcome as Jimmy stepped across the threshold. ‘Look who I’ve brought.’

  She saw figures, a man and a woman, dark against the bright light, step up to meet her son, arms stretched. And still she hung back.

  Voices. ‘Oh, isn’t he gorgeous. Oh, my baby. Oh, my boy.’

  There was laughter.

  And Izzy hung back.

  A woman appeared in the doorway, tall, slender, wearing a skirt and a white shirt, she stepped onto the veranda, the house was warm and bright behind her. She smiled, held out her arms and said, ‘Izzy, what’re you doin’ standing out there in the cold? Come in.’

  Epilogue

  A Very Good War

  They talked. and they talked. And they talked. Jimmy said he’d never seen anything like it. ‘Well, heard, actually. How can two people have so much to say without repeating themselves?’

  But Izzy and Elspeth could. Their conversations rambled through reminiscences, anecdotes, favourite old stories and the five-year catching up they had to do. The pair started at breakfast, carried on till lunch, chatted through supper and, in the evening, sat on the swing on the veranda of the house Izzy and Jimmy had built, looking out across the garden to the world beyond – a huge green landscape, the river, trees, then mountains bluing into more mountains – talking. It had been going on for three weeks.

  In the morning, as Izzy clattered in the kitchen, making coffee, pancakes and scrambled eggs, Elspeth said, ‘Time was the only thing you could make was porridge.’

  ‘Needs must,’ said Izzy. ‘People have to eat. Jimmy’s mum, Maggie, taught me.’

  ‘You get along with Jimmy’s folks?’ asked Elspeth.

  Izzy nodded. ‘Yes. It was easy. That night when I first arrived, Maggie called to me, “Come in,” she said. In I went and they were so lovely, so welcoming, I knew everything was going to be fine. I belonged. And so did Sam.’

  The school bus arrived to pick up Sam, Jimmy hauled on his jacket, said he had to go. He was doing what he’d said he would do – working at the local hospital and, in his spare time, breeding horses. There were five Appaloosas in the stables behind the house. He kissed Izzy, picked up Amelia, kissed her and told her to be a good girl and left. Amelia, Izzy’s newest arrival, four years old, with tumbling curls and huge eyes, was a wilful child and stubborn, like her mother.

  ‘That’s it,’ Izzy had told Elspeth. ‘No more babies.’

  ‘That’s what you said after Sam.’ Elspeth reminded her.

  ‘Yes, but this time I mean it. Also, after Sam I forgot what giving birth was like. The memory of it melted away. First pain with Amelia, I remembered. And, I’m still remembering. Definitely, no more.’

  At first, when Elspeth had said she was finally coming, Izzy had wanted to go to New York to meet her and accompany her on the journey to Montana. But Elspeth had written to say that wasn’t necessary. ‘I just have to get on a train and sit,’ she’d written. ‘I want to do that. I want to travel the route you travelled and see it for myself.’

  As she went, she wrote long letters to Charles. They spoke about endless unfenced landscapes, mountains, the dining car and how she’d bonded with her fellow travellers. Though she’d hardly spoken to them – ‘They have become familiar faces,’ she’d said. She’d told him about the long mournful whistle. ‘It adds to the allure of this journey. It’s romantic, it tells a story, everyone’s story. Sometimes when I hear it, I think I could go on travelling forever. I’d just sit here, staring, dreaming, thinking about my past and never arriving anywhere.’

  This letter had been addressed to Mr Moon. Seeing it on the envelope had made Charles laugh. He read her thoughts on endlessly travelling and thought, That’s my Elspeth. Throws herself into whatever she’s doing. Right now, she’d be living on Izzy’s ranch and imagining herself living the cowboy life, riding the range, sleeping in the bunkhouse, rounding up cattle. She’d come back to him. He knew that. She’d told him she loved him.

  ‘I seem to have fallen in love with you, Charles Moon,’ she’d said. ‘Despite myself, I don’t know what’s come over me. I’ve never had much control over my heart. But love, it’s damnable. It stops the flow of logical thought.’

  He’d said he didn’t know she had logical thoughts.

  ‘From time to time,’ she’d told him. ‘However, I find that I am thinking of you when I should be thinking of sensible things. I watch the clock, waiting for you to come home. It’s awful. But, there you are. I love you.’

  He’d told her he loved her back. He thought he’d loved her from the moment he first saw her in that dreadful cottage Izzy had lived in with her baby.

  ‘I hope that loving me won’t stop you from stopping me doing stupid impulsive things,’ she’d said.

  He’d frowned, working this out. Then he told her he loved that she did impulsive things. ‘I love your stupid past life. It makes me smile.’

  Her letter made him smile. He folded it. Put it in his pocket. Then, taking his walking stick, he left the house and started his long morning walk to the university where he wasn’t Charles Moon. He was Charles Marriot, lecturer in history. He smiled all the way. Soon his Elspeth would come back to him. She’d enjoy the journey.

  ‘Of course,’ Elspeth told Izzy. ‘It didn’t last long. His being Mr Moon, I mean. Somehow, Charles got the landlord to think he’d made a terrible gaffe and we became Mr and Mrs Marriot. You can’t just live together. People call it living in sin. You’d think that would make more people do it. Living in sin sounds so juicy.’

  Izzy shrugged. ‘When you put it like that, I suppose it does.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Elspeth, ‘he thinks life would be easier if I changed my name by deed poll. I’d be Elspeth Marriot.’

  Izzy made a face.

  ‘I know,’ said Elspeth. ‘I wouldn’t feel like me any more. Still, we are living as man and wife and if we want to buy the flat, it might make things easier.’

  ‘It might,’ Izzy agreed. ‘Did you start living as man and wife straight away. Soon as you moved in together?’

  Elspeth shook her head. ‘I made him wait.’

  ‘How long?’ asked Izzy. ‘Twenty minutes?’

  Elspeth snorted. ‘Three weeks. I went to bed one night and he was in it. He said his bed in the spare room was uncomfortable and cold, and, since he was paying more of the rent than me, he thought he should have the best bed. I just got in beside him. And that was that.’

  On Elspeth’s first night with Izzy, she’d spent some time looking at the wedding photographs. She wish
ed she’d been there.

  ‘Oh, it was a small do. Just me Jimmy and Sam and Jimmy’s folks.’

  Six weeks after Izzy’s arrival, she and Jimmy had married. ‘Had to do it,’ Izzy said. ‘His mum and dad wouldn’t let us sleep together. We were sneaking to secret places for a cuddle. Like teenagers, now I think about it.’

  As they poured over the photos, Amelia asked where she was. ‘Why didn’t you take a picture of me?’

  ‘You weren’t there,’ said Izzy. ‘You weren’t born yet.’

  ‘Yes, I was,’ said Amelia. ‘I was there. You just didn’t see me. I was there. I sang a song.’ She started to sing ‘If I’d Known You Were Coming, I’d Have Baked a Cake’, her favourite. The rendition was to Elspeth’s liking. It was in perfect tune. The girl had a good voice, unlike her mother.

  Hearing the song sung loudly and without a trace of embarrassment from the singer, and marvelling at Amelia’s firm belief that she was at a gathering she couldn’t possibly have attended on account of not being born at the time, Elspeth realised that Amelia was Hamish all over again. Resolute in her beliefs and fearless in letting other people know about them.

  ‘That one’s going to be a handful,’ Elspeth said. ‘She’s like her grandfather.’

  ‘Yes . . . I already figured that,’ said Izzy.

  Afternoons, Izzy worked in her garden. Elspeth sat on the lawn, watching. Amelia helped. She drenched plants with her toy yellow watering can, bossily wagging her finger at them, telling them to be good boys and girls and, ‘Grow.’

  God, she’s so like Hamish, Elspeth thought. Looking round, she realised that this small part of Montana was an exact replica of the garden at the manse in Scotland.

  ‘It’s my homage to my father,’ Izzy said. ‘I’m thinking that if he can see it from wherever he is, he’d approve. I’m apologising to him for telling him not to bother praying for me. The time came when I needed a prayer.’

  Elspeth said Hamish would love this place and asked after Izzy’s mother.

  ‘She’s well. I’m going over to see her next year. Dropping in on you and Mr Moon, by the way. Then when I come home, she’s coming with me. We’re trying to persuade her to live here with us. There’s room. I think she might. She’s always saying it’s time she had an adventure.’

  Elspeth smiled.

  ‘My mother says she wants to be like me. She thinks I’m fearless. I make rash decisions and follow them through with no thought of the consequences.’

  Elspeth picked a daisy, twirled it between her fingers and asked if Izzy thought that was true.

  ‘Nah,’ said Izzy. ‘I just don’t think about things properly. I decide to do something, do it, then think about it. I just never factor in failure. It doesn’t occur to me. So, I bumble through life bumping into things, making mistakes, getting into trouble, following my nose, really. I really ought to consider the consequences more. But if I did, I wouldn’t have had Sam, I wouldn’t have joined the ATA and I’d never have flown.’

  ‘You’d have missed your true calling,’ said Elspeth.

  ‘Yeah,’ Izzy agreed.

  She still flew. From time to time, Jimmy’s father asked her to take up his plane to survey the ranch, looking for stray cattle.

  It still brought rapture into Izzy’s life, a thrill so wild, so deep, it took her breath away. Brushing shoulder to shoulder with mountains, cruising high over pastures, gullies and the river that wound through Jimmy’s father’s land. She’d spot strays and radio their position to the hands on the ground. It was heaven. She was always alone in the sky. But not lonely, never that. Lonely was scary. Lonesome, she thought. Yes, lonesome. Lonesome was the stuff of country songs and old legends. It was romantic.

  From time to time, Izzy and Elspeth went for a ride. They took it slowly. Elspeth was keen to help with the horses. She groomed and fed them. She sang to them. Getting into the saddle was something else. She never did get onto the back of the horse she’d worked with in the forest. They ambled along, not chatting all that much, just enjoying the air and the view.

  Sometimes, Izzy would burst ahead, spurring the horse into a gallop, yelling back to Elspeth, ‘Come on. Give it a go. You’d love a gallop.’

  Elspeth always refused. She didn’t want to fall off.

  Julia had fallen off her horse. She’d fractured her skull. That had been over four years ago. Izzy hadn’t been able to go to the funeral, she’d just given birth to Amelia. She imagined Julia thundering towards a jump, whooping with joy, jacket flapping, scarlet silk lining flashing. She always did love a bit of scarlet silk. Julia had died instantly.

  ‘Never seen so many flowers,’ Elspeth had told her. ‘The church was full of them. The scent was overpowering. I met Claire, too. Charles knows her. Do you keep in touch with her?’

  ‘We send Christmas cards. We write, but not that often.’

  ‘Claire’s like an Englishwoman from a Hollywood film,’ said Elspeth. ‘Perfect skin, friendly and slightly aloof. When she was speaking to me, I got the impression she was thinking about something else.’

  ‘Did you meet her family?’ asked Izzy.

  Elspeth said she hadn’t. ‘Charles said her husband took months and months to recover from the POW camp. But now he’s something important in the city. Her daughter got a place at Oxford. Her son rebelled. He never settled after they brought him home from South Africa. He dropped out of school and ran away back there. He works on his uncle’s farm.’

  Izzy almost said that Claire had once slept with Charles, but held her tongue. Instead she said there was a lot more to Claire than met the eye. ‘A smouldering passion.’

  ‘Talking of smouldering passion, you should have seen the young men at Julia’s funeral. Masses of them.’

  ‘Julia had a few more boyfriends than she told us about,’ Izzy said.

  ‘But nobody after Walter. Charles was sure of that.’

  Izzy smiled, ‘Beaux, darling. That’s what Julia would have called them. I can’t say that. I could never call a boyfriend my “beau”. I guess I’m not posh enough. And, she called everyone “darling”. Sometimes, I used to think it was because she forgot people’s names. But now, I think she was just friendly. And, she could get away with it.’

  ‘You never saw her after you left for America?’

  Izzy shook her head. ‘We wrote. I paid her back the money I owed. And, she was right, I didn’t need a return ticket. She was lovely.’

  ‘You miss her,’ said Elspeth.

  ‘I miss them all – Diane, my father, Julia. I have my quiet time when I think of them – twenty to two. Jimmy told me to do that. Put aside a little bit of every day to remember the people who have gone from you. It helps.’

  Elspeth supposed it would.

  Their best conversations were in the evening, after they’d eaten supper and the children were in bed. The two would sit outside on the swing, gazing out at the gathering dark, remembering distant moments, speculating about the future. They’d drink coffee and speak aloud their meandering thoughts.

  ‘Now I think about Jimmy and me, we did it all the wrong way round,’ said Izzy. ‘People are supposed to meet, fall in love, find somewhere to live, get married, do it, you know, in bed, then have children.’

  ‘That’s the myth of love stories and songs,’ said Elspeth.

  ‘But I met Jimmy, slept with him, had a baby, married him, built a house with him, then we fell in love and had another baby. It’s all jumbled up.’

  Elspeth said that the war jumbled up a lot of peoples’ lives. ‘Look at me. I met Charles, moved in with Charles, shared a bed with him, then fell for him. And for a while, he took my name. In the scheme of things, I’m meant to take his.’

  Izzy agreed.

  ‘It was the war,’ said Elspeth. ‘It stopped us in our tracks. Took us places we never imagined we’d be, introduced us to people we’d never normally have met. If Hitler hadn’t invaded Poland, I’d never have married Tyler. I’d never have met Lorna. I’d know nothin
g about trees. The things I saw in that forest. It’d take years to tell you it all. I was hungry for four years. I’ve done things I’m ashamed of.’

  ‘Everybody’s done things they’re ashamed of,’ said Izzy.

  ‘Not all that many married to get out of a forest, and ditched their husband after one day. I still can’t go past York on the train without feeling awful. Tyler’s out there somewhere trudging through a dense wood, cursing me.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Izzy. ‘He’ll have moved on. He’ll be happy. It’s his nature. And if he is in some dense wood, he won’t be trudging. He’ll be striding. He’ll be where he loves to be in the country he longed to go back to.’

  ‘Well, thanks for that, I feel a little less guilty.’

  Izzy said, ‘Don’t talk to me about guilt.’

  Elspeth looked at her, eyebrows raised, shocked. ‘What have you got to be guilty about?’

  ‘Everything,’ said Izzy. ‘It was a war, Elspeth, a bloody war. Men trudged through France and Belgium. People died, thousands and thousands of them. People went missing. People lost limbs. What did I do? I saw a woman burned to death and that was awful. I lost people I knew. But I made a lot of new friends. I met my husband. I had a baby. I flew. I loved it. I lived for it. It was a thrill. I saw marvellous things from where I was in the sky.’

  ‘What’s to be guilty about?’

  Izzy sighed. ‘All in all, in spite of everything, I had a very good war.’

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781409033707

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Published in 2010 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing