Like everything else, the visitor centre was on a grand and formal scale but Celeste was disappointed to find that there was no café. As it was still empty, she was able to ask a member of staff to keep an eye on her things while she spent a few minutes looking at the exhibits, photographs and interactive displays, many of which disclosed poignant personal stories about members of the US military who had lost their lives in World War II.
Celeste’s knowledge of military history was sketchy at best. Reading the information boards, she felt overwhelmed by the huge number of deaths and scarcely able to comprehend the immensity of the personal tragedy and loss laid to rest within metres of where she stood. These young men, many of them still in their teens, had given their lives for her country and for people like her.
She learnt that the cemetery contained the remains of 3,811 American war dead and that the Walls of the Missing recorded 5,127 names of those who had been listed as ‘missing in action’. Most of the fallen had died in the Battle of the Atlantic or in the strategic air bombardment of north-west Europe.
She understood these references a little better now and began to form a picture in her mind of the conflict that Eugene Ashford and so many others like him had been caught up in. She knew they had died as heroes and were lovingly remembered as such by their families and friends. And yet, she couldn’t help but reflect that for every name engraved on a monument or headstone within this cemetery, there were other names engraved in other cemeteries on other shores in loving memory of those who had died on account of their actions. These included innocent children and babies – victims of Allied bombardments.
She wandered through the Memorial Building, constructed of the famous British Portland Stone that was used for the construction of war memorials thanks to its exceptional hard and durable qualities, and on into an elegant anteroom whose ceiling was covered by an extraordinary mosaic, predominantly blue in colour, through which ghostly aircraft were depicted making their final flights. Perhaps more than any photograph, this evocative work of art made her feel for herself the pathos and tragic waste of life of these high-flying young men sacrificed in the war.
Celeste unfolded the copy of Barbara’s email that she had printed off and went over to find the helpful old gentleman, who was looking after her stuff. Barbara appeared to be a very efficient lady. She had provided Celeste with details of Eugene’s full name, rank, dates of birth and death as well as his memorial ID and the burial plot coordinates needed to find his headstone. When Arthur (she’d read his name on his lapel badge), picked up Celeste’s workbox and tripod and offered to accompany her to the plot, she was happy to accept his help. It wasn’t long before she was following him along the neat strip of grass separating two concentric curves of grave markers laid out in parade-ground precision, each one gleaming pristine white in the morning sunshine.
I won’t be needing to scrub the stone, thought Celeste happily. It was all so clinically well kept. The grass was as perfectly mown as a croquet lawn. She could hear the mowers going up and down in the distance already even though it was a Sunday in March. Most of the graves were bare though a few of them were adorned with small flags – the Stars and Stripes and The Union Jack – and occasionally a small posy of spring flowers or a black-and-white photograph were propped up against the headstone.
After a couple of hundred metres, Arthur stopped, checked the piece of paper Celeste had handed to him and pointed to the marker.
‘This is the one’ he said. ‘Eugene J Ashford.’
Celeste hung her head, saddened to see how little information was given on the headstone. With stark simplicity the inscription read.
EUGENE J ASHFORD
351 BOMBER SQUADRON
CALIFORNIA 19 MAR 1945
She crouched down to place the pot of flowers in front of the headstone and ran her fingers gently along the grooves of the inscription. Was this all that remained? For a life given in sacrifice, a few clinical words carved out on a stone cross? There was so little space on the cross – no room to add a date of birth (which was perhaps a blessing since so many of the dead soldiers were so painfully young), or for the family to add a comforting thought or endearment or message in memory of their loved one.
Once Arthur had left, it didn’t take Celeste long to tend to Eugene’s grave since she had accomplished most of the work arranging the flowers at Seventh Heaven that morning. She completed the final touches – a few tall statement stems that she had kept to one side for fear they would be damaged in transit, a purple ribbon to go around the rim of the clay pot. She had also brought copies of the two photographs sent through online by Barbara, which she had laminated at her college and attached with clips to plastic plant-markers taken from the shop supplies. She pushed the markers firmly into the turf so that the photographs were displayed in front of the headstone.
Eugene’s eyes seemed to follow her – dark and serious in the first photograph, mischievous and twinkling in the second. There he was, frozen in time in the shallows of life’s great adventure, unaware he had so few days left to live when he posed for the camera. She felt a connection with him and sat very still on the grass gazing at the two images of his face.
There was one more laminated card to display. The CelestialHeadstones.com website included an optional box where clients could type in a message to be displayed with the flowers on the grave. Celeste read over Barbara’s message, which she had carefully transcribed from the screen onto a handwritten card. Although, it was rare for her to put pen to paper these days (since all communications seemed to take place via a screen), Celeste’s handwriting was clear and neat in the copperplate style that she had perfected as a schoolgirl.
Barbara’s message read like that of a little girl to her daddy and Celeste could understand this only too well – Eugene’s death must have stopped the clock for Barbara, somehow arrested her emotional development – her love for her father was crystallised in those cherished memories of early childhood.
To my darling Daddy,
Lieutenant Eugene Jack Ashford of the US Army Air Corps
Navigator of the skies.
I was your little angel.
Then you flew your airplane all the way up to heaven.
Now you are my guardian angel watching over me from the stars.
You were so strong, so gentle and so brave.
Not a day goes by without me missing you. You are always in my heart.
Forever your little girl,
Baby x
Barbara had also included a quote from the English First World War poet, Rupert Brooke. Celeste knew a little about Brooke’s poetry as she had studied the First World War poets for her English literature exams at school. She knew that Brooke had connections with Cambridge having been an undergraduate at The King’s College and having lived for some time only a stone’s throw from where she now knelt, in the little village of Grantchester, which was the namesake and setting for one of his most famous poems. Of course, Celeste was also familiar with the poem ‘The Soldier’ (If I should die, think only this of me/That there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England…) But she had never come across the poem ‘The Great Lover’, from which Barbara had chosen a hauntingly beautiful and fitting quote:
My night shall be remembered for a star
That outshone all the suns of all men’s days.
As Celeste attached Barbara’s message to the headstone, she reflected that Brooke’s sentiment expressed in this verse was prophetic. The poet himself had been a young man of great beauty and precocious talent who had met an untimely death in 1915 from sepsis on an army hospital ship moored in a sheltered, sunlit bay off the Greek island of Skyros. He had been hastily buried on a hillside among olive groves with only a painted wooden cross to mark his grave. But thanks to his entrancing and luminous poetry, Brooke’s humble grave marker had been replaced with an ornate stone monument and had become a place of pilgrimage dappled with sunlight through olive branches, for lovers of
his poetry. So, the prophecy in this verse had come to pass. His star continued to shine on down the generations whilst the lives of others who had survived him were soon forgotten.
In meditative mood, Celeste took photographs of the grave from every angle and set up her tripod to include a picture of herself, kneeling to one side of the memorial flowers. As she balanced on her haunches, focused on the shots, she began to feel strangely on edge. She glanced over her shoulder, overcome with a creeping electric sensation that she was not alone. She shrugged it off. This was a graveyard after all. It was easy to start imagining things. She stood up to take a video sequence showing the 360-degree views from the spot where Barbara’s father was buried.
It was as she turned towards the trees that she froze mid-circuit. Her hand began to shake as the video continued to roll. She could see a figure, there in the woods, watching her, half-hidden in the shadows. When she looked up from the viewfinder, the low winter sun was dazzling. But shielding her eyes she could make out the dark shape of a man, very upright and still. His silhouette against the trees fitted the photographs of the airmen she had seen inside the visitor centre clothed in loose trousers and boots and bomber jackets. The shape didn’t move but seemed to shimmer as the breeze stirred the new spring leaves and sunlight filtered down through the branches.
She couldn’t tell how long they stood there, eyeing each other, senses connected and alert, like predator and prey on an African savannah. From nowhere, an icy gust of wind crossed the cemetery, toppling the pot of flowers and blowing her hair across her face. Once she had righted the pot and swept her hair away from her eyes, the figure was gone, and its trailing black shadow seemed to dissolve into the trees. She put out a hand to steady herself on the stone cross. As she gripped the cold white marble, she felt the blood draining from her head and her legs began to buckle.
PAST
13
She’s at her father’s house. It’s his weekend. It used to be her house and she still has her bedroom here but now she thinks of it as his – ever since he moved in his new bimbo Natasha. It’s such a tired old tale. Natasha is his former secretary – more than twenty years his junior. Celeste supposes older men would find her attractive – good figure, bottle-blonde hair and striking features if you can ignore the pocked skin that she cakes in foundation. Celeste has no idea what Natasha sees in her father – with his grey, thinning hair and his flaccid belly and his self-important arrogance – apart from his money of course and his position – money and power – so many young women will settle for that over a full head of hair and toned muscles and sex appeal… He’s her meal ticket to a comfortable life.
As for her life, she and Tom moved out of their luxury five-bedroom home with their mother after the divorce to live in a small semi in the next village rented from a social housing association. By rights, Stacey should have kept the house, since she kept the children, but she was so out of her head with alcohol at the time of the divorce that she hadn’t the sense or the money to take advice or engage a decent lawyer. She just wanted out. He fleeced her. He’s supposed to pay the rent of their ‘so-called’ affordable housing but somehow, they always seem to be in arrears each month, even though he has no trouble affording the costs of Christmas holidays in Barbados or skiing in the Swiss Alps to keep The Bimbo happy.
Stacey doesn’t earn a penny so she relies on her ex’s child support payments and alimony to put food on the table and clothes in the cupboard for her children except when she blows it on booze.
Tom is with Stacey. Their father usually has them both on alternate weekends, but he asked for some ‘one-to-one quality time’ with Celeste. He feels they are growing apart. She’s getting out of hand. He wants to talk some sense into her. She would much prefer to have gone with Tom and Stacey to Alton Towers. (Stacey made her father buy the theme park tickets in exchange for ‘bagging’ Celeste.) Instead, her brother got to take a friend, and she got to make up a threesome for the weekend with her father and Natasha.
She’s already in her father’s bad books again and she only just arrived – late as usual. Natasha cooked a special meal in her honour – paella with chicken and king prawns, followed by chocolate soufflé. To be fair, Natasha is a good cook and according to Celeste’s father she spent most of the day, planning and shopping and cooking the meal. She’s trying to ingratiate herself. But Celeste has recently decided to go vegetarian and gluten free, so she point-blank refuses the paella and eats only two or three spoonsful of the chocolate soufflé (under duress, even though it’s delicious).
Natasha puts a brave face on it. ‘It’s no problem,’ she simpers. ‘It’s my fault. I should have asked.’
Her father is furious, but Celeste doesn’t care. She doesn’t want to eat supper anyway because she’s planning to go to a party later (someone’s eighteenth from the year above) and she doesn’t want to ‘look fat’ in her size XS skin-tight mini dress.
He has a go at her in front of The Bimbo, and she swears at him and leaves the table in ‘disgrace’ (disgust) and goes up to her room and shuts the door and sits on the bed and gets out her laptop intending to do a couple of hours’ homework before getting ready for the party. He steams up after her and marches in, yelling his head off. He calls her a ‘selfish little bitch’, and she calls him a ‘lame bastard’. He keeps on at her until she shouts at him to ‘leave me in peace to work’ and ‘go back downstairs to your two-faced, money-grabbing, vile little whore’.
And that’s when he loses it. He lunges across the room to the bedside and slaps the side of her face with all his force. She puts up her hands to protect herself. Her ear is ringing, and he jolted her neck and her cheekbone hurts so badly she thinks he might have cracked it.
‘You asked for that,’ he says grimly, as he walks out and slams the door. Through the door, she hears him shouting his parting shot. ‘If you think you’re going to that party, you can forget it. You’re grounded.’
She’s too angry and shocked to cry. She looks at her face in the mirror. The marks of his fingers are still on her cheek. Her mouth tastes salty. She pulls down her lip to see. The inside of her lower lip is bleeding where it knocked against her teeth and already beginning to swell up. She fingers her cheekbone carefully. Bruised but not broken, she thinks. But she wouldn’t be surprised if she has a black eye tomorrow.
He’s never hurt her physically before even though she knows he has a vicious temper. There was always a lot of shouting and screaming in the house, but it was usually between her mum and dad. She never actually saw him hit her mother – and, God, let’s be honest, Stacey gave him a lot of provocation with the way she behaved. But now she comes to think of it, there were mornings when her mother came down to breakfast with bruises on her arms or her forehead or her chin, which Celeste always put down to drunken falls after one gin (or several) too many.
But maybe it was him leaving his marks on her?
Stacey will never tell. She’s too proud.
So, Celeste will never know.
PRESENT
14
You.
You are even more beautiful from behind.
As I follow You round the cloisters and backstreets of Cambridge, I would know You in a crowd of a thousand people.
You walk fast for a girl. Sometimes it’s hard to keep up.
I know the way You hold your head and the way your hips swing from side to side and the way your hair bounces as You walk and the length of your stride and the way your left shoulder is always slightly in front of the right, as if you are hurrying to get ahead of yourself.
I want to walk in your footsteps – on grey pavements or chipped cobbles or crushed blades of grass.
I would die to hide in your sunlight or shine in your shade.
I have become a part of You.
I am your ghost.
*
Thinking she was about to faint, Celeste sat down on the ground in front of Eugene’s headstone and put her head between her knees.
&nbs
p; ‘Stop being an idiot,’ she said to herself. ‘You’re just low on blood sugar. You need something to eat and drink.’ She decided the best plan would be to drive into Cambridge (a city she’d never visited) to get some lunch and have a look around before setting off on the long drive back to Pimlico. She gave herself a minute or two to recover her composure, sitting quietly with her eyes shut, listening to the birds singing in the trees. Just as her breathing was beginning to slow, she felt a sudden drop in the light intensity and temperature as if she were in someone else’s shade. But when she opened her eyes, there was no one there. She shivered and stood up. Seconds later the peace was broken by the revving and then rumbling engine of a motorbike starting up from the direction of the wood and moving away into the distance.
She opened her eyes then stood stock-still, listening to the sounds in the landscape. It didn’t make sense. The cemetery was surrounded by fields beyond the treeline. There couldn’t be a road… a track through the woods at most… What was a motorbike doing down there? This was too weird! She’d had enough of this place, surrounded by the dead. It was messing with her head. She had to get away.
She retraced her steps to the entrance, stopping briefly like a tourist to search for the names of Joseph Kennedy and Glenn Miller in the ‘Tablets of the Missing’ inscribed on the vast Portland stone memorial wall. She had learnt in the visitor centre that Lieutenant Joseph P Kennedy Jr (the oldest of the Kennedy brothers), in the US Navy Reserve, was flying a B-24 Liberator aircraft loaded with high explosives on a secret mission against a German V2 rocket site on 12 August 1944, when his aircraft exploded. And also, that Major Alton G Miller (better known to all as the famous jazz musician and band leader Glenn Miller), was flying to Paris from a small airfield near Bedford on 15 December 1944, to make arrangements for a Christmas broadcast, when his plane disappeared over the English Channel. They were never found. Like the airmen depicted in the mosaic they had passed from this world into another heavenly sphere – vanished into thin air, vaporised.
No Smoke Without Fire Page 8