‘Yes …’ Alice falters. ‘I begged him, but he said Will wouldn’t want him. He knew of another farm though: a couple who couldn’t have a baby. He said they might take him if I … helped him.’
‘If you helped him?’ None of this makes sense.
Alice looks down at her lap. ‘He … he tried to … interfere with me. I thought that, if I went along with it, the baby would be safe.’
The room shifts. Alice is red now. Patrick Trescothick? It doesn’t surprise her. He had tried to corner her in the stable, the August after her baby. ‘Don’t pretend that you’re a good girl,’ he had said. For a moment she feels a shot of compassion, but her sympathy is buffeted aside by this blast of new information: that her baby never went to the orphanage but was taken elsewhere. She still can’t quite comprehend it.
‘So who brought him up? Were they kind? And how did Patrick Trescothick know them?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘I don’t know anything about the family – or I didn’t at the time.’
‘You left him there, but you knew nothing about them? Whether they were good people? The sort of childhood he would have?’ Her voice escalates with incredulity. She left him at an unknown farmhouse with no idea about the family, and she never thought to tell her that she had done this – or to look for him years later? The thought is inconceivable. She defied her mother’s instructions, and then lied to Maggie. The nuns would ‘look after him really well,’ she had said. Or was that quite what she had said? She can see her now, looking at her as she sat, tracing the pattern of her eiderdown and feeling faint, in her bedroom. ‘They’ll look after him really well. I know they will,’ she had said. ‘They’, not ‘the nuns’. And Maggie had believed her because she couldn’t afford not to believe.
Her anger surges. Alice has no way of knowing if he was well looked after. ‘Try to remember what you can of these people.’
‘They were moorland farmers, much poorer than your parents.’
‘And the farmhouse?’
‘It was to the west of Rough Tor, near St Breward. He said they would look after him.’
‘And you believed him? Patrick Trescothick?’ She waits, remembering his handling of Clover, and the way he cocked his gun at Will. The implicit threat when he blocked her exit in the stables. His smell: whisky, old tweed, and a muskiness she would later identify as sexual, but at the time she thought was sweat.
‘I didn’t have much choice.’ Alice’s voice rises, and for the first time, Maggie senses some fight in her; some resilience. Her hands are clenched into fists and she is sitting straight. ‘It was a terrible mistake, but I am trying to right that wrong. I’ve found the farmhouse and the family’s name, Jose, and the name of your son – Will’s son. He was – is – called Jeremiah.’ Her voice cracks with emotion. ‘And I am going to find him, if it is the very last thing I do.’
Jeremiah. The name means nothing to Maggie: she cannot square it with the child of her imagination. Her anger pushes up: a physical knot that swells and threatens to overwhelm her so that she feels as if she will choke. She cannot speak to Alice with kindness, though she knows she was just a child, and a child assaulted by the vet, at that. At some level, she senses that she wants thanks for tracking this unfamiliar Jeremiah down – and yet she has just a name: no address, no child, no way of knowing if he is dead or alive, let alone in Cornwall or even Britain. And, had she done as she was asked, there would have been no need for this searching. Maggie might have been reunited with him many years ago.
Her fury is overriding now: pressing upon her so that she wants to spew out words of hatred. She needs to get away before Alice drops another bombshell – or she says something she will regret.
She stands up, and in her haste knocks over her chair.
‘Please don’t.’ Alice comes forward, and for a moment she thinks she is just trying to stop her from correcting the furniture, but she puts her hands on Maggie’s to stay her.
‘Please don’t go. There’s more that I need to tell you,’ she says.
Maggie glances down at the thin, wizened hands imposing themselves on hers – and Alice removes them instantly.
‘I know that Will died,’ Maggie tells her, gripping the side of the table, concentrating on keeping her voice steady. ‘My mother told me. Years ago, when my late husband started courting me. I had hoped that I could find him. But she had heard years before from Mrs Eddy. And she took great delight in informing me of the fact.’
‘Do you know how?’
‘No. No details.’ She looks at Alice now, almost daring her to tell. The other woman’s eyes are filmed with tears. For a moment she catches a glimpse of the small, lost girl who arrived here.
She rights the chair, and sits back down.
Thirty-eight
Then: 30 June 1944, London
London was drab. Sticky, humid and dusty, with a dirty heat that seemed to belong to cities. Not the crisp dry heat of a cornfield, the air sweet with the heady smell of crushed straw.
Everywhere was concrete, brick or stone. Towering masses of grey and white – or piles of rubble. Over the river and to the east it was worse. Aunt Olive, in Battersea, had had her terrace flattened by a doodlebug, and Will, sent by Annie to help her, had struggled to find it. Forced into a crater, all that remained was wood, tiles, bricks, broken-up furniture and, before they were dug out by the ARP warden, the remains of the family next door.
He’d never seen anything like it in Cornwall. The odd house blown to smithereens; the bombing in Bodmin; the gates at Tredinnick blown off their hinges. A chicken, blasted of its feathers, or a cow blown to bits. He gulped down a laugh. Black humour: that’s what it was, wasn’t it? One of the things the British were meant to be good at, that was supposed to be getting them through all of this.
War came to Cornwall as it came everywhere else: the skies filled with the drone of the B17 bombers and B24 Liberators, or the sound of a Messerschmidt; the streets with soft-shoed GIs, with their tanks and their preparations for what they now knew was D-Day – the invasion of France. And there had been casualties. He still thought of the twenty-one killed at St Eval, when a bomb bounced into a bunker where they were taking shelter. But there had been no destruction – and no insistent, nagging anxiety – on anything like this scale.
He climbed the steps to Waterloo Bridge and glanced to either side: downstream to St Paul’s, its dome majestic against the destruction of the East End; upstream to the Houses of Parliament, vast and golden, the face of Big Ben glinting in the sun.
He was glad to be leaving here. Relieved – until he received Alice’s letter that morning – that his call-up papers had arrived. In a couple of days he would be on his way to a training battalion in Wakefield, and after that, who knew where? Italy, North Africa, France? The Hun was on the run, it seemed, and he was finally going to play a part. No longer a farm boy, but a soldier: battle-weary, scared, exhilarated, perhaps even victorious. Trained to kill, not to grow and rear.
It had been a mistake to come back here, apart from seeing his mum, though she wasn’t the Annie he remembered. And this wasn’t home any more. The war had fractured the Cookes: William, though nearly forty, in Italy; Robert – now six and a half – in Hampshire; the girls in Cornwall; and Annie, freed of her brood and unrecognisable without a clutch of children, now working as an ARP warden.
Even if his family hadn’t been forced apart, London still wouldn’t be home. His heart wasn’t here. The happiest time of his life had been last summer – when the fields were ablaze with corn, and he and Maggie Retallick were in love. Nothing could compare to what he’d felt then: that sickness in the pit of his stomach that softened as soon as she smiled, and that incredible sense of being alive that made everything – colours, taste, smells – brighter. The way he’d felt when he’d watched a film in Technicolor – but multiplied a hundred times.
Just the thought of her brought a smile to his face, while the
memory of her curves – that dip of her waist – made him tingle with excitement. For a moment, he let himself remember lying in a sand dune, his arms round her, his head resting on hers, listening to the skylarks and breathing in the fresh smell of her hair.
‘What are you thinking?’ she had asked, smiling up at him.
And he had made something up because he would have felt stupid telling the truth. That he wasn’t thinking anything at all, but was feeling it. Sheer happiness. He had been happier than he ever imagined he could be.
The drone of a doodlebug overhead. A steady vroom vroom vroom like an insistent motorcycle driving at a steady speed. They made him jittery, these new bombs, though he knew he only needed to run for shelter if the engine cut out. You could count to twelve before it struck, according to those more experienced than him, more jaded, or more willing to chance it. It hadn’t helped those killed at Victoria Station the week before last, nor the scores left dead the day after, as they said their prayers at the barrack chapel on Birdcage Walk.
He glanced above. It was still going: flying towards Holborn to destroy somewhere in Bloomsbury or north London. He let out his breath and felt only a brief twinge of guilt that the fact he was unscathed meant that someone else might be harmed. His heart was thudding now, like a bird stunning itself against a window. These V1 raids had been going on for over a fortnight, and still he couldn’t get used to them.
He wiped beads of sweat from his cheeks and started walking faster. Perhaps he should just go straight there now? Down to Cornwall – a mad dash before reporting to his training battalion in Yorkshire tomorrow. Could he manage getting there and back? It would be reckless or – what was it Maggie would call it? – spontaneous. The thought – which had buzzed at the back of his mind ever since he’d received the letter – nudged at him, increasingly insistent. As if he could ever be that foolhardy or brave. As brave as she.
The Will who had kissed Maggie in the sea, who had made love to her in a hay barn with her mother in the house less than fifty yards away, might have done this. But the one who had been shouted at by Evelyn Retallick, her eyes like bullets? That Will could only go back if he was sure that Maggie would welcome him there. Because this changed things, this letter in his pocket … In his heart, he wanted to jump on a train and race down there, and yet his head told him that doing so was not just logistically impossible, but stupid. She hadn’t written – might not even want him back.
For there was a baby, the letter said. The thought terrified him, to be honest, and yet he felt just the tiniest leap of excitement at the same time. Maggie and he had made a baby. And now it had been sent away. Alice hadn’t said where. She had just said that Maggie had had a baby in April; that Evelyn was cross – which must be a polite way of putting it – and that they’d given it up for adoption. The letter was brief and written from a different address, as if she was worried that someone would open it. Cryptic except for that last plea – before the lots of love and the string of kisses. Please, Will. Can you help?
He wanted to go down, straight away. The thought consumed him as he crossed the Strand and turned east in the direction of the Royal Courts of Justice. He had to find this child – perhaps living with some different family – and persuade the Retallicks that he and Maggie would not just love it, but could give it a home.
Even as he worked it out it seemed ridiculous. What if Maggie didn’t want it? She was going to be a teacher, and if she’d wanted the baby then surely she’d have written to ask for his help? She could have found Farmer Eddy’s address and contacted him from her aunt’s in Bodmin. He’d only left Cornwall at the start of May: plenty of time for her to tell him she was pregnant, or to tell him that, yes, she loved him still.
But there’d been no word since he’d left Skylark. At times, he’d wondered if Mrs Eddy had refused to pass on any post – he’d had so very little. But she was a good woman, and he couldn’t imagine her doing this, even if Evelyn had asked.
He had written to Maggie, of course, but with little hope that the letters would get through. And as the bitter winter progressed, it seemed that he might have been mistaken. She no longer cared for him. Perhaps she loved someone else?
The thought plagued him so that he was abrupt with the cows, and their milk yield dropped. Once, he had kicked the stable door in a fury, and the intensity of his anger had shocked him. He knew that he had to get away from Cornwall, right away. When his papers came, he was back in London, scraping together work as a messenger boy and dreaming of that golden summer at Skylark Farm.
A double-decker bus rumbled past, and he crossed the street, walking along the curve of the Aldwych. It was a mistake to return, however briefly. He no longer belonged here. He wanted to be back in Cornwall, with Maggie. His heart swelled at the thought of what she must have gone through, alone. He hoped he had done enough, in this letter. He had tried to be poetic. I remember our swim, he had written, and how we felt then. I remember the sand dunes and the storm against the casement. You have always been there, and I for you. Doubt crept in. Perhaps he should add a bit more to let her know quite how strongly he felt? The letter wasn’t sealed, but he had tried so hard to write neatly, had been so conscious that he wanted to impress her, he didn’t want to spoil it. Surely she would understand?
The Aldwych was busy. Late lunchtime, and the girls from the Air Ministry were returning to their office: the street was bustling. There was a queue outside the post office at Bush House, a line snaking from the door. The woman in front of him smiled, the stain of her red lipstick somehow shocking against the grey of her skin, the cut of her cheekbones.
‘Do you have a light?’ Her voice was hard, her eyes frank. She seemed older than him, though perhaps she only seemed that way because of her extreme thinness, or the way she held herself, as if she hadn’t relaxed properly for a long time.
He shook his head.
‘Well, this is a bore,’ she drawled, turning her back on him and shuffling forwards.
Another drone, another doodlebug approaching, the noise getting louder as it flew lower and lower. But this time it happened: the engine cut out.
A moment’s silence – then ‘Run!’ He didn’t know who screamed it, for several people seemed rooted in the queue.
He grabbed the woman and pushed her inside Bush House.
‘There’s no need to shove …’ she began, but he wasn’t listening – too distracted by the silvery swoosh of the falling bomb.
The force of the others powered them in. Crouched down, head shielded, he started counting: nine, ten. Images of Maggie cascaded: her hair, her smile, her laugh. Eleven, twelve. She will never know how much I love her, he thought, as he heard the cruummmpppp: the sickening thud as the bomb exploded, blowing the windows into slivers, peppering the walls with shrapnel, blasting bodies through the swing doors.
A woman landed in a heap by the table beside him: a sack of clothes, coated in glass, she started to cry loudly.
‘Are you OK?’ he called to her. Beside him, the lipsticked woman swore, her voice trembling, then managed to stumble up.
He moved through the billowing smoke to the first woman.
‘Just bruised, I think,’ she whimpered, stretching her legs as she tried to stem her tears. ‘We were lucky.’
‘Luckier than those.’ He gestured towards the street, through the smoke billowing in from the blasted window.
In the smog outside, it seemed to be November: a mist had descended and a plume of smoke spiralled above the junction with Kingsway. The street was strewn with bodies: flung against the building, lying, crumpled, in piles.
No one seemed to be moving – though to the left of him, through the smoke, further away from the bomb and its crater, he could hear an eerie moaning. Loud moaning was a good thing, he had learned in his brief time back in London. It was when people moaned quietly that you feared the worst.
He made his way towards the sound, the dust thick in his throat, past banknotes floating down the street and a do
uble-decker bus wrenched open like a sardine tin. Leaves had been stripped from the trees opposite – but something else was hanging there. He peered, and then retched, his stomach opening out onto the pavement. It was flesh, blown from limbs.
He was alive, though, wasn’t he? He was alive. The thought burned as he groped his way through the smoke and down towards a voice that was crying. He had another chance. A curious hysteria took him over. He would go straight to Cornwall to see Maggie. Bugger the consequences. Would tell her immediately: that he loved her; and wanted her, and their child.
The moans seemed louder now, and for a moment he didn’t hear the silvery whoosh of the glass window. Nor did he see it as it slipped from the fourth storey of the building, sharp and lethal, glinting in the sun.
It fell like a stone: straight and forensic, intent on dissection – and neatly sliced him in two.
Thirty-nine
Now: 23 August 2014
Maggie takes to her bed when she comes back from Yard Cottage. It is so unlike her that Lucy knows something is terribly wrong.
She knocks, then pushes open her bedroom door. Her grandmother is lying there, covers pulled up to her chin, face drained of colour and the skin pulled tight over her cheekbones. It is almost as if she is looking at a corpse.
‘Granny?’ Lucy perches on the edge of the bed and reaches for fingers that are as light and dry as bones.
‘I found out how he died.’ Maggie turns to her. ‘Will – not the baby, though he may be dead as well, for all I know. He was hit by a sheet of falling glass … It happened in the Aldwych, of all places.’ Her crisp, deliberate tone slips just a little. ‘He had sheltered when the bomb was falling – and was only hit when he came out.’
‘I’m so sorry …’ Lucy starts, but her grandmother doesn’t seem to be listening. The words are tumbling out.
‘He had just turned eighteen. About to join up. Two days before setting off for training. It was only six weeks after he left Cornwall. Ten weeks after his son was born.’
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