Letters From the Past

by Erica James

  ‘Everything in life should be fun, don’t you think?’

  ‘I wish it could be, but sadly it’s not always the case.’

  ‘Which means, and don’t get me wrong,’ he said through a cloud of smoke, ‘I’m not trivialising the harsh realities we all have to face from time to time, but we have to make every effort we can to bring more fun into our lives, and for those we care about. Can you pass me those potatoes you so carefully wrapped in aluminum foil, please?’

  She did as he said and watched him place the potatoes on the wire rack a few inches above the hot coals.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘while they cook, I’ll fix us both a proper drink. How does a martini sound to you?’

  ‘It sounds heavenly. But why don’t I do it for us?’

  He smiled. ‘Not on your life, you’re my guest. So sit down and relax.’

  Instead of sitting down as he’d instructed, she went over to a lemon tree. She breathed in the delicious fragrance from the blossom. Perhaps when she was home, she would try growing a lemon tree in the garden, then in the winter move it into the glasshouse for protection.

  Thinking of Island House and its pretty garden – the epitome of an English garden – she thought how very far away it suddenly seemed. Intriguingly she no longer felt the need to rush home.

  She sat down in the shade of a vine-covered pergola and tilting her head right back, she closed her eyes. Birdsong was the only noise she could hear. Paradise, she thought. No wonder Red said he loved living here. She was beginning to understand why. She was also beginning to wonder if he was right and they could work together on turning her novel Sister Grace Falls from Grace into a film script. It might be fun. But could she trust him not to ride roughshod over her creation?

  ‘Your martini, Madame,’ he said from behind her. ‘Shaken, not stirred, just how you like it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, sitting up to take the glass from him. ‘I could get used to this.’

  ‘That’s what I like to hear.’

  He sat opposite her and clinked his glass against hers. ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Cheers,’ she echoed. ‘You make an excellent barman,’ she said after she’d taken a sip and savoured the dryness of the liquor.

  ‘What can I say? It’s a job I pride myself in doing to the best of my ability. And now that I’ve mixed you a perfect drink, please do me the kindness of telling the rest of your story, about you and the burning Walrus.’

  She tutted. ‘I knew that was the real reason you invited me here.’

  He smiled. ‘You would have been disappointed in me if I hadn’t asked you.’

  ‘Very well,’ she said softly, as once more the door to the past opened and she allowed herself to be taken back.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Tilbrook Hall, Norfolk

  April 1944

  Romily

  To this day I have no recall of the impact. Knocked unconscious, I came round to find myself choking on smoke and being hauled unceremoniously from the cockpit. I was dragged to safety and when I looked back at the Walrus, I saw it was on fire, along with the barn. The heat from the flames was scorching my face. Another one of my lives gone, I thought vaguely as my head spun and my vision blurred to the point I was seeing multiple burning Walruses. I was trying to work out how many lives I was down to, when an almighty boom ripped my eardrums apart and the world exploded.

  I was dead. I was convinced of it. The conviction filled me with the sweetest joy as in that moment of certainty I saw Jack right there before me. Hadn’t I promised him that we would be reunited in the afterlife? Filled with euphoria, I stretched out my hand to touch his face. ‘Oh, my darling,’ I said, ‘I’ve missed you so much.’

  I saw his lips move, but no sound came out. There was a frown creasing his expression. I then realised that the face before me didn’t belong to Jack. The euphoria that had filled me evaporated in an instant.

  The frown on the man’s face intensified. Once more his lips moved, but for some inexplicable reason no sound came out. Was he mute? I tried to battle my way through the fog of confusion that was clouding my brain.

  I had just recalled the moment when the cockpit had filled with smoke, when my lungs gave a spontaneous heave and I coughed violently. Pain shot through my body and the frowning man now looked at me with increased concern. He spoke again and as before, no words came out. It was then that I became aware of an acrid stench. I twisted my head to my right and saw a colossal inferno, flames reaching high into the sky, creating an angry black cloud of thick smoke. It was, I realised, the burning wreckage of the Walrus and the hay barn I had tried to avoid hitting.

  With that understanding came the knowledge that I had been dragged to safety by this brave stranger, and just in time before the fuel in the tank of the Walrus had ignited. Moreover, I comprehended that a fire of that magnitude would make a thunderous roaring noise. But I could hear nothing. I had been rendered deaf as a result of the explosion.

  Irrationally I felt proud of myself for reaching this conclusion. I pointed to my ears. ‘I can’t hear anything,’ I said. Or perhaps I shouted the words, I couldn’t tell. ‘The blast.’

  He nodded and I gave in to another bout of violent coughing. When it passed, I sat up. It was then I caught sight of my left leg which was twisted at an unfeasible angle. In registering this, I succumbed to a wave of nausea and thoroughly let the side down by being hideously sick.

  From somewhere about his person, my brave rescuer produced a handkerchief and began mopping me up.

  ‘You’re most kind,’ I said (or yelled), as though we were at a cocktail party and not in a field with the burning wreckage of an aeroplane behind us, and my leg pointing the wrong way.

  He smiled and for the first time I saw that my knight in shining armour was an extraordinarily handsome man with straight white teeth and dark expressive eyes beneath a pair of thick eyebrows. He was about the same age as me and I’d wager he was not English. He reminded me of a wildly attractive French racing driver I had once known. ‘What’s your name?’ I asked, ‘seeing as we’ve been so intimately thrown together?’

  His thick brows drawn together, he spoke his name, but I shook my head, unable to make it out. ‘Spell it,’ I said, indicating that he should draw the letters in the air.

  ‘M . . . A . . . T . . . T . . . E . . . O.’ I said, when his hand came to a stop. ‘Italian?’

  He nodded and smiled again.

  ‘Well Matteo, would you help me to stand, please?’

  He looked at me doubtfully, but with great care, he did as I asked. It was when I was upright and leaning heavily against him, wondering where he might take me to get help, and how far that might be, that I noticed he was wearing a uniform that had seen better days. But what was significant about it was that there were large patches sewn on to the jacket and trousers, indicating that he was a prisoner of war. Rather gruesomely the patches were meant as targets should the prisoner attempt to escape.

  Without warning, he turned abruptly and scooped me up in his arms. He had gone about a hundred yards, with me fearing he might collapse with the effort, when I saw a number of men running towards us. They had come fortuitously prepared with a couple of stretchers, no doubt in anticipation of more than one casualty from the aircraft that had come down.

  I was laid carefully onto a stretcher and transported not so carefully, at speed, across a field where sheep were grazing.

  With the woods behind us, I strained my neck to see where we were going, hoping a doctor might be quickly despatched to deal with my broken leg. Frankly I’d be happy with an equine vet if he could administer sufficient morphine into me to numb the pain I was in.

  My luck seemed to be continuing. Firstly, I’d been rescued by the handsome Matteo and now I discovered that I had been taken to Tilbrook Hall, a grand old house some five miles from RAF West Raynham. I�
�d seen it on the maps. It had been requisitioned by the MOD, and not only was it partly used to accommodate prisoners of war, but it was also being used as a hospital for wounded servicemen.

  What was more, by the time I was transferred from the stretcher and onto an examination couch, my hearing had begun to return, accompanied with a whistling as though I were under water with a kettle boiling inside my head. But I could hear enough to catch the contemptuous tone of the doctor who was examining me.

  He was a stout, flush-faced gentleman of advancing years with monstrously bushy eyebrows, a pince-nez perched on his supercilious nose, together with a disagreeable look of censure.

  ‘Well, well, well, this is quite the mess you’ve got yourself into, young lady,’ he said, addressing me as though I were a silly young schoolgirl. For good measure, he tutted. ‘This is what comes of you women imagining you can do the work of a man.’

  I did a rare thing; I kept my mouth firmly shut. After all, I wanted this man to mend my leg. If I antagonised him, he might not feel so inclined to make a good job of fixing me. Instead I cupped my hands around my ears and shook my head, pretending I couldn’t hear him.

  As it turned out he instructed a younger doctor to operate on my leg and some hours later, I came round from the general anaesthetic to find myself in a small room on my own. Presumably the wards were all full of servicemen. I was told by a pretty young nurse who, believing I was still deaf, spoke slowly and with exaggerated care in pronouncing each word, plainly hoping I might be able to lip-read.

  ‘The operation went like clockwork,’ she said, pointing to my leg which was now in plaster and suspended from the ceiling by a contraption of wires and pulleys. ‘You’ll soon be up on your feet and flying again,’ she added with a smile.

  I told her that my hearing had partially returned, and she went on to say that I was to take no notice of Dr Dorcas, that he was an old-fashioned stick-in-the-mud. ‘If you feel well enough, there’s somebody waiting to see you.’

  ‘Really?’ I asked. ‘Who on earth could that be?’ I didn’t feel like seeing anybody, I was still feeling woozy from the anaesthetic, and was sure I could benefit from a dash of lipstick and a brush through my hair. But curiosity had the better of me.

  The nurse grinned. ‘I’ll send him in. But don’t tell Dr Dorcas I let you have a visitor so soon or he’ll have my guts for garters.’

  I promised it would be our secret and was surprised, and delighted, when minutes later she brought in my handsome rescuer, Matteo. He looked at me anxiously with his dark eyes, which I discerned now were clouded with what I recognised as sadness.

  ‘I thought you might like these’ he said with a shy smile, while holding out a small bunch of wildflowers.

  ‘How thoughtful of you,’ I replied.

  ‘I’ll fetch a vase,’ the nurse said brightly, leaving us alone, but not before winking at me. Her expression suggested that she considered me exceptionally lucky to have a ‘real looker’ like Matteo standing by the side of my bed.

  I was inclined to agree with her, and whether or not it was the lingering effect of the anaesthetic, I had a strange feeling deep inside me – like an unfurling of something that had been locked tight for a long time – that this handsome Italian POW with his sad eyes was going to be somebody I would never forget. And not just because he had saved my life.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  La Vista, Palm Springs

  October 1962

  Red

  What was it about this woman that she could hold his attention the way she did?

  Had it not been necessary for him to fetch the steaks to put on the grill and to mix another round of martinis, Red would gladly have gone on listening to Romily for the rest of the day. But his stomach had begun to rumble with all the subtlety of a jet engine taking off, and she’d laughed, saying that she had better be quiet or they would never eat.

  Pouring the vodka into the shaker with the vermouth, adding ice cubes and then shaking vigorously, he smiled to himself. When Gabe and Melvyn had started up about him collaborating with an acclaimed novelist from England, he’d visualised a wrinkled grande dame in tweeds with a face like an old boot. Never did he imagine a captivating woman who had the power to stop him in his tracks. Maybe even make him consider the improbable, that he could fall in love with her.

  He shook his head in disbelief at such an idea. He was not the type of man who believed in love at first sight. Sure there had to be some kind of initial spark of attraction, but that was as far as he was prepared to go. He had always believed that to love – to love heart, body and soul – one had to dig down deep to find that particular buried treasure.

  With most women he held himself in check, giving only of himself that which he was prepared to offer. That was why nothing ever lasted. The relationships he’d experienced had always been flawed for the simple reason the women wanted more than he would provide. He never blamed them for wanting more, it was entirely his fault he couldn’t give them what they wanted, and he made a point of saying so.

  But along had come Romily Devereux-Temple, and in twenty-four hours of knowing her, he was inexplicably thinking he might give more of himself to her than he had with any woman before. It was as if she had taken a knife to the locked-down shell of him and was prising it open to get at his heart.

  To prevent that happening, he had no choice but to deploy his tried and tested old techniques of heavy-handed flirtation, knowing that she was not the kind of woman who would fall for it. But with each archly disapproving look she gave him, he felt that damned shell of his opening a tiny crack more.

  To snap the shell shut again, to keep things entirely superficial, his tactic was to force her to keep talking about herself. While she spoke, he could observe her and figure out why he was reacting the way he was.

  It was the damndest thing, but he could imagine that in another lifetime – when they’d both been young and carefree – she would have been the real deal for him. The whole enchilada, and some.

  Had that Italian prisoner of war, Matteo, thought the same? Had he fallen under Romily’s spell the moment he set his so-called sad eyes on her? Irrationally Red felt jealous of the guy having the chance to save Romily, to prove himself a hero and capture her heart. Because it sure as hell sounded like that was exactly what had happened. And had she deliberately told Red that story to say, ‘Look buster, you stand no chance against the memory of my perfect husband, and what’s more you, old-timer with your artificial leg, you are certainly not in the same league as a sexy Italian man who rescued me from a blazing inferno!’

  He pulled himself up short. What the hell was this! What was he doing writing himself off as some old-timer? God damn it; he was a successful Hollywood scriptwriter, a bloody war hero who had bedded more women than he could remember, even with half his leg missing! So why now should he doubt himself?

  Because this particular woman could see right through him.

  And because there came a time when a person had to accept the obvious, that life lived on a superficial level was no longer enough. And at the age of fifty-six, he had reached that point.

  Gabe and Melvyn had said much the same to him only a few weeks ago.

  ‘Don’t you get tired of being the eternal playboy?’ Gabe had said.

  ‘Haven’t you ever wanted to settle down?’ Melvyn had asked.

  They were both devout family men, which was unusual for Hollywood, where affairs were all part of the crazy merry-go-round.

  He’d indulged in affairs with a few married women himself, a couple of actresses too, seeing that as an easy way to avoid having to get too serious. Such was the strict rules laid down by the studio bosses, no actress wanted her extracurricular activities made known, so they were as safe a bet as any for allowing him the pleasure of sex without commitment.

  Put like that, he sounded just the lousy bum Romily Devereux-
Temple would wholeheartedly despise. Come to think of it, there were definitely times when he despised himself.

  He poured the drinks into the cocktail glasses, placed them on a tray along with the plate containing the steaks and went back outside.

  She was where he’d left her, sitting in the shade, her sunglasses off, her eyes closed in a tableau of perfect repose. She was so still he wondered if she were asleep. He wondered too what it would feel like to kiss those slightly parted lips of hers. No sooner had he thought this than she opened her eyes and for a guilty moment he could have sworn she’d read his mind and was about to rebuke him.

  But she didn’t. Her voice, silky smooth, she said, ‘It’s so peaceful and relaxing here. I was close to nodding off.’

  ‘I’m glad you feel able to relax,’ he said, lowering the tray onto the roughly hewn table he’d made himself, and which he was rather proud of. He liked nothing better than to take a hunk of discarded timber and turn it into something useful. ‘How do you like your steak, rare or well done?’

  ‘Nothing in between?’ she asked, getting up to come and stand next to him.

  ‘Nope, not with me there isn’t,’ he said, ‘it’s all or nothing.’

  ‘Funnily enough I guessed that might be the case.’

  ‘Yes ma’am, what you see is what you get.’ He tone was upbeat and jokey.

  ‘But that’s not true, is it?’ she said, after a meaningful pause.

  Her question took him unawares. ‘I assure you it is,’ he replied.

  She took a long sip of her drink, her gaze on his. ‘It’s not true of anyone,’ she said at length. ‘We all play a role we wish to convey, or believe others want of us. Seldom do we lower our guard and be our real selves.’

  ‘Is that true of you also?’

  ‘What? You think I’m exempt from normal behaviour?’

  ‘I think most people regard themselves as the exception to the rule.’

  ‘Is that what you do?’