A Spell of Snow (6 page)

    
‘Did you just take
me out of duty? Or because they told you you’d be a bad person if you didn’t?’

    
She chewed her
lip. ‘No, it wasn’t quite like that. I was pretty excited to hear about you,
actually, but scared too. I wasn’t sure if I could handle it, but I couldn’t
bear to think of you on your own.’ She leaned towards me. ‘You do know they’d
never have let you stay on at the homestead alone, don’t you?’

    
I hung my head
slightly, and then nodded. ‘I know. I don’t know why I said that. I just miss
home so much.’

    
She reached out
and squeezed my arm. ‘I want to make it better for you, but I’ve had a hard
time working out how. Can I give you a hug? I’ve wanted to, but I’m not your
mum, so…’

    
It was all the
encouragement I needed at that moment. I just fell into her arms and burst into
tears. I cried for a long time, for the mum I’d lost, for the dad I’d never
known, but most of all for Edward, who thought he was going to be a farmer but
who died a soldier aged just nineteen.

‘So Ruby got married just two years after I was there,’ I
said. I held the creased marriage certificate in my hands. ‘It’s a shame you
don’t have a photo.’ Not that I was especially keen to see a picture of Ruby in
her wedding dress, but it would have been good to see Edie and Ben, and Tom and
Vera.

    
‘There weren’t so
many cameras about in those days, as I expect you noticed,’ Auntie Cheryl said
with a smile.

    
‘I wish we had got
on, Ruby and me. It would have been amazing to have been friends with my great,
great, grandmother, and she wouldn’t have...’ I paused. I still hadn’t
mentioned how I felt about Edward, and what Ruby had done with my drawing. ‘Did
she get to be a teacher in the end?’ I asked. ‘It just says ‘spinster’ on
here.’

    
‘No, she didn’t.
She was a housewife and mother after leaving service. Sam Jenks would have had
an above average income as a chauffeur though, so she wasn’t as badly off as
all that.’

    
Auntie Cheryl
rummaged in the box of records and took out a scrap of folded paper that was
stained and yellow with age. ‘Edward had this on him when he died,’ she said.
‘They gave it to Edie in his final effects.’

    
I took the paper,
my heart thumping. It showed signs of having been crumpled and then smoothed
out and folded into a small square. It was almost worn through on the folds,
and the stains obscured some of the faint pencil drawing, but I could just make
it out. It was my sketch of the horse and the couple kissing, and there at the
bottom were the words:
I have known you all my life.

The car drew up at the end of a cul-de-sac in a new housing
estate. ‘I don’t get it,’ I said, staring about me in confusion.

    
‘Come on, I’ll
show you,’ my auntie said.

    
We got out of the
car and she led me back down the road. ‘See that back garden?’ she said,
pointing. ‘That’s where the farmhouse used to be.’

    
I peered through
the jungle of shrubs and plants, failing to spot anything familiar, and then I
pivoted around, trying to imagine this neat piece of suburbia as Edie and Ben’s
farmland, but it was impossible.

    
‘No wonder the
police didn’t believe me,’ I said with a small smile.

    
She laughed.
‘Exactly. Now let’s look for your bus stop.’

    
We drove back down
the hill and through a few more streets filled with bungalows and tidy front
lawns, until we eventually arrived at a place that looked slightly familiar. ‘I
recognise that corner,’ I said, and Auntie Cheryl parked as close as she could.
It looked very different, with houses clustered around a busy main road, but
the bus stop itself was in the same spot, and the dry stone wall beside it had
barely altered.

    
I leant back in my
seat with a sigh, watching the cars and pedestrians passing. It was hard to
believe this was once an almost empty lane. ‘So how did I get into the past?’ I
said. ‘It was modern buses I was on, I know that for sure. And you said the
police found me on the CCTV.’

    
‘Seems like it was
just
you
who went into the past, not the bus. You just happened to be on
it.’

    
I sighed. ‘We’re
never going to make sense of it, are we?’

    
‘Do you need to?’
she asked, patting me on the arm. She hadn’t asked questions, but I think she’d
guessed about Edward after all. For one thing, she’d let me keep the drawing.

    
‘It feels like I
saved Edward’s life for nothing. For him to die just a year and a half later.
It was all so… meaningless.’

    
‘Was it, though?’
she said softly. ‘It meant something to you, I think. And maybe to him, too.’

    
I looked across at
her, and she met my gaze in silence. Perhaps she was right. Even though
Edward’s death was such a waste, my time with him had been special.

    
When we got back
to the house, she said, ‘Do you feel up to looking at the rest of the records?’

    
I nodded, but my
stomach knotted slightly as we took out the box again. I’d been too upset to
look at anything else yesterday, and now I wondered if there were any more
shocks to come.

    
‘Is there anything
about Ruby?’ I asked. ‘We had unfinished business. She… well, I wish I could
understand her.’

    
‘There are a few
pictures of her in her later years,’ Auntie Cheryl said, shuffling through the
papers. ‘Here we are, this is one of her with her daughter and baby Harold in
about 1950. Oh and here’s one of her and Sam in their garden in the sixties.
She died a few years after that, in 1970.’

    
I took the photos,
and stared at the older woman Ruby had become. She looked surprisingly serene
considering she never achieved her ambition to become a teacher. I wished I
could have told her how much I sympathised with her situation, but she never
gave me a chance.

    
Still, I was glad
she looked happy. I peered more closely at her daughter and grandson, my great
grandmother and the grandfather I never knew.

    
‘Oh, and here’s
something I’d forgotten about that might interest you,’ Cheryl said, taking a
letter out of the box. ‘It’s to do with Edward,’ she added, giving me a look of
concerned sympathy.

    
I took the letter
from her with a touch of apprehension. ‘There aren’t any
from
Edward?’

    
She shook her
head. ‘No, that’s all there is.’

    
I opened the
letter. The paper was thin, almost transparent, but it had still survived for
almost a hundred years. It had a British Forces address in France written in
the top right corner and it was dated September 1914.

    
Dear Ruby,
it
began,
I can’t even begin to tell you how sorry I am about Edward. I know
you and your family are going to miss him so much. At least you know he died
fighting for his country, and maybe that is a small comfort.

    
You asked me to
tell you everything I know about his death.

    
He was brought
into my hospital with a severe stomach wound. He was still conscious and asking
for me as he remembered I’d been assigned here. I found him in a very bad way,
but he was still able to talk, and he wanted me to pass on to you how much he
loved you all. He asked me to look for a picture he always carried, so I
managed to find it in his wallet and handed it to him. Oh Ruby, it was that
drawing you told me about. You remember? The one you nearly threw away. He
looked at it for a long time, and then he sighed and closed his eyes and seemed
at peace. And he was gone.

    
You did the
right thing in giving it to him after all. I know you were angry at the time,
but he must have loved her, and I don’t think he and I were as suited as you
always thought. Besides, the war has changed everything for us all, hasn’t it?
I’m not the same farmer’s daughter that I was last year. Nursing out here has
taught me too many horrible truths for that.

    
Always remember
that Edward died at peace, and that’s down to you.

    
I’ll come and
visit you and your mam and da when I’m home on leave in a couple of months’
time.

My very best
wishes, dear Ruby,

Beryl.