Letters to the Lost (27 page)

And thinking about her brought him right back to the place he’d first seen her, outside Nancy Price’s house, which reminded him of the promise he’d made to Albert Greaves. He did a quick mental calculation: Church End wasn’t far off his route, he could call in on the old man on his way home and use the key he held to have a look inside Nancy Price’s house. His furtive trawl through the records earlier had confirmed that there really was no solid information to go on, and (much as he hated to admit it) Ansell had probably been right to drop the case. No money, no heirs – it was a complete non-starter. All that Will could do was contact the council and see that the estate was dealt with officially, though he had a feeling such an impersonal dispersal of his friend’s effects wouldn’t go down well with Albert.

The queue shuffled forwards, and he found himself standing next to a display of cakes and biscuits. On impulse he picked up a couple of packets – perhaps Mr Kipling’s exceedingly cheap cakes might sweeten the disappointment. Of course, there was always the possibility that he might find something significant inside the house; something that would change everything, like a mattress stuffed with money and an address book bulging with relatives . . .

Or not, he thought wryly. Miracles might happen, but only to other people.

20

1943

Stella was waiting by the sitting-room window, looking out for Nancy. In the street a pack of boys were playing some complicated game involving milk bottles half-filled with soil and piles of stones. With the school holidays well underway they had a grimy, feral appearance. As Nancy rounded the corner by the church they shrank into the shadows beneath a blowsy buddleia in Alf Broughton’s garden, pressing themselves against the fence as she passed.

Stella grabbed her handbag and ran to the front door, disturbing the stillness of the empty house. When the dates for Charles’s Embarkation Leave had come through, Reverend Stokes had tactfully announced he would go to visit an old friend from his teaching days, and her protests that this was unnecessary fell (very literally) on deaf ears. Without the wire less playing all day at high volume the Vicarage seemed eerily quiet.

Nancy jolted to an alarmed standstill on the path as Stella appeared.

‘Blimey, you look like a prisoner on the run. I thought you said he was away?’

‘He is. I was looking out for you, that’s all. Didn’t want to miss the bus.’

‘Wanted to find out if I’ve got a letter for you, more like,’ Nancy said, throwing Stella an arch look as they started walking. ‘Sorry to disappoint. Nothing today, but you know what the bleeding post is like. Probably three’ll arrive together tomorrow.’

Stella nodded mutely, blinking back tears. Without being conscious of it she had been keeping herself going for the last two days on a combination of hope and excitement, and having both removed so abruptly left her feeling like a puppet whose strings had been cut. As they passed the lurking boys Nancy took her arm and gave it an encouraging squeeze.

‘Now, no moping allowed. You got to stay positive; look on the bright side. Smile, smile, smile, as the old song goes.’

Of course, she was right, Stella thought bleakly. The whole world was missing someone, mourning someone. It was horribly self-indulgent to brood, not to mention boring for everyone else. She forced her mouth into a smile.

‘Too right. It’s not often we get a whole afternoon together these days. And you look gorgeous – is that a new coat?’

‘D’you like it?’ Nancy looked smug and secretive, dropping Stella’s arm to pull the belt of the gabardine trench coat a little tighter and putting her hands in the pockets like a mannequin. ‘Len got it for me. God knows where it came from, but ask no questions, get told no lies. Got friends all over the place, Len has. I’m dying for you to meet him. You’ll get on like a house on fire. A right charmer, he is.’

Stella didn’t doubt that, but she was less sure about the house on fire bit. From what she could make out, Nancy’s new man was a bit of a shady character. He’d been wounded at Dunkirk – a collapsed lung, according to Nancy – which prevented him from going back into uniform. Now he was working in something that was ‘very hush hush’. Stella suspected it was the black market.

‘It’s a gorgeous coat. Really elegant. Makes you look like Katharine Hepburn.’

Nancy patted her hair. ‘That’s what Len said too. So where’s the Rev gone then? To see his lah-di-dah parents?’

‘No, Devon. To visit Peter Underwood.’

Charles had announced his intention to spend ‘a few days’ of his fortnight’s Embarkation Leave in Devon quite casually: in fact, the naïve, gullible, pre-Cambridge Stella wouldn’t even have noticed the slight note of defiance in his tone or the defensive set to his jaw, never mind understanding what they signified.

‘Oh well, it’s given you a bit of breathing space. How’s it been, you know, since he’s been back?’

They were the only people at the bus stop, which meant Stella didn’t have to lie. ‘Awkward,’ she sighed. ‘I know he’s got a lot on his mind, but he won’t share any of it with me. Sometimes I wonder if he’s forgotten he married me and thinks I’m still his housekeeper.’

‘Blimey.’ Nancy’s pencilled brows shot upwards. ‘No bedroom action?’

Stella shook her head. She wished she’d been honest from the start about the fact that there’d never been any ‘bedroom action’ in their marriage, but felt it was too late to confess that now.

‘He’s either shut away in his study or in the church. I went across there yesterday when he didn’t appear for supper and found him crouched on the altar steps. He was sort of . . . collapsed. I thought for a minute he was having a heart attack, but it turned out he was just praying.’

The episode – his fervour and his despair – had reminded her of their wedding night, only this time she understood. With the benefit of her new insight she felt huge sympathy for him, almost tenderness. She would have liked to reach out to him, offer him comfort and a human ear to listen, but his coldness made it impossible.

‘Praying? What for?’

‘God knows.’

The joke was lost on Nancy, who was looking past her to the end of the road.

‘Ooh, good – here’s the bus. So what do you want to do first, shops or cinema?’

The house was as quiet and still as ever when she got back. Shutting the front door she stood for a second in the hall, watching the dust motes swirl in a shaft of light from the sitting room and breathing in the mildewed smell that she’d never succeeded in changing. Then she put down her bag on the hallstand and went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea.

She moved automatically, without being aware of what she was doing, so that when she went to spoon tea into the pot she couldn’t remember if she’d done it already. Despite the silence of the house her head was full of noise; the noise of engines roaring, planes thundering forwards and taking off.

Dan’s kind of planes. They’d been on the newsreel again, before the film started, and she’d watched in an agony of hunger and hope and horror for a glimpse of the redhead in the sparkly shoes on the side of one. ‘
Every morning at airfields all across the east of England our American allies are taking up the baton from the RAF,’
the voice-over had announced in clipped tones, over incongruously cheery music. ‘
As our Lancaster Bombers return from night raids on the centre of Germany’s war industry, the American B-17s are setting out to keep up the pressure. There is no let-up. Aerial photographs show the results; seven square miles of Hamburg’s war centre virtually wiped off the map. As the squadrons return, the gaping holes in many a bomber are testament to the intensity of German fighter resistance.’

Stella’s eyes had burned. She wanted to stand up, to scream at the people whispering and passing bags of sweets along the row to shut up as the camera hovered over jagged holes torn in the side of planes, shattered glass, painted ladies riddled with bullet holes. It had closed in on a crew lowering an injured man from the hatch. ‘
Morale amongst these brave men remains high as the effectiveness of this combined offensive becomes clear. They won’t stop until the job is done.’

The rest of the film had passed in a blur. The actors could have been speaking in Chinese for all she took in of the plot, though she was glad of the darkness of the cinema and the respite from having to talk to Nancy of normal things and smile. She’d squeezed her eyes shut and called out to him inside her head, hoping she could somehow make him hear her, let him know that she was thinking of him. Loving him. She remembered with absolute clarity how it had felt to lie on his chest in the bed in Cambridge. He had seemed so strong. But he was made of skin and bone and muscle, like everyone else, and those things could be so easily shattered and torn apart. He was fragile. Fragile and so precious . . .

Oh God, where was he? He’d promised to write – why had no letters reached her?

Outside, inky clouds were massing above the rooftops and the summer afternoon had taken on a bilious yellow tint. She’d washed the sheets from Reverend Stokes’s bed and they hung on the line, glowing eerily in the acid light. Listlessly she went outside to unpeg them. The air was still and sulphurous. She carried the sheets inside and, taking them upstairs, draped them over the banisters to dry completely in the way that Charles hated. He considered it vulgar to have laundry on display.

As she came down again the light in the hall had turned purple and yellow, like a bruise. A shaft fell across the picture of the Virgin Mary on the wall, making her face look sickly and liverish. In the moment that she turned to look at it again something caught her attention. A sound, nothing she could name; a breath perhaps, or the creak of movement. She froze, the hairs rising on the back of her neck.

A few feet away the door to Charles’s study was ajar. Had it been earlier, when she’d left to go out with Nancy? With a hammering heart she went towards it and pushed it open, thinking as she did so that she should have armed herself with something – a candlestick from the dining room was the thing that came to mind – in case an intruder was hiding in there. So vivid was the image of a sinister stranger pressed against the wall behind the door that it took her a stunned second to process what she was really seeing.

‘Charles!’ Her hand flew to her mouth. ‘You . . . You’re back! I didn’t know – I mean, I didn’t expect you until tomorrow at least!’

He was sitting at his desk, and swung the chair round towards her. There was something skull-like about his face; the skin was stretched tight across his cheekbones and his eyes were sunk into black hollows. It shocked her.

‘I came back early. As you can see.’

‘Is – is everything all right?’

‘Perfectly.’ His peculiar, bland smile didn’t falter. It was as if it had been nailed on. ‘You were out when I got back.’

‘Oh, yes. Yes, I went out with Nancy. Just uptown – we had tea at the Kardomah in Piccadilly and then saw a film. Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman – not terribly gripping.’ She was babbling guiltily, as if she had done something wrong in going out, but as she spoke she noticed a glass on the desk, amongst the scattered papers. A glass containing amber-coloured liquid that she would have been certain was whisky or brandy if it wasn’t for the fact that Charles never drank. ‘I was just making a cup of tea – would you like one?’

She fled to the kitchen and got another cup down with shaking hands. Something must have happened – something terrible – but what? Had he somehow found out about Dan? Her mind swept the possibilities like a searchlight: had she left a letter lying around before she’d gone out? She dismissed the idea – the last letter had been four days ago, and was now tucked safely into a nightdress case and hidden at the back of a drawer; her underwear drawer, the contents of which were so distasteful to Charles that he would never open it. Which brought her face to face with the other possible reason for Charles turning to drink.

Peter.

She poured the tea and carried a cup through to him. He was sitting where she’d left him, but the glass was now empty. She wondered whether to take it away when she put down the tea, but thought better of it, not wanting him to feel that she was reproaching him.

‘I thought perhaps an early supper . . . ? There isn’t much, but you must be hungry after travelling all the way from Devon . . .’

‘Thank you.’

It was a dismissal. She went back to the kitchen and began to tidy it, since there seemed little point in laying the table in the dining room for powdered scrambled eggs. Out side the rain had begun to fall, washing away the other-worldly light and replacing it with an underwater gloom. When the eggs were cooked (though it was always difficult to tell and seemed to make little difference to the taste) she called down the passageway to him. She spread oily margarine onto the toast and was spooning egg on top of it when he appeared.

In spite of everything her heart went out to him. His eyelids were swollen and his sandy hair was sticking up where he’d pushed his fingers into it. His dog collar was askew, as if he’d wrestled to loosen it. ‘Sit down,’ she said, setting a plate in front of him. ‘I’ll just get a jug of water. Unless – well, unless you’d like something else? Something stronger?’

‘Of course not.’

He picked up his fork and began, mechanically, to eat. No Grace. No comment on the dismal food. Surreptitiously Stella watched him, longing to know what had happened but unsure how to ask. As the silence stretched, broken only by the clatter and scrape of cutlery and the rain on the window, she said cautiously, ‘How was Peter?’

‘Well. Peter was . . . very well.’

‘Has he heard if he’s to be sent overseas again?’

Charles laid down his knife and fork, his mouth twisting in a bitter parody of a smile. ‘No, he’s not going to be sent overseas just yet. He’s going off to a training camp, somewhere unpronounceable in Wales.’

‘Training? What for?’

‘The army, of course,’ he drawled. ‘He doesn’t feel able to deliver the message of a gospel in which he no longer believes, so he’s renounced his position as Chaplain and is joining the ranks.’ He was drunker than she’d realized and his words ran into each other, as if there were no spaces between them. ‘He’s fired up with passion at the idea of fighting side by side with the youth of England. He wants to kill and be killed in the name of freedom and justice.’