Secrets of a Charmed Life (34 page)

I am suddenly reminded of the letter in the bedside table that Charlotte had mentioned. I ask her if she wants me to know what it said.

“It was from my half brother, Colin. He had traced me to Charlotte's in 1956 and written to her to see if I might possibly be willing to communicate with him. Start fresh. His mother had died and I was the only family he had. Imagine that.”

“And did you?”

She smiles, sniffs the air, and points to the open window. “Tell me, do you see a stooped old man sitting by the hydrangeas, smoking a pipe?”

I rise from the sofa, cross to the window, and peer out. In addition to party streamers, children on the lawn, and rows of fruit trees, I see on the terrace an elderly man puffing on a pipe. I catch a whiff of fruity tobacco. “I see him.”

“That's my brother, Colin Thorne. Half of the children on the lawn are his great-grandchildren, and their parents are my nieces and nephews.”

“Was it hard to forgive Colin for what happened that day you were at your father's house?” I ask, and then I wish I hadn't. It was far too personal a question.

“Colin had done nothing that required my forgiveness. I'm the one who chose to believe he wanted me to be paid off so that I would leave the Thornes alone.”

“And that's not what he wanted?”

“What he wanted was a relationship with his half
sister. He thought the inheritance that our father had left me would be the overture to begin having it. I never gave him a chance.”

“But then you did.”

“Again, I think Providence was prodding me to mend the brokenness where I could. When I arrived at Thistle House in 1958, the place was a tumbledown mess, slipping into ruin and in need of extensive repairs that I couldn't afford to make. Before I even contacted Colin, I was thinking I would have to sell the place. When I agreed to meet him in Oxford for tea—on the very day Julia came to the house, no less—he handed me the bankbook for what he had done with my original inheritance. It had more than quadrupled in value. And he insisted I take it. Not as payment for anything I had done or hadn't done, but because our father had given it to me.

“That money allowed me to make the needed repairs to Thistle House and, strangely enough, gave Mac and me a haven in which to reconnect with each other. Mac came to realize that part of the reason I wanted to remain Isabel to the outside world was because of him—because she was the woman he loved. He was also a forgiving man and always had been. So while he was ready to love me as Emmy, he saw how much a stranger Emmy was to me. And as I said a few moments ago, I saw no compelling reason to resurrect her. Graham Dabney had died some years earlier and his widow had remarried. They were the only family Eloise Crofton had and who could've possibly appeared out of the blue to challenge my maiden name, which I didn't even use anymore. Mac was able to write a whole new series of books here, and we ended up selling our house in Saint Paul and making Thistle House our permanent home. Mac and Colin became very good
friends. I think each having the other to talk to was good for them. They both knew who I had been before and I think they found a kinship because of that.”

Isabel smiles easily as a memory slips across her mind. “Reconnecting with my brother allowed me to learn who my father was. I knew his faults—who of us doesn't have those?—but I knew nothing of his merits, if I may call them that. I don't think he planned to seduce Mum when she was a young maid in his house. They were both starving for love and affirmation. When you are hungry for something, you often do not use your best judgment. I know that better than anyone. After Agnes died, Colin found personal papers that belonged to our father, which led him to believe Henry really did love Mum and perhaps, me, too. But Henry Thorne had been a slave to his position in society. He saw no other way to provide for me and Mum than by paying her rent, giving her money for food and clothes, and adding me to his will. Even when Mum was with Neville, my father still supported her. He wasn't a terrible person, nor was Mum. They made choices, some good, some bad. Just like I did. And then they had to live with those choices, just as I had to live with mine. And as you will have to live with yours.”

At that moment my recorder clicks off. I've run the battery down to nothing. We both look at it.

“I suppose that means I've given you enough material for your essay,” Isabel says.

It is a comment made to make us both laugh. We do. But it also calls to attention that just as I came to this house with a goal in mind, Isabel MacFarland surely agreed to this interview for a reason of her own.

“You want me to do something for you, don't you?”
I ask. “That's why you said yes to an interview about the war when you've never said yes before.”

Her gaze is tight on mine. “I do.”

A thin ribbon of silence stretches before us and then I ask her what she wants from me.

“I want you to secure one of those five spots in the London paper.”

I laugh lightly. “But that's not up to me. I—”

“It most certainly is up to you. Write the essay as if your life depends on it. Stay up late writing and rewriting it. Make it the most compelling paper you have ever written. I very much want it in the newspaper.”

“Isabel, I can't
make
my professor choose my paper. I can't—”

Again she cuts me off.

“I wouldn't have agreed to this chat if I didn't think you have the ability to secure one of those spots. You're not the only one who has been interviewing today. I have been listening to everything you say as intently as you've been listening to me. I have chosen you to write down my history. You are the one who will give me what I've wanted all my life now that I am at the end of it.”

For a moment or two I can only stare at her in confusion. I can't resurrect her long-dead bridal gown career or her deceased sister. And I can't give her anything in a newspaper article except perhaps the return of her real name.

But that is not what she's wanted all her life.

She inclines her head toward me, coaxing me to remember all that she has told me from the history of her life in the short time I have spent with her. What did she always want? What did she want before she found Julia?

Before she lost Julia?

Before she sketched the first wedding gown?

Before she stood on a sunny beach with her toes in the sand and her mum at her side?

“You wanted your mother to be proud of you,” I whisper.

Isabel nods once as tears rim her eyes.

“You can give Mum the honor of having flesh and blood and a name again. I want people to know the sacrifices she made for me and Julia. Anne Louise Downtree is a forgotten soul, Kendra. She is nothing but a three-word entry in the record of the war's dead, remembered by no one except me, her daughter, Emmeline. I don't know that she can see me from where she is, but if she can, I want her to view me as I stand at the end of my existence. I want her to see that I understand there are no secrets to a charmed life. There is just the simple truth that you must forgive yourself for only being able to make your own choices, and no one else's.”

Astounded at what she is suggesting I am able to do for her, I hesitate a moment before responding. “If I'm going to write this paper the way you'd like, I need to know why you've waited until now. You've had more than fifty years to come clean about who you are.”

“I'm not the historian you are. All these years I've failed to see what you historians already know. I'm an old woman and I have a grand opportunity with you, so I'd best take advantage of it.”

“What do you mean, ‘what historians already know'?”

“Surely you've not forgotten what you said about history when you first walked into this room, Kendra?” She is half grinning at me, half frowning.

I think back to when I had arrived a few hours ago and Isabel and I were talking about the value of recording the past. I had asked her what was the good in remembering
an event if you didn't remember how it made you feel. How it impacted others. How it made them feel. You would learn nothing.

“You want to pass on what you have learned, don't you?” I say.

“Well, aside from the fact that it seems a good thing to do, I think Mum would want me to. I think she would be proud of me if I did.”

I let her answer settle over me for a moment. “This is just one article in one newspaper. I'm afraid you will be disappointed.”

“A great many movements have begun from one article in one newspaper. I am only responsible for my own choices. I am choosing to tell my story, Kendra. Who listens to it is not my burden. Telling it is.”

We hear a knock at the door and then Beryl pokes her head inside. “Everyone's here. It's time for the party, Auntie.”

“We'll be right out, Beryl.” Isabel turns to me. “You will stay, won't you? There are people you need to meet.”

“I would like that very much.”

She rises a bit unsteadily and I move quickly to help her. Isabel thanks me when she is firm on her feet, and then draws a manicured hand gently across her brow to brush away a stray strand of hair. “How do I look for a ninety-three-year-old?”

“I'd say you don't look a day over ninety.”

Isabel tips her head back and laughs. “Julia would have liked you, Kendra. Oh my. Yes, she would have.”

“I would've liked her, too.”

Her laugh ebbs away but her grin remains. “I've been a coward most of my life, you know.”

At first I say nothing. Sages of the past would say we
are—all of us—just imperfect people on a flawed planet who are trying to hold on to what is good and lovely and right.

“On the contrary,” I finally reply, “I think history will prove that Emmeline Downtree was actually very brave, considering all that she had to endure.”

Isabel regards me thoughtfully, then crinkles an eyebrow in contemplation before reaching for my arm. “Shall we?”

We make our way down the hall, into the kitchen, and through the laundry room, where the garden door is ajar and sounds of celebration are skipping on the breeze. On the threshold, the eyes of those who have been waiting for the guest of honor turn expectantly toward us. Among the many faces, I see Professor Briswell, standing a few feet away from a woman who looks very much like a younger version of Isabel, as well as more than a dozen happy children who've not a clue what war is like.

As we pass the open door's window, a bit of lace curtain lifts on a ribbon of air, caresses the back of Isabel's neck, and then falls away like a discarded bridal veil.

We step out onto the terrace and the people, young and old, begin to sing.

NO
work of historical fiction can be written without the assistance and expertise of others, and this has never been truer for me than with this book.

Thank you, Tim and Joyce Norris of Stow-on-the-Wold, for your friendship, for arranging all those interviews at the British Legion, for the many e-mails sent and received, and for answering my relentless questions. Next time the tapas are on me.

Thank you, Tom and Judy Hyde, for your sweet hospitality: for the fish and chips; for letting me meet your mates, share a pint with them, play a game of dice, and talk about what it was like to be a child in a time of war. And, Penny Culliford, thank you for the many helps with this and that, and for the lovely cabaret show at Battersea.

Many thanks to my amazingly gifted editor, Ellen Edwards, for your insights into what affirms life and
satisfies the soul, and for knowing when I needed to dig deeper into the hearts of these characters.

Thank you, Professor Margaret Dyson of the University of California, San Diego, for helping me understand the basics of child psychology in the early 1940s, and to British author and historian Julie Summers, thank you for sharing with me your expertise on the evacuation of London's children.

To my mother, friend, and proofreader extraordinaire, Judy Horning, thank you for accompanying me on an unforgettable research trip to Gloucestershire; for poring over the research materials at the Imperial War Museum in London; for trudging in the rain, cheerfully jumping onto countless trains, and, of course, reading the raw manuscript.

The following works opened to me the world of London at war and I am grateful: Amy Helen Bell's
London Was Ours
, Ben Wicks's
No Time to Wave Goodbye
, Julie Summers's
When the Children Came Home
, Lynne Olson's
Citizens of London
; Peter Stansky's
The First Day of the Blitz,
Mark Bernstein and Alex Lubertozzi's
World War II on the Air
, Philip Ziegler's
London at War
, Jessica Mann's
Out of Harm's Way
; Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson's
The Murrow Boys: Pioneers on the Front Lines of Broadcast Journalism
.

And to those Britons who shared your war stories with me, I know how timeless some of those memories are to you, even all these many years later. I saw it in your eyes. Grateful thanks are extended especially to Jean Ashton, Eddie Warren, Ron Bockhart, Maj. Gen. Clive Beckett, Dorothy Donald, Faith Jaggard, Colin Mayes, and Roy
Holloway.