Leonora drove her hire-car towards Hursley, trying to recall what it had been like that day in 1944 when she had gone to Farley Mount. In this country, the media was building up towards what looked like being a great climax of old film and tattoos and fireworks on the fiftieth anniversary of VE day in September. It had already had one bite of the cherry with a D-Day anniversary last month, when Leonora had heard on the car radio, as she toured the UK like the American tourist she now was, wartime songs she had not heard for fifty years, yet whose words she could still remember without falter.
As she watched for a break in the Clearway lines, she hummed to herself. That day in 1944 when they had come along here on their cycles, this road had been narrow and pale grey and bendy, and it had been ribbed with silvery tracks of all the tanks that had gone along it assembling for D-Day. It was now a wide, black orderly highway with road junctions where there had then been dusty unsurfaced lanes slipping off to unsignposted villages. In spite of there having then been such a concentration of men and vehicles, today’s constant stream of cars seemed to be so much more stressful and obtrusive.
Or does it only seem like that because I was fifteen and more aware of me than of what was going on?
More aware of Waldemar.
Waldemar, blond and startlingly blue-eyed, who was so attractive in his POW clothes with the diamond target between his shoulders. Waldemar, still wearing his Luftwaffe cap against regulations. Waldemar Altzheiber, who had been one of the gang of hired labour cutting the hedges round the field at the back of Station Avenue.
On the day of the picnic, Waldemar was too new a phenomenon to understand. He was the enemy her Dad had been fighting, he was a Luftwaffe pilot who had probably dropped bombs all over England… and yet he would not keep out of her thoughts or her dreams – such dreams… dreams that made her afraid in case she should talk in her sleep and Mam should hear.
That day, as today, had been burning hot. That entire summer of ’44, as this one of ’89, had been long and hot and dry. But the air then had been light and easy to breathe, because the roads then were empty of most traffic except military. Today there was a constant stream of cars, some doing ninety, and vast container lorries with continental registrations doing speeds that caused a slip-stream.
She came to the Farley Mount turn-off. Everything had changed. It looked as though the place had become part of the tourist and leisure industry. She parked and walked to where they had all posed for the old man to draw them. Mam had never known about that sketch: Waldemar had taken it back when he was repatriated and had returned it to her on the day they married. Twenty years difference in their ages, yet the marriage had been good whilst it lasted. Greater difference in age than there had been between Little-Lena and Mrs Kennedy when they had gripped hands so tightly the day before the war had broken out.
She sat beside the odd monument to a horse and lit a cigarette as she had done fifty years ago, but now without the kind of ceremony of Georgia’s cigarette case and flint-sparking lighter, without the excitement of being invited to accept a symbol of modern womanhood. ‘Have one, but don’t tell your mother.’
Leonora Altzheiber was both excited and apprehensive at the prospect of meeting Georgia Kennedy again. For fifty years she had kept another secret which Mrs Kennedy had confided in her. At the time, no one else knew why she had disappeared from Markham, where she had gone, and why she had left so suddenly – not even Eve Hardy had known. Georgia Kennedy had told only young Leonora Wiltshire – and it had been painful to know.