Rachel
Silver Jubilee day, 1977, and June 2002.
By the time the kitchen clock struck seven I knew that my cousin wouldn’t be coming back. I abandoned my rehearsal of the cool response I’d planned for her return: I always knew you were just mucking about, Jess . . .
While we waited for the men to finish searching the hedgerows and the white snaky curve of the Ridgeway path above us, I watched my aunt. Evie sat at the kitchen table twisting the fabric belt of her new dress as though she was trying to wring the anxiety out of herself. She caught me staring at her and managed to twist her features into something halfway to a smile. This attempt to reassure me made me feel even more frightened. ‘Come back!’ I shouted silently at my cousin. ‘It’s not a game any more.’
I was still clutching my Silver Jubilee mug with its Queen’s head and coat of arms. I wished I could go upstairs and put the mug away but I felt bound to stay here at the table with my aunt, as though any movement could jinx the search for Jessamy. We sat in silence, listening to the kitchen clock tick-tocking until the noise seemed to drill itself into my chest.
‘I’m going out,’ I blurted out after five more minutes had passed. ‘I’m going to check the stables again.’ I put down the mug and rose.
Evie gave a start. ‘No.’ She reached across and grabbed my wrist. ‘Stay there.’
I wriggled my wrist free. ‘Let me. Please.’
She ran her hands over her face. ‘Rachel, we’ve looked a dozen times. We’ve been all over the farm.’
‘There are places we hide . . .’
‘I know them all. The elm the lightning hollowed out.’ She sounded almost fierce. ‘The little hollows in the sheep field. Your father and I used to hide in them, too.’
She gave another of the strained smiles. ‘We’ve combed this place, every inch. And you and I need to stay here, in case she comes back. Imagine if she returned, cold, tired, scared . . .’ Her voice cracked a little on the last word. ‘And there was nobody here.’
I stared hard at the kitchen table. Jessamy and I had been making Union Jacks out of red, white and blue Plasticine and they still sat at the end of the table. I reached across for one of them and squashed it in my hand. Some of the blue Plasticine squelched into the white strips. I clenched my fist again. The red ran into the white and now it didn’t look like a flag at all. I kept on squeezing it until I held a dirty grey ball in my palm. ‘We need to check on the ponies,’ I said.
She put a hand to her mouth. In the field outside the house stood a new chestnut, a surprise for Jessamy. Evie had arranged for him to arrive while we were at the Jubilee party.
Eventually I must have fallen asleep, the spoiled Plasticine still in my hand, because I came to with my head resting on the oak table. ‘. . . again in daylight,’ a man was saying.
‘Thank you.’ Evie’s voice sounded like a stranger’s: polite, detached.
But in the morning they found only half a dozen deflated Jubilee balloons and some crumpled Union Jack paper napkins, blown into ditches and hedges.
I returned to Winter’s Copse six weeks after the Silver Jubilee party, when my summer holidays began. My father, Evie’s twin brother, Charlie, had done what he could to protect me from the newspaper and television coverage of the disappearance but I’d caught a few glimpses of myself, huddled behind Evie as she stood in the kitchen doorway, before Dad could switch off the television. ‘Craven villagers are still perplexed by the disappearance of Jessamy Winter,’ the reporter started.
Whenever I could escape the insistent tones of a school teacher I let my cousin’s image drift back into my mind.
This evening Evie was making me tea: scrambled eggs on toast, and I was laying the table. I set three places. Evie turned from the range with the saucepan of eggs, and her eyes widened at the sight of the three table mats and sets of cutlery.
She let out a quiet moan. The saucepan in her hand dipped so that the yellow contents slopped on to the table. ‘Sorry,’ she said, raising her other hand to her mouth. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry, Rachel. It’s just . . .’ The words seemed to jam in her throat. She rocked herself backwards and forwards; more of the scrambled egg spilled out of the pan, pattering to the scrubbed kitchen floor.
It was then that the fact of Jessamy’s disappearance hit me with an almost physical violence. I stared at the stupid, wretched, third place I’d set and knew that she would never lift the knife and fork, never drink from the water glass again. She’d never ride that new pony still waiting for her. It was my birthday next week and I was going to be ten. Jess wouldn’t be there when I cut my cake. If there was a cake. Perhaps there would never be cakes again.
These days, in my job as a freelance marketing consultant, I write copy and do a bit of simple design work. I work with sophisticated photo enhancement programs on the computer. It’s possible to excise an image and replace it with something else: an unwanted wedding guest can become a tree or bush. But before you carry out the replacement you’re left with a cut-out of the missing person’s body, filled only with an amorphous grey vacuum.
As Evie’s scrambled eggs splattered out of the saucepan I saw my cousin’s outline at the third table setting, with a vacuum where her body – that vital, energetic mass – had been. And that outline followed me round my life as I progressed to all the places where Jessamy should also have been: university matriculations and graduations, weddings and funerals.
But eventually life filled in the vacuum so that I started to look through it. But nothing could fill in the vacuum for Jessamy’s mother.
The Golden Jubilee was approaching; only weeks away now. Evie had already sent me the invitation to the village party, with its official Jubilee logo on the top. Twenty-five years since my cousin had disappeared. Everyone watched old film coverage of the Coronation and the Silver Jubilee on television. Parties were planned; bunting was ordered.
But for Evie the anniversary could only ever be that of the last time she’d seen her daughter.
Evie
Coronation Day, 2 June 1953
The red jelly in the half-eaten trifle looked like drops of blood against the yellow custard and real cream on the top. Splashes of orange squash had stained the white tablecloths and the balloons tied to the fence had already started to deflate.
Evie clutched the table and closed her eyes for a second. A metal coil tightened round her head. When she opened her eyes again the jelly still looked like blood. She swallowed hard and looked away. The children were eating more slowly now, their eyes glazed as though they were inebriated, tin-foil crowns sliding down their heads. One or two would almost certainly be sick. Several of the adults also looked a little green, though that might have been the cask of best ordered especially for the party, rather than the food.
Sandwiches, cold sausages, cold beef, lemonade, tea, fairy cakes, buns, trifle, chocolate cake: a cornucopia to celebrate the new queen, the new hope, the modern age. All consumed within an hour. Perhaps these new Elizabethans would never again feel that desperation to taste something sweet and rich in the mouth that Evie remembered from the years of rationing.
New Elizabethans. To distract herself from the spoiled food and her throbbing head Evie rolled the phrase silently round her lips. She liked the idea of being a New Elizabethan. The old Elizabethans had been a vivacious lot: explorers, pirates and poets. Perhaps their twentieth-century kin would be equally entertaining. Her headache seemed to subside. Feeling better, she looked along the table for her next chore. Some of the older folk were sitting back in their chairs, eyes slightly glazed. Hard to imagine them exploring and writing sonnets. But the children . . . Perhaps they’d live great lives. Perhaps she herself might be a writer. But if she’d been going to do something clever in her life she’d have made a start by now. It was too late now: twenty-three, married, with this—
‘Evie!’
Day-dreaming again. The earthenware teapot in Evie’s hand was needed at the far end of the trestle table. Fiona Fernham gave her a fierce wave. ‘That tea will be good and stewed now. Give me the pot if you’re just going to stand there staring at nothing.’ She gave Evie the kind of glare that one of her illustrious land-owning forebears might have given a retainer.
‘Sorry.’ Evie walked over and handed the pot to Fiona. If you were female and aged between sixteen and sixty and resident in the village of Craven you weren’t granted a day of leisure to celebrate your new monarch’s anointing at Westminster Abbey. It fell to you to decorate tables, drape bunting, shell hard-boiled eggs, cut sandwiches, refresh tea-pots, and walk backwards and forwards all afternoon bearing heavy trays.
Relaxation was only for the young, the old and the male. Still, at least these exertions meant there was no time to brood.
Matthew caught her eye and he gave her a long, slow wink. ‘Pay attention, Eve.’ His face was tender. He must have overheard the exchange. For all his softness she knew he wouldn’t have liked hearing her spoken to like that. She was a Winter, by marriage at least. The Winters were landowners, successful farmers, even through the gloomy interwar years.
Evie flipped her apron at him and made a face to lighten the moment. Matthew’s mother sat beside him, a small dribble of tea falling down her chin. But her eyes were bright. Perhaps she was remembering the Coronations of the past: the Georges and Edwards. VE Day. And VJ Day, too, though that had been more muted because the boys weren’t home yet. All this remembering. There were things Evie preferred to forget. Her hand shook as she picked up an empty plate.
She didn’t feel sick, exactly. Just exhausted, with the occasional throbbing head and hot stabbing pains beneath her navel. Oh God, if only she could go home and curl up somewhere warm. But she couldn’t because people – she meant Fiona – would guess what was wrong with her. Pregnancy was the desirable condition for someone eighteen months’ married. To be incapable of keeping a baby until term was reprehensible, especially if your husband needed someone to hand his farm—
‘At least try and clear up that mess!’ Fiona was almost shouting now, pointing at the jelly splodges on the table as though Evie herself had spilled them on the cloth. Matthew used his knife to scrape up the worst of it onto his plate. ‘Oh not you, Mr Winter! I meant Evie.’ The coldness in Fiona’s voice when she said Evie’s name showed that the dislike was more than purely social.
‘No trouble for me to help,’ Matthew said in his slow, deep voice. ‘You ladies have been working all afternoon.’
But Matthew was Male and not intended by Providence for drudgery. Evie eyed him. He looked calm enough but you could never tell. Sometimes too much noise distressed him. And large numbers of people eating at the same time were difficult for him, too. She noticed the crumpled-up paper napkin beside his plate and wondered whether he’d hidden half a bun in it. Sometimes she still found food hidden in drawers or placed behind the cushions on the parlour sofa. At first she’d thrown it away but now she simply left it where it was and never mind the mice.
Evie took a cloth from her pinafore pocket and dabbed at the red stains on the cloth. You could never get them out, not completely. Even after a boil wash pinkish tints would remain. She felt her husband’s gaze on her and looked up to see Matthew regarding her with that expression that was peculiarly his own: half quizzical, half sad. She never knew sad for what, exactly. He’d lit a cigarette now that the meal was over and blew gentle puffs of smoke and his face was still soft as he watched her.
Matthew didn’t know about the pregnancy yet. She hadn’t been sure enough to raise his hopes. Or dash hers, she thought. But they were probably already dashed.
The children were on their feet now, clamouring for three-legged-races and egg-and-spoon. The fake sable-edged robes they’d worn for the pageant lay crumpled and trampled on the grass. Evie looked at their pink cheeks and shining eyes. New hope. A fresh start. She had to look away.
I still have so much, she told herself briskly. Think of all those war widows. Or those women whose children were crushed to death by bombs in London, Bristol or Portsmouth. Or those even more wretched women all over Europe whose entire families were deliberately murdered.
She finished clearing the table and went to put the scraps in the swill bucket, hidden behind the hedge, the smell of the wasted food making her want to retch. The pigs would like it, though. When he’d first come home, Matthew had stared at the pig swill and she’d known he was thinking how men in the camp would have fought over it.
Philippa, who lived in the cottage next to the shop, was rinsing plates in a bowl of soapy water on an old table, her hands wrinkled by long immersion.
‘Weren’t we clever to miss the worst of the rain?’ It had rained most of the morning.
Evie smiled and nodded, inhaling the smell of new grass to ease the nausea.
‘How’s Matthew?’
‘This is a good day.’ At least she’d asked outright. Some of the others gossiped about him behind their hands. ‘He still hides food but the dreams don’t seem as bad. This cool weather makes his bad foot ache, though.’
‘Nearly eight years and still they’re not right.’ The woman’s face suddenly took on a guarded expression, as though she’d said too much. Evie wished she hadn’t stopped. But she couldn’t ask her for details. Before the war Philippa had walked out with Jonathan Fernham, Fiona’s brother, for a while, but when he’d come back he’d done no more than occasionally partner her in mixed doubles or lead her round the village hall in a stiff foxtrot.
‘Did you watch the ceremony on television, Evie? We went to my mother’s to see it.’ Philippa handed Evie another bowl to empty. Evie watched the jelly and cake crumbs slide off the bowl into the swill bucket, where they joined more cake crumbs and a pint of cream that had turned too much to be used at the party. In the war they’d have done something with all that food. Again her stomach protested.
‘I saw it.’
The girl polished a plate with her drying-up cloth. ‘Those gorgeous dresses. Imagine having all that silk and taffeta.’
Evie nodded, although she hadn’t paid much attention to the Queen’s costume.
‘Like something from a film.’ Philippa wrung out the cloth. ‘A life of glamour. That’s what the Queen has. Not like us.’ She put her hands to her lower back. ‘Though you don’t need the posh frocks and jewellery.’
Evie put a hand to her face.
‘You’ve just rubbed jelly into your cheek. Here.’ Philippa flicked it off with the cloth. She gazed at Evie. ‘How do you do it, Evie?’
‘What?’
‘I remember you when you first came here, a scrawny little kid from south London. Nothing special. But now . . .’ She didn’t sound envious, only slightly reproachful. Evie had got her man, after all.
Evie shrugged. ‘I don’t think I’m all that special. My mother was pretty, as far as I remember. But by the time I’m twenty-five I’ll be a weathered old hag from all those winter nights in the lambing shed.’
Philippa turned back to the washing-up bowl, shaking her head. ‘And Matthew adores you and you live in the prettiest house in the village.’
And only one thing was asked of her.
‘Fetch me some more plates if the kids have finished with them. I’ll freshen up this bowl first.’ Philippa tipped out the soapy water onto the grass, where the suds gleamed like small crystal balls before popping.
‘I’ll fetch you some hot water from the urn.’ Both women jumped at the voice. Martha Stourton stood at the hedge, unsmiling, watchful, her pale eyes huge in her face.
‘Thanks!’ Philippa answered.
Evie retreated behind the hedge. First Fiona Fernham and now Martha: this was going to be a day of avoiding women who didn’t approve of her. The grass was nearly dry here now and she could risk her new frock for a minute’s peace and quiet. She’d promised herself that she wouldn’t brood today, she’d let the past go, fold back the memories and pretend they’d never been taken out again. She removed her pinafore and laid it on the grass to protect the full poplin skirt. ‘There’s enough material in that frock to clothe all the women in the village,’ Matthew had joked when she’d put it on. Then his eyes had softened and he’d put his arms around her. ‘It shows off your neat little waist. You’re fit for a queen yourself.’
It might have been her imagination but the dress already felt slightly tight around the bust and stomach. Could she still be pregnant after yesterday? She felt the muscles around the tops of her legs and in her pelvis tighten, as though they were trying to hold on to the foetus.
The grass was soft and springy from all the rain. It made a comfortable resting place. Nobody would see her here. From her pocket she retrieved her Woodbines and lighter. Mrs W didn’t like smoking in the house. She could barely talk but her hands would flutter in her lap at the sight of a cigarette packet.
From here Evie was looking up towards the White Horse. Its front legs were hidden by the curve of the hill and it looked more like a kangaroo. Small black figures walked around beside it; not everyone was marking the Coronation, some had travelled out here to look at the horse, now restored again after its ignominious wartime camouflaging. Above the horse, hidden by the slope, the Ridgeway cut its way like an east-west scar across the Downs. Sometimes, when she walked up there, Evie could almost imagine a call blown on the breeze, or the treading of hooves behind her. She never turned round in case she saw the ghosts of the men and beasts who’d tramped the footway all those centuries ago. And she only ever walked on the eastern section of the path, never to the west of the White Horse.
Evie let her eyes close for a moment. Sleep had been elusive for the last few nights but wanted to snare her now. Her chin slumped onto her chest. The packet tumbled from her hand before she could even remove a cigarette.
‘Taking a break?’
Her eyes flew open. Martha, back from fetching water. She sat up. Martha always made her feel guilty for taking a minute’s break. If Evie sat on a hay bale or leaned against the fence posts for a sip of tea from the Thermos, that would be the moment Martha conjured herself up from nowhere to suggest with just a flash of those green eyes of hers that Evie lacked commitment. ‘Just wanted a rest.’
‘I see.’ Martha’s eyes seemed to glide along Evie’s body. Perhaps she’d guessed.
‘I’ll just finish this. Would you like . . .’ She gestured at the cigarettes.
‘Thanks.’ Martha took one and lit it with her own lighter, standing beside Evie as she smoked.
‘Funny how peaceful it gets as soon as you step just a few yards away from the crowds.’ Might as well try for some conversation, Evie thought, difficult as it was with Martha.
‘Especially now the silver band’s stopped.’ Martha took a draw of the cigarette. ‘Bit different from London.’
She liked to refer to Evie’s early childhood in the city, as though underlining her incomer status.
‘I don’t really remember London.’ She forced a note of neutrality into her words. ‘I was so young when I came here.’
‘Ten.’ Martha made it sound like a contradiction.
‘I should be getting back. Philippa needs the plates cleaning.’ She was gabbling.
‘I saw you up on the hill earlier on, Evie. Didn’t you want to watch the ceremony on television? Matthew bought you a set, didn’t he?’
The last sentence made it plain what Martha thought of such uxoriousness. ‘He thought his mother would like to see it.’ She felt her cheeks burn and turned her head so that Martha wouldn’t see and forced herself to stare at the trees and the distant lettuce-green Cotswold hills to the north. But the older woman simply stared at her for another second before drifting away towards the tables.
Evie stayed where she stood, giving herself another minute, just until the worst of the pain subsided. Should she tell Matthew now? He looked so happy, sitting with his mother at the trestle table, enjoying the celebration. If she told him, he’d worry. Wait another day.
She should have told him this morning, when it had started.
She’d come inside to join Matthew and Mrs W. She wasn’t really that bothered about watching the Coronation but it had started to rain again. Just like D-Day had been, cold and wet, not like early summer at all. Matthew moved up on the sofa so there was room for her, grimacing slightly as he moved his left foot. ‘Tea’s just brewed, Evie. Here, let me pour you a cup.’
‘No, you stay there, I’ll do it in a moment.’ She looked at the square wooden cabinet, received with such pride and anticipation just days ago. The picture wasn’t bad, smaller than the cinema but you could make out the shining brass on the horses’ harnesses and the details on the carriages. Shame you couldn’t see the colours, though. So many people on the streets: thin faces, and tired-looking, still, some of them. The war had only finished eight years ago, after all. Perhaps the cheers and shouts were a release of emotion. People looked at that young woman in the carriage with her smooth skin and they thought she was drawing a line under it all.
Evie considered whether this would ever be possible. She gave her husband another little smile and looked back at the television screen
‘Just look at those arches they’ve put up over the Mall,’ Matthew marvelled. ‘It’s like something from ancient Rome.’ The Queen’s coach was coming closer. The camera angle changed and Evie saw the backs of the spectators’ heads, then the sides of their faces as the camera moved round to get a clearer shot of the monarch. What did she feel, this young woman, as she saw all those people? Perhaps she was flattered, gratified. Or perhaps she was secretly terrified, longing to run away and spring on one of the horses they said she adored.
How many tens or hundreds of thousands of them were in London to see this procession? Little children, old people, middle-aged women in their best hats, soldiers in uniform. Happy, smiling faces.
Mrs W’s shawl had fallen off her lap. Evie rose to retrieve it for her, moving closer to the television screen just as the camera changed its angle, focusing on the crowd instead of the coach, so their faces were close to Evie’s eyes. How extraordinary that she could look at these excited strangers while sitting in their own parlour, eighty miles away from the Mall.
A cramp squeezed her abdomen. And she felt the back of her neck prickle with cold sweat even though the coal fire was lit in the grate.
A cool tingle ran down her spine. It was going to happen again and there was nothing she could do to stop it, to hold on to what might have been a child. Somehow she managed to pick up the shawl and tuck it round her mother-in-law’s lap.
‘Robert.’ Evie had to strain her ears to pick up the word. The old lady raised a finger and pointed towards the screen. Evie glanced at the television and saw only the blurred black and white faces of thousands of strangers. A quick glance at Matthew’s relaxed expression told her he couldn’t have heard his mother murmur his brother’s name. Evie sat back again and forced herself to breathe slowly. Mrs Winter was confused again; she couldn’t possibly have made out an individual in that throng.
Robert was dead. That’s what they’d told Matthew when he’d come home from the hospital. Your brother died in a barn fire. He fell asleep and left a cigarette alight and the dry hay caught fire. He is buried underneath one of the yews in the churchyard.
‘There,’ said Robert’s mother slowly again. Evie’d never even been certain whether Mrs Winter had understood that Robert had died those eight years ago. Impossible to tell whether the information had pierced the old lady’s expressionless eyes.
Evie touched her arm. ‘The picture’s not very clear, is it? You can’t make out the details?’ She gave the arm a gentle shake. ‘Where did you think you saw him?’
Mrs W’s eyes focused on the square box. The carriage had reached the Abbey now.
‘First the Duke of Edinburgh and then the Queen alight from the royal carriage,’ Richard Dimbleby said on the television.
The old woman’s lips opened. ‘There,’ she said again, her eyes focusing somewhere in the direction of the television. Something about the flags and crowds must have made Mrs Winter remember a previous Coronation. Perhaps Robert had enjoyed watching the news film at the cinema and that was why she was thinking about him now.
‘You’re right, mother, she’s there now,’ Matthew said. ‘Going in a young wife and mother and she’ll come out a queen. Doesn’t she look young? Barely older than our Evie.’
‘There,’ the old woman said again.
‘I’m just going to check on that heifer.’ Evie stood, her eyes on the window behind the television. The room felt stifling, despite the unseasonable chill outside. Remembering Robert was making her feel dizzy.
‘She’ll be fine, love. Leave her till later. You’ll want to watch the ceremony.’
‘I don’t mind.’ She left the room, praying he wouldn’t make a fuss, but he didn’t, Matthew never did unless something triggered one of his bad turns; then he’d grow uneasy if she left his sight. She forced herself to walk unhurriedly through the house to the kitchen, where she swapped her court shoes for a pair of boots in which to negotiate the muddy farmyard. The heifer looked up as she approached the shed, eyes no longer dull, nose damp and twitching. Good. She could go back inside now, into the companionable fug of the parlour. But she didn’t. She found herself walking out of the yard. She needed space – her feet found their own way across the field and through the gate. The faint outline of a sheep track led up to the Ridgeway. Years ago she and Charlie had stood up here looking down as smoke curled from the roof of the barn.
Evie’s feet pulled her into a run uphill, towards the ribbon of clear sky forming over the grey skies. She passed Martha Stourton’s cottage and was careful to take quiet steps, in the shadows, until she was outside the view of anyone looking out of a window. Her lungs protested as she dashed forward but she kept going. It started to rain and almost immediately her frock became a cold flapping sheet around her legs. Evie headed slowly back down the hill towards the farm, her head bowed down, her mind dipping backwards into the past. She found herself standing by the back door again and rubbed the raindrops off her face.
From the drawing room came the sound of Richard Dimbleby’s voice, still narrating the Coronation from Westminster Abbey. A blast of trumpets snarled out. She could slip off this bloodied dress and leave it to soak. Lucky she’d planned to wear the New Look-style frock she’d made to the party on the green.
It could be as though it had never happened.
Robert
Camp at Ban Pong, Thailand, November 1942
Dear Evie,
I lost the earlier letters I wrote: they must have dropped out of my pack as we marched out of Changi camp in Singapore for the last time. I could rewrite them from memory but haven’t the heart to list it all. How Matthew and I were redeployed from the Berkshires when we reached India and sent out with men from other regiments to Singapore. The last days trying to hold out against the Japs, hiding out in a small village when the fight was over, capture, humiliation (they made us line the roads and drove their dignitaries past us to laugh).
This will be another letter I write but can never send to you. But just pretending you read what I write helps me enormously. You’re just a kid of twelve so perhaps it’s as well you don’t. Perhaps it’s a bit odd, me writing to you rather than to Mum. Or Martha. But when I think of you I feel calm, like I used to.
We’d seen bad things in Changi, but when we heard the rumours that the Japanese wanted to build a railway between Burma and Thailand, I assumed that was all it was: a rumour.
But it wasn’t.
November now, not sure of the exact date. I think about you back on the farm. Have you slaughtered a pig? Is the farm manager ploughing? Have you had frosts? I love the first frost, the way it makes your cheeks glow and makes the horses toss their heads when we take them out in the harness. I would give anything for just an hour’s frost to refresh us. ‘Never thought I’d miss the cold,’ Matthew said just this week. ‘I used to hate getting up when the windows had frozen up inside. But imagine sleeping in a room where you know no insects will bother you.’ Good old Matthew. We’ve done our best to stick together, joining the same regiment and then managing to get me sent to Singapore with him when he was redeployed. Otherwise I’d be with the Berkshires in India. Most of the officers are very sympathetic but warn us that it’s up to the Japs as to whether we stay in the same camp.
A thousand miles in a goods wagon to Ban Pong in Thailand, the nearest point on the Thai railway system to the coastal plain of southern Burma, two hundred miles away across the mountains. The Japs want to cut a railway across these peaks. Even we British couldn’t do it. They’re insane, Evie. Just writing that sentence could get me shot so I must hide these letters very carefully. Even just having this blank exercise book is dangerous. I pulled it off a desk at the school in Singapore we were holed up in and somehow I managed to keep it with me. How long ago that seems now. But I can’t face writing about what happened back there again, so I’ll just start from here, from the start of our work on the Burma railway.
When we reached Ban Pong they marched us through the town. The Thais stared at us without much curiosity. From the gardens of the bigger houses came the scent of tropical blossom and flowers. I smelled something I recognized: jasmine. I tried to hold on to that smell, Evie, so that I could draw on it when we reached the camp and they stood us outside the stinking hut that was to be our quarters. Someone started laughing. ‘Look,’ he said, pointing up to the tall teak trees. We looked up and saw the black vultures in the branches. ‘They know they’ll be fed.’ Then we were all laughing, but it wasn’t laughter like there is at home when the cricket club piles into the Pack-horse on a Saturday evening after a match. I looked at us in our filthy clothes, already thin, some shaking from the effects of disease, and I wondered if we were actually already dead and hadn’t realized. Perhaps this was hell. Matthew managed to grab a bed-space next to me. Thank God, thank God for letting him be here with me. ‘No snoring, Bobby,’ he said. And we might have been on Scout Camp on Boars Hill.
Our nearest neighbour, i.e. the person just inches away on the next mat, is a man called Macgregor, a Savile Row tailor in peacetime. ‘Could you measure me for a new dinner jacket?’ Matthew asked. ‘This one seems to have lost its shape.’ He pointed to the ragged shirt he wore and even Macgregor, a solemn Scot, laughed. ‘Aye, you’ll be needing to take in the seams a little, too.’
A few days later. Haven’t written because I have had my first attack of malaria – that stagnant pool beside the hut, I suspect. Not too severe. Poor Matthew, he’s still not right after his bout at Changi. When I had the fevers I dreamed I was at home, at Winter’s Copse. I ran out onto the lawn at the front of the house in bare feet, and it was cool and lush. I fell down and rolled over and over in the dew until I was soaked through.
Then I woke and saw I was lying in sweat-drenched clothes and instead of the coo of wood pigeons the harsh shrieks of the guards filled my ears.
Rachel
March 2003
One click of the DVD remote and Jessamy stood before me.
The television screen showed me a giggling, prancing nine-year-old with a mop of dark hair. I could almost feel electricity crackling round her. This film must have been shot in ’76, the year before the Silver Jubilee party. I guessed it must be early June because the lawn was still a soft, almost fluorescent, green and lush; it would have felt like a silk carpet under Jessamy’s bare feet. In fact, 1976 was later to turn into the year of the drought. I, too, was only nine that summer, but I remember how later on the heat enveloped the village, trapping us all inside the oven it created.
Looking at this DVD, such oppressive sunlight seemed impossible; everything on the screen was soft, the light radiant rather than glaring.
Winter’s Copse itself looked much as it does these days, sheltered by the oak, chestnut and beech trees which had given it its name, its chalk walls and muted orange brickwork unchanged. The smaller size of the plants and shrubs in the garden was the only clue that we were looking back over a quarter of a century. Evie had been a busy gardener back then, always hoeing, digging and mulching. But it was Jessamy who grabbed all the viewer’s attention. She grinned at the camera and lifted her arms above her head like a ballerina, bending a slim leg. Then she sprang forward into a cartwheel, legs perfectly straight as they moved through the air, and another and another before cantering towards the apple tree. She made a graceful jump up to the lowest bough, catching it with her hands and swinging her legs through the O she’d made with her arms and flipping her body through so she was standing again. She always was quick to take a risk if she thought it would be exciting. Her legs and arms had attracted many bruises and cuts from failed attempts to scale walls or jump water troughs and her knees were seldom without scabs. These never seemed to detract from the grace of her limbs, though.
I wondered who was taking the film. Perhaps Matthew, Jessamy’s father. He’d once owned a cine camera, I recalled. It hadn’t been used since his death from lung cancer in 1972. Perhaps Evie hadn’t known how to use the camera. More likely she’d never had the time to learn: after the shock of her husband’s death there’d been the farm to deal with.
Jessamy released the bough, with another smile at the camera, and darted towards something outside the frame. I knew it must be the hutches beside the fence which housed her beloved guinea pigs. As she ran she turned and called out over her shoulder. There was no sound to this film so her words were lost, but I imagined she was pleading for them not to stop filming her. Jessamy always loved being the centre of attention, the star, the focus. And that’s what she was for her mother. Not surprising, really, after such a long wait for her birth. Her mother had married Matthew Winter in 1952 and Jessamy hadn’t arrived until 1967. But I didn’t want to think about Evie’s problems conceiving.
I’ve noticed that there’s always one child in each clan who’s the golden one, the one your eye is drawn to. Jessamy held that position in our family. I’ve noticed, too, how these children seem more likely to end up prematurely dead or involved in some tragedy. Maybe the gods really do love them too much. Or else they envy those shining faces and supple limbs.
I couldn’t watch this footage without my eyes pricking. Perhaps we were all once children playing outside on a sunny lawn in some endless, blissful summer, adult worries hidden beyond the dark shrubs at the bottom of the garden.
Yet there was a shadow falling on Jessamy in this film, a real shadow, not a metaphorical one. It wasn’t that of the person holding the camera, as far as I could calculate; it fell from someone observing the scene at some distance to the right of the camera. Not Matthew: he’d died four years earlier. The shadow might have been Evie herself but I could make out the edge of her peony-printed dress at the other side of the garden. She must have been tying back an early rose or pulling bindweed from a shrub. Evie was never one for pushing herself forward into the frame, even though her beauty usually drew all eyes to her. Her modesty was one of the things I loved most about my aunt. Perhaps she’d never shaken off her sense of being an incomer in this village, even though she’d lived at the farm for over sixty years. ‘I wasn’t born here,’ she’d said once. ‘Not like you, Jessamy.’ And Jessamy had wriggled with pride. ‘I’m a native, aren’t I, Mum?’ And Evie’s smile had been full of love.
I’d felt a prick of jealousy. Like my aunt, I hadn’t been born on the farm. I was only a visitor. But Evie had spotted my discomfort. ‘You’ve been coming to stay since you were a baby, Rachel. You belong here too.’ And Jess had flung her arms round me.
‘I wish you could live here all the time.’ And her breath had been warm against me, scented with the Heinz tomato soup we’d had for supper. Her hug was so tight I could barely tell where I stopped and she started. Sometimes this lack of boundaries pushed me into situations I found frightening: she’d put me up on her pony and insist I rode at a jump I knew I wouldn’t manage. Or she invented one of her terrifying games and made me join in: climbing out of the bedroom window, or running across the field the bull lived in. But I could never resist the lure of that wide grin, those sparkling eyes. ‘C’mon, Rachel, dare you!’
But now the shadow in the film was preoccupying me. Whose was it? I tried to assess its height and breadth. But my efforts came to nothing. It might just be that of a passing neighbour, come to drop off a cake or collect eggs. Anyway, it was hard to concentrate on its grey outline because Jessamy was moving again, turning cartwheel after cartwheel, her limbs long and tanned, her movements smooth and accomplished for such a young child. The shadow swayed slightly as she passed over it. I found myself clenching my hands, willing its darkness away from the girl.
But I was also feeling another reaction to the film, an emotion I tried to push aside as it was unworthy and immature. Where was I when this film was shot? I told myself I was being ridiculous. It was too early in the summer for me to have come to stay at Winter’s Copse for the school holidays. And this obviously wasn’t one of the weekends Dad drove me over for a brief visit. None of this logic soothed me. I was jealous, envious of Jessamy’s life at the farm without me. ‘There’s always a home for you here,’ Evie had told me more than once. ‘We miss you so much when you go back to school.’ But nobody in this film seemed to be missing the absent niece and cousin. Perhaps they never thought of me at all when I was away. Uncle Matthew had died and Evie and Jessamy had drawn even closer together in their loss.
I wasn’t going to let myself revert to being a prickly little girl. ‘I’m going to pull myself together,’ I’d told Luke as I left the flat to come down here. ‘Sorting out the house will be cathartic. And when I come home again you’ll find me a changed woman. No more weeping. No more hormones. I shall redecorate our bedroom and book an exotic holiday for us. And I’ll reinvigorate my business. Clients will come flooding in.’
He’d looked down at the suitcase he was carrying to the car for me. ‘I’m worried it’ll all be too much for you.’
‘No.’ I took the suitcase. ‘I can manage.’
‘I don’t doubt that.’ He sounded sad.
‘You know what I’m like: I need to keep busy.’ I patted my jeans pocket to make sure I’d got paracetamol with me. At least I didn’t have to worry about taking painkillers now.
‘Are you sure you’re OK to drive?’
‘It’s been twelve hours since my last drink.’ My head gave a rebuking throb.
‘I didn’t mean the alcohol.’
I knew he didn’t.
‘Do you really have to do this now, Rachel? Couldn’t it wait?’
‘I need to start clearing the house.’ I picked up my suitcase. ‘And plan the funeral now we can go ahead.’
‘You could plan it from here. You don’t need to be in Oxfordshire to make phone calls.’
My hand tightened on the handle and I laid the case in the car boot. ‘There’s the dog. I need to find a home for him. I need to talk to letting agents. I need . . .’
I need to be at Winter’s Copse, I wanted to say. I need to feel my aunt and cousin are close by. Even if they’re both dead. I need to come to terms with the shock of Evie’s death, so sudden, so unexpected. Perhaps something of Evie will still linger in the house. Perhaps there will be answers.
‘Don’t stay too long,’ he said, gently. ‘We need to make plans, contact the clinic—’
‘No.’ The word took me by surprise. ‘No more clinics. We need to move on, plan our lives round something different.’ The cross-London rush to the clinic for daily blood tests. The nasal sprays that made me retch. The injections I had to administer at home. The sense of failure, growing stronger every day so that it had started to affect every part of my life. I could barely write some simple copy for an advertisement which I could once have dashed off. ‘All the embryos are gone, anyway.’
‘We could try to—’
I held up a hand. ‘I can’t bear the thought of producing more. It makes me feel like a brood mare.’ I sounded brattish but Luke just nodded and closed the boot.
‘Perhaps it’s wise to leave things.’
And as soon as he said this I felt my emotions rush in an opposite direction. I’d wanted him to try and persuade me it was worth trying again.
I pushed the stop button and ejected the disk. Evie had gone to all the trouble of having this home movie transferred to a DVD just before Christmas. I knew this because I’d found the receipt from the computer company in Wantage that had carried out the transfer for her.
She’d placed the DVD in her desk with her will and details of her solicitor and of various insurance policies and other papers I hadn’t yet had time to examine. Evie had meant this footage of her daughter to be seen in the case of her death, probably by me as I, along with her solicitor, was an executor and had the task of clearing out Winter’s Copse and selling everything that couldn’t be rented out along with the property itself.
She could never have expected death to come so suddenly, though. Cardiomyopathy, the post-mortem had revealed, a condition I’d had to look up on the internet. Inflamed heart muscles. Evie had never mentioned heart trouble to me. Perhaps she hadn’t realized. It seemed unfair that a woman who still tramped up and down the hill and maintained a huge garden with barely a moment’s breathlessness had suffered such catastrophic heart trouble. Luke had raised his eyebrows over the post-mortem results, too. ‘Your aunt seemed one of the healthiest people we know. Perhaps the strain of not knowing what had happened to Jessamy had worn her down. But you should ring her GP, Rachel, see what she thinks.’
The GP had been kind but mystified. ‘Evie came into the surgery about four months ago to have her blood pressure checked,’ she said. ‘I listened to her heart then and it sounded fine.’ There was a pause. ‘I’m just looking through her notes again but there’s no sign of anything like a virus that might have damaged her heart.’
‘When I rang her two days before she died she told me she was planning to dig up one of her flowerbeds and try a whole new planting scheme for the summer.’
‘Nothing giving her problems on the farm?’
‘Not that I’m aware of. She sold the livestock a few years ago. Thank God.’
I’d shuddered at the images of the burning pyres of sheep and cattle in the foot and mouth disease outbreak in 2001.
Evie’s doctor could add nothing more except her regrets.
In the last two days I’d emptied drawers and cupboards, written to the telephone company to have the landline disconnected, informed Evie’s bank and building society of her death and phoned friends and family on my mobile, ticking actions off a list and feeling as though I was moving underneath an ocean, limbs weighed down by the pressure of the water. We hadn’t even had the funeral yet: that would have to wait until the crematorium was less busy. Flu season.
As the house emptied it seemed to reflect my own state: a vacant womb that couldn’t contain what it was supposed to contain. Only Evie would have understood this. ‘Not being able to have a baby made me feel I was worthless,’ she’d told me after one of my failed IVF treatments. ‘We were surrounded by animals who could reproduce whenever they were required to, year after year, and I couldn’t even carry a baby past a few months.’
I felt like that every time I walked to our local shops at home, tripping over buggies and prams and toddlers, all of them mocking my barren state.
‘Until Jessamy,’ I’d said.
‘Until Jessamy,’ Evie echoed. ‘When I got to four months with her and realized I wasn’t going to lose this baby I couldn’t believe it.’ And there was a fierceness on her normally gentle face.
My mobile trilled, breaking in on my remembering and alerting me to a text. ‘Cd come down 2 help . . .’ Luke. ‘No point, all going well, thanx, xxx,’ I texted back, feeling even worse. But I’d manage. I always did.
And I didn’t want Luke here just now. Admitting this made me feel shame, but it was true. Sometimes mad thoughts bubbled up and wanted to burst from my lips. I wanted to tell him to ditch me and find himself someone else, someone who could produce a child or who wouldn’t care about not having children.
Evie’s dog Pilot whined gently at me as I passed him in the hallway. ‘What am I going to do with you?’ I stroked his smooth dark head and went upstairs to my cousin’s bedroom and sat on her bed, staring at her chest of drawers and wardrobe, the bookcase that Evie had long ago emptied of books and toys. Little of Jessamy remained in this house except the DVD film and some photographs. And yet I often sensed my cousin’s presence in Winter’s Copse. Sometimes I found myself turning suddenly, half expecting to see that broad grin, that way she had of standing, thumbs tucked into the belt loops of her skirt or trousers, ready for action, for a walk down to the village shop to buy sherbet fountains or Curly Wurlies.
My pulse was still racing. The film had shaken me. I hadn’t been expecting to see Jessamy leaping across the garden. I hadn’t braced myself for it. ‘Did you think I’d forget Jessamy, Evie?’ Like a loon I almost listened for an answer. Nothing. ‘I’ll never forget her, I promise,’ I went on. When I’d watched that DVD I’d felt myself falling through time, back to when I myself was nine or ten again, spending much of the summer with my widowed aunt and my cousin at Winter’s Copse while my parents were abroad. I was once again that child who swung on ropes and collected eggs, who fed calves and rode the pony round the paddock, who shared Jessamy’s bedroom and giggled with her after lights-out.
Evie always greeted me with outstretched arms. My aunt, so reserved and dignified with adults, was a different woman in the presence of children. She’d show us how to do magic tricks with cards and coins and how to make explosive mixtures of bicarbonate of soda and vinegar. She said that the house was too big for such a small family. I knew from conversations with her in the last months of her life that my aunt had wished for more children. Sometimes, looking at her fine, straight nose and perfectly shaped forehead, I could picture her as the matriarch of some Italian dynasty, sitting at the head of a long table and indulging her grandchildren.
I went back downstairs to the television set and laid the DVD in a cardboard box with the photographs and the diaries I’d put aside to read. Had Evie ever intended me to see these? Perhaps she’d have burned them if she’d known death was on the way. She’d left Jessamy’s little medal in the box, too, the last prize she’d won. I remembered my aunt twisting the medal’s ribbon round her wrist that afternoon as we waited and waited for its owner to come back to the party.
I took the box into the kitchen and looked at the gap on the dresser where Jessamy’s Silver Jubilee mug should have stood as part of an unbroken chain linking Queen Victoria’s Coronation to the Golden Jubilee of Elizabeth II last year. Victoria, the two Edwards, the two Georges and Elizabeth II herself: all commemorated in this collection of china. Evie had valued continuity even though she wasn’t much of a one for chitchat about the Royals. I can’t ever remember her expressing an opinion about the divorce of Charles and Diana, for instance.
What should I do with these mugs? Sell them along with everything else of value that I didn’t want, I supposed. Our London flat was small and minimalist. The mugs wouldn’t work alongside the stripped wood floors and modern art.
Perhaps I’d just leave them here when the house was rented out. Twenty-five years was the period Evie had decided upon. If the case of Jessamy’s disappearance hadn’t been resolved by then, I was to inherit Winter’s Copse. The house owned by the Winters for hundreds of years would pass out of the family. I picked up the newest of the mugs, the Golden Jubilee one given to my aunt just months ago. Something rattled inside it. I pulled out a small lead knight on a horse. He’d been painted once but the colours had peeled off. Enough of the pigment remained on his face for me to see he’d once been carefully coloured in. Lancelot. Or perhaps Galahad, who, I thought I remembered, had been the knight pure in heart who’d found the Holy Grail.
Evie’d never recovered her grail, her lost child. It had slipped from her grasp and remained in shadows. I replaced the mug and its contents on the shelf.
A little cowardly part of me wondered whether Luke had been right and I should have delayed the task of tidying up her affairs, not that there was too much to do. But who else was there? Evie’s face, still in its final repose, flashed back into my mind. I pushed the image away and swapped it with a happier one: Evie waving Luke and me off after a weekend’s visit to Winter’s Copse.
‘See you next weekend,’ I’d called, throwing her a last kiss.
‘Drive carefully,’ she told me. I turned at the door and looked back at her. She was wearing a dark blue wool dress, a scarf pinned round the neck in the elegant manner only she could effect and flat ballet pumps. She’d looked like Audrey Hepburn. That had only been about ten days before her death.
When I went to the hospital after her death she was lying in a small, quiet side room, wearing that same blue dress and scarf. Evie’s heart had given up in the morning at home. I’d pictured her wearing old trousers and a jumper to walk the dog, but perhaps she’d been planning to go out to lunch with a friend. The scarf was pinned very carefully round her neck. Evie always joked that nobody except her understood scarf-tying and only she could arrange her scarf correctly. Surely the scarf would have been taken off while they did all those horrible violent things they did to people’s hearts when they were trying to save them. Someone must have retied it after she’d been pronounced dead.
‘It was lovely that you took the trouble to tie her scarf the way she liked it,’ I told the nurse, when she knocked on the door and brought me a cup of tea. She blinked.
‘Oh, that wasn’t me.’ She frowned. ‘Can’t remember who was on duty then.’ She’d opened the door. ‘Stay with her as long as you need.’
I’d stooped down to rest my lips on my aunt’s smooth cheek, scared she’d smell of death but determined I should carry out this last gesture of affection. Her skin felt smooth and soft. She smelled slightly of the scent she always wore and of the herbal shampoo she’d used for the last thirty years, buying it by mail order when local shops stopped stocking it. It was the realization that Evie would never again need to wash the long hair she’d worn tied back in a bun that made the tears flood my eyes. She’d never again hand me a cake or a pie to take back to London.
I fell forward onto my knees and wept for my aunt in a way I hadn’t for my own father following his death in a car crash, or for my long-vanished cousin. I couldn’t have cried more for Evie had she been my own mother and I stopped only when exhaustion bowed me over her bed, my head resting on the scratchy white hospital sheet with its chemical scent.
‘You’ve gone,’ I said now, addressing her empty kitchen. ‘Where are you now, Evie?’ Surely if her spirit lingered anywhere it would be somewhere here at Winter’s Copse. But all I heard in answer was the squeak of the birdfeeder swinging as a woodpecker, harlequin coloured in black and red, fed from it. Someone had kept it topped up with bird food. Probably Evie’s cleaning lady.
I listened for a few more seconds until the woodpecker flew off, then tried to get back to the letters I was writing at the pine table.
I kept having problems with the word ‘executor’ and misreading and mis-writing it as ‘executioner’. That’s what my executor’s jobs felt like, too, as though I was rummaging through boxes and drawers and killing off my hopes and dreams. I finished the letter and decided to tidy up. As I picked up the cardboard box the contents shifted and I noticed the scrap-book lying underneath the farming diaries I’d scooped up from the filing cabinets. This was a scrapbook as I remembered them from the seventies when scrapbooks were made of dull-coloured sheets of thick paper with plain covers, rather than flowers and seashells and God-knows-what-other whimsy.
I pulled it out and opened it. Every sheet was stuck over with cuttings. They came from a mixture of local and national newspapers and started around the time of the Coronation. With a sick feeling I flicked through until I reached the events occurring at the Silver Jubilee party. I felt my insides knot together as I read them. There was my own nearly-ten-year-old face peering out from one of the cuttings as I stood beside my aunt, my eyes wide and blank. The photograph must have been taken the morning after the party. I remembered the journalists coming to the door. We hadn’t been expecting them and, unsuspectingly, Evie had opened up. Grieving widow begs for news of missing Jessie . . . Nobody had ever called her that. Farmer’s wife loses only child . . . Little Jessamy vanishes as country toasts Queen . . . Gypsies questioned about missing child . . .
I replaced the scrapbook in the cardboard box and decided to put the box in Evie’s office.
But in the office my energy seemed to ebb away, as though the act of reading the cuttings had sapped me. I sat at my aunt’s desk and looked at the photographs I’d gathered up and placed here so I could decide which ones I wanted to take back to London with me. The one of Jessamy as a ten-year-old, of course, sitting on her pony with a beaming smile, her back straight.
I also wanted the picture of Uncle Matthew aged, I estimated, in his fifties. The colour in the old photo had faded but I could make out the smile on his face. He was kneeling in front of a tractor in the farmyard, his hands in front of him, back straight and parallel to the ground like a cat’s. His eyes were sharp and he was observing the tractor as though it was another cat. Probably checking a repair had been carried out correctly. I imagined my aunt spotting her husband at work and running inside to grab a camera, unable to resist the shot of a man in love with his work. Evie and Matthew had had a happy marriage. ‘It shook me terribly when he became sick,’ she’d told me once. ‘He always seemed so strong. It was lung cancer, nothing to do with the diseases he caught in that camp, but I always wondered whether it weakened him in some way, like his . . .’ And she’d broken off, shaking her head.
I smiled at Matthew’s picture and put it aside, turning to a black and white photograph of Evie and my father Charlie, at roughly the age Jessamy had been when she vanished. It had probably been taken by their mother, my grandmother, because they were standing in the doorway of a mock-Tudor semi. If I hadn’t known of Evie’s origins, I’d have imagined my aunt to have been born in some neo-classical pile in the shire counties, but she’d been a south London girl and proud of it. She and my father looked bright, expectant, in Fair Isle cardigans, gas masks slung over their shoulders, with no idea that they would never return to that house. There was something of Jessamy in Evie’s features: they might have been sisters at that age.
The fourth photograph, a black and white print, was of two young men with bare chests and stick-thin legs, behind them palm trees and a barbed wire fence. Matthew, with his brother, Robert. I’d never met Robert, who’d died in a fire on the farm just after the war.
The men were smiling but the smiles were almost like grimaces. They were standing in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp somewhere in the Thai jungle and someone (fellow prisoner? guard?) had taken this photograph of them because today was Christmas Day 1942, as evidenced by the small branch they’d decorated with paper chains and stuck in a tin pot in front of them.
They didn’t look like survivors. It was beyond me why my aunt had kept this photograph in the frame. Matthew certainly didn’t look his best after months of privation, not at all like the smiling man in the tractor picture. If I’d been given this photograph to use in my work I’d definitely have needed my software to smooth out the lines in his face. The silver frame was attractive, though. Perhaps I’d take out the picture and replace it with a photograph of Evie herself. There’d be plenty to choose from: Evie had the kind of face that the camera loves; it was – had been – almost impossible to take a bad photograph of her. I undid the clasps at the back and removed the velvet-covered board, giving it a gentle shake to dislodge the photograph onto the desk.
As it came out I saw that there was another picture there, hidden behind the group shot. I turned it round so it was the right way up and found myself looking at a photograph of a young man of about eighteen in uniform, with roses behind him. ‘Matinee idol,’ I muttered to myself. Examining his features I felt a glow of admiration. This man was beautiful, in a completely masculine, nineteen-forties style. He also looked familiar and the roses were obviously those still growing round the front door. I glanced again at the picture of the two men in the camp and recognized him, or his ghost, in the figure standing next to Matthew.
‘You’re Robert,’ I said. God, I was going mad, talking to myself like some old biddy. ‘Jessamy’s Uncle Robert.’ I glanced back at the portrait photo. ‘What on earth did they do to you out there to make you lose your looks like that?’
The young and handsome Robert Winter smiled back at me. I noticed that the smile reached his dark eyes, slightly wrinkling the skin around them. But their expression remained melancholic. ‘Did you know what you were getting into when you signed up?’ I asked him. ‘Was there any warning—’ I stopped, thinking now of my cousin, of how her disappearance had come as a sudden hammer blow.
The clock on the fireplace struck eleven. I coughed, trying to dislodge the stone that had suddenly threatened to choke me. I was supposed to be going into town to talk to the mason about headstones. No time to search for a photograph of Evie to place in the silver frame. I replaced Robert’s photograph under the glass and fastened the clasps behind the backing. ‘You can stay there for now,’ I told him.
As I left the room I glanced back to make sure I’d turned off the electric heater. I caught sight of Robert Winter’s dark eyes. They looked different again from this angle, seeming warning or reproachful. Perhaps that was why Evie had swapped his photo for the group picture.
I should probably stick every one of those photographs in the cardboard box so that I didn’t have to look at them again.
Pilot, Evie’s black Labrador, stood as I entered the hall, anticipating his walk by furiously wagging his tail. Evie had given him at least one long outing a day. ‘Later,’ I told him.
He gave me what sounded like a sign and flopped down again. ‘Sorry,’ I added. ‘I promise I’ll take you out soon.’ In London my day had been organized round the demands of my clients. Down here it had always been the animals who dictated the timetable: cows to be milked twice a day, chickens to be fed, horses to bring in and out of the field. Even as small children Jessamy and I had been bound to certain tasks such as collecting eggs or feeding calves. I hadn’t minded. It had been magic.
‘You could be a country girl, young Rachel,’ Martha had told me, nodding approval as she came upon me collecting eggs. ‘You’re making a better fist of it than your dad ever did. Charlie could never find all the eggs. But he and Evie came here too late in life.’
‘They were only ten,’ I had protested. ‘That’s not much older than I am now.’
‘They were incomers. Them and that Eyetie.’
‘Eyetie?’
‘Italian. Carlo, his name was. A POW. He helped on the farm. Spent most of his time taking naps if he thought he could get away with it. Luckily Mr Edwards, he was the manager while the Winter lads were away, and I were here to keep things going round the place.’
And she nodded her head in apparent satisfaction and shuffled off. Martha never stayed long in the farmyard, preferring the open fields above the farm, where we’d see her striding around, her silhouette on the ridge like an exclamation mark against the pale sky. I hadn’t seen Martha yet, probably been putting it off because they said she was now so eccentric and I didn’t feel strong enough for eccentrics. She’d been kind to me, as a child, though, and I’d have to pay her a visit.
I’d related Martha’s comments to Jessamy as we’d curled up together in her bed that night. She scowled. ‘Martha’s got this thing about Mum being an incomer. Don’t tell her what Martha said, it’ll make her cross.’ She wriggled closer to me. ‘Martha’s right about you, though, you belong here. When we’re grown up you and I’ll live here together all the time,’ she whispered. ‘We’ll share the work between us. You can have your own cows and horses. And sheep. Do you promise, Rache?’
‘Yes,’ I whispered back.
‘It’s a solemn oath.’ She sounded as though we were in church and lightning would strike me if I broke my word. ‘Like they used to make in olden times.’
But she’d been the one to break the oath, involuntarily.
Robert
Camp at Nong Pladuk, Thailand, January 1943
Dear Evie,
We managed some kind of celebration for Christmas, with a pretend pudding made of rice and a few currants someone had bartered for. We even had alcohol, brewed from vegetables or rice. It would make good rust-remover. So you see, we do keep our spirits up, Evie. Note the pun! I try to look at the animals, to admire the hornbills with their strange casques on their beaks, and the macaques. You’d smile to see how they carry their babies on their backs. Not so sure you’d smile at the scorpions and snakes, though.
These letters are becoming more like diary entries but they serve a purpose. There are rumours they’re going to move us on again. I’ll write again soon, Evie. And I pray I’ll come home soon, too.
Rachel
A few days before the Silver Jubilee, 1977
‘Just one more go,’ Jessamy begged.
We were in the farmyard, admiring our latest game: an obstacle course constructed from milk churns, hay bales, a rusting Ferguson tractor and whatever else we could find. We’d been up since six because the early morning light had flooded the bedroom and woken Jess and then she’d shaken me out of my sleep. Any time spent awake in bed was time wasted, she said. As soon as we’d heard Evie pull the bolts of the back door open to let out the dog we dressed and came down to play before breakfast.
‘It’s too easy for you.’ The low beams of sun shone on the fragments of old man’s beard floating round the farmyard so they looked like fairies.
‘You nearly managed it, too, Rache. You’d have done it if you hadn’t fallen off the bale.’
I nursed my sore wrist. ‘You’ll just win again anyway.’
‘Make it harder for me.’
‘How?’ I considered increasing the drop from the bales. If I put one on top of the other Jess wouldn’t be able to spring down as neatly onto the upturned oil drum. But I’d never be able to hoist another one up on top.
‘I know.’ From her pocket she extracted a handkerchief. It was large so it must have been one of her father’s. ‘Tie this round my eyes. Then I can’t see.’
‘You want to do it blind?’
‘Why not?’
‘You’ll fall off the bales. It’s too risky.’
‘No I won’t.’ She was already tying it round her eyes. ‘Can’t see a thing. C’mon, Rache. Take me to the starting line.’
I moved her by the shoulders to the broom we’d laid on the ground. She set off, hand in front of her, finding her way to the row of bricks and walking across them sideways with easy, neat movements. ‘This is peasy,’ she called. Then she found the bales and climbed up, crawling over them like a monkey on all fours. I thought she’d climb down the other side but she sprang down in a neat gymnast’s jump.
‘Come on, girls!’ Evie called from the kitchen. ‘Breakfast is ready.’ I smelled the bacon.
‘Let’s finish it off later,’ I said.
‘I’m nearly there.’ She was running towards the wall now. Once she’d scaled and jumped down the other side and crossed the water trough, she’d have finished the course.
She’d almost finished when Evie’s black Labrador jumped up from his vantage point by the milk churns and ran towards the kitchen door. He always was a greedy dog and he must have smelled the bacon frying. He didn’t knock into Jessamy but his shadow must have passed over her face, disorientating her so that she changed direction by a couple of inches. Now she was running towards the steel tow bar of the trailer. ‘Stop!’ I screamed. ‘Wrong way.’
Too late.
The tow bar caught her on the shins. She let out a cry, arms flaying as she struggled to stay upright. My held breath seemed to choke me. She fell very slowly onto a wooden crate. I ran to her. ‘Jess!’ Her fingers pulled at the handkerchief’s knot. Her shocked scream had brought Evie tearing out of the kitchen. ‘What have you done?’ She ran across the farmyard and pulled the blindfold off Jessamy’s face. ‘Oh sweetheart.’ Her eye was already swelling up. ‘You must just have caught it on the corner of that crate. And look at your legs. I’ll wrap some ice cubes in a cloth and put it on your eye. You’ll have some more pretty bruises to show everyone.’ She put an arm round Jess’s shoulders. ‘Why do you have to take these risks? That’s the second bad bang to your head in a fortnight. One of these days you’re really going to hurt yourself.’
‘I just can’t stop myself.’ Jessamy spoke through sniffs. ‘If I see something I have to try it. I can’t let myself be a coward.’
‘Stay there,’ Evie ordered. ‘I’ll bring the compresses out.’
Jess sat on one of the bales. Already I could see the shock passing from her face.
‘What’s going on?’ Martha stood in the yard, a jar in her hands. ‘Brought honey down for the girls.’ She handed the jar to me and scowled at Jess’s eye. ‘What’s happened to you, missy?’
I saw the mischief flicker over my cousin’s bruised face.
‘Mum hit me again.’ Jessamy said, giving me a wink. ‘She’s so strict.’
As I caught sight of Martha’s face I saw horror mix with contempt. ‘Jess was just—’ I started to tell her.
But Martha’s lips were already set tight.
Evie came out with the compress: a drying-up cloth she’d soaked in cold water.
‘Vet’s coming at ten, isn’t he?’ Martha said.
Evie let out a sigh. ‘Yes.’ I saw Jessamy glance towards the cowshed.
‘Don’t mention the cows,’ she’d whispered to me when I’d first arrived. ‘Mum’s worried about them.’
‘Why?’
‘TB. Perhaps.’
I didn’t know what those letters meant but I knew that they struck fear into farmers. ‘What will happen?’
‘They prick the cows’ skins and if the cows react to the pricks it means they could have TB.’ Jessamy swallowed and looked away.
‘And then?’
A shrug. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
When I woke a few days later on the morning of the Jubilee Jessamy’s bed was empty. I went to the window and peered out but there was no sign of her in the yard. I put on my dressing gown and went downstairs. The dog wagged his tail in his basket by the door. Jessamy was walking towards the house, very slowly, her hands in her jeans pockets, her head bowed. Perhaps she was still mourning the death of the three cows the vet had put down. When she saw me she gave a start.
‘Where’ve you been?’ I asked.
‘Wanted to check Starlight’s water.’ I knew it was a lie; we’d gone to the field last night and topped up the pony’s trough with the hose. I stared at my cousin. Her eye was healing well; the black bruise turning to yellow. Jess’s bruises always went down quickly. She gave a shrug and walked past me. Perhaps she’d been checking on the remaining cows. Didn’t want me to see she was worried about them. Jessamy’d been quiet since the three had been slaughtered.
‘You’re up very early, girls,’ Evie said behind me. ‘I’ve got something for you. Look in the bread bin.’ It was a loaf of bread coloured red, white and blue. ‘Just a bit of fun,’ she said. ‘There may be another surprise later on, after the party.’ Her eyes sparkled. ‘I thought we all needed cheering up.’
‘What is it?’ Jessamy cried. ‘Tell us.’
‘No.’ And she refused, even though we bombarded her with questions, and set us to work with various tasks. ‘No surprise unless these are done first.’ There were plates and cutlery to count out into wicker baskets for transporting over to the village green. The morning passed in a haze of errands and panics over tablecloths and serving spoons. Meanwhile Evie took a hammer and nails and a length of chicken-wire out to the hen house to mend a hole.
I went out into the yard and found her talking to Martha. Evie and Martha rarely spoke to one another more than was necessary for running the farm. ‘They’ve never got on,’ Jessamy had told me once. ‘Martha wanted to marry into the family, you see. But Robert died. And Mum married Dad. So there was nobody left for her.’
I moved behind the slurry bin, feeling shame and curiosity all mixed together.
Evie clenched the hammer. ‘I can’t deal with any more bad news.’
‘Don’t you want to look at these ewes?’
‘I’ll come up later.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m just praying that’s the end of this run of bad luck.’
‘Farming’s a tough life. I always told you that,’ Martha hissed. ‘I’m glad you’ve sorted that henhouse. I see the fox took two more chickens last night.’
I hadn’t seen the bodies. Evie must have cleared them away.
‘Or was it the gypsies?’ Martha went on. ‘I saw them hanging around in the lane yesterday. You need to make sure everything’s properly locked.’
‘We shouldn’t blame them for every single mishap.’ Evie sounded weary.
‘They took that saddle last week, I’m sure of it.’
‘We don’t know that.’
Martha snorted as she walked away. I peered round the bin and saw Evie stand motionless for a few seconds. She put down the hammer and nails on top of a milk churn – unlike her not to replace them in the work shed immediately – and walked very slowly back towards the kitchen, her face puckered up into an expression I couldn’t read. I ducked back into the shadows behind the corn bin until she’d passed me, waiting there for a few minutes so there was no risk she’d know I’d been listening.
I meant to tell Jess what I’d seen but as I re-entered the kitchen Evie thrust a Pyrex bowl of strawberries into my hands. ‘These need hulling. Then there’s cream to be whipped.’ And I was swept up into the maelstrom of Jubilee preparations.
The telephone rang about ten minutes before we left and Evie took the call in the farm office, so we couldn’t hear. She came back to the kitchen with a flushed look on her face and a smile. ‘All according to plan,’ she said.
‘What is?’
‘You’ll find out.’
‘I almost don’t like surprises.’ Jessamy stuck out her lower lip. ‘It drives you mad not knowing.’
‘It’s only fun for the one who’s keeping the secret,’ I said.
‘I hate keeping secrets.’ For a moment Jessamy looked quite solemn.
For the party itself Jessamy and I both wore long white socks with our cotton summer dresses. Because our legs were skinny they often fell down around our ankles, revealing the bruises on Jessamy’s leg that matched the one on her eye. ‘You look like you’ve been in a fight,’ I told her.
She laughed but then once again that strange expression passed over her face and was gone before I could comment on it.
Apart from the bruises my limbs seemed very similar to Jessamy’s but were actually inferior in all respects. Jessamy had never been beaten in a race by any girl her age in the parish and few of the boys of her own age could run faster than she could. She never appeared big-headed, though, taking her athletic successes for granted but not referring to them. Lucky Jessamy, golden girl, born with all the good fairy godmother gifts: pretty, fast, clever and popular.
‘I wish I was you, Jessamy.’ The words popped out now as I gazed at my cousin, fresh from her latest triumph in the egg-and-spoon race on the village green, where the party was in full swing. Evie turned to me, her brown eyes anxious. ‘You always win everything.’ I went on, knowing I’d made a mistake, saying all this, but unable to stop myself. ‘I’d like to win just one thing, just once.’
Jessamy’s eyes narrowed but she said nothing.
‘I don’t understand why there have to be so many races at a Jubilee party.’ Evie sounded tired. ‘It’s supposed to be a day of fun, not an athletics contest. But you’re a good runner, Rachel, too, just like your father. I remember how he could whizz up the hill behind the house. I could never keep up.’ She squeezed my shoulder and the soft sleeve of her floaty dress brushed me. It felt like a butterfly wing against my arm. I’d already noticed people looking at my aunt today. People always did. This afternoon she’d put on a silk smock dress, tied loosely round her waist, and swept her hair off her face using a thick hair band.
‘I might not enter the sack race after all.’ Jessamy spoke casually. ‘Horrible scratchy old bags. And I’m tired now.’ In fact she seemed so full of energy that it was almost crackling round her.
I peered at my cousin but her face was closed. She dug at a daisy on the field with the toe of her white plimsoll. I wanted to ask her what was up but there wasn’t time.
‘Off you go then, darling.’ Evie smiled at me. I crossed to the starting line, where the ladies from the parish council were laying out sacks.
‘Jessamy not competing this time?’ I turned to see Martha standing beside me.
‘No.’
She turned to look at her for a moment. I was conscious of the concentration in her expression. ‘Shame. She always does well. The Winters were always good at sport and running.’
‘So was Aunt Evie. And my Dad.’ Martha blinked and looked away. There were five of us in the race, two big boys from the senior school in Wantage, a girl my age, and a smaller boy. I looked at the older boys’ sturdy legs and didn’t rate my chances. But when the pistol fired and I started jumping I struck an easy rhythm, unlike my larger competitors whose legs were too long to fit comfortably into the sacks. The finishing line raced towards me.
Evie beamed at me. Jessamy gave me one of her silent looks from underneath her dark lashes. I could tell she was really pleased for me. But there’d still be some part of her which wished she’d competed and won.
‘Let’s go and look at the Jubilee cake before you run the relay,’ Evie said. We were both on the same team. Jessamy would be running first to build up a good lead and I was to follow. There’d been long practices on the lawn back at Winter’s Copse, using some old bed legs as batons.
‘Hope I don’t drop the baton.’ Nervousness sent ripples through my stomach. Jessamy had been good about standing down from the sack race for me. If only I could repay her by doing well.
‘It’s just for fun,’ Evie said again, sounding suddenly flat. ‘But you won’t drop the baton. Come on.’ She put a hand behind each of our backs and steered us towards the tea tent.
A huge rectangular fruitcake sat on a silver-foil-wrapped platter, iced in white with the Queen’s coat of arms in different-coloured sugars. A photograph of the Queen in a silver frame stood next to it on the table.
‘When will they cut it?’ Jessamy asked, examining the ribbons round the cake.
‘Not for a while yet. There’ll be a loyal toast first.’
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘Like a kind of congratulations to the Queen.’
‘And then they’ll give us our mugs?’
Jessamy was obsessed with the silver-rimmed mugs showing the Queen’s head. ‘Let’s go and look at them again, Rachel.’ The mugs were stored in a cardboard box under the table displaying the Jubilee cake. We knelt on the grassy floor to study them. Each mug nestled in its own cardboard square inside the box. Jessamy stroked their rims. I knew she was imagining hers on the dresser at home. Not long to wait now. I watched the tip of her tongue as she placed it between her teeth, a sign that she really, really wanted something so much that she was almost scared of admitting it.
‘Come on, girls, it’s your race soon,’ Evie called. ‘No, it’s not Zandra Rhodes, just something I ran up myself,’ she told a woman from the village, who was touching the sleeves of her silk dress and cooing. ‘Hurry, you two!’ We walked to the starting-line, Jessamy brushing crumbs from her mouth. Nobody who didn’t know her as well as I did would have noticed that her chin was now more firmly set. I crossed my fingers that the baton change would go well.
Jessamy left me to go down to the starting point and I stood in position facing her thirty yards down the track. She pulled up her socks so that they covered the bruises on her legs.
The starter fired the pistol and Jessamy seemed to blast from the starting line, ahead of the other four runners within four paces, increasing the lead all the time. She was nearly at the other end of the course and I was standing, palm stretched out for the baton, my face muscles aching from the strain of concentrating. My fingers were almost clasped around the black plastic when the baton fell to the grass. I scooped it up and managed to propel myself forward at the same time but the precious lead had been lost. The boy from the pub was breathing down my neck. I clenched my teeth and pushed myself harder and harder, still just holding the lead, perspiration beading on my brow. I handed the baton over to the third runner and glanced back up the track. Jessamy’s eyes were on the runner. The fourth girl had her hand outstretched. The change was smooth but the team beside us were already level now. Our fourth runner, a sturdy girl from a farm in the next hamlet, threw herself up the track, arms pumping away. Her opponent was already an inch ahead. I closed my eyes. A cheer from the crowd told me that the race was lost. I joined in the clapping, unable to meet Jessamy’s gaze until the other competitors started drifting away. I stole a look at her. She was smiling at the winners but I spotted the blankness in her eyes that changed to something almost like confusion.
Evie was coming towards us. ‘Well done, you two!’ she told us. ‘Let’s go and get you both some orange squash.’
‘I’m not thirsty.’
‘Jessamy . . .’
‘I’m going to look at the mugs again,’ she called as she ran off.
‘I’m sorry,’ I shouted after her, not caring that people could hear, would know exactly what I was sorry for. Jessamy Winter’s cousin had let her down in a race.
She glanced over her shoulder. ‘. . . don’t know what to think any more,’ I thought she said.
Evie and I looked at one another. ‘It’s because I dropped the baton,’ I whispered. ‘She doesn’t know what to think about me any more.’
‘It’s just a village race,’ she said. ‘You ran well, Rachel. I haven’t seen you sprint like that before.’
‘I’ve been practising.’
‘It paid off.’ She smiled at me and I felt better. ‘I remember your father running up the hill one night.’ Her expression was dreamy. ‘I thought my heart would burst trying to keep up with him.’ It was the second time she’d brought up this memory.
‘Why were you running up the hill at night?’
Evie didn’t seem to have heard me and steered me towards the drinks stand. ‘I don’t know what’s got into Jessamy.’ Out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of my cousin heading across the bright field towards the darkness of the tea tent. Perhaps Jessamy had decided she really did want another look at the mugs. Over the chatter of the crowd I heard her laugh, just once. I wanted to run after her but perhaps it was better to wait until she came to me, when she’d worked out what to think.
Then she was gone, taken up into the black interior with its trestle tables of Victoria sandwich, scones and buns and the big earthenware teapots borrowed from the village hall.
Evie found me orange squash at the stand, keeping up a stream of conversation all the time. Trying to distract me from my humiliation, probably.
‘Now I wonder where that cousin of yours is.’ She sounded more relaxed.
‘She went into the marquee.’ We walked across to it.
Evie peered at the crowds queuing for tea and buns. ‘She’s not here. Perhaps she’s gone outside again to play with her schoolfriends.’ She frowned. ‘Very naughty of her to leave you out.’
I wasn’t surprised. I deserved exclusion.
‘I hope she’s not going to miss out on the loyal toast and cake cutting.’ Evie looked suddenly weary; unusual for my aunt, who generally never sat down except for meals. She’d have been forty-seven that summer and now I noticed the lines around her eyes. For the first time it struck me how hard it must be for her: farming without Uncle Matthew. A neighbour tapped her arm and she turned. ‘Yes, just the three reactors . . . Thank you. We’re hoping that’s the end of it,’ I heard her say. Those three slaughtered cows again.
As we left the tent to look for Jessamy I spotted three of the gypsy children peering out from behind the tea tent. They’d been invited to the party along with everyone else but preferred to linger on the periphery, only occasionally venturing inside for currant buns and squash. Jessamy liked the gypsies, or tinkers, as some people called them, admiring their skills on horseback. The older girl, Rosie, went to school with her. They didn’t look like what I imagined gypsies should be, being fair-haired and blue-eyed. ‘Irish originally,’ Martha said. ‘Riffraff.’
‘I like Rosie.’ Jessamy’s lower lip had stuck out. ‘She’s kind. Her dog’s got puppies and they let me play with them.’
I stayed by my aunt’s side for the rest of the afternoon, shadowing her as she moved from one group of friends and neighbours to another. Everyone seemed to have a word for Evie. She might not have been born in the village but she’d come to live here at an early age and then married one of its oldest families. Evie Winter had a certain status.
We were summoned to the tea tent for the loyal toast in front of the Jubilee cake. ‘. . . God save the Queen!’ Mr Fernham, the chairman of the parish council, ended, the smile on his face spreading across the park. The ladies from the choir launched into the National Anthem and we all joined in. I was thinking how Jessamy would have enjoyed watching plump Mrs Chivers’s bosom quiver as she trilled. Mr Fernham’s sister wore a look of almost religious fervour on her thin face. He sang in more measured tones, as though contemplating the meaning of each word.
Then Miss Fernham took the cake off to slice it into pieces for handing round. With her brother she hoisted the cardboard box of mugs on to the trestle table. One of the cardboard squares at the top of the carton was now empty, I noted. The children’s names were called out: youngest first and upwards in age so that Jessamy and I came roughly halfway through the list. Each child trotted back to its place clutching a mug.
‘Jessamy Winter.’ Mr Fernham looked towards Evie and me. Evie shrugged. ‘Rachel Parr.’ I took my mug from him and muttered a thanks. His gaze lingered on me for a second. Perhaps I had an orange-squash moustache. I walked back to my aunt, wiping my mouth.
‘I really thought she’d be back in time to get her mug.’ Evie sounded tense now.
Jessamy had already cleared a space on the dresser shelf so that there’d be room for the new Silver Jubilee mug beside the Queen’s Coronation mug.
‘Have you any idea where she might have gone?’ Evie asked.
I shook my head.
A muscle twitched in the side of Evie’s face. ‘I’m going to ask Mr Fernham to put out an announcement over the loudspeaker.’
‘Not yet!’ Something about the idea of an announcement made Jessamy’s disappearance suddenly seem frightening.
‘Why ever not?’
‘It’s too soon.’
‘We need his help, darling.’ She sounded curt. Probably thought I was behaving like an idiot.
Evie and I went to the stewards’ tent and Evie explained about Jessamy. Mr Fernham was very calm and picked up his loudspeaker to issue a short message asking Jessamy Winter to report to the stewards’ table by the tea tent. So strong was the confidence which he injected into this broadcast that I turned my head to look for Jessamy running across the park towards us. But she didn’t.
Now my slight impatience at her absence was growing into concern because of all the trouble she’d be in if she didn’t return, rather than because I thought something bad had happened to her. My aunt was tolerant of Jessamy’s whims but I could tell by the small vein pulsing on one temple and her tight grip on my arm that Jessamy wouldn’t just get away with a few cross words. It would be bed with just a piece of toast for her: lights out and no talking. How could she have been such a fool? But then that baton sliding out of my hand onto the grass shot back into my mind. This was all my fault.
I could feel my aunt’s tension in the fingers she kept wrapped around my arm. I thought of Uncle Matthew, barely remembered now except as a kind and silent presence around the farm. He’d scooped me up many times when I’d fallen off the bicycle I’d been learning to ride in the yard and had let me hold the new lambs. I wished he’d been around this afternoon to soothe my aunt. I was aware of how feeble any attempts on my behalf to do this would be. Dad should be here to support his sister but he was in Majorca building a marina and holiday apartments.
We waited. It was time to sit down at the trestles for sandwiches and cake and people began to amble over. One or two cast sympathetic glances at us as they passed. ‘Not found her yet? Little minx.’ ‘You’ll have something to say to her when you get her back.’
I refused to join the other children, superstitious that if I sat down with them I was accepting that my cousin wouldn’t be back this afternoon. I stood with my aunt beside the stewards’ tent. The balloons tied to the awnings and table legs had started to deflate. Paper cups and plates littered the grass and some of the smaller children were rubbing their eyes and whining. I kept expecting Jess to run across the grass in that easy loping gait of hers to join us. ‘Where’s my mug?’ she’d ask. ‘Hope you saved me a piece of Jubilee cake.’ I stared at the gate until my eyes ached with the effort of making out an outline of her figure that wasn’t there. I closed them, counted to ten and then opened them, hoping she’d be there.
But she wasn’t.
Mr Fernham appeared with two plates of the sliced cake for us. ‘Fiona made it. It’s very good.’
Evie crumbled off a piece and put it into her mouth but I murmured an apology.
People were starting to push back their chairs, their meal complete. In a moment they’d start moving slowly towards home, happy to put their feet up and watch the TV coverage of the celebrations in London, weary after an afternoon of rich food and games. Evie and I would walk through the fields to the house and Jessamy would be sitting in the kitchen. Evie’d tell her off, but not harshly; she’d gone beyond anger now. I felt her anxiety pulsing from her in little waves. But Jess would be back at home. She’d look stricken for exactly one second and then she’d give that shrug of hers, say she was sorry, and mean it, and accept whatever punishment her mother gave her without a word of complaint. I’d say sorry too for dropping that baton. Jess didn’t bear grudges.
‘I could run back to the farm,’ I offered. ‘See if she’s there and then run back here.’
‘No.’ Evie clutched my shoulder. ‘Stay with me.’ She had something wound around her hand and wrist; I couldn’t work out what it was at first. Then I recognized it as Jessamy’s egg-and-spoon medal. The red ribbon was cutting into Evie’s slender fingers. The red matched the polish she’d put on her nails that morning.
It seemed Evie needed me as much as I needed her. The realization made me feel strange, as though the grass beneath my plimsolls was tilting and threatening to tip me over. Again I wished that there was someone else here with me, an adult.
Volunteers were stacking chairs and clearing plates. Mr Fernham reappeared. ‘I think we should organize a search for Jessamy.’ He shook his head at Evie. ‘Nothing too serious, but we could knock on doors, check whether she’s playing somewhere inside.’
‘I don’t think she’d leave the party willingly,’ my aunt said.
‘And who would she go with?’ I put in, my eyes sweeping the green. ‘Everyone’s here.’
Mr Fernham scratched the back of his head and went off to organize the search party. Evie turned to a neighbour to ask her to check her garden for Jessamy.
While Evie’s back was turned. Martha approached me. ‘Nobody would harm that precious child.’
I pressed my lips into an expression resembling a smile, wishing I found her words more reassuring, and walked on, remembering the half-conversation between Evie and Martha I’d overheard that morning in the farmyard.
‘Martha’s completely mad,’ Jessamy had told me once. ‘She’s the great-great granddaughter of one of the last Welsh drovers, the men who herded the animals along the drove-ways before the railway was built. He was crazy. That’s what they say at school, anyway. And so’s she. But she’s nice to me.’
Everyone always was.
Evie had finished the exchange with the neighbour. ‘Let’s go home and wait, Rachel. Oh.’
‘What?’
‘I forgot about the pony.’
‘Pony?’
‘I bought another pony. So you can have one each when you ride. And he’ll be company for Starlight. I arranged for him to be delivered while we were out.’ Evie bit her lip.
I felt a little ashamed at how my excitement about the new pony intruded on my worry about Jessamy and prayed it didn’t show.
Evie gasped. We’d turned a bend and in front of us stood a girl in a dress the same yellow colour as Jess’s, back to us. I felt my aunt stiffen and my own heart pump.
Then the girl turned and we saw her round, spectacled, face and blonde curls. Not Jess. Evie’s breath came out in the form of a long sigh and her grip crushed my hand so that I cried out.
Evie
October 1977
On an afternoon as golden and still as this Evie could still hope for the best. Children did turn up months after they’d vanished, it wasn’t impossible, the police had said. Evie should keep her hopes alive.
‘Alive,’ she repeated silently to herself. She pushed her hands into the pockets of the old duffel coat she wore. The word seemed almost incomprehensible now; she’d said it to herself so many times. Jessamy is still alive, somewhere she is alive.
‘I’m pleased to plant this tree in honour of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Coronation of Her Majesty the Queen.’ Jonathan Fernham drove his spade into the earth and brought up a clod. It smelled sweet, almost tangy, like something you might want to eat. No frosts so far this autumn and still plenty of golden leaves on the oaks and beeches. Warm enough not to need a coat. Jessamy had left the Jubilee party four months ago without as much as a jacket, wearing just that flimsy cardigan over her primrose-yellow summer dress. On a day like this it wouldn’t be nearly warm enough. Evie tried to push the image of her daughter shivering out of her mind. Impossible. She shouldn’t have come today but some foolish hope inside her believed that Jessamy might somehow find out that the Jubilee tree was to be planted, might manage to make her way back to the village green.
No signs of a struggle back at the party in June, the police had concluded. No reports of a child being dragged off the field. And heaven knows, there’d be witnesses enough, with the celebration still in full swing. ‘Your daughter has seemingly vanished off the face of the earth,’ the sergeant had told her the afternoon following Jessamy’s disappearance. ‘Is there nothing more you can tell us? Nowhere she might have gone? What about other family?’
And she’d run through the family tree with them again: Matthew, her husband, dead. Her brother Charles and his wife. ‘So it was just you and the other little girl at the party?’ the sergeant had asked.
‘That’s right, Rachel, my niece.’
‘And she doesn’t know where Jessica is?’
‘Jessamy. No.’
He’d looked displeased at the correction. ‘No quarrel between Rachel and Jessamy?’
‘Jessamy was a little annoyed that a baton had been dropped in a relay race at the party, but that was as much her fault as Rachel’s.’ Evie knew Jessamy had felt anger only for herself. ‘They’ve always got on well.’
The sergeant didn’t even bother to write this in his notepad.
‘Nothing going on at home?’
‘Nothing.’ She thought of the TB. ‘We had some cattle slaughtered earlier in the week. Jessamy was upset about that but she’s grown up on the farm, she’s used to things going through hard patches.’
The sergeant’s pencil remained motionless in his fingers.
‘Did she have her own passport or was she still on yours?’
‘On mine.’
‘Good.’ He wrote something. ‘Any other family?’
‘Only my brother now. He’s divides his time between the south of France and Surrey. He came to collect Rachel at lunchtime.’
‘We’ll need to speak to him.’
She gave him Charlie’s number in Weybridge.
‘No trouble with the gypsies?’
She shook her head.
‘Nothing stolen?’ He gave her a knowing look. ‘That’s not what your neighbours say.’
‘Sometimes eggs go, the odd hen, too. A saddle disappeared from the stables a week or so back. But that could be anyone.’ There were occasional whispers in the village of stolen dogs, too, sometimes. Evie had no doubt that some of the rumours were justified, the Jacksons were no saints, but stealing a child? The small surviving part of her still governed by logic knew it would be insane for them to do that. And why would they? They had no particular reason to dislike the Winters and Jessamy and Rosie played together at school.
‘Maybe.’ He closed his notepad and stood, muttering something about detectives coming to talk to her later. She watched him tramp up the lane. He’d be going to speak to Martha.
When his footsteps had faded Evie had let herself slide off the chair on to the quarry stoned floor, where she’d pulled her knees up under her and huddled like an infant, trying to hide away from it all. She’d stayed there, motionless, until darkness had fallen and the range had gone out and the dog came to sniff her, begging to be fed. Thank God Rachel hadn’t still been here to see her like this. Charlie had begged Evie to let him stay at Winter’s Copse with her but she’d almost pushed him out of the door, superstitiously believing that Jessamy would return to her in the dark and quiet, when her mother sat alone with the dog at the kitchen table.
But she hadn’t.
‘You all right?’ Freya Barnes’s dark eyes were focused in a look of deep concern. ‘You don’t have to do this, Evie, if it’s all too much. I’ll go back to the farm with you if this is all too much.’
‘I’m fine.’ Thank God for Freya. People had muttered about the West Indian woman when she’d first arrived a year ago. Freya was ignoring all the whisperings and had even managed to get a part-time job in the school. She would have been teaching Jessamy this term.
Evie watched Jonathan Fernham insert the sapling into its hole and remembered a time, years back, when she had planted trees – pear and damson – in the garden. Jessamy had still been in a pushchair then, her cheeks creamy and smooth as the flesh of a hazelnut against her brown hair. A hazelnut, safe in its shell. Never so safe again. Matthew had still been alive then, too, a quiet, comfortable presence around the farm.
Freya gave her a complicit grin and winked. Freya had never shown any embarrassment on the subject of Jessamy and perhaps that was why she and Evie had become close friends over the last months.
Even Freya could never be told Evie’s nightmares; how she sometimes dreamt of a ghostly blacksmith descending the down the afternoon of the Silver Jubilee party and stealing Jessamy in reprisal for a night Evie and Charlie had once spent in his magical smithy. Or of a band of shadowy drovers sweeping her daughter off as they herded monstrously formed animals along the Ridgeway to some hell that no human could penetrate.
Mr Fernham trod in the earth round the planted sapling. The little tree looked like a thin young girl, liable to be blown away in the first autumn gale. Evie felt a pang for its tender roots and slight waving boughs.
Jessamy lived, she surely lived. Evie closed her eyes briefly and spoke silently to her daughter, begging her to come back.
Robert
Camp at Nong Pladuk, Thailand, February 1943
Dear Evie,
I look at the city boys with their thin arms and hollow chests and know each sleeper we lay will cost a life. I thank God for those years of good food and physical work at home. The times Matthew and I carried food pails to animals or drove in wooden posts. We have muscle and stamina.
When we worked at home there’d be a cool breeze blowing off the Downs. We’d bring a flask of tea or a stone bottle of ginger beer. Sometimes at harvest Mum would walk up with a jug of cool lemonade for us. I wonder how my mother is now. She wrote to me before Singapore fell. You must have helped her write that letter, Evie, because I recognized your writing in places. I lost what she sent me. But I still have that wonderful letter of yours, Evie. It’s about the only thing I didn’t lose on the journey from Singapore. Sometimes we see Thai kids playing and I wonder what you’re doing at home. It’s strange to think of you sleeping in our old bedroom, playing with our old toys. But it’s a good thought.
A week later. We’ve been moved from the railway itself to a camp further up-river.
And there are new guards. They seem to speak a different language: perhaps they’re Koreans. On a brighter note (perhaps the only bright note) we have a pet! It’s a baby macaque, a boy. Macgregor found him in the jungle and even his stern Scottish heart melted at the sight. He’s something we can look after and we seem to need this, even though it means we give him rations (we’re allowed to trade what we are paid for our labour for food). Perhaps it reminds Matthew and me of the animals we’ve cared for at home. We’ve called him Stanley.
Two nights later
Little Stanley has already earned his rations, Evie. When we came into the hut to sleep he started to shriek and would not stop shrieking. The men around us were cursing and shouting at us to stop the bl..dy racket. He seemed to be staring at my mat so I pulled it up. Curled underneath it was a scorpion, couldn’t make out what kind as it was dark. Extra rations for Stanley tomorrow!
Following night
I try, I try so hard, Evie, to keep the dark away, to concentrate on what’s good: the comradeship, the jokes, the conversations, but days like this make me wonder if it’s worth the effort. Clinging on to the light seems too much.
Evie
Golden Jubilee, June 2002.
If Evie closed her eyes it could be twenty-five years ago. Or fifty. The Union Jacks. The marquee. The breeze picking up, making the bunting whirr above them and the children shouting. Time passed. Years went by but they’d all come back to this part of the green to mark the Queen’s reign.
What did the Queen make of all the Union Jacks and balloons, the commemorative china and the cakes? Was she flattered, overcome? God knows Elizabeth II had had her share of family woes: break-ups, flighty in-laws and cousins, fires. But she’d never lost a child; never that, so she could still be considered fortunate.
Lost. Once again Evie paused to consider the implications of that word. Lost suggested that you’d put something down and forgotten where it was. It suggested that the fault somehow lay with you. Had she been at fault at the party twenty-five years ago? These days parents seemed to keep their children under closer scrutiny. It hadn’t been like that a quarter of a century ago; not in this village, at least. Children had come and gone pretty well at will, subject only to school hours and household chores. And Jessamy had been at a village party, surrounded by friends. She’d been ten, not three: old enough to remember repeated warnings about not going off with strangers.
As she had so many times before Evie ran through everything that Jess had done in the days and weeks leading up to the Jubilee. And there was nothing. Her daughter had been playing outside quite a bit; but it was early summer, with long, light evenings. And Martha had been out on the farm, keeping an eye on things. Officially Martha was the shepherd, but the role had always encompassed more than watching sheep. Martha helped with the cattle, the crops. She was everywhere. Too much so, perhaps. If it hadn’t been for the centuries binding the Winter and Stourton families together Evie would have found a way to pay her off years back. But she had never been able to do this.
No, if there’d been strangers hanging around Jessamy, Martha would have noticed them. Nor could the gypsies have had anything to do with this. The afternoon after the disappearance police had been seen leaving the caravans the gypsies lived in during the summer months. That night every pane of glass in the caravans’ windows had been shattered. Evie had walked past to see them picking the shards off the grass. Her cheeks had burned and she’d wanted to tell them she was sorry. Rosie was helping her mother to pick up the glass. Her feet were bare. Suddenly she’d squealed and held up her foot, a red drop of blood already forming where she’d stood on a shard. Evie had walked on.
Sometimes she woke from her sleep convinced she knew what had happened to Jessamy, had seen it all in her dreams, clear and distinct. But even as she grasped for the images they curled up round the edges.
The wind scooped up paper plates and spun them over the lawn. It blew scraps of conversation, loudspeaker announcements and children’s shrieks out of earshot. Tablecloths fluttered as it caught them. Evie felt on edge. But of course she did. They’d all been so kind to her, giving her tea and finding her somewhere more sheltered to sit, but it was impossible for her to settle here this afternoon. She scoured the green, walking from group to group, looking, always looking, sometimes turning on her heel as though someone might just be slipping out of view behind her. Perhaps a child eating a bun or the laughter of a group of young lads would trigger a memory. It could be anything, anything at all.
And if Jessamy were going to reappear this was surely where she’d come, to the same place from where she’d vanished twenty-five years earlier. A portal, that’s what this party might be, a gateway to the past. Evie was proud of herself for having picked that word up from a children’s science fiction programme.
She pictured a parallel universe in which Jessamy had not disappeared, in which she was still at this party with her mother, organizing the sack races or pouring cups of tea, chatting to people she’d known all her life. For the first years of Jess’s disappearance it had been easy to imagine that her daughter still moved beside her. Evie had seen her outline clearly. A quarter of a century on, the details seemed to have blurred. Would Jess have worn her hair short? Would she have put on a dress this afternoon or would the cold wind have made her favour trousers?
Jessamy must be here, somewhere: by the face-painting stand, or looking at the display of Coronation photographs beside the marquee. It was just a question of willing her to appear, wanting it hard enough so that the atoms would rearrange themselves into her form. Time was supposed to be relative so perhaps Jessamy’s ten-year-old self was still actually here. If only she could call out to her daughter, warn her not to leave the park . . .
Enough.
Pilot wagged his tail as her gaze fell on the park gate. Dogs weren’t allowed on this fenced-off section of the green. That had changed since the Silver Jubilee party, when spaniels and Labradors had accompanied their families to celebrate the monarch’s twenty-five years. The dog caught Evie’s eye and his tail thumped against the grass. She longed for his silent company, his warm head against her sandaled foot, his breath comforting on her bare skin. As a group of latecomers pushed the gate open he raised his head and pricked his ears. Did he, like her, check to see whether Jessamy was with them? But of course he wouldn’t have a clue who Jessamy was. Once, foolishly, Evie had given Pilot the still-unwashed nightdress her daughter had worn the night before the 1977 Jubilee party. He’d sniffed it with his usual gentlemanly politeness. ‘Find, Pilot!’ she’d urged him. ‘Find her for me!’ But traces of Jessamy would long since have vanished. He’d given his tail a single wag and dropped his handsome black head to the flagstones, confusion obvious in his eyes. ‘Sorry,’ she’d said. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry.’
As though looking at herself from the outside she saw what others must see: a batty, ageing woman with foolish hopes, who held her grief behind a mask of control so that some probably considered her reserved. She just couldn’t cry in front of anyone else, not even Freya.
The wind seemed to sharpen its edge and Evie could feel her cheeks burning in its rasp. She lifted her head to see if clouds were massing on top of the down but the sky was still clear. In this light the hill was etched sharply and it looked like a wave about to crash down upon them, wiping away the flags and balloons, the cake with the Queen’s head on it and the children running races, sweeping them all away in a morass of red, blue and white. She should warn them of the calamity close at hand. They wouldn’t believe her. She wouldn’t have believed it either, twenty-five years ago. Despite the cool air, she felt perspiration glow on her brow.
Come back now, darling. Walk out of that tea tent with a plate of chocolate brownies or a scone and jam. It’s not too late. She closed her eyes and opened them again. Nothing.
‘Evie?’ Freya stood beside her. ‘How are you coping, my dear?’
She managed a nod.
‘They were needing help in the tea tent. I said I’d find volunteers.’
She rose; she’d be no worse off in the tent. Why wouldn’t Jessamy come and find her in there? It had, after all, been the last place she’d been sighted before her disappearance at the previous Jubilee.
Evie followed Freya across the field. Around them children whooped as they balanced eggs on spoons. Adults chatted. It all looked so innocent. Things in this village always did.
The hedge beside the tea tent rustled. Evie caught a glimpse of eyes, blue, mocking: the gypsy children, travellers, they were called now, standing out in the lane. The two smallest were Rosie’s. Just like their parents all those years ago they wouldn’t come into the park. Perhaps they’d always regard themselves as outsiders, not part of the pack. Who could blame them? Some in Craven would always blame them for Jessamy’s disappearance although they’d been questioned again and again and their cars and caravans checked for her fingerprints. With nothing found.
Evie shivered again. Perhaps it would have been better to have stayed at home today. But it would have been cowardly. And part of her had been so sure something would happen here today; she’d imbued the date with such significance, as though the celebration bunting and the gilded carriages in the Mall could magic Jessamy back to her.
She was aware of people looking at her as she took up her place in the tea tent. They must realize the significance of this date, too. Some of them hadn’t even been living in this village when Jessamy had vanished, but knowledge of the disappearance had been passed on to them along with information about post office opening hours, where to find a cleaner, and the best place to buy eggs and honey. There’s that old woman up at Winter’s Copse, Evie Winter. Her daughter went missing. Never found. She could tell when the newcomers had found out about Jessamy, tell by the sudden interest mixed with awkwardness in their expressions when they met her in the post office.
Evie’s mind went back to her own arrival with Charlie, to how the villagers had come to examine the evacuee children in the village hall. The older children, especially the boys, had been taken first. Useful on the farm. She and Charlie had almost been the last to be selected because they were twins and the teacher wouldn’t let them be separated. Not everyone had room for two children. They’d stood in the hall and people had walked past them saying kind things but leaving them there. Evie had felt like an unfavoured animal in a zoo.
She sliced cakes and poured tea in the marquee for an hour until one of the young mothers from the new estate came to relieve her. She suddenly knew she had to go home. And immediately. As she walked out of the tent towards the gate, Freya, now manning the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey stand, raised an arm in farewell. Freya would explain her disappearance to anyone who needed to know. She’d already told Evie that she shouldn’t go to the party, that she should drive out for the day or go for a long walk, perhaps even go to France for the long weekend.
Martha sat on one of the straw bales set up around the edge of the field, watching the children playing football, a look of complete concentration on her face. Perhaps she too was remembering Jessamy running races and playing with her friends in this very park. Evie continued towards the gate and untied Pilot’s lead. They walked up the lane towards the farm passing the houses with their delicate brick – and stonework walls and thatched roofs. She passed the village hall, a modern structure on the site of the old hall where in another lifetime she and Charlie had arrived as evacuees from London. As she always did she peered up the alleys in case Jessamy was standing there in the shadows. But why would a grown woman hide in the gloom?
As Evie walked the breeze seemed to pick up her foolish hopes and disperse them.
Robert
Camp at Nong Pladuk, Thailand, March 1943
Dear Evie,
I was a fool to hope things might be going better. I just don’t know how to tell you about what happened today.
A Korean guard came past the workshop where we were sharpening tools, Stanley the monkey was playing quietly beside us with some strips of bamboo. The guard stopped. I thought he was enjoying the sight of the animal. Sometimes there are moments when you can see that we’re all fellow human beings. I bent my head down towards the bench. A shadow flickered over me. I turned just quickly enough to see the sweep of the guard’s gun. He skewered the monkey on his bayonet. Stanley took one last gasp of air and looked at us. I thought I’d be safe with you, he seemed to say. Then he gave a shudder, and some blood ran out of his mouth. I thought Matthew might strike the guard, I clutched at his arm.
On the farm animals are killed all the time: for meat or because they’re old and sick and suffering. I was never one of those lads who’d torture flies or frogs. ‘The boy who torments an animal is the boy who’ll grow up to torment his fellow humans,’ Dad used to tell Matthew and me.
I shouldn’t write and tell a kid like you about these things, but just putting them on paper helps. I’m going to try and pull myself out of it. Tomorrow I’ll write about our work.
Next day
I’ve been moved out of the workshop so my main task at the moment is hammering drills into rocks so that charges can be blasted. We also cart the stone away and cut trees and drag away the logs. Splinters cut our fingers and palms and each splinter seems to cause an infection, so that our hands are always swollen and yellow. I almost prefer the rock work, though that, too, leaves the hands bleeding and cut. At home, felling trees was fun: I looked forward to hitching the horses to the logs and pulling them out of the copse. Here it is us who are the horses. Sometimes the Thais use elephants but these are better treated than we are. I wish you could see the elephants, though. Must try and draw them for you. And the barges on the river with their painted eyes. You see, I can still find the good things to concentrate on! I am trying, Evie, really I am. I know I could let myself slip. Some of them here already have and their minds are disordered. I’m so afraid I’ll
Matthew still very feverish, I wish I could find him some quinine, but I will not let them put him with the other sick men. Who knows what might happen if I wasn’t there to keep an eye on him? I’ve always been good at looking after people and animals. Dad said I’d have made a good doctor or vet but I only ever wanted to work on the farm and I wasn’t good enough at maths.
My other main concern is to find another hiding place for these letters: somewhere dry. Almost impossible in this place.
Rachel
March 2003
‘Sit, Pilot!’ I shouted but it was too late. The dog had heard the faint clink of the lead and was already bounding towards me. ‘Stay.’ He wagged his tail and kept on coming. Where should I take him? I tried to remember where Evie had gone for walks. Sometimes, if she had the time, she’d walk him up to the Ridgeway, the ancient droveway carved along the top of the hills. It was a walk I loved, with its ancient earthworks and monuments, and its view of the Vale and the distant Cotswold escarpments. But as it was already growing dark I decided to take the dog down to the village and round the Green. Jubilee Park, it had been renamed, somewhat grandly, after the Silver Jubilee.
I opened the back door and the dog shot past me, spinning in delight. I smiled and realized that those muscles in my face felt almost stiff from lack of use.
Pilot propelled me down the lane into the village. He obviously knew the walk to the park well. There was a fenced-off section where dogs couldn’t enter but the rest was just open space, with three oaks of descending size in the middle. Daddy tree, mummy tree, baby tree. The largest was the Coronation oak, planted in 1953. Beside it was the tree commemorating the Silver Jubilee and beside that in turn was the sapling planted just weeks ago to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Queen’s accession. I strolled towards the family of oaks as Pilot dashed across the green in a series of excited loops, feeling guilty that I hadn’t brought him down here before now.
Evie had been present at the planting of the Silver Jubilee tree, but not of its predecessor, the Coronation oak, or its successor, the Golden Jubilee tree. Perhaps she’d been recovering from one of the many miscarriages she’d suffered. What was it with the women in our family and their problems bringing a child to term? Perhaps Jessamy would have been better at it than I was. She mightn’t have needed to make appointments for embryos made with donor eggs to be inserted inside her. Stop it, I told myself. Trying for a baby is over, don’t torment yourself, don’t indulge yourself.
At the time of the 1977 oak planting only months had passed since Jessamy had vanished. Despair must surely have replaced hope by then, but maybe Evie had still half expected to see her daughter walking back towards her across the green. I hadn’t seen my aunt for some months after the disappearance of Jessamy. My mother had been overcome by one of her rare and powerful maternal impulses and had bustled me off to the south of France with them, promising a tutor. At the time this had seemed a huge improvement on the stuffy girl’s school in Reading I’d attended and I was happy enough to comply. In fact, nothing educational had been arranged and I’d spent the autumn wandering around St Tropez, wondering what was happening back at Winter’s Copse and fretting about Jessamy. And Evie. Every time my father brought back a day-old Times with him, I’d scan the pages to see whether they’d found Jessamy.
‘I should be back there helping to look,’ I told him. My father wasn’t one for demonstrativeness but he picked up my hands and squeezed them.
‘Your aunt will need you,’ he said. ‘Not for the search, but to cheer her up. Perhaps you could go and stay over Christmas. That’ll be a tough time for her.’
‘Nonsense, Chas.’ My mother’s disapproval creased her brow; something she hardly ever let happen because she worried about lines. ‘It’s morbid for the child to act as support to her aunt. Dangerous, too. Supposing whoever it was who kidnapped Jessamy came back for Rachel?’
My father had scowled at her in a way that made her look away. ‘We should be supporting my sister. She’s all alone on that farm waiting for news.’
And I had pictured Evie sitting by the range in the kitchen, the dog at her feet, willing the telephone to ring or someone to rap on the door. My stomach churned and I wanted to be sick.
I should have gone to the damn Golden Jubilee party back in June. But friends had offered us their house on Kos. Sunshine. Swimming. Sex. Perhaps the combination would help my body relax and do what it was supposed to. And, to be honest, I’d been half relieved to miss the party and the whispers as people reminded themselves of what had happened at the last Jubilee.
‘Have a wonderful holiday,’ Evie had told me. ‘Make sure you have a good rest, both of you.’
Perhaps Evie herself could have done with a relaxing holiday. Who knows, perhaps time away would have done something to help her heart.
I forced myself to concentrate on Pilot and his zigzag race across the green. I’d promised I wouldn’t torture myself.
Pilot raced towards me. ‘This has all preoccupied me too much for too long,’ I told him. ‘We’ve given it our best shot.’ We certainly had: our consultant was world-renowned.
‘There is no obvious reason why you shouldn’t conceive,’ he’d told me. ‘But I’d like to run some tests.’ One test had led to another and then we’d found ourselves having attempt after attempt at IVF, each failure marked by nights of tears and Rioja.
Evie had died and that very morning I’d probably been fussing about an appointment at the IVF clinic. And the IVF hadn’t worked anyway. It was as though I’d been mocked for my blinkered, obsessive desire to procreate.
‘As if there weren’t enough people in the world anyway,’ I told Pilot.
I walked briskly back to the Jubilee oaks, the dog striding out beside me. The wind blew the young Golden Jubilee oak so that it looked like a small, lost wraith. Just like a missing child, in fact. I pushed the image back behind a mental door and slammed it shut but it hammered its fists on the wood and screamed for attention.
Rachel
March 2003
As I’d promised myself, I started to fill cardboard boxes with small items from the house which any prospective tenants wouldn’t need and which, I supposed, I’d have to take back to London with me. Evie’s sewing basket. The old pack of cards she’d used to teach Jessamy and me rummy. An old Scrabble set, which I remembered Evie taking out on Sunday evenings during the summer holidays when I was staying. I stared at the objects, almost as though I expected them to hold some explanation of what had happened to Jessamy. But all I saw was a collection of faded objects.
What on earth was I going to do with them? Perhaps the tenants wouldn’t mind if I stored them out of the way in the cellar. There wouldn’t be much room at home. Our flat was so different from Winter’s Copse, with its passageways and half-rooms, its bookshelves and cupboards full of interesting things, its floorboards that creaked and sighed according to the time of the day and the warmth of the sun. Yet Winter’s Copse had its share of perfectly proportioned reception rooms. It was Queen Anne and had been built by Samuel Winter, the first Winter to come to the village in the late seventeenth century. He’d farmed the acres first as a tenant and had married a rich merchant’s daughter from Oxford, enabling him to make the landowning family, the ancestors of the Fernhams who still lived in the village, a generous offer for the land. ‘The Fernhams didn’t like giving up land,’ Evie had told me. ‘Samuel Winter must have paid a big price.’ And Jessamy’s eyes had glinted with pride. Martha had been out in the field, too, helping us gather the last of the blackberries, hooking her shepherd’s crook over the furthest branches so we could pull the ripest berries towards us. It was a fine early September afternoon.
‘The Winters did well,’ she said. ‘They got the land and they wouldn’t give it up. And you’re the last of the line, young Jess. We need to show you how to care for the farm.’
‘I teach her,’ said Evie. ‘I pass it all on.’
‘My family have lived here as long as the Winters,’ Martha went on, seeming to ignore her. ‘We know how things are done here.’ The berry she had picked dripped red juice onto her fingers.
The Winters had survived the agricultural downturns of the nineteenth century, when cheap grain and meat had flooded in from America and the colonies, and the slump of the thirties. ‘They were never afraid to take risks, to try new things,’ Evie said. ‘One of the first threshing machines in the county was used on the farm. And the Winters were one of the first to switch to a new breed of sheep in the nineteenth century because it produced better meat yields.’ I could hear her voice telling me this with pride, could see Jessamy smiling with pleasure at her clever ancestors.
I left the Coronation mugs on the dresser, not feeling strong enough to deal with them today and went into Evie’s study. I’d already taken some of the paperbacks into the charity shop and placed the really good things, including a King James bible and some silver, in storage at the bank. Apart from the Jubilee mugs and the diaries and photos all that was left were some black bin liners of clothes I hadn’t had time to take down to the charity shop.
I picked up a silver-framed photograph of Evie and my father from the desk. Five years since he’d died in a car crash on one of the winding roads above his latest south of France property development. My mother was in Dubai now, enjoying her new incarnation as rich expat wife of Barry, another property developer. Her latest email had described champagne receptions and shopping expeditions. ‘Found the dearest little frock for you, darling,’ she’d told me. ‘Just delightful. Barry sends love.’ I knew the dear little dress would be a skimpy black evening number and wondered where she thought I might wear it.
‘Don’t give up too much of your time to sorting out Winter’s Copse,’ my mother had continued. ‘After all, you’ve still got twenty-five years until you get hold of the place. And you need to get on with making me a grandmother!’
How typical of her to cut right to any self-interest I might have felt about what I was doing here: she had always found it hard to accept my affection for my aunt. Perhaps she’d been jealous of Evie and the time I spent with her. ‘I want to do it,’ I told her in my email reply. ‘The house has many happy memories for me.’
The notion that I needed to do this as part of saying goodbye to my aunt would never have occurred to the woman who’d given birth to me.
As for the line about making her a grandmother, I wondered if she’d ever listened to a word I’d told her in the past about the trouble we were having conceiving. I’d already explained about the donated eggs procedure we were considering if the next IVF round using our own embryos failed. There’d been a silence on the phone. ‘I suppose it would be like having your own baby,’ she’d said at last.
‘It’s just me now,’ I told Evie and Dad in the old black and white photograph. They smiled back at me and I almost imagined they could hear me, so I chatted on like a loon. ‘Isn’t it funny how you just happened to come to this house in 1940 and not anywhere else in the village?’ I hadn’t meant funny as in comic, more that our lives would have been utterly different if Charles and Evie had been taken in elsewhere. Or stayed in London. In which case, I reminded myself, they’d have probably been killed alongside my grandmother when the bomb landed on the house in August 1944. And Jessamy and I would never have existed. So I wouldn’t have been standing here in this house anyway. A logical disconnect, Luke would have called this chain of thoughts.
Luke. There’d been nothing very logical about the night we’d spent at home after the last IVF failure. The evidence, in the form of greasy take-away cartons, most of them still nearly full, and empty bottles, had spoken of yet another attempt to anaesthetize ourselves from the reality of our situation. ‘I know we shouldn’t be drinking like this but I just can’t help it.’ I’d filled my large wine glass again. I’d had to wash the glasses before we could drink from them, so dusty had they become in the last months. Luke had been keeping me company in my abstinence from alcohol.
‘I’ll probably regret this in the morning,’ Luke held out his own glass. He’d be worrying about how he was to keep control of 8E next morning in the classroom with a hangover.
I put a hand to my brow as though to push away the reflections, and focused instead on the evacuee aspect of Evie and my father’s childhood. Most village families had taken in children from towns and cities, Evie had told me once. But usually they’d hoped for sturdy boys who could help on the farm or with digging allotments, or a single girl who could be squeezed into a small spare room and act as a companion to a woman whose son or husband had joined up. Twins of ten were another proposition altogether.
‘Robert must have wanted a teenage lad, too,’ she’d said. ‘It would have been so useful for him on the farm. But he chose us. That shows he must have . . .’ Her mouth closed on the unspoken words.
‘Must have what?’ I asked.
‘Nothing,’ she’d said. ‘We were so excited when we left London on the train with all our classmates. I don’t think we understood that we weren’t just going on holiday.’ Her expression altered. ‘But our poor mother knew, despite her brave face. I think the reality only dawned on me when we were standing in the village hall. It was a terrible place with a tin roof, stifling in summer and freezing in winter, reeking of damp lino and mildew. Most of the people who came to take in evacuees just walked past us, though a few old ladies cooed over your father. He was such an attractive child.’
‘So were you.’
She laughed. ‘Not then. I was too thin-faced for a child. But they couldn’t have Charlie without me. Mum had made our teacher promise they wouldn’t split us up because we were twins.’
‘It must have been awful, waiting to be chosen.’ I shuddered, remembering netball teams chosen by the most popular girl in the class, how she’d select her friends and leave me standing alone, unwanted. How much worse this selection of evacuees must have been.
‘Being evacuated seemed like fun at first. I remember the train with its cream and brown livery, how smart it was, and the charabanc from the station to Craven. But then we reached the village hall and I thought Mum would think I hadn’t tried hard enough to look appealing.’ For a moment my aunt’s face was that of a child’s. ‘She’d even found some wool to knit us both new cardigans so we looked our best: mine was red and Charlie’s was blue. With smart horn buttons. But it didn’t seem to be working.’ She paused. ‘Then Robert Winter came in and saved us.’
Robert
Kanburi, Thailand, late March 1943
Dear Evie,
I’m starting to realize that nothing can save us from this ordeal but I’m still trying to keep my chin up. We’re in another camp, thirty miles or so north-west of Ban Pong. It’s called Kanburi or something like that, hard to tell whether the Australians have cut out a few letters from the proper Thai place name. The town itself has shops and some good-sized wooden buildings, running down to the river.
When we were told we were marching to our new workplace some of the men looked at one another. I didn’t know what they meant by those looks. I do now.
We were responsible for moving all the tools and equipment we needed for our work constructing the railway. No mules. We were the mules. At home I could carry tools on my shoulder without thinking about it. I could heave a sack of feed in one easy movement and carry it across the farmyard. ‘You’re strong,’ you told me.
I’m not strong now. By the time we’d reached this camp I’d dropped most of my tools at the side of the track. The guards could have killed me for that but I scarcely cared any more. We slept each night in the open, with nothing to protect us from the mosquitoes. Or the snakes and centipedes and scorpions. I felt the darkness rolling over me and I wondered whether I should just let myself drop over the edge of the path so that I’d shatter on the rocks below. Only knowing Matthew was beside me stopped me from doing that. We didn’t say much. We didn’t need to.
The first few weeks we were here I managed to get a job cutting strips of wood into signs and painting them. Good work to conserve energy. But then I was thrown out of that post. I think they saw I was too strong to waste. So now I break stones on the ground they’re clearing for the railway. Each work day is ten hours long. I watch the tracks lengthen and I think of all those Japanese soldiers heading north-west for India.
I long for someone to tell us that the war is over and that they are coming to save us. I don’t even know who the ‘they’ are. Last night two British officers were hauled out because they’d made and hidden a radio. They will be made to stand in the open for two days and nights. And that won’t be the end of it, the Japanese build punishment on punishment. They stand you out. Then they beat you. Then they let the doctor patch you up and then it starts again: stand out, beating. Or perhaps a visit to the secret police treatment centres in the town. And the worst is what happens in your head.
A radio. All those evenings at home before the war when we sat in the parlour and listened to the wireless. Mum was better then, not confined to bed. Matthew’d listen to the news with us, though he didn’t like the wireless as much as I did. Mum liked the dance bands – she’d been quite a dancer herself before the stroke.
I used to be called a steady lad. Reliable middle order batsman, they said, just like his brother, just like all the Winter men. Mum knew different. Sometimes, when I was small, and there was an animal to be slaughtered on the farm, she’d find a reason for me not to be there. ‘Go down to the shop, Robert,’ she’d tell me, handing me a sixpence. ‘I need tea.’ And I’d go, even if I knew she didn’t need the tea, even if I was ashamed because I knew I should be there watching the slaughterman with his sharp blade and quick strokes. Mum knew my secret: that I’m not like my brother, that when I see bad things they won’t leave my imagination. Stanley will always have that bayonet through him in my mind. I can’t replace the picture with one of him chattering to himself as he played with our tools.
But it helps when I pretend I’m back at the farm. You and Charlie are playing tag in the farmyard. You’re good runners, like hares darting from the barn to the henhouse and stables. Sometimes I join in and you scream with delight as I catch you. Then I realize that the screams are real and they’re coming from the officers as the guards beat them. I try and pull myself back into Winter’s Copse but the screams keep me here, in this hut with its stinks and crawling insects.
Do you remember when I first saw you in the village hall? When I came to take you home with me.
Evie
1940
He unlaced his boots at the entrance and approached the line of children in his stockinged feet, stopping in front of them to examine them. For a whole minute nobody spoke. Even Miss Moss ceased her chatting with the WRVS lady who’d driven them here from the station. The thin woman sitting in the corner with the clipboard watched the young man intently.
Evie felt the warmth of his eyes on her face. She stared at him and couldn’t keep her eyes from his. He was probably the most beautiful boy she had ever seen. Evie’s chest suddenly felt tight. She stared at the fire extinguisher on the wall until it blurred. He smiled and there was a note of apology on his face. Evie hardened her face. He walked away.
And turned. And came back to look at them again. The young man nodded slowly and padded over to the desk, where Miss Moss, the schoolteacher, handed him some papers.
Unsure what was to happen next, Evie and Charlie remained in the line.
The young man walked back to the door and replaced his boots, which, Evie saw, were caked in mud. He turned. ‘What are you waiting for, you two?’
The thin woman in the corner made an exclamation. ‘It’s all right, Miss Fernham,’ the young man said. ‘I know what I’m doing.’
‘They’re from south London. Are you sure it’s appropriate?’ She spoke in a clipped voice.
He gave a single nod.
Evie sought Miss Moss’s eyes. ‘Off you go with, erm, Mr Winter, Eve and Charles.’ Miss Moss’s fingers pulled at a loose thread on her angora jumper. ‘His mother is waiting for you at home. I’ll see you both at school on Monday. You can tell me all about the farm.’
‘The farm?’ Evie must surely have misheard.
‘Apparently the Winters live at Winter’s Copse, the biggest farm in the parish.’ She made a gesture with her hands like a woman shooing away pigeons. ‘Off you go, you’ve been chosen now.’
Chosen. They had been chosen to live on a farm. But why? The children picked up their suitcases.
‘You like chicks?’ Mr Winter asked as they joined him at the door. She noticed the way his eyes crinkled up at the corners. His hair was thick and shiny like a film-star’s. ‘Ducklings? We’ve got both. In spring we have lambs, too.’ He held out his hands. ‘What am I thinking of? Give me those cases, you both look all in.’
And they handed them over and followed him out of the hall and up the village high street. Most of the gardens had flowers in them: roses and honeysuckle and other plants she didn’t recognize. In London people had started digging up gardens to grow potatoes and carrots. There were cats, too, sitting on walls, enjoying the last of the sun. Apart from their own footsteps the only sound was of cows mooing somewhere behind the cottages. Evie nudged her brother. ‘D’you hear that?’
They turned off the street and up a narrow lane leading uphill. Charlie slowed. Evie tugged at his hand to hurry him. Mr Winter stopped, and walked back to them. ‘I’m going too fast, aren’t I?’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Sorry. I’m not used to kids. How old are you two?’
‘Ten,’ said Evie.
The young man whistled. ‘Tiddlers.’ With one smooth movement he hoisted a case up under each arm and held out a hand to each of them. ‘Come on, I’ll give you a pull up the hill.’
His hands felt warm and rough. Her suitcase had left a red welt on Evie’s hand but he held it gently so it didn’t hurt.
He turned through into a field with lots of trees in it. ‘The orchard,’ he said proudly. ‘Best apples in the parish. Pears too. You like pears, Master Charles?’
Charlie nodded, still too shy to speak. Mr Winter grinned and suddenly looked hardly older than them. ‘My big brother Matthew says I’ve got a knack with fruit trees. They do well for me.’
So there was an older brother, too.
Then the house was before them. Evie stopped. It was enormous. Posh. It made their own house in London look teeny. The white walls with their soft orange brick detail seemed to be growing out of the fields, as though the building was a living, breathing thing, part of the landscape. Trees waved their boughs all around it.
‘I like your house,’ she told Mr Winter. Immediately she was aware that like wasn’t a big enough word for what she felt. Winter’s Copse, was its name, it said so on the sign.
He turned to smile at her and his eyes were like warm toffee. ‘It’s the prettiest house in the village, if you want my opinion. But I’m prejudiced.’
Uncertain what the word meant, Evie nodded.
They didn’t enter by the front door; he walked them round to the back, through a side gate. The garden was long and given over to grass, with flowerbeds of lupins and delphiniums beneath the stone walls. A black and white collie rose and wagged its tail but the young man waved it away. ‘The kids are too tired for you tonight, Fly.’
Inside the kitchen copper saucepans hung from the ceiling and the range was warm. A slim girl about the same age as Robert stood at the table, arranging plates and cutlery. ‘Thanks, Martha,’ Robert said. ‘You can go now.’
The girl’s eyes, a curious pale green in colour, narrowed. Evie felt her sweeping cold glance take in every detail of her appearance: the new cardigan, the not-new skirt, the slightly scuffed, if highly polished, sandals. She gave a brief nod, her glossy dark hair falling over her shoulders.
Evie’s attention moved to the chairs round the kitchen table. The day had started early. ‘Supper in a minute,’ Robert said. ‘Martha’s got it ready. I’ll just take you upstairs first.’
They followed him up the broad wooden staircase.
‘Mother’s in here,’ he said quietly. ‘You’d best see her tonight, before she gets too tired. She had a stroke a few years back, just after Dad died, and now she can’t move or talk much.’ He nodded at them to enter the bedroom, which was dark because the curtains were drawn. It smelled of menthol and lavender. A woman sat up on her pillows to peer at the children. She wore an old-fashioned lace cap. Evie noticed the spectacles folded on top of the bible on the bedside table. Perhaps she couldn’t even see without them. ‘Plenty of milk,’ she told her son. ‘To build them up. Pretty little things.’ And the lids covered her watery eyes. Mr Winter beckoned them out of the room.
‘You’re in this room.’ He opened a door on the other side of the landing. Two beds, a chest of drawers and a wardrobe. A striped rug on the wooden floor, some cross-stitched verses from the Old Testament on the walls. A big bookcase against one of the walls, its shelves packed with children’s books and toys, which must once have belonged to Robert and his brother. On the floor sat a large model castle with knights defending its ramparts. Charlie gave a short exclamation. He’d left a toy fort at home in London but it was nothing in comparison with this one.
‘Used to be ours,’ Mr Winter said. ‘Matthew’s and mine. We collected all those knights and painted them.’ He laid a suitcase on each bed. Evie flopped down beside her case. ‘Have a wash-up,’ he said. ‘Bathroom’s at the end of the landing. Then come down. Martha’s made us a stew for supper. I’m no cook.’
‘Can we play with it?’ Charlie’s eyes were still on the fort.
‘That’s why I put it in here for you.’
‘Robert,’ the girl Martha called up the stairs. ‘Supper’s ready.’
He gave a little start. ‘We’d better go down. She doesn’t like it if we let the food get cold.’
The stew had real beef in it, just small pieces but you could tell it was the proper thing. Martha served the children. The ladle paused as she came to Evie’s plate. Evie looked up, enquiringly. ‘Your hands could do with a scrub, young lady.’ Evie felt heat spread across her cheeks. She’d washed her hands in the bathroom but she’d missed the smear of soot on the top of her left hand.
Robert laughed. ‘Not to worry.’
‘Didn’t your mother make you wash before meals?’ Martha served the stew. Evie nodded, humiliation flooding her. And more than humiliation, the image of her mother came to her, standing in the kitchen and serving the tea: not stew but dripping on toast . . . Something blocked her throat and for a moment she couldn’t breathe.
A hand stroked her arm. ‘Been a long day, hasn’t it?’ Robert said. ‘Eat up now, you’ll feel better for the food.’ Evie nodded and picked up the knife and fork. Her brother shoved forkfuls into his mouth. Evie tried to be neater but it was hard when her stomach was almost touching her back with hunger. ‘Thank you, Mr Winter,’ she muttered with her mouth full of carrot.
‘Call me Robert.’ He looked amused. ‘I’m only eighteen.’
‘I’ll be off then.’ Martha folded the dishcloth over the tap.
‘Thanks, Martha. See you tomorrow.’ Evie felt herself relax as the girl and her sharp eyes left. Fly the collie padded into the kitchen and rested his head on Robert’s lap. His master ran a palm down the dog’s head and smiled at the children.
When they’d finished he took their plates. ‘I’ll wash up now,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to share the chores in the future as Martha only comes in once a day, rest of the time she’s out on the farm.’
‘She doesn’t live here then?’ Evie felt relief.
He rolled up his sleeves. ‘She lives in a cottage up the lane. Tomorrow you’ll have to help with the dishes, but you two need to rest tonight.’ His movements in the sink were quick and deft, she noticed.
‘Why did you choose us?’ Evie asked. ‘All those other people said they could only take older children. Or that they couldn’t take in two.’
He turned to consider her as though she were a grownup asking an important question. ‘I’ll tell you why, Evie Parr.’ His eyes really were the colour of toffee as Evie remembered it from before the war, with long, thick lashes. ‘I’m always right about the creatures that’ll do well here. Matthew says I’m better at choosing livestock than he is. He’s away being trained for the army now but he knew he could leave things with me.’ His expression grew more serious. ‘When Matthew and I go off to war we’ll have to get in a farm manager. Martha won’t be able to manage by herself.’
‘You’re going to war too?’ Evie felt as though a cold boulder was dropping down through her body.
‘All the Winter men have gone off to fight when they’ve needed us, even though farmers don’t have to. We’re both joining the local regiment, the Royal Berkshires.’ He must have noticed the panic on her face. ‘But don’t worry, Evie. It won’t be for a while yet. I said I’d wait till we can find a good manager. And mother’s here as well to keep an eye on things.’
She crossed her fingers that finding a manager would prove an impossible task.
Next morning he took them for a tour of the farm, starting with a climb up the side of the hill. ‘The White Horse is up there,’ he said, pointing at some curved lines above them.
‘A horse?’ Charlie squinted.
Robert laughed. ‘You can’t see it; it’s cut into the chalk. It’s been covered over for the war. Else German airmen might use it to navigate. But it’s old, thousands of years old, maybe more. People were living up here before Abraham was born.’
‘What did they do?’ Charlie asked.
‘Hunted. Made tools. Worshipped their gods. Come on, here are the sheep.’ They climbed a stile. ‘The lambs are putting on weight nicely.’ They barely looked like lambs now, with their chunky bodies. Evie was disappointed. He laughed at her face.
‘Not so sweet as they were in February, I’ll grant you. These are Hampshire Down sheep. They fatten up well. There used to be hundreds and thousands of sheep up here but times grew hard for sheep farmers and now we’re the only farmers in the parish who keep our flocks.’
‘Why?’ asked Charlie.
‘Matthew and I worked out that if a war was coming people would want meat that didn’t need shipping halfway round the world.’ He nodded at the black-and-white faced lambs. ‘Reckon he had a point. Martha and I think the farm wouldn’t be the same without the sheep.’
‘Does Martha know a lot about sheep?’ Evie asked, trying to make the question sound casual.
‘Her family were shepherds up here for hundreds of years, before the land was all enclosed. Many families had flocks on the Downs.’ Evie felt a pang of envy for Martha for belonging so completely to the green hill and the sheep. ‘There’s not much about a sheep that Martha doesn’t know,’ Robert went on. ‘See that field there?’ He pointed at a square below them. ‘That’s where we put them in the winter so they can feed off turnips.’
He plucked a flower from the grass and showed it to her. ‘Look, Evie, this is an ox-eye daisy.’ She took the white flower from him. ‘And this,’ he pulled up a plant with yellow heads, ‘is yellow rattle.’
‘Yellow rattle,’ she repeated.
‘Can we go back to the house now?’ Charlie asked. Evie knew he’d be wanting to play with the toy fort.
‘We’ve got to see the cows first.’ Robert nodded down the hill to where the cows grazed in the meadow. When they reached the cattle the grass looked so juicy Evie almost imagined wanting to chew it herself.
As they walked through the farmyard he took her by the arm. ‘This is going to be your special job.’
‘What?’
He pointed at the chickens scratching at the ground. ‘Putting the hens and the ducks in at night. And feeding the cat.’ He nodded at the stone wall at the far side of the yard, where a tabby stretched out. ‘While I’m away it’ll be good to know you’re keeping an eye on the things here.’
At night, while they sat round the kitchen table with the wireless on, he’d read to them from an old book he and his brother had enjoyed as children. The stories were about knights on quests and the beautiful women they fought for. While the women waited.
The days seemed to speed up. Sunday afternoons, letter-writing time, seemed to come one after the other without a second between them. Evie looked at the calendar in the kitchen with its scenes of south coast seaside resorts and realized that three months had passed.
‘Charlie doesn’t like the animals as much as I do but he likes playing out in the barns,’ she wrote to her mother. ‘Robert says I’m a reel help on the farm and have a way with animals. If you come down here one weekend I’ll show you the chicks, only they’re quite big now, not fluffy any more.’ She drew one for her mother, then put down the pencil for a second and closed her eyes. Before she’d left London she’d pressed the image of Mum on that last morning deep into her memory: wearing her best dress and a hat that was almost new, faint shadows beneath her eyes. Now Evie had to struggle to remember the exact shade of blue of the dress: periwinkle or navy? She had a photo of Mum and Dad with the two of them, taken on a south coast beach a year back. But of course it didn’t show colours.
She wouldn’t make the mistake again. She’d be sure to remember the colour of Robert’s toffee-brown eyes. And the exact shade of his hair and the pinkness of his lips. She’d never ever forget those. Would he forget her? He’d been so kind to her and Charlie but perhaps when he was away with all the other soldiers the children’s images would slip from his mind. Evie sat up in bed. This couldn’t happen. From the drawer of her bedside table she pulled out her writing pad, kept for the weekly letters to her mother. What should she say? She felt embarrassment prickling at her skin and stuffed the pad back in the drawer and curled up.
But sleep wouldn’t come. It could be months, years before Robert came back. More than a school year, perhaps. Evie sat up again and switched on the light. This time she didn’t let awkwardness stop her. ‘I will look after everything on the farm for you,’ she wrote. ‘Don’t worry about anything. When you come back and I have grown up I would be very happy to stay at the farm to help you or maybe even as your wife. I just wanted you to know this in case you forgot wile you were away. From Evie Parr.’
Before she could change her mind again she tugged an envelope out of the drawer, folded the sheet and sealed it up. She’d put it in his jacket pocket at breakfast time and hoped he wouldn’t notice it until he was well on his way by train.
Next morning, his last before he went off to basic training, Robert produced a Box Brownie and took some photographs of Evie and Charlie with the farm animals. ‘For your mum,’ he said. ‘Bet she’ll think you’ve both grown a lot. Don’t move.’
‘Let me take one of you,’ she begged when he’d finished. He looked so handsome in his uniform.
‘You don’t want me,’ he said.
‘Please.’ How much more confident she felt now that she’d written the letter. She could see the white top of the envelope sticking out from the top of his jacket pocket. He hadn’t noticed it yet. She pictured him opening it on the train, or perhaps sitting on his bunk at the training depot, reading her words and knowing that, whatever happened, Evie would be waiting for him, as loyal as one of the ladies in the stories of the knights he’d told them at night.
‘All right. Where do you want me to stand?’ She made him walk to the blood-red roses by the front door. ‘I feel like a Royal,’ he said. ‘Or a film star.’
Evie clicked the shutter down and caught his image for ever. When she handed back the camera she noticed Martha standing on the side of the lawn observing. Perhaps she should have offered to take Martha’s photograph too for Robert to keep. But she couldn’t bring herself to suggest this.
That night, as she switched off the little lamp between her bed and Charlie’s, Evie thought she heard the back door open. Voices murmured in the kitchen. She turned over but sleep wouldn’t come. Who was Robert talking to? He’d never told them not to come downstairs once they’d gone to bed but Evie hadn’t liked to get out of bed. It was how Mum had brought them up: good children stay in bed.
Another door opened. Robert and his guest were going into the parlour, unused since the war had started. Evie sat up, wide awake. Her feet seemed to find their own path across the floor. She hovered at the top of the stairs. She heard more movement downstairs, a man’s deep baritone and a lighter, fluting voice.
She crept downstairs and across the carpeted hallway to the parlour. The door hadn’t been closed completely. Evie peeped through.
Robert and Martha lay on the sofa. He had his hand down the girl’s blouse. She was weaving her hands around in the front of his trousers. Every now and then he’d mutter something and stretch out his back, like the farm cat when you stroked it.
Evie took a step back. She couldn’t understand what she was seeing but it scared her. She took another step away and another. The couple didn’t seem to have noticed her. She couldn’t draw her eyes away from the pair on the sofa. Robert was pulling down his trousers now and Martha had slipped her legs from underneath him to remove her stockings and underpants and hoist her skirt up so that the bits of her that should be private were visible. Evie put a fist to her mouth. She’d only been months on this farm but already she knew things she hadn’t known in London about male and female animals and what they did. Animals, but not people, not Robert. He lay down on top of Martha and now Evie could only see his firm, rounded behind and Martha’s naked legs, covered with fine hairs, crossed above it. Robert was grunting now, as though he was hurt. One of Martha’s hands dangled down from the sofa, curling and uncurling.
Evie looked back at the door to the parlour. Perhaps if she made a noise, coughed really loudly or dropped a book . . . She didn’t know why she wanted to stop this but it seemed imperative that it be halted. Then she remembered Fly, the dog. He wasn’t allowed past the kitchen. On the few occasions when he’d managed to sneak into the rest of the house he’d burst through doors, fascinated by the forbidden territories. She tiptoed to the kitchen and called to him. From his basket he raised an eyebrow. ‘Come on, boy.’ He looked uncertain. She grabbed a knife from the dresser and cut a tiny sliver from the ham joint sitting on the table.
He got out of the basket, ears pricked. Will this get me into trouble? still on his face.
‘It’s all right. In you go.’ She patted her legs and pushed open the kitchen door. ‘Go and find your master.’ She led him out, managing to creep on up the stairs in front of him. He stopped outside the parlour door. Robert made some kind of muffled exclamation and Martha responded with something between a moan and a laugh. Fly sniffed at the door, tail wagging. ‘Go on!’ she whispered. He put a paw to the door and scratched it. From the stairs Evie threw the sliver of ham. It landed a few feet inside the parlour and the dog sprang after it.
‘What the devil?’ Robert said. She heard the sofa springs squeak and the door open. ‘Fly? What are you doing here? Bad dog! Out.’ His leather belt clinked against the parlour floorboards. He must be picking up his trousers from the floor and putting them on.
Now was Evie’s chance. She stood and came downstairs. ‘Robert? Is something wrong? I heard you calling.’
He opened the door, fully dressed though his shirt was untucked. ‘Nothing. Just the dog. I must have dozed off. Go back to bed, Evie.’
‘All right.’
She paused at the top of the stairs, hearing him return to his companion. ‘. . . You should leave now, the children . . . awake . . .’
‘. . . come up to the cottage with me . . . your last night . . .’
‘. . . carried away . . . shouldn’t do this again . . . always . . . friends . . . respect.’
‘. . . just playing with me, Robert Winter.’
The parlour door squeaked open and someone came out. There was a brief pause and Fly yelped in the kitchen. ‘Don’t take it out on the dog,’ Robert called. ‘Here Fly, here boy.’
Then there was the sound of the kitchen door slamming.
Evie peered through the banisters and saw Robert, face pale, shivering, though it wasn’t a cold night. For a moment he looked quite unlike the person he was when he was showing them how to do jobs on the farm. He looked lost.
Evie tiptoed back to bed and fell almost instantly asleep.
Evie
The night of the Golden Jubilee party, June 2002.
The chairman of the parish council placed the lighted taper against one of the twists of newspaper on the beacon. A small blue flame ran up the twist, looking too anaemic to achieve what was required of it. But the beacon-builders had done their job well. The flames multiplied and crackled as they found more twists of newspaper and dry kindling to consume. And the fire took form, hissing as it found new food.
Evie stood apart from the others, hands folded in front of her, feeling chilled inside despite the growing heat of the flames. It was a mistake to come this evening. She’d fooled herself into thinking she’d recovered from the party in the afternoon. She’d been keen for people to see that she could manage the Jubilee celebrations. Her pride had overrun her common sense.
A couple of children beside her giggled at one another, already restless, probably wishing there were fireworks to go with the bonfire. Evie strained her eyes to look out for other beacons to the north, on the Cotswold or Chiltern hills, but couldn’t see them. It wasn’t quite dark yet. These June days stretched on and on until she almost begged for darkness.
At this time of year the green of the grass and trees was almost too much to be true, as though it had been assembled for a Hollywood film set. The warmth of the bonfire stroked her back and she moved her head to the left so that she was looking west towards the sun’s embers. Back at the time of the Silver Jubilee she’d have regarded the night sky with a farmer’s eye, thinking of her livestock, planning ahead. She wished she still had them to preoccupy her but there were no animals left at Winter’s Copse except for the dog, Pilot. Perhaps she should buy some more animals, chickens, possibly. But she’d only be trying to fill a gap which was impossible to fill. She recoiled, too, from the prospect of becoming an elderly lady who was too fond of animals.
She was the last left of the Winters – for however long she might last. The Queen still sat on her throne, though, with her dogs and horses and her ill-married children and vigorous, Germanic-looking grandchildren all around her. Some people didn’t like the Royals, Evie wasn’t sure about all of them but viewed the Queen in the same way she did the Silver Jubilee tree on the village green, almost fizzing with new growth now but withered and naked in the winter storms that blew in from the west. The Queen, the tree and Evie herself were survivors; they just kept on going.
But she wasn’t entirely alone, she reminded herself. There was Rachel, dearest niece anyone could have wished for. But Rachel was young and had her own life and shouldn’t be over burdened. Especially as something had obviously gone wrong recently. Until about a month ago Evie had noticed a liveliness to her niece’s voice when they’d talked on the telephone, a buoyancy. That bounce had vanished in recent weeks. Setbacks with the longed-for baby, perhaps. How well she could sympathize.
As the last of the sun’s rays dissolved, the bonfire light played kindly on the faces of those standing round it, making everyone glow rosily. Lines were smoothed out and eyes sparkled from the blaze. Evie thought of the centuries during which the drovers had herded sheep and cattle along the Ridgeway. They must have lit fires at night and sat round them, singing perhaps. Or telling stories. She glanced up at the shadowy ridge above the beacon. Some people said they saw the ghosts of the drovers and their animals up there. On a night like this, it was almost possible to imagine the brightness of the fire drawing them down from the white pathway. Or perhaps the flames would attract those who’d lived up here long before the drovers had, back in the Bronze Age. This area had been continuously inhabited for thousands of years before Christ was born.
Evie looked into the flames again until the brightness made her eyes ache and she glanced away. A figure disentangled itself from the shadows and stood at the other side of the fire. Martha. The flickering light gave her face no rosy hue; she looked as though she’d been carved out of stone. For seconds the two women looked at one another. Still this animosity – that was the wrong word because nothing was ever said – this sense of something unresolved between them. And yet it had been Martha who’d provided the strangest but strongest reason for Evie to carry on. Some mornings, flattened by longing for her daughter, Evie had sat at the kitchen table asking herself if she could be bothered to go out to the cattle or up the hill to the sheep. Martha had appeared in the farmyard, fork in hand, or with a can of oil needed for the tractor. Her presence had been like a challenge, a suggestion to Evie that she should prove herself a true native, someone who’d stick it out on this hillside, even if there was no point because there was no surviving Winter. She’d pull on overalls and boots and go to join the woman, silently helping her to hitch the trailer to the tractor or to move livestock from one field to another. Martha’s quiet presence became something that marked the days and weeks, something that stopped her from sitting in that chair by the range, even though the other woman had never once said anything about the loss of Jessamy. Perhaps because of that. Evie thought back to that evening more than half a century ago when she’d discovered Robert and Martha together on the parlour sofa and wondered whether Martha had ever suspected that it had been she who’d let the dog out and disturbed the lovers. Perhaps that was where the dislike had originated. And it had never faded. Even on sludge-grey days when depression wanted to clamp Evie to her bed she’d forced herself out to meet Martha’s unfathomable stare. Here I am. Still here. Despite everything.
Evie turned now so that the warmth of the flames bathed her back, resting her eyes on the darkening vale beneath them.
‘. . . drinks in the Packhorse,’ someone said. Tonight there’d be drinking and singing. The troubles of the previous year, the burning pyres of animals just miles from the village, needed excising. The Jubilee was the time to forget about foot and mouth. But Evie didn’t want to follow them down to the pub. Freya Barnes lingered when the others walked on down the hill.
‘Coming, Evie?’ But the tone of her question made it clear Freya knew the answer would be negative.
‘I’ve got things to do.’ Excuses, and Freya would know this. But she wasn’t one to press a point.
‘Look after yourself.’ Her soft eyes looked sorrowfully at Evie before she joined the others trooping down the steep lane towards the car park.
Evie lingered in the shadows of the trees to give them time to get ahead, wrapping her silk scarf more tightly around her neck. She followed the lane down the steep hill and then struck out across the fields, not needing to stick to footpaths and barely requiring her torch to avoid young crops because she knew each one of these acres and what grew in them as well as she knew herself. As she descended she could almost feel the difference in the soil, the downland chalk turning to sticky clay beneath her soles. She reached a stile and crossed the field of thoroughbreds shaking their heads in enjoyment of the freedom and whinnying softly as they spotted her. The grass squeaked beneath her thick shoes and she could smell the juices at each footstep. Once she’d welcomed early summer with an almost animal relish. But now she longed for autumn and its gold-tinted afternoons and evenings, with the wind wailing round the roof, the heat and gentle light in the kitchen like an embrace on her return from the village shop or a walk with Pilot. The long nights could safely contain all those unanswerable but necessary questions she needed to ask herself. In the summer brightness she’d be forced to re-examine them.
A single lantern burned bright in the western sky. Venus. She hadn’t known anything about the planets until Robert Winter had taught her their names and where to spot them. One day, Evie Winter and her hopes and fears would just be a speck of dust on a small planet. She’d curl up in the sweet-smelling soil beside Matthew and rest in his quiet presence for eternity.
She’d reached the field in front of the house, in sight of the trees sheltering the farm. The oaks were becoming too tall. But she couldn’t bear to call in the tree surgeon and have him cut them. She had an almost supernatural fear that the chainsaw would somehow cut into her own body. Her eyes fixed on the gilded boughs of the largest oak. She ought to leave this place while she still possessed the strength to start again somewhere else, a small cottage on the Dorset coast, perhaps. But she couldn’t. Not just because Jessamy, assuming she still lived, mightn’t be able to find her if she left the village; anyone could find anyone these days, using the internet. That is, if they wanted to be found.
No, she couldn’t leave because, for all the bitterness nights like this inflicted on her, the first stars in the clear evening light and the smell of the blossoming year still held her in their grip. Even though the farm was becoming too much for her and she had been forced to close up rooms upstairs as the attempt to heat and maintain them defeated her. Once this place had employed half a dozen men to work the land and two girls to help in the house and dairy. And Martha. Always Martha up there on the down, watching the sheep. Watching the farm. Now it was just Evie and two afternoons of Slovakian cleaner.
She lengthened her stride, suddenly anxious to make the farm before the shadows grew any deeper. The house was now only a minute away if she kept to the fields and climbed the stile. The bottom plank swayed as it took her weight. Evie made a mental note to find hammer and nails in the morning, feeling her shoulders hunch at the prospect of yet another chore. How cheerfully she could have fixed a loose plank if her daughter had still been in her life. ‘I had to mend that stile again,’ she’d have said in the course of their weekly telephone catch-up call with Jess. ‘Damn nuisance.’
‘Can’t you get someone to do it for you?’ Jessamy would have replied, impatient at this imposition on her mother. ‘Or leave it for me to do when I come up next week.’ Because, of course, her daughter and her young family would be regular weekend visitors.
‘I need more biscuits,’ she’d announce in the village shop. ‘And some boxes of cereal. The grandchildren will be here tomorrow and you know how much they eat.’ And all the old women and young mothers standing in the queue would roll their eyes and laugh indulgently.
Or would Jessamy have perhaps been living at Winter’s Copse by now? If so, the responsibility for the stile would have been hers. Or her husband’s. Jessamy would have brought a strong, handsome, kindly man to live on the farm. The grandchildren would be living here, running down the lane to the village school each morning and bringing their friends back to play on the bales, just as she and Charlie had all those years ago. She, Evie, would have converted one of the farm cottages as a home for herself; on hand in case she were needed to help with the animals or grandchildren, but at a discreet distance.
Evie gave herself a mental shake and felt for the torch she always carried in her pocket so she could see to undo the lock on the gate. If she let herself she could fall into a familiar trap: she’d imagine that Jessamy was striding out just ahead of her, just yards away, reachable if only Evie could quicken her pace. She forced herself to slow down, not to play the game with its inevitable painful ending.
She could make out the chimney pots and the swaying outline of the first roses on the trellis above the garden gate. Pilot would be pacing up and down behind the door, anxious about his supper, anxious to have her back with him.
‘Evie.’ The figure stepped out from behind the cherry tree and her heart shot into her mouth.
She clutched at the torch.
‘Didn’t mean to frighten you.’
‘You gave me a shock.’ She barely managed to utter the words.
‘Sometimes I think she’s come back.’ Martha’s voice was a whisper. ‘I think I’ll see her playing in the garden. Especially on nights like this.’
‘She’d be a grown woman now, like Rachel.’
The idea seemed to shock Martha. ‘Grown?’ She swallowed. ‘I suppose so.’
‘You never give up hope she’ll come back one day, do you, Martha?’
The idea seemed to freeze Martha. Her face was immobile when she spoke again. ‘The child’s life was never the same after her father died.’
Evie’s fingers curled. But it was pointless to defend herself against whatever accusation was being made. Hadn’t she gone over the afternoon of the Silver Jubilee and the preceding weeks again and again in her mind, trying to pinpoint any possible blame she should attribute to herself? There’d been a time when even finding something for which she could blame herself would have been a relief. ‘Night, Martha.’
‘Good night.’ It was the longest conversation she’d had with Martha for years, since most of the fields had been contracted out and Evie no longer had need of extra help. Martha was too old to work now, anyway. God knows what she did with her days: she always seemed to be walking around outside, refusing to join in with the Afternoon Club or the WI like everyone else her age. Sometimes Evie would come across a fresh nail in a fence plank and know that the other woman still walked around the farm with that shepherd’s crook of hers, checking on things. It might have made her angry once but not any longer.
She went inside, into the drawing room. Not quite cold enough for a fire, though she yearned for the comfort of yellow flames. She switched on the television, to see the roundup of Jubilee celebrations. All round the country people were huddling round beacons.
‘Jubilees and Coronations are always cold,’ the pretty presenter said, with the air of someone reading an official verdict. ‘But Coronation Day was supposed to be sunny, that’s why they chose the date.’ Evie remembered Richard Dimbleby saying something similar when she’d watched the Coronation coverage. She and Matthew had laughed. The weather here in Oxfordshire, or Berkshire, as it had been back then, had been terrible too. She remembered running out of the house and up the hill, the wet seeping down the back of her cardigan and turning her dress into a soggy dishcloth. Then she remembered Jessamy’d been wearing that thin cardigan over her cotton frock at the Silver Jubilee party.
Unable to settle, Evie switched off the television and stood. Above her on the mantelpiece stood the photo of the Winter brothers, taken in the camp in 1943. Something had happened out there in the East, something that was more than just the quotidian horror and deprivation of those Japanese camps. It had left a mark on the brothers. It had been on her mind lately, even though she kept telling herself that it was old history, distinct from the mystery of Jessamy’s disappearance.
Pilot whined to be let out and she roused herself.
Robert
Kanburi Camp, ? March 1943
Dear Evie,
I wish I knew the exact date. I think it’s March now. The turn of the year, Dad used to call it. You can start to see signs of winter ending at home. Mothering Sunday. Lent, Lady Day. What’s happening on the farm now? How’s the farm manager getting on? Drilling. Lambing almost done. Perhaps a few days that feel like spring. Aconites and crocuses in the garden and the daffodils just starting. I wonder if you pick them and put them in a vase for Mum. She loves those first flowers the most.
I know roughly where we are now: to the north/northwest of the last camp. I don’t know if knowing makes it better or not. Matthew needs quinine. He’s weak, weaker than I am. Beriberi, dysentery and several more bouts of malaria. We need medicines. The hospital hut is really just somewhere they lay out the dying men. In the last camp the Japs let us trade with the local Thais. At this one the Koreans who guard us push us away from the trading barges with the butts of their guns. On one of them sat a little girl of about your age, watching as the Koreans shoved us off. A pretty thing, just like you. I dream of home every night. I dream that I come back to Winter’s Copse but nobody recognizes me. I keep saying it’s me, it’s Robert. Eventually you all agree that it’s me. Then I try to tell you what has happened to us out here but you won’t believe me. ‘Don’t lie to me,’ Mother says. ‘Remember your commandments, Robert.’
Two days later
I promised you I would fight the dark, didn’t I? Something good has happened and I will tell you about it. We were allowed to go to the village to buy from the traders with the baht we’ve earned. I had a list of things I needed: rice, eggs, soap. And medicine.
When we reached the village some guards came out and waved their guns at us, making it clear we couldn’t proceed. Macgregor tried to reason with them but got his answer in the form of a bloody nose from a swung rifle.
As we trudged back to the camp I felt someone tap me on the back. When I turned I couldn’t see her at first: the child from the barge. She was tiny, shorter than you, Evie, though her face appeared about the same age. She held up something: a small bag of rice. I glanced over my shoulder, the guards were lashing out at some poor Australian who wasn’t walking quickly enough. They weren’t looking in my direction. ‘One baht,’ she said in English. I was so surprised I couldn’t even work out whether she was overcharging me. All I could think was that Matthew could have boiled rice tonight. She opened the bag and showed me the rice, gleaming grains, not like the dirty stuff we have in the camp with its weevils and insects. I gave her the money and she seemed to pocket it and hand me the rice in the same movement, vanishing into the trees on her shoeless feet.
Evie
A week after the Golden Jubilee party, June 2002.
Evie couldn’t get the Thai jungle out of her mind. She kept recalling the men coming back from the East, returning to the village, trying to pick up the threads of their pre-war lives.
‘Matthew didn’t seem as changed by the camp as Robert,’ she told Freya Barnes the day after the Golden Jubilee. ‘But he’d never eat a complete meal. I found half-slices of bread in drawers and apples behind books for years after we married. He could never bear to finish it all.’ She looked round at the loaded fruit bowls on Freya’s kitchen dresser, the cake tins, biscuit barrels. ‘Eventually he stopped doing it.’
‘You gave him what he needed, Evie. He knew he was safe with you.’
‘I didn’t do more than any other woman would have.’
‘That I doubt. Matthew was lucky to have you.’ Freya let out a sigh. ‘What those poor men went through.’
Evie was sitting at the kitchen table, feeling, as she always did, comforted by the gleam of well-polished worktops and kitchen cabinets. While she was with Freya some kind of external benevolent power still seemed a possibility. But perhaps that was just the after-effects of good coffee and home-made shortbread. ‘I don’t know why I keep thinking about those early years.’
‘Remembering the Coronation probably brought it all back. It was still raw then, wasn’t it, the war in the Far East? I saw a programme saying they were the forgotten army. Most people had no idea what the prisoners went through.’
‘We had a prisoner of war on the farm ourselves. Carlo. From Italy. At first we were a bit suspicious of him but after a month or so he felt like one of the family. Then he just vanished.’ The same day that Robert had died in the barn fire. But she didn’t tell Freya that.
Freya glanced at her. ‘Did you ever meet Matthew before he went away to fight?’
‘Just once, briefly, when he came back before he was posted. He was only home for a few days, though, and most of that time was spent discussing the farm and the manager they were to employ when Robert joined up too.’
‘Wasn’t farming a reserved occupation?’
Evie nodded. ‘The authorities tried to persuade Matthew and Robert that the country needed food as badly as it needed men in uniform. But they thought they should fight. Plenty of less able-bodied men could manage the farm, especially with land girls and POWs to help out.’
‘And yet it meant so much to them.’
‘The Winters have always fought for their country, that’s what Robert said. And they were so pleased that they could stick together. The war against Japan hadn’t started then. Nobody could have imagined what would happen to them in Singapore.’
She fell silent.
‘I’ll make you some coffee in a moment. And there are some scones and whipped cream.’ One of Freya’s hands wove its way through her dark curls while the other tapped on the keyboard. She was writing her weekly column on household and rural matters for a small e-zine. She let out a sigh and leaned back. ‘Give me some ideas for what to do with all the Jubilee party left-overs.’
‘Best to throw them away.’ Someone kind had brought Evie a plate of Jubilee fairy cakes, decorated with sugar flowers and pink icing and she couldn’t bear to look at them.
Freya eyed her. ‘Jessamy’s haunting you again, isn’t she?’
Evie looked away. Sometimes her friend saw more than was comfortable. ‘She’s on my mind most of the time at the moment.’
‘You want to talk about it?’
Evie shook her head. ‘It just makes the sadness spread if I talk about it too much. If I can keep it inside me it feels controllable.’
‘And that’s better?’
‘At least when it’s just inside me I don’t feel overwhelmed by it.’
Evie gave a shiver, remembering how once, years ago, the anger had filled her whole body, making her shake and her stomach flip within her. She’d banged her head on the wall by the piano in the drawing room, trying to force out the rage before it consumed her. The dog, not Pilot but his grandmother, had risen from her bed, hackles rising, whining. It was only the sight of the animal’s scared black eyes that had made Evie stop. Before she’d only thought of herself as sad, anxious, preoccupied, obsessed. Now the full force of her rage hit her again. She felt the rank unfairness as a bitter taste in her mouth and took a mouthful of coffee to counter it. Her Jessamy ought not to have been taken from her. It went against all that was natural and just in the world. She’d already lost Matthew. And Robert. And her mother.
Freya nodded. ‘Well, you know you’ve always got a listener here when you need one.’
‘Just being here in your house with you helps.’ She touched Freya’s arm, warm under the olive-green linen shirt. ‘Sorry for being such a bore.’
‘There is no need for sorry.’ Freya turned the pile of papers beside her and waved the printout of an email at Evie. ‘I’m already getting the nutters asking me about crop circles.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘That’s the thing about this part of the world, you attract all the fools.’
‘You’re still thinking of Midsummer Eve last year?’ Despite herself Evie felt her lips twitch.
‘You think I’d forget a horde of hippies streaming through my back garden on the way up to Wayland’s Smithy?’
‘They certainly won’t forget you.’ Clad in her nightdress and waving a dishcloth, Freya had chased them off her lawn. Evie laughed for the first time in days.
‘I wouldn’t mind if they tidied up after themselves, Evie. If they had a respect for the land.’
‘You probably know more about this place and all the old myths and legends than any of the New Agers.’
Beneath Freya’s dark skin lay a repository of stories concerning the pale Norsemen and their myths.
‘My father certainly loved the old stories. And he taught me to love them too.’ Freya laughed. ‘Strange for a man who never even saw snow his whole life.’ She switched off the laptop. ‘We should go for a walk up there one sunny afternoon, Evie. Do us good.’
Evie was remembering her own night up at Wayland’s Smithy, right at the end of the war. She’d never been back to the place in the nearly sixty years that had passed since the barn fire. As she walked home she thought again about Wayland’s Smithy and Robert’s return from the POW camp.
For years she’d been waiting for him to reappear. She and Charlie had stayed at the farm under the supervision of old Mrs Winter and Mr Edwards, the new farm manager, and she’d crossed the days off the calendar, knowing that she was coming nearer and nearer to . . . what? No correspondence had arrived from the Far East, just the original cards he and Matthew had sent saying they’d been taken prisoner, and something from the Red Cross in 1942, briefly describing the brothers’ removal to Siam, or Thailand, as it was called now. Evie had read the telegram to Mrs Winter. ‘Milk,’ she’d said. ‘To build them up.’ And Evie had agreed that they should be given milk on their return. Then there’d been silence for over two years.
By the summer of 1945 she’d been fifteen, old enough for the crush to have taken on an even more passionate drive. She’d sat in the hayloft with the land girls and listened to them chatting about men, and admired the photographs of their boyfriends in their various uniforms. And she’d felt a kinship with these older girls with their Coty lipsticks and waved hairdos. One afternoon they’d been sitting there and talking about one of these trivial things when Mr Edwards had rushed in. Clasped in his hand was a telegram. ‘I’ve taken it straight up to Mrs Winter and she already knows, but it’s good news!’
Evie jumped down from the ladder where she perched. ‘What?’
‘Both the Winter brothers are safe. Matthew was liberated from a camp in Siam. Robert was found back at Changi in Singapore. We don’t know why they were separated.’
‘When will they come home? How long will it take them?’ She was gabbling questions while her startled mind tried to make sense of it all: they were coming back, Robert and Matthew.
‘The telegram doesn’t say. I imagine they’ll send them by train to Rangoon, I expect. And on by ship to Bombay and from there to Cape Town. It could all take some time.’
‘Robert’s coming back?’ Evie hadn’t heard Martha approach. Beneath the turban she wore over her hair while she worked her face was flushed. ‘Let me see that.’ She pulled the telegram from Mr Edwards’s fingers. He tried to retain it.
‘It’s really Mrs Winter’s telegram.’
‘Robert would want me to know.’ Martha frowned at it. ‘Doesn’t say much, does it?’
‘It’s a telegram.’ Evie heard the acid in her own voice. ‘I expect they’ll write.’
‘Robert will want me to know what’s happening.’ Martha stuffed the telegram back at Mr Edwards, with a glare at Evie.
Evie sat on her bed that evening and examined Robert’s photograph. She must have dropped the frame at some stage because a small screw at the back was loose. In the morning she took it into the workshop out in the barn to find a screwdriver. She placed the picture on the workbench while she searched the little drawers of nuts, bolts and screws on top of the cupboard. A shadow passed over the doorway as Evie found the right-sized screwdriver. She turned to see Martha standing there. ‘Morning,’ she said to the older girl.
‘Morning.’ Martha examined her with those curious light eyes of her. ‘Whose photo is that?’
Evie picked up the frame. Not quickly enough.
‘It’s Robert.’
She started tightening the little screw on the back as Martha came closer.
‘Why’ve you got his photo?’ There was a sharp note to her question.
Evie shrugged. ‘To remember him while he was away.’
‘You wanted to remember him?’ Martha gave a short laugh. ‘And why would that be? He’s not going to be thinking about you, Eve Parr, is he? You’re just a kid.’
She cast the photograph a passing look of scorn and walked out.
Evie examined Robert’s face again. ‘She’s waiting for you,’ she told him. ‘And so am I.’
Robert
Kanburi Camp, end of March 1943
Dear Evie,
The little Thai girl’s name is Noi. She came up to me again this evening as we marched back to camp. In her hands were two duck eggs, a pale blue like a winter sky at home. I thought of you collecting eggs in the farmyard, coming in triumphant when you found them all. I handed Noi the coins and once again she took the money and passed me the food in one single graceful movement. ‘Noi,’ she said, pointing at herself. ‘Robert,’ I said, pointing at my tatty shirt. I put the eggs in my pocket and made a gesture to suggest we should both sit down. I rested my back against a tree and put up a hand to push aside a slim swaying branch by my face. She called out and her face was white. I’d been about to brush aside a snake! I had the quickest impression of a browny/greeny form that hissed at me before I rolled onto my side and away from its fangs.
Noi’s terror was replaced with laughter. She made one fist into a snake’s head and pretended to bite her other hand. Then she stopped laughing and said something in Thai that sounded more serious, even in the melodious sing-song tones that Siamese women use to speak their language. I knew she was telling me to be more careful where I put my hands.
Matthew and I had the eggs for our supper. It is wonderful how even a small amount of protein makes you feel stronger again. I used to like my eggs scrambled with butter, all yellow and creamy. Here they are plain boiled, eaten with salt if we can get it.
I wonder if young Noi will be able to find us more food. Or medicines.
Evie September 1945
Into Evie’s dream moved a dried-out husk the size of a tree. But the husk had a face. Evie woke. She caught sight of a face at her door then it was gone.
She rolled over on her side and pulled the sheet over her shoulders, closing her eyes and willing sleep to return. But the face was on her mind. She probably had imagined it but just in case she was going to close the door. She rose and walked towards it, her hand reaching for the handle, when a shadow passed across it.
Evie opened her mouth to cry out but found herself speechless. The figure must be a ghost. It looked like Robert Winter, but it was thin, its face lined like an older man’s. Under her pillow Evie kept the photo of Robert in his uniform, taken at the rose-trailed farmhouse door the day before he left to go to war. This apparition in the doorway with its skeletal face and lined skin was a pastiche of that man.
Perspiration beaded her forehead. She heard her breath coming fast.
‘Hello, Evie.’
‘It is you.’ She could speak again but her voice sounded as if it belonged to someone else. She rubbed her eyes. But he still stood in front of her with his gaunt face and huge eyes. He didn’t look like the boy whose picture she’d kept in her mind for all those years. He didn’t look like the handsome hero she’d imagined who’d return to fall in love with her as soon as she was old enough to be worthy of this privilege. For the last year, since her mother had died in one of the final bombing raids, anticipation of Robert’s return had kept Evie going through long schooldays and evenings spent helping with the milking or trying to rustle up meals for Charlie and Mr Edwards.
‘Back again. At long last.’
She forced her lips to work. ‘I missed you so much.’ She’d rehearsed these words a thousand times. ‘And Charlie did too.’
‘Did you?’
‘We wrote to you. Did you get the letters?’ She had to keep on talking, nervous of what the silences might expose.
He shook his head. ‘We had nothing. In the end all I had was that letter you wrote me before I left the farm. Do you remember, Evie?’
‘Yes.’ She took a few steps backwards until she reached her bed, where she sat. Her fingers picked at a loose thread on the eiderdown.
‘Most of it disintegrated but I could still read the important bits.’
What exactly had she said? She could remember writing the letter but not the words she’d used.
‘It really kept me going, knowing that there was someone back here rooting for me. Got me through some bad times, I can tell you.’
‘I’m glad.’
‘I wrote to you, too, Evie.’
‘Did you? We never had the letters.’
‘I lost some of them in Singapore. But I kept on writing even though they’d never have let me send them. So I hid them. In all kinds of places. Matthew kept them safe for me.’
‘I’d like to have read them.’ But she knew she wouldn’t have been able to bear it.
‘Did you hear about what the Japs did to us, Evie?’ He came into the room and sat on her bed. She willed herself not to flinch from him as he passed her. Even the smell of him was different: metallic and dry, like a road in hot sun. He’d once smelled of new grass and warm cotton. ‘Did Matthew tell you? Perhaps he thought a young girl like you oughtn’t to know those things.’
‘He hasn’t come back here yet. He’s still in hospital.’
‘They told me that they’d had to amputate part of his foot. It rotted.’
She heard the rasp of her drawn breath.
‘He had a skin abscess and it went down to the bone. No penicillin out there to treat infections. And the heat and humidity made it worse. You could smell it from yards away.’
‘Poor Matthew.’
‘He had beriberi, too. And we all had dysentery and malaria. But the foot was the worst thing.’
‘It must have been dreadful.’ She sounded like a stuffed doll, mouthing tired old phrases.
‘My health wasn’t bad until towards the end when they . . .’ He swallowed hard. ‘But Matthew’ll come back here.’ He didn’t seem able to speak for a moment. ‘We’ll look after him, you and I. He can have our milk to drink: best thing for him.’
‘We kept the herd going,’ she said. ‘Only lost two in all the years you were away. One had milk fever and the vet couldn’t work out what was wrong with the other. But no TB.’
‘You did so well, Evie. I’m so proud of you. I always said you’d make a farmer.’ If she closed her eyes and just listened to his voice it might have been the old Robert talking to her.
‘And you should see the pigs. We’ve chosen the one to slaughter. He’s a beauty.’
‘So we’ll have pork chops this autumn.’ His voice was warm. ‘It’s going to be just like it was before I went away, Evie, just like you wrote in your letter. And I’ll forget everything. It’ll be just as though it never happened.’ He sounded dreamy now. ‘Perhaps we just imagined the whole thing.’
She wondered if he ever saw his own reflection in the mirror. Surely that would tell him that his imprisonment had been no bad dream? All round the village there’d been talk of the atrocities, the hunger.
He ran a finger over the ridges on her candlewick bedspread. ‘I was worried you and Charlie might have gone back to London by now.’
‘Our house was bombed last year. Mum died. We’re still waiting for our dad to be demobbed but he won’t have a home for us.’ Evie could list these events almost without feeling them now. Her mother was becoming just a memory. She’d seen her father briefly when he’d visited the farm for a few days in 1943. It had been like receiving a visit from a favourite uncle.
‘So it looks like you two’ll be here a while longer.’ He got up. ‘That’s just as it should be. I should get to bed now. Night, Evie.’ For a second as he wished her goodnight it was as though she’d flipped back three or four years; there was a glimpse of the boy she remembered with his ready smile. Then the haggard man reappeared, moving stiffly towards the door. Evie waited until he’d crossed the landing to his own room and jumped up to lock her bedroom. She’d never locked the door before. When they’d turned twelve Charlie had moved to the little box room next to this one at the suggestion of Mrs Winter in one of her rare lucid periods.
‘Making yourselves very comfortable,’ Martha had said, observing them moving clothes and books.
Back then Evie had taken this as reassuring evidence that they were both to stay in the farmhouse and of her own increased maturity and stature. Now she wished her brother was still sleeping in the bed beside her. But this was Robert she was worrying about: Robert Winter, who’d given her the best raspberries to eat and shown her where the farm cat kept her kittens. Robert, her knight.
During the day Robert was absent. He seemed to do little on the farm, but that was all right because there were still Mr Edwards, Martha and the two land girls, who’d been joined eighteen months earlier by an Italian POW, who came up to the farm from a small nearby camp every day. Mr Edwards had moved into Matthew’s bedroom and had his meals with the children. A nurse had been employed to come in twice a day to look after Mrs Winter. Occasionally Evie’s form teacher would express uncertainty as to the propriety of these arrangements. ‘You live with an incapacitated elderly lady and a man you barely know?’ She frowned and the spectacles on her nose made her eyes look like blue pebbles.
‘The land girls often come in for meals.’
‘They’ll be going home soon.’ She paused. ‘And in my experience, many of those young women are very far from setting a good example to girls of your age.’
‘Mr Edwards is very kind.’ Evie cast desperately about in her mind. ‘He helps with homework. He can cook, too. And he plays Scrabble and Monopoly with us.’ And didn’t even mind that Charlie always won.
‘I’m sure he’s respectable. But I’ll be relieved when the Winter brothers are back home again. This arrangement doesn’t seem proper for a young girl.’
‘There’s Martha, too. She lives up the lane but she comes in every day.’
For the first time Evie felt grateful to have Martha around.
And now here was Robert Winter, back to take care of them. Only he wasn’t the same Robert he’d been before he’d left. Gone was the quick smile. Gone was the gentleness with animals. Evie had seen him slap Fly on the head when he failed to respond quickly enough to a command.
The smell of spirits on his breath was becoming harder to ignore. Where Robert acquired the spirits, heavily rationed, was anyone’s guess. Mr Edwards, coming in from the cowshed to scrub up under the kitchen taps, wrinkled his nose. Robert saw the expression on his face. ‘You got something stuck up your arse?’ The toffee-coloured eyes were hard like dirty windowpanes.
Evie stared hard at the history homework laid out on the kitchen table.
‘Sorry, old chap.’ Mr Edwards shrugged. ‘Just seemed a little . . . early.’
When he wasn’t drinking Robert Winter retired to the barn with an old Norton motorbike he’d bought from one of the regulars in the Packhorse, taking it to bits and cleaning and oiling each part before reassembling it. Evie hoped the new interest might wean him from the bottle. Martha came down to the farm one evening, wearing a dress Evie didn’t recognize. She must have been saving it for the homecoming.
‘I could cook for you, Robert.’ She leant against the range. ‘Like old times. What do you fancy?’
‘What if he says he wants lobster?’ Charlie asked. She ignored him.
‘Hens are still laying well. I could make a soufflé. I’ve got some cheddar. Bet it’s years since you had one of those.’
He gave a non-committal smile.
‘And all those blackberries would make a good crumble.’
‘Evie wants them,’ he muttered. ‘For jam.’
‘Oh, Evie wants them, does she?’ Martha tapped her long fingers on the edge of the range. ‘Hope she won’t waste them: jam’s a tricky thing. Well, have a think.’ She stood straight. ‘Or perhaps you’d fancy a stroll up the hill to look at the sheep?’
‘I went out earlier. They’re all fine.’
Martha pursed her lips. ‘I’ll be off then.’ Still she hovered. ‘If you’re sure there’s nothing I can do for you.’
He shook his head. ‘Thanks for coming down, Martha.’ As she left the kitchen Fly cowered against the wall, even though it was years since Martha had kicked him.
Robert spent hours with Carlo, the Italian prisoner of war, talking and smoking with him, sometimes consulting him about the motorbike. Perhaps he felt a particular bond with Carlo on account of their both having been prisoners in a foreign land. Robert even gave the Italian some of his clothes, saying that they didn’t fit him any more. One afternoon Evie brought them out their mugs of tea to find Robert handing over a pair of boots to the Italian. ‘Even my damn feet shrank in that place.’
‘Grazie, signor.’ Carlo’s dark eyes shone. ‘They are nearly as good as Italian leather.’
‘According to you everything in Italy’s better than everything here,’ Robert said. Evie looked at him quickly to see whether he was about to grow angry but his expression was relaxed.
‘Not everything. Not politics.’ Carlo grinned. ‘And your girls are good. Take the land girls. Or Miss Evie, nobody better than her between Sicily and the Dolomites.’
‘Couldn’t agree with you more.’ Robert’s smile had a flintiness to it. ‘But don’t mention Evie in the same breath as the land girls, old man.’
Carlo glanced from one of them to the other. ‘Scusi.’
‘Our Evie’s special, Carlo.’
‘Yes/
‘What about Martha?’ Evie asked cautiously. ‘Would you say that she was beautiful?’ Surely men would be impressed by that thick dark hair and that willowy shape.
The sudden tension felt like it did in church when the organist played a wrong note.
‘Unusual eyes,’ Carlo said, in a buoyant tone she didn’t recognize. ‘And she have good figure.’
Robert said nothing but narrowed his eyes and stared across the farmyard. Evie cursed herself as a fool and cast around for a distraction. ‘You’ll be repatriated soon enough,’ she told Carlo.
‘Not sure I want to go back there, anyway. Italy is a very poor country, even more so because of the war.’
‘But you’re always saying you don’t like England and the damp and you can’t wait to leave,’ she said.
‘Perhaps I go to America. Sometimes people get to Ireland and go on from there. So I hear.’
‘By people I assume you mean POWs who escape,’ Robert said.
Carlo made what Evie could only describe as a Latin gesture, shrugging with his palms turned upwards.
‘You could probably do it if you really wanted. Plenty of places you could hide out in.’ Robert shuddered. ‘Someone in the Packhorse was talking about German spies hiding in the Sarsens up at Wayland’s Smithy on the Ridgeway.’
‘Do you think they did?’ Evie asked.
‘Good luck to them, if they did. Place is supposed to be haunted. No way you’d get me squeezing myself into a small space in the dark like that. When I was a lad I might have done it for a lark but not now, not since . . .’ He broke off. ‘If I escape I’ll find a nice woman to hide me.’ Carlo’s eyes twinkled.
The pig was ready for slaughtering. Evie helped Mr Edwards pull the measuring tape round the animal. He nodded. ‘Nice job, Evie, he’s fattened up well.’ They walked back to the house.
‘I can send for someone to do it,’ Mr Edwards said over breakfast. During the war they’d used a slaughterman from the village who came up with his sharpened blades wrapped up in a canvas pouch. Evie’d watched once or twice but preferred to absent herself when it was an animal she knew well.
‘I’ll do it.’ Robert sounded calm, controlled. He looked around the kitchen table. Evie made her shoulders relax and put a bit of toast into her mouth, where it sat like a slab of concrete. Mr Edwards stared hard at the teacup in front of him.
‘If you prefer.’
Evie rose and started piling plates and saucers to take to the sink; pieces of crockery crashed together as she stacked them. ‘Careful with the china, Noi,’ Robert said.
She stared at him.
‘Evie, I mean.’
‘Who’s Noi?’
He pushed his plate away. ‘Just watch what you’re doing.’
‘Sorry.’ She plunged the plug into the sink and ran the taps so hard that all the crumbs shot off the plates and were lost in the suds. For the first time in months she was relieved to go into school, even though it was double Latin this morning.
When she walked back into the farmyard that afternoon a trail of bloodspots led from the barn towards the track up to the Downs. ‘Hello, Evie.’ Robert leant against the stable wall, watching her.
‘What’s happened?’ He shook his head. ‘Where’s the pig?’
His body seemed to stiffen. ‘He’s still alive. For now, anyway.’
She looked from him to the bloodstains on the ground. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘They look like rubies, don’t they?’ She realized he was looking at the stains, too. ‘Almost beautiful. I started to do it, Evie, but I couldn’t.’ The words were almost hissed at her. ‘He got up and ran out. Edwards had to go after him with the shotgun.’
Evie put a hand to her own neck, as though she could feel the prick of the blade that hadn’t gone far enough into the artery. The one unforgivable sin, to leave an animal half dead, suffering. Before he’d gone off to war she’d seen Robert pursue a fox he’d taken aim at and left with a smashed shoulder. He’d chased it for an hour and a half before he could finish it off.
And this pig was valuable. They’d given him scraps that could hardly be spared. He was supposed to last all autumn and well into winter. Bits of him had been promised to neighbours in exchange for sugar and tractor parts.
She heard the tramp of boots across the yard and Mr Edwards and Carlo came in, both bloodstained. ‘It’s all right,’ Carlo said. ‘He didn’t go far. Just the orchard. He is greedy for those apples. We finish him there.’
‘Can we . . .?’ She felt bile in her mouth. She’d been going to ask if they could still use the meat in such circumstances, if it had been spoiled by the pig’s death in the orchard, but she had to run to the kitchen sink.
Robert burst into the kitchen one Saturday lunchtime when she and Mr Edwards were frying lambs’ kidneys.
‘Throw me a bottle of beer, Evie.’
She sensed Mr Edwards stiffening as he turned the kidneys in the frying pan. She looked down at the crate beside the stove. Empty.
‘They’ve all gone.’
‘There was one there last night.’ He glared at Mr Edwards. ‘Did you take it, Edwards?’
‘I did. The first I’ve had for some weeks, I might add.’
Robert moved closer. ‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning that I drank the last bottle of beer, yes.’ Mr Edwards nodded towards the table. ‘I think we’re ready, Evie. Let’s call Charlie in and serve up.’
‘Don’t try and brush me off.’ Robert was standing so close to him now that they looked like a pair of angry rams, sizing one another up. ‘This is still my home, you know, Edwards.’
‘I do know that. I appreciate I’m really in the way here. In fact, my time at Winter’s Copse is coming to an end.’ Mr Edwards took the frying pan off the stove. ‘I’ve heard from the ministry about my next posting. Now you’re back there’s no need for me to stay. I’d like to spend some time with my father, too. He’s getting on. And your brother’s starting to recover, isn’t he?’ A letter had come from Matthew in hospital, saying he could now walk on crutches. They hadn’t had to amputate his infected left foot, a souvenir from the Japanese camp.
Evie felt panic wash over her. Mr Edwards might be dull, pompous at times, but he was kindly. He’d locked the back door every night and if the fox got into the chicken house he’d get up with the shotgun and shoot it. She’d felt safe while he was at Winter’s Copse and the land girls came up every day. As though reading her mind he glanced at her as he handed her a plate. ‘When does Matthew leave hospital, Eve?’
‘He’ll never be right again.’ Robert picked up a fork and stabbed at the wooden table. ‘Those fevers, those diseases. But I should have forgotten about the quinine. It was a bad idea, Noi.’
‘We don’t know what you mean.’ Evie heard her voice sounding like a taut length of wire. ‘We don’t know who Noi is.’
His eyes were wide, pupils constricted. ‘Sorry.’ He forced a sickly smile. ‘Look at me. Scaring a good kid like you, Evie. Who’d have thought I’d come to that?’
‘Eat your lunch, old chap.’ Mr Edwards spoke softly. ‘We don’t always know what to say to you. Or how to act. Be patient with us. Tell us how we can help.’
‘Sometime I feel as though I’m still out there. I can’t shake it off.’ He sounded very young, almost like Charlie. ‘I think they’re still here: the other prisoners, the guards, the . . .’ He’d picked up his fork and was driving the prongs into the wooden table.
Mr Edwards placed a plate of kidneys and boiled potato in front of him. ‘It’ll pass. I know that’s precious little to say, but every day takes you further away from that camp.’
‘I wish I could cut out the bit of my memory that keeps throwing it back at me.’ As he always did since his return, Robert stared at the dinner plate. He caught Evie looking at him. ‘Can’t get used to seeing so much food. And I know it’s not as much as we used to eat before the war, but compared with what they gave us out there . . .’
‘Who’s Noi?’ Evie asked again.
She thought he’d ignore the question.
‘A girl about your age in Thailand.’
‘Try not to dwell on the past.’ Mr Edwards handed him the dish of carrots with a frown at Evie. ‘Get some of these on your plate. Vitamin C.’
‘You grew those here?’ Robert gave an approving nod. ‘Carrots are hard on this soil. You must have added sand?’
‘We did. Carlo and I mixed it in. Helped with the drainage.’
‘I noticed today that you’d got him to thin out the woods.’
Mr Edwards’s hands tightened on the vegetable dish.
‘Nice job.’
How easily Robert could make a person beam. Even an ordinarily serious adult like Mr Edwards. There was still enough of the movie star charm in him to make you overlook the rapid changes of mood.
Robert picked up his cutlery and stared at the knife and fork. ‘We used to eat squatting down, like natives. I even wore a loin cloth.’ He blushed. ‘Sorry, Evie.’
‘That’s all right,’ she said.
‘And I used my fingers to scoop up the grains of rice from the bowl.’
The days following that lunchtime were quiet. The last of the harvest came in. Robert spent his days out in the farthest fields. Checking fences, he said. The land girls tripped up the lane in the high heels and dresses they’d swapped for their breeches and boots and kissed Evie goodbye, promising to write. She sat on the gate and waved at them until they’d turned the bend.
Mr Edwards took the children aside one evening after school. ‘I don’t think you should stay here after I’ve gone.’ He spoke quietly and intensely. ‘Young Robert’s suffering from some nervous disorder. Not surprising really. Conditions in those Jap camps were grim. Don’t know exactly what went on out there, but he’s obviously been through something terrible.’
‘Robert would never ever hurt us,’ Evie said.
‘I don’t think he would do so intentionally. But he’s not right in his head at the moment.’
‘Where would we go if we left here?’ Charlie asked.
‘If your father hasn’t got a home for you I expect they’d find you something temporary.’
‘You mean a children’s home, don’t you?’ Evie stared at him. She’d heard about these places. Girls at school whispered about what happened to children who’d been orphaned and had no families to take them in. Children’s homes were cold, bleak places. Usually they split up the boys and girls, made them leave school as soon as they legally could and sent them out to work.
Mr Edwards blushed. ‘It wouldn’t be for long.’
‘No.’ Evie walked to the parlour window. She could make out the apples on the trees in the orchard. ‘This is our home. We can’t leave.’ A couple of leaves whirled down very slowly. She clutched the windowsill.
‘Robert is a sick man, Evie.’
‘It’s not his fault,’ Charlie said. ‘It was what the Nips did to them out there on that railway. They’re war criminals. They should all be hanged, Martha says.’
‘Martha?’ Evie felt her mouth curl as she spoke the name.
‘She spends a lot of time with Robert up in the field with the sheep.’
‘Indeed.’ Mr Edwards sounded dry.
If Evie and Charlie left the farm Martha would be left alone with Robert. Another reason to refuse to leave Winter’s Copse. Why she felt Robert and Martha should not be left alone Evie could not say. It was almost as though the two of them were two chemicals that would ignite one another if left together in the same test tube. She turned from the window. ‘It’s kind of you to be worried about us, Mr Edwards. But we’ll be fine.’
‘We’ll talk again,’ he said. ‘Before I leave. I can’t just leave you like this.’
‘Matthew will be home soon, anyway,’ Evie added.
Just saying the older Winter brother’s name made her feel happier. She’d met Matthew just once when he’d come back on leave before his posting to the East. She remembered a quiet man, less handsome and vivacious than his brother had been, but kind.
They never had the talk with Mr Edwards because he left suddenly the next day while they were at school. ‘His father had a bad fall,’ Robert told them. ‘Insisted on going back to his bombed-out house in Portsmouth and fell through the floorboards or something. He’s very elderly. Edwards had to make a dash for the train. I took him to the station on my bike.’
He put a hand round Evie’s shoulders. ‘So it’s just us three now.’
‘And Martha,’ Charlie said. Evie felt her cheeks heat. She hadn’t ever told her brother about that long-ago discovery of Martha and Robert together in the parlour.
‘I expect we’ll muddle along fine enough,’ Robert said.
And fine they were for the first week or so they were in Robert Winter’s charge. Evie didn’t think he was drinking as much; at least there were fewer bottles stacked in the back of the barn. He’d finished the work on the motorbike and spent most of his time bartering vegetables and eggs for petrol. Martha came down to the house, always with lipstick on. Robert seemed to treat her with no particular interest. Sometimes Evie spotted her on the down, or examining the field of turnips where the sheep would be folded in the winter. Often Martha would stand completely still, a hand over her eyes, gazing down at the farmhouse.
Looking out for Robert, Evie thought. So she could spring out at him.
Charlie now spent most of his free time out of doors, taking sandwiches with him. He preferred to avoid mealtimes with Robert, when conversations could suddenly dry up in the middle of a discussion of the hens’ laying habits and Robert would stare out through the dining-room window into nothing and they knew he was back in the camp again. She offered to play Monopoly with Charlie and not to mind when he filled up Park Lane with hotels but he said it was no fun with just two. ‘Everyone knows the whole city’s bombed, anyway. When I leave here I’m going to get a job building everything up again.’
‘Real hotels, not little red wooden ones?’
‘Why not?’ Charlie waved a hand towards the down behind them. ‘I’m getting sick of all this open space. Spaces should be filled. I want to build places where people go to have a good time.’
Released from the watch of Mr Edwards Carlo worked less intensely. Evie came across him enjoying an extended break in the October sunshine, cap pulled over his eyes, back against the warm barn wall beside a pile of empty food sacks and the milk cans waiting to be scrubbed. He gave a start at her approach.
‘Hey, bella. Where’s Mr Robert?’ He moved up so that she could sit next to him.
‘I don’t know. Shouldn’t you be doing something?’
‘I’m taking a break. It’s allowed, no?’ He took his lighter out of a pocket.
‘I suppose so.’
‘Mr Robert, he’s more relaxed than Mr Edwards.’
‘Is that good?’
Carlo shrugged. ‘He is . . . what you call it . . . not right here.’ He tapped his head. ‘He stays away from Martha, though. That is good.’
‘Why?’ She wondered whether he’d think the same as her, that the two were somehow unstable together.
‘She is also not right up here.’
‘Oh.’
‘For her, I think, it has always been so. But she encourages him to see things in the wrong way.’ He gave another half-shrug. ‘But he is a good man really. He give me these, remember.’ He pointed at his boots, which he’d polished so they shone like new conkers. ‘My old ones leak but not these.’ The cigarette lighter wasn’t working. Carlo muttered something in Italian and replaced it in his pocket. ‘Mr Robert says I can borrow his lighter.’
‘Won’t he need it himself?’
‘He hardly smoke these days.’
It was true; Evie couldn’t remember seeing him with a cigarette since his return; even that means of relaxation seemed to have failed him. She tasted a sour flavour in her mouth. ‘He was so different before he went off to war.’ She remembered how he’d shown her how to feed the calves. He’d been patient with her and when she’d finally got the hang of it and the calves’ tongues were slurping milk from between her fingers he’d smiled as though he was as pleased as she’d been.
Carlo stubbed out his cigarette. ‘You learn a lot about a country by the way it treat its POWs. Whatever happened to him out there must have been very bad.’
‘We haven’t been cruel to you in this country, have we, Carlo?’ She couldn’t bear the thought.
He shook his head. ‘Little boys throw stones at us once when we were working alongside a railway. And the food in the camp is terrible but here Mr Edwards and Mr Robert give me good food and decent tools and I don’t work if I am ill.’
‘And you can have your little naps.’
He winked. ‘Farming is hard work. And you, little Evie, you and your brother give me plums and apples and are kind. You almost make up for the dreadful weather.’ He stood and stretched.
‘Carlo?’
‘Hmmn?’
‘Do you think Robert still loves Martha?’
His eyes rolled. ‘Love? He never love that one.’
‘But . . .’ She couldn’t bring herself to tell him about what she’d seen that night before Robert had left for the war.
‘She is . . .’ His hands described a woman’s curves in the air. ‘But that’s all it will be, all it should be, for Robert.’
‘Why? What’s wrong with Martha?’ Evie asked, feeling a shameful enjoyment of the implied criticism.
He was silent for a moment. ‘She keeps him in the camp,’ he said. ‘She should listen to him, yes, is good to listen. But not always ask him questions, questions, questions. Perhaps a good friend would help him look forward again.’
Something rustled in the empty food sacks behind them. ‘Damn rats,’ Carlo said. Then his eyes narrowed.
‘What is it?’
‘Thought I saw someone. But perhaps not.’
Evie looked but could see nothing.
Carlo gave a yawn. ‘Back to work now.’ His face grew dreamy. ‘One day I’ll run away, Evie.’
‘Even though we’re so kind to you?’
‘I want to be free again, free to smoke all morning if I want. Or free to earn lots of money. I want to go to America.’
‘Oh America, America!’ she teased. ‘What’s so great about America?’
For a second he looked almost serious. ‘I think my life would start again out there, Evie. I really do.’
Robert seemed like the old Robert: teasing her about her frumpy old school uniform and her love of running races against her classmates. ‘How’ll a boy ever catch you if you run that fast, Evie?’ They were standing up on the down and she was holding a fence post steady for him while he hammered in nails.
She smiled and wondered about throwing in a quick question of her own but before she could someone called over the brow of the hill, ‘Robert?’
‘Hello, Martha.’ His eyes were on the post.
‘Haven’t seen you for a few days. Thought I’d check you were getting on all right.’ Martha spoke with apparent casualness as she approached but Evie could hear the tension in each word.
‘Everything’s fine, thanks.’ He kept his eyes on the nail. ‘Just busy.’
‘How’s your mother?’
‘The doctor found a nursing home for her on the coast. Thought the change of air would do her good for a week.’
‘Mrs Winter’s at the coast? Nobody told me.’ Martha sounded put out. ‘You coming down to the Packhorse tonight?’ She clenched her hands in front of her.
‘Probably stay in and have an early night.’ He raised the hammer to strike the nail and Evie stared down at the post. The hammer fell and when she turned her head, Martha had gone. Gloom had veiled Robert’s features as though someone had lowered a blackout over his face.
That night they sat round the table with their tea. ‘I used to dream of this when I was in the camps along the railway out in Siam,’ Robert said.
Charlie’s face lit. He’d been longing to ask about the railway. ‘I looked it up on the map. It’s amazing to think of the Japs building a railway. Even our British engineers never managed it.’
‘Amazing,’ Robert repeated as though he didn’t know the meaning of the word. ‘Yes, it was amazing, I suppose. Amazing and appalling, with the river curling through the mountains and the treacherous currents. And the insects and snakes.’
Evie shuddered.
‘There were gibbons and macaques, though. I used to like them, although sometimes . . .’ He broke off.
Sometimes they’d eaten them, she guessed. Robert took a sip of tea. ‘We had tea with our evening meal but it was just leaves floating in dirty water and I’d close my eyes and think of tea made properly, with our own milk, in a china cup. And sometimes the only source of protein in a whole day would be whatever weevils we found in the rice. Think of that, Evie, we ate feed we wouldn’t give our livestock here.’
‘I wish we’d seen your letters,’ Evie said. ‘To know what you suffered.’
‘It’s in the past now.’ He stirred his tea and stared down at it. ‘And it doesn’t show me very well, Evie.’
‘What do you mean?’
He shrugged. ‘I told you, it was different out there. Things happened.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Perhaps I’ll explain, one day. I’ve got the letters back now. Matthew sent them on to me from the hospital. Perhaps after I marry you and I know you’ve got to stay here with me.’
Evie’s tea spilled over the rim of the cup onto her fingers and the scalding liquid made her wince. A couple of months ago this suggestion of future marriage to Robert Winter would have been her dream-come-true. She tried to muster a smile. That foolish, foolish letter she’d written.
‘Not much of a prospect, eh, Evie?’ He shook his head. ‘But I’m fattening up, aren’t I?’ His eyes had taken on the hard, glassy expression which meant he was somewhere else; not sitting in the Berkshire farmhouse but out in the East. ‘I’m becoming more the kind of man who’d catch a girl’s eye?’
‘I’m a bit young to marry,’ she said at last, trying to sound calm.
‘I’d wait for you to grow up.’ His eyes were still staring out at something she couldn’t see. ‘In the meantime I’m going to take such good care of you.’
She glanced at her watch. Nine. Thank God. She caught Charlie’s eye and pointed at the dial. ‘We should go up.’
‘Time for a half in the Packhorse,’ Robert said as they left the kitchen. ‘Night, you two.’
Evie’d been up early every morning this week to help with the milking and there’d been games at school this afternoon. She heard the purr of the motorbike taking Robert down the hill before sleep claimed her.