It cost Ted a box of chocolates, two pairs of nylons, a bottle of Evening in Paris and an evening at the cinema to find out where Julie was. The young WAAF at Manston had been up for a bit of fun too, so he hadn’t rushed off when he had the information he needed. There was no hurry. Eve Seaton had been sent to hospital in Oxfordshire. ‘She’s not right in the head,’ the girl had said, as they walked back to camp from Ramsgate in the dark. ‘I heard she got caught in a buzz bomb raid and now she thinks she’s someone else. Queen of Sheba, I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘What will happen to her?’
‘I dunno, do I? Either she’ll be discharged as unfit for service or she’ll get well and come back here. Why are you interested in her anyway?’
‘She’s a childhood friend I lost touch with during the Blitz.’
‘Oh, so you’re making use of me to find a lost love.’
‘No, it’s not like that at all. I promised her family I’d find her. She hasn’t written home in ages. But they can wait, I’d much rather be with you.’ He demonstrated that by drawing her into an empty air-raid shelter and getting inside her bloomers.
He’d seen her once more after that, but as the money Summers had given him had run out, he had stood her up and gone back to London. Julie was, for the moment, out of reach, but there was more than one way to skin a cat.
St Hugh’s was an all-female college which had been taken over by the War Office as a military hospital, and its lovely lawns had been covered with brick huts used for wards. Sitting up in bed being subjected to innumerable interrogations and test after test was more than frustrating, especially when all Julie had on her mind was finding Harry. Traumatic amnesia was not uncommon, she was told, especially in wartime, but it didn’t usually last so long. The doctors and specialists who came to see her were intrigued and questioned her over and over again. She wondered if they were trying to make her slip up so they could reveal her as a fraud. All that did was make her angry. ‘I did have glimpses of the past,’ she told them over and over again. ‘But I couldn’t hold onto them. They were just pictures in my brain.’
‘What kind of pictures?’
So she went through it all again: a beach and the sea, a long shiny corridor, children playing in a garden, the demonstration of the bouncing bomb she had seen at the cinema, odd words that resonated.
‘But you say you only had one child.’
‘I think the children were my charges when I was in service before I married, or maybe children from the Coram home. I often used to look after the younger ones.’
‘They were important to you?’
‘Yes. I love children. I was overjoyed when I had one of my own.’
‘Were you always claustrophobic?’
‘Yes. I think it was because I was shut in a cupboard as a punishment when I was in the orphanage.’
‘But you happily travel on the Underground.’
‘Not happily. I have to grit my teeth every time I do it and I’m always glad to get above ground again. And I hated the Anderson shelter.’
‘So you let someone else take your child to the shelter.’
‘It wasn’t like that. I’ve told you.’
‘Tell us again.’ It went on and on until, in desperation, she said, ‘When are you going to let me go? There’s nothing wrong with me and you have other people who need your help far more than I do.’ They were bringing casualties back from Normandy in increasing numbers. Julie saw them arriving, some of them in a very bad way and it set her thinking of Alec. A letter from him had been forwarded to her soon after her arrival at the hospital. It had been written shortly after his return to his unit.
‘Sorry, if I worried you,’ he had written. ‘I had a few adventures, but I’m back with my unit where I belong. At least for the time being. Where I really belong is in your arms, and the minute I get leave, I shall be home to claim them. I think we should be married straight away. I don’t think this scrap is going to be over quickly, so there’s no sense in waiting. Florrie and Matt were right to say you should grab your happiness while you can. Do you agree? The war will be over one day, and pray God that won’t be too long, then we can settle down and bring our children up in peace. I know we will be happy together because there can never be anyone else for me but you.’
There was more of a loving nature, but it only added to her dilemma. What would he say when he learnt she already had a husband, one she had promised to love, honour and obey until death parted them? Was it possible to love two men at the same time? She would not know the answer to that unless she came face to face with Harry again. ‘Let me go,’ she pleaded.
In the end one of them said he would write a paper on her case for The Lancet and might need to speak to her again, to which she replied, ‘You know where to find me. I’m not going to run away.’
Two weeks after her arrival there, they gave her a travel warrant back to Manston and let her go. She hoped SO Murray had discovered where Harry was and was prepared to give her leave to go to him. Telling him she was alive when he thought her dead was not something she could put into a letter.
Alec arrived back at Brize Norton and was transferred to St Hugh’s the day after Julie left. He had been picked up off the Caen street by stretcher-bearers braving a hail of bullets to do so and been carried to safety, then given a very bumpy ambulance ride back to the regimental aid post in the brickfields. He hadn’t at first noticed any pain, but that ride along a road potholed by shellfire set his body on fire and he had to bite his lip to stop himself crying out. Even so, he couldn’t prevent a moan or two escaping when the vehicle jolted into a particularly deep hole. At the forward aid post they gave him morphine, dressed his wound and sent him on again to Ranville. At the field hospital there they dug a lump of shrapnel out of his shoulder under anaesthetic, and a few days later he was shipped back to England, his war over for the time being.
He was unsure whether to be glad or sorry. He had been pulled out of the battle and spared the rest of the carnage, but he had left his men behind, left them to fight on. He wanted to be with them, to live or die alongside them, to be in at the kill when the enemy was finally defeated. But perhaps he would be; the battalion was due to be relieved and brought back to train for the next phase of the war and he might make a full recovery and rejoin them then. If they all survived. They had managed it so far, but how long before their luck ran out? He felt as if he had deserted them.
On the other hand, he was in England and that meant seeing Eve and his family and being able to sleep and eat from a plate instead of a mess tin, and then sleeping some more. He remembered asking if anyone had informed his family where he was before drifting off again. The answer must have been yes, because his mother arrived one afternoon to see him.
She brought him grapes off the vine that grew in the greenhouse on the farm garden. Fat and juicy, they brought home to him that there was life away from the noise and stench of battle and that life was waiting for him at the end of the conflict, a life to look forward to.
‘How are you, Ma?’ he asked, studying her face. She looked worn, there were dark rings round her eyes and her hair seemed greyer than he remembered, yet it had only been a couple of months since he had last been home on leave.
‘I’m fine. How are you?’
‘Coming along nicely. It’s not a bad wound but it’s damaged the muscle, so I’m going to need physiotherapy when it’s healed. It could have been much worse.’
‘Yes, you could have been killed and I thank God you were not. When they told us you were missing believed killed it was terrible. We didn’t know whether to hope or not. Of course, we kept telling each other you would turn up, but sometimes we got very low. We couldn’t see how you could survive being shot down over the sea.’
‘Shot down over the sea? Is that what they told you?’
‘Yes, the plane you were in didn’t make it back. We thought it had gone down on the outward journey, not the return.’
‘Poor you. I’m sorry you were so worried.’
‘Florrie took it badly and so did Eve.’
‘Have you seen Eve?’
‘Not recently. She was coming to see us but something happened …’ She stopped, wondering how much to tell him.
‘What happened?’ When she did not immediately answer, he added, ‘Come on, Ma, out with it.’
‘She was on a train that got hit by a doodlebug …’
He caught his breath in shock. ‘She’s not … not dead?’
‘No, she’s not dead, she wasn’t even hurt. She just disappeared. Florrie said …’ Again she paused.
‘What?’ He pulled himself into a sitting position, ignoring the stab of pain the movement caused. ‘Why are you so reluctant to tell me?’
‘Because Eve ought to tell you herself, not me. In any case I don’t know all the details.’
‘But you’ll tell me all you know, even if I have to wring it out of you. Come on, Ma, don’t leave me hanging like this.’
Maggie took a deep breath and launched into a garbled account of what had happened, ending, ‘She was in hospital here for a couple of weeks, then they sent her back to Manston …’
‘Is she there now?’
‘I don’t know. Florrie seemed to think they would give her leave to sort things out, but I’ve no idea if they did. We didn’t want to say anything to you while you were fighting in France in case it upset you.’
He fell back against the pillows. ‘Damn this shoulder! Damn this bloody war!’
‘Alec, language!’
He smiled wryly. It was typical of his mother to tick him off about his language in the middle of a conversation that had the power to ruin his life. ‘I’ve got to get out of here, got to find her. I can’t let her go—’
She put a hand over his. ‘Calm down, son; you can’t do anything until you’ve recovered and you won’t do that getting all het up. I’m sure Eve will sort things out herself. Florrie said she would, but it might take time. You must be patient and concentrate on getting better.’
A bell signalled the end of visiting hours and she stood up to leave. ‘I’ll come again when I can. Maybe your dad will come with me.’ She bent to kiss his cheek. ‘When you’re well they’ll let you come home to convalesce, I’m sure.’
He was not as sure as she was and watched her walk down the ward and disappear through the door. The language he used when she could no longer hear him would have shocked her to the core. He tried to get out of bed and had almost succeeded when a nurse saw what he was up to and stopped him. ‘Come, Sergeant, back into bed with you. If you need anything fetched, I’ll fetch it.’
But she couldn’t fetch Eve, could she?
* * *
‘According to Mr Austen, Julie Walker is a sergeant in the WAAFs stationed in Kent. He went to speak to her, and though he confirmed she was based there, he did not see her because she is in hospital being treated for injuries she received in a doodlebug raid. He says he’ll go back when she returns to the station and will bring her to us. He wants more money.’
‘We’re not going to wait for him, are we?’ she said. ‘We’ve got to go down and confront this woman, whoever she is, and settle this thing once and for all.’
‘How can we if she isn’t prepared to admit it?’ he said. ‘We’ve never met her. Besides, they probably won’t let us see her in a military hospital.’
‘Then we’ll get Donald Walker to come with us. It’s all his fault anyway. You’d think he’d know his own daughter-in-law, wouldn’t you? I’m beginning to think that dreadful Austen man was right and he deliberately said it was her when he knew perfectly well it was not.’
‘Angie, that’s unfair,’ he said. ‘You heard what he said when we talked to him about it. The features were unrecognisable, and if she was the same colouring and build as our Rosie, it’s understandable.’
‘Well, are we going down or not?’ she demanded.
He sighed. She had become bitter and short-tempered since that last meeting with Ted Austen. He wished the horrible man had never reappeared. She had been so much better since she had come to accept that Rosie was dead, and this didn’t make their daughter any more or any less dead. It would be better to let matters rest. Unfortunately, it was not her way, and he knew he would have to take her down to London yet again, doodlebugs or no doodlebugs. ‘I’ll write to Mr Walker and ask him to suggest somewhere for us to meet,’ he said. ‘We don’t need to involve Mr Austen.’
Unfortunately Ted could not be excluded, because the meeting place Donald Walker suggested was his home in Islington.
The minute he unlocked the door and stepped inside Donald knew that someone had been squatting there. Afraid he might still be in the house, he made Hilda wait outside while he searched all the rooms. He was furious when he saw the state of the sitting room: there was an unwashed glass mug making a ring on the polished table, a dirty plate on the floor and scattered newspapers over the sofa. He was even angrier when he saw his unmade bed and a wardrobe full of strange clothes, but there was no one there. He went back to Hilda. ‘Whoever it was, they’re not here now. We’ll have to report it to the police.’
As he spoke, Ted came whistling up the path. He came to an abrupt halt and the whistle died on his lips when he saw his one-time employer. ‘Mr Walker,’ he said, recovering himself quickly. ‘Why didn’t you let me know you were coming, I’d have made sure the house was aired.’
‘It’s aired all right,’ Donald said grimly. ‘I thought you were supposed to be keeping an eye on the place. Someone’s been in and made themselves at home.’
‘Really? But I was here a few days ago and I didn’t see anyone. It must be a tramp, or perhaps someone who’s been bombed out. They do that sometimes when they’re desperate. I’ll sort him out, never fear.’
‘You can start by gathering up all that stuff in the bedroom and throwing it out. Better still, take it to the WVS, they can no doubt make use of it.’ He turned to his wife. ‘Come, Hilda, we’d better clear up the mess in the sitting room before the Summers get here.’
‘Did you say the Summers?’ Ted put in. ‘You mean Mr and Mrs Summers, Rosie’s parents?’
‘Yes. You’d better stick around, considering you seem to know more about Julie than any of us.’
Ted followed them into the sitting room, had a quick look round to see if there was anything that could identify him as the intruder, and then hastened to the bedroom to gather his clothes and toiletries into a couple of suitcases. He took them down and stood them in the hall before rejoining Donald and his wife in the sitting room. He would put them back after everyone had gone. ‘Would you like me to make you both a cup of tea?’ he asked. ‘I’m sure you could do with it.’
‘Is there anything to make tea with?’ Hilda asked.
Ted knew he had slipped up but as usual he quickly recovered. ‘If someone’s been squatting here, ten to one they brought tea and milk with them,’ he said. ‘I’ll go and look, shall I?’
While he was in the kitchen, Mr and Mrs Summers arrived and the conference began with Ted serving tea. It was perfectly clear to all of them that there was a difference of opinion about what should be done. Donald and Hilda wanted everything left as it was. ‘If I see Julie, and I’m yet to be convinced it is Julie,’ Donald said, ‘I’ll tell her to take herself off and stay dead. Harry can do without the upheaval in his life. He’s happy with Pam and they have two beautiful children. I reckon we should leave well alone.’
Stuart was inclined to agree with him, but not so Angela. ‘We can’t leave our daughter in a grave with the wrong name on it,’ she said. ‘I want her exhumed and buried again in our own kirkyard.’
‘And what about our grandson?’ Hilda snapped. ‘What you are proposing will mean digging him up too. It will break Harry’s heart.’
‘You are assuming it is your daughter in that grave,’ Donald said. ‘We only have Mr Austen’s word for it.’
They all looked at Ted, who was standing with the teapot poised over Hilda’s cup. ‘I am ninety-nine per cent sure,’ he said, carefully pouring tea. ‘I know it isn’t Julie because I’ve seen her recently.’
‘It’s a pity you didn’t keep that information to yourself,’ Donald said.
‘I couldn’t do that,’ Ted defended himself. ‘Not with Mr and Mrs Summers searching all over for their daughter and asking me to keep an eye out for her. It was my bounden duty to tell what I knew.’
‘Not to mention seeing a way to make money,’ Stuart put in.
‘I haven’t made any money out if it.’ Ted pretended to be aggrieved. ‘If anything, it has cost me money, what with travel and board and lodging down in Kent and having to pay other people for information. I am well out of pocket.’
‘That’s as maybe,’ Donald said. ‘We can’t decide on anything until we’ve spoken to Julie. So where is she?’
‘In hospital in Oxford,’ Ted said. ‘When she’s discharged, she’ll have to report back to Manston. I’ve got someone there who’ll tell me when she arrives and I’ll bring her to you.’ He wished he hadn’t been so offhand with that WAAF at Manston. He needed to know when Julie returned from hospital so he could take her to her husband and watch them tearing each other apart. And if she wouldn’t come willingly, he’d kidnap her. The idea of that appealed to him.
‘If she’ll come.’
‘Oh, I have ways of persuading her.’
‘Then what?’ Hilda demanded.
‘If she confirms that it is Rosie in that grave, then we can’t put off telling Harry,’ Donald said. ‘And then there’s Pam. How’s she going to take it? I think we should warn Mr and Mrs Godwin so they can break the news to her when the time comes.’
‘Who are Mr and Mrs Godwin?’ Angela asked.
‘Pam’s parents. They live at Swanton Morley in Norfolk. Our son was stationed there until recently.’
‘Then that’s where we’ll go,’ Angela said. ‘We can see them all together.’
‘Flight Lieutenant, there is someone to see you,’ the station commander told Harry. ‘I’ve put her in my office, you can talk to her there.’
Harry had settled down at Cosford, living in barracks, working with new intakes and enjoying pandering to their youthful enthusiasm, but he missed Pam and the children more than he could say. He wrote every day and had loving letters in return, some with small smudged fingermarks or crayon squiggles, purporting to come from the twins, which made him smile and long to hug them both. They had talked of Pam bringing them up to Cosford on a visit, but he had been so tied up with work, nothing had, as yet, been arranged. Had she decided to pre-empt him and come up to surprise him? His face wore a broad smile as he hurried from the outer office where he had been talking to the group captain and went into the inner sanctum.
But it was not Pam who stood with her back to him looking out of the window, it was someone in a WAAF uniform with a sergeant’s stripes on her arm. She turned when she heard the door open and he was confronted with the ghost he had seen at Canterbury Hospital. Except this time he knew she was not a ghost. This was Julie. This was the girl he had loved and married and mourned. He stared, his mouth half open, unable to frame the hundreds of questions that battered his brain.
The silence between them went on and on until at last she spoke. ‘Hallo, Harry.’ It was her voice too, soft and appealing, just as he remembered it.
‘Julie.’ It was a croak. ‘I thought … I thought—’
‘You thought I was dead, yes I know. I’ve seen my own grave.’ She gave a cracked laugh. ‘How many people can say that, I wonder? “In memory of a beloved wife, Julie Walker, and son, George Harold, twenty-one months, who died as a result of an air raid, September the 7th 1940. May they rest in peace until we meet again in heaven.”’ The laughter stopped as she stumbled over the words.
‘Oh, my God, Julie!’ He opened his arms.
She ran into them.
He pulled her close, smelt the once familiar scent of her hair, felt the heart of her thumping under her uniform jacket and all his old feelings for her rushed back. This was his Julie, his childhood sweetheart, whom he had loved. ‘I can’t believe it’s you.’
‘It is. I was afraid you might have forgotten me.’
‘I couldn’t forget you, Julie. We meant too much to each other for that ever to happen.’ There was an old horsehair sofa against the wall, which the CO used when he had to stay on call overnight, and he pulled her down onto that to sit beside him, keeping his arm about her shoulders, as if holding her helped him to believe she was real. ‘Tell me what happened. Why did you let me believe you were dead? That was a cruel thing to do, Julie.’
‘I didn’t let you believe anything, Harry. I couldn’t tell you where I was because I’d been injured in an air raid and lost my memory. I didn’t know who I was or anything about myself.’
‘It’s hard to believe.’
‘I’m not lying, Harry.’
‘No, of course not. I meant I find it hard to believe you’re alive,’ he said, shaking his head as if to shake his tumbling thoughts into some sort of order. ‘We buried you. At least we buried someone, or rather my parents did. Dad said there wasn’t a mark on you. He must have known …’
‘I don’t know about that. Perhaps he was trying to spare you. I was pulled out of the shelter alive, but I had a broken leg and a broken arm and my face was a mess. It was ages before I could look at myself in the mirror and not shudder.’
‘And George?’
‘I’m sure George is in the grave, alongside my friend, Rosie. You remember Rosie Summers, don’t you?’
‘I remember you speaking of her but I never met her. Her parents were looking for her. They went to Dad and he contacted me, but I couldn’t tell them anything. I never dreamt … I still can’t take it in.’
‘I can understand that, I had problems believing it myself, but if you listen a minute, I’ll tell you the whole story.’
It took some time to tell, especially as he kept interrupting, and once someone came into the room, apologised, and made a quick exit, but she got it out in the end. She said nothing about Alec; it didn’t seem appropriate. ‘Grace Paterson took me to see the grave,’ she finished, ‘otherwise I might have thought I was having a nightmare and would wake up and find everything as it was before the war started.’
‘It can’t be like that again.’
‘I know.’
‘How did you find me?’
‘It was easy enough. My section officer made enquiries through the RAF and gave me a week’s leave to come and see you.’
‘God, this has taken the wind out of my sails.’
‘I expect it’ll take a little while to get used to the idea.’
‘You can say that again.’ He was silent a moment or two, trying to digest all she had said. ‘I could talk to you the rest of the day, but I think the Group wants his office back and I’ve got to go back on duty, but I’ll be off tonight. Have you got somewhere to stay?’
‘I’ve booked into the Park House Hotel.’
‘Shall I come and see you there? Talk some more?’
‘Yes. No doubt you’ve lots to tell me. And to tell you the truth, I’m exhausted.’
They rose together and he accompanied her to the outer office, where he arranged for a taxi to come and take her back to her hotel. They had little to say while they waited for it to arrive. Harry’s head was still full of questions but there were other people working in the office and he couldn’t voice them. He was glad when the cab arrived. He saw her into it, bent to kiss her briefly, and watched as she was driven away, then he took a huge breath and turned to go back to the workshop where he had been taking a class when summoned to the office. He had been gone a long time and the men had dispersed. He sat at one of the benches, cluttered with earphones and wireless parts, and tried to sort out what Julie’s reappearance really meant to him.
It was not an easy task. She was sturdier and more mature than the half-grown woman he had married – he supposed that was down to being in the services; in wartime you grew up quickly – but underneath she was still Julie, still the lovely girl he had married, still vulnerable, for all her sergeant’s stripes. God help him, still his wife. The fact that he was a bigamist suddenly struck him and he put his head into his hands and groaned. ‘Pam, oh Pam, what have I done to you?’
The note was short. It was put together with words cut from a newspaper and stuck on a sheet of white paper. ‘Your husband is a bigamist.’ Pam dismissed it as the work of a crank, but she couldn’t get it out of her head. All day, while she went about her usual chores, bathing and dressing the twins, giving them their breakfast and putting them in the garden in their pram to enjoy the sunshine, washing and ironing their little garments and cleaning the house, she worried about it. Of course it couldn’t be true. Harry was a widower, everyone knew that. But then she remembered him telling her he thought he had seen Julie’s ghost. It couldn’t have been Julie, could it? Julie was dead and buried. But supposing she was alive after all? No, that couldn’t be. She had a grave with a headstone. But Harry had never seen her dead. Could his family have made a mistake? But why wait until now to come back to life? Perhaps whoever had sent that nasty missive had seen the woman Harry had called a ghost and jumped to the wrong conclusion. Or had it been sent by Julie herself to cause trouble?
It all went round and round in her head, from sheer disbelief to doubting and then to thinking it might be true, until she thought it would drive her mad. Harry had loved Julie and made no secret of it. She remembered telling him a dead woman could not harm her. But was she dead? Would Harry abandon his new family for an old love? Jealousy swept through her and made her irritable. She took the rag rug from the kitchen hearth, flung it over the clothes line and thumped it with a cane carpet beater until her arm ached.
‘Pam, whatever’s the matter?’ Her mother’s voice penetrated the red heat of her anger. ‘You’ll knock that rug to bits – it can’t be that grubby.’
Pam dropped the carpet beater and burst into tears. The astonished Jane took her into her arms and let her sob for a few moments, then led her indoors and sat her at the kitchen table. ‘Now what’s this all about? Is it Harry?’
Pam nodded without speaking.
‘Oh, my God. And we thought he’d be safe at Cosford away from the action.’
‘He’s not dead,’ Pam cried. ‘He’s not dead.’
‘What, then?’
Pam bent and picked the screwed-up letter out of the log basket where she had hurled it and handed it to her mother.
Jane smoothed it out to read it. ‘Good Lord, where did this come from?’
‘It was in this morning’s post.’
‘It can’t be true. His first wife’s dead and buried. It’s someone with a grudge trying to cause trouble.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know.’ She paused and searched her daughter’s tear-streaked face. ‘You surely don’t believe it?’
‘I wouldn’t, except that a few weeks ago Harry said he thought he’d seen a ghost, someone the spitting image of Julie. It shook him up so much he had to go to see her grave to convince himself she was dead.’
‘Everyone has a double, they say.’
‘Yes, I’m being silly.’
‘Tell you what, I’ll look after the twins; you take yourself off to Cosford and see Harry, set your mind at rest.’
‘Do you think I should?’
‘Why not? Give him a nice surprise.’
Pam managed a lopsided smile. ‘Or a dreadful shock.’
‘You married again?’ Julie queried, wondering why that surprised her. After all, she had been telling herself ever since her memory returned that he might have found someone else, had even wondered if she might welcome it, considering she had found Alec. Instead it hit her like a blow to the stomach. The sight of him in the station commander’s office, tall and handsome in his uniform, just as he had been when she waved him goodbye at the door when he went to Canada, had flung her back to that day and how miserable she had felt then, and she had run into his arms. She hadn’t intended to do that; her plan had been to remain cool and practical, to discover how he felt about her sudden appearance. Instead she had been overcome with emotion.
She changed into a civilian frock to meet him again that evening, a printed floral cotton with white collar and cuffs and a white belt, and brushed her fair hair out of the severe style she wore in uniform. Then she had ordered a meal and a bottle of wine to be served in her room. ‘I’m on leave and spending precious time with my husband,’ she had told the proprietor.
He grinned. ‘I understand. Seven o’clock do you?’
‘Yes, perfectly. Will you send him up when he arrives?’
She had returned to her room to wait for him with growing trepidation. Their earlier meeting had been unsatisfactory in so many ways. The surroundings had hardly been conducive to loving reunions and he had been too shocked to take in everything she said or to talk about himself. She had known she would have to repeat it all when he arrived, which is exactly what had happened, and this time he had many more questions for her. While they ate and drank the wine, she told him everything all over again, and it was not until after they had finished and sat over the remnants of the meal, drinking the last of the wine, that she began to question him about himself. It was then he told her he had remarried.
‘Yes. I met her when I was stationed at Swanton Morley. We hit it off right from the start. You were gone and I was lonely and needed someone to keep me going, someone to come back to after an op. We married in March 1943 and have two children, twins, a boy and a girl.’ It sounded flat said like that, but he couldn’t tell her how he had fallen in love with Pam, how she was a steadying influence when he felt like going off half-cocked, how they laughed at the same things, how good they were together in bed, how much he adored the twins, who were fast-developing characters of their own and whose wide grins when they saw him coming made his spirits soar. He couldn’t say any of that.
‘But you can’t be married to her, can you? You’re still married to me.’
‘I know that now. I didn’t at the time.’
‘What are you going to do about it?’
‘I can’t leave her, Julie, if that’s what you think. She’s the mother of my children.’
‘Do you love her?’
‘Of course I love her. I wouldn’t have married her if I didn’t.’
‘But you loved me. You said you did, and I adored you, right from the beginning when we met on the beach. Do you remember saying we were fated to meet again when you rescued me from Ted Austen?’
‘Of course I do. I remember everything about our life together – your funny little ways, how you learnt to cook and how well you looked after George, which is why I find it difficult to understand why you left him with your friend that day.’
‘It was one of the things I found hard to understand myself when my memory came back, but Grace reminded me. I owed her some money and I needed to pay it back. I knew you wouldn’t like me getting into debt.’
‘So you went to see Miss Paterson in the middle of an air raid and left our son to be looked after by someone you hardly knew because you were afraid I would be cross with you.’
Stated baldly like that, it didn’t sound like the actions of a loving mother and she hastened to explain. ‘The raid hadn’t started when I left, and it was such a hot day I didn’t want to drag him across London with me.’
‘Why did you owe Miss Paterson money?’
‘I borrowed some from her to pay Rosie. Rosie had been providing me with stuff that was hard to get: extra rations, bits and pieces for George.’
‘Black market.’
‘Yes, I suppose it was. I didn’t think of it like that. It was simply stuff I needed for George.’
‘And you couldn’t pay for it. Oh, Julie, we talked about how you could manage your housekeeping before I went away, remember?’
‘Yes, and I tried, I really did, but having a few extras was so tempting and Rosie didn’t charge much, not at first.’
‘That’s how those things usually start, and then it grows from there. You get into someone’s clutches and you can’t get out of them. Where was Rosie getting the stuff?’
‘I think it was from Ted Austen.’
‘That creep who tried to rape you?’ he asked in astonishment.
‘Yes. I didn’t know it was him. I didn’t even know he knew Rosie, not until I saw him again just over a fortnight ago, and then the penny dropped. I would have stopped it sooner if I had known.’
‘How did that come about? Seeing him again, I mean.’
The meeting wasn’t going at all as she had expected it to. Instead of talking about how they felt for each other, their joy at being together again, he was quizzing her about Ted Austen. ‘He saw me when I visited the cemetery. He seemed to get a great deal of pleasure out of it. He tried to blackmail me – said if I didn’t want you to know I was alive, he’d keep mum for a consideration.’
‘So you decided it would be better to come clean?’
‘No, Harry, that’s not fair. I wanted to see you again, it was the first thing I thought of when my memory came back, after worrying about leaving George. He got hold of the wrong end of the stick there. Why are we talking about him? He’s a reptile and I loathe him.’
‘Where did you get the money to pay Miss Paterson back?’
‘I pawned my wedding ring. I was going to redeem it, truly I was, but I didn’t get the chance.’
‘I’ve been wondering about that,’ he said looking down at her bare fingers.
‘When I came round in the hospital after they pulled me out of the shelter, I couldn’t remember being married, and as I wasn’t wearing a ring everyone assumed I was single. I was given the surname Seaton and chose Eve for a Christian name and was issued with a new identity card and ration book in that name. I had nowhere to go when I came out of hospital and took a job in Southwark for a time hoping someone might recognise me, but no one ever did, so I joined up.’ She paused, searching his face. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have come back. There have been times in the past couple of weeks, while they were doing all sorts of tests on me in hospital, that I wondered if it would have been better if I’d never remembered. I even thought of pretending I hadn’t and carrying on as Eve Seaton to the end of my days.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘Because I loved you, Harry, and we are husband and wife, until death us do part—’ She stopped suddenly.
‘I know. I dread to think what this is going to do to Pam.’
‘You have to tell her.’
‘I suppose I must, but it’s going to be difficult.’
She watched him struggling with his inner turmoil and understood only too well. Why she didn’t tell him about Alec she didn’t know, although it had been the last thing Florrie had said to her before she left Manston. ‘Don’t forget Alec is waiting for you.’ In the emotion of her reunion with Harry, she almost had.
She drained the last of the wine in her glass and stood up, only to discover her legs were decidedly wobbly. ‘Oh dear,’ she said, stumbling against the table.
Laughing, he jumped up to guide her to the bed. ‘You never could hold your drink, could you, my love?’ He sat her down, took off her shoes and stockings and her dress, then pushed her back onto the pillows and lifted her feet onto the bed, before pulling the eiderdown over her. She was only half aware of what he was doing. ‘Harry,’ she mumbled. ‘I’m sorry …’
‘You’re exhausted,’ he murmured. ‘And small wonder. I’m shattered myself. I’ll try and see you again tomorrow.’ He dropped a kiss on her forehead and left her to sleep.