My reaction, when Stafford told me about the postcard, surprised me. It was one of anger, of betrayal at the fact that he had kept from me something so vital. I had begun to assume from the way he spoke of her that Alice must be dead. But now, not only was there the strong possibility that she was still alive, there was also an address at which she might – just conceivably – be found.
‘Why didn’t you tell me? At the beginning?’
‘Because you didn’t know the full story,’ he said. ‘I needed to explain all of it to you so that you’d understand. So that you’d understand her, before you went looking.’
Stafford said that before he’d got the postcard he’d been certain that Alice had died, decades earlier. That was war, he said, that was the sort of mess it made out of what you thought you knew, out of the life you had imagined yourself having. So the thing seemed, at first, like a message from a ghost.
‘Have you seen her since?’ Had he kept this from me too?
‘No. I never went.’
‘Why … because of Elodia?’
‘Yes. It would have been a terrible disloyalty.’
Was that the whole picture? I think perhaps not. In fact, I am sure there had been fear, too. Fear that he might find Alice changed beyond recognition from the person he had loved: that it would be better to remember her as the young woman she had been. Fear that she might find him terribly changed, too – that she would find him wanting.
‘So she lives here now?’ I indicated the return address that she had given, in Paris: Rue de Seine.
‘I can’t say. As there’s been no contact since …’ He made a helpless gesture to indicate the span of years. ‘If you went there, though, you might be able to discover something further. A start, at least.’
I glanced down at the postcard. I turned it over, and saw the view it showed: of a sandy beach buffeted by grey waves, and two buildings, one large and historic in aspect, the other nestling in its shadow, a cottage perhaps a tenth of the size. I had the strongest feeling of recognition, as I studied it. And I knew, before I read it, this was Winnard Cove.