The clock ticks away the night; outside, the moon has risen in a clear sky. Alec sits on the edge of his bed trying to work through everything he’s feeling—bewilderment, to be sure, and the same disorientation that has plagued him since that terrible day over the Mediterranean. And June . . . He had not expected to see her at the docks, had not known how to talk to her, except in those confusing, awkward bursts like some other version of himself. He had not known how to reach out with these dreadful appendages and bring himself back to her. She must be hurt by the distance between them, but what is he meant to do? So much has changed since last he was in this room, on this bed, that it’s hard to understand how the room has not changed like everything else. How many places has he slept since he last slept here? Twenty? More? And with each transition, something else vanished or was left behind, although never the ghosts of the friends he’s lost. Those follow him as loyally as hounds.
And to find himself living here, in Constance’s cottage, with June . . . He has dreamed his whole life of being with her, of a life like this, but now that he has it, he has no idea how to navigate the reality. And how is it that his aunt is dead? It hadn’t felt quite real before, but now her absence is everywhere. It would have been dreadful to be here without June, knocking around the house by himself. What would it feel like to be alone? How claustrophobic might all that empty space become? Even this single room is nearly too big for him. But he doesn’t know how to ask June if she’s staying, if this is how they live now. If this is the first in a series of moments he can count as real, as the beginning of their life.
In Odessa, he had shared his quarters with three other men. There had been clothes and bedding, and the Russians had made an effort to combat sickness and infestation. They had had plumbing and cheap calico towels, rations heavy on root vegetables and light on grains and decent meat. They had been prisoners still, despite the end of the war, and the relative comfort had been balanced always by the fear that at any moment one of them could vanish onto a train to the Gulag. But. Better than Germany. He tries not to think about the men still there, waiting to be sent home, or the officers who had acted as their keepers. The Red Navy fellow in charge of him had been so serious, though he’d seemed so young. In the end he had turned out to be older than Alec, but his relative innocence had blurred everything. Alec had liked him, but now, with weeks on the sea and most of a continent between them, he can’t help but wonder how much of that fondness had been a misplaced gratitude.
The light beneath his door shivers as June comes upstairs and pauses just outside on her way to the room beside his. He feels so far away. In Odessa there had been music at night, winging its way down the corridors from the lush quarters of their Soviet captors, and sometimes the music had slipped into his fetid dreams and left him dizzy and confused. Here there is no music, but the sounds of the fens are better, though perhaps equally confusing. A fox barks at the night, and somewhere far off in the distance the defensive double-noted call of a tawny owl answers. He goes to the window, looks out in case he can see anything alive out there. Beneath the moon, the black peat expanses stretch out as silver as a badger.
And, standing, he feels that pull again toward June. He feels so powerless—he is right here, she is right there—but he is helpless to bridge the gap. There is too much space between the way she looked at him tonight, with love and hope, and his fear that she will not want him. That the way he sleeps, or doesn’t, will frighten her; that his hands are too rough and broken for her skin; that whatever he has become after all the years of war and captivity is not the man she deserves.
Alec wakes at dawn to the rich songs of siskins and mistle thrushes. The realization that he has finally escaped the horrors and come home brings a thick, blasted fire of guilt with it, and he has to lie still until it goes away. What little sleep he’d managed had been full of the cats of Stalag Luft I, and the host of dead who travel through his dreams and infest his sleep—Cobber, Tim, Charlie, Smasher . . . All the men who died while he survived. The men whose fates he doesn’t know prey on his dreams as well—is Sanjay one of the lost? In Odessa, the Russians had been generous with their vodka, and it had sometimes helped him care less about the dreams. He had never liked the stuff, but it had been a damn sight better than the lethal booze some of the men had distilled from God only knew what in Germany. He had never been sure whether drinking that had been intended to help them forget their circumstances or just kill them outright.
He gets to his feet, rubs and tugs at his hands to ease the stiffness that comes with sleep, and goes to the window, trying to orient himself to the view of the winter-burned fields out the window. Alec has wanted to be back in Fenbourne with June for as long as he can remember, and now that he is . . . Well. Before the war, he had mostly come to feel at home in the Fenlands. He knew the people of the village, and their dogs, and sometimes their cows. He had overheard Cook gossiping with Miss Laflin, the postmistress, over the back fence at the vicarage a thousand times, or the teachers at school whispering about the headmaster, Mr. Shotley. In the ten years between Alec’s arrival in Fenbourne and the morning he’d sauntered off to Cambridge and Clare College, he had come to terms with its habits and mores, finding his place.
And before that, India. Bombay and Srinagar and the rest, places that felt as much like home to him as England ever had. Could a man ever really let go of the colors and landscapes that had meant home from the beginning? June has shown him so much here in Fenbourne, but even she had never been able to make Fenbourne quite replace that other life she had never known, full of elephants and temples.
The truth is, war has peeled away all sense of home from anywhere, even here.
Alec knows he should be grateful. He is alive and reunited with the woman he’s loved his whole life. He is going to have to try harder than he had last night, if he hopes to make it right with her.
“One step at a time,” he mutters to himself. He picks up his towel and a change of clothes and goes to the bath. The night before he had bathed in water nearly too hot for him, scalding away the thick, stale film of ship and stress. During the passage from Odessa to London he had washed himself as well as he could, standing in his cramped cabin with a rough cloth, a crust of bad soap, and a basin of cold water. It had hardly been enough, but compared to the miserable shared tap of Odessa, and the horrors of Germany, it had been adequate. But now . . . The extravagance of being able to settle himself into the deep tub here, letting it warm his hands and the rest of him, is an immeasurable glory. He had nearly wept, but he had been so self-conscious, aware that June would be downstairs wondering what he was doing. But there will be other baths, as many of them as he and the ancient water heater can stand. He can be clean all the time now. His hands tremble as he fumbles with the tap, and again he nearly cries.
Downstairs, June is sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the telephone directory. He had smelled the coffee from upstairs, his senses lighting up with want, but the directory throws him. For a moment, he wonders if she means to memorize it, the way she has always memorized everything.
She looks up and smiles. “Good morning, Alec.”
“Good morning,” he replies. His hands drift behind him and out of sight, but he forces himself to let them hang at his sides. Perhaps if he can pretend well enough that he is not ashamed of them, it will become true.
She stands. “Would you like some coffee?”
Alec lets himself wallow in the idea. When was the last time he had good coffee? Algeria? And whatever it is that she has brewed, it does not have that watery character that he had seen on bases and in cafés during the war.
“Please, yes,” he says. He takes the chair across from her place, makes himself meet her eyes. “It smells marvelous.”
At the sink she runs the water until it’s hot, fills a mug, and lets it warm for a moment as if she too finds the cottage a bit too cold. Alec’s chest flutters. He is having his morning coffee with June, an idea that only a few weeks ago seemed like a distant and improbable future. The idea echoes: I am having coffee with June. I am here, with June. June is here.
When she sets the mug in front of him, he presses his left palm to it, letting the heat push into the sore spots in his bones. His right hand he settles in his lap, out of sight. Trying to be less self-conscious is a process, it seems, though he feels as if his inconsistency will only make things worse. The coffee is not the oil-black concoction he remembers from Algeria, but it’s unlike anything he’s had in ages, the aroma so dense he can almost touch it. He lifts the mug and sips carefully.
God, he thinks, hoping June won’t see the emotions welling up. “This . . . I haven’t had anything like this in years, June. I would have thought with rationing . . .”
“I know,” she says. “I’m lucky to have the good stuff. It was a gift from Floss Corbett.”
Alec looks away, trying not to let his reflexive irritation about Corbett color how the coffee feels. How that next sip tastes. He makes himself smile. “Lucky, that.”
“If you’d like cream or sugar . . .” She gestures at the two small jars in the center of the table.
He hasn’t seen proper cream in years, and his mouth waters. How is it that such luxuries are just there, right before him? He’s always taken his coffee black, but turning down real sugar and rich cream now feels tantamount to turning down a meal. After years of Klim and worse, such a notion is nearly beyond his ken.
“Might be nice, a spot of cream,” June says quietly. “Sometimes you just want that bit of extra.”
Alec settles his mug in front of him and reaches for the cream with the rough pincer of his left hand, then goes back for the sugar.
When he’s finished, the coffee is nearly dun, and he’s almost embarrassed. When he sips it, it’s too milky, and too sweet, but the wash of it into his throat and his belly is incredible. Yet that beautiful rich coffee is all but lost in it. It never crossed his mind that something as simple as a coffee on a cold morning could be so confounding.
He looks up sheepishly. “I’ve made it too sweet.”
“Think of it as a treat, then,” she says. “There’s more in the pot if you’d like a fresh cup. You can have it however you like.”
“Second chances,” he says before he considers his words.
“Indeed,” June says, regarding him warmly. “I wondered if you might like to take a walk with me.” She looks down into her nearly empty mug. “I know you saw a bit of Fenbourne yesterday, but . . .” Her brow knits. “I thought it might anchor you, a bit? The familiar?”
The image of the shattered vicarage surfaces. He takes a long swallow of coffee to buy himself a moment before he has to answer. His stomach tightens. “Perhaps?”
She nods. “All right. It might be good for you.” She shrugs, her smile quivering just a bit. “And I would like it very much myself.”
When she stands, lifting her mug for one last sip before she takes it to the sink, the ring on her left hand flashes in the morning light, and Alec’s heart speeds up accordingly. In the bustle of the day before he hadn’t noticed the ring, but now it seems part of the larger domestic tableau they’re inhabiting. He wants to take it as a sign.
“June?”
She turns back to him, a look on her face he doesn’t know how to interpret. Wary, perhaps? His chest hurts, thinking this is how he has made her feel.
“You’re right.” He rubs his hands together, trying to center himself and corral everything he’s feeling. “That does sound like a good idea. Let’s.”
“Grand. Thank you.” Her eyes shine. “I was going to make myself a bit of toast and some eggs—would you like some?”
He is always hungry, even when his stomach hurts. And his stomach almost always hurts. Too, it’s hard to navigate the new landscape of being in this cottage with her and trying to figure out what they are now. Who he is now. He blinks, tries to stop himself from overthinking all of this.
“Thank you,” he says. His stomach growls, although he can’t tell whether it’s with hunger or nerves. “I would love some.”
When they head out, the sun is as high over the hedgerows as it’s likely to get. Alec had forgotten how short the days were here in January. But God, the air feels good. It’s too cold, sinking into his lungs like a stone, but the relief of another day away from the tired, metallic air of his cabin on the troopship is immeasurable. When he falls into step with June, she smiles; she seems as relieved as he is that this works. He feels like he should be talking, but what can he say? He’s surprised when she loops around the long way, instead of following the sluice road straight into Fenbourne. At least they’re together, doing something that feels relatively normal, as if she understands that he is going to need some time to get his feet back under him again. The clarity of the air is such a gift, but after a certain point, when the chill has gone bone-deep, the bitter wet of the Fens and the terrible searing cold of the German camps are not so different. He jams his hands deeper into his pockets, but the cold is inescapable.
In the village, it seems as though all roads lead to the vicarage. Alec stares up at the emptiness, trying to take in the enormity of the destruction. They stand together for a moment. He has an ocean of things he wants to say to her, but with the ruins looming over him it’s so hard to begin. Finally he says, “You must miss them awfully.”
“I do,” June says. She slips her hand around his elbow.
He holds perfectly still, his heart banging away at the feeling of her touch. His mind races, trying to find the right thing to say. “It won’t always be quite this raw.”
June gazes at him, and he stares back, captivated by the impossible color of her eyes, the dark wing of brow on fair skin, although she is perhaps not as fair as she once was. But time has passed for them both, and God knows he doesn’t look the same anymore, either.
“Thank you,” she says at last. “That helps more than you know.”
They resume their walk. As they pass the solicitor’s office, June reminds him that eventually he’ll have to stop in and handle the various legal issues of probate and inheritance, and he’s grateful when she doesn’t suggest he do it now. Instead she leads him through the lanes, and gradually he finds himself not as disoriented and lost. For the most part, the village seems much the same. He’s been away for what feels like half his life, but perhaps Fenbourne is the kind of place where time runs more slowly, and things change much less.
When they reach the bridge over the River Lark, June stops, her arm tightening on his.
“Oh,” he says, his chest full of feeling again. “Oh, June.”
“I thought you might want to see it,” she says, her voice low but strained, as if she’s trying to make it sound light. “One of the best parts of Fenbourne, as far as I’m concerned.”
How to tell her how often he thought of this bridge, and those stars, while he was in the camps? How much time he used up in meticulous reveries of drifting on the river with the girl he loved more than anything? He pulls her closer, feeling her hand against his ribs through his coat and layers. Can she feel his heart, how it beats for her?
When they reach the cottage, Alec stops in the lane outside the stone wall and faces June. “Thank you.”
She blinks. “For what, Alec?”
He gestures at the landscape, the cottage, everything. “For making it so I didn’t have to do this alone. And for bearing with me.”
She looks up at him with a crooked, sad smile. “I know things are . . . confusing, but I want to help you.”
“June . . .” He pauses. “I missed you terribly. All the years I was flying, I just wanted to see you again. And in the camps . . . Thinking of you was how I bore the worst of it.”
Her eyes well up with tears, and she steps closer. “Oh, Alec . . . You sweet boy. I am just so very glad you’re home. That we’re home.”
Alec nods wordlessly. The tide of his anxiety has not turned, but: Home, he thinks. Perhaps there is hope after all.
That night when he goes upstairs, the clock still too early despite the low black quilt of night overhead, he tries to sound less abrupt when he says good night. Every time he thinks he might be able to take another step closer, presume upon her for the things they used to share, he remembers his hands. Tonight she stood when he did, and before he came upstairs she stepped closer, paused, and hugged him. He had frozen, a dreadful moment of panic, and then somehow he had managed to put his arms around her, and they had stood like that for a second or two before he felt so confused and awkward that he’d stepped away. And he’d wanted to kick himself, but there was too much he didn’t know—where to put his hands when the hug ended, for one thing, and what to do with the dizzying blur of her hair against his face, when to let go or not. The uncertainty derails him—he knows she still loves him, or at least that she still feels some kind of connection to him. But how could he touch her with hands like this? Would she even want him to? Surely she can’t want them on her. So, another night alone, but this one less of a disaster than the last. She had said home, earlier; they share that want. Then he will keep working to make it so.
June continues her work with Melody Keswick and the displaced persons, telling Alec while they eat or sit before the fire in the evening about the day’s meetings or the news that trickles into Fenbourne about the rest of the world. With each day that passes, Alec feels more at home in the cottage and in Fenbourne. When he walks through the village by himself, he tries not to avoid people, tries to focus on the moments of beauty that call at him, whether a hare watching him from the side of the road or a sow thistle prickling against his palm. He wishes it were easier to shove his hands into gloves, so that he could stop relying on pockets for both warmth and disguise. And each night he tries to push himself to act on his feelings, and each night he fails. The gap between what he wants and what he can do feels wholly insurmountable, even while he can sense June’s growing uncertainty. The hugs become a bit less awkward, but there is always that moment when his hands fall to her waist like they did so long ago and he panics. He always pulls away, feeling the pang of knowing that before, he would have left his hands in place and pulled her close to kiss her. And now he looks down into her face and wonders if that is what she wants, and how he is meant to know. It used to be that kissing her was one of the best things he knew, and now it is just another way he can’t remember how to be.
While June comes and goes, Alec struggles to reorient himself. He shuffles through newspapers and magazines, coming to terms with the new state of the world, teaching himself how to turn the pages again. He practices pages with Smasher’s Bible too, scrawling out verses he recognizes on a sheet of rough paper with a stub of pencil. His efforts to write have been disastrous so far, but he keeps at it. And for now June has offered to help him with letters to the families of the friends he lost, as well as requests for information he will send to the RAF in the hopes of finding out what happened to Sanjay and the others.
Every time he walks through Fenbourne he pauses at the office of his solicitor, Mr. Swift, then goes on. It seems too final, somehow, no matter how clearly Alec understands the task will need to be done. It seems easier to spend his time instead looking through the pages of adverts and seeing if anyone is hiring for whatever it is he can do. Although that is a question itself, isn’t it? There are days when the queries for men who can lift or write or operate a machine overwhelm him, and those days he is most likely to strike out as far as he can into the fens until he is alone with the sky and his hands don’t matter as much.
With the RAF he had had a future, not to mention a plan for himself, and for June. Money is not the main concern—he has his parents’ estate and the small sum that had come to him at Constance’s death, but he has always thought of those as something to set aside for the future. In the present he needs to work, to be productive. Despite his ruined hands, there must be something, mustn’t there? A way to find his way back to the sense of purpose he’d had as a pilot?
Midway through the first week, Mrs. Hubbox comes, along with a boy called George, who appears to belong to her despite his East End accent. It’s hard to think of the housekeeper as Mrs. Hubbox, when he knew her for so long as Mary, the Attwells’ maid. How has she become this middle-aged woman with a cheerful Cockney son? Later, June tells him that George had been one of their evacuees, and that Mrs. Hubbox had claimed him after his mother’s death in a Whitechapel bombing. He tucks away that information, trying to rid himself of the sense that Fenbourne has become a bewildering orphanage.
A few days later, June returns from one of her meetings with a basket. Alec stands to greet her, distracted by the basket but also by the excited glow in June’s face. The basket shifts in his arms as she hands it to him, and a low whimper escapes it. He sits and opens the lid, and a small brown puppy pops up, all eyes and ears and tail.
“June?” He glances at her, but most of his attention is held by the puppy. He lays a palm across the top of her head, and her tail flutters. When he lifts her out of the basket, she wiggles against him, licking at his face and fingers.
“I thought you might enjoy the company,” June says quietly, her eyes still gleaming. “You know Melody’s retrievers, yes? One got loose, and apparently there was a tryst with a spaniel from one of those farms on the Ely road.”
“I see,” Alec says, but he’s only half listening. The puppy is soft and so warm, her belly against his forearm like a compress. He looks up at June. “She’s lovely.”
June beams at him. “At any rate, she needed a home.”
The puppy nips at his fingers, and Alec cradles her against his chest. For a moment he can almost believe his hands are fine. Here is something he can hold without wishing for his hands to be as they once were. He sets the puppy on the floor, and she winds herself around his legs, tail wagging ecstatically before she sets to chewing at his bootlaces. “She’s a beauty. And look at those paws!”
“Yes,” June says, stepping closer and eyeing the puppy. “I expect she’ll be a good-sized dog, Alec.”
“I imagine so,” he says. He reaches out with his left hand and brushes it across the back of June’s hand, his stomach knotting when he doesn’t know what to do next. The puppy barks, and Alec stands. When he goes to the door, the puppy follows, and he grins at her.
“There’s a bit of rope in the kitchen, if that would be useful,” June says.
“I’ll get her a proper lead tomorrow,” Alec says. He bends and strokes the puppy’s back. “Come on, little girl.” The puppy barks again, and he scoops her up and carries her outside.
It’s a clear night, early enough that the moon is just rising off to the east. Alec makes sure the gate is closed and sets the puppy carefully down on the tired, frost-gray grass. She looks at him, barks again, and sets off to explore, looping back to him every few minutes. Alec watches her, hardly aware of the cold, his heart beating so hard for June and this little tobacco-colored animal that he can hardly stand it.
Overhead, the stars pepper the sky, and when he looks up to find his bearings the way he always has, his breath catches. For the first time in years, he remembers his mother telling him how to follow the stars from Ursa Major to the North Star at the tip of the smaller bear’s tail. He looks back toward the house, where June is leaning in the open doorway, watching him. He smiles.
The puppy completes another loop, pouncing at Alec’s feet and grabbing his laces again. He crouches to fuss her ears, then glances back up into the night. How many times had he sat in the velvet dark with his mother and listened to her tell him stories about the stars? All those swans and dragons, princesses lost and found. The star bears shimmer overhead, the most constant thing he has ever known, the stories and the stars his guide and solace.
“Ursa,” he says. He looks back at June. “What would you think if I called her Ursa?”
June’s face lights up, and she glances at the sky. She smiles at him. “Ursa is perfect.”