39

Relations at Calmly View were not so cordial.

Joseph, rubbed raw by the news of his father’s death and his confessions to Mrs F, did everything he could to keep his barriers high.

She tried to bring him round, managing somehow to hoard and barter the ingredients for a cake.

‘I thought perhaps we could make it together,’ she said one night after dinner.

Joseph, hands in suds as he washed the dishes, felt trapped.

‘If you want to,’ she added. ‘I thought it would be nice. We could... talk, as we make it.’

But the strange thing was, her lips were saying one thing, but her body language something else altogether. She certainly wasn’t demanding him to do it, nor did she push him when he kept his lips tightly closed, despitethe rare prospect of cake. Instead, she retreated to the fire, which spluttered pitifully as always, and she sat poking it without conviction.

Joseph had seen more change in her that past week. It felt like she was keeping her guard high too, though Joseph hadn’t a clue what she was protecting.

There were moments when he found her looking at him intently, like words were balanced on her lips, but if they were, she soon swallowed them.

As a result, the house was often stripped to an odd and uncomfortable tension, and with the wireless reporting news of Hitler’s continued pressure, they found themselves choosing silence, Joseph within the confines of his room, ruminating on when he would be sent back home. He could think of nothing else. Felt the instruction was coming any time now.

It was here, after yet another tense dinner downstairs, that Joseph heard a soft knock at his door. He wiped at his eyes, confused by the gentleness of the rap. When he opened the door, peeking around it, there stood Mrs F, dressing gown pulled tight around her.

‘You’re awake, then,’ she said.

Joseph nodded.

‘I was hoping you’d come with me. There’s something I’d like to talk to you about.’

Joseph looked over his shoulder for something he could use as an excuse. But there was nothing, so he followed her down the stairs, already sure of what she was about to say.

‘You don’t have to explain it, you know? I can save you the bother,’ he said quickly. ‘I’ve already packed my case.’

He hadn’t, but she didn’t know that.

As Mrs F walked past the table and Joseph saw what was laid upon it, he realised that he wasn’t being kicked out quite yet.

Practically every inch was covered in a paper patchwork: letters, photographs and telegrams from the mysterious tin.

‘I’ve realised,’ she said, her voice thick with uncertainty, ‘that I’ve not been entirely honest with you lately. In light of what you’re going through, with your father, and your mother, too, it seems only fair I tell you some truths of my own. Truths that might help you.’

‘Is this about Adonis?’ he asked, though he had a strong feeling it was not. A lot of the documents appeared old and faded.

‘No, Joseph, this is about me. About my family.’

Family? He thought. There had been talk of a brother and a father, but as his eyes flicked across the table, they didn’t seem to obviously feature. He let his hand fall on the photograph nearest to him, and picked it up, seeing Mrs F flinch as he did so.

‘Is this you?’ he asked, squinting at the photo, seeing a resemblance.

‘No, no,’ she replied, teasing the photo from his hand as if it had been a mistake to let him see. ‘I’ve no photos of me at that age.’

‘Then who is it?’ he said, noticing that the same little girl appeared in the majority of the snaps laid out.

‘My daughter,’ she replied.

His instinct was to laugh, and he had to stifle his surprise as he spoke. ‘But you don’t have a daughter. Is she grown up now?’ He looked for more evidence of her on the table, but not in any of the snaps did she seem to grow older. ‘I mean, she can’t live round here, otherwise I would’ve met her, wouldn’t I? She a nurse or something?’

Mrs F didn’t answer immediately. Instead she reached for another photograph where there was no sign of the little girl, just a man and a woman, and there was no doubting who the woman was: the explosion of untamable hair gave it away.

‘I met Wilf when I was fifteen,’ she said. ‘At a dance.’ She seemed to leave the room for a moment as she spoke. ‘Not that we danced that night. We were both too shy. I could feel him looking at me, could hear his pals ribbing him, telling him to come over. But he was blushing more than me. In the end I said hello as we collected our coats.’

She finally looked up from the photograph, her face flushed. Joseph could see her discomfort.

‘Oh, this is silly,’ she said, a touch of ice back in her voice as she started to sweep the memories back into a pile. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

But Joseph thought otherwise. ‘Bloomin’ does,’ he replied. ‘You can’t not tell me now, can you? I mean, look at the way you’re staring at him in this one. You clearly loved him.’

‘I didn’t straightaway,’ she said, struggling to meet his eye. ‘Love him. And I should’ve done. Any time I spent not loving him was wasted time, given how little we ended up having. I turned him down at first, when he asked me out. So he took a different tack, left a flower on my doorstep every day for a week, same flower I had pinned to my dress at that first dance. No note or anything attached, but I knew it was him. Said yes in the end, just so my brother would stop pulling my leg about it. Then the daft beggar turned up with a bunch of them when he picked me up.’

Joseph wasn’t much of a romantic. What twelve-year-old was? But he knew what he was hearing meant a lot to her.

‘I think we both knew we’d get married,’ she went on, ‘you do know, when it happens to you. But we wouldn’t have done it so quickly had war not broken out. He proposed to me on the day he joined up. Maybe he thought it’d soften the blow, but to be honest, stupidly, I don’t think either of us worried about what would happen. Lads joined up for the adventure, everyone thought it’d be over in weeks.’

She picked up another photograph.

‘This was our wedding day, the twenty-sixth of October, nineteen-fourteen,’ she said, her face managing somehow to look both happy and heartbroken. ‘The age of us, though. Looks like that uniform belongs to his dad. Not him.’

He did look young, and Joseph wondered if Wilf felt like he did, the first time he held a rifle.

‘Did he go off to fight straightaway?’

‘Nearly. We had several weeks while he finished his training. He moved in with my family. It was strange, becoming a wife, when I still had my dolls sat at the bottom of the bed. Not as strange as it was when he suddenly wasn’t there any more.’

‘Did he write to you?’

She smiled again. ‘He did. Often. Though after a while they became more erratic. I’d get two in a week, but find they’d been written a month apart. Then it would be weeks and weeks. It was hard. I was waiting for him to respond to a very important letter I’d written.’

‘About what?’

‘Expecting a baby.’ She paused. ‘I waited three months before telling him. In case something went wrong. Plus I hoped that the war would be over quickly so I could tell him in person. I wanted to see his face. Wanted him to see mine.’

‘He must have been pleased then, when he got the letter?’

The question seemed to knock the air out of Mrs F. ‘I don’t know if he ever received it. No letter came back. Not for months. Then, when I was five weeks from giving birth, I got a telegram telling me his regiment had fallen under fire. That he’d been killed.’

Now it wasn’t just Mrs F who was winded. He was too. The closeness of it, the pain he’d felt at the same message.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he asked her. ‘When you told me about my dad?’

‘I couldn’t,’ she replied sadly, shame keeping her head held low. ‘I know I should’ve, when I’ve told you distinctly to talk about things. But the truth is, Joseph, I’ve buried this for so long that I didn’t think I could reach the words any more, not without it being too difficult and painful.’

‘I would’ve understood,’ he said. ‘I would.’

‘I know that.’ She sighed. ‘But it’s not just Wilf that I lost. You saw the photo, of our daughter... Violet. She was wonderful. I wanted her more than anything to be the mirror of her father, and though she didn’t have his eyes, every time I looked at her, all I saw was him. And although it hurt, it kept me alive, meant I had something to fight on for.’

‘So where is she?’

‘She was taken, too.’ Joseph felt the pain in each of those four words, saw it in every crease and line on Mrs F’s face. ‘Not immediately. I saw her walk. And talk. Saw her play with my dolls, but when she was four, she got influenza. Thousands did. It took a liking to Violet, and it didn’t matter what I did, it wouldn’t let her go. We fought it, but it won in the end. She died too.’

Joseph heard what she was saying, and knew what it meant, but had no idea what to say.

‘I’m sorry,’ was all he could find.

‘No, my lad, I’m the one who should be sorry. Because it’s affected me every second since you’ve been here. But that’s not your fault,’ she added quickly. ‘For years now, I’ve buried all trace of them. At first, I kept photographs out on the walls, but it was too much. I couldn’t stop being sad at the fact they weren’t here any more, so I put them in the tin, out of sight.’

‘Did it help?’

‘Well I didn’t feel as sad. Just angry instead. Raging, most of the time. But at least using the tin meant I was in control of when I saw them. They weren’t following me as I walked round the house every day. But then... well, then you turned up.’

‘I’m sorry about that too.’

‘Well, you mustn’t be. It’s hardly your fault. I know you don’t want to hear that, but it’s true. I owed your grandmother so much. When Violet passed, I lost my mind. Saw things, said things that scared my family so much they put me in hospital. Which is where I met your grandmother. She was a nurse, my nurse. With all the soldiers coming home not just injured, but ill, screaming and crying and living with nightmares from the war, they drafted in nurses from all over the country to help cope. I don’t remember a lot of what I said to her, but she never abandoned me. She listened and talked, and though she never had any answers, she never walked away. She got me well again, more than any doctor did, and I made her a promise that I’d always help her back if she needed it. And that promise, well, it turned out to be you.’

‘You really were lucky, weren’t you?’ Joseph said sarcastically.

‘Well, you’ve hardly been easy,’ she said. ‘But that isn’t all your doing. It’s mine, too. When you first arrived, I wasn’t ready to be a parent again, to care about another child. It had been a long time since I’d opened the tin and allowed myself to think about the family I’ve lost.’

‘Didn’t help me being here, then?’

‘No.’ She smiled sadly. ‘Not at first. It hurt like hell, but it also made me realise how tired I was. How tiring it is to carry all that anger around every day. You know that feeling, don’t you?’

Joseph said nothing, though he felt it all.

‘So I’ve decided I’m not going to hide them away from now on. That’s why I’m telling you. Because I don’t want to be tired or angry any longer, and I don’t want you to be either. Do you hear me?’

Joseph nodded and sighed. ‘I don’t feel angry. Not right now. Just sad.’

‘Me too,’ she replied. ‘And maybe that’s all right. Maybe it’ll pass, if we both allow ourselves to feel it.’

Nothing was said for a minute. And Joseph was fine with that. It let him feel things, things other than just sadness and loss.

He felt hungry.

‘How long does it take to actually bake a cake?’ he asked.

‘Depends how good you are at taking orders,’ she replied. ‘You’ll find the eggs in the larder. And don’t be dropping them, do you hear? Cost me a king’s ransom, they did.’

He walked to the larder without saying a word. He had no need for an argument. And besides, he knew he wouldn’t win it anyway.