The street outside was practically black. In the distance, the distinctive shape of the Curfew Tower was a single block of whitened stone near a streetlamp. A few shops and hotels showed light behind their curtains, and that was all the glimpse I had of this old familiar town.
I had gone away from this life because of the war. And stayed away afterwards because I hadn’t been quite ready to think of what else to do.
Now the adjustment in my mind came gently like the settling of a cloud of dust. I had been wondering for a while if I had to remember I was a woman. At last I could see that the change was more magnificent and yet more solitary than that. It was a new sense of being fixed in this body, and walking with these two feet through this darkened night towards my own future here.
Which was why it was such a powerful endnote to the thought when I was stopped about twenty yards beyond my aunt’s front door by a call of my name.
He called the name that was solely me, I mean – the one that spanned all the years of my life.
‘Lucy.’
Robert had barely taken the time to snatch his coat from its hook. He was sliding his arms into its sleeves. I had turned in the middle of the wintered line of trees that marched down towards the market hall. He was nothing more than a faint shape of a man in this freezing night, moving closer amongst the black sky, the road and the town. I could barely see the shadow of his eyes.
I faltered there in the midst of experiencing a peculiar urge to forget all those wise thoughts about walking my own path through life, and repeated instead that old test of whether this was real or fantasy. He drew nearer. I said foolishly through a fog of my racing heartbeat, ‘Do you know, I don’t think my uncle has any idea at all of retiring.’
‘No,’ Robert’s shadow agreed. His hands were straightening the collar behind his neck. ‘I suspect Mr Kathay just wanted some assurances that he isn’t facing this alone. And got them, I think, along with a few surprises.’
‘Such as hearing my ambitious plans for stepping into his shoes, you mean? He must believe he raised a shark.’
Robert had come to a halt before me. He was taller than I was, and close enough that I could just make out the features of his face, but I couldn’t quite recognise the expression I found there. There was a steadiness to it that was nothing like that former barrier of reserve, because I think the seriousness was in me rather than him. He was merely finishing tiding his collar.
His hands dropped. The movement was a marker of the end of one conversation and the beginning of the next.
All of a sudden I wasn’t quite ready to hear the opening line, or give it myself.
I said impulsively before he could speak, ‘I saw Doctor Bates today, by the way. He was convinced that he had to break the news to me that we’re losing Amy Briar. They’re getting married.’
I sensed the change in him.
Robert’s body stiffened. So did his voice to match when he asked, ‘Why would you tell me that now? And in that way – as if we’re only speaking about trivial matters?’
‘I don’t know.’ It was another hasty lie. Because I knew perfectly well why I had told him.
It was because every other thought in my head was rattling around that feeling of being very alive in this body. I could feel the tightness of the belt about my waist and the depth of the pockets that held my hands. I could definitely feel the ground beneath the soles of my shoes. He was making me nervous and I was betraying every unhappy doubt in my head.
I admitted sheepishly, ‘Doctor Bates came to see me today and quizzed me about your plans. I didn’t want it to be a secret that I’d met him, so I told you. Are you planning to leave us?’
There was something very raw for me in the way he took a moment to answer the question. The slight movement of his head gave a negative. He said, ‘You’ve asked that before and the answer’s still no. Not that I’m aware of.’
The pavement behind him was being touched by the marbled gleam from a nearby inn. Its shutters were slightly parted so that it was possible to see the empty bar inside.
And now my mouth was moving on rapidly – to say what, I have no idea. Some mindless nothing, I imagine, directed at that thin chink of light because I could feel the tug of the cheery part I usually played at the office.
But he was already saying, ‘Lucy, please. Be clear. Don’t make this an endless dance around the edge of misunderstanding. Just tell me – after everything you said tonight about working with me, are you trying to explain that you don’t want more from me after all? You don’t even want me as a friend? Just as a colleague?’
‘What? No! Of course not.’
My bewilderment shattered the night.
I blundered into life; into touching a hand to him. I suppose it conveyed my disbelief. It showed him that I had thought the reverse – that he didn’t want me.
My body felt almost feverish. I was moving like I was still expecting him to recoil, even when the moment of contact from my reaching fingertips acted upon him like a firebrand.
Because my hand was met. Gripped. He drew me sharply closer. The hard crush of the way he took hold of me rivalled the way the night air closed around us in the lull between fierce gusts.
At first, the lift of my mouth to meet his was clumsy. There was so much of my need in it. And I didn’t know why any of us had been so afraid we were hurting him. He didn’t believe either I or my aunt or uncle had ever caused harm by leaning on him. Now I felt the tide-rush in my mind as I glimpsed the truth.
It was some time later that Robert drew back enough to permit a dizzying descent into release; into the madness of racing to catch my breath. He turned his head aside a little. I plunged headlong into breathing in the scent of him only to find that every nerve was aching. I hadn’t prepared for this.
‘Don’t be afraid.’ I felt his whisper against my forehead. There was the faintest hint of a laugh. His arms still crushed me.
He added softly, ‘I think I understand at last why you keep accusing me of being about to go away.’
It took me a moment to find my voice. ‘Do you?’
‘I think so. But believe me when I say there is, at the very least, no present state of war that could carry me from this place.’
I didn’t know at what point in the past minutes he had discovered his confidence, because I was more shaken than ever.
Now my pulse began to run in a lighter race. I kept my eyes closed to feel the gentle drift of his jaw against my temple while I tried to find an explanation for my nervousness that didn’t depend so much upon my history. When I spoke, my voice was less giddy, more ready to sound like my own. ‘After our latest bus ride, when you left me, you said—’
The silent touch of his smile interrupted me. It was a fresh introduction to my habit of confusing his words with everyone else’s version of him, and was in itself a final answer to the manner of his farewell those few days ago. The gentleness of his departure hadn’t been inaction in the face of the hint I had given, but the opposite of it.
In the wake of that appalling day, his simple use of my name had been a very decisive action indeed. Because I’d made him free to use it. And after a day of extreme emotions when it might have hurt us both to react too swiftly to the better feelings I’d shared – for him the use of my name had been a promise of the value he placed on getting to know me.
A car slunk past in a blaze of light and a choir was practicing its carols in the very distant memorial hall beyond the Curfew Tower – which was as stark and still as it ever was because no bell tolled an end of things in this town tonight.
He didn’t let me go. Beneath the intermittent drift of that distant song, I confessed, ‘All the same, I still don’t understand why you made me wait so long before letting me meet you at home. I felt so cut off.’
‘I promise I didn’t mean it like that,’ he said gently, ‘and the choice wasn’t all mine. But I suppose your past was sufficiently matched by my own to make me sure you needed the room to settle in on your own terms. I thought you needed to do it without the pressure of finding a strange man crowding every footstep. Didn’t you?’
He didn’t require an answer. This wasn’t another remark on that slight discrepancy between how resilient I thought I was, and everyone else’s idea of me.
Because he was already sharing this piece of his own history when he admitted, ‘In truth, I believe I’ve spent a lot of time worrying about you, one way or another. When you met me that time on the landing outside your aunt’s bathroom with your hands full of childhood treasures, it came after the latest of many hellish visits to failing publishers. All of a sudden there you were. There was no camouflage at that moment – for either of us.’
I felt his grip tighten on the memory as he added, ‘So then I had to worry about what it should mean, and consider the way your aunt and uncle and I were all teetering on the brink of lying to you horribly. And with that in mind, I should tell you that I wasn’t under orders when I met you at Bourton. It was my choice, and I was painfully nervous about what your reaction would be.’
‘I’m sorry.’
I sensed the warmth that grew in the dark. ‘Lucy, I’m trying to say that I like worrying about you. You make it so harmless. And I don’t have to feel ashamed.’
No one had ever said anything like that to me before. And I didn’t think I had ever heard anything quite so brave. Framed somewhere within that last part was another tentative attempt to explain that there had never really been any doubt that he would stay, or that he would do what he could at Nuneham’s.
Sometime later we were stepping out into the deserted road. I asked very gently indeed, ‘What did happen to your friend who was shot? Did he die?’
Robert took the question as it was meant: a quiet continuation of what had been shared just before.
We were passing the Curfew Tower and I didn’t know why I had been convinced that a choir was working its way through its Christmas repertoire. The meeting room was black and silent when Robert told me with some relief, ‘Fergus didn’t die.’
He added, ‘The better German prisoner-of-war camps tended to avoid having a British soldier’s death on their hands, if they could help it; just as we did here with our prisoners. Both sides had a system of medical exchange, where we’d attempt to return the patients who were in most danger. I managed to galvanise the warden into getting him evacuated. Fergus lost a lung but he’s living in Bognor Regis these days. He’s well enough.’
We were at the shop door. Without fully knowing what I was doing, I hesitated in the recess of the doorframe so that he turned to face me. Then I reached up and kissed him.
And then in the next moment, I was shyly ducking my head for the sake of rummaging in my handbag for my key.
My shoulder was lightly resting against him as I searched. He didn’t move away. It was a powerful feeling, understanding how the simple, everyday ordinariness of this contact mattered too.
Suddenly, every confused emotion in me was vivid and warm, and my probing fingers couldn’t find that key beneath the usual clutter of purse and diary and other nonsense. Tonight, I could immediately lay a hand upon my handkerchief, which was no use at all.
Still searching, I asked without thinking, ‘Unless you’ve got your set to hand?’
Then my skin burned when I realised how much that sounded like an invitation. Robert’s reply above my bent head left some ambiguity about which question he was answering. ‘Not tonight.’
I lifted my head. I asked on a strangely uncertain note, ‘You’re going?’
It wasn’t that I was trying to rush this. Or returning to that old fear of loss. Suddenly and without being able to fully define why, I didn’t want to end this by stepping back in there myself.
He understood, at least in part. His hand lifted to leave the smallest trace of fire upon my cheek.
He told me, ‘Goodbye is only until tomorrow, isn’t it?’