Page 154 of Strangers in Time

“And I am quite fortunate indeed to have known Ignatius Oliver.”

After the burial, Molly and Charlie sat in the study, with a small fire warming them.

“When do we go to Yorkshire?” he asked.

Arrangements had been made for them to move to Yorkshire and live with the Tinsdales for the foreseeable future.

“Next week, by train. It’s all confirmed.”

“Are you sure they want me?” said Charlie.

“They are very sure. And if you don’t go, I won’t go.”

He looked at the fire. “It feels quite odd bein’ here without him.”

“It will always feel that way, I suppose. Hewasthis place, really. You can’t imagine one without the other.”

“He was truly a good bloke.”

“I wish I had told him something,” said Molly.

“What?”

“He always talked about how brilliant Imogen was, so much smarter than he, so much cleverer at everything, really. And while he and I talked some about that habit of his, I wish I had told him far more often that he was quite extraordinary, too.” She looked earnestly at Charlie. “What do you think?”

“He had to make it look like he was workin’ for the Jerries when he was really workin’ for us. That’s quite tricky. He was really brave, with all he done, the air warden bit and everythin’. I mean, I guess it was brave for Imogen to jump off that cliff. I never coulda done it. But… I think it was braver to stay here and keep tryin’ to do the right thin’. Like Mr. Oliver done.”

“I think you said it far more eloquently than I could, Charlie.”

“And he knew that you felt that way ’bout him, Molly. He really did. We loved each other. Only thin’ that kept us goin’ was that. We didn’t have nobody else.”

She sighed and looked at the Crown typewriter with the blank page.

“So’s we can come back here when we’re older?”

“Yes,” Molly said. “This is our home, Charlie.”

HOMEONCEMORE

MOLLY WAS SEATED INthe study of The Book Keep. It was a fine spring evening with a warming breeze and a mostly cloudless sky. During the war people in London would be looking anxiously to the skies for German bombers on such a lovely night. But now it was just a fine time to be alive.

She was writing a letter using her father’s old Conway Stewart pen. She loved the flow of the instrument and the elegance of the ink bleeding onto stiff paper.

She was now fifty-one years old, divorced, and the mother of a son and a daughter, one still at uni, and one who had graduated and was now working at a museum in Amsterdam. Her hair was cut shorter and fashioned in the style of the day. It held more than a touch of gray that she was debating covering up. That decision seemed trivial and absurd after what she had faced during the war. But that was also what made it wonderful to be able to contemplate. Her face was fuller and her frame about two stone heavier than during the war. She was in good health, and the recent jettisoning of her faithless husband had been the best decision she’d made in the previous decade.

She was a fully qualified clinical psychiatrist with a thrivingpractice, an excellent reputation, numerous scholarly papers, and two medical textbooks to her credit.

She knew that she had chosen this particular field because of what had happened to her mother. Dr. Foyle had desperately wanted something better with which to treat troubled patients. And now Molly and other health care professionals had a spectrum of medications to prescribe to those in their care. Sometimes they didn’t work; sometimes they did more harm than good. But they were all better and far more humane than poking sharp metal objects into fragile brains.

She understood her mother’s condition now. Her psychoses probably could have been managed with modern-day medications and professional counseling. Unfortunately, her mother’s condition had occurred too early for those types of remedies. But Molly’s current patients benefited from them and from her training and empathic bedside manner, which, as a nurse long ago had told her, was half the battle.

She finished the letter, slid it into an envelope, sealed it, and wrote an address on it.

It was a missive to the Tinsdales. They had been so very kind to her all this time, and she kept in close contact with the family, whom she had visited many times over the intervening years. Molly set the letter aside and looked at the finished manuscript that sat on her desk. She next focused on the names of the two authors of the book set forth on the title page.

Imogen Oliver and Molly Danvers.

This novel seemed as far from her medical writings as possible, but perhaps not. Itwasfull of psychology, the human condition, in the most traumatic of times. People did not typically need her help when suitably happy with their lives. They needed her skills when the opposite occurred, as it so very often did in life.

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