Page 53 of Strangers in Time

The letter was addressed to her father, Herbert James Wakefield.

The words were stark and antiseptic, constituting a blunt assessment of her mother’s condition. The author of the letter was Dr. Thaddeus P. Stephens. It was his decided medical opinion that Eloise Mary Wakefield was suffering from an acute anxiety neurosis. But Dr. Stephens felt that with certain treatments her prognosismight improve. Stephens did not say precisely what the treatments were, but he did bandy about certain abstruse medical terms.

Molly needed to see the other, more recent letters from Dr. Stephens to which Mrs. Pride had referred. And she also needed something to eat. She had never been without food this long. As she washed her face at the bathroom tap and smoothed out her hair, Molly looked in the glass above and, in her mind’s eye, she saw a much older woman there. She went downstairs, her hand holding tightly to the banister, as she still felt wobbly in her legs.

“Mrs. Pride?” she called out.

To her surprise, the woman didn’t answer.

Molly went up the back stairs to Mrs. Pride’s small apartment and knocked. There was no response. She eased the door open and looked inside. The bed was made and no one was there. She ventured to the toilet that was Mrs. Pride’s, but it was empty as well. Molly walked to the kitchen and looked through the pantry. It was quite bare. She opened the icebox and found a slice of bread, some margarine, and cheese. She put the cheese on the bread, placed it on a plate, set the kettle on, and boiled the water, then had her tea and cheese and margarine sandwich at the kitchen table.

After she finished, Molly wondered what to do. Should she search Mrs. Pride’s room for the letters? Or were they perhaps in her father’s study? She hadn’t been in there since she had returned, though it was a room that as a child she had adored. It held shelves of old books and the sweet smells of her father’s strong pipe tobacco and the nuanced aromas wafting from old inkwells. Comfy, cracked leather chairs and a small couch with worn upholstered cushions with images of horses and buggies from another era sat in one corner. The room also had a sturdy fireplace and a decanter of whiskey with glasses on a wooden sideboard with a granite top that, as a little girl, she had dared not touch.

It was her father’s sanctum. It reeked of him.

She had vivid memories of opening the door to that room and seeing her father at his desk writing a letter on crisp, monogrammed paper with his favorite pen, a Conway Stewart trimmedin herringbone with a gold nib. He had allowed her to practice her letters with that very pen. It had felt so wonderful, so important and weighty, in her small grip.

It was then that she heard the latchkey in the kitchen door and looked around in time to see a hatted Mrs. Pride briskly walk in with her market basket.

“Oh, Molly. I thought you’d still be asleep.” When she saw the dirty plate and empty cup on the table she exclaimed, “Oh, luv, please tell me you didn’t prepare a meal for yourself. I went out with the ration books to get the makings for your dinner.”

Though Molly’s stomach was still quite empty, she said, “Oh, that’s all right, Mrs. Pride. I’m quite full up. You can use what you purchased for your meal.”

Mrs. Pride looked at her nervously. “I hope you had a good lie-in. And I’m sorry if… if the things we discussed upset you.”

“They absolutelydidupset me. And while I wish you had sent word to me about all of this, I can understand why you might have been hesitant to do so.”

“Well, thank you for saying that, dear.”

“But Father should not have left you in the dark, and without a word to me. And what of Mother? Does she know that he’s gone?”

“I… I don’t know.”

Molly closed her eyes for a moment. She had revered her father all of her life. She had never questioned his judgment about anything. Now she was both hurt and disappointed by him.

Molly opened her eyes. “Now, the other letters from the sanatorium? Could you bring them to me? I’ll be in Father’s study.” It seemed to Molly that she had adopted the tone of the mistress of the house. And she supposed she was now.

But for how much longer?

THESANCTUM OFSANCTUMS

MOLLY HURRIED DOWN THEhall and entered her father’s study. She closed the door and gazed around the book-lined space. Crossing the room, she drew aside the curtain, and gave a searching look up and down the street. There were no passing motorcars and no people out walking. Over the tops of the opposite houses Molly could see the night coming as the sky burned gold and red before the sink of the sun snuffed it out.

Molly sat at the desk. The green leather high-back chair swiveled. As a little girl, she had sometimes spun around in it till she became dizzy. Once she had nearly become ill, but fortunately had made it to the toilet before desecrating her father’s sacred place with her sick. Ignoring the electric switch on the wall, she lit a candle, drawing a match from the same box her father had used to light his myriad pipes that perched in a wooden rack on the desktop.

On one side of the desk was the fat black telephone that no doubt Herbert Wakefield had made important calls on. As a child she had lifted the receiver and pretended to call the King and ask him over for tea. Her father had showed her how to make a trunk phone call to her now-dead grandmother in Shrewsbury on the occasion of her birthday.

She took up the Conway Stewart pen, which Molly was certain had lain in perfect parallel to the letter opener since the very day her father had walked out the front door. She held the pen over a sheet of crisp paper monogrammed with her father’s initials. The pen now felt small and rather insignificant in her grip, but then again, her hand was much bigger than the last time she had held it. Yet nothing came to her that was exceptional enough to mar the page, so she set the instrument aside.

What if he left here and was killed somehow?

She closed her eyes and lay her throbbing head on the desk until, about ten minutes later, she heard bustling out in the hall and the door opened. She lifted her head in time to see that it was Mrs. Pride with a meal tray.

“Shall I put it on the table over here, dear?”

“But I told you that—”

“A bit of cheese and bread is no proper meal for you,” her nanny said quite firmly. “Now here’s a nice plump sausage, some chips, mustard, bread and cheese, and a carrot. And a quite nice parsnip, which I literally had to fight a so-calledladyover. And a fresh cup of tea withrealmilk, and I got our sugar rations.”

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