Page 35 of Last Letter Home
‘It’s astonishing, isn’t it, to think that she knew Paul, even slightly. I should have asked her more about him.’
‘So you’ll go back to see her?’ Aruna asked, sounding disbelieving.
‘Of course.’ She bit her lip. ‘And I didn’t ask if she knew my grandfather.’
‘You should definitely go back,’ Luke said.
Aruna said little for the rest of the visit and Briony wondered what was wrong. Perhaps she was simply tired. Never mind, she’d loved having them both today. The three of them got on so well, with Luke always the mollifier, so easy to have around to offset Aruna’s spikiness. Yes, the couple were a good balance for one another. She was happy for Aruna to have found someone special.
Later, when they left, she walked up to the van to wave them off.
‘We’re in Norfolk for a couple more days,’ Luke told her, after giving her a hug. ‘Mum said to ask you over to a meal. Would tomorrow evening suit?’
‘That’s so nice of her. I’d love to, thanks.’
‘Great! I’m texting you the address now. It’s fairly easy to find. There!’
As Briony watched the van disappear through the great arched gate, a nameless melancholy washed over her. Usually she felt perfectly reconciled to her own company, but as she walked back to the cottage alone, wrapping her fleece tightly against the cool of the evening, she knew it to be loneliness. Perhaps it came from thinking about her mum.
Once upon a time her family had been a close little unit, loving, supportive. Both sets of grandparents lived nearby and she remembered seeing a lot of them when she was small, though Grandad Wood, her father’s father, had died when Briony was five or six.
Grandpa Andrews, her mother’s father, she remembered because he’d been so busy and active in his retirement, either up and repairing something in the house or garden, or out and about with the Rotary Club or the Ramblers. He was a sociable soul, but when he came home he liked Granny to be there, calm, reassuring, the heart of the house, sewing, or entertaining friends to tea. If she was out he’d be like an abandoned dog, ears pricked, listening for her to come home.
The Woods were a family who were always arguing about small things, but rarely discussed the large ones. Neither Briony nor her brother rebelled, so far as she could remember. Each of them had their own passions. Birchmere wasn’t far from Gatwick airport and her brother, two years her junior, had always been fascinated by the planes whose noise infuriated everyone else. He would always rush out to spot Concorde on its evening flight and badgered their father constantly to take him to air shows. He and Briony had little in common with one another apart from family ties, and just as it was natural for him to have become an engineer with British Airways, so it was for her to follow her obsession with the past. She loved to lose herself in a world when flight had been no more than a fantasy for humans. And with their father constantly working long shifts at the paper it was their mother who had held them all together, encouraging their separate interests. During the months of her illness they all felt helpless, unable to communicate with one another. When she died, a silence fell between them all. Was this why she was alone now, Briony had asked Grace, her counsellor; because aloneness felt natural to her? Or was the seed of it from somewhere even further back? Grace hadn’t been able to tell her.
Eighteen
June 1939
Sarah hacked ferociously at the stump of ivy, then dug the fork under it again, trying to loosen the roots, but it would not shift.
‘Damn you,’ she told it, wiping her brow with the back of her hand.
‘Having problems?’ a voice called. She looked up, shading her eyes against the sun to see a man in uniform striding across the lawn. It was Ivor.
‘Good morning, nice to see you back.’ She had heard he was home on leave. ‘It’s a battle to the death here, but one I’m determined to win!’ She gave the stump a kick.
‘Let me try.’ He took the fork out of her hand and she watched him sink it into the soil, far deeper than she’d been able, and brace himself against the roots. The ivy gave creaks of protest but did not budge.
‘Wait a minute.’ Expression grim, he flung his jacket over a chair, rolled up his sleeves and returned to the job. He dug out the network of smaller roots, and this time, when he plunged the fork in under the stump, it broke away suddenly with a series of snaps and groans. ‘That’s settled him.’ He mopped his brow, his eyes bright with triumph.
‘Thanks,’ she said, seizing the stump and dragging it free. ‘Alas, poor Yorick.’ She held it aloft in imitation of a skull, before tossing it into the wheelbarrow. When Ivor laughed, she thought, Mummy’s wrong about me, I’m not in the least stand-offish.
After a cool spring, the first week of June had been sunny and warm, not comfortable for this kind of exertion, but following a difficult conversation with her mother that morning, Sarah had needed to take out her frustration on something and the recalcitrant ivy, a gnarled great-grandfather of creepers, whose leaves encompassed the whole rear wall of the house, had seemed a suitable adversary.
She’d first broken the news to Mrs Bailey about applying for gardening college back in April, and the reaction had been exactly as she’d feared; that she was needed here in Norfolk with her mother and sister and it was extremely selfish for her to think about doing anything else.
Diane’s reaction depressed her even more. Her sister looked so pitiful that it twisted Sarah’s heart. Still, though, Sarah wouldn’t change her mind. She wrote back to the college, expressing interest in a place, and a fortnight later was invited to Kent for interview.
She had liked the principal very much. Miss Agatha Trot was a trim, handsome woman in her prime, who had travelled widely in her younger days, hunting for new plants in South and Central America, which had given her a ready host of stories to tell. When a letter offering a definite place arrived a day or two later, Sarah’s first instinct was to accept immediately and enclose a cheque for the deposit. But doubts quickly began to set in. If there were to be a war. Those were the words that entered any conversation now about the future. It was difficult for anyone to make plans. In the end she had sent a holding letter in reply.
This morning’s argument had followed the arrival of another letter from the college administrator enquiring whether Miss Bailey intended to take up her place, and if so, would she please supply the deposit as requested.
‘You’ll be wasting your money,’ Mrs Bailey snapped, ‘but I suppose you must do what you choose. You usually do.’ This was particularly unfair; Sarah felt stung.
There had followed a moment’s silence, during which Mrs Bailey read a note that had arrived from Margo Richards. ‘Apparently Ivor is returning today for a visit,’ she said, over her spectacles. ‘I expect he’ll call. You know, Sarah, he does seem very interested in you. I can’t think why, you’re always so stand-offish with him.’
‘I am not!’ She was particularly surprised as she found it easy to be friendly to him. She felt sorry for Ivor because of the weight of his father’s expectations on him and he was good company, always interested in what she was doing. In turn, she found his views on politics thoughtful and well-informed. However, her mother’s pointed comment confirmed something that she’d privately been beginning to wonder herself. He hadn’t been home very much at all recently, but when he had he’d made a point of coming to Flint Cottage almost immediately.
