Page 64 of Last Letter Home
‘Luke told you then. It was nothing important. This big shot in a sports car drove up, just to turn round, I think, but he saw me sitting there and he wanted to know what I was doing. His English was pretty poor, but I could tell he wasn’t happy.’
‘Did you tell him we were inside?’
She shook her head. ‘No. I said I was a tourist and I was resting because I’d hurt my foot.’ She chuckled. ‘He offered me a lift, like I was going to accept. He started turning the car, then he stopped and pointed towards the house and said it was a bad place. “Bad place,” he kept saying.’
‘You didn’t tell me any of that.’
‘Didn’t I? I suppose I was cross that you were so long, and then there was all that drama with the stupid tin you found. Oh, Briony, don’t frown. Well, what was I supposed to think, you and Luke going off on your own together.’
‘Aruna! It wasn’t anything like that. We both wanted to see the house, that’s all. I’d never had gone if I’d thought you’d be worried.’
‘It wasn’t just then, was it? What about at Westbury Hall? Luke seems to have become obsessed with the place and that wretched garden.’ Briony didn’t know whether Aruna meant Luke was interested solely in the place or whether she was hinting something else. She couldn’t confront her to ask. She was frightened of ruining their friendship. She chose deliberately to assume it was the place that Aruna meant.
‘There’s a link between the Villa Teresa and Westbury, that’s probably what interests him. The fact of the two gardens, maybe. And Paul and Sarah.’
‘Those bloody letters. I wish you’d never been given them. They’ve stirred everything up.’
‘It’s to do with my family, Aruna. Nothing you have to worry about.’
‘All I know,’ Aruna said slowly, ‘is that things with Luke have not been the same since our holiday.’ The implication, from the accusing look on her pointed face, was that Briony was somehow to blame.
On the way to the tube station Briony’s feelings of desolation grew. It was so unfair. She and Aruna had hugged as they parted, but Briony sensed a lack of warmth. Aruna was angry, angry at the situation as much as with her. She wished she could feel angry in return, for the false allegations Aruna hinted at, for the dismissal of what was important to Briony, but instead she felt desperately sad and hurt. Did Aruna think so little of their friendship that she’d lost all trust in Briony without finding out whether Briony really had betrayed her? She touched her card to the ticket barrier and paced the platform before stepping onto a train south, where she slumped down onto a seat amid chattering, laughing people on their way home from evenings out.
I feel old, she thought, in the face of their energetic youthfulness.
Aruna had been her friend for fifteen years, the closest she’d had. They were quite unlike, but each in turn made up for the other’s differences. Aruna was fun, darting and colourful as a little dragonfly, flitting about with new ideas, finding new ways for them to enjoy life. Briony had been the steady one, comforting Aruna when things went wrong, when she’d been dumped. Aruna had been betrayed by men more than once, deeply hurt. Briony wished, desperately, that she could sort things out between Luke and Aruna, but she didn’t know how, only that she must keep away from Luke, possibly from both of them. She’d email Luke the transcripts of the letters, but not encourage further communication.
Her heart felt heavy as she unlocked the front door of her flat and pushed it shut behind her. Her nose wrinkled at a mouldy smell from a basket of washing that she’d pulled out of the machine and forgotten to hang up. A pile of junk mail lay slewed across the hallway. It was one of those nights when home felt very lonely.
She made a mug of green tea and stood sipping it and staring out of the living room window at the row of old houses opposite, where other lives went on. They’d had a street party once, for a royal jubilee. For several days afterwards people had smiled at one another as they passed, said hello, but then life reverted to how it had been before. Or so it was for Briony, who was out so much of the time. Her downstairs neighbours, a middle-aged childless couple, had come up for drinks the previous Christmas, but they lived busy working lives, too, and she rarely saw them.
She finished the tea and, fancying something sweet, remembered a bar of chocolate she’d brought home, but when she padded across to the kitchen and reached into her bag for it, her hand closed instead round the parcel. With a pair of kitchen scissors she began to slice through the parcel tape, cursing its thickness. Inside she found not a fat hardback book, but an old box of similar size and shape. It was a large cigar box made of some light, pale-coloured wood. There was a small cheap envelope taped to it addressed to her and she pulled it off, opened it and leaned on the work surface to read the letter inside.
She reached the end with growing astonishment, and quickly scanned it again.
Dear Dr Wood, it ran, in rounded, feminine handwriting.
You wrote to someone who wrote to my dad, Mr Derek Jenkins, but he is 87 now and his hands are very shaky, so he asked me to write to you for him and send you this box. I didn’t know he had them, but he says he got them a long time ago and meant to give them back, but he never saw her again. He says if you can find out what happened to Sarah Bailey maybe her family would want them, but they’re no good to him and it would be a weight off of his mind if you had them.
Yours truly,
Lindsay Sweet (Mrs)
The woman who had interviewed Derek Jenkins, the Baileys’ evacuee, had received Briony’s letter after all and passed it on to him! Briony opened the box and drew a sharp breath, suspecting at once what it was she had.
The box was packed tightly with piles of neatly tied letters, many still in their envelopes. She slid one from the top of its pile and read on the front: Miss S. Bailey, Flint Cottage. She pulled the letter out and read the signature at the end. Paul. They were Paul’s letters to Sarah and there were dozens of them! But how did the evacuee come by them?
She hastened with the box over to the sofa and sat down with it on her lap. Drawing out a pile eagerly, she unpicked the strand of wool that bound them, took the one on top and unfolded it from its envelope. The handwriting was in a thick pencil, difficult to read, so she reached for the switch on the table lamp next to her and shifted into the circle of light.
My Dearest Sarah, it began. Briony’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Dearest’? The relationship had changed. With growing excitement she began to read the words that followed.
Thirty-one
1941–1942
The North Devon seaside town was embraced by high cliffs, and the window of Paul’s hotel room looked out onto the small harbour so that the bright clinks of wind in the rigging attended his falling asleep and his awakening. If he woke in the night he liked to lie and listen, for he found it soothing. When winter storms raged, spray spattered the windows. Paul had never lived by the sea before. He was exhilarated by it, by the waves pounding the hard sand as he ran assault courses on the beach, by swimming in the freezing tidal pools. All this was part of the training. At other times he loved to watch grimy boats unload coal or the morning’s catch to the sad cries of the gulls which glided overhead or swooped to squabble over shiny corpses of discarded fish.
The work they were given was gruelling, even by the standards of heavy gardening. Worse, it was boring and frustrating, more so than he’d predicted. It took a while to learn the knack of using the pick and shovel efficiently to dig trenches. Then there was mixing and laying concrete before erecting Nissan huts on the cliffs. The boots they issued him were too big – the joke circulating that they were left over from the Great War turned out to be true – but Paul learned to stuff the toes with newsprint and his callouses eventually hardened over.
