Page 83 of Last Letter Home
‘Surely they’d say whether he died in service or was demobbed.’
‘Neither. I can’t say definitively, but I’m fairly sure I’ve searched in the right places.’
‘Right.’
‘So the last thing we know about Paul is this.’ Briony passed her father the note from Paul that she’d found in Harry’s memory box.
‘Dearest Sarah . . .’ Her father read it aloud. He turned the scrap of paper over, but the reverse was blank apart from the black smudge that had come through from the front. He shook his head and passed it to Lavender. ‘OK, so it seemed that Paul survived and expected to meet up with Sarah. Except it seems that she didn’t receive this note that was supposed to have been delivered by Harry.’
‘So perhaps she never knew he was coming back. Never saw him again.’
‘It would rather suggest it. I’m sorry, love, I know how much you have invested in this.’
‘Why wouldn’t Harry have delivered it?’ she wondered.
‘What are the options?’ Her father’s old journalistic skills were coming into play. ‘One, Harry didn’t meet up with her for some reason. Two, he forgot to give it to her. Three, he didn’t want to give it to her.’
‘Why would that be the case?’
‘Maybe your father thinks Harry was in love with her,’ Lavender spelled out.
‘Something like that.’
‘Yes.’ Briony knotted her brows as she considered this. Nothing in the letters had made her think that. ‘Perhaps Ivor leaned on him,’ it occurred to her suddenly. ‘Ordered Harry not to give it to her.’ She tried to imagine a situation in which this might have happened, but it didn’t seem possible. Harry had sounded more sympathetic about Sarah to Paul than to Ivor.
‘Oh, this wears my brain out,’ she sighed.
Her father had brought downstairs the oldest of her mother’s photo albums and she began to turn the thick black pages. It was sad, she thought, that there were no photographs of her grandparents’ wedding and she wondered why. There were plenty of their daughter, though, Briony’s mother. Jean, a tiny bundle, her face peeping out of the folds of a knitted shawl, her mother with her calm face and a halo of fair hair gazing down fondly at her. Crawling, her chubby face one big gap-toothed smile; a toddler with a ribbon tied in her unruly fair hair; with her father at three or four, paddling in the sea. Jean always looked so happy in these photographs, knowing she was precious and loved. That was the kind of person she grew up to be, too, Briony’s beloved mother. Briony blinked furiously as distant memories began to flood in. Being taken to view a litter of squirming spaniel puppies in a neighbour’s kitchen and her joy when her mother said they were to have one. The scent of hot damp linen as her mother ironed sheets in the steam-filled kitchen with The Archers on the radio.
‘Briony?’
Briony started and looked up at her stepmother.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Mmm. Just thinking.’ She closed the album, realizing that it might be difficult for Lavender if they dwelled so much on Briony’s mother. That must be why she appeared a little wan. Instead she selected one of the old wartime photographs from the box. Her grandfather was recognizable despite the way he screwed his face up against the light. Paul, she supposed, was next to him, a tall dark-haired man with dancing eyes, and that was Ivor, lighter in build and classically handsome with fair hair and regular features, his moulded lips unsmiling. She’d no idea who the other three men were. The Three Stooges, it said on the back, which simply wasn’t helpful.
It was when she was getting ready for bed that it struck her to investigate the drawer underneath, to see if there was anything further that was relevant to her search. She knelt to edge it open, but there was only the box of her mother’s old school books. She pushed the drawer back, then slipped in under the duvet, her feet finding the comforting warmth of the hot-water bottle her stepmother had left there. Dear Lavender. Lying there in the quiet darkness, thoughts of Aruna and Luke returned to haunt her. Perhaps she should have texted Aruna to ask if she was all right, but Lavender might have a point, that she should leave well alone. Would Aruna expect it, though? Briony brooded over the previous night’s events, and remembered again the guidebook that she’d found in Aruna’s flat. Why had Aruna been looking at it? And it came to her that the answer to the mystery lay in Italy. What had happened in Tuana, in the Villa Teresa, where Paul had last been heard of?
The wartime film footage Mariella had given her! Briony slid out of bed with a shiver, pulled her laptop out of its case and returned to bed with it, hoping that tidy Lavender hadn’t switched off the house wifi. No, its symbol above the toolbar glowed steady. The internet drop-file she wanted came up easily and soon she was watching the images that she’d first seen in that stuffy living room on an Italian summer evening. The stricken plane wheeling in the sky, the devastation of the war-torn valley, then in through the gates of the Villa Teresa, through the ruined garden, to where the two men were unloading boxes from a truck. She froze a frame to study their faces, then let it run on to the soldiers playing cards, concluding that three of the cheerful faces were the ‘Stooges’ from the photo in her grandfather’s box. Finally, the pale walls and tiled roof of the villa itself came into view and – who was that? She stopped the film and edged it back a tiny bit. There, in the window. She reached and switched off the bedside light so that the image gleamed more sharply. Could that be Ivor, standing at the window, watchful expression, hands on hips? The face was in shadow, but the man’s jacket was buttoned up smartly and he bore himself proudly. Possibly it was him, she reckoned, and moved on. Now, the busy hoe and the gardener working it, the shock again that this was Harry, the springy hair, laughing eyes and tanned narrow face, so like her brother Will’s. Definitely her grandfather. But where then was Paul?
The picture flew away in its ragged tail of ribbon and the screen darkened. Once more Briony slid the marker back to the scene where the truck was being unloaded, but though she examined each face again, and those of the card-players, there was no sign of Paul. Perhaps he hadn’t been around that day, or – why hadn’t she thought of this before? – perhaps he was the cameraman! There had been another occasion when he had been taking the picture, when was that? As she shut down her laptop, laid it on the bedside table and settled down under the duvet, she remembered being with Robyn Clare in her lovely apartment in Westbury Hall studying the photograph of the household in 1939. She’d looked for Paul then in the line-up of family and servants, but Robyn believed that he had taken the picture and could not therefore be in it.
As she lay waiting to fall asleep, Briony remembered the last letter of Paul’s that she’d read. It alluded to something terrible that had happened that meant he and Ivor were in trouble. She wondered again what it could possibly be.
Forty
April 1944
The spring brought hope after the long winter in the mountains. Only rarely now did a rime of frost glitter on the mud when Paul stepped out in the early mornings, and this quickly melted away under the fierce young sun. He and Harry and Private Sullivan, one of the Three Stooges, so-called because they’d been billeted together in Naples and since proved inseparable, had started to dig up a plot of land in a sheltered area in the back garden of the villa to grow vegetables, though so far there wasn’t much available to plant. He had been watching Harry with some concern, but the man had only suffered one further serious bout of fever, soon after Christmas, and periods of gentle activity in the warming air seemed to be doing him good.
They were two of a dozen men living at the Villa Teresa under Ivor Richards’ iron control. A rock-steady Scot named Sergeant John Fulmer commanded another six down in Tuana itself, occupying the Town Hall, where they’d turned the big reception room with its solemn portraits of past dignitaries into an ops room and dormitory, much to the chagrin of the current mayor, a retired bank manager with a distinguished wave of iron-grey hair and a proud, Roman face. His officials were now beset by people from all around with lists of insoluble problems and there was only one small office in which to receive them and nowhere to hold meetings or entertain. Still, the presence of the soldiers at least meant the town received shipments of food and other supplies, though these had been irregular over the hard winter, so it was difficult to do more than grumble.
On this particular April day, Paul and Harry used the last of the petrol to drive a truck down to Tuana. Supplies from Naples had arrived the night before, a welcome relief now that the weather had improved and some of the roads and bridges had been repaired. They assisted in distribution of foodstuffs to the eager, jostling local women, entrusted medical supplies to the nuns at the convent, as there was no doctor now living in the town, and handed out sacks of seed and animal feed to farmers or their widows, with the guidance of local officials.
There was a local boy Paul had seen before, who was fascinated by the British soldiers, and whom the mayor had introduced as his grandson. ‘I help, I help,’ Antonio said today, his dark eyes flashing. He was fifteen, a tall, athletic, good-looking boy. His father, the mayor’s son-in-law, had been taken prisoner by the British, but his family appeared sure that he would eventually return safely. ‘I want to fight la Germania,’ the boy explained, ‘but they say too young, too young. So I help you, yes?’ He lorded it over the women and children who scrambled for tins and dried goods, upbraiding them if they tried to take too much, which made Paul smile as he ticked items off a list. Inevitably, Antonio would manage to scrounge a few extra items for himself as payment. It was difficult, very difficult, to deny him.
Paul and Harry replenished their petrol tank and packed their truck with the troop’s own allocation of rations.
