Letters to the Lost (11 page)

No such luck.

‘Halle-fucking-lujah, the wanderer returns. Bex, go downstairs and get Ali to kill the fatted kebab, would you? And then tell Poshboy to get in here.’

Will’s heart sank. Bex appeared in the doorway, grinning. She was nineteen and dressed for the office like she was heading out on some extreme hen-party weekend, but she was essentially a sweet girl who took her role as Ansell’s comedy sidekick in good part. She rolled her extravagantly lashed eyes and stood aside to let Will past.

‘Ah, Posh, glad you could join us.’ The happy synergy of Posh and Bex was a matter of perennial hilarity to Ansell, especially as it allowed him to paint Will as a pointless airhead and Bex as the serious talent. ‘News just in. A case in the name of Grimwood, which has been a breeze to follow up. While you’ve been gazing at your navel and paying calls like some kind of fucking Victorian lady, Barry has printed out the family tree and contacted relatives. In Clacton, if you think that pedal car of yours can make it that far?’

That was a good question. The Triumph had been Will’s twenty-first birthday present from his parents, intended only for leisurely weekend runs along open country roads in the life they had assumed he would have (which had obviously not involved anything as low-rent as driving around making cold calls). However, it was also a rhetorical question. Wearily Will leaned across and took the printed list of addresses.

‘No worries. But what about Nancy Price? I know she doesn’t own the house, but her neighbour mentioned that she’d lived there since the war at least, and that she was the kind of person who didn’t believe in keeping money in the bank. I was thinking – it might be worth having a look in the house, if we could get permission. You know – wads of cash under the mattress, that sort of thing.’

While Will had been speaking Ansell had been studying his computer screen. Now he tapped out a few words on his keyboard and looked up with a distracted air.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, are you still here? Only I thought I told you to bugger off to Clacton and do some actual proper work for a change? Bex – get Nigel on the phone would you?’

Will sighed. It was a slim chance, he knew that, but still – he’d hoped he could persuade Ansell to take it. Because now he was left high and dry with the problem of his promise to Albert Greaves.

He went into the office he shared with Barry, a harassed ex-policeman with two divorces and a battle with alcoholism behind him, and ahead of him too, some days. Beyond the wide, blank windows the city was painted entirely in shades of dirt.

‘So it’s a day at the seaside for you,’ Barry remarked, not looking up from his screen. ‘All right for some.’

Will switched on his computer. ‘Lovely. Perfect weather for it too.’

‘Better than being stuck in here.’ Barry still had eight months left of a two-year ban for drink-driving. He stretched and leaned back in his chair, locking his hands together behind his head. ‘You can bring me back a stick of candy floss and some nice signed agreements. I’ve lined up quite a few appointments for you.’

‘Excellent.’ Distractedly Will scrolled down his screen and clicked open files.

‘That Nancy Price case came to nothing, then. Thank Christ. Finding heirs on that one was turning out to be a proper nightmare. No money there, Mike reckons. Complete wild-goose job.’ When Will didn’t respond he said, ‘Got anything nice planned for the weekend?’

Will remembered the summons to Sunday lunch at his parents’ house. ‘No,’ he said bleakly. In the corner the printer whirred and spat out paper. ‘What about you?’

‘I got the kids on Saturday afternoon. I was going to take them down Chessington, but Kelly wants to go to Bluewater. Shopping.’ He grimaced. ‘Here, didn’t Bex give you the paperwork for Grimwood? I’ve already printed it out.’

‘Oh, yes – thanks for that. Just printing out a map.’ He closed Nancy Price’s file and collected the papers from the printer tray. ‘I’ll be off then. Have a good weekend.’

‘Ha flaming ha,’ said Barry.

The Local History room in the library was warm and quiet. The helpful library assistant who’d shown Jess to it had pointed out directories where she might look up the name of a particular person, and books and records relating to Church End around the time of World War Two. Internet access was free of charge, and she explained to Jess (in a hushed voice, even though there was no one else in the room) how to log on using the number on her library card. Jess thanked her politely, and couldn’t bring herself to mention that she didn’t have one. The librarian left, and she looked at the rows of spines, wondering where to start.

An hour later she had amassed a small pile of books on the table in front of her, and found several references to the cottages on Greenfields Lane. They were, she discovered, amongst the oldest properties in Church End, built when it was still a rural hamlet, for ‘artisan workers’, whatever they were. There had been another row, facing the remaining one, which was pulled down to make way for the gardens of the big Victorian houses that were built with the arrival of the railway in Church End. In a little book entitled
Kelly’s Directory
, which appeared to be a sort of yellow pages and telephone book but without the telephone bit, she discovered that number four Greenfields Lane had been lived in by a Mr and Mrs Mitchell in 1914. But of Mrs S. Thorne there was no mention.

Outside it had started to rain. The library was a modern building with wide plate glass windows, through which Jess had a good view of the darkening street. The pavements glistened with rain and shimmered with the lights from the shops and passing cars. The thought of going back to the house, to the dark and cold and damp and eerie silence, had never been more unappealing.

The library was open until seven, the helpful assistant had told her. Jess put back the books she’d been using and walked slowly along the shelves, until she reached a section called ‘Military History’. Something stirred in the back of her mind and she took the letter from her pocket and unfolded it.

382 Squadron. What did that mean? She scanned down.
Death, my old adversary from my flying days . . .

There were loads of books on World War Two. The war at sea, in Africa, in Italy, in the East . . . The Battle of Britain. The Holocaust. Code breaking. Special Operations . . . Jess read the titles on their spines, and when they meant nothing to her, slid them out to look at their covers.

They’d learned about World War Two at primary school. Mrs Ainscough’s class. She remembered a display on the wall about rationing and the blackout, and a story they’d had to write about evacuation. The thought of leaving Gran and going to a strange house in a strange town had filled her with horror: little had she known then that she’d be doing exactly that just a few years later, when Gran died. It had been her dad she’d gone to live with, not a complete stranger, but it amounted to the same thing. Before Gran’s funeral she’d only met him a handful of times, when he came up from Manchester on rare duty visits, bringing chocolate bars and garage flowers as gifts. The chocolate was for her, and was always a kind she didn’t like, with nuts in. The flowers were for Gran, gaudy crysanths wrapped in cellophane with the cut-price label badly torn off, to say thank you for relieving him of responsibility for his accidental daughter.

At least he came, Gran said, stiffly. It was one up on
Her
, which was the only name Gran ever gave to the woman who’d decided she wasn’t cut out for motherhood and left when Jess was four months old.

She took down a book about the Home Front (a term she remembered from those far-off days in Mrs Ainscough’s) and, noticing one entitled ‘American Invasion’, pulled that out too. The gap it left revealed a photograph of an enormous aeroplane on the cover of the next book along. A group of men crouched beneath its nose, on which there was a painting of a sexy blonde wearing hardly any clothes and an inviting smile. The book was called
Bombs and Bombshells: a History of the USAAF in Britain
. She added it to her armful.

A gust of wind hurled rain against the windowpane as she settled herself back at her table and opened the first book. A black-and-white world opened up before her, of men in uniform with slicked-down, gleaming hair, of girls who looked like the painting on the plane but with more clothes on, of couples dancing the old-fashioned way, hands clasped, gazes locked. There was something innocent about them, but something romantic too. Sexy, she thought with a beat of surprise.

She paused on a double page blow-up of a crowded dance floor. Young people, just like her, dancing. The photograph had been taken over seventy years ago, and yet as she pored over the details the colour seemed to bleed back into the scene, until she could almost feel the heat, smell the sweat and perfume, hear the blast of the music.

In Mrs Ainscough’s class the war had been distant history, but as she looked at that photograph she understood in a way she hadn’t before that it was real life. Dan Rosinski’s letter was lying on the desk beside her, and her eye was drawn back to its spiky, urgent handwriting.

Real life. Real people. And it wasn’t over yet.

8

1943

In the end Nancy had won, as she always did. Though Stella still felt far from comfortable with the idea of going out, Saturday evening saw her sitting obediently at the dressing table while Nancy twisted her hair into little pin curls on top of her head and, cigarette wedged into the corner of her mouth, chattered nineteen to the dozen.

She’d arranged to meet some other girls from the salon at the dance, she told Stella. ‘You’ll love them – a right laugh they are, and it’ll do you the world of good to spend some time with people your own age for a change.’ Stella’s heart sank. She knew she ought to be glad that Nancy wanted to share her new friends, but the prospect of meeting them was enough to make her courage fail. Their names popped up regularly in Nancy’s conversation, so that Stella already had an idea of the kind of girls they were. Confident girls, who chewed gum given to them by GIs and knew how to do all the latest dances. The kind of girls that would stop at nothing in their pursuit of a good time, and were bound to think that Stella was seven kinds of boring. Normal, attractive girls.

From his cross on the wall, Christ watched reproachfully as Nancy took a compact out of the little vanity case she’d brought with her and dusted powder over Stella’s cheeks and nose.

‘Now – close your eyes.’

‘What for?’

‘A bit of eyeshadow, that’s all. And . . . the finishing touch . . .’ There was a muted snap and Stella jumped as she felt something being dabbed against her mouth. ‘Lipstick!’

Stella opened her eyes. She barely recognized the woman whose glittering eyes stared back at her from the dressing-table mirror. Tentative butterfly wings of excitement fluttered in the pit of her stomach.

‘I don’t know about the lipstick, Nance – it’s very . . . red.’

‘Which, in case you hadn’t noticed, is what everyone’s wearing these days.’

‘Not in King’s Oak they’re not.’ Stella laughed nervously. She couldn’t stop looking at the woman in the mirror. A stranger, in a stranger’s clothes. ‘I’m not sure it’s quite . . . me.’

‘Don’t you dare rub it off – haven’t you heard? It’s unpatriotic to waste anything these days, and that goes just as much for my precious lipstick as it does for stale bread.’ Nancy slicked her own lips with scarlet and pressed them together, then dropped the lipstick back into her bag. ‘Come on, let’s get going.’

The woman in the glass stood up and stroked a hand down the silky fabric of her dress. Excitement fought with misgiving. In the ugly familiarity of the Vicarage bedroom she no longer looked like Charles’s respectable, dutiful, failed wife. She remembered what Ada had said about Cinders. She had been transformed from insipid drudge into a sophisticated siren.

‘Hurry up, Dolly Daydream.’ Behind her, Nancy straightened up from checking her stocking seams. ‘You know what they say . . . So many Yanks, so little time.’

As she spoke, Stella caught sight of the little silver and marcasite watch Roger and Lillian had given her for Christmas, lying in the trinket dish on the dressing table. She slipped it on and fastened the clasp. The metal felt cold and tight around her wrist, like the hard grip of icy fingers. There – now she could be sure not to stay past midnight. She looked at the bed, scene of her failure and humiliation, its mustard-coloured cover pulled smooth. Just a few hours, and she would be back between its chilly sheets, where she belonged.

But until then she could pretend to be someone different; the stranger who wore red lipstick and had pin curls and a skirt that caressed her legs when she walked.

‘Coming,’ she said, and switched off the light.

London might have been a city in blackout, but if the Luftwaffe had just leaned out of their cockpits Stella felt sure they could have been guided towards it by the noise. As soon as they got off the bus they could hear the sound of Glenn Miller drifting down the street, over the heads of the people huddled together against the cold in the queue for the Opera House.

‘Looks like we might not get in,’ Stella said, trying to keep the relief out of her voice. The sense of optimism and adventure she had felt in the bedroom had been slowly draining away during the bus journey, and at that moment an evening spent listening to the wireless with Reverend Stokes seemed rather appealing.

Nancy seized her arm. ‘Don’t you believe it,’ she muttered. ‘Just keep quiet and look pretty.’

She set off at a purposeful pace, her pelvis swaying so extravagantly that her hip nudged Stella’s with every step, her eyes scanning the row of faces in the queue. At last, when they were almost at the front she let out a joyful yell, and hurled herself at a soldier in American uniform, dragging a horrified Stella with her.

‘Johnny – oh, Johnny, there you are! I thought I’d never find you!’

Before the startled GI could protest she’d thrown her arms around his neck and fixed her mouth on his. The swell of muttering and grumbling from further back in the queue was drowned out by the chorus of whoops and cheers that went up from the other Americans in the group. Stiff with embarrassment, Stella found herself absorbed into it, sheltered from the belligerent buffeting of the people behind by towering giants who gave off a collective scent of aftershave and mint chewing gum. They seemed taller than British soldiers, or was that just the elegant cut of their uniforms? One of them – dark-haired and olive-skinned – introduced himself as Frank, and his friends as Jimmy and Ron and Mitch, then he bent his head to whisper in her ear, ‘And that’s Eugene that your friend there is eating, though I guess for tonight at least we’d better call him Johnny.’