Letters to the Lost (4 page)

On the stage Charles rather stiffly thanked the bridesmaid, and Nancy gave a cheeky little mock curtsey, which he pretended not to notice. Peter Underwood made his creaking way up the steps.

Heat was gathering beneath the rafters now. The men had taken off their jackets and rolled back their shirtsleeves and the children could be heard shrieking and whooping in the yard outside. Everyone was getting restless. In the kitchen the ladies doing the washing up had forgotten to whisper and, as the best man’s speech stretched from five minutes to ten, most people tuned out his thin, sardonic drawl and listened instead to the far more interesting conversation drifting through the kitchen hatch, about Ethel Collins’s sister who’d been bombed out of her home in Enfield and had moved in with her son and daughter-in-law in Bromley.

‘And it was in the summer of ’31 that Charles and I embarked on our memorable fishing trip to North Wales. Just as Jesus our Lord found himself on Jordan’s banks with five loaves and a few small fishes, so Charles and I found ourselves stranded in the middle of Lake Bala with only a meagre cheese sandwich between us . . .’

Stella’s attention wandered away from the wilds of North Wales to the kitchen, where Ethel Collins’s voice rose indignantly above the groan and hiss of the tea urn. ‘They’ve got an inside lav, but Joan’s not allowed to use it. She’s handed over her ration book, but there’s barely a scrap of food, and that woman swiped all her coupons and used them for a new dress for herself . . .’

Guiltily Stella retuned her mental wireless back to Peter Underwood. The hearty, outdoor Charles emerging in his speech bore little resemblance to the man Stella knew. Or didn’t know. She might learn something if she listened.

When Peter finally turned the last page of the sheaf of papers in his hand, there was a relieved ripple of applause, then Miss Birch bustled forward clapping her hands and announcing that it was time for the bride and groom to cut the cake. Fred Collins was dragged back from the yard and ordered to put down his stout and pick up his camera. Stella found herself standing beneath the banner beside Charles, once more smiling into the lens. On the photographs it would look like they’d been at each other’s side all day, though the reality had been rather different. His hand covered hers on the cake knife and her chest clenched. He had such lovely hands – long fingered and elegant. She thought of later on, in the hotel in Brighton, and how those fingers would undo the buttons of her nightdress and move across her skin . . .

‘We’ll have to do that one again,’ Fred Collins guffawed. ‘You had your eyes closed, Mrs Thorne!’

The Vicarage was a solid Victorian house with its own particular scent of boiled vegetables, damp tweed and masculinity that Stella hoped would somehow alter when she was properly in residence, as a wife rather than a housekeeper. Carrying her cardboard suitcase she led the way upstairs, with Nancy following behind, peering into rooms as they passed.

‘Big old place, isn’t it? Just fancy – all these rooms are yours now.’

‘Not really. The house belongs to the church, not Charles, but I know what you mean. I’m very lucky.’

‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ Nancy muttered as she followed her into the bedroom that from now on was to be Stella’s. The high wooden bed was covered by a mustard-coloured counterpane and there was a wooden cross bearing a carved figure of the tortured Christ hanging on the green-painted wall above it. Everything in the Vicarage seemed to be painted green; the same shade as the church hall, and the pavilion on the playing field, come to think of it. ‘Anyway, it’s not luck,’ Nancy went on. ‘You deserve all of this and more. He’s the lucky one, marrying a gorgeous girl like you.’

‘I don’t think his family see it that way. I’ll always be the girl from the Poor School to them.’

‘That shows what they know.’ Brusqueness, in Nancy’s case, was a sign of sincerity. The bed creaked as she collapsed back onto it, hitching up Betty Collins’s blue bridesmaid satin to reveal a packet of cigarettes tucked into her stocking top. ‘You’re a cut above the lot of ’em. Daughter of a Duke, that’s who you are.’

Perching on the stool in front of the squat chest of drawers that did service as a dressing table, Stella smiled. All she knew about the mother who had given her up was that she’d been in service in a big house in Belgravia. Her father’s identity was a mystery, but Nancy’s theory was that he was from ‘upstairs’, which explained what she called Stella’s ‘ladylike ways’.

‘Well, it doesn’t matter whose daughter I am now, does it?’ she said softly, beginning to pull out the pins securing her veil. ‘I’m Charles’s wife. That’s all that matters to me.’

‘If you say so.’

‘I do. I know you think I’m mad, but it’s all I’ve ever wanted: a house to keep and a husband to love. A tea set with roses on it. You know that.’

Looking out of the window, Nancy exhaled a sighful of smoke. There was a long pause, in which the only sound was the hiss of the brush through Stella’s hair and the distant sounds of children shouting in the street. ‘I’ll miss you,’ Nancy said, suddenly sombre.

‘Oh, Nance – I’m only going to Brighton for four days.’

‘I don’t mean that, and you know it. Things are bound to change. You can’t go out dancing and eat chips on the bus on the way home now you’re a vicar’s wife, can you? You’ll have to cook his tea and be there to hand round biscuits at all those evening prayer meetings he has.’

‘It won’t be so bad. We’ll still see each other.’ Stella supposed Nancy was right about the dancing, but she wasn’t sure she’d miss it that much. It seemed a small thing to forgo in exchange for all that she would be gaining. ‘Here, help me out of this dress would you? We can meet up on Saturdays for the pictures or a look in the shops, and you can come round here whenever you like.’

Heaving herself up off the bed, Nancy gave a humourless laugh. ‘I don’t think Charles would be too happy about that.’

‘Well, he’ll just have to get used to it. We’re as good as sisters, you and I; he knows that. You’re the closest I’ve got to family.’

‘Except Miss Birch. I reckon she thinks of herself as family now – can you believe what she was like today?’ Cigarette wedged into the corner of her mouth, Nancy smirked and said in her best Miss Birch voice, ‘
Stella is one of the great successes of Woodhill School
. . .’

A volley of Miss Birch impressions followed, accompanied by much giggling, as Stella dressed in the powder-blue suit Ada Broughton had snaffled from the donations for refugees and Nancy re-did her hair, pinning up her curls in one of the styles she had learned in the salon where she worked, and which she had assured Stella was the height of sophistication. When she’d finished she settled a little powder-blue hat on it, tilting at a daring angle.

Stella looked at the finished result uneasily, turning her head this way and that. ‘I look very . . . grown up.’

‘You look gorgeous. You’ll knock his socks off. Talking of which . . .’ Nancy turned away and picked up her handbag from the bed. Out of it she produced a small, brown-paper-wrapped package. ‘Wedding present. Or, honeymoon present, more like.’

She watched as Stella opened it and, laughing, held up the slippery sliver of pale pink satin.

‘Nance, it’s beautiful! What is it?’

‘It’s to wear in bed, silly. On your wedding night.’

Stella’s cheeks glowed, and there was a peculiar tingling in the pit of her stomach. ‘I couldn’t! There’s nothing of it – I’ll freeze!’

‘Don’t be daft – you’ll be burning up with passion. Charles won’t know what to do with himself. He’ll have so much to praise the Almighty for he won’t know where to start.’

Everyone came out of the hall to wave them off. Fred Collins made them stand beside the open door of the taxi for a final snapshot, Charles’s arm stiffly around her, his expression tense because he was aware of the meter ticking away. And then she was kissing Nancy again, and Ada and Ethel, and even, awkwardly, Roger and Lillian. She was about to get into the taxi, hurried up by Charles, when Nancy shouted, ‘Your bouquet!’

‘Oh!’

She ascertained where Nancy was standing, then turned her back to the crush of well-wishers. But as she threw the bouquet upwards, the roses’ thorny stems snagged on her gloves and its trajectory was altered, so that it sailed over her head in a confetti of velvety petals, straight into the hands of Peter Underwood.

Stella craned her head to look through the rear window of the taxi as they drove away. Everyone had crowded into the road and was waving frantically, except for Peter who was standing quite still holding the bouquet.

‘It was supposed to be Nancy who caught it,’ Stella muttered, anguished.

‘Peter always was rather a marvel in the slips,’ Charles said, admiringly.

The taxi turned the corner at the bottom of Church Road and everyone was lost from view. Settling back on the seat, Stella felt sudden, inexplicable tears prickle her eyes. Looking down she saw that her glove was torn and the pristine whiteness stained with blood.

3

2011

The short days bled into each other, through endless stretches of night.

The best way, the only way, to cope with the darkness and the cold and the hunger was to sleep. In the absence of electric light, television, regular mealtimes, her body clock reset itself to some more primitive rhythm and she did this with astonishing ease, like an animal hibernating, so that chunks of time were simply swallowed up by oblivion.

When she was awake, the silence boomed and echoed in her head and she felt her voice shrivel and harden in her throat, like the Little Mermaid’s. It made her realize how much she wanted – needed – to sing; how, in spite of Dodge and her soured dreams, it was still part of who she was. Slipping soundlessly through the shadowy house she felt like she’d ceased to exist. Like a ghost.

The world shrank to fit within the damp walls and the narrow slice of street visible through the gap in the curtains. Because the lane in front of the house was a dead end, traffic along it was limited and she became familiar with the regular passers-by. The house next door belonged to a young woman in her twenties, with either a job or a boyfriend that took her away from home overnight sometimes. She watched her leaving early in the morning, her heels clicking hurriedly up the front path, her ponytail swishing silkily, and envied her efficiency, her purpose, her cleanliness.

The house at the other end of the row was lived in by two middle-aged men, who left together in the morning, bundled up in bright, knitted scarves, and returned separately at night, one of them weighed down with bulging carrier bags from a posh supermarket. She hadn’t seen the resident of the remaining house, but guessed it was an old person. Cars pulled up outside it three times a day, from which blue-uniformed women emerged. Carers, she assumed. Their visits were timed to coincide with mealtimes, and reminded her of her own hunger.

The meagre stash of supplies in the kitchen cupboard had dwindled to almost nothing. She had finished the fig rolls, as well as a tin of rice pudding, one of peaches and a box of soft, stale Ritz crackers. All that remained was another tin of peaches and a jar of meat paste. Just looking at it made her feel ill; she would only resort to eating that in the direst emergency.

The hunger was worse than the darkness or the cold because it didn’t just affect her body but her mind too. When she wasn’t asleep she found it increasingly hard to find the energy to move from the sofa, where she huddled beneath the blanket and gazed glassily out of the window as her thoughts scrolled, never finding focus. For months – since the night when Dodge had hurt her properly, frighteningly, for the first time – she had thought of nothing else but getting away from him. Most of the time it had felt like a hopeless ambition, but now she had achieved it she was like someone who had quite literally emerged from a dark tunnel into dazzling light. She had escaped, but couldn’t see where to go next.

In the end it was the immediate need to eat that forced her to act. During her three days (was it three? . . . she’d lost track) on the sofa the pain in her ankle had eased until she was able to put weight on it and walk. She had the money in her jacket pocket . . . But she also had filthy hair, no shoes and the kind of dress that was likely to result in hypothermia and unfortunate assumptions. Wearily she mustered her remaining energy and applied it to the task of overcoming these obstacles.

She started with the hair.

There were scissors in the drawer in the kitchen; big ones, with long, rusty blades. Standing in the bathroom, she tipped her head upside down and, gathering her hair into a ponytail, attempted to cut it off. The blunt jaws of the scissors gnawed on it, like a dog chewing on a piece of tough meat, but eventually a heap of dark, lank hair lay at her feet. There was no shampoo, so she put her head under the tap, gritting her teeth as her scalp constricted beneath the icy water.

Afterwards she felt lightheaded from the cold, the inversion of gravity and the absence of her long, heavy hair. She rubbed her head vigorously with the scratchy towel, then stood in front of the mirrored cabinet to examine the results of her handiwork.

Oh God, she looked like a Victorian orphan, or someone from the chorus in
Les Misérables
. Her eyes and mouth were suddenly too big for her face, which was tiny and pinched beneath her new ragged hair. Her nose was bright red with the cold. But she felt cleaner. Lighter. Shivering, she wrapped her arms around herself and went towards the stairs.

The downstairs of the little house had become so familiar it almost felt like her own home, but so far something had stopped her from going upstairs. It felt intrusive, somehow; disrespectful. Her harsh laugh bounced off the walls of the narrow stairwell. She’d broken in, stolen food from the cupboards, opened mail that wasn’t addressed to her. She was up to her neck in ‘intrusive’.

At the top of the stairs there was a tiny square landing, with a door on either side. The one to the left was closed, but the other was half open, letting in light and revealing a bedroom too small to contain much more than a double bed and dressing table, and an old-fashioned wardrobe made of flimsy dark wood.