Letters to the Lost (53 page)

Jess pressed the key into the palm of her hand, feeling the metal warm up against her skin. ‘I don’t suppose . . . You haven’t heard how Dan is, have you?’

‘As a matter of fact, I have.’ Mr Ramsay’s smile made hope fizz in the pit of her stomach. ‘There was a message on my machine this morning, from Mr Goldberg. He phoned before he left the office yesterday evening, which would have been about ten o’clock our time, to say that Mr Rosinski was awake and talking.’

At Jess’s squeal of excitement Ms Hideous-Handbag stopped talking and stared, outrage turning to disgust as Jess clambered onto the counter to throw her arms around Mr Ramsay’s neck. ‘
Talking
? So he knows? He knows about Stella?’

‘Oh yes, he knows,’ Mr Ramsay said dryly, straightening his glasses as Jess released him. ‘Apparently he’s been trying to pull strings and call in favours to get a flight to London.’ His smile slipped a little. ‘But he’s not well enough for that. He’s asked to come home, and they’re arranging that as soon as possible, probably tomorrow or Friday. But don’t get your hopes up, Jess. It might seem like he’s getting better, but Mr Goldberg says it could be quite the opposite. It’s not uncommon for people to . . . rally a little, near the end.’

‘I get that.’ She bit her lip, eyes stinging. ‘But it’s like . . . I don’t know, like a gift. A gift of time. We mustn’t waste it. Thanks, Mr Ramsay. Thanks for letting me know.’

‘You’re welcome. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if there’s anything else I can help you with.’ As he turned to leave he gave the handbag woman a frosty glance over the top of his glasses. ‘Excuse me, madam, I couldn’t help overhearing. I’m a solicitor, and I’d advise you that, since the work on your garment has been carried out with reasonable care and skill, you have no redress from the law for your accident with the red wine. I’d hate you to waste your money on a claim you couldn’t win.’ Turning, he gave Jess the ghost of a wink, and was gone.

My Dear Jess

Sorry for the radio silence. I wasn’t feeling so good last week and they took me into the hospital. I guess everyone thought it was the end – me included. And then they told me that you’d found Stella and although I was pretty far out of it and I don’t remember hearing anything, I must have. Because here I am. The docs said it was quite a dramatic comeback.

Jess, I know I don’t have long; miracles, like lightning, don’t strike twice in the same place. I wanted to say
thank you
, though those words sure are inadequate to express my gratitude towards you. These last few months you’ve given me hope and friendship and something to look forward to. Your emails brightened my days, and – even if we’d never got close to finding Stella – I knew that the search had turned up someone pretty darn special in her place. I’m glad I was able to get the transfer of the house organized in time. I hope that it, or the money that it raises, will give you the things you deserve in life. Security. Independence. A place to be happy.

It seems like I have been old for a long, long time; so long that I forgot what it was like to feel young. You made me remember, and allowed me to relive those days. I can’t think of a more precious gift.

Thank you.

Take care of yourself for me.

Dan xx

She’d picked up the email on Will’s laptop. It was Friday evening and they were at the house, the doors and windows thrown open to allow the green-scented air to flow through and dry the walls and surfaces and paintwork she’d scrubbed. Will had been there all day, and all of yesterday too, clearing out rubbish, sweeping away cobwebs and hacking into the overgrown garden, getting ready for tomorrow when Stella came.

She read Dan’s email again, swiping at tears with the hem of Will’s rowing club t-shirt. Before this week how long had it been since she’d cried? Years; when Gran died, probably, but it was like she’d inadvertently drilled into some kind of spring, hidden deep inside herself. All her emotions kept gushing out.

Leaving the laptop open, she got up from the lumpy sofa and went through to the back of the house. Through the open door she could hear Will’s voice, the staccato rhythm of his words spoken in time with the swing of his axe. Or Albert Greaves’s axe, to be precise, and Albert himself was sitting on a kitchen chair by the back door, one elbow propped on his walking frame, a can of beer in his hand, supervising.

They both looked up as she went out. Will straightened up, letting the axe fall to his side. The evening sun made a halo around his head and gilded the hairs on his forearms. After two days outside they were already turning brown.

‘Everything all right?’ he said, watching her face.

She nodded. ‘The connection’s working fine.’

He looked relieved. ‘That’s good.’

Albert took a sip from his can. ‘You get it up and running, then, your inter-whathaveyou?’

Jess went to perch on the windowsill beside his chair. The rose clambering up the wall would soon be in flower, she noticed. Creamy yellow petals were just visible where the green buds were splitting open. A drop of pure happiness expanded inside her at the prospect of what lay ahead; the summer, and a garden of her own, Dan’s priceless gifts of security and independence. And Will.

‘The internet. Yes. Karina next door has very kindly let us use her wireless connection, just until we get our own. We’ll need it tomorrow, you see.’

Albert shook his head, puzzled but content. ‘I don’t know. In my day, the wireless was something you listened to. Tommy Handley, now he was a funny man. Vera Lynn – The Forces’ Sweetheart. What was that song she used to sing ? Let me think . . .’

Will and Jess looked at each other. Smiled. An aeroplane droned distantly, a white trail fluffing up in its wake across the lavender sky. Albert started to sing creakily, like a gate opening on rusty hinges.

‘
It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow . . .
’

‘Yes,’ Will said, still looking at Jess, holding her in the sunlit warmth of his gaze, ‘I think it probably will be.’

Of course, it would have changed. It was silly to expect it to be the same after seventy years. New houses might have been built around it, a mini-estate, perhaps. The forget-me-not blue front door would probably have been replaced by one of those low-maintenance UPVC ones. Nancy might have taken out the fireplaces and installed radiators, and put in a modern bath of moulded plastic in place of the cast-iron one in which Dan had soaked on that long-ago summer evening. The violet wallpaper would be gone, for certain.

‘Nearly there,’ Will said gently beside her. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes . . . thank you.’ The shops along the main street were all different. Unrecognizable. In fact, most of them weren’t shops at all but restaurants and cafés and takeaways. There was a bowling alley in the old picture house, a burger bar where the fried fish shop used to be. The pub was still there, and the corner shop where Dan had seen the card advertising a house for sale, though its old wooden front had been stripped away and replaced with glass and garish hoardings.

And then the car was slowing and turning into Greenfields Lane and she couldn’t look any more. How silly Will must think her, sitting there with her eyes closed, though he was far too sweet to say anything. She felt the car stop, heard the engine stutter into silence and Will open his door to get out. Inside her head she relived the moment when Dan had first brought her here, and she had stood with his hands covering her eyes and his breath warm on her neck.

Dan, where are we?

Home.

She opened her eyes, and saw that it was all just exactly the same.

Jess and Will stayed in the front room as she made her slow pilgrimage through the ground-floor rooms, gathering memories, greeting ghosts, touching the places where Dan’s hand had rested, all those years ago.

‘I hope you’re not shocked by the state of the place,’ Jess said as she came back through from the dining room. ‘We’ve cleaned it up as best we could, but it can’t have been touched for years.’

‘It hasn’t.’ Stella let out a breath of laughter, her gaze falling on the crumbling velvet sofa. ‘It’s all just exactly the same. Nancy never was the domesticated type.’

‘The council had cleared out a lot of her belongings when they took charge of the place, but they kept the things they thought might be of personal value. There wasn’t an awful lot here, to be honest. A lot of it had been taken when she moved into the home, but we thought that maybe you might like to take what was left. For Vivien . . . ?’

‘Yes. I’ll ask her.’ It was a thoughtful offer, though Vivien had never shown any interest in her real mother and, given her taste for designer trappings and expensive décor, Stella couldn’t think that there would be anything from here that would find a place in her carefully styled home. ‘How kind of you to think of that.’

‘Would you like to go upstairs?’ Will asked.

‘Oh . . . I’m not sure . . . Really, there’s no need.’ Now the time had come, her chest felt tight, as if the thin walls that held her emotions in check might suddenly break. The violet-strewn room was so vivid in her memory, she wasn’t sure she could bear to have the image overlaid by something different. But Jess was taking her arm, leading her gently towards the stairs.

‘Actually, there is really. Some of the things they kept were yours. One of the rooms was locked. We didn’t know what was behind the door, but the council must have opened it when they took over. They found the missing letters in there, lots and lots of them. They’d been pushed under the door – that’s what Nancy must have done whenever one arrived. They’re up here, waiting for you. Come and see.’

And so, slowly, carefully, they filed up the stairs. Jess led the way and opened the door into the bedroom that had been shut and locked for almost seventy years.

‘Oh . . .’ Stella pressed her hands to her mouth as she turned to take it all in, though there was really no need. All was as it had been. The afternoon sun sloped across walls strewn with faded violets and lay in honeyed pools on the old brass bed. On the bedside table the pile of letters waited for her.

‘It was a bit of a mess, as you can imagine, having been shut up for so long,’ Will was explaining from the doorway. ‘Lots of soot had fallen down the chimney and there were cobwebs like ships’ rigging. We think a bird must have built a nest in the chimney because the floor was covered in straw.’

Packing straw, she thought, remembering Mrs Nichols’ gift and stifling a gasp of laughter. The bed creaked as she lowered herself onto it, stroking her hand wonderingly over the sheets she had brought from the Vicarage in her suitcase. Dazedly she shook her head.

‘I feel like I’ve come home. Like he’s here.’

There was the tiniest pause. And then, taking in a breath Will stepped forwards and opened the laptop computer he was carrying.

‘Well, actually . . . in a manner of speaking . . . he is.’

*

The sun slipped down the wall to the floor. The violets in the corners of the room retreated into the shadows. They talked.

In the corner of the computer screen there was a small box in which she could see herself, the image that Dan would see on his screen. She looked old, but she didn’t feel it. The years rolled back and she was the girl she’d been back then; shy, a little uncertain, enchanted by him.

Illness and age had altered her golden boy. The unruly mane of tawny hair was almost gone and his skin had the pallor of sickness, but he was there in the gestures she remembered so well, the quirk of his smile and the pitch of his voice. The things he said. The way he made her feel.

He was there.

He had married, he told her. He had married Louis Johnson’s widow, Jean, when her boy was fourteen years old and beginning to be a handful. ‘She figured he needed a father, and I figured I owed it to Louis. It was a happy enough marriage. We didn’t have any babies of our own, which I guess she would have liked, but Jimmy was a good kid. He has a son called Joe, who fixed this whole thing up with your Will. He’s great. He works as a stunt driver in the movies.’

‘Is he married?’

‘No . . . but he has a great partner. Called Ryan.’

Across the thousands of miles that separated them their eyes met and held and they smiled, both thinking of Charles. ‘Things have changed,’ she said softly. ‘The world is a better, more tolerant place these days. Did we help to make it better, do you think?’

He sighed and shifted his position on the bank of pillows. Pain flickered across his face and she felt her heart twist. ‘I’d like to think we did, because otherwise what was it all for? What did those men die for – Louis and Joey Harper and all the others? Wasn’t it so people could live the lives they wanted to have and be the people they were meant to be?’

‘Sometimes I think we were unlucky, being born at the time we were,’ Stella said. ‘I look out there and see Jess and Will, and it seems so simple for them. They love each other. They’ll have a life together; a home and children – simple, wonderful things. I envy them that. But then I remember how lucky we were too, to have met at all. If it hadn’t been for the war I would never have known you. I could never have become the person you made me. I would have lived a smaller, narrower life if I hadn’t loved you.’

‘Jeez, Stella . . .’ She had heard him say those words before, in that exact same weary, ragged way, as if he was drawing them right out from his soul. The deliciousness of hearing them again made her shiver. ‘Just one more time. What I wouldn’t give to see you one more time; properly, so I could touch you. They won’t let me fly, you know. I’ve tried every airline and not a single one will have me on board.’ He shook his head. ‘Insurance risk, they say; I might die in the air. It would be funny if it wasn’t so goddamned infuriating. We died in our thousands in the skies over Europe back then. They sent us up there to die. No one ever mentioned insurance risk.’

She was laughing, and crying, and melting inside. ‘I’ll come. To you. I’ll get a flight as soon as I can.’