Letters to the Lost (54 page)

He was tired now, she could see it in every line of his face, in the opaqueness of his eyes. Tired and in pain. His smile was slow and sad and relieved and beautiful.

‘Good. I’ll wait for you.’

She sat, for a little while after the screen had reverted to its view of an improbably featureless hill, and thought. Her head was full of his voice and the things that he’d said. She wanted time to just hold those things there, and cherish them.

In the garden below the window Will was working, hacking into the overgrown shrubbery that had swallowed up the lawn. It had been hot before, and he had taken his shirt off. She watched him now, noticing how the muscles moved beneath his skin, remembering how it felt to be quick and strong and young. And suddenly it was as if she had fallen through time, and she was walking across the garden to Dan, who was pushing a lawnmower, a sheen of sweat like gold-dust on his sun-warmed skin, a cigarette wedged in the corner of his mouth.

Time. It stretched and contracted. Jess appeared and the boy on the lawn turned and was Will again. She watched him loop his arm around her and kiss the top of her head. They looked beautiful together, she thought with a sharp lurch of emotion. Not only because they were both young and attractive, but because they were so transparently in love. It transformed them; set them slightly apart and made them seem invincible. She wondered if they knew how precious it was, to have the whole joyous adventure of their life together ahead of them? And then she caught a glimpse of the rapt expression on Will’s face as he smiled at Jess, and she knew that they did, and that they would be all right.

She took a step back from the window, but the movement must have caught his eye and he looked up. Seeing her there he raised his hand, questions written across his open face.

She smiled and raised a hand in return. Then she gathered up her precious letters and left the violet-scattered bedroom to go and ask if they would be so good as to help her book a flight to America.

Epilogue

The wide sky is a deep, glowing indigo. The stars are beginning to fade and there is a thread of pinky gold where it meets the more opaque blue of the sea, showing that a new day will soon begin.

The house is on the beach, exactly as he said it would be. The rooms are big and airy, one leading into the other, in a way that makes you feel like you can breathe and spread and relax, and there are whole walls of glass looking out over the sweep of pale sand and the ocean. In the living room, huge sofas are placed around the fireplace.

On the floor there is a white fur rug.

Dan’s family had been there to greet her, to welcome this elderly English stranger who knew their father and grandfather even before they did, and who has flown across the Atlantic to be with him at the end. For a while the house had been filled with people, and voices, and a curious atmosphere of tender joy that was almost like a celebration. Then, with infinite kindness and tact, everyone melted away and left the two of them alone. Again. The circle is complete.

Photographs lie scattered across the bed, like bleached autumn leaves. Last night she lay beside him and they studied them together, marvelling at their own youthful beauty, gilded and warmed back into being in the soft glow of the lamp. The photograph he’d taken of her in the ruins of St Clements is creased and torn at the edges, but it brought the moment back with a clarity that made her feel breathless; the throbbing thirst of her first hangover, the anguish over a lost watch (whatever happened to that? She hasn’t seen it for years), the uncomfortable awareness of the American stranger. The expression on that girl’s face is closed and self-absorbed. She can’t see what lies ahead.

How different it would all have been if she could. How many different choices she would have made.

But it is over now. The time for choosing is past.

The pale strip of sky on the horizon is spreading upwards; water bleeding into ink, diluting the darkness. The chest against which her cheek rests is still, and the hand she holds beginning to lose its warmth.

But she holds on.

In a little while she will let go. She will get up, alert the hovering nurses and find Joe and Ryan. In a little while. But for now the sun is rising and the sky is turning pink and gold, and she is with him. And they are both at peace.

Acknowledgements

There are many people who helped
Letters to the Lost
on its journey from head to printed page and to whom I owe thanks for the encouragement and support they gave me as I wrote it. Chief amongst these are my fabulous friends Abby Green (whose perfectly timed parcel in the post provided a spark of inspiration and gave me the boost I needed to start the story), Sally Bowden, Sharon Kendrick, Heidi Rice, Fiona Harper, Scarlet Wilson and Julie Cohen (with thanks for her invaluable research assistance). Before I started writing the book I was lucky enough to get to know the wonderful Lucinda Riley, and I am indebted to her for her advice and friendship: the former made it easier to write, and the latter made the process much more enjoyable.

I couldn’t send this book out into the world without saying a special thank you to the inestimable, irreplaceable Penny Jordan, without whom I may never have written a word, and whom I think of with gratitude and love every time I sit down at my computer. Heartfelt thanks also go to Lucy Gilmour, whose wisdom and insight have guided me on the road from aspiring to published writer, and to Susanna Kearsley, whose generosity played a big part in the book’s journey to publication when she introduced me to Becky Ritchie of Curtis Brown at an RNA party (thank you, RNA!). Becky was its first reader and its greatest champion, and I’m incredibly fortunate to have her as my agent. I feel honoured to be a CB author, and sincere thanks go to Rachel Clements, Sophie Harris and Alice Lutyens for all they’ve done to send
Letters
out into the world. And to Deborah Schneider of Gelfman Schneider, who wrote me an email that actually made me shout with happiness. Thank you!

After the solitary months of writing, one of the best bits about actually selling a book is suddenly becoming part of a team. I’m hugely grateful to the warm, wonderful and welcoming people at Simon & Schuster UK and St Martins Press in the US; especially to Clare Hey and Anne Brewer for their thorough but sensitive editing, their patience and positivity, and for long email exchanges in which we discussed Dan and Stella, Will and Jess like they were people we all knew.

Final thanks go to my family. To my mum, Helen, who proved an excellent research assistant, calling upon her more senior friends for first-hand information about whether hotels did room service in the early 1940s and how houses were bought and sold in wartime. To my husband, John, for always,
always
believing it was just a matter of time until the book got published and never minding how long it took, and my daughters, Poppy, Rosie and Ella, for being patient about research trips thinly disguised as family holidays, and understanding that wearing pyjamas all day and messing about on the internet is work when I do it, but not when they do. (Sorrythanksloveyou xxx.)

An Interview with Iona Grey

Letters to the Lost
is a big sweeping love story. What came first: the characters or the storyline?

Actually, the title came first! For some time I had been working on a completely different novel, set in the early years of the twentieth century, and one day after lunch I was making my way upstairs to my study in the attic (reluctantly: to say it wasn’t going well would be an understatement) when I passed my daughter’s room and glimpsed a letter lying open on her desk. Instantly curious as to whom it could be from, I continued on my way but as I sat down at my keyboard the phrase ‘Letters from the Lost’ drifted into my head.

I still have the piece of paper that I began to make notes on that afternoon. At the top it says (ungrammatically) ‘Who are the letters to? Who are they from?’ In the dusty filing cabinet at the back of my mind I had an idea about an ordinary house, empty and long-abandoned, and I knew that the letters would arrive there. I think all the chaos and upheaval of London in wartime made it feel very possible that the house could have belonged to someone from that time who had planned a future there. A future that, for whatever reason, hadn’t happened as hoped. Those were the seeds from which the present and the past storylines grew.

What is it about letters that so appealed to you?

There’s just something immediately intriguing about a letter – as the one on my daughter’s desk proved! Especially in the twenty-first century when communication is mostly done by text and email, a handwritten letter is inescapably significant: special, and suggestive of words and emotions too important to be trusted to technology. Texts are dashed off in seconds, emails in minutes, whereas a letter takes time and involves planning; the purchase of paper, envelopes, stamps, and the unhurried ritual of setting out the address and date at the top of the page. A letter bears the personality of the sender in every stroke of ink, and it can be folded away and kept somewhere secret, to be rediscovered a lifetime later.

We switch between 1943 and seventy years later. What was is about those periods that drew you to write about them?

I feel helplessly drawn towards the Second World War as a setting, I think because I grew up with wartime stories. Born in the 1970s, mine is the generation whose parents and grandparents had lived through it and were beginning to filter their memories and experiences into children’s fiction. I remember the scramble to be next in line for Judith Kerr’s
When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit
and Noel Streatfeild’s
When The Siren Wailed
from the library cupboard in my primary school, and my great excitement when
Carrie’s War
by Nina Bawden (my favourite book) was adapted for a TV series. As I got older I continued to seek out books set in this era, so it was instinctive to place my own story during the war.

The 2011 bit was a balancing act: I knew I had to have a modern enough setting to make all the technology the story uses to be possible (there’s much internet searching for historical records, as well as email and skype) but I was aware of Dan and Stella’s advancing years!

If you could travel back in time to London during the Blitz what would you most want to see? Do you think you would recognise the city from your research, given how much it has changed?

What a great question! I think more than anything, I’d like to experience the atmosphere and the mood of the people. Today we use the term ‘Blitz Spirit’ quite casually to refer to cheerfulness in adversity if the train we’re travelling on breaks down, or when one of those rare heavy snowfalls makes everything grind to a halt, but I don’t think anyone who wasn’t alive during the war can possibly appreciate its true meaning: the relentless, understated courage required by everyone to simply keep going, through privations and separations and fear. I was captivated and moved by all the photographs I came across during my research, of people picking their way through rubble to go about their everyday business, smiling as they bedded down with their children on the platforms in the underground for the night, drinking tea amidst smouldering ruins. It’s humbling to remember that they weren’t just coping with such conditions for a few inconvenient days or weeks, but indefinitely, all the time.

In twenty-first-century Britain the threat to our lives from enemy attack is – in real terms – relatively low, and yet we live in an atmosphere of anxiety and high alert. I’m fascinated by the way the country, and in the Blitzed cities in particular, continued to function with apparent normality during those six long years between 1939 and 1945. To us Keep Calm and Carry On is a slogan that appears on mugs and tea towels, but to millions of ordinary people it was a basic principle of survival, when they didn’t know when – or how – the war would end.

The Second World War was a time of increased opportunity for women with many working outside the home for the first time, yet Stella remains very much within the domestic sphere. Was that a deliberate decision?

I’ve read – and loved – lots of novels set in the war in which women take on the new roles the conflict afforded them; delivering aeroplanes, working in government departments or for the S.O.E. doing terrifying and dangerous missions in occupied territory. The bravery shown by those pioneering women (who must have faced a degree of prejudice from their male colleagues in addition to everything else they had to deal with!) is fascinating and inspiring. However, I wanted a heroine who absolutely wasn’t heroic. Stella is shy and mousy and painfully self-effacing. She infuriates Nancy and at times she infuriated me. Wearing red lipstick on a night out is the closest she gets to daring, until she meets Dan.

I wanted to write about a woman like that because I think there must have been a lot of them, and history (understandably) doesn’t record their experiences as much as those of the pilots and ATS girls and secret agents. I think I was influenced by the stories I heard so often growing up, from my grandmother and godmother, about the challenges of feeding a baby in an air raid, or getting a new dress for a dance. Stella starts out being afraid of everything, wanting to bury herself in domesticity and almost pretend that the war isn’t happening, but when that becomes impossible she has to draw on inner reserves of courage to face the situation she finds herself in. It was this quiet, ordinary brand of bravery that interested me.

Which part was easier to write – the past or the present?

I wrote the past story, in its entirety, first, so in a sense that was the easiest. It was the core of the book, and its spirit – the spirit of the 40s – was the one that I wanted to evoke most strongly. I think of it now as being an absolute breeze to write, though I recently opened up my first draft document and saw all the scenes that were slashed and abandoned, so I think I’ve slightly deluded myself about that! The first scene I wrote was Stella and Charles’s wedding, which is initially seen through the eyes of Ada, and her voice came into my head with absolute clarity and really led me into the period. She’s only a fairly minor character but for me she was the lynchpin.