The Girl on the Beach (17 page)

‘OK.’ Ted took the card and stuffed it into his pocket
without bothering to look at it. They thanked him and left. He breathed a huge sigh of relief but their arrival worried him. Had they been to the police? Perhaps he ought to lie low for a bit, or go somewhere else, perhaps north of the river. He waited until they had gone, then set off in the ambulance to reconnoitre a new patch.

‘He’s lying, isn’t he?’ Angela said as a taxi carried them away.

‘Yes, I’m pretty sure he is.’ It had taken a long time to trace the man and that had only been done through Mr Walker who had found someone at the factory who remembered Rosie being friendly with him. Mr Walker had given them Austen’s last known address but he no longer lived there. His landlady had had a forwarding address for his mail, but she couldn’t remember it. ‘I wrote it down on a piece of paper but I don’t know what happened to it. It was a long time ago. If I find it I’ll send it to you.’ They had given her their address and gone back home to the endless waiting and uncertainty which was taking its toll on Angela’s health.

They had decided the woman had forgotten all about them, when almost a year later she wrote saying she had found the address while redecorating after having some bomb damage repaired, so the next weekend off they went again, enduring hours on unreliable trains. Ted Austen hadn’t been at that address either, but they had been told he frequented a pub not far away.

Stuart had taken Angela back to their hotel and left her there while he went to investigate. He was glad he had; it had been a sleazy kind of place, where he imagined all sorts of shady deals going on, and that reminded him of the store
of cached goods in Rosie’s digs. He had hung around and pretended to want petrol. Someone heard him ask. ‘Ted Austen’s the man you want to see,’ he had told him.

‘Where can I find him?’

He had been told the whereabouts of the garages, gave the man a fiver and returned to the hotel to tell Angela, who had insisted on accompanying him. ‘Do you think he does know where Rosie is?’ she asked him now.

‘That’s another matter. I’m not sure. We’ll have to keep an eye on him.’

‘Do you think we should report him to the police?’

‘What for? We’ve got no proof. And if he’s arrested, we’ll never know what happened, will we?’ He had long ago stopped talking about finding their daughter alive.

She sighed. ‘I sometimes wonder if we’ll ever know that.’

‘Perhaps it’s time to let go.’

‘I don’t want to, not yet. Let’s go and see Miss Paterson. You never know …’

Donald Walker had given them Miss Paterson’s address at his son’s suggestion, but they didn’t expect to learn any more from her than they had from Rosie’s landlady and that dreadful man they had just left.

In that they were wrong. Miss Paterson had not met Rosemary, but she did know that she and Julie Walker were good friends. ‘Your daughter would go and visit Julie quite frequently,’ she told them. ‘I’m not sure, but I think she was looking after George the day Julie was killed. Julie wanted to see me about something important and Rosemary had offered to stay with the baby, so she could be quicker. Julie got back home to George and they died when the Anderson shelter had a direct hit, but as Rosemary was not also in the shelter she must have decided
to risk going home. I didn’t know she had disappeared.’

‘She never arrived back at her lodgings.’

‘Oh, I am so sorry. She must have been caught out.’

‘Caught out?’ Angela queried, startled. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m sorry, I meant caught out in the open when a bomb dropped.’

‘Then why did no one find her body?’

‘It was all very confused that night. It was the first really big raid and things weren’t as organised as they might have been and have been since. I’m dreadfully sorry I can’t help you any further.’

‘There is one thing,’ Stuart said, after some hesitation. ‘Do you know anything about any black market dealings?’

‘Oh dear.’

‘You do?’ Angela seized on the note of regret in Miss Paterson’s voice.

‘Well, Julie did say something.’

‘Then tell us, please. We must know.’

They listened as she recounted what she knew. ‘I’m sure it wasn’t anything really dreadful,’ she said. ‘Rosemary had this friend who could get things and Julie was always anxious about George and wanting to have everything she thought he needed, so she accepted what was offered. It got a bit out of hand and Julie owed Rosemary money. I lent her a little so that she could pay her, but last time I saw her, she said she wouldn’t do it anymore.’

‘I knew that man was lying,’ Angela said.

‘What man?’

Stuart told Grace Paterson about Ted Austen. ‘He denies all knowledge of Rosie,’ he said.

‘Maybe he’s telling the truth,’ Miss Paterson said. ‘If he
knew where she was, he wouldn’t have broken into her lodgings to retrieve his goods, would he? Always assuming that’s what did happen.’

They conceded she might be right, and though they had learnt a little more, they were no nearer finding their daughter, or, as looked most likely, her remains.

‘Angela,’ Stuart said carefully as the taxi took them back to Liverpool Street Station for the journey north. ‘I think we have to accept that Rosie died in that raid. If, as Miss Paterson says, she was caught outside …’ He dare not put his thoughts into words: that she had been blown into little pieces too small to identify.

She was in tears. Her fierce conviction that her daughter was alive somewhere, perhaps injured or frightened, was fading. She could not make the evidence fit. In a way she was glad they had pursued the search, in a way she was sorry because then there had been hope; now there was none. ‘If only we could have had a body to bury,’ she said, mopping her face.

He put his arm about her and drew her to him. ‘I know, love, I know. Perhaps we should have a service – not a burial but a remembrance, and a little plaque to put in the wall in the kirk. We could lay her to rest that way.’

‘Yes,’ she said, but she still wasn’t sure.

Everyone was talking about the second front that summer – when it would happen and where – but it was largely conjecture. Those in the know realised there was a great deal of work to be done before that happened: planning, raising the troops, gathering the equipment, arms and ammunition, and training, a great deal of training. Alec heard that volunteers were needed for a new parachute division and put himself forward. He liked the idea; it had a certain glamour attached to it and there was a shilling a day extra pay once you passed out. Not only that, he knew Eve was stationed at Ringway where the training was done. He had no intention of giving up on her.

He found himself in the newly formed 13
^th
Battalion and stationed at Larkhill on Salisbury Plain, with no idea what was in store for him. Being in the south it was a long way from Ringway, but they were not there long before they were sent to Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire. He did not tell Eve what he was doing; he was determined to make
her see that he would not accept defeat and the element of surprise might help.

Hardwick Hall was one of the most historically important stately homes in the country and they weren’t allowed anywhere near the house. Their quarters were huts on the estate. The training here was meant to toughen them up and weed out any who were not up to the physical aspect of the job. Alec found himself on assault courses set up in the woods, where they clambered about like monkeys in the treetops and wallowed in mud, and undertook route marches in full kit, carrying arms and ammunition. These started at ten miles, which had to be done in two hours, then twenty miles in three hours, and ended up with fifty miles to be done in twenty-four hours. Alec, used to working all day on the farm, considered himself fit, but this was something else altogether. The disgrace of being sent back to their units as unfit was a spur to most, but Alec had the extra one of being determined to go to Ringway. He arrived there in July 1943.

He had no time to make enquiries or go looking for Eve, the training was so intense. Apart from the continuing physical exertions – they were up at the crack of dawn for PT – he soon found himself in one of the hangars, where they learnt to fall, jumping out of an old fuselage onto matting, keeping knees and feet together and learning to roll, both forwards and backwards. They did it over and over again until it became second nature.

‘When are we going up in a bloody plane?’ someone muttered under his breath as they toiled to the top of the tower, a contraption from which they jumped, their rate of descent being controlled by a fan. It was much higher than a fuselage and the landing harder.

His words were heard by the RAF instructor. ‘Not yet, you don’t,’ he said. ‘Not until I’m satisfied you won’t break your ruddy neck on landing.’ He held out a helmet on the top of which were painted the words ‘Dig here’, which produced a laugh from the fledgling parachutists. Though they were all keen to make their first jump, they were also nervous. So much could go wrong. The instructor’s job was to minimise that.

At the end of the week they were told they could have the weekend off, which was received with a cheer and a general exodus into Manchester. Alec went looking for Eve.

She was on duty in the stores, looking forward to going off at lunchtime and having the rest of the day to herself, not that she could go until the queue of men with chits to draw stores had been dealt with. Head down, concentrating on the paperwork, she did not notice Alec until she heard his quiet voice say, ‘Hallo, Eve.’

Her head shot up. ‘Alec! What are you doing here?’

‘Looking for you.’

‘How did you get here?’

‘By train and truck, as if that mattered. I’m here.’

‘On leave?’

‘No, silly, posted here to do parachute training.’

‘Oh, Alec, why didn’t you warn me?’

‘I wanted to surprise you.’

‘You certainly did that.’

‘When are you off duty?’

She looked up at the clock on the wall. ‘In about half an hour.’

‘Come on, Corporal, we can’t stand here all day while you chat,’ the man next in the queue grumbled.

‘Go away,’ she told Alec.

‘OK, I’ll wait outside.’

She was in a blue funk. Alec was here and he was wonderfully vibrantly alive; he was not at the end of a letter, subject to the vagaries of the postal service. Feelings she had been manfully suppressing had suddenly shot to the surface on seeing him. She had wanted to throw herself into his arms at the same time as she was dismayed by her reaction. Now what to do? She toyed with the idea of slipping out of the back door and avoiding him, until she could sort herself out, but told herself that would be cowardly. She worked for the next half-hour in a daze, then walked out to meet him.

‘Where to?’ he asked, kissing her cheek.

‘Wherever you like. We could take a bus into Manchester, go to a dance, or the pictures.’ Anywhere public where they would not be alone, she thought, admitting to herself that, after all, she was a coward.

They went to see
Mrs Miniver
, which was not a good choice, Julie realised, when she found tears running down her face, and not all to be laid at the door of the film. She mopped them up, hoping Alec had not noticed. Afterwards, walking through the darkened streets to catch a bus back to the station, he put his arm about her shoulders. ‘You’re not as tough as you’d have us believe, are you?’ he said.

She laughed. ‘No, I’m a big softie.’

‘Could you not spare some of that softness for me?’

‘Oh, Alec, you know I do.’

‘Then why turn away from me?’

‘I haven’t turned away.’

‘Yes, you have. On that last leave at home, you pushed me off.’

‘I’m sorry, it’s just that …’ She was floundering and
stopped to calm herself. ‘It’s just that life is so uncertain. You never know from one day to the next what’s going to happen, do you?’

‘And after losing all your family, you are afraid of losing me, is that it?’

It was a way out. ‘Partly, I suppose.’

‘Isn’t that all the more reason to make the most of the time we might have together, however long or short. That’s what Florrie and Matt decided and I think they were right.’

‘But you don’t know much about me, do you?’

‘I know all I want to know. The past is gone. You can’t bring it back.’

She sighed. ‘I wish I could.’

‘Oh, Eve, I wish I could take away the hurt. Please, let me try.’

‘You’ll hate me then.’

‘I could never hate you. I love you. Don’t you understand what that means? It means that I want to marry you, to call you mine, to be joined with you, body, mind and spirit for always. We could be happy together and I could make you forget the horrors.’

‘Forget,’ she murmured. ‘I wish I could and I wish I didn’t.’

‘That’s an enigmatic statement if ever there was one.’ There was a bench at the bus stop and, instead of going to stand in the queue, he pulled her down beside him onto it. ‘Are you going to tell me what’s troubling you?’

She looked about her; there were people coming and going, not the time or place to unburden herself, but she knew she would have to, sooner or later. She could not go on stringing him along. ‘Not now, it’ll take too long. Tomorrow. I’m off duty.’

‘Is that a promise?’

‘Yes.’

He hugged her to him and kissed her cheek. The bus drew up and they climbed aboard behind the queue. He was cheerful; she was withdrawn. Already she was rehearsing in her mind what she was going to say. And after it was all over and he had left her, angry and disappointed, she would have to write to Florrie and repeat it all. And that would be the end of their friendship, the end of her visits to the farm and the dear people there who had been so good to her. She would be alone again.

‘Good God!’

They had taken a bus into the countryside and walked for miles. He had tried light conversation, but she was unresponsive until he had almost lost patience with her and pulled her down onto the grass beside the track. The sun was shining, the heather was in bloom and the skylarks soaring, but she noticed none of it. He put his arm about her shoulders. ‘Eve, we can’t go on like this.’

‘I know.’

‘Then what’s bugging you?’

She had taken a deep breath and launched into her story, the words tumbling over each other in her effort to get them out, and at the end of it his reaction had been, ‘Good God!’

‘They told me I’d had a child. Whether it’s alive or dead, I’ve no idea. Whether I wanted it or not, I’ve no idea. Whether I loved its father, I have no idea. How can you want to marry someone like that, someone who does not exist?’

‘Of course you exist. You are sitting here beside me. The problem is, what do we do about it?’

‘There’s nothing we can do. I’ve tried everything.’

‘Do you think you will remember in time?’

‘At first I thought I would, the doctors thought so, but it’s been so long now I think it’s gone for good.’

‘I can’t imagine what it must be like, not to remember a childhood, not to remember mother, father, sister, going to school, taking that first job. Can’t you recall any of that?’

‘No. Sometimes I have odd flashes of what I think might be memories, but they’re never substantial enough to grasp and say, ‘Yes, I remember that.’

‘What sort of flashes?’

She told him about the long corridor in what she assumed was an institution where she might have left her baby, the feeling that it was at the seaside, reinforced by the most recent one about the bouncing bombs, which had left her unsettled for days, and her fear of being shut in the dark, which she assumed was on account of being buried under rubble during the air raid. ‘As far as I am concerned that was when my life began,’ she said, relaxing a little now the story had been told. ‘The seventh of September 1940.’ She gave a troubled laugh. ‘Eve Seaton came into this world already an adult.’

‘Oh, my love,’ he said, hugging her to him. ‘I wish I could help, but if you can’t remember, you can’t, and that’s it.’

‘I’m sorry I’ve been such a disappointment to you, but you’ll soon find someone else.’

‘Find someone else! What are you talking about? I don’t want anyone else. I want you. Why, if you were to marry me, you would have a new name, a real one.’

His words echoed for a second, as if she were being nudged, but the feeling left her as had so often happened in
the past. ‘But would such a marriage be legal?’

‘I don’t see why not. In any case, I don’t care. The past’s gone, water under the bridge.’

‘No, it’s not. It’s a whirlpool, going round and round, going nowhere, dragging me down and everyone I love with me.’

‘Eve Seaton, you are talking nonsense. Either you put the lost life behind you and get on with the one you have, or we make a concerted effort to find out the truth and all that entails, good or bad. There must be something that can be done. Somewhere or other there must be lists of people missing in air raids. At least you know the place and the date, so that’s a starting point.’

‘I’ve done all that.’

‘Then we’ll do it again. Together.’

‘And if we don’t succeed?’

‘Then I want you to promise me you’ll put it behind you and become Mrs Alec Kilby.’

‘Can you put it behind you?’

‘Yes.’ He was firm on that score.

‘I don’t think you realise how difficult it will be. Every day something or someone will remind you that you’ve only got half a wife, the other half will be gone into some void, a ghost to haunt you. I might even be a criminal. Who’s to tell?’

‘I don’t believe that for a moment. Losing your memory does not change you fundamentally. You’re still the same person inside, still the sweet, compassionate, brave Eve Seaton I know and love, and I reckon you always were.’

‘Oh, Alec.’ She was in tears. He mopped them up.

‘Don’t cry, sweetheart, I was trying to cheer you up.’

She gave him a watery smile. ‘You have.’

‘Good.’

‘What about Florrie and your parents? I’ll have to tell them now I’ve told you.’

‘Of course, but they know how I feel about you and will go along with whatever we decide. All I need to know is if you love me. That’s all that matters.’ He turned towards her and took both her hands in his, looking earnestly into her eyes, such very blue troubled eyes. ‘Do you? Yes or no?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thank heavens for that.’ He gathered her into his arms and kissed her good and long, but he was careful not to let his feelings run away with him. This love was too precious to spoil and he had to take it very slowly. He was also aware that nothing else had been resolved. It was all very well to say they would find out the truth, but how could they do anything about it while they were subject to the vagaries of the War Office? Sleuthing would have to wait while he went back to helping win the war.

For the next few weeks he saw Julie as often as he could, but the training was even more intense as they progressed. They had to do eight jumps to qualify, three from a cage suspended from a barrage balloon, one of which was done at night, and five from an aircraft. He was a bundle of nerves before that first balloon jump, as they all were, but once in the air with the parachute open above him it was a wonderful sensation. They had been told how to control their descent by manipulating the harness straps, but that was not easy as they swung to and fro while an instructor on the ground yelled up at them through a loudspeaker. They all landed safely, if not elegantly, rolled up their parachutes and carried them to the trucks to be taken back
to Ringway, where WAAF parachute packers would repack them.

‘It’s the most exhilarating feeling,’ he told Julie, later that day when they both had a few hours off duty. ‘You feel so free and the world’s spread out below you. The landing was a bit hard and one or two hurt themselves …’

She knew that happened quite often and had seen the ambulance careering out of the gate towards Tatton Park where the men were dropped. Broken femurs and ankles and dislocated shoulders were fairly common. Now and again there was a fatality when a parachute failed to open ‘But you were OK?’