June 24, 1958
Dear Emmy,
The ballet was wonderful. Beautiful, actually. And I had a surprisingly nice time meeting Simon’s family. No one asked me about my own family except to say things like So Simon tells me your grandfather is a professor of literature at Oxford? I cornered Simon and asked him what he had told everyone about me. He just said he told them I was lovely and smart and that I lost my family in the war. You can say that and it answers a thousand other questions. The war is still spoken of here as if it happened yesterday even though it’s been thirteen years since VE Day.
So instead of answering awkward questions about where was home for me and did I have any brothers and sisters, I answered questions about what it’s like to be the granddaughter of an Oxford don.
Granny and Gramps had wanted me to go to college just like they wanted Neville to. I did try, Emmy. I tried to be the person they wanted me to be. But I found myself hungering for London. It was as if London were calling me to come back and become reacquainted with it again. There was unfinished business between London and me, and I needed to attend to it.
My grandparents, especially Gramps, weren’t happy about my wanting to leave college before I graduated but they handled my decision better than they had handled my father’s. They didn’t cut me off, financially or personally, which is what they did to Neville. Sometimes you get a second chance in life. The thing was, as soon as I decided I needed to come back, I felt ready to come back. It was the strangest thing. It was 1953 and I had just turned twenty, the same age you were when the war ended.
I think that’s why I had to come back then.
I looked for you in the faces of the people I saw on the streets.
I steeled my resolve, made a list of all the bridal shops, and I went to each one, looking for your name on the dresses or your face behind the counter.
The first job I had was with the telephone company, which made it easy for me to look for your name in all the telephone exchanges in England, but I did not find you.
Gramps helped me get the job at Masters & Sons Cartographers. He went to school with Reginald Masters, the owner. I’ve been there for three years, and Simon for two. We became friends and then he asked me to dinner. He’s never had a steady girlfriend before. He’s the studious type. I have dated, but I can’t say I’ve had a boyfriend. I’ve had boys date me and boys dance with me, but I’ve never had a boy care for me like Simon does.
As I got to know him better, I learned that he’d spent the war far from his parents, in a Suffolk farmhouse, cared for by foster parents who hadn’t a tenth of the affection for him and his brother that they had for their own children. If that were not hard enough, he was teased by the local children for the way he spoke, his city ways, and his bookish looks and behavior. When he returned to London after five years as an evacuee, he felt as displaced as I did when I came back to England. He isn’t afraid to show his sensitive side, because it’s really the only side he has. It took him forever to work up the courage to kiss me.
I like that about him, Emmy. I like that the very thought of kissing me makes him tremble.
He would marry me tomorrow if I said yes.
He has told me a hundred times he loves me.
But I struggle to say this back to him, even though I think what I feel in my heart for him is love. And that’s what scares me. I know what it is to have loved. To have a life that is uniquely yours and to have people in it who are your sun and moon and stars. I know that feeling.
And I dread how weak it makes us.
Simon says love doesn’t weaken us; it opens us. To love is not to be fragile; it is to be unlocked and open. And when something is open, other things can come in.
And things can be taken out, I said to him. When you’re standing there doing nothing remarkable, all you love can be yanked out of your open arms.
What can be given in one moment can be taken in the next.
Which is why I agreed to start seeing Dr. Diamant. After five years without professional counsel, this is why I must lay it all bare before another psychologist.
I don’t feel entitled to happiness, Emmy. I robbed you of yours.
Dr. Diamant says the war is to blame for what came between you and me.
I look around London and I see all the new buildings. It’s obvious that what the war did has been fixed.
What I did is what I must fix.
I want to fix what I broke.
Julia