‘Listen, you were wrong yesterday. I’m not going to change my mind. I’m not going to turn around and go back home. I want to know them – I need to know them.’ Them. The girls, the twins. His and Sarah’s. (One thing is certain: society has changed. Back in my day it would have been the woman shut out of her children’s lives if she dared to break company with their father.)
Sarah is speaking now, and she is no doubt reminding him that parenting is not about his needs, because he says, ‘I know; that’s not what I meant. I should have said that I think they need me, too. They need a dad, Sar; at least, they will one day.’
Further silence. And from the raised tone of her voice at the other end of the line, evident even from where I sit, she does not agree.
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘yes, I know. I was a terrible husband … Yes, you’re right, and that’s on me. But it’s been a long time, Sar, seven years. I’m a whole new set of cells … No, I’m not trying to be funny, I mean it. I’ve made changes. I even have a hobby. Remember that old camera—’
She is speaking again and he nods and makes occasional listening noises, eyes on the corner of the room where the walls meet the ceiling, tracing the line of the joist with his gaze as he waits for her to finish.
Some of the wind has left his sails when he says, ‘Look, Sar, I’m just asking you to give me a chance. A visit every so often – the opportunity to take them to Legoland or Harry Potter World or wherever it is they want to go. You can draw the boundaries however you see fit. I just want a chance.’
The call ends without a resolution. He drops the phone onto the bed and rubs the back of his neck and then he goes slowly to the bathroom and takes up the photo of the girls.
We are of one mind tonight, he and I. Each of us separated from the people we love; each of us wading through memories of the past, seeking resolution.
All human beings crave connection, even the shy: it is too frightening for them to think themselves alone. The world, the universe – existence – is simply too big. Thank God, they cannot glimpse how much bigger it is than they think. I wonder about Lucy sometimes – what she would have made of it all.
In the kitchenette, Jack eats some sort of bean-filled sluice straight from the tin. He makes no attempt to heat it. And when the phone rings again he hurries back in to check the screen but is disappointed. He doesn’t answer the call.
They all have a story, the ones to whom I am drawn.
Each one is different from those who came before, but there has been something at the heart of each visitor, a loss that ties them together. I have come to understand that loss leaves a hole in a person and that holes like to be filled. It is the natural order.
They are always the ones most likely to hear me when I speak … and, every so often, when I get really lucky, one of them answers me back.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Summer, 1940
They found the matches in an old green tin on a shelf behind the stovetop. It was Freddy who spied them, leaping from foot to foot with lusty enthusiasm and declaring himself the winner. Such gleeful celebrations sent Tip into another weary round of tears, and Juliet cursed quietly as she struggled to light the burner beneath the kettle. ‘Come, now,’ she said, as at last the match flared, ‘spilt milk, Tippy, love. It doesn’t matter.’ She turned to Freddy, who was still larking. ‘Really, Red. You’re four years older than he is.’
Freddy, preternaturally unperturbed, continued to dance as Juliet mopped Tip’s face.
‘I want to go home,’ said Tip.
Juliet opened her mouth to reply but Beatrice beat her to it. ‘Well, you can’t,’ she called from the other room, ‘because there’s nothing left. There is no “home”.’
Juliet held on to the last threads of her frayed patience. She had been jolly all the way from London, but it seemed further jolliness would be required. Addressing her daughter’s adolescent acerbity – which had arrived at least a year too early, surely? – would have to wait. She leaned closer to Tip’s alarmingly blotched face, aware with sudden pressing anxiety of his short breaths and sparrow shoulders. ‘Come and help me with the supper,’ she said. ‘I might even find you a little square of chocolate if I look hard enough.’
The welcome basket had been a kind touch. Mrs Hammett, the publican’s wife, had arranged it: a fresh loaf of bread, a wedge of cheese and a stick of butter. Strawberries and gooseberries in a muslin cloth, a pint of creamy milk and beneath it all – what joy! – a small block of chocolate.
As Tip took his square and retreated like a stray cat in search of a quiet place to lick his wounds, Juliet made a plate of cheese sandwiches for them all to share. She’d never been much good in the kitchen – when she met Alan she’d been able to boil an egg and the intervening years had not added much to her repertoire – but there was a certain therapy to it: slice the bread, scrape the butter, lay out the cheese, repeat.
She glanced as she did so at the handwritten card that had come with the basket. Mrs Hammett’s steady pen, wishing them welcome and extending an invitation to dinner at The Swan in the village on Friday night. Bea had been the one to remove the card from its envelope and was so taken with the idea of seeing the place where her parents had spent their honeymoon that it would have been unwise to say no. Strange to go back, though, especially without Alan. Twelve years now since they’d stayed in that tiny room with its pale, yellow-striped wallpaper, its leadlight window and view across the fields towards the river. There’d been a beautiful pair of teasel pods in a cracked vase on the chimney hearth, she remembered, and gorse that made the room smell of coconuts.
The kettle shrilled and Juliet called out to Bea to put her recorder aside and make the tea.
Huffing and flouncing ensued, but eventually a pot of tea arrived at the table where the rest of them had gathered to eat the sandwiches.
Juliet was tired. They all were. They’d spent the entire day on a packed train crawling west from London. Their provisions had been gone before they reached Reading; the journey afterwards had been exceedingly long.
Poor little Tip, beside her at the table, had deep, dark bags beneath his eyes and had hardly touched his sandwich. He’d slumped, cheek resting in the palm of his hand.
Juliet leaned close enough that she could smell the oiliness of his little-boy scalp. ‘How are you holding up, Tippy Toes?’
He opened his mouth as if about to speak but yawned instead.
‘Time to visit Mrs Marvel’s garden party?’
He nodded slowly, his curtain of straight hair shifting back and forth.
‘Come on, then,’ she said. ‘Let’s get you to bed.’
He was asleep before she’d even started to describe the garden in her story. They were still on the path, about to reach the gate, when his weight settled against her and Juliet knew that she’d lost him.
She allowed herself to close her eyes, matching her breathing to his, relishing the solidity of his small, warm body; the simple fact of him; his fluttering exhalations tickling her cheek.
A light breeze drifted through the open window and she could easily have fallen asleep herself if not for the sporadic punctuations of gleeful laughter and noisy thumps emanating from downstairs. Juliet managed to ignore them until the fun degenerated, predictably enough, into a spat of sibling discord, and she was forced to disentangle herself from Tip and make her way back down to the kitchen. She dispatched the older two to bed and, alone at last, took stock.