Juliet was determined to remain strong for them. She was the pilot of her family’s little plane, and no matter the indecision she felt, the questions that suffocated her when she turned off the lamp at night and lay awake in the slow-passing dark, the worry that she would make the wrong choice and in so doing ruin them, it was her responsibility to make them feel safe and secure the next day. The responsibility was that much heavier without Alan. It wasn’t easy being the only grown-up.
Most of the time she managed to keep a cheerful face on things, but there had been that one unfortunate moment on Wednesday evening. She had thought the children were all outside in the meadow behind the back garden and had been sitting at her desk trying to finish the article for Mr Tallisker before dinner. Since the meeting on Monday she’d become convinced of her editor’s wisdom: the diverse and fascinating ladies of the Birchwood and Lechlade branches of the WVS had provided invaluable inspiration and Juliet was determined to do them justice.
She’d been writing about Imogen Stephens’s daughter, describing the moment in which the young woman glanced through the kitchen window and saw that the man she loved, whom she’d been told to give up for dead, was walking up the garden path towards her. Juliet’s fingers had been tapping faster than the hammers of the typewriter could manage; she had been right there with her subject as she threw off her apron and ran to the door, as she warned herself not to believe her eyes, as she hesitated, unwilling to prove herself wrong, and then heard the key turn in the lock. And as Imogen’s daughter fell into her lover’s arms, Juliet’s own heart had overwhelmed her: the months of worry and waiting, her weariness and all the change; just for a minute she had let down her defences.
‘Mum?’ The voice had come from behind her, and then closer, ‘Mummy? Are you crying?’
Juliet, her elbows on her dressing table, her face in her hands, had frozen in mid-sob. She’d caught her breath as quietly as she could and said, ‘Don’t be silly.’
‘What are you doing then?’
‘Thinking, of course. Why? How do you do it?’ And then she’d turned around and smiled and tossed a pencil lightly at her daughter, and said, ‘Funny Bear! Have you ever known me to cry?’
And then there was Tip. He was a concern, but then he always had been. Juliet was still trying to decide whether there was anything new to worry about. She just loved him so much – not more than the others, but differently. And he had been taking himself off alone quite often. (‘Great,’ said the Alan in her mind. ‘He’s self-directed. Best way to be. He’s creative, you’ll see, he’ll be an artist when he grows up.’) But along with the games that he was playing, lining up the little soldiers and then knocking them down again, taking them on secret missions in the garden and the quiet pockets of the house, Juliet was pretty sure she’d seen him talking when there was no one else around. She’d scoured the trees for birds, but he seemed to do the same thing inside, too. There was a warm spot on the stairs that he appeared to like especially, and once or twice Juliet had caught herself lurking around the corner, watching.
One day, when he was kneeling beneath an apple tree in the back garden, she’d crept up softly and sat beside him. ‘Who are you talking to?’ she’d said, with an attempt at ease that sounded strained even to her own ears.
‘Birdie.’
Juliet glanced up at the leaves. ‘Is the birdie up there, love?’
Tip was staring at her as if she’d lost her mind.
‘Or has it flown away already? Maybe Mummy scared it?’
‘Birdie doesn’t fly.’
‘No?’
He shook his head. ‘She walks, just like you and me.’
‘I see.’ A ground-bound bird. They existed. Sort of. ‘Does she sing, too?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘And where did you meet this Birdie? Was she in a tree?’
Tip frowned slightly at his soldiers as if making sense of the question, and then shrugged towards the house.
‘Inside the house?’
He nodded without shifting his attention.
‘What was she doing there?’
‘She lives there. And in the garden sometimes.’
‘I see.’
He looked up sharply. ‘Can you? Can you see her, Mummy?’
Juliet hadn’t known how to answer. She’d considered agreeing with him that, yes, she too could see his imaginary friend; but while she was willing to accept that he’d invented a companion to provide comfort at a time of great change, feeding the delusion seemed to cross a line. ‘No, darling,’ she said. ‘Birdie is your friend, not Mummy’s.’
‘She likes you, though, Mummy. She told me so.’
Juliet’s heart hurt. ‘That’s lovely, darling. I’m glad.’
‘She wants to help you. She said that I should help you.’
Juliet could resist no longer. She took the little man in her arms and hugged him tight, aware of his frail limbs within her embrace, how small and warm he was, how far he had to go in life and how dependent he was on her – her, for God’s sake, poor lad.
‘Are you crying, Mummy?’
Damn it! Again! ‘No, darling.’
‘I can feel you shaking.’
‘You’re right. But they’re not sad tears. I’m a very lucky mummy to have a little boy like you.’
Later that night, when the children were fast asleep, their faces returned by slumber to younger, poutier versions of themselves, Juliet had slipped out into the cooling air and taken a walk along the river, stopping again at the jetty so she could sit for a time and look back at the house.
She’d poured a glass of whisky and swallowed it straight.
She could still remember the rage she’d felt that day in 1928 when she told Alan that she was pregnant.
But what she’d thought then had been fury at Alan’s failure to understand her, she perceived now had not been fury at all, but fear. A sudden, emptying sense of aloneness that had felt an awful lot like childish abandonment. Which probably explained why she’d behaved like a child, stropping off like that.
Oh, to go back and do it all again, to live it again. That day. The next. The one after. The arrival of Bea in their lives, and then Red, and then Tip. All three growing up and away from her now.
Juliet topped up her drink. There was no going back. Time only moved in one direction. And it didn’t stop. It never stopped moving, not even to let a person think. The only way back was in one’s memories.
When she’d returned to their room at The Swan that day, after they’d kissed and made up, the two of them had lain together on the little bed with its pretty iron rails, Alan’s hands either side of her face, his eyes searching hers, and he’d promised solemnly never again to insult her by suggesting that she work less.
And Juliet, with a kiss to the tip of his nose, had promised never again to stop him from giving up acting if he wished to sell shoes instead.
First thing Friday morning, Juliet read through her ‘Letters from the Laneway’ article for a final time and then wired it to Mr Tallisker. She’d given the piece a provisional title: ‘Women’s War Rooms: or, An Afternoon with the Ministry of Defence’ and crossed her fingers that her editor would agree to keep it.
Pleased with how the article had turned out, Juliet decided to take a morning’s break from her typewriter and, at the insistence of the older children, while Tip was playing with his soldiers in the garden, went with them to the barn in the back field. There was something they were desperate to show her.
‘Look! It’s a boat.’
‘Well, well,’ said Juliet, with a laugh.
She explained to the children that she’d glimpsed a little wooden rowing boat strung from those very rafters twelve years before.
‘The same one?’
‘I should think so.’
Red, who had already scurried up the loft ladder, was hanging from it now by one arm in a state of alarming excitement. ‘Can we get it down, Mummy? Say we can, please!’
‘Careful, Red.’
‘We know how to row,’ said Bea. ‘And besides, the river’s not too deep here.’
Tip came to mind, tales of drowned girls; dangers.
‘Please, Mummy, please!’
‘Red,’ said Juliet sharply. ‘You’ll fall and end up in plaster and that will be the summer over for you.’
Naturally he didn’t heed her warning but started bouncing on the ladder’s rung.