AT THE END of the evening, Olivia took Nana back to St. Bridget’s. Far from finding it upsetting, she had enjoyed the evening and Olivia was pleased she’d taken her. She only wished Pappy could have been there to see the shop so alive. He would have been so proud.
At St. Bridget’s, the nurses made a great fuss over Nana, asking her all about her day out. Olivia waited until Nana was settled in bed before she kissed her good-bye. She hated to leave her, always wondering if it would be the last time. She hugged her as tightly as she dared and told her she loved her, but Nana had already dozed off and didn’t hear.
When Olivia returned to the shop, she found a note on the desk from Ross to say well done on a fantastic night and that he’d sold loads more books after she’d left (ha ha). She loved that he’d written her a note. She loved that he’d signed it “Ross Bailey, Writer.” She especially loved the illustration of a fairy he’d added at the bottom. It looked a lot like her and whether coincidence or intentional, she loved that something so simple could make her smile from her eyes to her toes.
She spent a little while reading the wishes the children had left for the fairies in the window, where the yellow cinquefoil and white harebells bloomed and green shoots were entwined around the window frame. Taking a piece of paper from her notebook, she wrote her own wish, adding it to the others beside the fairy door.
Upstairs, in the flat, she searched in the boxes from Bluebell Cottage and looked through the family albums, but couldn’t find anything that resembled the additional fairy photograph Nana had described.
Despite being physically exhausted, Olivia couldn’t sleep. She began packing for her trip to England, more eager than ever to get to Cottingley and more reluctant than ever to go back to the apartment in London to pick up a few things. Even though, in one of their few curt e-mail exchanges since his brief visit, Jack had told Olivia he would be away on a business trip, it would still be difficult to be back there. She’d already started the tricky business of canceling the wedding—endless apologies from her, endless tears from shocked family and friends. Their understanding and condolences were tough to take since she was the one causing all the upset, but she reminded herself constantly that an unhappy marriage would have been far tougher and would have lasted far longer. As Henry had told her when she’d confided in him about the wonderful mess she’d made of everything, this, too, would pass.
To take her mind off things, she lit a candle and set the radio playing quietly in the background. With Hemingway purring at her feet, she reached for Frances’s manuscript, happy to escape from real life for a while and lose herself among the forgotten pages of someone else’s story . . .
NOTES ON A FAIRY TALE
Cottingley, Yorkshire. August 1920.
I would travel to Cottingley with our family friends, the Bainses, who were returning to Bradford after holidaying in Scarborough.
Mummy said her good-byes to me amid the bustle and noise on the station platform. I promised to behave for Aunt Polly and Uncle Arthur and to try my best to take more photographs of the fairies so that the men in London would be pleased.
“Do try, Frances,” she urged, dabbing at my cheek with a moist handkerchief to wipe away a smut of smoke. “I know how daft you and Elsie can get when you’re together.” She gripped my shoulders and lowered her voice as she looked me straight in the eye. “This isn’t a holiday. You’re to remember why you’re going.” I nodded. “And when you’re done, we can put the whole business behind us.”
I’d always trusted those dolphin-gray eyes. I hoped she was right.
The slamming of the carriage doors and a great hiss of steam signaled that it was time to go. I stepped into the carriage as the stationmaster blew his whistle, the shrill cry following me inside the compartment, prodding and poking at my conscience. Tell her! it shrieked. Tell her! I pressed my glove to the window as Mummy blew a kiss and the pistons began to turn, and I knew it was too late. With a jolt and a judder, the great locomotive groaned along the tracks until I couldn’t see Mummy anymore and the soot-blackened walls of the station gave way to green countryside as the confession I had almost made faded into the distance, smothered by the great clouds of smoke streaming from the funnel.
The locomotive ate up the miles between Scarborough and Bingley, whistling intermittently to the village children who ran through the fields to wave at the passengers. I held the new camera on my lap and wondered why it was that life kept pulling me in such strange directions; why it was that only a few years ago I’d been happily playing on Cape Town’s beaches, all thoughts of fairies confined to the pages of my books, and now fairies were all I ever thought about. I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep so that Mrs. Bains couldn’t interrogate me about my visit to Cottingley, or the new Cameo camera I was taking with me.
Despite my apprehension, I couldn’t deny the prickle of excitement when I stepped onto the platform at Bingley station, nor could I resist the smile that returned to my lips as I watched the familiar view through the motorcar window: the gorse and heather, the sweeping views, the rolling hills and steep valleys, the soaring chimney stacks from the distant mills and factories. It was like looking at old friends, and when Uncle Arthur pulled up outside Number 31, it was like coming home.
Elsie was waiting at the gate. She was nineteen now, more woman than girl. I felt shy in her company, unsure of her full bosom and the elegant limbs she draped across the furniture like silk fabric. Elsie wasn’t just older. She was a different shape. A different person altogether.
Aunt Polly was all smiles and lavender water, exactly as I remembered her. “Eee, Frances Griffiths. You get taller every time I see you. Must be all that sea air, eh? Come into the front room, love. Kettle’s on.”
The subject of fairies was fiercely avoided as we stuck to more comfortable topics of conversation: How was Scarborough? How was Annie? How was my father settling into his new appointment as a regimental sergeant major in Catterick? How was school? All this from Aunt Polly, whose questions poured out of her without end, much like the cups of strong tea she poured from the cracked pot. It was almost a relief when she finally acknowledged the elephant in the room.
“Quite a turnup for the books, this business with the photographs, isn’t it, Frances? Who’d have thought they would be considered so interesting? Gentlemen from London visiting the likes of us!”