Joe arrived last Monday, a few weeks late, swaying his huge bulk up the front path like a human hay bale, a tweed cap pulled low on his head. Jessie’s absurdly grateful for him. He has already removed the knotted heart of brambles and rubble from the bottom of the garden, achieving in hours what would have taken her months. He’s built raised vegetable beds in the kitchen garden. Later today, he’s going to have a look at the pool so they can make a final call on it, the old well, other bits and pieces.
When he arrived, Jessie asked him if he knew the house at all, searching for that telltale flicker of recognition, the sign he might not last the morning. But he simply nodded. “Aye, I know the house,” and said his dad, Sid, and his uncle Brian used to do some work at Cornton Hall, just down the road, back in the day. Fine house down the river, did she know it? She did. Encouraged by Jessie’s interest, happy to chat, Joe dug into the grubby back pocket of his trousers, pulled out a wallet, and from it, a grainy black-and-white photo of a shy-looking man in country clothes and a fedora-style hat. “Dapper fella, my old man.”
Very dashing, Jessie agreed, peering at the picture, the ornate sweep of the wrought-iron gates of Cornton Hall in the background uncannily the same.
That was his pa all over, Joe continued proudly—always wanting to better himself. Never got the chance. Heart attack. Poor bugger. Jessie had looked up. Aye, Joe said, right at the end of that cursed summer, as if answering a question she hadn’t voiced. At this unexpected, lurching nod to Audrey, the past breaching the present once again, Jessie’s heart sank. But Joe lasted the morning. And the week. Thank goodness, Jessie thinks as the tractor vanishes into a cold huddle of trees, taking her thoughts with it, and Romy opens her hands and cheerfully declares, “Gone.”
Jessie is stabbing rosemary into a leg of lamb later that afternoon when Joe finds it. As part of his investigation into the tree root beneath the orangery floor, he dismantles the boxed-in window seat that edges the room—and there it is, a brown paper parcel wrapped in garden twine. Old houses always throw up a few surprises, he says, wiping a thread of sweat off his upper lip with his arm. Jessie thinks she’s probably had enough surprises at Applecote, thanks all the same.
The front door slams and Bella is beside them, eyes shining, fingers restless at the sides of her school blazer, desperate to snatch the parcel out of Joe’s hand. “Oh my God. What’s that?”
“Love letters probably,” jokes Joe.
Jessie stiffens. She’s had quite enough of other people’s love letters, too.
As Romy stacks the alphabet bricks on the kitchen floor, Bella starts to unpeel the brown paper on the table. Joe is right: letters, water-stained, disintegrating, handwritten. Jessie watches, sucks in her breath—she knows exactly what Bella will be hoping for—and is grateful to see the water-blurred ink is almost unreadable.
“Oh no, wait, nineteen . . .” Bella points to a smudged postmark. “Nineteen fifty-nine,” she says, looking up at Jessie excitedly. “That’s the year of those old newspapers, isn’t it?”
“The heat wave, you’re right. How funny.”
“I was totally meant to find this,” Bella mutters, sitting down, considering the letters and then slowly, carefully sliding letter fragments together using the tip of her index finger. “I reckon I can work them out.”
Jessie gets a glimpse of a different Bella then, the one the art teacher at Squirrels enthused about in her last report, creative, inquisitive, absorbed.
“Some are sent from . . . from Morocco. Others . . . Oh, look, Jessie, the later ones, from London.”
“A traveler, then,” says Jessie, returning to the lamb. She drizzles olive oil over the skin, tucks garlic cloves around its base.
“Oh. Oh no. They’re not addressed to Audrey,” Bella says flatly, disappointed. “Someone called Pam. And . . . it’s hard to make out the other names. A Dot? Is Dot actually a name?”
“Short for Dorothy.” Jessie thinks how the names already sound historic, surely due a revival. No one calls girls Pam or Dot anymore. Maybe, if they had another, a sibling for Romy . . . She stops herself sharply. They’re way off that right now, way off any kind of stability.
She sighs, glances at the clock. Will should have made the train. She imagines him settling in, the warmth of his body under his suit, the way he holds his book away from him, in denial at needing reading glasses.
“Listen to this. ‘Please, please write back soon, your loving . . .’” Bella reads out, squints, trying to work out the words. “Ma. It’s Ma, isn’t it?”
“Uh-oh,” shouts Romy with unfortunate timing. She pokes the tower of bricks and they crash to the floor.
“It is,” says Jessie quietly, standing behind Bella, wiping her hands on her apron. And for a moment, she can almost hear a mother’s voice, carried across time by the wind.
“A mother,” Bella whispers, her voice trailing such longing that Jessie is almost overcome by the urge to gather Bella in her arms. But as she lifts her hand, it stills in space, unable to reach farther, and she’s struck by the deluded futility of such an idea. Bella can’t bear Jessie touching her. She wants her mother, not a poor replacement. So Jessie turns back to the lamb. The ferric smell of fresh wet meat.
Will stumbles in as their supper finishes, drained, pale-faced, the freezing night clinging to him like a heavy damp coat. Romy wraps her body around his legs, brushes her little fingers lovingly over his evening stubble. But Bella hangs back, punishing him for his unreliability. And when Will goes to hug her, apologize for being a day late, she coolly steps away. Jessie sees hurt ripple over Will’s face and squeezes his hand, trying to tell him it’ll be all right. He turns to kiss her and, for the first time ever, their mouths miss and his kiss lands awkwardly on her cheek. She puts her hand to the spot where it lands and laughs. He looks at her, bemused, wondering why she’s laughing.
In that moment, Jessie feels acutely all the hours they’ve been apart these last five months, the way separation creates experiences that are no longer shared, parts of each other’s lives in which they no longer live. And she wonders how they will ever get themselves back.