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A division of HarperCollinsPublishers
www.harpercollins.co.uk
HarperImpulse
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperImpulse 2018
Copyright © Lorna Gray 2018
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
Cover design by Ellie Game © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
Lorna Gray asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008279592
Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008279585
Version: 2018-06-08
For my family
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
A Letter From the Author to the Reader
Acknowledgements
Keep Reading…
Also by Lorna Gray
About the Author
About HarperImpulse
About the Publisher
I have been taught that I must appreciate the origin of a thing before I can truly understand its meaning. This is because my father has a passion for antiques and he is a man obsessed by the written record, the provenance that proves where an item began its life and charts its path through time. For him, provenance does more than add value to a precious object by declaring it to be a genuine relic from some notable moment in history. It ties him to long-gone human lives. It gives him a chance to touch what they have touched and take their stories as his own.
Very well – put in those terms, the provenance of my story is this: I grew up in London and my teenage years were an unspeakable mess of war. I belong to that unheroic generation of girls who were too old to be evacuated with the smaller children but too young to lend my weight to the war effort. While older women were called up to save the nation by building aeroplanes or tilling the land or were generally being terribly useful in the WAAF or as a WREN, I did nothing very useful at all. If anyone has ever wondered who did the mundane work behind shop counters after those brave women went off to be busy elsewhere, the answer is that the ordinary, everyday work was fulfilled by girls like me.
At the age of fourteen I left a life of disrupted lessons in a dingy air-raid shelter for a daily journey to work in Knightsbridge. I watched through dirty bus windows as, day by day, the bold London landmarks that had charted my youth fell prey to the destructive power of the Blitz. And I did nothing.
Now, though, the war is over. The recent past has grown a little brighter; a little clearer. The whine that was once the sirens and dogfights of yesteryear has become, these days, really nothing more sinister than the shriek of black swifts that tumble playfully in summer skies. Although, even their cries have been silenced of late. This is because the little birds left about a week ago to pass onwards on their migration and their departure has been a fitting companion for the decision I made last Saturday. The one where I gave notice to my employer and decided that after two years of peace it was time to stop worrying that childhood had made me a passive witness to conflict. It was time I took my life off its war footing and found what hope this adult life could bring.
Unfortunately, before announcing this grand scheme to my parents, I really ought to have remembered that I am abysmally poor at speaking what I feel under pressure.
I know now what my father suspected. After all, I’ve already mentioned that my father believes that the key to everything lies in understanding the past. So if I’d hoped to get my parents to listen to what I really wanted to do with my future, I should have chosen an easier excuse than my determination to stop living each day like London in peacetime was just the same as war and always stifling.
It probably wouldn’t have made any difference anyway. My parents found it far more digestible to deduce that their young daughter had been made restless by the after-effects of an unfortunate romance. And since I couldn’t entirely refute it, the only compromise we could agree on was the exchange of this urban post-war stagnation for an altogether different kind of peace in the form of a long overdue visit to a spinster cousin in the timeless Cotswolds. My parents saw her as a usefully dithering older relation who would act out the time-worn part of a cautionary tale and save me from tripping into bitter independence. I thought my parents were mistaking me for someone else. My life so far had not exactly been renowned for its brave choices. The fact I’d let them argue me into coming here was proof enough of that, I should have thought.
Anyway, irrespective of all that, I’d have stood a rather greater chance of receiving this cautionary experience had my cousin actually been at home when I arrived.
In fact, by her absence, my cousin is responsible for many things. Had she met me at the bus stop as she had promised, I wouldn’t have been forced to walk the two miles alone with my case to her tiny cottage at the bottom of this dusty valley. If she’d been at home when I finally arrived here, I would have had her company instead of nothing but the mile upon mile of blue sky – a novelty in itself after the smogs of London – and my only neighbour wouldn’t have been the deserted single-storey building that stood just beyond the turn of the track about a hundred yards upstream, firmly dispelling the fantasy of a simple life passed in a rustic hovel. My cousin’s company might also have eased the disorientating sense of loneliness after the important bustle of leaving London, which was only broken by the distant telephone that proceeded to ring on and off for the next three hours.
She certainly might have known who the owners were and decided to do something about it before the sun dipped below the ridgetop behind me. And if she had, when I finally gave in and took it upon myself to labour my way back up that trackway with the view of at least seeing if I could be of any use, I could have either escaped or averted this fresh proof that conflict stalked everywhere, even in peacetime. I certainly wouldn’t have found an old man lying flat out on his garden path beneath peas and feathery carrot-tops, with a wound to his head.
Chapter 2
He wasn’t alone. I arrived at the moment that the fellow who had been trying to help him had to rapidly set him down on the crude stone slabs of the path because the old man’s weight had grown too much.
I was beside them before the old man had even stopped falling. Despite my first impression, this was not an act of war. There were no armies here, no great propaganda campaigns to tell us which nations were on the side of right. I had to make up my own mind and all I saw was a poor old man who had lately bashed his head and made it nearly to his own front step before abruptly succumbing to the shock. I remember his face vividly. There was a greyness to it. His skin was creased by age, with fine woolly hair over the top. He was wearing the coarse shirt and heavy brown trousers of the ordinary countryman. His garden path was a narrow line between overcrowded beds and he stirred a little as I reached his side. One side of his face was gritty from his fall. There was a smear of blood on his right hand that spread to my arm as he watched with that blank instinct that comes from partial consciousness while I dropped into a crouch and examined him.
I don’t remember the second man. He remains an infuriatingly formless shape in my memory of that day. The image has been subsequently enhanced by the memory of other encounters in other places at different times, but that day I only saw the way he was tugging ineffectually at the fallen man’s gardening coat in an attempt to make the old man rise and that he surrendered the invalid’s care to me just as soon as I reached his side. He did it with relief, it seemed to me. I remember the hasty instruction he gave to stay and do what I could, and the way his dirtied hand briefly patted my shoulder as he slipped out past me towards the gate. I heard the breathless urgency in his voice as he said that he would fetch better help. I barely looked at him. My eyes were all for that semi-conscious old man and the awful graze on his temple, and the flies that clustered everywhere.
It was about three minutes later when I caught again the renewed ringing of that solitary mark of human companionableness – the still distant telephone – that it dawned on me how strangely the man had made his exit. I also realised just how brutally silent everything else was. The telephone wasn’t close by; there were no telegraph wires reaching across this disordered triangle of five or so dwellings, but that persistent drone was near enough to prove the point. Clearly, wherever the other man had gone, he certainly hadn’t gone to call the doctor.
Suddenly it felt utterly exposed to be crouching over the old man like this. We were enclosed in a cocoon of greenery where anyone might be watching us and yet we might not see them. It was a very raw means of lurching into the sudden twist of considering what had really happened here. My search of those blazing shadows was stilled between telephone rings when the rattle of a car engine rose like a skylark on the air.
The busy traffic of London was unknown here. This single car claimed the entire valley as its audience. I’d thought at first it was departing; that it showed that the man was making his departure even more final. But the thread of sound became more defined, pausing only for the brief mumble as it met a gate across the lane, before continuing its ascent once more from the valley bottom. Now it was running along the ridgetop just above the village. I had the awfulness of waiting here with the sudden sense of my uselessness if it should turn out that this car was carrying the man back to us. I didn’t know what it would mean for me if he should return in an entirely different spirit to the sort that brought assistance. Because I had no doubt at all that if no one had been near enough to answer that telephone, certainly no one would hear any shout of mine.
The car didn’t veer harmlessly away to leave me with nothing but a sense of my stupidity for cringing here while better help passed us by. I waited, braced amongst the bees to do Lord knows what, while the whining engine turned off the lane at the plain stone barn and dropped into the village triangle.
It stopped. A voice spoke to another inside the neat little burgundy runabout and then a man and his small white dog got out.
He wasn’t the man who had left me here on this path. This man was tanned and fair-haired, or at least had ordinary hair made fair by the sun, and he was of that age, about thirty, where these days you could be reasonably certain he’d encountered harder scenes than this during his war service. He certainly reacted quickly now. Quicker than I did. I shot to my feet and he’d passed me with a hand to my arm to set me to one side before I’d even spoken. Somehow I’d anticipated more discussion first. So I staggered there and dithered while he dropped to one knee by the old man’s side, and felt I ought to be barring his path or helping or something; and discovered instead that he was harmless and I wasn’t needed, and found time to notice the ugly streak down my wrist and to reel from it and feel a little sick.
A voice demanded my attention. It was the driver of the car. He’d climbed out and now he was standing in the gateway and saying, ‘You must be Miss Sutton, I presume? What’s happened to Mr Winstone here, do you know?’
It was a relief to be recalled to the gate by the car driver’s questions. It was like stepping out into a summer’s day. Behind me, the invalid was still befuddled and his crooked old hand was bloodier than ever where it had touched his head. The small cottage that loomed over him was made of crumbling stone, and so were its neighbours on this narrow terrace. I was rubbing heat back into my skin, a gesture of general uncertainty about my role here and whether it really was right that I was surrendering responsibility for Mr Winstone’s welfare to the kneeling man like this, and I had to shudder as I discovered what lay under my grip for a second time.
The man I met at the gate prompted me into speech. He ducked his head to meet my eye – his eyes were brown and alert and he was very tall. This was a deliberate attempt to establish control. He wouldn’t have known it but the technique was familiar. It was amiable enough but it wasn’t far removed from the methods the air-raid wardens had used to instil calm in panicked slum dwellers after they had abruptly discovered a void where the house next door had been.
I imagine the technique had been well used in the London Blitz, but it certainly didn’t work on me now. This man woke me to the disquiet that lurked within and I forgot the stain on my arm and said with a voice made sharp by suspicion, ‘What do you mean ‘presume’? How do you know who I am? And who is he?’
Along the path, I saw that Mr Winstone had managed to sit up and was feeling his head and talking, or possibly cursing, to the younger man, who was resting on one knee beside him amongst the spilling geraniums. Old Mr Winstone spoke in the elongated vowels of the West Country. The younger man had a tanned hand lying easily across the point of his other knee with a finger hooked into the collar of his enthusiastic dog. His manner was intense and restrained to gentleness all at the same time. His accent was softer than the old man’s. He looked and sounded like a working man; rough clothes over strong limbs.
In quite a different tone, the taller man by my side told me calmly, ‘He’s Danny Hannis. Bertie Winstone’s son.’
Briefly, very briefly, my gaze flickered from its watch on the path to this man’s face. His mouth formed a benign acknowledgement of the difference in names. He amended, ‘Stepson. Danny was in town to pick up a part for the tractor, so it made sense to come home with me. He knows I take my car on a Wednesday. I know who you are because we don’t get many visitors to these parts and, besides, I’m a friend of your cousin. She didn’t tell me directly that you were coming, but word gets about. I’m Matthew Croft, by the way. How did you find him like this?’
There, amongst the patient answers to my questions, was the real question of his own.
I stopped trying to goad myself into a distress of helplessness and looked straight at him for the first time. He was older than his friend by a few years in a way that made him too old for me but probably very suitable for my cousin. Since my mind was still clearly struggling to let down its guard and determined to record every detail it could now, I also happened to notice that his hair was fair, his eyes were very dark in this violet sunset, and his clothes and general demeanour made it seem more likely that he was on his way home from a day in the office rather than a day in the fields.
When my mind finally decided after all this that it was time to answer his question before he had to repeat it a third time, I found myself saying on a note of disbelief, ‘There was a man. He went that way.’ I pointed my hand towards the corner of the lane, with a vague bias for the direction it took along the ridgetop past that barn towards the gated section and downhill, perhaps, to the valley bottom. ‘He had a pale jacket …’
I caught Matthew Croft’s expression. It broke through my seriousness and left a rueful smile in its place. I was not, it seemed, destined to be a very valuable witness.
Danny Hannis must have lately arrived at pretty much the same conclusion about his stepfather. Mr Winstone didn’t seem to know who had left him on the floor either. Danny’s swift glance along the path towards his friend was like a brief release of concealed impatience. It came in a blast and then his gaze moved on to me. At this range his eyes looked blue or perhaps green and very clear indeed. And rather too sharp. He saw the blood on me. His look began as a question but it was a shock to see my own suspicion reflected there upon his face.
I heard myself saying quite automatically, ‘You know, since that fellow is presumably not coming back again to pick up Mr Winstone after all, shall we have a go at patching him up ourselves?’
It was for once the right thing to say. Suspicion evaporated for all of us. I saw Matthew Croft’s nod. He beckoned and I heard the creak behind as a youth scrambled out of the car and we all bustled Mr Winstone into the house. Inside, this place was no bigger than the average worker’s terrace in a London slum and if Danny Hannis lived here with his stepfather, it amazed me that there should have been enough space for him. The old man himself was settled into the dipped seat of an armchair and the younger men propped him there while I scurried into the equally diminutive kitchen to scour my skin free of that revolting stain. There was no tap, only a stone sink and a jug of water drawn from the village pump, but there was soap and a good cloth and at last my skin was pink and clean and I could stop acting like a shocked bystander and think of going back and offering help in the other room.
I didn’t stay there for long. I found myself being sent back into the kitchen very smartly on an order from Matthew Croft to do something useful like preparing warm water using the kettle on the stove.
The ancient cooking range was the sort that had to be lit in the morning and kept lit all day if any cooking was to be done, even in summer. It was sweltering in that tiny space and it took about ten minutes to heat the water. I reappeared in the doorway with a basin and a clean cloth in time to make Danny Hannis abandon the question he had been about to ask and rise instead from his crouch before the old man. ‘Come along, Pop,’ he said with that slight slant to the voice that men use to imply considerable care. ‘Bear up. What’s all this you’re saying about water? You didn’t get a good look, I suppose?’ This last was meant as a question for me without so much as turning his head.
I couldn’t tell him anything about any water beyond the basin in my hands. There was no need to say anything about burglary either. I’d overheard them eliminating that much and, besides, both the kitchen and this equally tiny living room were perfectly clear of signs of invasion. I might have still held out some hope that the departed male had merely been an awkward neighbour helping the old man home after a fall. Except that I could see now that my usefulness in the kitchen had the air of being inspired by that all too familiar division based on gender – and therefore presumed fitness to bear the hard truth.
I also believed Matthew Croft had only encouraged Danny to ask me his question in order to pave the way for giving me firm thanks and sending me on my way. I could tell they’d discussed this from the way Danny reacted when I repeated the all too brief description of a male with dark hair and a pale jacket. He hadn’t expected me to have anything to add. I was, in fact, forgotten at the instant I began speaking and Danny Hannis returned to his crouched position before the armchair. His hand went out to Mr Winstone’s where it rested upon the arm of his chair, and he fixed the old man with the most compelling concern I have ever seen and it shook me.
I heard him repeat for what had to be the hundredth time, ‘What happened to you, Pop? What could possibly motivate someone to bash you over the head?’
And if I had ever really felt I might need to stay to defend Mr Winstone from this man, the feeling was dispelled here. There was, beneath the search for information, genuine bewilderment in his voice.
It was at that moment that fresh voices came from the path and the owners of them entered through the front door. And when I say these newcomers brought a sharp return of tension, this feeling was based on Danny’s reaction rather than mine.
Chapter 3
The first to come in was a woman in her mid-thirties, who matched Matthew Croft in being rather taller than the norm for her sex. She stopped on the threshold, took in the oddity of a scene where the old man was sitting in his armchair surrounded by his stepson, a friend and a stranger. Then she stepped in and moved Danny aside from his place before his stepfather’s chair with a murmur and a familiar touch to his wrist.
She was the sort of woman who might have posed for any of the propaganda photographs that had proliferated during the war; the sort where capable women in crisply tailored uniforms were caught in the last dramatic moment before setting off on a mad uncharted flight across England in order to deliver a new aircraft to its crew. Now she was asking Danny Hannis to explain how the old man could pass from being well and unharmed at her house a few hours ago, to this. I gathered she was a Mrs Abbey, who lived a short distance away. She was not only an older and decidedly more self-assured woman than I; she was also braver. Her hands went straight to the wound on Mr Winstone’s head.