by Rafe Posey
She’s been back in Fenbourne not quite two days, and she has spent half that time upstairs in this room she doesn’t know, the eaves low over her window, trying to adjust to the strange new angles of her life.
* * *
• • •
Breakfast is a tired affair with too-damp oatmeal cladded with milky skin, a far cry from the lush fruits of Colombo, but at least she’s had weeks to make her transition back to the real world and start to acclimate. Mrs. Bixby, who has run the Rose and Crown for as long as June can remember, hovers and clucks like an old hen. June, accustomed now to the odd blend of autonomy and order that the war provided, has no idea how to talk to her.
Afterward, she pedals a borrowed bicycle through the village. She nods to the grocer and the butcher’s boy. Everything is the same, as long as she avoids the church and the devastation that surrounds it. The postmistress stops her to offer condolences, and June struggles to respond, especially when she sees the curiosity, and the questions she’ll have to dodge, flickering in the postmistress’s eyes. After so many years of only seeing colleagues who knew what she was doing, who were part of her work, she lacks a frame of reference to talk to others. She carries too many secrets within herself now. There are too many questions she must guard against.
* * *
• • •
The village falls behind June as she pedals out past the garage where the smith used to be, past the poplar-lined turn that leads to the Ely road, past the low, squat bungalow where Mrs. Hubbox lives. Something has kept June from visiting her, an anxious, uncomfortable echo she can’t quite identify. Cook has retired to a village in Kent with her daughter’s family, but June doesn’t know what the Attwells’ former housekeeper is doing now, and she knows without question that her parents would want her to look out for Mary Hubbox, a fixture for June’s whole life. It’s enough to know for now that Mrs. Hubbox had survived the bombing, that she had been at market that day. But she wishes her parents and Alec’s aunt had been at market, too. Or in the unscathed church. Or anywhere, really, except where they’d been.
Out on the lanes, the world opens up, and for the first time she feels like she can breathe. Off to the west the spires of the cathedral at Ely break the horizon; in every other direction, the world is made of dikes and hedgerows. She knows this world as well as she ever has—the Highland cattle, the redpolls and bramblings, the avocets she can hear in the distance, the lanes as straight as curtain rods. The sameness of the autumn landscape is a comfort, despite the bewilderment that swarms like hornets—her family is gone, Alec is missing. Nothing is as it should be.
She pulls her bicycle off to the side of the lane to let a man with a team of oxen come through. At the crossroads, she’ll turn right and then right again, and make her way to the familiar old cottage at the north end of Fenbourne. Another destination to dread, certainly, but Mrs. Bixby had seemed unsure whether anyone was taking care of it. So this morning she took it upon herself to call on the elderly Mr. Swift, who had been her parents’ solicitor as well as Constance’s. He has known June her whole life, and it is easier than she hopes to persuade him that her engagement to Alec, who is nominally the owner of the cottage, is enough of a tie to give her the key. Now at the very least she can stop by and take a look.
Alec’s last missive, a thin Red Cross form sent from the German POW camp a year ago last spring, is in her pocket, folded carefully away. She doesn’t have to open it to know what it says. It’s the same solid printing as his notes from Italy, not his own hand. The man who wrote for him in Italy must have been transferred to Germany as well. And, like his Italian notes, it mostly doesn’t sound like him—it’s too stilted, almost aloof, a collection of comments about weather and passing the time as well as he can. But this message ends differently from the others—there’s a line asking her to remember the princess and the bear for him. Every time she has read the letter since its arrival she has had the same electric lurch in her chest that she had the first time. How is she meant to parse it? Is he giving up, or holding out hope? The message and its effects are disjointed and jarring.
She can’t get over the feeling of dislocation—they were so close, when they were both still in England—and then the trajectories of their wars diverged. There has been nothing from him for so long, and she doesn’t know whether she should be more afraid that he has stopped writing because he’s given her up or that he is longing to tell her where he is, and can’t. The other possibilities are too terrible to consider.
The house is silent when she steps off the bicycle and wheels it through the stone wall’s front gate, which she latches carefully behind her. A turtledove regards her from the edge of a battered wheelbarrow, its mate swaggering along the ground beneath.
June has only been inside for a moment when she realizes how unprepared she is for this responsibility. Constance has been dead since January, and the house is dark and vacant, as cold and musty as a mausoleum. June has no idea where to begin—the house isn’t dirty, exactly, beyond a layer of dust coating every surface, but the feeling of emptiness is oppressive. The worst is the sense of a life left midway: the kettle on the hob, a set of linens folded on the end of the bed, the careful stacks of mail on Constance’s desk. How can she ready the cottage for Alec if she can hardly bear to be here? It is nearly beyond her, reminding her both of Constance and of her parents. She has sat in these rooms, walked these halls, a thousand times. Now she paces through the house, wishing she knew what to do.
The longer she stays in the cottage, the more her disquiet grows, but so has her resolution. She bicycles back into the village. By the end of the afternoon she has made arrangements to become a caretaker of sorts for the cottage until Alec’s return. While she waits, Mr. Swift has his clerk make the necessary calls to see that the utilities are available for use, and then the plan is set. She takes the bicycle back to the Rose and Crown and calls Fenbourne’s one taxi to drive her and her handful of belongings to the cottage.
That night, June hardly sleeps. She’s taken the bedroom that Alec’s uncle used when his leaves and furloughs brought him to visit. It’s odd to find herself here, but she feels a bit less like an intruder now than she had. She spends much of the night making lists, setting her plans for the cottage into neat categories and subcategories. Having so much space to herself is confusing; at the barracks in Colombo she had had a tiny square room with a basin in it, with slatted windows to keep out the weather and mosquito nets to do what they could about the insects.
In any case, here she is, setting things in motion. She has a world to remake.
* * *
• • •
The next day June takes the 10:15 to King’s Cross. On the train, June writes a letter to Roger, letting him know that she is readying the house for Alec, wherever he is. Roger, who finished out the war in Burma, probably knows as little about Alec’s whereabouts as she does, but she asks anyway. Then she draws maps of Alec’s locations for the past six years, as far as she knows them. His absence is a puzzle, but puzzles have solutions. She cannot bring back her parents, or Constance, but she still has hope for Alec, and in London there are people who can help her.
Her first stop is a Red Cross office in Westminster. But the man she talks to there is overwhelmed with displaced persons and refugees and knows only that most of the men in German camps were repatriated within days of liberation. Even when June persuades him to look into the particular camp, he is only able to tell her that Alec’s name is not on the rolls as one of the men flown back to Le Havre by Allied planes. He doesn’t know what that suggests, although it is possible that his name was missed, or that he returned some other way, or that he stayed on the Continent. But June is not interested in vague possibilities. She wants proper information, data she can put into an equation of sorts to find her answers.
Outside, London is the same confounding blur it was after the Blitz, though there is a new measure of orde
r threaded through it now that the war is over. She had taken a taxi from the station to Westminster, and the scarring of the city has left her shaken. She was there for some of it, during the Blitz, none of this is new, but it feels different somehow. The checkering of bombs is hard to comprehend—so much of the city is unscathed, and then around a corner the next block is gone entirely, single structures left standing like an old woman’s teeth. Children play on the precarious edges where houses used to be, unmindful of the dangers of shifting rubble or unexploded ordnance.
In Westminster, the endless to and fro of people on the sidewalks pulls her eye away from the destruction. She stops in the shadow of the Abbey, tempted to go inside, but she worries she will feel more out of place than ever. It reminds her that her parents would have prayed for Alec’s safe return, although they might have hedged their bets by appealing for human aid as well. But June has never been able to reconcile faith and reason the way her father could, and in this instance it is no different—she does not believe that God could bring Alec back, but perhaps her connections at Whitehall can.
The enormous Italianate building that houses the Foreign Office on King Charles Street has always struck her as a bit over the top, gone a bit tatty at the edges despite the once-magnificent décor inside. No matter—she is here to find Floss, not to critique the architecture. With the war over, there are fewer gatekeepers than there had been, but still it takes nearly an hour for her to work her way into the outer chambers of Floss’s dominion. He has had the same secretary—Mrs. Copeland, with her cat-eye glasses and beady eyes—guarding his doors as long as June can remember. She greets June politely, but without any particular favor, just as she always has, and asks June to wait.
Floss emerges after only a few minutes, the base of his cane thumping on the thick carpet. “June! What a lovely surprise.”
June stands. “I don’t mean to disturb you.”
“I am, as ever, your servant,” Floss says, smiling and guiding June into his inner sanctum.
June tries to smile back, but her face feels brittle with impatience. “Alec’s not back. He’s missing.” She gestures eastward. “The German POW camps were liberated in May, most of them, and the men largely repatriated the next month. But Alec wasn’t among them.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” He sits and regards her steadily, his good leg jiggling a bit. “I’m sure you know most of our men came home, but lot of good chaps died, and nobody ever wrote it down in all the confusion. And some of them were taken back to Russia, rather than being sent home properly. Happened quite a bit in some of the German camps close to Poland and whatnot.”
June hesitates, trying to collect her feelings before she pushes on through Floss’s brusque response. “I would have thought the Russians would follow the rule of war. Even the Germans mainly hewed to Geneva and the Red Cross. In any case, if we’re not at war with them, they can’t very well have prisoners of war.”
“Stalin is not a great believer in Churchill or Truman, and many at Whitehall think he’s using our boys as bargaining chips.” He shrugs, brushing invisible dust from his trouser legs. “Seems he’d been mowing down the Russians we liberated when we sent them back, as if he felt their capture indicated some kind of weakness. So we stopped sending them back.”
“Can you find out if they have him?” She stands. “I’ve known you to find deeper secrets than this, Floss.”
“I will do what I can for you.” Floss stops fussing with his suit and looks up at her, his face serious. “But you’d be wise to prepare for the possibility he won’t come home at all. Or, if he does . . . They may have broken him, June. He may be very different now.”
“Please just find out what you can,” she says. She has no way to convey to Floss what Alec is to her.
“He may not even be where I can find him. And if he is, it’s a new world now. A new war. The old methods of making things happen no longer work. But of course I’ll make what inquiries I can.” He gets up and goes to the window, looking out toward St. James’s Park across the street for a moment before he turns back to her and continues, as if everything he’s saying is perfectly reasonable. “As a separate issue, I’ll be opening a new station in Berlin, once they’ve done with carving it up. Think about the work you could do there. Be so much better for you than waiting around like this.”
June bites her tongue. Does he have any idea of what an ass he sounds?
“Don’t look at me like that,” he says. “I know you’re worried about Oswin. He’s a good lad, and he’s served his country. But so have you, and, well, I hate to seem unkind, under the circumstances, but you’re not out of it. You’re what we need. Not more wives and babies.”
June shakes her head, her whole body strung tight with wanting to shout at him, even as she tries not to wonder what exactly it is he’s offering. She stands and goes to the door. When she turns back to him, her voice is rough. “Just find him.”
* * *
• • •
She is halfway to the stairs when a better solution clicks into place. Floss may not be able to help her, whatever his contacts in the intelligence community, even if he wants to. Perhaps his old methods won’t work, but he is not the only man in Whitehall to whom she can take her query.
As June strides along the corridors and ornate staircases that separate her father’s friend Sir Reginald Cooper-Byatt’s domain from Floss’s, she practices asking him for help. He is not Floss; they are not friends. He is a benefactor, nothing more. But if taking the problem to him will help her find Alec, she will do it.
* * *
• • •
Sir Reginald comes around his desk to greet her, clasping both her hands in his. “I was very sorry to hear about your parents,” he says quietly. He leads her to the seating area facing his vast window, and sits facing her.
“Thank you,” June says. Some of the wind goes out of her sails—keeping her focus on Alec has helped her avoid the cold, raw place of mourning her parents.
“What a thing to come back to,” Sir Reginald says. He frowns. “Are you home for good, then? And quite recovered?”
“Yes.” She pauses, wondering if he too is going to try to recruit her for some new effort with new enemies. “Thank you for seeing me today.”
“Of course,” he says. “How can I help you?”
“It’s my fiancé,” she says. “He’s missing.” As she explains about Alec’s captivity and what Floss has told her, Sir Reginald’s heavy brows sink into a worried glower.
When she finishes, he shakes his head. “Ah. Yes, Corbett is quite right that we’re having a bit of a sticky spot with the Russians. That said, I may have a man in Moscow who can tell me if your lad is there. I’ll see if I can reach him first thing tomorrow.”
* * *
• • •
When the phone rings a few days later, the clarion of it takes June by surprise despite the vigilance with which she’s been waiting for Sir Reginald’s call. She steels herself and picks up the handset with the steadiest greeting she can manage.
“He’s in Odessa,” Sir Reginald says without preamble. “A guest, they’re calling it.” His sigh crackles through the phone lines. “There is good news—he is not in hospital, not in some type of camp. Red Cross and Crescent are doing what they can, and the British attaché in Moscow has access now and again, and they report that conditions are fair enough.”
A sob of relief rises in her chest, and she pushes it down before the sound emerges. “What can I do?” Her hands tighten on the handset, but with determination, not nerves.
“Nothing just now,” he says. “Having a spot of difficulty with their government, but he’s an officer with a fine record, and we may be able to find a way through this. At the very least, we can try to keep him from being sent to the Gulag.”
June feels numb. It was one thing when Floss had brought up the terrible possibility o
f the Gulag, quite another to hear Sir Reginald dismiss it as an option. She hadn’t realized how afraid she had been of losing Alec to Siberia forever until it was no longer a worry. “Thank you, Sir Reginald.”
“This office owes you a great debt, Miss Attwell. Let’s see if we can bring your young fellow home.”
* * *
• • •
June’s bedroom in the cottage looks out to the east, and on a clear morning the sun comes in and mottles the uneven wooden floorboards like water waiting to be swabbed away. June has brought the globe in here, despite the pangs it gives her. In some ways, it’s a comfort, a means of connecting herself with the past that hurts less now she knows that Alec is alive, and where he is. Too, the part of her mind that was so busy during the war, now frustrated by the relegation to household inventories, has begun to speculate on the more engaging problem of map-making. So many of these countries no longer exist—there are changes on nearly every continent as empires rise and fall, ceding or grasping new territory. Thrace, German East Africa, the Ottoman Empire . . . All folded into somewhere else or renamed by new governments. Sometimes, almost guiltily, she looks at Berlin, imagining the fresh partitions between East and West.
Each morning when she gets up she lays a fingertip atop Odessa. It seems that if she can find Alec on the globe, perhaps he will know she is waiting for him—an irrational thought to be sure, but it feels solid enough, a worthy talisman. June has spent untold hours scouring railway timetables and maps of Eastern Europe and the Black Sea, memorizing every route by land or sea from Odessa to London. As the crow flies, it’s not so far, but when that distance is compounded by the Soviet shadow that has fallen across the eastern half of Europe, hope is hard to come by.
