She hadn’t quite been crying, but now tears welled in her eyes and a big one rolled down her cheek before she could blink it away.
‘Did Mum come and see you?’ she asked, and her voice wavered.
‘Mm. About the flat she’s found. She’s gone over to tell Sally now.’ He paused. ‘Is that what’s upsetting you?’
‘No … not exactly.’
‘Come and sit down for a minute.’ He shifted along the bench, making room. ‘You can tell me if you like. Or not, if it’s none of my business.’
She told him. He listened, and stared at the ground, frowning; at first he said nothing, then, ‘That’s really tough, Grace. I’m so sorry.’
He didn’t say, It’ll be fine, or, Don’t worry, you’ll soon make new friends. She was thankful for that. Some grown-ups always thought they had to have an answer, a way out of a problem. Instead he said, ‘Tell me about Marie-Louise. What’s she like?’
‘Well … She makes me laugh.’
‘Tell me one time when she did,’ Roger said.
Grace thought. There was that day in hospital when Luke asked if she’d hold a funeral for her leg. When Grace told Marie-Louise later – expecting her to say, ‘Oh, that’s sick,’ which had been her own reaction – she considered it in all seriousness for a moment before saying, ‘In the Catholic church, sometimes people do that. You can, if you want,’ and Grace said, ‘What, an actual funeral? With a tombstone that says Here lies the leg of Grace Russell?’ Marie-Louise said yes, and this struck Grace as absurd: ‘So I could go and visit my own leg, and take it flowers every week?’ Marie-Louise gave a spluttering laugh, and next moment they were giggling together, and leaning against each other. Nurse Liz came in to see whatever was the matter, and they had managed to get the words out to explain, and it sounded like a weird thing to find so irresistibly funny.
It was the first time Grace had properly laughed, since It, even though there had been tears too.
She found herself telling Roger all this. He didn’t laugh, didn’t say anything at all. He just nodded slowly, and smiled in a rather sad way.
‘Wait. I can show you her photo.’ She took out her phone and scrolled through her pictures to find the one she’d taken at the Natural History Museum last half term. Marie-Louise was in front of a carved archway that had stone monkeys scrambling up it, and her face, close to one of the monkeys, wore the special twisty smile that Grace’s mother said made her look like the Mona Lisa as a cheeky fourteen-year-old.
Roger studied the picture, then handed the phone back. ‘She does look nice. And she sounds like a lovely friend. Funny. Kind. She’ll still be in your life, Grace, even though you’ll miss her badly. I know you will.’
She bit her bottom lip and fumbled in her jeans pocket for a tissue. He sounded as if he knew how she felt; she recalled his look of desolation when she first saw him sitting alone.
‘But you haven’t told Polly yet?’ he said. ‘Shall we go and find her?’
‘Oh, no,’ Mum said. ‘That’s all you need. It’s awful for you, Gracey, I know.’
Grace waited for the ‘but’. There wasn’t one.
‘Friends are so important,’ Mum said, after a long pause.
Yes, Mum. I know that.
‘You can still see Marie-Louise. We’ll go to Paris, like she said. Maybe at half term.’ Mum gave Grace a cuddle. ‘Perhaps it won’t seem quite as bad in the morning.’
Yes, Mum, it will. How can it not?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Half a Face
As soon as Grace woke up, all the disappointments of yesterday crowded back.
They piled in like a heavy duvet smothering her under its weight. She could only think of all that was lost. Her leg. Her home. Now her best friend. All things that other people took for granted – as she had, before.
She let herself wallow until she was bored with being in bed, having only added to her bad mood by being lazy. She got up and dressed, not bothering with breakfast.
You haven’t lost yourself, Grace, Marie-Louise’s voice said, slightly reproachful. Your self. Come on. No one can take that from you.
Grace didn’t feel so sure.
Without thinking she took her pen and sketchbook to the table. Working on one or more of her sketches had become a daily habit, usually alone in the flat while Mum was in the office, sometimes outside. Since she’d started using a fine black pen rather than pencil, her drawing had become bolder and more confident.
But today all pleasure had gone out of it. She opened the pad and looked through the pages, not even getting as far as picking up the pen. She could see only flaws and clumsiness where before she’d been pleased with her efforts.
In secret she’d been working on a detailed picture of the house to give Mum for her birthday in September; then she’d thought of drawing a portrait of Flash to give Marcus – if only she could do it well enough. She’d taken several photos of Flash to work from in private. But she’d never tried drawing a dog before, and she aimed to show Flash’s personality, which made it especially hard.
She’d been trying to draw Christina too, from the scanned photograph she now had on her phone. She liked to feel that Christina was always with her, in her pocket or rucksack, for company. But Christina – like Flash – proved hard to catch in a drawing. Although Grace could copy her figure, her pose, her clothes, with reasonable success, she couldn’t capture Christina’s face or expression. Any face that emerged from her pen seemed to push the real Christina out of sight.
It was when she wasn’t trying – when she just sat and thought, or when she was in the house or the stable yard – that she saw Christina most clearly. But today Christina was elusive. Too many gloomy thoughts were getting in the way.
What was the point? Grace shoved back her chair, ripped out the drawn pages, screwed them up hard and put them in the recycling box.
She went outside and stood by the gate looking down to the woods. The day was grey and overcast, suiting her mood; looking at the doomed meadow added to her sense of everything going wrong. She couldn’t even find the energy to go over and ride Plum. She thought about going down to the lake to see if Jamie was there, then remembered that she’d been snotty with him yesterday.
Too much was shifting and changing. The meadow was hazed with pollen and thistledown, and she saw hints of summer edging towards autumn: green blackberries were showing in the hedgerow, and walking along the drive between house and stable yard she’d been surprised to see spiky green conker cases among leaves that were already crisping. A change in the light – lower, slanting – deepened the colours, firing the greens of summer into autumn richness. But she was in no mood to be grateful for such abundant beauty.
Everything said that her time here was running out. And possibly Flambards’ time was running out too. Hopelessness tugged at her. She pictured bulldozers moving in to churn up the field in front of her, and new houses springing up like Lego. The woods and lake would be made tame and suburban, with concrete paths and lights, and bins for dog poo. She’d hate to be here to see that.
Why did we come, if it’s all going to be spoiled?
But in spite of the imminent wrench of leaving, she wouldn’t have chosen not to be here, to spend the summer holidays in London instead. Anyway, Marie-Louise wasn’t there, and London would be no fun without her.
The ping of a text message arriving made her think for a second that Marie-Louise really was telepathic. But it was Mum: Come to the office, quick! Something for you to hear.
As Grace entered, Roger gave her a quick sympathetic smile that acknowledged their conversation of yesterday evening. Her mother was fidgety with excitement. ‘Come in and sit down, Gracey!’
As so often, she and Roger seemed not to be working, though Mum was wearing her glasses as if trying to look businesslike. On Roger’s desk was a bulky tape recorder, the old-fashioned reel-to-reel kind he’d said he needed.
‘Where did you get that?’
Roger explai
ned that Ian had phoned someone in the music department at school, who had this ancient machine in a store cupboard, and had gone in specially to fetch it.
‘We’ve been listening to Fergus,’ Mum told Grace. ‘Roger’s great-grandfather, the one who was a pilot. He’s talking about William – our William!’
‘And they did know each other,’ Roger said. ‘Let me find the place.’
The tape recorder was an unwieldy piece of equipment. The controls made loud clicks and clunks as Roger wound the thin tape forward and back, stopping now and then to listen. He was afraid of breaking it, he said, and would make a new digital recording later. ‘This is too precious to lose.’
After several false starts, he said, ‘This is it,’ and they all settled to concentrate. The sound quality was poor. There were two voices: a young-sounding man asking questions, and an older one answering.
‘This is Fergus,’ Roger said.
‘… Yes, I went into the Royal Flying Corps soon after the war broke out,’ said the cracked old voice. ‘There was no RAF back then, not till 1918. I’d always been keen on aviation, so I joined a flying club when I went up to Cambridge. That was where most of us came from at the beginning – from amateur flying clubs. When I was stationed at Saint Omer I was in the same squadron as William Russell. Will, everyone called him.’
Grace looked at her mother; they both leaned closer to the machine.
‘He was born and brought up at Flambards – not that I’d heard of it, back then. I didn’t come to live in Essex till after the war. He was a quiet, serious sort of chap, not easy to get to know, but I liked him at once. He’d been designing aircraft, as an amateur, and that was what he loved. He was immensely clever, though he made light of it – knew more than most of the ground crew about engines and maintenance, having worked through it all himself.’
‘And he was shot down?’ said the younger voice.
‘Yes, barely a month after I met him.’ There was a sigh. ‘Crash-landed in a hayfield and died of his wounds later that same day. I was so sorry. I often wondered what he’d have gone on to do, with all his talent and ambition. And his poor young wife, Christina, widowed at twenty-one – he’d spoken of her and everything he’d put her through. I had no idea then that I’d end up being her neighbour, or that we’d become such great friends.’
His voice in the room was almost ghostly – the voice of someone long dead, but someone who had known Christina and Will as friends, and was speaking of these things as if they’d only just happened. Tingles ran down Grace’s spine as she listened intently, not wanting to miss a single thing.
‘But all that was later,’ Fergus went on, ‘when the war was over. Mark Russell, Will’s brother, I met in hospital a couple of weeks later. It was only two days after we lost Will that I was shot down in flames myself. We didn’t have parachutes, not that I could have got out even if I’d had one. Never expected to make it – in fact I wasn’t even sure I wanted to, the state I was in –’
Grace looked down, hearing her own thoughts from the hospital bed: I might as well die. What’s the point of living like this? Across the years, Fergus spoke of something she understood too well.
‘– and Mark was terribly injured too. He was Army, but in the general chaos we were thrown into a ward together. Somehow we both survived, and one thing led to another and I ended up working with Mark on the cars, and making a life for myself here. It’s strange how that worked out – Mark told me that this was the very place where Will learned to fly, with an interesting old chap called Dermot, a bit of an eccentric. He saw Will’s ability when he was just a lad, and encouraged him.’
‘This Mr Dermot actually lived here?’ the younger voice said. ‘At Marsh House?’
‘Yes – Will was living at Flambards then, of course. Born and brought up there. Will never got on with his father, who was fanatical about horses and hunting, by all accounts. Will never took to that, unlike Mark, who was such a bold rider. They were such different characters. Will had a wonky leg, he told me, after a hunting accident when he was fourteen. When he began serious flying he had to have his leg broken and re-set – it was difficult for him to manage the controls otherwise. He really was a remarkable young man. Such determination. He saved up and flew himself to Switzerland and back in his flimsy little aircraft to get treatment from some leading surgeon there. I remember him telling me that as if it’s what anybody would have done.’
‘That’s amazing, Grandad!’ said the younger man. ‘But let’s go back to you and your injuries. It was a while before you had facial reconstruction, you said?’
There was a sigh that was partly a wheezing laugh. ‘Oh, I was a sight, I can tell you, with my half a face. Enough to terrify myself, let alone anyone else. Used to give myself a jolt if I looked in a mirror, though I avoided that as much as I could. Children used to scream and run away in the street – they thought I was a monster. That’s why it suited me to bury myself here in the country, where local people got used to me and were kind. Especially your gran, and Christina. They persuaded me to go to the Sidcup hospital for the reconstruction job. That certainly made a difference. I still look peculiar, but people don’t mistake me for something from a Hammer Horror film any more.’
‘You look like Grandad,’ the other voice said, and there was a pause that seemed to be filled with a hug and a laugh.
‘I’ve been lucky, I know, the way things have turned out,’ Fergus went on. ‘You’ve seen the photos, haven’t you? Before and after? I used to be quite a nice-looking chap. I can say that without being vain – it was so long ago. Then the flamer, and that turned me into a horrifying gargoyle. I was a hero as well, for being in the RFC and fighting for my country, but that was soon forgotten once the war was over. No one wanted to look me in the face.’
‘Oh, Grandad, that must have been heartbreaking!’
‘Mm, mm. But in the hospital I saw people worse off than me. Faces half blown off, mangled beyond recognition. It was astonishing the poor chaps could still be alive. But they were, and they had to get by, somehow. Some of them wore masks – tin masks, we called them. I tried it for a while, but it was hot and stifling behind one of those. And they were just as frightening to strangers. Just imagine. So people were going to feel ill at the sight of me, whichever way.’
‘How did you cope with that?’
Another sigh. ‘I learned to live inside myself, I suppose. I had my piano – I could lose myself in music. I made some friends in hospital and we got together to play jazz. And I still had my mind. I hadn’t lost any of that.’
‘You still haven’t,’ said the younger voice.
‘Not like some poor chaps. The things they’d seen, been through. I remember one lad—’
Roger pressed a button to stop the tape. They all looked at each other in the pause that followed.
‘There’s a lot more,’ he said. ‘Too much to listen to the whole thing now. But when I’ve made the recording I’ll give you a copy on a memory stick.’
Grace stared out of the window, her eyes focusing on an earlier century. Her mind was full of Will and Christina and poor Fergus. She was looking at the drive as it curved round towards the lane, thinking that Will and Christina must have walked or ridden along it, countless times, leaving Flambards or coming home. They would have been in this room, in the dining room and the kitchen. In the stable yard. In the meadow and woods. This had been their home; they were everywhere. Still with that sense of her gaze travelling back a hundred years and more, she looked at Mum and saw that she too had a slightly dazed, unfocused look. Roger was winding back the tape; it whirred and whirred and then stopped with a loud click.
‘Have you got those photos Fergus mentioned?’ Mum asked.
‘Yes, they’re at Ian’s. They were in the box. I’ll show you if you like – but I warn you, they’re pretty shocking.’
‘Maybe not just now, then.’
‘I’ll bring the other one over though. From before the war, when he was at un
iversity.’
‘Can we look at the photos Mum gave you?’ Grace’s voice came out husky. ‘The ones of Will and Christina, I mean.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Roger sorted through a box file, brought out the three photographs and handed them over.
Before, Grace had concentrated on Christina, pretty in a light-coloured blouse, strands of hair escaping under the brim of a shady hat, unaware of the tragedies that would soon afflict her. Now her eyes were drawn to Will. He and Christina were in a field, grass mown short and dotted with daisies, standing proudly beside a small aircraft with struts and slender wings and a passenger seat open to the sky.
Grace showed Roger and her mother. ‘Was this the plane he flew to Switzerland?’
‘I don’t know. I imagine so.’
There he stood: Will, who would so soon die in a hayfield in France, who would never be any older than twenty-two. Who was clever and determined enough to know how to make a plane fly, and brave enough to pilot it – alone! – all the distant miles over sea and land and mountains to Switzerland. How did he even know the way?
‘Hello, Great-great-grandfather,’ she whispered.
‘He’d be astonished to hear you say that,’ Roger said, and she gave him a quick smile.
Will in the photo looked barely old enough to be a father – just a boy, not a great deal older than Jamie or Marcus. The face smiling at her from the photograph was thin, even gaunt. He wore a peaked cap back to front, which gave him a jokey and even quite modern look. He and Christina were holding hands, and she was laughing too, a little giddily, making Grace wonder what they’d just been doing or saying, and what they were going to do next. Maybe they’d just made a safe landing in the plane, or maybe they were going to climb into it and take off. They were so alive.
In the last few minutes, Fergus had sprung to life too – no longer just a name on the family tree, on a gravestone, someone Roger talked about, but a voice that had spoken to her. Here, now, he had introduced her to the young Will and to his own younger self, as if the time between had suddenly shrunk to nothing.
The Key to Flambards Page 13
