by Emma Fraser
‘You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to,’ I added. ‘I’ll find another way.’
‘I’ll do it.’
‘Thank you, Sophie. Ring me if you find out anything.’ Hopefully there would be nothing to discover, then I could put Lucy Corrigle to one side and concentrate on Mum.
‘I will be thinking of you,’ Sophie said in her quiet, serious voice. ‘And your mother.’
While I’d been on the phone, Mum had come downstairs and was in the sitting room. The windows had been opened, letting in the sounds of the birds outside and the sweet-smelling scent of roses. Her tablets had been tidied away.
She glanced up from the sofa and smiled. Her eyes were bright, her hair neatly brushed and she’d even put on some lipstick. It took every ounce of self-control I could muster not to weep.
‘When do you have to leave for London?’ she asked.
My chest tightened. So she’d gone to all this effort hoping to make it easier for me to go back to work.
‘I’m not going anywhere, I’m here for as long as you need me.’
‘No, Charlotte! I don’t want you putting your life on hold for me!’
‘It’s non-negotiable, Mum. I haven’t taken a holiday for years. I’m more than due time off.’ I dipped my head so she wouldn’t see the pain in my eyes, how frightened I was that this was the last time we’d have together. I couldn’t even bear to think it.
She took my hand and squeezed it. ‘In that case, I’ll just have to make the most of you while you’re here.’
‘How about some lunch?’ I asked, returning the pressure of her fingers. She’d barely eaten any of her breakfast. ‘I could rustle us up some scrambled eggs if you’d like?’
Mum grimaced. ‘I’m not terribly hungry, Charlotte.’
‘You need to eat!’
Mum arched her eyebrows and I bit back a sigh of frustration. Who was I to talk? Engrossed in work I’d often skip meals, most days grabbing a sandwich from a supermarket for my supper.
‘You’re not the best cook in the world, you never were.’ Mum laughed and the tension that had quivered for a split second between us vanished.
The eggs turned out better than my mother feared and after lunch, cups of tea in hand, I helped her sort through some of her financial papers. There was so much she wanted to do; write to her bank, call her lawyer to update her will, pass over Power of Attorney to me.
It wasn’t long before Mum was too exhausted to do any more. She slumped back and I looked over at her in alarm.
‘Why don’t you have a nap?’ I jumped up, ready to help her. ‘Can I get you a glass of water? Do you need some painkillers?’
‘Stop fussing, Charlotte,’ Mum said softly. Nevertheless she let me ease her legs up onto the sofa, Tiger shuffling out the way until I had covered my mother with a blanket.
‘I’ll leave you to rest,’ I said, tucking her in.
She reached out her hand and grabbed my wrist. ‘Stay and talk to me, Charlotte.’ She managed a small smile. ‘There will be plenty of time later for me to rest. But right now there is so much more I need to tell you.’
The ache in my chest blossomed. I wished we could pretend that everything was just the same – us in our separate chairs, books open, looking up occasionally to discuss and argue about what we’d been reading. But we had so little time to get to know each other again and if Mum had things to tell me, I wanted to hear them. I sat back down and smiled to let her know I was listening.
‘Talking about Greyfriars has brought it all back.’ When she looked at me I saw her eyes were shimmering with unshed tears. ‘Nothing was the same after that summer. Everything changed. Perhaps if the war hadn’t happened. Or if my parents hadn’t died…’
Chapter Ten
Olivia
1941
Despite it being May, the dining room was cold and bleak, the curtains pulled closed to shut out the sun.
A wireless played classical music softly in the background above which could be heard the scratching of fountain pens on paper, escaping sighs and the occasional muffled sob. As on every Sunday evening, the girls, twenty of them, were composing the obligatory weekly letter home.
Olivia sighed and looked up, thinking of what she should write. She’d given up pleading to come home after Father had told her that the Friels put their best foot forward, lifted their chin, and made the best of things. Everyone was suffering, he said, and she had to be brave too.
She didn’t feel brave, she felt utterly miserable. Boarding school was nothing like Mother had promised it would be. It wasn’t fun at all. Perhaps because the St Michael’s Mother, Aunt Georgina and Edith had attended in Fife had been requisitioned for a hospital and the school decanted to a castle in Perthshire.
Under any other circumstances, Olivia would have been delighted to have finally got her wish to live in a proper castle, but this one was a disappointment and nothing like Greyfriars. Where Greyfriars had been light and sunshine and happiness – until the last few days of that holiday anyway – the castle was gloomy and forbidding and she hated it.
Her dorm, shared with nineteen other girls, was in the original ballroom. All the paintings that had once hung there had been taken down, as if the schoolgirls’ grubby hands might defile them, and twenty cast-iron single beds set out in a row, ten on either side. Each girl had a locker and a narrow cupboard for her belongings, every item marked with their name.
Boarding school simply didn’t suit her. It wasn’t just living cheek by jowl with the other girls, or even the gloomy, freezing cold castle – it was the lack of freedom. Every moment of every day was accounted for and followed a strict pattern. There was no kindly matron to soothe the girls’ homesickness in the absence of mothers – quite the opposite. Matron’s entire raison d’être, or so it seemed, was to make the girls’ lives as miserable as possible. No sergeant major in the army could have been more of a stickler for following rules. And there were oodles of them. No talking once they had gone upstairs, no getting out of bed after lights out, no talking to boys on the way to church, prep after school, hockey every Saturday, every last thing on their plates to be eaten no matter how vile – and most of it was vile.
She should be getting used to it after almost two years, but she just wanted to be at home with Mother and Father. It had been ages since she’d seen them.
A tear slipped down her cheek and she used the cuff of her school cardigan to wipe it away. It was almost impossible to imagine Britain was at war. Although many of the girls had fathers fighting abroad or had come from homes in London, they never spoke of it. Far away from it all, it was easier to imagine that nothing terrible was going on. But in London it was different, and it was all the more exciting for it.
The first Christmas when, because the bombing they’d expected hadn’t happened, she’d been allowed home, had been lovely. Enormous balloons hung over the city, the front of most of the buildings were partly covered with sandbags, the windows criss-crossed with black tape and there were soldiers and army trucks and cars everywhere.
Despite the rationing, Cook had squirrelled away enough to produce a feast on Christmas Day. There had been a tree and presents too. Father had a desk job in a ministry in London so he was there in the evenings. During the day, Olivia and Mother had walked through Regent’s Park, or visited some of Mother’s friends. Once they had had tea at the Lyon’s tea room in Piccadilly, just the two of them, and Mother had talked to her, as if she were quite grown up.
Mother told her Aunt Edith had been accepted by the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Nursing Service and was in Peebles undergoing some sort of extra training and that she hoped to be sent abroad. Aunt Georgina had written from Singapore and Mother read Olivia snippets from her letters. Everything Georgina wrote made Olivia want to go there more. No one mentioned Findlay and Olivia knew better than to ask.
It was almost worse going back to boarding school the second time. Especially when it was so difficult to find out what was going on in the rest of the
world. They were allowed to listen to the wireless once a week when they wrote their letters home, but never to the news bulletins. The only news they had of the war was the occasional smattering of gossip from a letter, but it was impossible to keep everything from them. When, last September, the Germans started bombing London and kept on bombing it, everyone knew about it.
Mother made light of the bombing in her letters. She told Olivia that London was determined to carry on as normal. She and Father still went to the cinema and out for dinner. Mother even made it sound like fun. Everyone was certain that Hitler would give up soon.
But it had meant Olivia couldn’t go to London last Christmas. Instead Mother and Father had come to stay with Agatha and Gordon. It had been almost as much fun as the Christmas before, although Father had only been able to manage a few days. They’d gone for long walks, muffled up in coats and scarves, returning to hot chocolate in front of the fire. Best of all, Mother said that she and Father hoped to go to Greyfriars for two weeks in the summer, taking Olivia with them. It would just be the three of them but, Mother had said with a big smile, it would be perfect.
The wireless was playing Mozart now. She mustn’t feel sad. In just over a month she’d be on her way to Greyfriars.
Catching the eye of the housemistress she bent her head to her task and picked up her pen again. It was difficult to think of things to write about. Perhaps she should tell Mother one of her stories? She seemed to quite enjoy them.
‘Miss Friel!’ Olivia jumped as her name rang out and everyone turned to look at her. ‘You are to go with Miss MacDonald here,’ the housemistress said. ‘Miss Walpole wishes to see you in her office.’
Olivia’s heart thudded. She hadn’t even noticed that Melanie MacDonald, one of the prefects, had come in. She’d been too absorbed in deciding which story to write in her letter. Being called to the headmistress’s office was not a good thing.
Melanie didn’t even look at her as she followed her out of the room and along the deserted corridors. Olivia racked her brains trying to think what rule she might have broken. It was easy to break the rules, without even knowing you had. The only one she knew for certain that she had broken was going out through the sash window at the far end of the dormitory and onto the flat roof where she’d hide behind one of the chimneys and read. One of the other girls, Brenda Smith, had seen her climbing back in after rest period and had probably told on her. Brenda Smith thought the more she tittle-tattled the more the teachers would like her. She was wrong.
Melanie stopped outside the headmistress’s office and knocked. Olivia took a deep breath. So what if she was in trouble? The worst they could do was make her stay downstairs after prep without a book to read or homework to do.
When the headmistress’s voice bade them enter, Melanie opened the door and gave Olivia a little shove before closing the door behind her.
Olivia had never been in Miss Walpole’s office before and she looked around with interest. It was large, more like a sitting room than an office, with a fireplace, a leather armchair, a bureau with a tray holding a crystal decanter and matching glasses on it, as well as ornaments – including a ballerina in a long dress with the toe of a blue slipper peeking out. There were landscape paintings on the wall, mostly of the sea but one or two of sombre-looking people staring grimly into the middle distance. All this Olivia took in in a moment. It was only when the headmistress glanced towards the window that Olivia noticed that someone else was in the room. Backlit by the sun streaming through the window their features were obscured. When the figure turned and stepped out of the light and Olivia saw it was Agatha, her heart stopped. Olivia never forgot what Agatha was wearing; a black dress and a matching hat with a small veil that hid her eyes. When Agatha took off her hat Olivia saw that her eyeliner had run. It was that that almost shocked her most. Agatha was never anything but immaculate.
Something terrible must have happened. No one was allowed visitors or even phone calls, except for one Sunday every month. The only exception to this rule was when a relative or family friend came to break bad news.
She guessed it had to be her father. But deep down inside she knew if it had just been Daddy, Mother would be standing there and not Agatha. She scrabbled around for an explanation that might still offer hope. Perhaps Father had been injured and Mother had to stay by his bedside. Perhaps Agatha had been sent to fetch Olivia to them?
When Miss Walpole told Olivia to take a seat and handed her a handkerchief, she wanted to run from that room and keep on running.
‘Is it Father?’ Olivia’s lips felt frozen and she could hardly form the words.
Agatha nodded. ‘I am so sorry, my dear child. There was a raid. A bad one. The night before last. I would have come sooner but I only found out for certain…’ She dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief.
‘Is he going to be all right?’ Olivia asked. She still clung to the last faint remnants of hope that he’d only been injured.
When Agatha came over to her and crouched by her side, Olivia saw her eyes were drenched.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Agatha whispered, ‘but your dear father is dead.’
It was as if someone had taken a bucket of freezing water and flung it over Olivia.
‘And Mother?’ She didn’t want to hear the answer. She wanted to get up and leave. She wanted to turn the clock back, imagine herself anywhere except there, in the headmistress’s study with the two women looking at her with unbearable pity in their eyes. An image of that last summer in Greyfriars came rushing back. Mummy in the bedroom, telling Daddy about the black dog and how she was worried they’d never be as happy again. Olivia knew then that if Father was dead Mother would never survive his loss. But even as those thoughts were rushing through her head she was telling herself that she would care for Mummy. With Olivia beside her, Mummy might not miss Father quite so much.
Agatha just looked at her and uttered a cry.
‘You are going to have to be a very brave girl,’ Miss Walpole said. ‘I’m so very sorry, Olivia, but your mother was killed too. They were in the house together when the bomb struck. I know this must be a dreadful shock.’
‘Mummy and Daddy?’
To have lost one of them was bad enough – but both. She would remember the horror of that day, the disbelief, for the rest of her life.
The room was going in and out of focus and she thought she might faint. ‘Can I go to them?’ If she could see them for herself… It might still be some sort of ghastly mistake.
‘You’re to come home with me,’ Agatha said gently. ‘For a few days.’
Olivia could only stare at her. She didn’t want to go anywhere, except to London to Mother and Father.
‘I’ve written to your aunts to tell them,’ Agatha continued, ‘although I can’t be sure when, or if, they’ll get the letters. I understand that Edith is abroad too. As soon as they hear the news I’m certain they will write to you, perhaps even come for you. In the meantime you must try to be strong. Your dear mother and father would want that.’
‘What about the funeral? When will it be?’
Agatha’s fingers fluttered to her throat. ‘Oh, my dear, there can’t be a funeral.’ She bit her lip and looked over to Miss Walpole in desperation.
‘The house in London was destroyed. Most of the street was,’ Miss Walpole said. She and Agatha exchanged a look. ‘I’m afraid… the bodies…’ Miss Walpole cleared her throat. ‘Your parents’ home took a direct hit. When your aunts return I am sure they will organise a memorial service. You will be able to say your goodbyes then.’ Miss Walpole stood, making it clear there was nothing more to say. ‘Now, Olivia, go and ask Matron to help you pack a bag.’
Olivia remembered little of the next few days. Agatha was kind, treated Olivia as if she had the flu, keeping her in bed and bringing her tea and toast. But after a week she said she thought it best that Olivia returned to school. She said of course Olivia must stay with them on all her out weekends and holidays too – until
such time one of her aunts was able to take over. She would write again and ask what they wanted done with her.
If Olivia found boarding school difficult before, it was so much harder afterwards. Nothing seemed to have anything to do with her. It was as if there was a glass bubble around her, separating her from everyone else. She spent more and more time in an imaginary world, either the one she read about in books or the one she created in her head. She decided that her parents weren’t dead and wove one of her stories around why they couldn’t come for her. Father was working in secret for the government and had to go somewhere, taking Mother with him. They couldn’t tell anyone – not even Aunt Agatha – because it was top secret and of course they couldn’t tell Olivia in case she let it slip. They would return when the war was over, explain they’d had no choice and she would forgive them because they were together again. She’d imagine them somewhere exotic – America was her favourite choice – because there they would be safe. But, of course, Mother and Father never came. And as the years passed, she gave up the fantasy.