Last Letter Home

by Rachel Hore

  For a couple of years after their mother’s death little that had been hers was removed from the house. It was Granny Andrews who had insisted on sorting through her clothes with the help of Jean’s closest friend from school. Her few nice pieces of jewellery were put aside for Briony, though the pearl necklace and the gold dress watch were not the sort of things she’d wear. Instead she secreted away for herself the things that reminded her of her mum – a phial of Chanel No. 19, a lipstick, half spent, some of her favourite novels, a black velvet choker she’d worn on evenings out.

  Because of a difficult housing market, Martin and Lavender, when they got together, decided not to move, and Lavender tactfully disposed of much else during the early years of their marriage. Occasionally her father had given Briony something of Jean’s – a pretty majolica vase bought on holiday, a framed handbag mirror with shells stuck round it that she’d made for Mum at primary school. She’d grown mature enough to recognize that the house must properly become Lavender’s, but she always felt there would be this wedge between her and her stepmother. Now, seeing these photographs of her mother buried away, and the box of papers, by rights hers and Will’s – not that Will ever showed any interest in such things – made her feel the sharp edge of it digging in.

  ‘Try in the corner there,’ her father said over her shoulder and she moved the wedding album to reveal the corner of a green, lidded shoebox, pale with age. She pulled it out.

  ‘I’ll leave you to look at it on your own, shall I?’ Her father smiled. ‘You don’t want me getting in the way.’

  ‘You are never in the way, Dad,’ she said, ‘but thanks.’

  Briony cradled the box and sat on the bed with it, eased off the rubber band that held it and lifted the lid. Inside was a jumble of photographs and news cuttings. There was a small flat blue box, too, which when she lifted it out proved to contain several medals. She laid it on the duvet and picked up a photograph from the top of the pile. It was a studio portrait of her grandfather as a young man of, what, thirty, good-looking with deep-set, laughing eyes, short dark hair smoothed back. Odd to think he’d be a hundred now if he had lived. She only had the haziest memories of him now; he’d died nearly thirty years ago.

  A wedding photograph, just the two of them, Granny in a neat suit, though she carried flowers. Grandpa and Granny had met in London at the end of the war, so the story went. Her grandmother had shared her sandwich with him on a park bench and they’d got talking. A whirlwind romance that had lasted a lifetime, she dying broken-hearted a few years after her daughter. It was strange, Briony thought, looking at their young faces, Granny’s radiant, Grandpa’s proud, and remembering that she was already much older now than they’d been then.

  From further down the pile she found herself holding a sepia-coloured postcard of camels and pyramids. She turned it over, but it was blank. Further into the box were several letters, and, at last, another photograph, this time of several soldiers lounging in front of an army truck. The building in the background she saw was none other than the Villa Teresa and her heart leaped. This was what she’d been searching for. She recognized one of the soldiers from the film footage – a tall, athletic, dark-haired lad with a serious expression. This time when she flipped it over, she was rewarded. Ivor Richards, Harry Andrews, Paul Hartmann, someone, possibly her grandfather, had scrawled in a triangle to match the position of the figures. The serious-faced young man must be the Paul Hartmann of the letters. She’d found him.

  Riffling through the dry papers in the box, she came to a small whitish envelope on which was written only a name: Sarah Bailey, she read in surprise. What on earth was it doing here? She lifted the flap easily, withdrew a sheet of paper and pinched it open.

  Sarah, she read. Sorry for the rush, but Harry’s promised to get this message to you. I’m back in Blighty and wondered if you’d received a letter I sent you a few days ago. I’m staying at the —. All my love, Paul.

  The name of wherever he was staying was smudged and illegible. But the word ‘love’, that intrigued her.

  Why had Harry Andrews kept a letter that clearly wasn’t his? Had he not been able to deliver it?

  Eight

  December 1938

  Sarah kept a protective hand on the shoebox beside her as she stared out of the train window at the wintry Norfolk countryside. White-laced trees bordered fields where hazy sunshine dazzled off a cloak of snow. A flock of starlings swirled up like cinders into the sky, imbuing her spirits with a mixture of joy and melancholy. Joy because she was returning to the countryside she’d loved since a child, melancholy because the innocent happiness of those times was now lost to her. Her lips trembled at the reminder that her father would never see the English countryside again. She glanced at her mother, sitting opposite, but Mrs Bailey was not noticing the passing landscape, so absorbed was she in her book.

  The train gave a long, mournful wail and began to slow as their station slid into view. Sarah nudged Diane, who’d been dozing against her shoulder since Ipswich.

  ‘Are we here? Thank goodness.’ Her sister gave a dainty yawn, stretched like a cat, then craned to check her appearance in the foxed mirror on the carriage partition. The nap had not refreshed her, Sarah thought, watching her adjust the angle of her hat and smooth her fur collar. There were dark shadows beneath Diane’s eyes that face powder failed to disguise. Their mother looked the same. Months of grief, preparations for departure from India and the stormy sea voyage had taken a toll on all three of them.

  ‘I don’t know what we shall do if there’s no one to meet us.’ Belinda Bailey’s upright figure registered regal disapproval as she slipped a soft leather marker between pages and stowed book and spectacles into her bag.

  ‘I’m sure the Richards’ maid will have passed on the message, Mummy. She sounded very efficient.’

  ‘I suppose we could ask someone at the station to summon a taxi.’

  ‘Mummy, I’m sure it’ll be all right.’ It was unusual for Mrs Bailey to fuss like this, a rare sign of nerves.

  The train’s brakes squealed as it juddered to a halt. A rubicund gentleman in plus-fours, who’d got on at Stowmarket, assisted them with their luggage. Sarah, clutching her precious box under one arm, managed a case with the other, while their mother carried the hatbox and Diane was left with only a handbag.

  ‘Always a pleasure to help the ladies!’ The gentleman beamed from the door when they thanked him. The whistle blew and the train edged into motion.

  By the time they turned their attention to the piles of cases, a young man had magically appeared. He was smartly dressed, with a neatly wrapped striped scarf. His smooth blond hair was cut in military fashion, and his moustache did not quite disguise a certain tightness around his perfectly moulded lips.

  ‘The Baileys, I presume?’ His voice was louder than necessary, and he touched his hat as if in salute. His chestnut eyes surveyed them with hesitation.

  ‘That’s right,’ Sarah’s mother said haughtily. ‘And who, may I . . . ?’

  ‘Aunt Belinda, I’m Ivor.’

  ‘Ivor, dear, of course,’ she said more warmly, shaking his hand. ‘You must excuse me, it’s so long since I’ve seen you.’ She introduced the girls to him. Sarah felt the grip of his hand, and his eyes held hers in a way she found pleasantly disturbing. To Diane, who glanced at him shyly, he merely nodded.

  Their mother was speaking again. ‘The last time we saw you, heavens, it must have been . . .’

  ‘I was twelve apparently. I’m afraid I don’t remember it, though I wish I did.’ He gave a gallant smile. There was a tension in him, Sarah realized. He thought before he spoke, as though he was watching himself, which intrigued her.

  ‘Oh, but I do remember you.’ Her mother’s bright voice grated. ‘It was the autumn I brought the girls home, because you were starting school, Sarah – you were eleven, weren’t you? – and Diane was nine. I believe you had recently started at Downingham, Ivor. Your school uniform was crisp and new, and yo
u told me very confidently that your ambition was to follow your father into the regiment.’

  ‘Did I really? What a precocious little oik I must have been.’

  Mrs Bailey gave one of her rippling laughs that Sarah hated, the one she reserved for impressionable men. ‘On the contrary, I found your directness refreshing. And, after all, that is exactly what you’ve done. Your mother wrote that you’re already a lieutenant. Congratulations.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Before he turned to look for a porter, Sarah saw that Ivor Richards was blushing.

  There had been plenty of young men of his type out in India susceptible to Mrs Bailey’s charm, boys far from the stern eye of their mothers and starved of female company. Junior officers eager to make their mark, but clearly carrying around with them a burden of unhappiness, usually to do with parental expectation. Sarah wondered whether this was the case here. She and Diane didn’t know the Richards family well, but they’d always known about them. Major Richards had been a close friend of her father’s from military training days before the Great War. The injuries he’d sustained in that terrible conflict had ended his army career and now the family lived in a house on an estate on the Norfolk–Suffolk border, where the Major was Estate Manager.

  ‘I left the motor right outside.’ Ivor led the women to the station exit, leaving the porter to manage the luggage. ‘Shall I carry that box for you, Miss Bailey?’

  ‘No thanks, it needs to be kept in a certain position,’ Sarah replied. ‘Which regiment are you, Lieutenant?’

  ‘The Norfolks, like my governor. Your father, too. I was sorry to hear about his death. But please, it’s Ivor. May I call you Sarah?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  This time the smile was spontaneous. ‘Good. Here we are.’

  His vehicle was an old shooting brake that looked as though it usually carried muddy spaniels. Mrs Bailey eyed it with distaste.

  ‘It seemed sensible to bring this, given the luggage,’ Ivor said by way of apology. He dusted off the front passenger seat and held the door while Mrs Bailey somewhat gingerly got in. He helped the porter cram the boot with cases and soon they were off, driving with caution down the icy roads, the girls hanging onto the straps in the back, an over-efficient heater scorching their shins.

  ‘How far is it?’ Diane asked above the hum of the engine.

  ‘Fifteen minutes away,’ Ivor called back.

  ‘It’s only three or four miles,’ Sarah told her. ‘Do you not remember?’

  ‘Obviously not,’ Diane hissed. ‘I haven’t seen the Richards for years, have I?’ Their boarding school had released her at sixteen as she had demonstrated so little interest in her studies, and she’d returned to India on the boat with Sarah, who had just finished sixth form. It was envisaged that the girls could train as typists in Bombay if they wanted something to do, but otherwise they could keep their mother company until such a time as they found husbands. Anyway, they knew it would only be a few years before Colonel Bailey retired and they might all return to England together.

  It had been Diane who had found him, one blazing hot Sunday in July.

  As the final preparations were underway for her twenty-first birthday party, Diane had stumbled in from the garden, chalk-faced with shock and babbling to Sarah and her mother to be quick. She had come across her father lying senseless on the path, the glass of gin he’d been drinking smashed on the gravel. He had suffered a massive heart attack and although the doctor arrived smartly, nothing could be done.

  ‘Mother is meeting us at Flint Cottage,’ Ivor was explaining to Mrs Bailey. ‘There’s a man cutting the holly bush in front. Not exactly the weather for it, but your tenants had let it run riot. We could barely reach the door.’

  ‘It’s good of your parents to arrange matters,’ Mrs Bailey said, clutching at the door handle as the car slid on a tight corner. ‘It was impossible for us to organize anything from India . . .’

  ‘They were glad to,’ Ivor said with warmth. ‘It was the least any of us could do in such sad circumstances. I’m afraid, though, that because the Watsons only vacated the place last week they left things in a pretty poor state. It’s been something of a rush getting it habitable for you.’

  ‘Your mother said that in her letter. I suppose we should have given the Watsons more notice.’

  ‘You couldn’t help that, given the situation.’

  ‘No. Once we reached London it felt important to be in before Christmas.’

  Sarah half listened to this conversation and wondered, not for the first time, where the poor Watsons with their young children would be spending the festive season. Really, their mother did get such ideas in her head that simply couldn’t be shifted. Sarah would have readily endured Christmas at Aunt Susan’s in Wimbledon, though she had to admit that her mother and Colonel Bailey’s spinster sister had never been close.

  Her attention was caught by the sight of an old man in a cloak digging a sheep from a snowdrift. His dog, a streak of black, was making little rushes to gather the rest of the flock. Clouds hung low, swollen with snow. It was like a Christmas-card scene. How many years had she longed for a traditional English Christmas with her family, instead of being in India or with Diane at Aunt Susan’s, but now it was here it would be a sad one. At least they would be dressed for it, thanks to their recent raid on Aquascutum’s.

  ‘Westbury Hall on the left,’ Ivor Richards announced, waving a gloved hand as they passed a high-arched gateway with a statue of a great dog on top. Through it, the briefest glimpse of a snowy drive up a slope to a house topped by Tudor chimneys and then it was gone.

  A minute or two further on, the car slid to a halt next to a long flint stone wall. Ivor climbed out, plodded round and opened the door for Mrs Bailey, then set about unloading suitcases from the boot.

  The women emerged more slowly and stood together at the low gate, gazing at the square lines of the Victorian detached house that would be their new home.

  ‘Looks pretty,’ Diane tried, uncertainly. They both glanced at their mother for a reaction, but she said nothing. Instead she swung open the gate and, with Sarah holding her arm, started carefully up the path, which, though swept clear of snow, was still icy. Diane followed, complaining about the cold.

  The holly Ivor had mentioned marred the frontage, but the house seemed larger than Sarah had expected. Two storeys, she saw, and gabled windows in the roof suggested attics. It lay amid a generous plot of garden bordered by great sheltering trees and studded with the white-shrouded hulks of bushes. What treasures the snow concealed, she must wait for the thaw to discover. She shivered in a sharp gust of wind and held the precious box closer.

  As they neared the mare’s nest of holly that blocked their path, the brisk snap of shears could be heard and the bright berried branches shuddered.

  Mrs Bailey spoke and the snapping ceased.

  ‘Sorry, ladies,’ a soft male voice cried. ‘Wait a moment, please. I’ll make you a way past.’ A cloth-capped, clean-shaven face became visible above the branches, then when his bulky form appeared, Sarah gained an impression of bright eyes in an intelligent face.

  ‘What a job,’ Sarah said politely as he steered them safely round the obstacle.

  The man smiled as he returned to his task. ‘It was much worse an hour ago, I assure you. I’ll be finished soon.’

  Sarah asked, ‘Mummy, shouldn’t we ask him to save some branches for Christmas?’ and when Mrs Bailey agreed, she asked the young man, ‘Would you, please? The berries are splendid.’

  ‘Of course. I was going to propose it anyway. I will leave some in the conservatory, if you like.’ His smile made his grey-blue eyes twinkle. They were almond-shaped, in a pale face that contrasted sharply with what she could see of his dark hair. He spoke perfect English, but pronounced the words softly, almost tenderly.

  ‘I say, Hartmann.’ Ivor’s rough tones ripped the air. ‘Take these in, will you.’ The young gardener flinched at the rudeness, but he propped up his shea
rs without complaint and went to lug the cases.

  A handsome bosomy woman in a country tweed suit appeared in the porch. ‘Belinda, darling, you’re here!’ she squealed, spreading her arms out to Mrs Bailey in welcome.

  ‘Oh, Margo!’ It had been many months since Sarah had last seen her mother spark into life. She watched, unexpectedly moved, as Mrs Bailey rushed into the other woman’s embrace. The two friends clung to one another, Belinda Bailey’s thin, powdered cheek pressed to Margo Richards’ plump, sun-browned one. Belinda’s eyes squeezed shut, her face crumpled with grief. Aunt Margo, Ivor’s mother, was someone Sarah barely remembered, but she knew the two wives had formed as close a bond as their husbands, sustained by infrequent meetings and the exchange of letters over the years. Seeing them together now, Sarah at last understood why her mother wanted to retreat here to the deep Norfolk countryside rather than rent a house in London. After the strains of her marriage and the sudden disorientation of widowhood, Belinda Bailey needed a place of safety.

  ‘I told you the place wouldn’t be ready, darling,’ Aunt Margo scolded as they gazed round inside, dismayed to see the wretched state in which their tenants had left the house. ‘I wish you’d agreed to stay with us.’

  ‘Perhaps we should have done,’ Mrs Bailey sighed, ‘but we’re here now, so we’ll have to make the best of it.’ Oh, her mother’s obstinacy.

  It had been Major Richards who, when the girls had returned to India after their schooling, had telegraphed Colonel Bailey to say that Flint Cottage had come up for sale and who, under Colonel Bailey’s subsequent instructions, had organized its purchase. Colonel and Mrs Bailey wanted somewhere in England to retire to eventually, and in the meantime they would let it out. Furniture, curtains and carpets belonging to the previous owner had been included in the sale, but nobody had realized before the Watsons’ departure how dingy the decoration had been.