Table of Contents
About the Author
By the Same Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Title Page
PART ONE CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
PART TWO BRIDGE HOUSE: SEPTEMBER 1944– SPRING 1946
Page 10
Page 20
Page 30
Page 40
Page 50
Page 60
Page 70
Page 80
PART THREE CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
Acknowledgements
Also available from Bantam Press The Way We Were
Marcia Willett's early life was devoted to the ballet, but her dreams of becoming a ballerina ended when she grew out of the classical proportions then required. She had always loved books, and a family crisis made her take up a new career as a novelist – a decision she has never regretted. She lives in a beautiful and wild part of Devon with her husband, where she loves to be visited by her son and his young family.
For more information on Marcia Willett and her books, see her website at www.devonwriters.co.uk/marcia.htm
www.rbooks.co.uk
Also by Marcia Willett
FORGOTTEN LAUGHTER
A WEEK IN WINTER
WINNING THROUGH
HOLDING ON
LOOKING FORWARD
SECOND TIME AROUND
STARTING OVER
HATTIE'S MILL
THE COURTYARD
THEA'S PARROT
THOSE WHO SERVE
THE DIPPER
THE BIRDCAGE
THE CHILDREN'S HOUR
THE GOLDEN CUP
ECHOES OF THE DANCE
MEMORIES OF THE STORM
MARCIA WILLETT
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ISBN 9781407036458
Version 1.0
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MEMORIES OF THE STORM
A CORGI BOOK
ISBN: 9781407036458
Version 1.0
First published in Great Britain
in 2007 by Bantam Press
a division of Transworld Publishers
Corgi edition published 2008
Copyright © Marcia Willett Limited 2007
Marcia Willett has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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To Father Keith and the Sisters at Tymawr
MEMORIES OF THE STORM
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
All day she'd been waiting. A gust of wind, lifting the bedroom curtain so that it cracked and billowed like a sail, had shaken her from a troubled sleep just after dawn. The corner of the curtain caught a photograph standing on the rosewood chest and tumbled it to the floor. She struggled up, the ragged fragments of her dream still wheeling in her head like a cloud of bats, and pushed back the quilt murmuring, 'Oh, no. Oh, no,' as if some terrible calamity had taken place. The glass was smashed: one shard remaining, long and jagged and curving upward, which seemed to cut the photograph in two, separating the four figures. Holding it in her hand she stared down at it, frowning in the halflight from the window. She and Edward smiled out with all the strong confidence of youth whilst the two other boys appeared dimmer by comparison, still imprisoned beneath the glass.
On reflection, this image was appropriate. She and Edward, the younger daughter and the eldest of the boys, had formed a natural alliance based on their mutual love of poetry and music that had set them a little apart from the two middle boys, who were athletic, strong and vigorous, and from the oldest of all the siblings: the gentle, domestic, sweet-tempered Patricia. How proud their mother had been of her sons; how disregarding of her two daughters.
Hester tilted the frame, looking for herself in the old, faded photograph. Is that how she'd been in that last summer before the war: chin tilted, with an almost heart-breaking look of fearless expectation? Edward, much taller – cheerful and careless in an open-necked shirt – had his hand on her shoulder. Their cousin and Edward's contemporary, Blaise, must have been behind the camera.
Abruptly she laid the photograph face downwards on the chest. The breaking of the glass had caused some kind of parallel rupture in her memory, cracking open the concealing layers of forgetfulness. She was seized by a sudden, formless panic – as if the break presaged bad luck. That was connected with mirrors, not ordinary glass, she told herself firmly. Yet tremulous anticipation, speeding her heartbeat and sharpening her hearing, pulsed into her fingertips and made her clumsy as she collected together the sharp fragments.
Downstairs, wrapped in her warm, faded shawl, she placed the larger pieces of glass on the draining board and bent down to take the dustpan and brush from the cupboard under the sink. Watched by an enormous, long-haired tortoiseshell cat, disturbed from his slumbers by the Aga, she put the kettle to boil on the hotplate, found a torch and went upstairs again to sweep up the remaining pieces of glass. The torch's beam picked out tiny shining specks scattered across the polished boards and the silky faded rug as, painstakingly on her knees, she swept up each one.
Later, after breakfast, she went out through the French windows and stood on the paved terrace above the river. The shining, tumbling water, shouldering its turbulent way between grassy banks, was silvered and glossed by the sun, which glinted through the naked canopy of the overarching trees. The strong south-westerly wind roistered in the highest branches of t
he tall beeches, plucking at the few remaining leaves and whirling them down in showers of gold. They floated away downstream, past the open meadowland where sunlight and water fused and dazzled, until they were lost to sight.
Hester rested her hands lightly on the stone wall. There had been heavy rain up on the Chains during the night and the boulders below the terrace were covered by the weight of water flowing down the Barle, but she could see their smooth, rounded shapes. It was here, just here, that Edward had fallen – no wall, back then, to break his headlong crash onto the boulders beneath – and she, held back by the urgent hands of her sister-in-law, had been prevented from trying to reach him.
Along with the vivid memory of the scene – Edward entering unexpectedly through the French doors from the dark rain-swept terrace to see his wife in the arms of his oldest, closest friend – came the familiar sense that something was not quite right. In Hester's mental picture of the drawingroom that evening there was always an unexpected flash of colour, a shape that eluded her but which she knew was out of place: mysterious shadowy corners, golden pools of lamplight spilling across polished wood, bright reflections in the mirror above the fireplace where blue and orange tongues of flame licked hungrily at the wood in the grate. A newspaper, casually flung down, was sliding from the chintz-covered cushions of the long sofa under the window, where damson-coloured damask curtains had been pulled against the wild night, and it was there, from just behind the sofa, that something pale but bright flickered suddenly out into the firelight – and just as suddenly disappeared.
A noise distracted her. Opening her eyes, glancing down, Hester saw a party of mallard being borne rapidly along on the bosom of the river. Quacking enthusiastically, they paddled furiously into the quieter waters beneath the trees and came splashing up the bank and onto the lawn. Hester turned back into the house, picked up the end of a loaf from the table as she passed through the kitchen, and went out across the grass to meet them. She laughed aloud to see their comic waddling as they rolled from one flat splayed foot to the other whilst the females still made their hoarse insistent cry as they approached. She forgot her premonition whilst enjoying the antics of the ducks but, once their daily ration was finished and they'd plunged back into the river, she was immediately prey again to a formless anxiety.
It was almost a relief when she heard the telephone bell as she was finishing an after-lunch cup of coffee. Willing herself to be calm, she recited her number clearly into the mouthpiece and was almost shocked to hear her god-daughter's voice. Whatever she'd been expecting she hadn't imagined it to have anything to do with Clio.
'Listen, Hes. The weirdest thing. I've met someone here called Jonah Faringdon whose mother stayed with you at Bridge House during the war after her own mother was killed in a raid. She was called Lucy Scott. Mean anything to you?'
Lucy. Little Lucy. Hester took a deep breath.
'Yes. Yes, indeed it does. She was a small child, of course.'
'I was wondering if I could bring Jonah back with me this evening? Give him some supper and have a chat and then I could drive him back to Michaelgarth or . . .' A slight hesitation.
Hester found that she was responding automatically to the unspoken request.
'He could stay the night here. You won't want to be turning out again. If he's agreeable to it and he's not expected back.'
'That would be great. We'll both have to be back here tomorrow morning anyway. He's a playwright, by the way. It's all shaping up very well and there's a real buzz already. I'm so glad I offered to help Lizzie out. We'll tell you everything later on. Can't quite say when we'll be home but sometime early evening. I'll do the supper and make up his bed. OK?'
'Quite OK.'
'Sure, Hes? You sound the least bit muted. It's just such a fantastic coincidence, isn't it?'
'Yes. Oh, yes, it is. Extraordinary. I can hardly believe it.'
'It's really weird. He can't wait to see the house where his mother stayed. And you, of course.'
'Of course. And I shall look forward to meeting Jonah.'
When she picked up her cup again the coffee tasted cold and bitter, so she set the cup back in its saucer. Her hands trembled very slightly and she covered them with the folds of her shawl. Little Lucy: so many memories crowding in, some happy, some poignant – and bringing with them a tiny twist of guilt. She'd always regretted that she'd never said goodbye to Lucy. Her departure had been so unexpected, so precipitate, and Hester had had other, more desperate demands to which she'd had to attend. It was too late when she'd realized that she hadn't said goodbye to the child; too late when she'd begun to wonder if she should have made certain that Lucy was safe.
Deliberately she turned her mind to happier recollections. For just over a year Lucy had lived with them at Bridge House and the whole family had loved her and taken her to its heart. Out of all the memories, one shone more clearly than the others, and Hester smiled a little, remembering.
Every morning before breakfast, Hester and Lucy go together to feed the chickens. Each carrying her pail of mash – Lucy's is a small red plastic seaside bucket – they cross the lawn and pass through the gate into the little meadow. Since the early years of the war most of the grass has been dug up so as to grow vegetables to feed the family, but part of it has been fenced off and here the fat red hens have their house: a rather ramshackle wooden building with a good strong door to shut against the fox. Hester knows how Lucy likes to go inside the little, lowroofed house, to put her hand into the prickly straw-lined laying boxes and feel the smooth eggs waiting. As the hens squawk and scuttle around the feeder, Hester waits whilst Lucy fills her empty, food-encrusted pail with the precious eggs. Nor does she neglect to examine the grassy margins of Hester's well-dug vegetable patch: the hens are allowed free range and there is sometimes treasure to be found in a clump of grass or a patch of nettles.
Hester watches, tenderly amused by the spectacle of the little girl – her long brown hair falling over flushed cheeks, her small careful hands parting the long grasses – and she enters into the excitement, new every morning, at the discovery of an egg laid secretly away from the little wooden house by a wayward hen. She bends to peer into the pail, held triumphantly aloft – 'Oh, well done, Lucy. Won't Nanny be pleased!' – and smoothes back the long hair, retying Lucy's ribbon. Lucy's brown eyes sparkle with delight and she takes Hester's hand as they go back to the house.
Hester realized that she was holding her hands tightly together within the folds of the shawl, as if she were clutching at something long since vanished. Sitting back in her chair she made a conscious effort to relax. It would be several hours yet before Clio would be home.
Because of the storm the journey from Michaelgarth was full of natural drama. It was nearly dark when they set out and rain beat relentlessly upon the windscreen of Clio's little car. In the tunnel of light made by the headlamps Jonah watched the trees bending in the wind, their twiggy fingers lashing the car's sides. He was feeling rather apprehensive. It was one thing to come down to the country home of the actress Lizzie Blake to talk through ideas for the film event she was planning; quite another to be speeding through the countryside with this rather dynamic girl who'd picked him up yesterday from the train at Tiverton Parkway.
As they drove away from Michaelgarth, Jonah had the oddest sensation that the whole matter was out of his control; that events were being just as efficiently stage-managed as one of his own plays. The difficulty was that he couldn't quite decide whom, in this instance, the producer or the director might be.
'I have the feeling that meeting Hester is important to you,' Clio was saying, changing gears, glancing to the right before turning into another narrow lane. 'Not just an idle enquiry but something more than that.'
He remained silent for a few seconds, surprised by her prescience, remembering his mother's unexpected response when he'd phoned a few days earlier.
'I shall be on Exmoor for the weekend,' he'd told her. 'Lizzie Blake has this idea of runn
ing a film event in the grounds of her country place and linking it up with the Porlock Arts Festival. She's persuaded a West Country television company to show a thirty-minute drama all written, filmed, acted and produced by sixth-form students, as long as it's up to a reasonable standard. I'm one of a group of professionals who has to show them how it's done. Rather fun, by the sound of it. Lizzie was Margery Kempe in my play The Pilgrim. Do you remember meeting her and Piers when we brought it to the Festival Theatre?'
'Of course I remember them both,' Lucy had answered. 'This is so strange, Jonah. I was thinking about Exmoor only last night, being there in the war at Bridge House.' He heard her give a huge sigh. 'I wonder if they are still there, the Mallorys.'
'I could ask around.' He'd tried not to sound too eager. 'Bridge House. That's the one in the photograph, isn't it?'
'It's all so long ago.' She'd retreated hastily, as if she'd been caught with her guard down and was regretting it. 'Nobody will remember.'
'They might. Piers' family has lived on Exmoor for ever. I'll ask him if he knows the Mallorys at Bridge House.'
And so he had, with astonishing results.
'To tell the truth,' Jonah admitted now, in answer to Clio's question, 'it's as if something's happening that I've always been half expecting ever since I first saw a photograph of my mother as a little girl in the garden at Bridge House.' He hesitated, not yet ready to discuss his mother's reluctance to talk about that period of her history. It seemed disloyal, somehow, to try to describe her reaction of fear and denial to a girl that he'd known for such a short time. 'When I was a small boy it was so strange, to see my own mother as a child, even younger than I was. She lost both her parents as a result of the war and generally she doesn't talk about it so I was rather surprised when she mentioned Miss Mallory.'
'Doctor,' Clio corrected him. 'Hes was the Professor of Nineteenth-Century English Literature at Lincoln University. She's been retired for a while now.'
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