The Keeping of Secrets

by Alice Graysharp

  ‘Alistair, who’s James? She’s been asking for someone called James.’

  ‘How the fuck should I know? Maybe she has a secret lover.’

  ‘Alistair!’

  ‘Got to go.’ Alistair sighed. ‘I’m too old for this sort of thing. Roll on next year.’

  ‘Oh, stop complaining. I’m having to work past retirement age. Just come before it’s too late.’

  Putting her phone back in her bag, Emily slipped back into the room. Retrieving her mother’s hand she asked,

  ‘Who’s James, Mummy? Can I contact him for you?’

  ‘Beaver Club.’ Pat drew a hoarse laboured breath. ‘B. He’ll get it, he’ll come back. Tell him sorry, so sorry.’

  ‘Beeva Club? Bee what? Sorry about what?’

  ‘Love him. Must tell him. I will. Marry. Then he’ll come.’

  Trying to raise herself again, legs working under the soft duvet, heels digging, frail hands and arms flailing, increasingly agitated.

  ‘Mummy, please, lie back.’

  Crying out, lips drawn back in a grimace of anguish.

  Emily grabbed the cord and pulled. A moment later a care worker appeared, a tall, sinewy young man with short-cropped sandy hair, in a soft blue uniform. Emily recognised him from previous visits. His badge said Marc.

  ‘There, there, Pat,’ he soothed. He turned to Emily. ‘I can call Maureen and the pharmacist. I believe you’ve already consented to a sedative if needed?’

  ‘James.’ Pat spoke loudly and clearly, focusing on Marc and stretching an arm, reaching out to him.

  ‘She’s taken to calling me James,’ Marc said apologetically to Emily.

  ‘You’re here.’ Half whispering. ‘You’re back.’

  Moving round to the other side of the bed Marc took Pat’s hand. She beamed up at him, agitation abating, striving ceasing.

  ‘You make a pretty good sedative,’ said Emily, smiling her thanks.

  Marc, perching on the edge of the armchair, leaned forward and stroked the hand he held.

  ‘James is here,’ he said.

  ‘Safe?

  ‘Yes.’

  Pat’s eyes closed and she sank back onto the pillows. Marc sat for a while until satisfied Pat was dozing again and, extricating his hand, rose and moved towards the door.

  ‘Just let me know if she needs me again. She’s such a lovely lady. She was so independent and determined to do things her own way when she first came here.’

  ‘Yes, that just about sums her up,’ smiled Emily.

  ‘A cup of tea? I’ll get one sorted for you.’

  Emily pulled a small notebook from her bag and balanced it on her knee. I must write down her last words for Alistair. I know what he’s like. If she goes before he gets here he’ll be devastated and jealous I was here and he wasn’t. She wrote, ‘James. Sort of back. Bloody eyes didn’t get him. Safe. Beeva Club. (Or is that BEVA, maybe an acronym?) Bee. Loves him. She will. Marry (?!). Come back.’

  Emily read her precis through several times. It made no sense. Mum loved Dad. So who is this James Bee? Does it matter? She’s rambling. I’ve read people at this stage can have hallucinations with the reducing oxygen to the brain.

  A different care worker, short, dark, Filipino probably, brought a cup of tea and some biscuits.

  Emily had never sat waiting for someone to die. Her father’s death nearly twenty-five years earlier in a car accident, a heart attack at the wheel, had been shockingly sudden. Edgy and a little nauseous she busied herself changing the flower water and tidying tidy surfaces. Squatting beside the low bookshelf she extracted the battered cardboard photograph albums and, piling them on the small table beside the armchair on the far side of the bed, slowly went through them. She had loved looking at these when a child. Here are the early ones of Mum and Dad together in a small back garden. Brixton. 1944. Mum’s looking up at him like there’s no one else in the world. You wouldn’t think there was a war on. Oh, there’s Monty with them in this one from 1945, Dad must have been on leave, maybe from when they got engaged. I vaguely remember Monty. I must have been only about four when he died. He would’ve been a very old dog.

  Emily immersed herself in her father’s army service abroad and on to the honeymoon photos, Mum in smart clothes the first few days then a two-piece bathing costume she had made herself, very daring, and here were the photos of the later cramped two bedroomed terraced house in Hounslow she remembered from her own childhood. Now where are her wedding photos? Ah, here. Dad beaming, Mum looking a little coy. I remember her once telling me she was on a period when she got married but that didn’t deter Dad!

  Pat lay still, breath rasping, hands occasionally twitching.

  ‘It’s okay, Mummy, I’m here and Alistair’s on his way.’

  Emily had read somewhere that the last sense to go was the hearing. How can anyone know that? she wondered. A Monty Python-like vision of a group of market researchers canvassing corpses in a mortuary with inane questions like ‘And what was the last of your senses to stop working? Was it (a) touch (b) sight (c) smell (d) hearing (e) common?’ assailed her. God, I have a sick sense of humour, she thought, and not sick in the way Luke means when talking with his friends.

  Luke, her eleven-year-old grandson. Oh God, I’d better phone Malcolm and let him know.

  Emily rang her son, speaking in a low voice in the bathroom, an ear on her mother’s breathing. Malcolm offered to leave work early and come over to sit with her and she hesitated, but thought, Alistair’ll be jealous. He’s always resented me having a child when he hasn’t. It’d better be just him and me here. Assuring Malcolm she was fine and would call him when she had any further news, she rang off and returned to the armchair. She searched older family photos but saw only the familiar faces of remembered friends and relatives who had gone before, including one of her mother aged about ten, arms entwined with her friend Bill. I know Daddy met Mummy through this Bill. Maybe this James was a friend of Bill’s?

  Pat became a little agitated as the afternoon wore on but this time Emily could not make out her mutterings. Supper came and she was offered her mother’s meal for herself, which she accepted pragmatically. I could be in for a long night. At least being on my own since Chris shat on me and left me for that Sharon bitch I’ve no one at home to worry about. Bastard! Her mind wandered around her marriage break up and her recent move to a flat while Pat lay breathing slowly and twitching occasionally.

  Around ten minutes to seven Marc returned. ‘I’ve nearly finished my shift for the day,’ he said. ‘We’ll be doing the handover soon. I thought I’d pop in and see Pat first.’

  Sitting on the chair and leaning forward, Marc said, ‘Pat, I’ll say good night now.’

  Pat half-snorted, drawing breath, and suddenly half-sat up, her eyes opening and moving as if reading off a sheet of paper. Enunciating as clearly as if she was addressing an art class, she said, ‘Group Captain James Alistair Bonar.’

  Turning her head, her eyes focusing on Marc, her hand reaching for him, a beaming smile lighting up her face, she added softly, ‘You came back. For me. They didn’t get you after all.’

  She breathed in again and exhaled, sinking back, her turned head resting on her right shoulder, her hand falling gently like an autumn leaf. Emily sat frozen, waiting for the next laboured breath that never came. Marc leaned forward, feeling for a pulse, placing the back of his hand above Pat’s mouth. ‘I’ll get Maureen,’ he said.

  Emily moved forward, placing her hand on the nearest shoulder. ‘God Bless you, Mum,’ she said loudly, in case there was any residual hearing left, and, sinking back down into the armchair, gave way to tension-released weeping, where Maureen found her.

  ‘Can I wait with my mother for my brother to arrive?’ Oh God, he’s bound to want to know the rest of her last words. Feverishly Emily scrabbled in her bag for her notebook and wrote them down verbatim.

  Alistair, ‘God, that bloody M25!’ found her sitting quietly beside the dead body of their mother
.

  They wept, hugging each other, distant indifference transformed by mutual grief. The storm subsiding, Emily said,

  ‘I asked them to hold back on ringing the undertaker until you got here.’

  ‘Did she ask for me? Was she upset I wasn’t here?’

  ‘She didn’t even seem to know that I was here.’

  ‘Didn’t she say anything? You mentioned something on the phone about asking for someone.’

  Emily picked up the notebook and handed the opened page to him silently. Alistair read her brief notes.

  ‘My God. Alistair,’ he read out loud.

  ‘I know. I’ve thought about little else since. Is that where she got your name from?’

  Alistair looked up. ‘It could be. When I was a kid I used to complain about having a name that was unusual amongst the Peters and Davids and Johns around me. She said I should be proud of it, that she chose a Scottish name because of the Clan Graham connection. I thought she meant Grandma Dorringham’s Scottish paternal line which was Clan Graham. But my family history research never threw up an Alistair on the family tree to name me after.’ Returning to the notebook, ‘How extraordinary.’

  Later, back at Emily’s flat, Alistair googled the name on Emily’s laptop and gave an exclamation that brought Emily running from the coffee maker in the kitchen.

  ‘How extraordinary!’ exclaimed Alistair again. ‘Look, here’s an airman on some obscure Canadian World War Two website with exactly the same name who died over the North Sea in November 1940. He was,’ Alistair added, peering at the screen, ‘a group captain. Downed by, of all things, a bomb from an Italian airplane.’ Alistair swivelled his head round. ‘I didn’t know the Italians took part in bombing sorties.’

  ‘Sorties,’ said Emily, looking down fondly at her younger brother’s thinning grey hair, his jowled face, his profile so like their mother’s. She picked up her notes. ‘Mum must have said sortie. I thought she said “sort of”, but she was saying sortie.’

  ‘And not eyes,’ said Alistair, pulling the notebook back, pointing, ‘but Eyeties. I remember Grandpa Roberts called the Italian prisoners of war who worked at the bakery “Eyeties”.

  ‘Perhaps she was remembering reading about this,’ he deduced, returning to the screen. ‘She could have just had some memory of this incident, then got it muddled with Dad, so her words about loving him could have been about Dad.’

  ‘We’ll never know,’ said Emily, returning to the kitchen and bringing in two cups of coffee and a plate of hastily prepared ham sandwiches. ‘Look, I need to ring Malcolm. Will you stay here tonight? If not, I might go to Malcolm’s.’

  ‘I’ll put up in your spare room, if that’s all right with you. Don’t know if I’ll sleep tonight. Want to get to the bottom of this.’

  While Emily disappeared into her bedroom to ring Malcolm, Alistair typed in Beeva Club and was asked ‘Do you mean Beaver Club?’, tried that and got an invitation to join the most junior section of the boy scouts. But on her return he crowed triumphantly.

  ‘Tried Beaver Club World War Two and look what I’ve found. The Beaver Club was set up in London in 1940. For Canadian servicemen. There are even photos of them playing billiards and chess, and here’s one of a guy asleep in an armchair. Maybe Mum worked there and met the guy there.’ Looking up, he added, ‘I’m sure I remember Grandma Roberts talking about working at a Canadian club during the war. This must’ve been it.’

  ‘I think we’re in danger of making too much of this,’ said Emily doubtfully. ‘She was fifteen when the war broke out and would’ve been only sixteen when he died. This guy’s a group captain. I don’t know exactly where that is in the pecking order but I’ll bet he wasn’t exactly a spring chicken.’

  Alistair swivelled back to the screen. ‘Mum was named after a man her grandmother loved but never married. I wonder if she named me after him,’ pointing to the screen. ‘I’ll see what else I can find out.’

  ‘No, we’ve done enough for today. We’ve got a whole stack of things to do and people to tell tomorrow,’ Emily insisted. ‘Come on, eat up and I’ll sort out the spare bed for you.’

  The next few days passed in a blur of activity, organising compassionate leave, registering Pat’s death, sorting her belongings at the home, arranging the funeral, and arranging to see the solicitor about Pat’s Will. The day after the funeral they sat in an elegant conference room on the ground floor of a Georgian building in Guildford. Petronella Moregrave (‘What a wonderfully appropriate surname for a probate solicitor,’ said Alistair to Emily as they approached the building), slim, thirty-something, dark and elegant in a black suit, was welcoming and sympathetic.

  ‘I believe you already have a copy of your mother’s Will,’ she said. They nodded. ‘I have, of course, got the original here, and also the codicil she made when her great-grandson was born.’ Ms Morgrave fished the documents out of the file, which she showed to them, adding, ‘I’m not aware of your mother making any later Wills or codicils but thought I should check you’ve found nothing else amongst her effects?’

  Emily and Alistair shook their heads in unison.

  ‘You’ve brought the ID I asked for?’

  They produced passports and recent utility bills. Ms Moregrave said, ‘If you would be kind enough to wait here, I’ll pop out and get the certified copies done I need. Meanwhile,’ she added, drawing out a package from the file and pushing it across the table before she moved towards the door, ‘I have something for you to look at while I’m gone.’

  The package was an A4 sized brown envelope copiously sealed with peeling sellotape and marked on the front in Pat’s handwriting, ‘To be kept with Mrs Patricia Adela Dorringham’s Will and handed to the Executors in the event of her death. Not to be opened prior to her death.’

  Slitting the top of the envelope with his pen, Alistair drew out a wodge of typescript perhaps an inch and a half thick sewn together by a thick thread woven in and out of holes punched into the left hand margin. Attached to the front was a handwritten letter in Pat’s elegant copperplate dated about two years after their father’s death. Emily shuffled her chair round the table so they could read it together.

  My Dearest Alistair and Emily

  Perhaps my mother’s insistence that I learn typing has paid off as I have spent the last year or so typing up an account of my War years and your father’s secret war work. The current nostalgia for the Second World War seems to concentrate on the rich and famous and there are ever more books coming out that idolise Hitler in a macabre sort of way. I want to tell you about the ordinariness of life for the people that we were and the sacrifices made for the greater good. If you choose to destroy this when you have read it you are free to do so; if you choose to publish it and make a few bob you are free to do so also. I shall leave you to choose a title. I would just ask that you do not judge but rather see me as an ordinary working class adolescent girl struggling to make sense of a world run mad by war. I know I brought you up strictly. I hope this will help you understand and forgive. Please know that I loved your father with all my heart from the moment I first set eyes on him, I love him still and will do so to my dying day.

  And I love you too my children, I love you to bits.

  With all my love,

  Mummy

  Emily said, ‘I wonder if Dad was her only love, though. I never thought to ask. She always said she met Dad in the spring of 1941. Six months after that Canadian airman’s death. Do you think she loved him, too?’

  ‘Well, maybe now we’ll find out,’ said Alistair.

  Emily, drawing the typescript towards them, began to read out loud,

  ‘Prologue

  There are always days in one’s life that remain forever fixed in the memory. The first day at school, the birthday when the dream of a special toy came true, the day our dog Peggy arrived, the day my father learnt of his brother Barry’s death in that evening’s paper.

  I am Patricia Adela Roberts and Saturday 2nd September 1939 was the
day my war began…’

  Author’s Note

  Storytelling by parents and grandparents of incidents and experiences of the Second World War was something of a family pastime as I grew up, often laced with humour and irony which masked the emotional toll wrought by the events. My research into the history of such events has brought with it a reality check of the truly horrendous experience for those who lived through war and for all who continue to do so in parts of the world today. To spend many consecutive nights cowering under seemingly endless bombing and emerging to claw through another day is a tribute to the resilience and courage of the human race. I have also been deeply moved by the dangers faced and sacrifices made by the armed forces of many countries.

  War changes people. In this novel I have explored examples of the effect war had in compromising standards that would probably have been maintained in peacetime, such as the opportunity for cheating the rationing system or sexual licence arising from uncertainty about the future and fears for a loved one’s safe return from combat. I have woven family recollections with other inspirational sources and my own imagination to create a work of fiction. While a number of events are based on real experiences, this novel is neither a memoir nor a biography. It is the fictional story of, as Pat wrote to her children, an ordinary working class adolescent girl struggling to make sense of a world run mad by war.

  To avoid any confusion with anyone living or dead, all names in this novel are fictional, except for the recognisable historical figures of General Sir Frederick Pile, King George VI and Myra Hess. I have however placed these historical figures in my work of fiction and as such nothing I say about them should be treated as historical fact.

  For further information about the background to The Keeping of Secrets and recommended reading visit my website www.alicegraysharp.com

  Acknowledgements