The Returning Tide

by Liz Fenwick

  Lara hovered by the opening of the tepee. Everything was proceeding to plan – dinner was cleared, and according to Cassie’s schedule it was time for the speeches. If Lara hadn’t seen several British films, she would have been puzzled by this item on the event plan. In the movies the best man always gave a short humorous account of the love affair between the bride and the groom, and today Fred’s brother had been funny and light-hearted. She was tempted to try the same at Leo’s wedding in December.

  Now Jack stood with a microphone in his hand, his face solemn. His eyes were the colour of a summer sky and the curl in his blonde hair refused to be totally tamed. Maybe it was his stance or the set of his mouth, but Lara felt for him. The crowd hushed as he cleared his throat.

  ‘I know that I’m not the best person for this task but Peta has asked me to thank the bridesmaids and the children.’ He paused and looked at a piece of paper in his hands. His Adam’s apple bobbed visibly. ‘I want to thank my grandmother on Peta and Fred’s behalf for the use of her beautiful home. Elle Rowse has been a huge part of Peta’s and my life, just as much a parent to us as grandmother, and sometimes all at once.’ He picked up his glass and looked into the crowd until he spotted her. ‘Thank you, Gran,’ he said, and the crowd responded with a polite ‘Hear, hear.’

  Then he turned to the bride and the groom and paused, a bit too long. Lara willed him to continue. She saw the people directly in front of her fidgeting on the bench and a few people leaned in to whisper. She frowned. Jack looked down at Peta and Fred and cleared his throat.

  ‘I don’t believe in love,’ he said. ‘It makes you do stupid things. You lose all perspective and things go wrong.’

  Lara could hear the gasps throughout the crowd, and saw the groom’s father shift in his seat as if he was about to stand and hit Jack. A man directly in front of her said in a stage whisper, ‘Get him off!’

  ‘But if I did believe in love and marriage,’ continued Jack, ignoring the hubbub of discontent, ‘then what these two have … just might be it.’

  Lara looked at the happy couple. Both appeared shell-shocked, and understandably so, yet she knew what Jack meant. She didn’t believe in love anymore, but as much as she agreed with him, his sister’s wedding was not the right time to air his views. Life today didn’t work as it had in the past. Love and marriage belonged to a time when things were mended not thrown away. She mentally raised a glass to his braveness as he asked everyone to toast the bride and groom and their future life together. As they all returned to their seats, the atmosphere in the tent had changed from joyous to angry. People began moving. Lara rushed the waiting staff to get the coffee and brownies on the tables. Maybe a little sugar would calm everyone. Otherwise a fight might start and no newly-weds deserved that, even if the perfect ideal of married love no longer existed.

  Despite the high-backed chair I had been given, my body complained bitterly as I stood. I wanted to shout at everyone to be quiet and forget what Jack had said, but with these damn hearing aids I could hear the loud whispers, and could read the thoughts expressed on Tamsin and Anthony’s faces. Peta was paler than she’d been earlier, but she placed a hand on her brother’s arm and kissed his cheek when he sat down next to her. No matter what he said she would still love him, but that speech would put some strain on their relationship. I hadn’t thought his anger and bitterness had gone so deep that he’d be unable to stop it coming forth at a time like now.

  Eddie took my hand once I reached my feet. ‘Well, that will be discussed for years to come.’ He shook his head. ‘Sometimes it’s best when people don’t say a thing.’

  A wry smile formed on my mouth. ‘Indeed.’ Both he and I knew bitter disappointment but it was not our way to speak of it. Our generation didn’t talk about such things for many reasons, and one of them was that we thought to spare other people’s pain. Silence might wreak havoc with your insides, but it made for a calmer, quieter existence. I thought of the reporter wanting me to talk about the war. My war, as she called it, was best left locked inside of me, where it had no power to harm anyone else.

  ‘I’m off to find a whisky,’ Eddie said. ‘Will you join me?’

  He still had charm even at ninety-four. He was a gentleman through and through. ‘I need a bit of fresh air first.’ I took a breath. ‘A stiff drink does appeal though.’

  ‘I’ll see if I can shepherd young Jack away from the angry wedding party and bring you one.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘A pleasure, my dear.’

  He hobbled one way while I went the other, towards the opening of the tepee. The setting sun was catching the tops of the pines in a golden glow and falling on the open ground beside the house. I shivered; the heat had left the day as the sun lowered in the sky. The catering staff had been superb, always there with the correct food or drink, sometimes before people had even realised they needed it. Their white shirts were almost yellow in the light as they moved with their trays towards the tent. At least something had run smoothly. I just hoped the band would begin playing again and defuse the tension. The breeze had turned. The weather would soon change.

  As I looked across the view, my eye was caught by a floral skirt billowing in the breeze. The woman wearing it was walking beside the house, and the pattern of the dress reminded me of one I had once owned. I paused, trying to see which guest had wandered to the working part of the house – and then I saw her properly. Caught there in the golden light stood a vision of myself, young again, with my grandmother’s earrings catching the evening sun.

  I was rooted to the spot. I barely registered Eddie as he walked towards me, a drink in his hand and a concerned expression on his face. ‘Have a good sip of this, put some colour in your face. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’ He followed my gaze and a second later he had dropped the glass in his hand. It didn’t shatter as it hit the grass, which was more than I could say for Eddie. His face crumpled in front of me.

  ‘Good lord.’ He cleared his throat. ‘It is an uncanny resemblance.’

  We stood shoulder to shoulder, watching her. I was relieved. If he could see her, my mind wasn’t playing tricks on me. I didn’t want to think about it, but it was all I could do. How could that woman look identical to myself and my sister? There was only one answer and I couldn’t believe it. Why now?

  I closed my eyes and counted through the years, guessing that the doppelgänger was in her mid-twenties, maybe thirty. It was hard to tell these days and yet she wore clothing that spoke of the past. I recognised the fabric pattern. But it wasn’t the clothes or the hairstyle. It was like the years had melted away and I saw what I wanted to remember. It was that last summer before we’d turned eighteen and our lives went their separate ways.

  Moments later the vision moved into the house and out of sight. The woman was gone.

  ‘I tell you,’ said Eddie, ‘it gave me a shock to see my old fiancée just as I remember her.’ He placed a hand on his heart.

  ‘Yes.’ I looked at Eddie, knowing his pain must be as sharp as mine. He was of a more forgiving nature, yet still he’d never married. His heart had broken and never healed. Dwelling on the past wasn’t helping things.

  ‘Need a drink by any chance?’ He coughed. ‘I do.’

  ‘Yes, I definitely do.’ I squinted at him. Maybe that was the way to go, to drown all the memories and the pain in alcohol. But unlike my father, I hadn’t chosen that route.

  I stopped. I was being unfair. Father had seen things that he couldn’t forget, from the beaches of D-Day to the death camps. He’d tried to block it out, indulging in women and wine until Mother had broken completely. It was as though the pain of his war couldn’t be contained within the body; its damage had to spread. My war had been different. Unlike my father, I didn’t crack in the aftermath of everything that happened – I became solid, unbreakable. And, thankfully, Andrew had known that. We had never spoken of the war, except for general references.

  Eddie, too, never spoke of what happened. H
e would regale the willing with the joys of flying, the excitement, the daring … but not how he lived with the fact that he had killed thousands of civilians. I could see those ghosts in his eyes; they spoke to the ones in mine, despite the fact that I’d never pulled a trigger or dropped a bomb.

  Rip Tide

  Make haste! The tide of Fortune soon ebbs.

  SILIUS ITALICUS, PUNICA, BOOK IV, LINE 732

  Twenty-Four

  Windward, Mawnan Smith, Falmouth, Cornwall

  12 September 2015

  I settled on the sofa in the sitting room, comfortable at last. The fairy lights lined the flaps of the tepee and they twinkled in the darkness. The night had drawn in so quickly that in the bustle of the celebration I hadn’t noticed until a chill had settled on me and Eddie suggested we retire to the house.

  ‘Do you think the girl could be connected to Amelia in some way?’ Eddie handed me a drink. In the tepee, the music continued and the dance floor was already crowded. ‘It was a shame I couldn’t find her. I did look and I asked about her.’ He shook his head. ‘But she disappeared like a vision.’ He looked at me closely. ‘But she wasn’t one, Delly.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, and frowned. His question reflected my thoughts but I didn’t want to talk about it. It was too painful.

  ‘She was the caterer.’ He laughed. ‘A cook like Amelia.’ He took a deep sip of whisky. ‘Do you know what happened to Amelia in America?’ he asked.

  I swung around, the loud beat of the music pounding in my head. ‘Do you?’

  ‘You know I don’t. How could I?’

  I closed my eyes. I couldn’t lash out at him. It wasn’t fair.

  ‘Thought you might,’ he said. ‘She’s your sister.’

  I sighed and Eddie placed a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘You never told me what happened.’

  I shook my head, unable to reply. Even when Mother died I’d refused to have contact with her. Father had stepped in, not that I wanted to engage with him either, but for once he did all that was necessary including informing my sister. He had tried to talk to me, to explain I guessed, but I had refused to listen to him.

  ‘I knew whatever it was it … had to be bad. You won’t even speak her name. Had Robert Webster been yours?’

  I gasped.

  ‘I see.’ He took a sip of his drink. ‘She had been quite loose when I pinned her down but …’ His voice trailed away. ‘She was a good person, the best really. I don’t think she would have done it deliberately. I know she thought I was dead.’ He shook his head. ‘It was the only thing that kept me from walking off a cliff.’ He laughed grimly. ‘That and the fact that walking was very tricky at the time.’ He tapped his prosthetic leg.

  He looked at me as if willing me to speak. I pressed my lips together.

  ‘I can only make guesses if you don’t tell me,’ he said.

  I turned to him. ‘We don’t talk.’

  ‘No, this is true. Putting the pain into words doesn’t make it go away. It makes it more real because, then, you have to look at it, you can’t step around it anymore. Yet …’ He took a long drag of his whisky. ‘I have found that I’ve had to talk as I’ve become old. The bottling it up, the denying it didn’t make it go away. It simply came out at night when I was alone. I’d wake screaming out names of people that were long dead.’

  It was my turn to reach out to him. My war had been bad but it was nothing compared to what he’d lived through. Having survived the European arena he went to Asia, where he was shot down and captured. When he’d come home he was half the man he had been when he left, and his fiancée was somebody else’s wife. How he could find any good words for her at all was beyond me, but then he had always been kind.

  The piles of unopened letters sitting upstairs might answer his questions – I had originally thrown them away, but Mother had retrieved them, hoping I would reach out to my sister and see reason. She thought I was taking the moral high ground but she had no idea. I couldn’t know about Amelia’s life. Reading the details would only make the pain cut deeper. Ignorance should have been bliss, if only my imagination hadn’t always tried to fill in the blanks.

  ‘Delly, let it go now.’

  I flinched. Elle, that was who I had become. The wedding and the baby had taken the future from me, so I had changed myself. Elle defined the new me, the me I’d carved out of the pain so I could embrace any future I could find.

  I doubted Mother ever wrote to Amelia of what had happened afterwards, when Father didn’t even bother to return anymore, not even for the holidays. She wouldn’t have burdened my sister with that. She would have written only the positives. I could almost hear her voice, as if she was sitting in her favourite armchair in the corner: It’s been a lovely spring with the weather so mild it’s brought on the roses early, and your sister has stepped in and taken over your grandmother’s garden. Who knew she had it in her?

  I actually glanced over at the armchair, just to be sure Mother wasn’t in fact sitting there. It had been sixty-four years since a bad bout of pneumonia took her that bitter November. With the appearance of the woman in the dress tonight, I felt the presence of the past in a manner that I hadn’t in years. The way she had walked and turned her head was identical. And yet my mind refused to believe what my eyes had seen. I knew that she must be related; there had to be a link.

  However it was one aspect of her that had unsettled me most – her hands, with their graceful fingers. Turning my own hand over in front of me, I saw the fingers were still long but graceful no longer. Age had bent them, the once-clear skin coloured by the sun. Youth was a memory, but in my head I was still young. It was my body that had aged. All these memories should have disappeared. I didn’t want them, and once opened they were not easy to close again.

  ‘Delly, where have you gone?’ Eddie stood in front of me, but I barely saw him. I had gone back to a time of promise. But now both Eddie and I were relics of the broken past.

  HMS Attack, Portland, Dorset

  10 May 1944

  Dearest Half,

  After writing of my despair, I hope you knew that it had turned to pure joy. It’s been four days since I’ve seen my love. The sun shines and my heart sings. I keep pinching myself. He’s alive and that’s all that matters. I’d thought I’d never feel his arms around me again and had steeled myself to live in this world without him but now I don’t have to. I thought what I felt for him could never be stronger but I was wrong.

  You are wondering what happened to him. I honestly don’t know. He has had stitches on his forehead, that is all I know. We held each other on the dance floor not daring to speak. Today I am counting the hours until this afternoon when I can go ashore and see him. We will only have four hours but it will have to be enough for now.

  I don’t know how you can live without Eddie. I’m obviously not as strong as you are and all these years I thought I was the strong one. Hah! Silly me. I can hear you chuckling as I write this. Will Eddie be able to come home on leave? I hope you can marry then. If it looks likely give me as much warning as you can. Will you marry in Cornwall or elsewhere? What will you wear?

  I can’t sit still any longer. I’ll write to you after I’ve seen him.

  I stopped writing, put the letter away and straightened my bed, after which I paced the room. All I knew right now was that I wanted to be in Bobby’s arms, not here. I couldn’t afford to waste any more time. If nothing else, what had happened on 28 April had taught me how important it was to live in the now. I had today with Bobby. I might not have tomorrow.

  After dinner Pat and I walked towards the tennis courts. I hadn’t knocked a ball around in a while but a few Wrens were playing as we passed.

  ‘Out with it, Adele.’ Her words sounded abrupt but she was smiling.

  I flushed. There was no easy way to ask what I needed to know. ‘Um, can you tell me … you know … how it’s done?’

  She looked at me closely then laughed. ‘No wonder you looked so uncomfortable
all through dinner.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘So you want to do the dirty deed with your Yank?’

  I nodded, not liking the way she said it.

  ‘I didn’t think you had it in you. But maybe you have. Maybe we all have because of the blasted war.’ She sighed, looking out to the white cliffs in the distance. ‘You’ve lived in the country and seen animals do it.’

  I nodded, swallowing.

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s much better than that but the action’s the same.’ She put her arm around me and whispered details in my ear. I felt my face flush with heat. I was both excited and revolted at the same time.

  ‘Judging by your expression – and your resemblance to a beetroot – you might not be ready.’ Pat smiled. ‘But better to plunge in than be like my old aunt after the last war. There may not be many men left once it’s over, and she still hasn’t had one.’

  Weymouth, Dorset

  11 May 1944

  As the train slowed and I peered out of the open window, I could see Bobby in the distance, standing waiting on the platform. Everything in me rejoiced. The sun beat down on his head and as the train brought me closer I could see highlights in his brown hair. When he was a child living near the sea he would have been fair. Would our children be fair-haired like me or dark like him? I caught my breath, shocked at what I had just thought – but I knew that was what I wanted more than anything. My head told me it was too soon to think like that, while my heart was already there, feeling how it could happen.