I'll Be Seeing You (4 page)

We were married eighteen months later and Flavia was born the following year. I began getting regular commissions to illustrate children's books, mostly ones about furry animals. The bunnies, as Mark called them, though they weren't always rabbits.

After only one of the years, I realized that the marriage had been a mistake and I'm sure that Mark realized it too. Ma had been quite right. We had almost nothing in common, no shared interests at all – except for our daughter. When he came home from his City desk, Mark expected me to be waiting, agog to hear about his day, not working away feverishly on some deadline, having got Flavia to bed and to sleep at last. I was exhausted from looking after a small child and trying to complete commissions in snatched moments, but I stubbornly refused Mark's offer to employ a full-time nanny because I wanted to take care of Flavia myself. And I hated the dinner parties and the long evenings at expensive restaurants with important clients, and the international conferences in soulless hotels. The world of high finance was as uninteresting to me as the bunnies were to Mark. It was equal boredom on both sides. Equal disillusion. And, looking back, a lot of the fault and failure was mine. However, we staggered on until Caroline arrived to work as his secretary at the merchant bank. Ultra-efficient and groomed to a whisker, she understood exactly what Mark needed and was eager and able to provide it.

The divorce was very amicable. I opted for a clean-break lump sum instead of maintenance and used two-thirds of it to buy a house in Putney. Mark paid for Flavia's schooling and university and gave her a very generous allowance. There was no bitterness, only relief. Our lives simply diverged. Flavia lived with me and I went on with the illustrations and taught watercolour painting at adult evening classes, while, with Caroline's support and encouragement, Mark rose to great heights in the City, and had four more children. But I remained a divorcee. A wretched, long-drawn-out affair, involving a married man and dragging on over several years, taught me a painful lesson and, thereafter, I kept out of trouble.

When Flavia had finished university and started work in London, we split the Putney house into two flats. She occupied the ground floor while I lived upstairs with my studio in the attic above, and we both looked after the small front and back gardens. It was a very successful arrangement.

I had promised to telephone Aunt Primrose about the funeral. She was the last remaining of five sisters, all named after flowers: Violet, Lily, Iris, Primrose and the youngest, Marguerite, my mother, who had been called Daisy all her life. Reggie, Primrose's husband, was almost stone deaf and she bellowed down the phone at me from sheer habit.

‘I'll be there, of course. Reggie's not up to it, I'm afraid, so I'll leave him behind.'

I could see her standing four-square to the draughts in the dilapidated drawing room of their ancient house in Wales, Uncle Reggie slumped in an armchair by the fire, the smelly old spaniels – four of them – flopped insensible on the hearthrug at his slippers.

I said, ‘I'm starting to try and clear out things here a bit. Is there anything of Ma's you'd like to have?'

‘Sweet of you to ask, dear. Nothing I can think of at the moment. We've got far too much here, as it is. But if you happen to come across any old family photos, I'd love to see them. From before the Flood, when she and I were young. Don't throw them out.'

I promised not to. ‘If I find any, I'll keep them safe for you. By the way, did Ma ever talk to you about what she got up to in the WAAF during the war?'

‘Well, she always told me she had a jolly good time. We all did, you know. Lily and Vi in the WRNS, Iris a Land Girl and me a FANY driving ambulances all over the place. We'd none of us have missed it for the world. Not the done thing to say so these days, I know, but who cares?'

‘Did she ever talk about having a love affair?'

There was a chuckle and the faint clink of ice against glass – an early evening pick-me-up to hand.

‘We
all
had those. Especially Iris. All those haystacks, and the Italian POWs working on the farms. She was very keen on
them
.'

‘But was there somebody special with Ma? Someone she told you about?'

‘Well, I seem to remember that there was an American . . . she was mad about him, but I think he was killed in action. She never mentioned him after the war, and, of course, it would have been before she married your father. Dear Vernon, he was always there, you know – waiting hopefully in the wings. Always dotty about Daisy, ever since we were children. Very sweet.'

‘Did you ever meet the American?'

‘Oh, no. Daisy and I hardly saw each other during the war. Too busy doing our own thing. Our leaves hardly ever coincided, and you couldn't get around like now. Journeys took for ever. But we wrote to each other and she mentioned him in her letters.'

‘Do you still have any of them, by any chance?'

‘Lord knows . . . I doubt it, but I'll have a search, if you're interested. I can't promise anything, though.'

‘Did she happen to tell you his name?'

Another soft clink. ‘Can't remember, I'm afraid. It's too long ago.'

‘Where she was stationed?'

‘Somewhere in Suffolk. A bomber station. I've forgotten what it was called. Some funny country name like Little Hogwash or Nether Snoring.' Another clink and a gulp. ‘Why all these questions, dear?'

‘Nothing really. I found an old photo in her desk – of an American bomber crew. I was just curious.'

‘Well, the Yanks came over here in force after Pearl Harbor. Thousands of 'em. And jolly good fun they were, too. One of them taught me to jitterbug.' Another rich chuckle. ‘But that was a long, long time ago. Couldn't do it now, not with my knees.'

I smiled. It was hard to imagine Aunt Primrose ever jitterbugging but I didn't doubt that it was true. ‘Well, we'll see you next week. Would you like to stay the night here?'

‘Love to but I'll have to get back to old Reggie and the dogs.' There was a pause, a slight lowering of the voice. ‘You know, Juliet, when your mother dies, you suddenly realize all the things you wish you'd asked her before. I felt just the same when your grandmother went – so did Daisy, too. We both wished we had. Only somehow when they're alive, there's never quite the time or chance, is there?' A sigh and another faint clink. ‘And then, of course, it's too late.'

Following my aunt's example, I went in search of a drink and poured a large malt whisky. It felt physically warming and gave me the courage to go upstairs and begin the task of clearing out my mother's desk. I sat down at the desk once more and began on the pigeonholes. I went through everything, making a pile for things that could be discarded and others that should be kept, and, as I worked, I kept having the eerie sensation that she was standing behind me, watching. I turned my head several times, hairs prickling on the back of my neck, but, of course, there was nobody there.

The letters I found were mostly recent – from friends, from Drew and Sonia, from Flavia and myself, from Aunt Primrose – and family snaps taken not so long ago. Her last year's diary, kept in the central pigeonhole with her old and tattered address book, showed regular appointments with the doctor and hospital from early October onwards. Beneath the pigeonhole there was a small drawer and inside it I found my mother's fountain pen and her marriage certificate. Marguerite Anne Woods had married Vernon Henry Byrne on 16th April 1944, at a register office in Buckinghamshire. Somehow Drew and I had never thought about how long they had been married. Their wedding anniversaries had passed almost unmarked – I'm sure Da forgot most of them – and this was the first time I had ever laid eyes on their marriage certificate. I was poor at arithmetic but I could do the sum. I had been born on 14th September 1944 – five months later.

I closed the desk lid and moved on to the drawers below. In them, I found bundles of much older letters – some of them going back a long time. I came across several that I had written to her as a child, handmade birthday cards I had given her over the years and some old school reports. There were more photos: ones of Drew and me as small children in the Oxford garden, of Da reading in a deckchair under the beech tree, of long-since dead pets – dogs, cats, rabbits. And even older photos of Ma herself with her sisters as young girls – one of all of them together with arms linked in a smiling row at the seaside, dressed in funny, old-fashioned woollen swimming costumes and rubber bathing caps: Violet, Lily, Iris, Primrose and, the youngest and smallest at the end of the row, my mother, Daisy. I put those aside for Aunt Primrose and opened another drawer. Old diaries, old theatre programmes, a box of paper clips, luggage labels, a bottle of blue Quink ink, a grease-stained notebook of post-war recipes that Ma had written down: tips on cooking with dried egg, ways of stretching the meat ration, new ideas for fish dishes. There was nothing that related to the American pilot. No more crew photos, no letters from him, no mementoes of any kind.

Until I came to the last drawer – the bottom drawer on the left. There were only two things in it and I took out the first. It was a small sketchbook – I had one rather like it myself that I carried about in my bag. This one was full of pencil drawings – sketches done on an air force station in wartime – and the people, the planes, the vehicles were all American. American uniforms, American Jeeps and American bombers with big white stars. The single exception was a drawing of my English mother in her WAAF uniform, seated at a table with a telephone beside her, papers in front of her, a fountain pen in one hand. As I turned the pages I might have been looking at my own work – the pencil strokes, the shading, the style and execution were all mine.
Incidentally, you get your artistic talent from him
. There was no name in the book, no writing at all, but I knew that it must have belonged to him.

The second thing in the drawer was an old 78 rpm record kept in a cardboard sleeve – the breakable, scratchable, fast-turning kind in use before vinyl long-players. I carried it downstairs to the old radiogram that had stood in a corner of the drawing room for many years. It had knobs to turn and twiddle and a dial for tuning in the wireless. The record-playing part pulled out from underneath and could take a stack of six and drop them automatically, one after the other. In the Forties it had probably been state-of-the-art; now, of course, it was obsolete. A museum piece. In fact, I couldn't remember the last time it had played anything at all. I switched on, hauled out the turntable and put the record on to play. The arm with its needle-head moved across and descended.

The singer was as famous as the song. I sat there in the gathering gloom of a snowy winter's afternoon in the icy drawing room while a young Frank Sinatra crooned the words softly to me.

As the record came to an end and clicked itself off, Karen, one of the St Hilda's students peered, white-faced, round the half-open door.

‘Oh, it's you, Mrs Porter . . . I'm so sorry. You gave me a bit of a fright . . . Mrs Byrne used to play that in here quite often. We could hear it. It's a lovely old song, isn't it?'

‘Yes, it's lovely.'

‘Perhaps it brought back memories for her.'

I still hadn't destroyed the photograph. Later, I looked at it again. I found a magnifying glass in the study and moved it slowly along the two rows of faces, examining each one – the smiling, fresh-faced young men who would, by now, be in their seventies – if they were still alive. I stopped at the officer in the middle of the back row – the one Drew had thought must be the pilot. He was looking directly at the camera with his cap tilted back slightly so that I could see his face clearly. It was a nice face – open and friendly and honest. It was quite possible, though still incredible to me, that I was looking at my own father.

Flavia and Callum arrived late on Friday evening. They had driven up from London, taking twice the normal time because of the snow and ice. Flavia had done the driving – Callum either wouldn't, or couldn't – and looked tired, but lovely. She had inherited Mark's fair colouring and she was tall and slim, like him, and with an elegance that she had definitely not got from me.

‘Sorry we're so late, Mum. I got held up at the office and then it was a ghastly journey. Cars skidding all over the place.'

I hugged her and air-kissed Callum dutifully. He was dressed all in black – not out of any respect for the occasion but because he seldom wore any other colour. Black leather jacket, black roll-necked sweater, black jeans. It was his style and it certainly suited him.

We had supper in the kitchen – a beef stew I'd cooked slowly in the Aga, and a bottle of red wine.

Flavia said sadly, ‘It's so weird without Grandma. I keep thinking she's going to come into the room.'

‘I know. So do I.'

She made an effort at normality. ‘By the way, Dad said he'd call you. He's coming to the funeral, you know.'

‘Yes, he told me.'

‘Not Caroline though, thank heavens. How are the arrangements going?'

‘Most of it's done. And I've found some good caterers to take care of things here for afterwards. They'll bring all the crockery and glasses, as well as the food.'

‘Grim to have to think about things like that now.'

‘Actually, it helps.' It was quite true. All kinds of practical things had to be attended to, decided and carried out at speed. It was when it was over that I dreaded.

We had coffee in the study in front of the gas fire. Callum, Flavia told me, touching his arm proudly, had just been offered a part in a new television detective series set in Liverpool. ‘Everyone thinks it's going to be a huge success.'

I said enthusiastically, ‘That sounds very exciting, Callum. What sort of part?'