Jubilee (18 page)

I could pick out every hedgerow, every copse, the silver ribbon of a road running east-west, cars and lorries moving silently along it. A train heading west to Wales slunk past. Along the pale
blue sky the twisted branches of oaks and elms spelled out secret words. It was where I belonged. ‘I belong,’ I told Pilot. He pricked up his ears. ‘But I shouldn’t still be
here. I should be back in London.’

It wouldn’t take me long to sort out my aunt’s affairs and rent out the house. Several letting agents had expressed interest. There was a shortage of good-sized family houses in this
part of the world and, as crocuses and snowdrops and aconites flowered in its gardens, Winter’s Copse would certainly elicit plenty of interest. I could have finished all the business and
returned to London within a day or two, but I found myself lingering over the task, needing to stay in this village, close to Evie.

The dog gave a gentle bark, as though trying to prevent me from maudlin sentiment. I did what I’d once done at boarding school on glum Sunday evenings: cast around for distraction. But my
eyes lit on the faint, brown rectangle on the grass below where the old barn had stood before it burned down. Pilot decided that more direct methods were needed to propel me forward and barked
once, politely.

‘Sorry.’ It was supposed to be his walk, after all. He was young and young creatures needed movement. Strange how I kept on differentiating myself from the young. ‘I’m
thirty-five, not fifty-five, that’s young,’ I said crossly, out loud. ‘There’s still time for me . . .’ What? Time for what? Time to recover from the disappointment
Luke and I had suffered?

The dog nudged my calf as though to tell me to get a grip. I laughed. ‘Let’s go.’ We walked briskly eastwards. The white track led uphill so that we left the White Horse behind
us. Not that it resembled anything like a horse from any angle I could find. As a child I’d complained about this: ‘It’s more like a kangaroo than anything.’

Jessamy had narrowed her eyes at me. ‘Don’t come here and criticize our horse,’ she’d told me, reminding me that I was just a visitor and not a full-time inhabitant of
Craven.

Martha had been with us. ‘It’s a very old symbol, Rachel,’ she’d told me, reproof darkening her eyes. ‘Older than Christ himself.’

I’d blushed. ‘The White Horse has all kinds of powers,’ she went on. ‘Some of the stories we used to hear when we were youngsters—’ She stopped abruptly as
Evie came up towards us.

As we climbed we passed a couple of other walkers and their dogs or infants in buggies, making the best of the promising weather. They threw a quick greeting or nod our way. I tried not to look
at the small children. Perhaps the next few years would be spent in avoiding them. Presumably, after a certain period, the worst of the longing would pass. I wondered if I had the words Unfulfilled
Neurotic Woman stamped on my head but those we saw simply smiled or nodded a greeting. Pilot and I were part of the landscape. Ordinary.

That was a word that had sprung to mind each time I’d run through the events of that Jubilee party twenty-five years ago. Everything that afternoon had seemed so safe and . . . ordinary.
If anyone had drawn up a list of places in the world where something as appalling as the abduction of a child were to occur, safe, quiet little Craven would have been bottom of the list.

Every time I replayed my memories of that day I came up with images of children running around and their parents eating and drinking and chatting. I couldn’t recall a single jarring scene
at the party except for Jessamy being annoyed at me for dropping the baton in the relay.

As we walked down the lane to Winter’s Copse I groped again for any otherwise unnoteworthy detail that I had stored away mentally and couldn’t retrieve. Between making calls to the
bank and solicitor and signing papers I racked my memory. But the harder I tried to focus on the details of the days before the Jubilee the more blurred the images became. ‘I know
something,’ I told Pilot. ‘I just can’t pull it out of my mind.’ He gave a wag of his tail. It was comforting to have an animal around me again. Coming to the farm as a
child and throwing myself into the routine of the cows and sheep and the pigs Evie had kept when I was younger had always been a thrill. I’d loved the hens, too. Hens. I was remembering
something. Hens the fox had taken. And something else the same week, something more serious, something to do with the cows. They’d had some disease which had meant they’d had to be
destroyed. TB. That had all happened just before the party. Evie must have been beside herself; she’d always worked so hard, and so successfully, to keep the farm going. Only the year before
last there’d been the foot and mouth outbreak and I’d been so relieved Evie no longer kept livestock. But this had nothing to do with Jessamy vanishing.

Something moved behind me in the lane and I turned. Nothing. Just a deer or even a hare, dashing for the shelter of the hedge.

That night, about to drift into sleep, the image I had sought flashed back into my mind. I sat up and concentrated. Jessamy. On her way back to the house very early one
morning. She never had told me where she’d been that morning. Even as I concentrated on her image with its bruised legs the details began to splinter.

I clawed at the fragments in desperation, trying to pull them back, but it was like trying to reassemble a kaleidoscope image. I banged my arms against the covers in frustration. Perhaps
she’d just been seeing to her pony, as she’d said at the time. But then she’d muttered something at the Jubilee party about not knowing ‘what to think’ any more. Had
she been meeting someone outside the house? Martha, perhaps? But Martha could have had no responsibility for what had happened to Jess. She’d been at the Jubilee party right until the very
end. And she couldn’t drive so she’d have had no way of removing a child from the village in haste. I reminded myself that I still hadn’t managed to get up the hill to see Martha.
It was something I needed to do before the funeral; she’d been such a constant presence in my childhood, standing beside me while I picked blackberries or fed calves, patient with me when I
was clumsy, only ever cross if she thought I hadn’t shown a proper respect for local ways and customs. I’d been remiss in not paying her a visit.

I couldn’t stay in bed any longer. Pilot whimpered gently. I hadn’t meant him to follow me upstairs when I’d gone to bed but hadn’t had the heart to send him down. I
stood by the window and looked out. The clear afternoon had preceded a frosty night, a sudden return to winter. Moonlight streamed across the meadows and over the hills above the village. The
window was open an inch and I heard a rustle in the bushes bordering Evie’s garden. A fox slunk over the white lawn, bathed for an instant in silvery light. As a child I must have shared this
room with my cousin. Did we talk much after lights out? I remembered midnight feasts. Evie must surely have known about them: she couldn’t have missed the Mars bar and Wotsit wrappers in the
wastepaper bin the morning after. Once or twice she’d left a plateful of fairy cakes out on the kitchen table and not commented when they’d vanished overnight. But there’d been a
time when Martha had brought up a fruit cake. ‘For the littl’uns.’ She gave her mirthless laugh. ‘I see their light on some nights. Very late.’

‘You’re always watching, Martha,’ Jessamy said, reaching for the cake.

‘Indeed,’ Evie had said drily. And Martha’s eyes had shone with that strange intensity.

‘Young girls need their sleep.’

What did we discuss at these midnight feasts? We were very young, I had still to turn ten at the time of Jessamy’s disappearance and she had only just passed this landmark; we
weren’t even pre-pubescent. We talked, I seemed to remember, about ponies and pop stars, our friends at school, giggling when we discussed any boys we knew. I couldn’t remember her
telling me anything which might have led me to believe she planned to run away. ‘Jessamy,’ I found myself whispering. ‘Where did you go? What happened to you?’

And for a moment I swear I felt her near me. I swung round, half expecting to see her standing beside me. Pilot, asleep by the wardrobe, whimpered briefly.

By the following afternoon there was little left for me to do at Winter’s Copse. The undertaker, vicar and crematorium had all been briefed. I’d invited just about
everyone I could think of who needed inviting to the funeral in the church the following Monday and back to the farm for refreshments after. A caterer had been booked to provide sandwiches and
cake. ‘I’ll be back either tomorrow or Sunday,’ I told Luke’s mobile answer phone. ‘I’ll let you know later on. We need to talk. I’ll cancel next
week’s blood tests but I need to speak to you first. Hope you’re OK. And Luke . . .’ I felt an apology coming on but wasn’t even quite sure what I was sorry for.
Sorry
for not being a proper woman.
‘I’m really, really looking forward to seeing you.’ Suddenly I longed for my husband in a way I couldn’t remember having done for years,
since before we’d been thinking about children.

I decided to take a look at the garden, washed in pale late-winter sunlight. Pilot shot past me as I opened the back door, tearing across the lawn. The snowdrops were past their dazzling whitest
best but a fresh crop of narcissi seemed to have appeared overnight. I noticed that someone had cleared last year’s dead geraniums from Evie’s terracotta pots. The shrubs rustled and I
called to the dog but he had already dashed off somewhere else. Probably sniffing around in the barns.

I couldn’t help but think of this garden in summer and how the colours graduated across the flowerbeds: reds and oranges by the kitchen door, cooling to blues and purples and from there to
soft yellows, silvers and whites at the bottom by the hedge fringing the lane. Evie’d created a garden that looked as though it had designed itself but which anyone who knew anything about
horticulture would recognize as the product of a talented mind. I hoped that whoever rented Winter’s Copse would be a gardener too. The thought of seeing the shrubs and flowerbeds covered in
bindweed and dandelions made a lump form in my throat. I went inside, slipping off Evie’s wellington boots on the kitchen doorstep.

On the kitchen table sat the cardboard box I’d filled with the photo albums and scrapbooks. The photos drew me to them. Me, a small figure with a mop of curls riding a Shetland and sitting
on the tractor with Matthew, grinning. Uncle Matthew, a man I barely remembered except for his slow smile, slight limp and quiet presence around the farm. I think my uncle must have been one of a
breed of Englishman, gentle and strong, not quick tongued but deep thinking and feeling, who’ve gone out of fashion these days. A bit like Luke. I focused my attention on a picture of Jessamy
dressed in a pinafore, face covered in cake batter, waving a whisk. Martha stood beside her in the bright oblong that was the open kitchen door. The woman’s face wore an expression of extreme
concentration as she watched the child.

I picked up an older album, its leather edges starting to wear. It contained black and white pictures of Matthew and his brother as children, raking hay into triangular-shaped stooks, feeding
lambs and holding up piglets with proud grins. Someone had had money for a camera to capture these informal moments. But the Winters had always been prosperous. I thought I could make out
Jessamy’s cheekbones in both her father and uncle as small children. Matthew was always an inch or two taller and Robert’s eyes were often turned towards Matthew. He must have been fond
of his big brother. Impossible to think of these healthy, glowing boys growing up to spend those years in prison camps.

From 1941 there were few photos. Both Winter brothers were away. But someone had photographed a teenage Evie and my father on top of a hay wagon smiling down at a man in an unfamiliar uniform.
This must have been the Italian POW, Carlo, whom Evie had remembered with such affection. ‘Carlo was always smiling,’ she’d told me. ‘It was wonderful having him on the
farm. He kept us going.’

What a contrast to Robert when he’d returned, so wrecked that he’d self-destructed, Evie said: spending time in the Pack-horse drinking whatever he could buy, talking about people
who weren’t there as though he could see them in the house. Then he’d burned to death in the autumn of 1945, having consumed a quantity of alcohol and taken shelter in the barn.
‘He’d been in the Packhorse and he’d already scared us out of our wits that night,’ Evie had told me during one of our long conversations tidying up the garden back last
autumn. ‘He must have gone to sleep it off in the barn. And lit a cigarette and dropped off before he noticed that it had set the straw alight.’

She paused. ‘I haven’t really talked much about that morning.’

‘It sounded traumatic’

She gave a shiver even though the afternoon was warm. ‘It was.’

Evie

1945

‘Ring for the fire engine!’ Charlie screamed as they ran towards the barn. His face was the colour of chalk-stone.

Her legs still ached from last night’s sprint and the smoke scorched her chest but Evie found new strength that sent her hurtling towards the house. Thank God Winter’s Copse had its
own telephone and she hadn’t had to run into the village to summon the engine. By the time she’d given the details and was tearing out towards the barn, the smoke was thick. In the
yard, Charlie was filling a bucket. ‘Find another one,’ he yelled. ‘Fill it and bring it to me.’ He pushed past her with the water.

Then someone was pulling the bucket away from him. ‘Let me, you find the hose.’ A man from the village, the father of a girl at school. There were other people in the farmyard now.
Thank God. She helped Charlie locate the hose in the cowshed and pushed the end into the tap. The fire engine bell clanged as they turned on the water. Men jumped off and pulled their pump and
thick hose off the engine. ‘Take it to the pond!’ one of them shouted. A lighter ringing of bells marked the arrival of the ambulance. ‘Stand back, kids, we’ll sort it from
here.’ Evie and Charlie shrank against the cowshed wall and watched them race past. Evie’s legs shook and she let herself flop to the ground. Still the smoke rose from the barn.