Jubilee (9 page)

On the farm animals are killed all the time: for meat or because they’re old and sick and suffering. I was never one of those lads who’d torture flies or frogs. ‘The boy who
torments an animal is the boy who’ll grow up to torment his fellow humans,’ Dad used to tell Matthew and me.

I shouldn’t write and tell a kid like you about these things, but just putting them on paper helps. I’m going to try and pull myself out of it. Tomorrow I’ll write about our
work.

Next day

I’ve been moved out of the workshop so my main task at the moment is hammering drills into rocks so that charges can be blasted. We also cart the stone away and cut
trees and drag away the logs. Splinters cut our fingers and palms and each splinter seems to cause an infection, so that our hands are always swollen and yellow. I almost prefer the rock work,
though that, too, leaves the hands bleeding and cut. At home, felling trees was fun: I looked forward to hitching the horses to the logs and pulling them out of the copse. Here it is us who are the
horses. Sometimes the Thais use elephants but these are better treated than we are. I wish you could see the elephants, though. Must try and draw them for you. And the barges on the river with
their painted eyes. You see, I can still find the good things to concentrate on! I am trying, Evie, really I am.
I know I could let myself slip. Some of
them here already have and their minds are disordered. I’m so afraid I’ll

Matthew still very feverish, I wish I could find him some quinine, but I will not let them put him with the other sick men. Who knows what might happen if I wasn’t there to keep an eye
on him? I’ve always been good at looking after people and animals. Dad said I’d have made a good doctor or vet but I only ever wanted to work on the farm and I wasn’t good enough
at maths.

My other main concern is to find another hiding place for these letters: somewhere dry. Almost impossible in this place.

Rachel

March 2003

‘Sit, Pilot!’ I shouted but it was too late. The dog had heard the faint clink of the lead and was already bounding towards me. ‘Stay.’ He wagged his
tail and kept on coming. Where should I take him? I tried to remember where Evie had gone for walks. Sometimes, if she had the time, she’d walk him up to the Ridgeway, the ancient droveway
carved along the top of the hills. It was a walk I loved, with its ancient earthworks and monuments, and its view of the Vale and the distant Cotswold escarpments. But as it was already growing
dark I decided to take the dog down to the village and round the Green. Jubilee Park, it had been renamed, somewhat grandly, after the Silver Jubilee.

I opened the back door and the dog shot past me, spinning in delight. I smiled and realized that those muscles in my face felt almost stiff from lack of use.

Pilot propelled me down the lane into the village. He obviously knew the walk to the park well. There was a fenced-off section where dogs couldn’t enter but the rest was just open space,
with three oaks of descending size in the middle. Daddy tree, mummy tree, baby tree. The largest was the Coronation oak, planted in 1953. Beside it was the tree commemorating the Silver Jubilee and
beside that in turn was the sapling planted just weeks ago to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Queen’s accession. I strolled towards the family of oaks as Pilot dashed across the
green in a series of excited loops, feeling guilty that I hadn’t brought him down here before now.

Evie had been present at the planting of the Silver Jubilee tree, but not of its predecessor, the Coronation oak, or its successor, the Golden Jubilee tree. Perhaps she’d been recovering
from one of the many miscarriages she’d suffered. What was it with the women in our family and their problems bringing a child to term? Perhaps Jessamy would have been better at it than I
was. She mightn’t have needed to make appointments for embryos made with donor eggs to be inserted inside her. Stop it, I told myself. Trying for a baby is over, don’t torment yourself,
don’t indulge yourself.

At the time of the 1977 oak planting only months had passed since Jessamy had vanished. Despair must surely have replaced hope by then, but maybe Evie had still half expected to see her daughter
walking back towards her across the green. I hadn’t seen my aunt for some months after the disappearance of Jessamy. My mother had been overcome by one of her rare and powerful maternal
impulses and had bustled me off to the south of France with them, promising a tutor. At the time this had seemed a huge improvement on the stuffy girl’s school in Reading I’d attended
and I was happy enough to comply. In fact, nothing educational had been arranged and I’d spent the autumn wandering around St Tropez, wondering what was happening back at Winter’s Copse
and fretting about Jessamy. And Evie. Every time my father brought back a day-old
Times
with him, I’d scan the pages to see whether they’d found Jessamy.

‘I should be back there helping to look,’ I told him. My father wasn’t one for demonstrativeness but he picked up my hands and squeezed them.

‘Your aunt will need you,’ he said. ‘Not for the search, but to cheer her up. Perhaps you could go and stay over Christmas. That’ll be a tough time for her.’

‘Nonsense, Chas.’ My mother’s disapproval creased her brow; something she hardly ever let happen because she worried about lines. ‘It’s morbid for the child to act
as support to her aunt. Dangerous, too. Supposing whoever it was who kidnapped Jessamy came back for Rachel?’

My father had scowled at her in a way that made her look away. ‘We should be supporting my sister. She’s all alone on that farm waiting for news.’

And I had pictured Evie sitting by the range in the kitchen, the dog at her feet, willing the telephone to ring or someone to rap on the door. My stomach churned and I wanted to be sick.

I should have gone to the damn Golden Jubilee party back in June. But friends had offered us their house on Kos. Sunshine. Swimming. Sex. Perhaps the combination would help my
body relax and do what it was supposed to. And, to be honest, I’d been half relieved to miss the party and the whispers as people reminded themselves of what had happened at the last
Jubilee.

‘Have a wonderful holiday,’ Evie had told me. ‘Make sure you have a good rest, both of you.’

Perhaps Evie herself could have done with a relaxing holiday. Who knows, perhaps time away would have done something to help her heart.

I forced myself to concentrate on Pilot and his zigzag race across the green. I’d promised I wouldn’t torture myself.

Pilot raced towards me. ‘This has all preoccupied me too much for too long,’ I told him. ‘We’ve given it our best shot.’ We certainly had: our consultant was
world-renowned.

‘There is no obvious reason why you shouldn’t conceive,’ he’d told me. ‘But I’d like to run some tests.’ One test had led to another and then we’d
found ourselves having attempt after attempt at IVF, each failure marked by nights of tears and Rioja.

Evie had died and that very morning I’d probably been fussing about an appointment at the IVF clinic. And the IVF hadn’t worked anyway. It was as though I’d been mocked for my
blinkered, obsessive desire to procreate.

‘As if there weren’t enough people in the world anyway,’ I told Pilot.

I walked briskly back to the Jubilee oaks, the dog striding out beside me. The wind blew the young Golden Jubilee oak so that it looked like a small, lost wraith. Just like a missing child, in
fact. I pushed the image back behind a mental door and slammed it shut but it hammered its fists on the wood and screamed for attention.

Rachel

March 2003

As I’d promised myself, I started to fill cardboard boxes with small items from the house which any prospective tenants wouldn’t need and which, I supposed,
I’d have to take back to London with me. Evie’s sewing basket. The old pack of cards she’d used to teach Jessamy and me rummy. An old Scrabble set, which I remembered Evie taking
out on Sunday evenings during the summer holidays when I was staying. I stared at the objects, almost as though I expected them to hold some explanation of what had happened to Jessamy. But all I
saw was a collection of faded objects.

What on earth was I going to do with them? Perhaps the tenants wouldn’t mind if I stored them out of the way in the cellar. There wouldn’t be much room at home. Our flat was so
different from Winter’s Copse, with its passageways and half-rooms, its bookshelves and cupboards full of interesting things, its floorboards that creaked and sighed according to the time of
the day and the warmth of the sun. Yet Winter’s Copse had its share of perfectly proportioned reception rooms. It was Queen Anne and had been built by Samuel Winter, the first Winter to come
to the village in the late seventeenth century. He’d farmed the acres first as a tenant and had married a rich merchant’s daughter from Oxford, enabling him to make the landowning
family, the ancestors of the Fernhams who still lived in the village, a generous offer for the land. ‘The Fernhams didn’t like giving up land,’ Evie had told me. ‘Samuel
Winter must have paid a big price.’ And Jessamy’s eyes had glinted with pride. Martha had been out in the field, too, helping us gather the last of the blackberries, hooking her
shepherd’s crook over the furthest branches so we could pull the ripest berries towards us. It was a fine early September afternoon.

‘The Winters did well,’ she said. ‘They got the land and they wouldn’t give it up. And you’re the last of the line, young Jess. We need to show you how to care for
the farm.’

‘I teach her,’ said Evie. ‘I pass it all on.’

‘My family have lived here as long as the Winters,’ Martha went on, seeming to ignore her. ‘We know how things are done here.’ The berry she had picked dripped red juice
onto her fingers.

The Winters had survived the agricultural downturns of the nineteenth century, when cheap grain and meat had flooded in from America and the colonies, and the slump of the thirties. ‘They
were never afraid to take risks, to try new things,’ Evie said. ‘One of the first threshing machines in the county was used on the farm. And the Winters were one of the first to switch
to a new breed of sheep in the nineteenth century because it produced better meat yields.’ I could hear her voice telling me this with pride, could see Jessamy smiling with pleasure at her
clever ancestors.

I left the Coronation mugs on the dresser, not feeling strong enough to deal with them today and went into Evie’s study. I’d already taken some of the paperbacks into the charity
shop and placed the really good things, including a King James bible and some silver, in storage at the bank. Apart from the Jubilee mugs and the diaries and photos all that was left were some
black bin liners of clothes I hadn’t had time to take down to the charity shop.

I picked up a silver-framed photograph of Evie and my father from the desk. Five years since he’d died in a car crash on one of the winding roads above his latest south of France property
development. My mother was in Dubai now, enjoying her new incarnation as rich expat wife of Barry, another property developer. Her latest email had described champagne receptions and shopping
expeditions. ‘Found the dearest little frock for you, darling,’ she’d told me. ‘Just delightful. Barry sends love.’ I knew the dear little dress would be a skimpy
black evening number and wondered where she thought I might wear it.

‘Don’t give up too much of your time to sorting out Winter’s Copse,’ my mother had continued. ‘After all, you’ve still got twenty-five years until you get
hold of the place. And you need to get on with making me a grandmother!’

How typical of her to cut right to any self-interest I might have felt about what I was doing here: she had always found it hard to accept my affection for my aunt. Perhaps she’d been
jealous of Evie and the time I spent with her. ‘I want to do it,’ I told her in my email reply. ‘The house has many happy memories for me.’

The notion that I needed to do this as part of saying goodbye to my aunt would never have occurred to the woman who’d given birth to me.

As for the line about making her a grandmother, I wondered if she’d ever listened to a word I’d told her in the past about the trouble we were having conceiving. I’d already
explained about the donated eggs procedure we were considering if the next IVF round using our own embryos failed. There’d been a silence on the phone. ‘I
suppose
it would be
like having your own baby,’ she’d said at last.

‘It’s just me now,’ I told Evie and Dad in the old black and white photograph. They smiled back at me and I almost imagined they could hear me, so I chatted on like a loon.
‘Isn’t it funny how you just happened to come to this house in 1940 and not anywhere else in the village?’ I hadn’t meant funny as in comic, more that our lives would have
been utterly different if Charles and Evie had been taken in elsewhere. Or stayed in London. In which case, I reminded myself, they’d have probably been killed alongside my grandmother when
the bomb landed on the house in August 1944. And Jessamy and I would never have existed. So I wouldn’t have been standing here in this house anyway. A logical disconnect, Luke would have
called this chain of thoughts.

Luke. There’d been nothing very logical about the night we’d spent at home after the last IVF failure. The evidence, in the form of greasy take-away cartons, most of them still
nearly full, and empty bottles, had spoken of yet another attempt to anaesthetize ourselves from the reality of our situation. ‘I know we shouldn’t be drinking like this but I just
can’t help it.’ I’d filled my large wine glass again. I’d had to wash the glasses before we could drink from them, so dusty had they become in the last months. Luke had been
keeping me company in my abstinence from alcohol.

‘I’ll probably regret this in the morning,’ Luke held out his own glass. He’d be worrying about how he was to keep control of 8E next morning in the classroom with a
hangover.