Letters to the Lost (39 page)

‘Oh. No.’ He backed away, trying hard to appear casual and indifferent, almost tripping over a floor cleaning machine. ‘No, don’t worry, it’s fine. Thanks anyway.’

From then on things got worse. As he drove North the weather got colder, and by Northampton it had begun to snow, in slushy great splodges that the Spitfire’s windscreen wipers smeared into a sheet of ice. Walter Cooke’s family proved to be large, complicated and very chatty, and at each house he called at, memories of the late Walter were taken out and dusted off along with the best china; aired in great detail before papers were signed. It was after ten o’clock when he had finished his final call. Getting into the car, he’d planned to give the cheap motel Bex had booked for him a miss and drive back to London while the roads were quiet, only to find that the Spitfire refused to start.

It had eventually been towed off Walter Cooke’s sister’s drive by a tattooed mechanic called Warren, who had given Will a lift to his hotel in the cab of his truck and promised, with frustrating nonchalance, to get the car mended ‘as soon as possible, mate’.

And so he was stuck, in Crewe, on a sleety Wednesday morning, with nothing to do but wait. He found a coffee shop advertising free wifi facing onto the empty square and went in. The woman who took his coffee order asked for his name to write on the cup, though there was no one else waiting at the counter and only a handful of other customers scattered around. Will took his drink over to a table by the window and got out his laptop.

While it connected to the network he sat back on the faux-leather sofa and looked out into the grey morning. He felt disorientated and uprooted, like he’d woken up in the wrong life. Opening up his email, the name Evelyn Holt instantly jumped out at him.

It had taken a while for his mother to trust modern methods of communication, and even now she used email rather like the telegram service of yesteryear; while her messages didn’t quite contain the word ‘stop’ at the end of every sentence, they might as well have done. ‘Don’t forget wedding present for S and M ,’ she wrote. Will sniggered. ‘Best items going from list fast. Also, they want to know whether you’re bringing a +1 for seating plan. Said I very much doubted.’

His smile stiffened and splintered.

His mother had never quite forgiven him for letting Camilla slip through his fingers at university. Milla, like Marina, had had all the qualities Evelyn Holt considered desirable in a daughter-in-law: namely, the right accent, the right parents, and a thorough grounding in the rules of polo, bridge and what cutlery to use at a formal dinner. Although she’d never said as much, Will knew his mother blamed him for not doing enough to keep Milla interested. Not
being
enough. For selfishly having a mental breakdown. For not being like Simon.

He’d always suspected that the benevolent fairies who’d blessed the infant Simon with brains and looks and sporting prowess had all had a previous engagement on the day of his own christening. The achievements that came so effortlessly to his brother eluded Will, no matter how hard he strived for them. He might have made the teams at rugby and rowing, but he’d never been captain, like Simon had; he’d got good grades in his exams, but never gone up on Speech Day to collect the prize for Outstanding Achievement. The greater his efforts, the more significant his failure, in his parents’ eyes. Realizing that was what had tipped him over the edge five years ago.

He closed the email and took a steadying sip of coffee. Sometimes he wondered what it would be like to have no family, like Nancy Price: no parents to assign you a role as constricting and uncomfortable as someone else’s too-small, cast-off clothes, no siblings to keep you in their shadow . . . Pretty good, he thought, staring out of the window onto the deserted square. And then an image of Jess Moran superimposed itself on the misted glass, hugging her knees on her hospital bed, completely alone.

He sighed shakily, running a hand through his hair. No, not good. No one should be alone, not like that. A wave of longing crashed over him, winding him for a moment and making him feel more disorientated than ever in its wake. Blindly, he turned back to the screen in front of him, sweeping his fingers over the mousepad. Nancy Price’s file jumped out at him and he clicked on it, desperate for the distraction it offered.

The Woodhill School roll of pupils was the first document that appeared. It was a screenshot of the archive record he’d been going through that day when Bex had interrupted him; the names and dates of birth of all the children who’d been registered at the school in 1932, listed in exquisite copperplate handwriting.

And suddenly it struck him – maybe Nancy Price did have brothers and sisters? Albert had said she was a Poor School girl and had grown up without a family, but that didn’t necessarily mean her parents hadn’t had other children. Sitting more upright on the leather sofa Will began to scroll through, looking for other Prices. And then something caught his eye and made him stop. He scrolled back.

Stella Holland.

Stella. It wasn’t the most unusual of names, but still . . . The hairs on the back of his neck prickled. Stella Thorne was Nancy Price’s friend – that much was obvious from the fact that she’d entrusted her precious love letters into her keeping. It was likely that their friendship would have started at school . . . Hastily he looked through the list to see if there’d been another Stella at Woodhill Community School in 1932.

There hadn’t.

It took less than five minutes to log onto the genealogy website, enter this new information into its search facility and get the results. Stella Elizabeth Holland married Reverend Maurice Charles Thorne, August 1942, Middlesex. The two women behind the counter broke off their conversation and looked at him in alarm as he gave a muted
Yessss
of triumph.

‘Sorry,’ he said with an apologetic grin, barely tearing his eyes away from the screen. His fingers were tingling, clumsy: it took two attempts to type Stella’s details into a new search. He submitted the information, and sat back, waiting for the next part of her story to be revealed.

And there it was.

In April 1944 Stella Thorne had had a baby. And the father was registered not as Dan Rosinski, but as Charles Thorne.

30

1944

At first the pain was good. She’d been labouring in the oppressive air for so long that she could barely breathe, and at last the storm had broken. She was scared, but she was ready, braced to meet its fury and open her throat to give voice to the grief and frustration and rage that she had carried inside her like a second, invisible child.

But it went on and on, like the nightmare, only this time there was no escaping it, no pretending. It swallowed everything, even time. Days and nights were chewed up in its vicious jaws until they became indistinguishable: a blurred, bloody scream.

Faces appeared and disappeared: Charles, Ada, Nancy, Dr Walsh. Not Dan. Never Dan, even though she willed him there with all her remaining strength. Jesus looked down on her from his cross, His carved wooden compassion morphing into impassive boredom.
Pain?
He seemed to say.
Tell me about it.

And then at some point Jesus disappeared, along with the green walls and ugly curtains of the bedroom, and different faces hung above her as she was rushed along draughty tunnels. In addition to the unseen hands that had seized her insides and were wringing them like sheets on washday, other hands held on to her arms, her legs, pinning them down and pulling them wide apart.

Indecent acts
.
An abomination
.
The unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God
. Someone was thrusting something up inside her. She couldn’t see who it was because he was wearing a paper mask across the lower part of his face, but she didn’t think it was Charles this time. And then there was a syringe, with a long needle. They were going to use it to burst the tight balloon of her stomach, she was sure of it. She tried to put her hands over her ears to protect them against the bang, but they were a long way away and too heavy to lift, and it was going dark.

When she opened her eyes it was still dark, but the storm of pain had passed. She was lying on her back, but there was no weight pressing up against her diaphragm and her body felt slack and empty. In the distance she could hear a baby’s reedy, warbling cry. As she sat up her insides seemed to slosh and surge, like liquid in a barrel. Standing, she felt a downwards rush, a warm gush that weighted the wet wadding between her legs.

She stumbled past rows of white-humped beds and out into the cavernous corridor. A light burned dimly some distance along its length and she went blindly towards it, arms outstretched as if asking for something she couldn’t name. The crying continued, gathering fury. The chair behind the desk was pushed back, vacant. Beyond the desk a slab of soft light from a window slanted across the linoleum. Behind the glass she could see rows of canvas-sided cribs, each one containing a sleeping baby. At the sight of them something strange happened inside her body; a prickling, like tiny needles in her breasts, resonant of the sensations Dan had woken in her but sharper, harsher, making her suck in a breath.

The click of footsteps behind her heralded the arrival of the nurse. ‘Mrs Thorne! What are you doing out of bed?’ She clicked her tongue disapprovingly. ‘You shouldn’t be up. You’ve lost rather a lot a blood – and still are, by the look of that gown. Come on, let’s get you cleaned up.’

She spoke in a well-bred accent, but there was nothing genteel about her iron grip on Stella’s arm.

‘My baby – he’s crying, I can hear him. I must see him!’ Stella tried to shake off the nurse’s hand. ‘I want to see my son!’

‘Now, now, Mrs Thorne, what a lot of nonsense. Your baby isn’t crying, nor is it a boy. See – there she is, sleeping peacefully. Now, let’s get you back to bed.’

With a strength she didn’t know she had Stella wrenched her arm from the nurse’s grasp and pressed her palms against the glass, peering in. Through the mist of her breath she gazed at the sleeping bundle that was her child. Her daughter. She was bigger than the babies on either side of her and the pale moon of her face was distorted and disfigured by a purple swelling on her left cheek.

‘Is she all right?’

‘Perfectly fine, considering what she’s been through. It was a very difficult birth. Dr Ingram did marvellously well,’ the nurse said warmly, and Stella felt like she herself had had nothing whatsoever to do with the whole affair. ‘He was all scrubbed up and ready to operate but in the end he managed to get Baby out with forceps. That’s what caused the mark on her face. It’ll disappear in no time. Now come along, back to bed with you.’

Reluctantly Stella allowed herself to be led away. Back beneath the papery starched sheets she looked up into the darkness and touched her own cheek. Indecent acts. She wondered whether Charles minded that she had failed to deliver his expected son. Would he love a girl?

I don’t care, she thought fiercely and her heart swelled and bloomed. She’s mine, all mine. I’ll love her enough for both of us. Enough for the whole world.

The maternity ward was its own enclosed world, quite cut off from the one outside. It was a world from which men were absent, except for an hour each evening when those who weren’t away on active service trooped in looking uncomfortable. The war, which had so dominated everyone’s lives for what felt, in the spring of 1944, like forever, seemed distant and irrelevant here. In their beds the women knitted cosily, not with scratchy khaki, but tiny garments in pastel lengths of whisper-soft lambswool unravelled from pre-war sweaters and cardigans. With babies nestled at blue-veined breasts they chatted, and veterans like Hilda Goodall in the bed opposite Stella’s dispensed advice to the first-timers.

‘I don’t care what that nurse says, you’d be mad to wake a sleeping baby. It’ll feed when it’s ’ungry, and it’ll soon let you know when that is, take it from me. Get some shut eye while you can.’

Hilda, a quivering mountain of a woman, milky like a blancmange, had just given birth to her seventh. The only break she ever got was when she was in the hospital having another, she said. It wasn’t hard to see why; after an hour watching her grimy, whining brood squabble and sprawl at visiting time, the whole ward was desperate to see the back of them. The newest addition to her clutch of children was as noisy and demanding as the rest. Raymond Goodall had been the bawling infant Stella had heard on her first night.

By contrast her own baby was angelic. When brought from the nursery every four hours to be fed she was invariably fast asleep, so that when the other mothers were discussing eye colouring Stella realized that she had no idea whether her daughter’s were the dark blue that appeared to be the norm amongst the others. She lay in Stella’s arms, limp and passive, inscrutable behind resolutely closed eyes. She showed none of the instinct for feeding that the other babies displayed, rooting hungrily for their mother’s nipple with quivering lips and frantic flailing fists, and when she fed it was apathetically, taking a few desultory draws before seeming to forget what she was doing and lapse back into a doze. Initially Hilda assured Stella it would be better once her milk came in, but the opposite proved to be the case. A stinging cascade of milk would be unleashed just as the baby lost interest, and she would splutter and choke and cry, a mewling cat-like sound quite distinct from the sound that came from the others.

The nurses frowned when they picked her up. ‘Funny-looking little fing, ain’t she?’ Hilda remarked. ‘Big ’ead. No wonder you had trouble getting that out.’ Stella was too polite to say anything. Compared to baby Raymond, who was perpetually regurgitating all the milk he gorged and had jug ears, her daughter was perfect. Even with the bruise yellowing on her pristine new skin, she was the most beautiful thing Stella could imagine.

And Charles was smitten too. As a vicar his parish duties had included visiting the sick so he was more at ease on the ward than the other fathers, and his clerical collar and his empty sleeve meant he was treated with deference by the nurses. They made a great fuss of helping him to hold the baby securely, though he wasn’t able to pick her up. He came most days, usually with Ada or Marjorie or even, on one occasion, Miss Birch.