Apple Blossom Time (20 page)

‘Oh, yes – that would wrap up everything nicely. You wouldn’t have to worry about truth or motives or anything inconvenient like that. It’s so tempting, we’d better not be tempted by it.’

‘I was afraid you’d say that. So it’s someone I know. Someone in the village?’

‘Well, that’s a pretty wide net. Practically everyone you know lives there – family, friends – about three hundred people, at the last count!’

‘You’re not being very helpful,’ I said, acidly.

‘You’re not giving me much to go on. Let’s be more specific. Is it your mother?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’

‘I’m not. I just don’t have any faith in the dotty stranger theory. I have the feeling that whoever is doing this to you is someone very close, closer than you’d like to believe. Your grandmother?’

‘Absurd. My father was her only son.’

‘Your stepfather?’

I thought a bit more carefully this time. Tom? No. ‘Definitely not. My father was his best friend. They were as close as Pansy and me.’

‘OK – it’s your turn. Who do you think it is?’

‘Oh, Martin,’ I sighed. ‘This is silly. It’s getting us nowhere.’

‘I admit it is a bit like playing Murder in the Dark.’

‘I know. Only one person is allowed to lie and that’s the one you’re looking for.’

Martin checked his watch. ‘I haven’t much time left,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you give the photo to me. I’ll see if I can have it enlarged or enhanced or something.’ He looked at it again. ‘You could expect a life of about twenty years from a print, unless it’s been carefully prepared. After that, they begin to fade. The paper is coated with gelatin and silver salts and pollution affects the silver. This one can’t be much more than twenty years old – when were the war cemeteries laid out? – but it’s very faded already. It can’t have been properly fixed in the first place. Too short a fix and they fade. Too long a fix and the print is bleached. Still … There might be some sort of clue in the inscription. I’m sorry. It’s the best I can do. I wish I could have spent longer with you.’

I felt a sudden panic flood me. So little time to waste, so much already wasted. ‘It’s stopped raining – nearly. Let’s walk for a bit.’

We walked through the park for longer than we had meant to, past the ack-ack gun sites and the barrage balloon winches and children who should have been at school sailing model boats on the lake. Perhaps there wasn’t a school left for them to go to. Somehow it seemed quite normal for Martin to take my arm. Everyone else seemed to be doing it. Why shouldn’t we?

‘What will happen if the zoo is bombed?’ I asked. ‘Will there be lions roaming the streets, picking off the alley cats?’

‘Snakes sliding down drains and coming up plugholes?’

‘Vultures eating the pelicans in St James’s?’

‘Zebras crossing?’

Sillier and sillier, children again. But we had left those days so far behind us.

‘Where are you going next?’ I queried. ‘No, don’t say. Stupid of me. Will it be overseas? Can you tell me that?’

‘I really don’t know, but I do know that I’m fed up making propaganda points. I’ve had it up to here. I want to take pictures for tomorrow, not for today.’

‘You used to say you wanted people to feel and taste your pictures – do you remember?’

‘That was a long time ago. God, I was a pompous little ass, always talking through a hole in my … sorry, darkroom language.’

‘Don’t worry. I’ve heard it all before – usually from women!’

‘The daft thing is that I still believe it. I’m going to wangle a trip to wherever it takes to get the images I want. One day, people will want to look back – hard to believe now, isn’t it? – and they’ll have a right to see what really happened, not what some bowler-hatted stuffed shirt in the MoI thinks they should be allowed to see.’

‘You haven’t changed all that much, you know, since you were sixteen. Still the bright-eyed idealist.’ I laughed.

‘Still tilting at windmills, you mean. Do you remember, you and Kate give me a camera case just before I left home?’

‘I remember. Kate and I fell out over it.’

‘I wish I could say I’d treasured it ever since. It was stolen a week later. Someone must have thought there was a camera in it. What a nasty surprise to open it and find my sandwiches.’

‘Do you remember…?’

So much to remember. So much we had shared.

And when we got to Euston, it would have been quite normal for Martin to kiss me. Everyone else seemed to be doing it. Why shouldn’t we? But he didn’t.

I let down the window with a leather strap that covered my fingers in grease, and ignored the glares and elbows of others who wanted to stand where I was. My turn this time. I hung out the window and tried to hear what Martin was saying.

‘We’ve been looking at this the wrong way round,’ he shouted above the hiss of steam.

‘We have?’

‘You’ll never guess who’s been sending these letters until you find out what they’re trying to tell you. So listen.’ The train began to move, pulling away from the platform, slowly at first, as the engine gave its first explosive gasps of steam. The grinding of wheels was louder than all the other sounds. All along the platform, people began to run, trotting along beside windows, using every last moment before goodbye had to be said. Martin ran along beside me. ‘Think about it. When you’ve worked out what it is, you’ll know who it is.’

I gave a little laugh. ‘Oh, simple!’

The train picked up speed. I held out my hand. He reached out. His fingers just brushed the tips of mine. People on the platform began to drop back, waving, waving. Martin was caught up in a group of crying women. He couldn’t get round them.

‘Laura…’ I heard him call and then I couldn’t see him any more.

No seats, of course. Either you hung out the window saying goodbye or you arrived early, found a seat and sat in it, keeping it against all comers. A sailor patted his knee in invitation. I just smiled and wedged myself into a corner.

I had been less than honest with Martin. I’d told him that I hadn’t a clue who’d been sending the letters. Strictly speaking, that was true. But I didn’t tell him what I feared – and hoped desperately was wrong: that the anonymous sender was James’s mother.

*   *   *

For some reason, I expected Martin to get in touch with me very quickly. Silly, really – we were all swept up in the unacknowledged preparations for the invasion of Europe, so why shouldn’t he be? Yet I watched the post, fearing for one letter, hoping for another.

It was a fortnight before his letter arrived and another couple of days before I even had time to break open the envelope. By that time, American, British and Canadian troops had landed on the beaches of France.

BP was working extended shifts, giving the commanders in the field up-to-date information on German plans and reactions. Even Hitler’s personal messages passed through us on their way to France. People said it would have been quicker for von Rundstedt to give us a ring to get his orders than to ring Berlin!

Bleary-eyed after a double shift, I sat on my bed to read Martin’s letter at last, too tired even to throw myself down to sleep. My ankles were swollen from sitting so long without exercise. After hours operating the keys of a cipher machine, spasmodic pains shot through my wrists. Sometimes I’d wake in the night with pins and needles in my hands. I’d tried to pick up a cup of tea and had dropped it when my wrist gave way, spilling the tea down my skirt. Just as well NAAFI tea was never made with boiling water.

*   *   *

‘Dear Laura,’ Martin wrote and the brisk beginning depressed me, but what did I expect? I’d as good as told him to treat me like a friend and nothing more.

I return the photograph to you. The quality is so poor that I was unable to take a very much clearer print off it. However, I called in a few (quite a few, actually) favours and was able to have it looked at by the RAF photographic interpretation people. There’s a very helpful WAAF flight commander at Medmenham … Well, anyway …

Even with their specialized equipment, they’ve been unable to decipher the whole inscription. They are used to dealing with vertical exposures, that is, pictures taken from directly above the subject. Their system doesn’t work so well on what they call ‘obliques’. They put two of my copy prints into their stereoscopic lenses without much hope of success. However, we were lucky. Some of the carved letters cast a shadow. From those, they have worked out some sort of result. The stone is probably engraved
A SOLDIER OF THE GREAT WAR
. The two part stones seen on either side also seem to have the same thing carved on them.

That’s all. Laura, I’m sorry. I’m not sure if that will be disappointing, or a relief to you. You’ve probably already realized that this is not a picture of your father’s grave. It is a grave of one of the thousands and thousands of men of all nationalities who were unrecognizable when they were buried. There is no visible background in the picture, no way of finding out where it was taken.

Whoever sent this to you is playing with you very cruelly. I dismissed the idea of it being a crank, but now I’m not so sure. Someone is trying to hurt you – we don’t know who and we don’t know why – and I don’t want him or her to succeed.

What next? You could tear it up and do nothing. Burn any future letters without opening them and don’t give the sender the satisfaction of upsetting you. Knowing you, I don’t suppose you’ll do that.

If you are still determined to carry on – and I really don’t think you should – then perhaps your best bet is to write to the Imperial War Graves Commission to find out where exactly your father is buried. They keep very precise records. If he has no known grave, he may be commemorated in some other way. This will also reveal his regiment and give you another channel to follow.

Be prepared for disappointment. Sometimes men just disappeared in the quagmire of the trenches and were never discovered or even missed for a long time. Regimental histories often have unexplained gaps. And don’t forget there’s a war on! People might just be too busy to bother to reply.

My strong advice is that you should do nothing. Someone is going to a great deal of trouble to upset you. Don’t give him or her the perverted pleasure of knowing that you care.

I won’t be able to be in touch with you for some time.

Yours, Martin

Did Mrs Kenton really hate me so much? Poor, bitter woman. I pitied her. She acted as though I had taken her son away from her, but why blame me? Because there was no-one else nearby to take the responsibility, I suppose. Patriotism was an abstract. Hitler was far out of her reach (though retribution seemed to be on his tail). But someone had robbed her of her son and I stood conveniently close for her to lash out.

I remembered her glare at me as we had stood in the Palace yard, admiring the bronze bauble that we had been offered in exchange for James’s life. I had been a symbol to her – a symbol of loss. Two generations of her family had been wiped out in that burning gun tractor – her only son and the children that he would have had, beautiful children, the grandchildren that I had denied her.

No wonder she hated me. The more I thought about it, the more I could understand her twisted viewpoint. She had been robbed by me, so she would rob me of something in return. She would take away from me the father I had never known, the soldier, the hero. An eye for an eye, one hero in exchange for another.

Her loss had deranged her. How could I blame her?

Yet I was not prepared to stop looking for my father now. All my life I had wondered about him, had asked and never been satisfied. The need to know was like a hunger, never assuaged. Now, at last, prompted by a sad woman, I was doing something about it. I would follow some of Martin’s suggestions. Follow up the what, he’d said, and it will take you to the who. Well, I already knew the who, but I was still going to chase after any clue that would help me find my father.

I read again the last sentence of Martin’s letter. It was his way of telling me as much as he could. He’d got his wish. He’d wangled his trip. I didn’t need to guess where he had gone. I wished Pansy had been near to put up a prayer for Martin’s safety on the Normandy beachhead. When she hadn’t been around, I’d failed for James, but I knew she’d succeed.

*   *   *

Now that the secrecy was over, our newspapers trumpeted the successes in Normandy, while underplaying the problems. Berlin by Christmas! Signal traffic through BP scarcely diminished at all and we were all working flat out. What a ridiculous time to catch chickenpox! Mrs Granby’s nephew was to blame. I thought he was rather a spotty little boy and put it down to a poor diet, but his spots were nothing compared to those I displayed two weeks later.

Infections raced like wildfire through the cramped and overcrowded huts at the Park, so I was given the option of military hospital, but was discouraged, as most of the beds were occupied by Normandy casualties or reserved for future ones.

‘Your landlady will take care of you, won’t she?’ asked the MO, with more confidence than I felt. ‘It’s not a serious illness for children, but at your age you ought to be careful. If your temperature goes up or you start to feel pain anywhere, come back here. Put collodion on the spots, or calamine lotion if you can’t get collodion, and try not to scratch too much. Keep away from your chums. I don’t want an epidemic on my hands. Have you been eating properly? No, I thought as much.’ He pulled down my eyelids. ‘A bit anaemic, I’d say. Run down, but who isn’t? Tell your landlady to make sure you get plenty of spinach!’ He signed me off on generous sick leave. ‘And don’t come back until you’re spotless.’

‘You’ll get shingles,’ screeched Mrs Granby when I arrived back at an unexpected time in the morning. ‘That’s what happens to grown-ups what get the chickenpox. And when the spots meet round your middle, you’ll die. I can’t be held responsible. I’m as reasonable as the next woman, but no-one could expect me to be responsible for a case of shingles. You’ll have to go home.’

I didn’t feel too bad when I left her, but by the time I reached home I felt as though Mrs Granby’s predictions were about to come true at any moment.