Authors: Graham Hurley
‘Yes.’
‘Otherwise you wouldn’t have come across like that.’
‘Yes.’
‘So what I’m thinking is we should be straight with each other.’
‘Really?’ She threw back her head and stared up at the ceiling. ‘But what would happen then?’
‘I’ve no idea.’ Winter reached for her hand. ‘You want to give it a go and find out?’
It took Faraday the best part of an hour to read the letters. He’d got home late after clearing his desk of paperwork and found a Jiffy bag waiting for him on the front-door mat. His name was misspelled again,
‘Farraday’, and he knew at once where it had come from. Karen Corey must have driven round and left it earlier. In barely forty-eight hours he’d forgotten all about Sunday’s celebrations and the square-faced figure in the curling wartime snap.
Oddly pleased to be entrusted with something so personal, Faraday emptied the letters onto the kitchen table. They were all handwritten, page after page of painstakingly neat script, and he sorted quickly through them, checking the chronological order.
Harry and Madge seemed to have met at a Saturday night dance. Harry had been with a mate called Bob. Madge was with her sister Daisy, and they’d made a foursome. Afterwards Harry had walked Madge home through the blackout. Where she lived, he wrote, had been a street he’d often visited as a kid. His best pal Michael used to be at number 4, right opposite. Wasn’t that strange?
As the relationship developed, the letters got longer and more intimate. Harry was a Royal Marine. He and Madge had courted through the spring and summer of 1943, meeting whenever Harry could wangle a railway warrant up from the West Country, where he seemed to be based. They went to the flicks. They saw Anne Ziegler and Webster Booth, the Sweethearts of Song, at the Empire in Edinburgh Road. They peered through the barbed wire at the beaches on the seafront and tried to remember what it was like to run down the pebbles and plunge in.
One July weekend, glorious weather, Harry borrowed a bike and they rode together up to a part of the hill that wasn’t wired off. Harry described the view, the Solent black with ships, and then the ride down into the country beyond. They’d found a lane that led to nowhere. There’d been an old flint wall, shelter
from the wind, and they’d sat with their backs to the wall in the hot sunshine, dreaming of what the world would be like once the war was over. ‘Did you mean what you said?’ Harry had written. ‘About having four kids? Only four’s my lucky number, and that might have to include us.’
Afterwards, he’d picked poppies for her, and then they’d pushed their bikes round the edge of a field, looking for a different way home. A pub at the foot of the hill had taken the last of his money – a lemonade and a bottle of light ale – but Madge wasn’t to mind any of that because, said Harry in a rare flourish, she’d made him the richest man in the world.
Faraday eased back on the kitchen stool, wondering whether Gwen owed her sixty years to that summer excursion, but then he did the sums and concluded that she must have been conceived earlier, around April, unless her real birthday was much later than Sunday’s celebration suggested. Either way, Madge and Harry had very definitely become a couple, and by the turn of the year Harry appeared to have proposed marriage. ‘Pompey or Plymouth?’ he’d written. ‘If we can choose where to live, my darling, which will it be?’
Then, abruptly, came a three-month silence. No letters. No news from the West Country. No cheerful digs about the weight that Madge was putting on. Finally, in mid-March 1944, a hastily written two-page scribble arrived, quite out of keeping with everything Faraday had read before. By now Madge must have given birth. Harry had enclosed money for the baby and said he loved the name Gwen. He also thanked Madge for the watch and told her it was the best Christmas present he’d ever had. Rarely needed winding up. Always kept perfect time.
In closing, he wrote that it was impossible to get
back into Pompey for a while but that he hoped to see her before too long. Life, he said, was a bit difficult just now but it wouldn’t be this way forever. She was to take the greatest care of herself and the baby and make sure that she got a fair share of the family ration book. One day soon they’d be on the beach together, all three of them. They’d have ice creams. They’d take the steamer to the Isle of Wight. He’d teach his baby daughter how to swim. And when the sun went down, they’d go home, their own little place, with absolutely nothing in the world to worry about.
The letter was signed, as usual, with a carefully drawn H. The row of kisses extended across the page with a cartoon explosion where the last one hit the edge. With space for a PS, Harry had written, ‘Remember how much I love you. And remember that nothing else matters.’ Squeezed below it, a second PS: ‘Bob sends his best, too.’
Bob? Faraday leafed back, remembering the name from an earlier letter. Bob had been Harry’s pal the night he’d first met Madge. He’d partnered Madge’s sister Daisy, and had reappeared a couple of times in subsequent letters. Whatever Harry had been up to during the winter of 1943, Bob had obviously been with him.
Faraday left the letters on the kitchen table and went through to the lounge. He’d remembered a trailer for a concert on the radio and if he turned it on now he might still be in time to catch the final movement. He bent to the hi-fi, and then pulled the curtains against the windy darkness, recognising the slow swell of strings towards the end of the Berlioz
Requiem
. Sitting with Madge and Faraday in the church hall, Karen had mentioned some kind of top secret outfit to which Harry had belonged in the months before D-Day. She
had had no details of what they did or where they were based, but Faraday had come away with the impression that it must have been connected to the preparations for D-Day.
Back in the kitchen he tidied the letters, wondering yet again why he’d been asked to read them. In one sense, it didn’t matter. Indeed, he rather enjoyed the opportunity to peer through this tiny keyhole at a world which seemed so far removed from the chaos and clamour that – on the grimmer days – threatened to overwhelm every copper he knew.
Strange, he thought. Back in 1943, with half the planet at war, there was still a bedrock of decency, a web of relationships, that more or less everyone seemed to take for granted. People led their lives with modest expectations and a cheerful determination to make the best of it. This resilience, this wonderful mix of optimism and fortitude, was there in every paragraph of Harry’s letters. Getting by was physically tough, money was chronically short, the Germans were itching to kill them all, yet life somehow went on regardless.
Faraday smiled, imagining this sunny couple pedalling up the slopes of Portsdown Hill and into the country beyond. Sixty years later, pleasures that simple seemed infinitely rarer. People were wealthy now. They had cars, mobiles, limitless credit. They could eat all year without once peeling a spud. They could switch on the telly, surf the internet, and spend an hour on the phone to Australia for the price of a pint. But what did all that technology, all that conversation, really boil down to? Were people any wiser now? Any happier? Any more deserving? Would Harry recognise the world he’d fought to save?
Faraday bundled the letters together and tried to
squeeze them into the Jiffy bag but they kept snagging on something inside. Abandoning the letters, he felt in the bag and extracted a single sheet of paper. The official-looking letter had come from the War Office. It was addressed to Madge Corey. As nominated next of kin, she was the person entrusted with the news of Cpl Harry Jennings’s death. He’d been killed in action on 28 March 1944. The undersigned, a Captain Barraby, offered his regrets. There were no further details.
Faraday stared at the letter, then reached for the Jiffy bag again. There was still something inside. Slowly, he upended the bag and gave it a tiny shake. A watch slipped out. He turned it over. Sixty years had taken the shine off the metal casing but he could still read Harry’s name engraved on the back. Faraday gazed at the watch, fingered the cracked leather of the strap, tried to imagine the circumstances in which it had last been worn. Then he turned it over again, checking the time.
Just gone midday, he thought. Or five past midnight.
Paul Winter let himself into the silence of the bungalow at Bedhampton, glad of the chance for a decent think. He’d left Maddox where he’d found her, tucked into one end of the zebra-skinned sofa. They’d talked for a couple of hours, mainly about her, a conversation that had swirled and eddied around her life, giving Winter a richer understanding of the path that had taken her to Camber Court.
In her late teens she’d wanted to be an actress. She’d failed to get into RADA or the Central School of Drama, but a combination of family money and a wild interpretation of Anya in
The Cherry Orchard
had won her a place on a three-year course in Manchester.
She’d loved the city but within a year realised that her career on the boards was going nowhere. She didn’t have the self-discipline to submit herself to someone else’s direction. She quarrelled with other people’s interpretation of the parts that came her way. And she loathed the slightly camp cliquishness that seemed to go hand in hand with the business of being an actress.
A change of course, and another large cheque from her father, took her to Bristol. This time she was reading English and from the moment she plunged into the nineteenth-century novel she knew that she’d at last made the right decision. Winter had never come across George Eliot or Ivan Turgenev but the way Maddox described the excitements of that first year made perfect sense. Every novel, she’d said, was an undiscovered room in the biggest house in the world. She’d unlock the door, creep in, meet the tenants, listen to their stories, admire the view from the window, and then move on. These were imagined worlds. You explored them on your own terms. They existed in the deepest silence, yet the voices, if you chose to listen, were unforgettable. They were there for her, and her alone.
Did she miss the thrill of live performance? Yes. Did she miss the company of her fellow drama students? Emphatically not. Did she regret abandoning the prospect of a working lifetime waiting for the big break? Again, no.
A decent degree at Bristol had brought her to Portsmouth. Philippe, her father’s
bête noire
, had made his brief appearance. Disinherited and reduced to living on her modest savings, Maddox had one day bumped into Steve Richardson. She’d known at once, she’d told Winter, that Steve was a fellow-traveller in life. He’d worked for a time in television, producing
pop shows, and had shagged the arse off a string of big-name boyfriends. He’d been a DJ on commercial radio, hosted end-of-pier beauty contests, co-written a musical about Noel Coward that had flopped within weeks. He’d been involved in every kind of madcap financial punt – from Anatolian-themed restaurants to a travel company specialising in gay tours abroad – and had finally been declared bankrupt. Only his longtime buddy, Ali Hakim, had kept him afloat.
Hakim had a great deal of money and it was Hakim – on Steve’s prompting – who had invested in the apartment at Camber Court. The gentlemen’s club had also been Steve’s idea, and Ali had come up with the funds to make it happen.
Steve, said Maddox, had always been undaunted by the small print of business. He might have been useless with cash-flow projections and downside risks but he cooked like an angel, knew his way around a wine list, and – most important of all – understood exactly how much you could screw out of grown men for the right kind of sex. When he and Maddox met, he was looking for a couple of quality girls. They had to be classy in every respect. Cécile, a Latvian blonde with a qualification in sports physiotherapy, was already on the books. Maddox would complement her perfectly.
Winter, intrigued, had wanted to know exactly how Maddox had dealt with this suggestion. Maddox had laughed.
‘We were pissed in a bar in Winchester,’ she said. ‘And I thought it sounded interesting.’
Steve had phoned her within the week. He was already living in Camber Court and the decorators had finished the bedrooms. One of Steve’s many friends ran a restaurant in Gunwharf; he was wealthy, driven, and was happy to buy sex rather than invest precious time
in all the preliminaries. Maddox was waiting for him at Camber Court the afternoon he’d found an hour to spare.
‘What was it like?’
‘Fine. He was a nice guy. You take charge.’
‘How?’
‘Run the shower, have the oils ready, all that. I’d psyched myself up for it. Told myself it was motherhood without the nappies. Men need a bit of looking after.’
‘And the sex?’
‘No problem. He was mad about oral and he was very unselfish. I wasn’t complaining. Far from it.’
‘And did he come back?’
‘Every Wednesday. Half past two to half past three. Back then Steve charged him six hundred and kept a hundred for himself. Within a couple of weeks he’d come up with two other guys. One was an American on attachment to IBM. He could only manage the evenings. The other was a property developer, young guy, pleasant enough but completely screwed up. I think he only wanted me so he could bitch about his wife. Easiest five hundred pounds I ever earned.’
‘And no reservations? No scruples?’
‘He didn’t care. He hated her.’
‘I meant you.’
‘None.’ Maddox had laughed. ‘But then I’ve always been lucky because Steve’s extremely choosy. Cécile and I never have more than half a dozen clients on the go. Most of them have been with me for a while. They become friends. They trust me and I trust them back.’
The conversation, as Winter had planned, led inevitably back to Wishart. He’d become a member of Steve Richardson’s gentlemen’s club at the start of last year. He knew one of Cécile’s clients socially, an accountant
with a forty-foot motor cruiser on a mooring at Port Solent, and the accountant had mentioned Camber Court. Intrigued, Wishart had been invited down for supper.
‘You met him at the flat?’
‘Yes. His accountant friend was there as well, with Cécile. I don’t think Maurice quite understood the set-up to begin with but the moment you walk in it’s obvious.’