Chapter Twenty-eight
Twenty-eight
They were shy at first, having suffered a distressing period of homelessness after their flat near Horse Guards was bombed.
Their parents had managed to find a place to live near Edgeware with a distant relative, but there wasn’t room for the boys, nor, after so close a call, was their father willing to give in any longer to their mother’s pleas that they stay together.
The boys took to Emmy like glue once she told them she had also lost her home in the bombings.
After they managed to extract from Emmy that she had lost her mother as well, they took it upon themselves to find ways to cheer her.
They made pictures for her to hang on her wall, and fought over who got to play cards with her and who got to hang the washing with her.
Charlotte told Emmy this was evidence of how much they missed their own mother.
The boys’ devotion at first surprised Emmy, but it soon became a soothing balm.
She felt scraped and raw after her cleansing experience in the yellow room, as though she were knit together solely of the pink, fragile skin that was revealed when a sunburn sloughed off.
Hugh’s and Philip’s affections lessened the sting of that newness.
Rose was jealous of the boys’ attentions toward Emmy; another reason for her to scowl incessantly at Emmy. Rose knew enough to understand that Emmy was somehow an extension of the girl who had been at Thistle House before, and occasionally she would ask Emmy, “Where’s the other one?” meaning Julia.
On several occasions Rose flat-out said to Emmy, as if it had suddenly dawned on her, that Emmy’s name wasn’t Isabel.
Once when she did this—in front of the boys, no less—Emmy leaned in toward Rose and told her she had a secret.
Emmy had discovered that Rose loved secrets.
She loved the word “secrets.” Emmy told her she wanted to be called Isabel because it was her favorite name.
And that she would call Rose by her favorite name if she would tell Emmy what it was.
Rose’s eyes glittered with the heady notion of being called by a name she loved far more than her own.
She leaned toward Emmy in return. “Ophelia,” she murmured.
Emmy told her that was a beautiful name and that she would call her that.
Rose’s reticence toward Emmy began to wane after that.
This was a good thing because since Emmy never wanted to go to the village, Charlotte went—most often with the boys in tow—and that meant Emmy stayed at Thistle House with Rose.
Rose slowly began to prefer Emmy’s company to Charlotte’s, an oddity that Charlotte seemed to wish to find endearing and not a bit hurtful.
She had cared for Rose for two decades, yet here was Emmy stealing away Rose’s affections after only a few weeks.
When Emmy caught Charlotte looking injured at Rose’s continued deference to Emmy, she apologized for it, and Charlotte just said, “Don’t mind me. ”
Rose seemed to think she and Emmy had a treasure trove of secrets between them now, when in reality they had just the one. And even that wasn’t a secret, since everyone heard Emmy call her Ophelia. But that one secret seemed like a thousand to Rose. And it made her happy.
Between caring for Rose when Charlotte was away from the house, minding the boys, and getting the house ready for the holidays, Emmy’s life seemed full of purpose.
They prepared for Christmas—the five of them—by agreeing that they would only give one another presents they had made themselves.
Emmy had long since put away the pieces of Charlotte’s wedding dress and had no desire to trifle with her bargain with God by sewing anything for anyone, so she used the money that Mac had given her and bought watercolor paints and canvases at an art store in Moreton.
Emmy had never painted before, but she had found creative release and joy in sketching, so wouldn’t it stand to reason that she could find the same in painting?
At night, after the boys were in bed, Emmy would set up a makeshift easel in the laundry room by the privy, the only place where she had any privacy, and experiment with brushes, shades, and strokes.
She painted what she saw in the laundry room, which, that first night, was Charlotte’s umbrella, the very same one Julia had dreamed of owning one day.
Over the course of the next few nights, a second painting took shape: a flaxen-haired nymph of a girl holding a red-and-white polka-dot umbrella with a curly licorice black handle, and walking in the rain down a flower-flecked path.
It would be the first of many Umbrella Girls, though Emmy did not paint another for six years.
That first one Emmy gave to Charlotte for their Christmas together at Thistle House.
For Rose, she painted a trellis of roses, and for the boys, a horse for Hugh, and a sailboat for Philip.
She also helped the boys make gifts for their parents, and for Charlotte and Rose.
They made calendars constructed from old greeting cards that the woman across the lane—the only one of the neighbors who didn’t crinkle an eyebrow when she called Emmy “Isabel”—was going to throw out and instead gave to Emmy for the boys.
During these weeks, Mac rang up from London several times, to say hello and give Emmy an update on his continued search for Julia.
Emmy knew he would be spending Christmas in the hotel, so with Charlotte’s permission, Emmy invited him for supper.
He rode the train with Hugh and Philip’s parents, who had also been invited.
As they all sat around the dining table Christmas Day with one of Charlotte’s fatter and recently retired laying hens serving as their Christmas goose, Emmy was astonished at how normal and wonderful the scene was. Even Philip and Hugh bickering over a chicken leg seemed perfectly sublime.
After dinner and before their train ride back to London, Mac asked to take a walk with Emmy. They bundled up against the chill and headed outside.
Emmy knew how the war was progressing; she and Charlotte listened to the wireless most nights after the boys and Rose were in bed, and they had a two-day-old newspaper once or twice a week to keep them abreast of what was going on.
Emmy knew that more than twenty thousand ordinary people like her mum and Eloise Crofton had been killed in the Blitz since September, and that hundreds of thousands had been made homeless.
Coventry had been decimated not long after Emmy returned to Thistle House, and terrible raids had been inflicted on Manchester and Liverpool in the days leading up to Christmas.
More than forty thousand British soldiers had been made prisoners of war on the Continent.
Emmy did not particularly want to talk about those things as she and Mac stepped outside, but how could they not? The war was what had brought Mac and her together and the war was the only reason he was in England instead of at home in the States.
Mac told Emmy he was afraid the year to come—1941—was going to be a long one. Things would get worse before they got better.
But then he took her mittened hand in his as they walked up Maugersbury Road. “I’m glad you’re here in Stow, even though I hardly ever see you. London’s no place for a young woman like you.”
Emmy didn’t know what to say to this. Mac didn’t know her at all.
“I wish I had news of your half sister,” he continued when she said nothing. “I hate to tell you that I don’t. And on Christmas, too. The one thing you can hold on to is that there’s no record of her death.”
“I almost wish there was, because then I’d know.” Emmy exhaled heavily, her breath puffing away from her in vapor.
They walked in silence for several seconds.
“You must be very close to her,” Mac finally said.
“I am,” Emmy replied. “She was—is—very fond of me. She looked to me for protection. I was more like a mother to her than an older sister.”
“Her mother wasn’t around much?” he asked.
“She . . . was around. She just struggled to make ends meet. It was hard. I think she did her best.”
“And the father you shared passed away a while ago, right?”
The mingling of her lives in conversation made Emmy feel a little dizzy, as though she were spinning in a circle and if she stopped, she would topple.
“Right,” she said simply.
“What was he like, your father?”
They were just short of entering town, a good place to stop. Emmy needed to be careful of what she said. And remember every word. She stopped at a picket fence that bordered a cottage of Cotswold stone and stared at the gray skies beyond.
If Julia and she had shared the same father—which was what Mac believed—then Emmy would have memories of him; she was the older by eight years. Emmy reasoned that if she could blend Emmeline and Isabel into one, she could certainly combine her nameless father with Neville.
“My father wasn’t a very responsible person. He had charm and liked to be happy, but he didn’t know how to think beyond the moment.” As Emmy said this, she wondered how much was true of her own father, whoever he was. He had certainly charmed Mum with no thought to tomorrow.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Mac stood close to her.
Emmy shrugged. “I’ve not spent any time mulling over it.”
He seemed surprised. “Really?”
“What good would it do? It won’t change anything. He was who he was. I’m not going to spend the rest of my life wondering why.”
Mac smiled. “Good for you.” He paused a moment. “So what are you going to spend the rest of your life doing? Assuming the Luftwaffe doesn’t kill us all.” He laughed lightly.
Emmy stared at the pointed slats of the fence. She didn’t have a plan for the rest of her life. Not anymore. “I really don’t know.”
A couple seconds of silence passed between them before Emmy realized she should ask him what his plans were. “What about you?”
Mac looked past the cottage, just as she had, to the colorless sky. “Well, if the Nazis don’t blow me to bits, I want to move back to Minneapolis or maybe Saint Paul, buy my own radio station, make a lot of money, marry, have a couple kids, retire at fifty.”
“That’s all?” Emmy said, and Mac laughed.
“I like knowing what I want out of life,” he said.
“Knowing isn’t having.” Emmy did not mean for it to sound bitter, but she tasted resentment on her tongue.
“But if you don’t know what you want, you can’t reach for it.”
She wanted to tell him that reaching hard for something you thought you must have, having it nearly in your grasp, and risking all to get it, could lead you straight to the heart of utter ruin.
But what would Isabel Crofton know of that?
“Want to meet in Oxford for the New Year?” he asked.
Emmy coughed to hide the breath he had stolen from her.
“I don’t mean at a hotel, Isabel. I mean at a party. A friend of mine in London has family there. It would be fun.”
Her eyes were watering at the curious exchange of air and breath and voice taking place in her throat.
“Maybe,” was all she could say.
But Mac did not make it to the party in Oxford on New Year’s. London was bombed two days before New Year’s Eve with such intensity that a firestorm swept across the city and nearly swallowed the East End whole. Five days passed before Mac rang Emmy and told her he was all right.
And so began 1941, the second year of the war.