Chapter Thirty-seven
Thirty-seven
Dear Emmy,
Simon and I are going to the ballet this afternoon.
Swan Lake. He has a cousin who is dancing in it.
After the performance there will be a party at his aunt and uncle’s house in Chelsea.
I have met only his mother and father. Tonight I will meet everyone else.
His brother, Dennis, and his wife, Trudie.
His grandparents, both sets. Four sets of aunts and uncles and a dozen or more cousins.
I am a little nervous about it.
I never know what to say when people ask about my family.
Maybe they won’t ask tonight. Maybe Simon has told them everything already and I can avoid having to explain it ten times over.
Except that if they all know, then I will be subject to the pathetic stares.
When you’re known as the young woman orphaned by the war and tragically separated from your only sister, you can’t help but be rewarded with pathetic stares.
No one really knows what to say to you, but they think hard to come up with something, and as they are blistering their brains to find the right words, they stare. They don’t mean to, but they do.
Simon will watch over me, thank goodness.
I doubt he will leave my side for a second.
He’s afraid I will get scared off and he’ll have to go back to the beginning and woo me all over again.
Did I tell you what he does for a living?
He’s an accountant for the company I work for.
Our company makes maps and globes and atlases.
I love working there. I love the idea that it’s important to know there are many places other than the one where you are.
I am an assistant to the art director. It’s not like I am good at art, not like you.
But I am good at maintaining the research files, and working with the surveyors and artists.
I keep everyone in line, my boss likes to say.
He told me he’s never met anyone who can keep track of all the details like I can.
I think it’s because during the war when I was forced to reinvent myself as Julia Waverly, I was highly aware of the details of my new life.
I knew how many steps it was to the third floor of the Bowers’ house.
I knew how many tiles there were on the bathroom floor.
I knew how many knobs were on the kitchen cabinets.
And how many books Professor Bower had in his study.
I had counted all these things. Counting things was how I kept hold of my new life since it was all I had that I could control.
When I would think of you and Mum and the flat and the kittens and home, I would have to start counting something to keep myself from going crazy.
Sometimes Granny would hear me whispering the numbers and she’d pretend that she hadn’t.
One of the doctors she took me to told her it was my way of coping with what had happened and not to pester me about it.
I think it worried her, though. Counting the rosebuds on the rug in the living room or slats in the blinds surely seemed pointless to her.
I no longer count to keep myself calm, but when I do have to count something, like presentation folders at work, it reminds me of how scared I was to come back to London when the war was over.
Granny and I returned to England in June 1945.
I was twelve but it was another four years before I saw London again.
Just as in America, school here in England wasn’t hard for me, but socially I was an outcast. Those of us evacuees who spent the war years in America were treated differently from those who had spent the war years in the English countryside, mostly because of our Yank accents, but also because it was believed we had not suffered like those who’d stayed had.
My teen years weren’t the greatest. I am ashamed to tell you there were times when I wondered how much rope I would need and if it would hurt very much. . . .
I didn’t see a psychologist for the first couple of years we were back, but Granny sensed I was having a rough go of it.
So she found one for me. Dr. Bristol was thirty-something and handsome.
I remember looking forward to Tuesday afternoons when I would see him.
He coaxed out of me a lot of what I have shared with you here.
He’s the one who said I needed to visit London again, even if just for a few hours, so that I wouldn’t be afraid of it anymore.
He even offered to come with Granny and me, which I was all for, but Granny said she could handle it.
Granny decided we’d go for tea at Harrods. Just for tea. Harrods wasn’t near Whitechapel or Saint Paul’s, so I wouldn’t have to see anything I didn’t want to see unless we started strolling east.
Did you know, Emmy, that fear can feel like heaviness? I am sure you probably do.
The whole time we were on the train, I seemed to be carrying the weight of those nine years I had been away from London. It was as if time itself were a tangible thing that one could put on a scale and then watch the needle swing right.
When we closed in on Paddington station, I looked for something in our car to count. I could find nothing, so I closed my eyes and counted seconds.
The train stopped and everyone stood up to be on their way.
Granny waited until I stood before she rose as well.
She silently took my hand and we got off.
I counted hats on heads as we walked through the station and out to the queue of taxis waiting at the curb.
Inside the cab, with Granny still holding my hand, I counted buses and bicycles and black cars as we made our way to Knightsbridge, a couple miles away.
By the time we stepped out of the cab a few minutes later, I had slowed to counting just my own breaths, slow and even.
Fear is worse than pain, I think. Pain is centralized, identifiable, and wanes as you wait.
Fear is a heaviness you can’t wriggle out from under.
You must simply find the will to stand with it and start walking.
Fear does not start to fade until you take the step that you think you can’t.
I got out of the cab onto the street and I stood there balancing the weight of nearly a decade of regret. Granny somehow knew just to stand still next to me after she’d paid the driver.
After a moment I knew I could walk and carry it because you would have wanted me to.
We had tea and Granny found things to talk about that had nothing to do with anything important.
We were just like any other young woman and her grandmother out for an afternoon of shopping.
I sat in my chair and drank from my cup as one in a near-dream state.
Fear is not only a leaden foe, but a liar as well.
It was not as bad as I thought it would be, sitting there in a London department store on an ordinary Saturday.
We walked to the underground to take a train back to Paddington. There was a terrible moment when we walked past a bridal shop and I was reminded of what I had stolen from you.
I’m sure you know I hid the brides box in the crawl space of our bedroom at Aunt Charlotte’s. When you went to get me a drink of water, I stuck it on a ledge that is over the frame of the little door. You can only see it from the inside.
I am so sorry, Emmy.
I wish you could know how sorry I am.
Dr. Bristol was immensely proud of me when I saw him the following week and told him about the trip.
He said I had crossed a bridge, a big one.
And now that I had crossed it, I could take more trips to London, which Granny and I did over the next couple years.
We even went to a church service at Saint Paul’s so that I could stand just a stone’s throw from where you and I lived and not be undone by it.
I stopped seeing Dr. Bristol just before I turned eighteen, at his advice, since he was a child psychologist and I was certainly no longer a child.
I also came to realize he was married and a new father, so the attraction I’d had for him had started to diminish.
He was very happy with my progress. I was talking, counting only when something truly needed to be counted, and I was able to stand on the streets of a London being rebuilt.
Not only that; I would be starting college and handling my adult life just like those of my peers.
Everyone has good days and bad days, Dr. Bristol told me.
I came to learn, though, that there are days that are neither good nor bad. There is a kind of day that is something else entirely.
On those days, you are restless for something. And that fidgety feeling doesn’t make your good days bad or your bad days good.
It just makes you hungry.
That was when I knew I had to move back to London to live, not just visit.
It’s time to get ready for the ballet.
Love,
Julia
June 24, 1958
Dear Emmy,
The ballet was wonderful. Beautiful, actually.
And I had a surprisingly nice time meeting Simon’s family.
No one asked me about my own family except to say things like So Simon tells me your grandfather is a professor of literature at Oxford?
I cornered Simon and asked him what he had told everyone about me.
He just said he told them I was lovely and smart and that I lost my family in the war.
You can say that and it answers a thousand other questions.
The war is still spoken of here as if it happened yesterday even though it’s been thirteen years since VE Day.
So instead of answering awkward questions about where was home for me and did I have any brothers and sisters, I answered questions about what it’s like to be the granddaughter of an Oxford don.
Granny and Gramps had wanted me to go to college just like they wanted Neville to.
I did try, Emmy. I tried to be the person they wanted me to be.
But I found myself hungering for London.
It was as if London were calling me to come back and become reacquainted with it again.
There was unfinished business between London and me, and I needed to attend to it.
My grandparents, especially Gramps, weren’t happy about my wanting to leave college before I graduated but they handled my decision better than they had handled my father’s.
They didn’t cut me off, financially or personally, which is what they did to Neville.
Sometimes you get a second chance in life.
The thing was, as soon as I decided I needed to come back, I felt ready to come back.
It was the strangest thing. It was 1953 and I had just turned twenty, the same age you were when the war ended.
I think that’s why I had to come back then.
I looked for you in the faces of the people I saw on the streets.
I steeled my resolve, made a list of all the bridal shops, and I went to each one, looking for your name on the dresses or your face behind the counter.
The first job I had was with the telephone company, which made it easy for me to look for your name in all the telephone exchanges in England, but I did not find you.
Gramps helped me get the job at Masters it opens us. To love is not to be fragile; it is to be unlocked and open. And when something is open, other things can come in.
And things can be taken out, I said to him. When you’re standing there doing nothing remarkable, all you love can be yanked out of your open arms.
What can be given in one moment can be taken in the next.
Which is why I agreed to start seeing Dr. Diamant. After five years without professional counsel, this is why I must lay it all bare before another psychologist.
I don’t feel entitled to happiness, Emmy. I robbed you of yours.
Dr. Diamant says the war is to blame for what came between you and me.
I look around London and I see all the new buildings. It’s obvious that what the war did has been fixed.
What I did is what I must fix.
I want to fix what I broke.
Julia