Home Once More
H OME O NCE M ORE
M OLLY WAS SEATED IN the study of The Book Keep. It was a fine spring evening with a warming breeze and a mostly cloudless sky. During the war people in London would be looking anxiously to the skies for German bombers on such a lovely night. But now it was just a fine time to be alive.
She was writing a letter using her father’s old Conway Stewart pen. She loved the flow of the instrument and the elegance of the ink bleeding onto stiff paper.
She was now fifty-one years old, divorced, and the mother of a son and a daughter, one still at uni, and one who had graduated and was now working at a museum in Amsterdam. Her hair was cut shorter and fashioned in the style of the day. It held more than a touch of gray that she was debating covering up. That decision seemed trivial and absurd after what she had faced during the war. But that was also what made it wonderful to be able to contemplate. Her face was fuller and her frame about two stone heavier than during the war. She was in good health, and the recent jettisoning of her faithless husband had been the best decision she’d made in the previous decade.
She was a fully qualified clinical psychiatrist with a thriving practice, an excellent reputation, numerous scholarly papers, and two medical textbooks to her credit.
She knew that she had chosen this particular field because of what had happened to her mother. Dr. Foyle had desperately wanted something better with which to treat troubled patients. And now Molly and other health care professionals had a spectrum of medications to prescribe to those in their care. Sometimes they didn’t work; sometimes they did more harm than good. But they were all better and far more humane than poking sharp metal objects into fragile brains.
She understood her mother’s condition now. Her psychoses probably could have been managed with modern-day medications and professional counseling. Unfortunately, her mother’s condition had occurred too early for those types of remedies. But Molly’s current patients benefited from them and from her training and empathic bedside manner, which, as a nurse long ago had told her, was half the battle.
She finished the letter, slid it into an envelope, sealed it, and wrote an address on it.
It was a missive to the Tinsdales. They had been so very kind to her all this time, and she kept in close contact with the family, whom she had visited many times over the intervening years. Molly set the letter aside and looked at the finished manuscript that sat on her desk. She next focused on the names of the two authors of the book set forth on the title page.
Imogen Oliver and Molly Danvers.
This novel seemed as far from her medical writings as possible, but perhaps not. It was full of psychology, the human condition, in the most traumatic of times. People did not typically need her help when suitably happy with their lives. They needed her skills when the opposite occurred, as it so very often did in life.
Molly had barely revised the first portion of the novel written by Imogen decades prior. It turned out the dead woman had been a more naturally gifted writer than Molly, but the second half of the novel had more than held its own in the storytelling, at least her agent had told her that. And there were several reputable publishers currently formulating serious offers to purchase the rights to the story.
Out in the shop she heard the bell tinkling and customers coming and going. She had two very good people helping in the shop, and it had prospered over the years.
She rose, opened the door, and stared out into the bookshop area as a half dozen customers looked over various volumes, while a queue of others were having their purchases rung up and bagged at the counter. She had retained much of the untidiness from Ignatius Oliver’s days, and customers seemed to like that attribute as they explored the stacks and crevices for new literary treasures.
She also had a special section of the works of George Sand, with not a single one missing any pages.
Molly closed the door, walked back over to her desk, and looked at the framed picture of Charlie and his family that was placed there. He lived in Australia now, where he had a ranch. As a young man he had traveled the world via freighters, trains, and planes, written down all that he saw and experienced, and he was the only one who read a word of it. He now had five children, and his wife, Meredith, was very kind and welcoming. Molly had been to visit once, and Charlie had even taught her how to ride a horse while she was there.
She had been terrified, her heart thudding in her chest, but in his calming voice, which had changed only slightly from his youth, he had said all the right things to carefully wean her from the panic. Even though he lived so far away, she could not imagine him not being a part of her life. He was the godfather to her son, and she was godmother to his oldest daughter. They spoke on the phone at least once a week.
She looked around the confines of the study. It hadn’t changed much. Oh, some of the furniture had worn out and been replaced over the years. But the desk was the same, as was the uncomfortable chair. The Crown typewriter was on a shelf now and had been replaced by an IBM Selectric II typewriter. Molly tended to type too fast and the Crown’s keys would gnash, like rheumatic fingers all in a dither.
But every time she opened the door and stepped in here, it was like creeping cautiously back into the war years. She could still see Ignatius Oliver hunched at the desk, the smell and haze of a meager coal fire lingering in the room like a thin fog.
There were several graves to visit in the city and she did so regularly. Her mother and father, Charlie’s mother and grandparents, and Ignatius Oliver. He was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery. Her parents were also buried there, and Molly herself had a plot there for when her time came. She was a fan of G. K. Chesterton’s poetry and had tearfully quoted from “The Rolling English Road” at Oliver’s funeral:
For there is good news yet to hear, and fine things to be seen,
Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.
If Oliver had not come along when he had, Molly was certain that her and Charlie’s lives would have turned out very differently, and not for the better. It wasn’t so much the decisions you made, it was simply who you stumbled into while you were trying to work out important matters. Run into one person instead of another, and one’s future could be completely altered, as Oliver had said in somewhat different language on New Year’s Eve so many years ago.
Molly took her bag, said goodbye to one of her assistants, and walked out into the spring evening.
The war had been over for decades now. London had moved on, of course, although there were many in the city, like her, who had lived through those desperate times.
V-E Day parades were still robustly popular. TV shows and movies were replete with stories of the worldwide struggle. Books aplenty had been written about it, and Molly was about to add hers (and Imogen’s) to that pile.
Yet memories faded and other wars had come to replace that one, though thankfully none as extreme or as far-reaching. The 1970s had been quite eventful for England. There had been strikes by miners and postal and dustbin workers. A drought in 1976 and one of the hottest summers on record had dampened the spirits of many, but the Queen’s Silver Jubilee a year later had lifted the country to a happier, prouder time. That was the way the world worked, Molly well knew. Highs and lows and long periods of a normal existence in between.
The decades-long nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union was still raging ahead. The British and all the rest of the world were justly terrified about how this struggle would play out between the two superpowers.
Indeed, half of her practice was now devoted to those who were certain the violent end of the world was near. Molly found she could speak with particular knowledge and thoughtfulness to such anxieties, because she had lived them herself. No foreign bomb had fallen on English soil since 1945. She hoped that would remain so, forever, but there were no guarantees. Life was not about predictability, indeed quite the opposite.
She stopped at the spot on the pavement where Ignatius Oliver had lost his life while valiantly performing his duties as an air warden. It was fronted now by a women’s shoe store, a nice one, an expensive one. Molly had never been inside, nor would she ever.
She and Charlie had left the shelter that night and walked back toward The Book Keep, wondering where Oliver was. Then they had come upon a small group of people and another air warden. They were gathered around something on the street. And that something had been the remains of Ignatius Oliver.
Both she and Charlie had fallen to their knees next to him and wept bitterly at losing the very best friend they ever had. As Molly had stared down at him that night so long ago, he had seemed at peace. Perhaps he had joined his wife, who had voluntarily given up her life, while his had been wrenched violently from him. But even with two very different outcomes, they could perhaps find a renewed connection for all eternity; at least she hoped so.
Molly felt herself tearing up at the long-ago but still painful memory, and she hastily moved off down the street. She knew there was a price to be paid with important relationships like that. They were wonderful, but they also had the capacity to exact a punishing price when one in the relationship was gone. Grief, sadness, anger at a loss, and terrible, unrelenting hurt were the costs to be paid for loving and being loved. It felt completely worth the bargain right up until the very moment payment was demanded.
She would never get over the loss of Ignatius Oliver, but she would always benefit from having had him in her life.
Molly looked into the window of another bookshop and then lingered, wondering what it might feel like to see her novel there. And if he had lived, what would Oliver think of her having finished Imogen’s story? Would she have done so at all if he had not perished?
Molly actually understood that she had completed the book mainly as a tribute to her dear friend.
Ignatius Oliver had come along at precisely the right time for two young people who would lose everything during the greatest armed conflict the world had ever suffered through.
Despite that, she knew theirs was only one small human story among millions of others.
But this was their story. Three people standing together against all the world could hurl at them.
As she looked at the clear sky, Molly’s mind superimposed a trio of faces there: Ignatius Oliver, Charlie Matters, and herself. Separately, through no fault of their own, they had been something less than full measure in the face of war’s deadly grip. Yet together they had confronted a collective hardship that, at times, seemed beyond anyone’s capacity. It spoke well indeed of the resilience of the human spirit when one had friends with whom to share the sometimes calamitous burden of existence.
We all need someone at certain times in our lives. It makes the inevitable pain lessened and the periods of happiness exalted.
With this uplifting thought blossoming in her mind, Molly continued her walk down the streets of lovely London in the warmth, and robust peace, of springtime.