Chapter 57
Elisavet came to visit Cora unexpectedly the following evening just as the sun was setting. She was outlined in gold.
‘I would like to talk with you,’ she explained on the doorstep.
‘Oh, yes, of course, by all means. Come on in. Glass of wine?’ Cora asked hopefully. ‘Or tea?’
‘Wine. Thank you.’
Cora took a bottle from the fridge, and because she hated suspense, she asked, ‘What’s it about?’
‘I’m going home to Kosovo,’ Elisavet said.
‘Oh!’ Cora paused in the pouring. It felt like a dreadful failing on their part. ‘Why?’
‘My parents miss me.’ She gave Cora a quick glance. ‘My fiancé, too, they tell me.’
Cora nodded. She understood. We’ll miss you, she thought but she didn’t say it, there was no point in making Elisavet feel responsible for that. ‘When are you leaving?’ she asked, taking the glasses through to the sitting room. She put them down and switched the TV off.
Elisavet sat on the edge of the sofa, holding the base of the glass in the palm of her hand. She hesitated before answering. ‘Soon,’ she said.
‘Soon? I hope you’re not going to miss Gladdie’s exhibition.’ Cora gave a rueful laugh. ‘Dew! That’s not why you’re going, is it? Can Megan and I come with you?’ She had nightmares about it. Their accumulated art efforts looked exactly what they were: amateurish.
Elisavet pressed her lips together in a smile.
Cora took a sip of wine. ‘What’s made you decide?’
‘I haven’t been able to leave my misery behind,’ Elisavet said.
‘Ah. No. Unfortunately, misery clings.’
‘For you, too?’ Elisavet’s dark eyes held hers accusingly. ‘You made it seem easy.’
‘Did I?’ Cora flushed. ‘I’m sorry. It wasn’t.
’ She swirled the wine around in her glass.
They’d reduced the past to an anecdote, their part in the Germans’ Great Escape.
There was a happy ending in their long, companionable marriage.
Frank joined the choir, and the joy of singing gave him a tingling feeling of belonging that never failed to move her.
He got a job in construction and then joined the fire service.
They had Gwyn, and Frank became a thorough Welshman, proud of it too.
To be fair, as an anecdote it was good, heartwarming even, if you left the pain of it out. ‘It’s hindsight, it is, Elisavet,’ she said apologetically. ‘We didn’t know it would be all right. It was agony at times.’ The unendurable sadness of war was that you did endure it, you carried on living.
‘We didn’t survive for any noble reasons.
It wasn’t out of faith in the future, nothing like that.
The truth is, I can’t say I had any.’ Cora’s gaze rested on the mended ornament on the mantelpiece, the broken boy with his sock around his ankle.
‘But the thrill of being with Frank in the greenhouse and my mother’s hatred cracked open in front of us, and walking out under an umbrella, him in my father’s suit, they were the highpoints of my life, where life jumped forward out of the mud onto something solid and good.
’ She pressed her fingers against her mouth.
‘But in between that, there were times when there was nothing to look forward to, except for sleep. I would dread waking up. I wished I was dead during that time, just to put a stop on it.’
She looked up at Elisavet’s tight face with the sudden clarity of agonising brightness, and for the first time she felt Elisavet’s pain as if it were her own pain, as if Elisavet’s dear heart were her heart.
She’d gone about it the wrong way, trying to make it better through words. She held out her arms.
Elisavet’s eyes blazed pink with tears, and Cora’s too, and Cora held her and held onto the awful jerk of grief that shook through Elisavet’s body into hers.
They stayed like that for a while, holding onto each other, and when their embrace loosened a little, Elisavet said one muffled word: ‘Home.’