Chapter 26 Ruth
Ruth
Ruth looked up from the image on the artist’s camera. “Did you imagine this one too?”
Elise nodded. “Yes. Well, in a way. With this one I didn’t even realise I’d drawn the two of you until it was pointed out to me.”
Ruth handed the camera back, feeling suddenly tired. She never had had time for psychic hogwash, and she wasn’t ready to change her opinion now. Although, if this young woman was telling the truth, it was a mystery, she had to admit. “Why exactly did you want to see me?”
Something shifted in Elise’s face, making her look vulnerable. “I wanted to ask you about the boy in the wall mural. I saw his photograph in an exhibition, you see, and it . . . it made me want to know more about him. I think he was called David, wasn’t he?”
“He was, yes.”
“If you don’t mind me asking, was it you who donated the photograph to the exhibition? The organiser said she received some anonymous donations.”
The girl had clearly done some digging. Ruth frowned, wondering why she was so interested in David. It was an evocative photograph, certainly, emotion and history captured with a click of a camera button. But David, unless one had known him personally, was just one evacuee out of many.
“I did,” she said, replying to the question. “Along with several other photographs. The call for donations came when I was clearing out my things prior to my move here.”
Elise nodded. “Would you . . . would you mind telling me about him? About David, I mean? That is, if you remember.”
Ruth remembered only too well, that was the trouble. It was partly the reason she’d had the mural boarded over in the first place. Unable to bring herself to paint over it and destroy it forever, she’d been equally unable to set eyes on it every time she was at the house.
She thought of her last meeting with Lilias in London, nine months or so after she’d joined the Wrens, she and Lilias in the best clothes they could muster, Lilias with her lipstick applied uncharacteristically clumsily, as if her mind had been on other things when she put it on.
Which no doubt it had been, what with her having so recently found out about poor David’s death.
“Lilias,” Ruth had said, “I’m so terribly sorry about young David. He was such a dear boy. I know how much you cared for him. It’s awful, truly awful.”
All this time later she could remember how Lilias had swallowed. The glint of tears in her eyes. “Yes,” she’d said, the short word containing such a vast depth of pain, it had taken Ruth’s breath away.
“Well,” Ruth said now to the young woman, unwilling to speak about David just for entertainment. “That depends very much on why you want to know about him.”
As she watched, a dramatic change came over Elise’s face—one that reminded Ruth of Lilias at that last afternoon tea in London, making her feel ashamed for her coolness and for not having offered Elise either a seat or some sort of refreshment when she’d first arrived.
Loss. Perhaps a loss as great as Ruth’s own.
“Well, he—David—looks a bit like my son. He . . . he died, you see, not very long ago. And I suppose I thought, if I could find something out about David, discover his story, it might somehow help me.” Elise shook her head.
“It sounds ridiculous when I say it out aloud. I just . . . felt compelled to find out about him. That’s the only way I know to explain it. ”
Ruth sighed, her force field quite gone now. “I’m so very sorry, my dear,” she said.
“You don’t remember him?”
“Oh, yes, I remember David very well. That’s the problem. Because I’m afraid there’s no happy ending to his story. Nothing at all to provide you with any comfort for your own loss.”
“Oh. I see,” Elise said, taking this in, then looking up. “But will you tell me, anyway?”
“Are you sure you want me to?”
Elise nodded. Ruth saw her pull herself together as she must have done many times since her son’s death. “Yes, I’m sure,” she said.
And Ruth sighed once more and began.