Chapter 27 Lilias
Lilias
Lilias drank her tea in the garden, overlooking the chrysanthemums. The elderly former tenant—a Miss Biden, and not Cherry Hawkins the fictional friend Elise had invented for her sister’s benefit—had been a keen gardener, and since she had arrived here, Lilias had been doing her best to keep the garden up, carefully tending the plants and pulling up the weeds.
The cottage was a good two miles away from the nearest small town, and often several days passed without Lilias seeing a soul.
But somehow, she never felt lonely enough to crave company.
Often, she was just happy to sit in the garden, listening to the bees buzzing in the chrysanthemums, but sometimes she painted a quick watercolour, or went for a walk in the nearby hills.
Simple pleasures and the sensation of the child growing inside her were more than enough for her.
She seldom even listened to the radio, and, if it hadn’t been for the need of a ration book when she ventured to the village shop, it might have seemed as if the war had ceased to exist.
Lilias had been bent over in the act of tucking in her bedsheets on the day she first felt her child move within her, and she cried out with delight, her hand going to her belly.
“Hello, my darling,” she said, longing for someone to share the moment with—her mother, Ruth, even Mrs. Symonds.
But her mother was long gone, and neither Ruth nor Mrs. Symonds had any idea as yet of the baby’s existence.
Dear Ruth. They had a standing appointment to telephone each other once a week—Lilias made her way down to the village to stand in line if there was a queue, and Ruth did the same in her village in Devon.
They were due a telephone call that very evening, in fact.
But, tempting as it was, Lilias knew she wouldn’t tell Ruth about the baby moving for the first time.
She wouldn’t—in the three minutes the coins she had would allow her to speak to Ruth for—be able to explain why she’d kept all this to herself.
And even if she could speak to Ruth about it, it would never be the same as sharing the special moment with Harry.
Whatever had happened to him? Would she ever find out?
Lilias sighed and sank down on the bed with her hands still covering her belly, feeling truly lonely for the first time since leaving Marsh House.
“You’d have loved your father, my darling,” she whispered to the child within her, allowing herself the luxury of remembering that stolen December evening.
One morning, shortly after she’d arrived in Yorkshire, it had come to her with sudden clarity that Harry must be dead.
For surely, if he weren’t dead, he’d have found a way to get in touch with her?
But the pain this conclusion brought was so severe, her brain immediately tried to counter it, rationalising that, should Harry turn up alive and well in London, or be locked up in prison, there would have been no one to inform her of the fact.
With Ruth away, and nobody else knowing that the news of Harry’s welfare was important to her, Lilias would be kept completely in the dark.
Now, several months from that day, Lilias felt more at peace.
The child within her ensured that she never felt quite alone, and she’d come to like the surrounding countryside and her regular walks.
It was so very different from the flatness of Norfolk, and far from the sound of the sea which had been a part of her life for as long as she could remember.
She thought suddenly of the salt marshes, realising that the sea lavender would soon be in full bloom.
If it hadn’t been blasted to kingdom come by army manoeuvres.
Wilfully, she dismissed the unpleasant thought, replacing it with memories of sea lavender as far as the eyes could see, and an oyster catcher calling to its mate as it took a low pass over the muddy gullies.
So absorbed in her memories was she, the sudden appearance of the postwoman made her jump.
“Beautiful morning, isn’t it?” the woman said cheerily, handing her a letter.
“Yes, indeed, it’s quite lovely,” Lilias agreed, recognising Mrs. Symonds’s careful handwriting and taking the letter hungrily. “Thank you.”
As soon as she was alone, she tore open the letter, but it soon became clear that this was a very different letter from the news-filled, gossipy letter Mrs. Symonds usually wrote, and Lilias gasped out loud with shock, covering her mouth with her hand.
Dear Miss Lilias,
I hardly know where to begin. I received such dreadful news when I went into the shop this morning.
I bumped into Mrs. Timpson’s evacuee mother, you remember, the one with the twin boys.
I don’t know if you know, Miss, but she comes from the same road as young David’s family.
Well, she told me the whole area has been badly bombed this week, including the Rest Centre where people were waiting for buses to take them to safety in the country.
She doesn’t know whether or not young David and his mother are safe, but she says a lot of children were killed at the Rest Centre.
It’s terrible, isn’t it, Miss? If only David’s mother hadn’t wanted to take him away again. He was quite safe with us . . .
The letter continued, but as soon as Lilias saw there was nothing more in it about David or the bombing, she put it aside, horrified by what she’d read.
It couldn’t be true. It couldn’t. She had to go at once, travel to London to find out for sure whether David was alive or not.
He was Harry’s son, and she loved him as if he were her own. She had to make sure he was all right.
Hastily throwing a few things into a bag, Lilias set off for the nearest town, stopping only to send Ruth a telegram to say she was on her way to London.
That there was the possibility of dreadful news about David.
Then she went on to the train station, making the London train with minutes to spare.
And, as it pulled away from the platform, it was as if she emerged from a cocoon she had been inhabiting for two seasons.
Outside this cocoon, the world was a frightening and very real place, a place where people waiting in a so-called safe shelter were killed in bomb blasts.
Watching the passing trees and fields out of the dirty train window, Lilias tried to cling to the hope that David was still alive and finally faced up to the difficulties of her own future.
She’d passed the last eight months in a sort of incubator, her life and her future on hold.
But she couldn’t do that any longer. There were decisions to be made, the most important of which was what she should tell her child about his or her father after the birth. The truth was impossible.
Since moving to Yorkshire, she’d taken to wearing a wedding ring for the sake of appearances.
Should she take this deception one step further and assume a whole new identity?
Become Mrs. Mary Brown, war widow or something?
It would satisfy the gossips and naysayers.
Those who would be quick to be scandalised by an unmarried woman with a child.
But no, this solution seemed equally impossible. Mr. Brown was not her child’s father; Harry was. Funny, handsome, entertaining Harry, as perfect a father as any child could wish for.
Lilias closed her eyes, picturing Harry walking towards her with the baby house martin nestled on his shoulder, and the pain of the memory cut so deeply, it was all she could do to keep from sobbing out loud.
When Lilias finally emerged from the tube station, the air was filled with smoke and sweet-smelling dust. Suddenly terrified it would harm the baby, she pulled her scarf up to cover her mouth and nose.
Though the time to think about harm to the baby had been that morning, when she’d taken the decision to come here.
Enemy planes could return at any moment; this was not a safe place to be.
But she still felt an overwhelming need to find out whether David was all right. And she’d come this far now.
“Excuse me, can you tell me where Barker Street is, please?” she asked a passing ARP warden.
He looked at her, his tired face streaked with dust. “Just down the hill, love. Third street on the left. There’s not much there, though. Took a right pounding the other night, that street did; same night they bombed the school.”
“Thank you.”
He gave her a nod and went on his way, and she walked on in the direction he had indicated.
Please let David be all right. Please.
She was shaking slightly as she reached Barker Street.
Or what was left of it, for the damage was shocking, with many houses flattened to piles of rubble.
People were sifting through this rubble, and, as Lilias began to pick her way through the debris on the road, two uniformed men carried something out of the tangle of broken bricks on a stretcher.
Whatever it was, it was covered up, not large enough to be a whole body, and Lilias felt her stomach clench again, the sweet dust thick in her throat.
But still she was compelled to walk on, finally reaching a small row of houses which were still intact.
Peering through the smoke and dust, Lilias tried to make out their house numbers as she walked along.
Thirty-seven, thirty-nine, forty-one. These were the odd numbers; number forty-eight must be on the other side of the road.
She turned to look and saw the house which must have been number forty was a blackened, roofless shell.
The dust was even thicker than ever here, and Lilias’s cough was almost constant now.
She wished she’d brought a drink with her, and pulled her scarf up further, pushing on.
Then, suddenly, there was number forty-eight, amazingly intact, as were its immediate neighbours.
Relief caused Lilias’s breath to catch in her throat on a sob.
She thought of David, his expression serious as he concentrated on training Compass.
Darling David. He had to be alive. He had to be.
Realising there probably wouldn’t be anyone at home, Lilias knocked on the door anyway, but to her surprise, after a few moments, it opened. And there was Nadine, dressed in black, looking older than Lilias remembered her.
“You,” she said, her expression blank as she looked at Lilias.
“Yes,” Lilias faltered. “I had to come. To make sure . . .”
“David’s dead.”
Nadine’s stark words seemed to ring in Lilias’s ears. She took a shocked step back, a sob escaping from her mouth. “No . . .”
But Nadine’s voice continued relentlessly on.
“I can still hardly believe it, but it’s true.
He’s gone, God rest his soul. They told us to go to the Rest Centre at the school for safety’s sake.
Safety, my arse. The place took a direct hit.
I’d left David with a neighbour while I went to the lav.
When I came back, he was gone. They all were; the lot of them.
” Nadine’s voice broke a little as she reached the end of this speech, and tears flooded from Lilias’s eyes.
David, dead. That precious life snuffed out in an instant. It was too much to bear.
She put her hand out towards Nadine, to offer her sympathy, to show fellow feeling, but Nadine was blowing her nose, pulling herself together. She looked down at Lilias’s outstretched hand, spotting her ring. “You’re married,” she said. “When did that happen?”
Lilias’s hand dropped, and she hid it in her skirts, still reeling from shock.
“Eight . . . months ago,” she lied, her body feeling suddenly chilled.
“I . . . I live in Yorkshire now.” She began to cough again, and as she did so, her coat opened to reveal the swell of her stomach. And this time it was Nadine who gasped.
“You’d best come in,” she said coldly. “Although I’ve no water to offer you.
The water mains have been blasted to kingdom come.
Whatever brought you here in that condition?
I only came here myself to fetch a few necessities.
I’m off to Kent this afternoon, where we go hop picking in the summer.
It should be safe there. My uncle’s friend is taking me down in his car. Too late for my poor David, of course.”
Still coughing, Lilias followed her inside, the tears starting up again.
Nadine turned to look at her. “I’m not sure why you’re so upset. It’s not as if he were your boy.”
Lilias pulled herself together sufficiently to reply. “We spent a good deal of time together, and I . . . I came to . . . love him very much indeed.”
“Well,” said Nadine, turning away. “He’s gone, poor little sod. Just like anyone I love. Just like my useless husband.” She turned back, her dark gaze piercing. “Don’t suppose you’ve got any idea what happened to Harry?”
Somehow Lilias managed to answer. “No.” She felt more nervous somehow about telling the truth than she’d done before when she was telling a lie. But then, before she could say anything else, something wet began to trickle down her legs onto the floor.