Chapter 37 Elise
Elise
Nonna was crying softly, repeating the same words over and over again, “It seemed right at the time. I’ve always loved you like my own.” As for Ruth, after that first moment of realisation, she had closed her eyes and withdrawn from the drama, pain claiming her again.
As shocked as she was by the revelations herself, Elise took control. “Come on, Gran. I think we ought to go, don’t you? Ruth needs to sleep, and we . . . well, we need to digest all of this. I think we should find a hotel and come back to see Ruth tomorrow, if that’s all right with her.”
Very slowly, as if she’d aged somewhat during the past few minutes, Gran nodded. Elise squeezed her shoulder and spoke to Ruth, unsure whether she could hear or not. “Ruth, I’ll pop back in a moment to say goodbye.”
When she did so, after Robbie had taken charge of Gran and Nonna, Ruth gave a long sigh. “I’m not asleep,” she said. “I just couldn’t bear to look at her.”
Elise took her hand. “I know,” she said emotionally. “It’s unbelievable. Like a story she made up.”
“It is,” agreed Ruth. “But it also makes perfect sense. I’ve never entirely understood why Lilias decided to risk her life to serve her country, not even with us having family in France. Now I have my answer.”
“Yes.” Elise tried and utterly failed to imagine how Lilias must have felt to lose her baby; not to know where she was, or even whether she was safe and well.
Ruth’s eyes flickered open. “This means we’re related, you and I,” she said, and for the first time, Elise realised it was true. It was Lilias who’d been her great-grandmother, not Nonna. Which made Ruth her great-great-aunt.
“I’m pleased,” Ruth went on, and tears filled Elise’s eyes. “I felt a connection to you right away. Now I know why.”
“Me too,” Elise said.
Ruth closed her eyes again. “But I’m beyond tired now, my dear. Speak to her for me, would you? Discover all there is to discover and come back tomorrow to tell me. Don’t bring her with you, though; I never want to see her again.”
Elise nodded, wondering how all of this would affect her own relationship with Nonna. Let alone Gran’s. “Is it all right if I bring Gran with me? Marie?”
“Yes, of course, if she wants to come. I should like to get to know her a little before it’s too late. To tell her about Lilias . . .”
Out in the car, Nonna was silent and grim faced, Gran was crying softly, and Robbie was looking stressed and out of his depth. “What the hell happened in there?” he asked, but Elise didn’t feel inclined to fill him in right away.
“Not now,” she said, clipping on her seat belt. “D’you mind just taking us back to Marsh House?” Sam would know of a suitable hotel her family could stay in. Though perhaps, for everyone’s sake, it would be better if Nonna didn’t stay in Norfolk for long anyway.
Later, in the lounge of the hotel they’d booked into, the whole truth came out.
Having taken Lilias’s baby, Nonna had, at first, headed to Kent to try to find sanctuary at one of the hop-picking farms she’d visited with Harry and David.
When this had proved to be only temporary, she’d returned to London and confessed what she’d done to her mother.
“Mum helped me,” Nonna told them. “We went together to register Marie’s birth.
Nobody questioned anything. Then Mum, me, and the baby moved in together, made a new start.
There was only the woman who’d helped with the birth who knew the truth, and she went a bit mad with grief after her twin boys were both killed in action. Died not long after that, she did.”
Elise, Gran, and Robbie sat around the room in stunned silence as they digested her words. Gran had long since stopped crying, and now she spoke to the woman she’d always thought of as her mother with bitterness. “She knew, too, though, didn’t she? Lilias. She knew what you’d done.”
Nonna flinched a little at her daughter’s accusing tone of voice, then rallied a little. “Yes,” she agreed. “Lilias knew. But she didn’t try too hard to find you, did she? Must have felt too guilty about seducing my husband.”
But this flash of righteous anger was gone almost as soon as it started, and Nonna’s battered face crumpled all over again. “I know what I did was wrong, Marie, but I honestly swear it never mattered to me that you weren’t my own flesh and blood. I’ve always loved you very much.”
All at once, Elise couldn’t bear to be in the room any longer. Moving quietly, she got to her feet and slipped out to the hotel bar. She wasn’t very surprised when Robbie soon followed her.
“Phew,” he said, taking the barstool next to her. “Staggering stuff, eh?”
Elise wanted to tell him to go away and leave her in peace. Instead, she took a sip of the white wine she’d ordered and thought once again of Lilias. “That poor, poor woman. Can you imagine how she felt?”
“Nonna doesn’t seem to think she searched too hard for the baby.”
She glared at him. “It was wartime. The poor woman had just given birth. Where was she supposed to start looking?” She drank some more wine, shaking her head.
“And things were different then, weren’t they?
There was so much shame in being an unmarried mother.
You know, deep down, Nonna and I have never been really close, not like Gran and me.
And now I find out they aren’t even related.
” She sighed. “My heart really aches for Gran. What a thing to find out at her age; not only that the woman she’s always thought of as her mother isn’t her mother at all, but the whole drama of it.
The deceit. Nonna seems to think love justifies everything, but it just doesn’t.
And there’s the boy who died, too—David.
My great-uncle, I suppose. So much tragedy. ”
Robbie was silent for so long after this, ordering a whisky for himself and drinking it straight down when it came, that Elise tensed, sensing what was to come.
“I’m so sorry I put our lovely boy through all that unnecessary suffering at the end. I was wrong; I know that now.”
“You can’t let a ten-year-old boy decide his own medical treatment, Elise,” he’d said. “It’s a decision for the doctors. They know what they’re doing.”
Now his eyes implored her for forgiveness. “D’you think Charlie blamed me? D’you think he loved me less?”
Elise thought of Lilias, all alone in a prison cell, waiting for her execution. Had she been able to forgive Nadine before she died?
As the silence went on, Robbie began to sob quietly, one hand coming up to cover his eyes, and as Elise watched him, something hard and indigestible inside her seemed to suddenly soften and slip away. He was just a father, that was all, broken and fallible.
Sighing, she reached out to touch his arm. “Of course he didn’t. You were his amazing dad. And . . . and he would probably have been just as ill, anyway, even if . . . even if . . .”
She broke off, unable to finish the sentence, and Robbie began to cry in earnest, then, reaching out to her.
She held him, letting him sob it out, all the guilt and the grief, joining him in his tears.
Until somewhere along the way a feeling of peace arrived, and she drew back a little, searching in her bag for a tissue.
Which was when she saw Sam, standing at the entrance to the bar, looking as if he wasn’t sure whether he ought to stay or not.
What reaction he might get if he came to join them.
She looked over at him, smiling, and mouthed, “Just a minute.” He nodded, and she saw his body relax.
Robbie sat back, wiping his face on his shirtsleeves. “What about you?” he asked. “Do you forgive me?”
Secretly, in her heart, Elise wasn’t completely sure she did. But it didn’t matter, anymore. So she smiled and said, “Yes,” and he blew his breath out in a sigh.
“Thank you.”
She waited a moment. “Will you be okay now? Only Sam’s here. I want to tell him what’s happened.”
Robbie glanced round and saw Sam. For a moment, his expression was bitter. Then his shoulders slumped, and she thought that perhaps he’d finally accepted it was really over between them.
“Yes, I’ll be okay,” he said.
She nodded. “Good.”
“Don’t let me interrupt you if you’ve got things to talk to your husband about,” Sam said.
“I’ve said all I need to say to Robbie for now,” she said, taking his hand. “Let’s go and sit in the garden. I’ve got a story to tell you. Quite an incredible story.”
Outside, on a secluded bench surrounded by hollyhocks, she told him everything. Afterwards, they sat holding hands.
“It is incredible,” he said. “Like the plot of a film. What will happen to Nadine, d’you think?”
“I don’t know. She’s so old. It’s not as if she’s going to be arrested for what she did now, is it? My grandmother has a lot to think about. But after all, Nonna is here, and Lilias isn’t. And Nonna does love Gran.”
There was a pause as they thought about it all. The leaves of a nearby silver birch tree rustled in the breeze.
Sam squeezed her hand. “D’you know what I think? I think Lilias chose you to help her because you’re her great-granddaughter.”
Elise nodded. “Yes. I think so too. And she was an artist, wasn’t she? I’ve always wondered where I get my creativity from. And it was from her.” She felt a sudden sense of loss. “I so wish I could have met her.”
He reached out to stroke her hair back from her face. “But you did, in a way, didn’t you? She communicated with you through art. Because you’re a relative. Because she loves you.”
His use of the present tense brought tears to her eyes. “I like to think she’s met Charlie now, wherever he is. That she’s taking care of Charlie.”
He squeezed her hand. “I’m certain of it.”
“Oh, Sam, what Lilias must have suffered. To lose her baby like that, before she’d even had the chance to hold her. At least I had ten wonderful years with Charlie.”
She pressed her face against his chest, crying for Lilias, who’d given her life for her country because she’d lost everything herself.
So much loss. Not just within her family, but during the war. And yet, without it, Lilias and Harry would never have met. There would have been no acts of passion or recklessness making themselves felt generations later.
When her tears began to dry up, Elise became aware of Sam stroking her back.
When she looked up, he bent to kiss her, ever so gently.
Then he pulled back, a question on his face.
“Is this all right? Only I don’t want to make any assumptions.
I like you. A lot. And I wouldn’t want to risk our friendship by—”
“Shh.” She halted his words by placing her fingers over his mouth. Lilias’s story had shown her the importance of clutching at happiness while you could.
Robbie had never been the love of her life.
If she was right, the love of her life was right here, and it didn’t matter whether she’d known him for a few weeks or a few hours.
Her feelings would be the same. Right from that moment in the sitting room, when she’d noticed his missing finger, she’d known.
“It’s more than all right,” she told him. “Except, perhaps, it needs to be more like this.” And as she placed a hand on either side of his face and pulled him close, she didn’t need any voice inside her head to tell her to do something that came completely naturally to her.
Much later, they drew back to look at each other, smiling and giddy. Then she remembered another love of Sam’s life.
“I don’t want to make things difficult between you and Jasmine.”
“Jasmine will come round. How could she not? You’re sweet and kind. Talented. And gorgeous.”
When he kissed her again, it was more passionate, taking her into the future with him. A future her son had never inhabited with her.
“Charlie would have been happy for you,” he said against her mouth, reading her mind, as he so often seemed to be able to do.
Elise nodded, wiping away a tear. Charlie would have been happy for her. Of course, he would have been sad, at first, about his parents splitting up. But then he would have got to know and love Sam.
Robbie would be all right too. He would move on, make a new life. Maybe with Kate, maybe not. But he’d be all right.