Chapter Ten
Iris
Iris and Robbie spent much more than a minute together in the old cottage that afternoon.
They spent hours there, not leaving until the early winter dusk descended, leaving them no choice but to return to the house, and the base, and the war that they had, all too briefly, managed if not to forget, then to separate themselves from.
But those afternoon hours passed in the space of a minute, whilst that first minute they shared – with those words, Hello, Clarence, reverberating in the frozen air between them – stretched across seconds that turned into hours that swiftly became an eternity.
To Iris, still half in her dreams, it was as though she was living it in an echo chamber, looking across at Robbie with swimming eyes that saw him both here and now, in the cottage’s crooked hallway with its peeling floral wallpaper, and all the other countless places she’d imagined them meeting, too: layers upon layers of alternative paths that they might so easily have chanced onto.
And was time really a constant? Or did it flex and bend?
Iris thought it probably did.
Especially in this old cottage, where it had always travelled at such strange speed.
Now she was within its walls again, encircled with Robbie by this motionless moment, it was impossible for her not to remember the last time the clocks had shifted for them here: back in that January of 1933, when the pair of them had knelt by the kitchen fire, and shared their almost kiss.
Was Robbie remembering it too?
Even as the question sounded in Iris’s mind, she watched his eyes, glassy with cold, shine, as though in answer.
Yes, he seemed to say, yes.
I’ve never forgotten.
Her smile grew.
So did his, lifting, but not disguising, the fatigue shadowing his face.
There were lines around his eyes that hadn’t been there before, and which shouldn’t by rights have belonged to him for years to come.
It was almost as though age had travelled backwards to find him, knowing how slim the chances were of them now meeting in the future.
But Iris couldn’t think about that.
‘Robbie,’ she choked, focusing on what was real, what was now, which was that she’d found him. ‘Where did you go?’
‘Where did I go?’ he said, incredulous. ‘Where did you go?’ His accent hadn’t lost its trace of Yorkshire.
‘London,’ she said, tears brimming, because she loved that she could still hear that boy she’d known. Loved that he’d held on to him. ‘I told you that. I wrote … ’
‘I wrote.’
‘No … ’
‘Yes … ’
‘What?’ she said, in bewilderment, and so much relief. He hadn’t meant to disappear. ‘Where?’
‘The wrong place, I think. Please don’t cry.’
‘I can’t help it. I’ve missed you a bit.’
‘I’ve missed you a bit, too,’ he said, no longer still, but closing the distance between them, scooping her up in a hug, just as he had countless times before.
Only now, he didn’t swing her playfully around and release her.
He held on to her, as she held on to him, her heart no longer singing, but swelling, until she felt it might burst. ‘I’ve missed you,’ he repeated, his lips to her ear. ‘I’ve missed you every single day.’
‘I tried so hard to find you.’
‘I tried to find you.’
She said no more. There was too much to say, and explain, and try to make sense of, and she didn’t know where to start with any of it.
She didn’t want to start.
Not yet.
She just wanted to go on holding him.
So, she did, losing herself in his embrace, his warmth.
Him.
He said nothing either, just tightened his arms around her.
It was enough.
For that minute of time standing still, it was more than enough.
But eventually, that minute did end.
He set her back on her feet, and together they turned for the kitchen, where they set to unpicking the past nearly six years that they’d lived as strangers.
Then time started moving again.
Then, it raced.
It didn’t take them long to establish what had gone so wrong for them, back in the summer of 1937, when Robbie had failed to meet Iris at Waterloo, and their letters had failed to reach each other.
By the time they’d finished laying a fire in the old grate, their hands skimming over each other’s as they stacked dry leaves and sticks, they’d got to the bottom of it.
It wasn’t a complex tale.
Just a sorry one.
Robbie hadn’t been able to come to Waterloo that day because of his mother. The revelation saddened, but didn’t surprise Iris. She’d suspected as much ever since Father Bannister had written to her about Annabelle Grayson becoming unwell.
Only, Annabelle Grayson hadn’t been unwell.
She’d fallen, with the help of Robbie’s father, down the Dower House stairs, breaking her spine. She’d never walk again, and to this day lived in a York nursing home, paid for from the proceeds of the Dower House sale, which Robbie had forced his father into.
‘He knows not to set foot near her again,’ he said. ‘I’ve told him that I’ll go to the police if he does. It’s only because of my mother that I haven’t done it already.’
‘She doesn’t want him prosecuted?’
‘No.’ He cracked a stick, throwing the pieces into the grate. ‘She says he suffered enough in the trenches.’
It was his dispassionate tone. The set of his jaw.
‘You don’t think he did?’ said Iris.
‘I’m sure he did,’ said Robbie. ‘But everyone suffers in war.’ He reached for another stick. ‘He’s the only one who’s put my mother in a wheelchair though.’
He went on, saying that his father had told everyone, Robbie’s headmaster included, that the fall had been an accident.
‘My headmaster called me to his office,’ he said, ‘just as I was about to leave for Waterloo to meet you. My father had telephoned from the hospital in York, saying I had to come straight away, that Mum might die. My headmaster drove me. It was the longest journey of my life. Well –’ he raised a wry brow – ‘at that point, anyway.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Iris, her cold hands full of leaves, aching at how terrified he must have been. Aching for his mother, too, with her shy smile and basket of holly.
‘No, I’m sorry,’ he said, taking the leaves from her. ‘I hate that I left you waiting like that.’
‘What choice did you have?’
‘I should have found one.’
‘You couldn’t have.’ She watched him push the leaves into the grate. ‘There was nothing you could have done.’
‘But I did do something.’ He looked back at her, and his face – his strong, handsome face, that was older, and tired, and still the one she liked more than any other – strained with regret. ‘I did the wrong thing.’
She frowned, uncomprehending. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean … ’ He exhaled a ragged sigh. ‘I mean, Iris, that I told my father about you. Clarence.’
‘Oh,’ she said, and that was all the time it took her – just the length of that single syllable, oh – to realise, with a cold jolt, why he’d never received her letters.
As she stared into his eyes, picturing his father’s arctic replicas – the disdain in them when he’d used to watch her in church; his sneer when he’d towered over her in her gran’s kitchen … you’re not in his class – it all made crashing sense.
Silently, she listened as Robbie told her the rest: how he’d lost his temper when he’d got to the ward and found his father next to his mother’s bed, and dragged him away from her, letting go all his fury, a lifetime of it, telling him that his control over both of them was done with.
‘All those years after you left Heaton, he stopped me seeing you,’ he said.
‘He kept me from your mum’s funeral, your gran’s.
I needed him to know that he hadn’t won, that we had, by staying in each other’s lives anyway.
I wanted him to feel weak, a fool, so I told him everything. ’ He stared at her. ‘I was the fool.’
‘No.’ She wasn’t having that. ‘You can’t blame yourself for who your father is.’
‘I should have known better. Shouldn’t have lost control.’
‘Anyone would have … ’
‘But I asked a nurse to send you a wire, right in front of him. I gave her the money.’ He shook his head. ‘He must have stopped her.’
‘Yes,’ said Iris, boiling inside, because how dare he have done it?
To them.
To his own son.
He was the one who wasn’t in Robbie’s class.
He was the one who was less.
‘My mother didn’t properly wake up for days,’ Robbie said.
‘At first, I didn’t leave the hospital. I was terrified she was going to die.
And that my father would try to come back into her room.
Which he did. Often. Until I threatened to go to the police.
After that, I stayed in a local pub. I couldn’t go home with my father there.
But he went back every night. He’d have been there each morning for the post.’
Iris closed her eyes, visualizing all those letters she’d written arriving at the Dower House, straight into his hands.
Had he read them, before he stole them?
She was sure he must have.
It made her feel sick.
‘I guessed something must be wrong,’ Robbie continued. ‘I knew you wouldn’t just ignore what had happened to Mum … ’
‘Of course not.’
‘I wrote to you. I wrote … God … I don’t know … so many letters.’
‘But I should have got them,’ she said, still not understanding that bit. ‘Lady Somers paid to have all our mail forwarded.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Well, no.’ She emitted a sound, much less than a laugh. ‘Not any more I’m not.’
‘Did you ever get anything forwarded from anyone else?’
‘You’re the only person who wrote to me there.’
‘I tried to see you. I went to the house.’
‘What?’ Her eyes widened. ‘When?’
‘The start of August, after Mum moved to her nursing home. My father had left York, I have no idea where he went, and all I wanted was to get to you. It … broke me, when I found the Somers’ house all boarded up.’
It broke her, thinking about him doing it.
‘I called in at a farm,’ he said, pulling a box of matches from his coat. ‘They told me the house had been put up for sale.’ He extracted a match. ‘Apparently, the Somers had sold a lot of the estate off already. Like Heaton with this place.’