Chapter Twenty-Four #4
‘Road accidents still happened, even in wartime,’ Tim tells me. ‘It was foggy, icy, and the bus Iris should have been on skidded off the road. Everyone was killed. But because of Heaton, Iris lived. She broke her wrist when Heaton’s driver swerved to avoid the bus, but that was it.’
I only half listen.
I’m remembering that other dream I’ve so often had: of me, in Iris, talking to that colonel.
Go, I’ve kept telling her, on and on.
You need to go.
I’ve always believed, until this moment, that I was trying to make her run away.
But I wasn’t.
I wasn’t doing that at all.
I was making her stay.
My head spins with the realisation.
I stare into Tim’s face, picturing the colonel again, wondering how, how, I knew to make Iris go with him.
An instinct from another of my own stages?
The warning memory of a parallel me, failing to help her before?
I’m too distracted to think.
Because whatever the truth of that, there’s one thing I no longer have any doubt about: I did help Iris.
Just like I stopped her from falling down those stairs.
And although I still don’t understand where this connection between us has spun from, I’m now thinking of my father again, how he saved me from my own death on these Yorkshire roads, and wondering whether Lord Heaton and Iris were connected too.
‘Were they any relation?’ I manage to ask Tim.
‘Heaton and Iris?’ He nods. ‘I suspect so. Iris’s mother worked for Heaton during the first war, when she fell for Iris, and he owned the cottage they lived in.
Iris would never have had it though. I think she much preferred the idea of a father who’d had no choice but to abandon them.
She loathed Heaton. Even more so once he saved her life.
Certainly at first.’ Breathlessly, he tells me she was taken to hospital after the accident, where a doctor set her wrist, and reported her pregnancy to Doverley’s adjutant.
‘Ambrose had her dishonourably dismissed.’ He sinks his head back against his chair.
‘He was a … vengeful … creature. But Beth and Ellie didn’t let him win.
They got a hold of Iris’s file, destroyed her records.
Ambrose was killed himself, by a V2 rocket.
We bombed that factory.’ He closes his eyes.
‘Lewis and his boys went down that night.’
He’s starting to drift.
Seeming to realise, he jerks his eyes open, and pushes himself on, saying that Iris moved to East Grinstead, where he was in a burns hospital.
‘She got a job in their office,’ he says.
‘Ellie had the idea that the vicar in Heaton should give her a wedding certificate and reference. Not with Robbie’s name on it.
That would have been too risky.’ He breathes in, out.
‘She took her gran’s maiden name instead. ’ Another breath. ‘Reeves.’
For a beat, I stare, stunned all over again.
Then, ‘That was my father’s name,’ I hear myself say.
Except my voice doesn’t feel like my own.
My lips don’t.
‘Yes,’ says Tim.
And my brain works, doing the sums.
My father was born in 1965, the same year as my mother.
Iris would have been forty-seven.
Too old, surely, to be a mother again herself.
Not without the kind of help that didn’t exist back then.
But …
Was she too young to be a grandmother?
I look to Tim, my heart pounding faster than ever, my mind fighting what I suddenly want to be true, much too much.
‘I’ve watched you in the pictures for years, thinking you had a look of her,’ he says. ‘I told Imogen that. It’s your eyes.’ Windows to your soul. ‘Your smile.’ He smiles himself, with infinite sadness. ‘Until I read your letter, I never imagined it could be anything but coincidence.’
‘But it’s not a coincidence?’ I say, desperately.
‘No.’ His dark gaze swims. ‘It’s not.’
The baby was a girl.
She arrived, in the maternity wing of East Grinstead’s cottage hospital, eight-and-a-half months after the sultry August morning Iris and Robbie had been so careless in their cottage, and a month before D-Day, filling the sun-filled dawn with her cry.
Iris held her. She held her for hours, looking into her eyes, windows to her soul, wondering if it was possible that she might actually be feeling the first shattered parts of her heart starting to knit back together.
Life, the entire business of living, still felt overwhelming – more so, now that she had this child, their daughter, to look after – but she was, at last, grateful that she was still here to do it.
Happy, even, that when Heaton had offered to drive her home that morning, she hadn’t said no.
Tim came to see them that afternoon, arriving with the first clang of the visiting bell. He’d only recently had another graft, and his face was shrouded in bandages.
‘I don’t want to scare her,’ he said, cradling Robbie’s daughter in his arms.
‘You won’t scare her,’ said Iris.
‘She’s perfect.’
‘Isn’t she?’
‘What will you call her?’
‘Clara,’ said Iris, watching her watching Tim: intent, but not afraid. ‘For Clare, but different enough that she’ll only ever be herself.’
‘Clara,’ Tim echoed, his voice thick with tears. ‘It suits her.’ He touched his finger to hers. ‘And if she’d been a boy? Would you have called him … ?’
‘No,’ Iris said. ‘I couldn’t have had him thinking he had to replace him.’
‘No one could.’
‘No.’
And for a second, they were silent.
Listening for his voice, even knowing it wouldn’t come.
Across the ward, another baby cried.
Over by the door, an orderly arrived, wheeling a tea trolley.
‘Iris,’ said Tim, drawing her gaze back to his, so dark and sorry, staring out from his bandages. ‘Whatever you need from me, it’s yours. Always.’
He hadn’t told her what had happened in Mabel’s Fury.
He wouldn’t, Iris knew that.
Just as she wouldn’t press him to, even though she was certain he’d forgotten nothing.
What would the point be in that, other than to cause him more pain?
He’d lost his photo of his father that night, along with everyone else.
It had melted, next to his heart.
Look after that boy, Clare had said to Iris, the night of Jacob’s birthday.
‘You never have to give me anything,’ she said to Tim now. ‘Just keep being my friend, please. And I’ll do my very best to be yours.’
‘I loved her,’ Tim says. ‘I loved her to distraction. So, I was her friend. As good a one as I knew how to be.’
Haltingly, he tells me the rest: how, after the war, Iris moved with Clara to York, near Robbie’s mother, whilst he went overseas with the foreign office, returning to visit as often as he could.
Ellen visited Iris too, and so did Beth Twinton.
He doesn’t go into a lot of detail, but from what he does say of those years they all had together – full of birthday teas at Bettys, seaside holidays, country walks, frozen Guy Fawkes nights, school plays, and summer picnics – I can tell how happy they were.
And also, how guilty that makes him.
‘Clara was wonder itself,’ he says. ‘She was fun, and stubborn, and warm, and smart, and very cheeky. Rob would have been so proud of her.’ He stares down at his mask. ‘I never forgot that every moment I had with her, with both of them, was a moment I’d stolen from him.’
‘I’m sure that’s not how he’d have seen it,’ I say, hating that he’s believed this, for all these years.
‘It’s the way it was,’ he says.
He finishes his tale with devastating brevity.
Iris died in 1962, the same year Robbie’s mother went.
Clara had started at Oxford – just as Iris and Robbie had hoped to – and, during her first term, whilst Tim was posted in Brussels, Iris discovered she had a tumour at the base of her skull.
‘The doctor’s said if they’d caught it sooner, they might have operated, but it started to grow, too fast, and then …
she was gone.’ More tears blur his eyes.
‘She went peacefully. Clara and I were with her, and I don’t doubt it broke her to leave Clara behind, but, at the end, it really was as though she knew she had a welcome waiting. ’ His chest heaves. ‘I’m sure she did.’
‘Yes,’ I say, gripping my hands into fists, trying to keep myself under control.
‘She asked me to look after Clara,’ says Tim, ‘but Clara didn’t want to be looked after. Not by me, not by Ellie or Beth. She wanted her mum, and she’d lost her, which made her so … angry.’
I nod, understanding that.
‘I’d lost her too.’ His voice catches. ‘I’d lost her, and I knew I didn’t deserve to be the one of us still left, so when Clara kept asking me to leave her alone, I did the worst thing possible and gave in.
’ He draws another rasping breath. ‘She went back to Oxford, and I went to Brussels, where I drank too much and told myself she’d call when she was ready.
’ His shoulders slump. ‘She never called. I think she was too ashamed. Things were said, and I don’t think she forgave herself for them.
’ He bows his head. ‘I should have told her there was nothing to forgive. But I let her push me away, when I should have pulled her in. Iris and Rob would have pulled her in.’ He grips at his mask.
‘Ellie tried to warn me. She told me to pull myself together, get on a plane, that Clara didn’t need time, she needed me.
But I wouldn’t hear it. Couldn’t believe it.
Then Clara … ran. She left Oxford, turned from everyone who cared for her, leant on a man who wasn’t good, when she’d only ever deserved the world, fell pregnant with your father, then died too.
’ His eyes spill. ‘She died, all alone, and she didn’t need to, but she went anyway. ’
I don’t ask what happened to her.
I already know that my father’s mother, ill with pneumonia when he was born, died in hospital two days later.
So very young, Mum said. She really must have been desperately low, not to have sought help.
It’s always hurt, thinking about her.
It torments me now.
Because she’s no longer a stranger to me. She was Iris and Robbie’s child, who I helped to save when I stopped Iris getting on that bus in 1943.