Chapter Twenty-Four #5
Except, it wasn’t only her I saved.
I saved my father, too.
I saved myself.
With a visible effort, Tim keeps talking, saying that because he had no legal link to Clara, no one contacted him when she died, and, although he sensed something was wrong, it was years before he uncovered what had happened to her, or that my father even existed.
‘No one would tell me where he was, though. I had no rights, there weren’t computers like we have now, no web.
I tried, I tried and tried, but I couldn’t find him.
’ Miserably, he looks at me. ‘I felt there was something waiting for him, but there was nothing I could do.’ His face strains.
‘It never occurred to me, until I got your letter, that he might have known something was waiting for him, too.’
‘Oh, Tim,’ I say, holding his trembling hands fast in mine. ‘I am so sorry.’
‘Why?’ he says, woefully baffled.
‘You’ve spent all these years torturing yourself.’
‘I failed them. I failed your father … ’
‘You never met my father,’ I say, releasing his hands, pulling his frail body into my arms, desperate to console him, for myself, and for all of them. ‘How could you have failed him?’
‘Because I did.’ His body shakes. ‘I failed them all. I’ve never told anyone about him. Not even Ellie. It’s hurt, too much.’
‘I’m so glad you told me,’ I say.
And I am.
My heart is breaking, but it’s a relief, beyond words, to know the truth at last.
To understand, finally, this thread, between all of us.
I’m not sure how long I hold Tim for.
I feel no urge to move.
Nor, it’s clear, does he.
But as our embrace goes on, I become conscious of a weight that’s stolen over me, not entirely unfamiliar, so heavy it might almost belong to another body, and, for the first time, wonder at the possibility of another’s presence within me.
In my arms, Tim’s body loosens, and I think he must feel it too.
Do you have a theory for why this only happens for some of us? Ellen asked me.
My father thought it was a gift, I told her.
Does it feel like that to you? she asked.
It’s starting to, I said.
It does now.
‘Thank you,’ says Tim, when, at length, he pulls away from me, keeping a hold of my hand. ‘Thank you, so much, for listening.’
‘Tim,’ I say, ‘thank you.’
And he nods, his dark eyes shining into mine.
For a moment, we’re silent again.
Then, ‘You’ve still got questions, I think,’ he says.
‘A couple,’ I agree.
‘Then, please, ask them.’
‘You’re sure?’ He looks so tired.
‘I’m sure. Ask.’
So, I do.
‘You told me last time we spoke about a woman who showed you up to the attic,’ I say. ‘Was it Iris?’
‘No. It was Ellie. I lost touch with her after Clara went, but when I retired, I moved back here, and we became friends again.’ Briefly, he smiles, and the warmth of it fills the room, lifting the sadness that’s been weighting the air, just a fraction.
‘She’s been a very … loyal … friend.’ His chest whistles.
‘I couldn’t tell Imogen about her. She didn’t want to end up in her book. ’
‘Was it her who warned you I’d pay you a visit?’
‘No,’ he says, and it doesn’t escape me that he knows immediately what I’m talking about.
She said you’d come, he told me, before I left the other week.
I assumed at the time that he meant Imogen.
Until Imogen told me she’d never said any such thing to him.
‘Who was it?’ I ask him.
He doesn’t immediately respond.
He closes his eyes, for so long that I fear he might be falling asleep.
‘Tim?’ I whisper.
‘It’s all right,’ he says, sluggishly, ‘I’m still here. And yes, that was Iris.’ His lips move in another smile. ‘Your great-grandmother.’
He falls silent again: remembering, I can tell.
And, in the space of a slow blink, so do I.
A walk down Doverley’s driveway.
The scent of autumn: dying leaves, smoke, and damp.
My arm, looped with Tim’s.
My eyes fixed on the profile of his young, troubled face.
‘How do you know?’ I hear him say, back then.
‘It was during the war,’ he tells me now. ‘A couple of days before our last flight. She was trying to persuade me into trusting I’d survive it all. She told me that I had to.’
‘You can tell our story.’ Iris’s voice fills my ears, and just as last night, I can’t be sure whether I’m recalling, or being. I no longer care. ‘Maybe they’ll make a picture of us all.’
‘She loved the pictures.’ Tim smiles. ‘She had all sorts of ideas about who could play us. She liked the idea of Rita Hayworth for Clare. I said she should consider Ingrid Bergman for herself.’ His eyes glimmer. ‘You must have been told how much you resemble her.’
‘Once in a while,’ I say, and smile too, through the ache in my cheeks.
‘Perhaps the actress will pay you a visit,’ comes Iris’s echo.
‘She joked that the actress would come to see me,’ says Tim. ‘She told me that I had to get through the war, because you’d need me to help you.’ His face trembles with emotion. ‘It’s you I need to help me, though.’ His gaze holds mine. ‘Can you? Please? Make it right, like you said in your letter?’
‘Of course I can,’ I say, and don’t need to ask him how he wants me to make it right.
It’s not what I wanted when I wrote him my letter.
It’s cutting me in two, accepting that I really can’t save any of them.
But I have now accepted it.
I’ve seen it: the final truth I’ve been searching for, and which Ellen was at such pains to convince me of.
On this stage, for our present, what’s past is past. The only true agency I now have is in shaping what comes next.
And I can give Tim some peace at last.
Rewrite his ending.
‘How should we start?’ I ask.
‘With a swim,’ he says, so quickly I can tell he has it all worked out. I think perhaps he has for decades. ‘All of them together. Not alone.’
‘Not alone,’ I agree. ‘Then, a boat?’
‘A German boat.’
‘And a kind officer?’ I guess.
‘Yes,’ he tells me, his body sagging with relief. ‘He takes the boys prisoner. But Ames escapes and finds his way to Mabel in France.’
‘They remain hidden,’ I say, burying my knowledge of Mabel’s true end, just before D-Day, care of a Gestapo noose. ‘Safe.’
‘Safe,’ Tim echoes. ‘Rob and the others get taken to a camp in Germany. They’re liberated in 1945.’
‘Like Fred,’ I say, thinking now of 96’s first group captain, who went down during the Battle of the Ruhr, and came back from the dead at the end of the war, delighting his wife and daughter by suddenly appearing in Kent, at his wife’s parents’ home.
‘Just like Fred,’ says Tim, letting more tears go. ‘Rob comes back to England, looking for Iris and Clara.’
‘I can see him now,’ I say, my own eyes stinging with the vividness of the image. ‘Iris has taken Clara to Doverley, to see the cottage … ’
‘Yes,’ Tim says, unsurprised that I know about it.
And I see the cottage too: not in ruins, crumbled by weather and time, but still whole, its front path dappled by soft spring sunshine.
‘A little girl in the village tells Robbie where they are,’ I say, thinking of my gran as a child in Heaton, certain she’d want to play this role. ‘He sets off, and finds them in the cottage’s garden.’
‘He surprises them,’ says Tim.
And neither of us go on.
We don’t need to put words to what Robbie says next.
We both know.
I can’t hear it, because it never happened.
But I imagine it.
That low, fun voice.
The hint of Yorkshire in his accent.
All the boundless life and love.
Hope too, of a different future, for all of them, all of us, ahead.
Hello, Clarence.