Chapter 48
Six months later
In history, Caffe Florian in the Piazza San Marco, Venice was the haunt of Lord Byron and Charles Dickens, Proust, Casanova.
Seeing as the last time Jane saw her friends was in equally opulent and elegant surroundings, she thought it would be a suitable meeting place.
Her cruise ship was in port for today and by lucky chance – or maybe more than luck – Frank and Grace were on their second day of holidaying in the city, after travelling here on the Orient Express.
A present Grace had arranged for their thirtieth wedding anniversary.
When Jane saw them walking across the grand square, her smile expanded. It was weird seeing them out of British context, but wonderful too. They spotted her and waved and their pace increased.
‘Jane, you look fantastic,’ said Grace, releasing her from her tight embrace so that Frank could enfold her.
‘I could say the same about you two.’ Jane chuckled. It wasn’t a lie. They looked glowing. They looked together.
‘Sit and let’s have coffee.’
‘I’ll get them,’ said Frank, ever the gent.
‘Absolutely not. Every penny I spend I’m denying Michael and that makes me happier than you could ever imagine.’
They ordered from a passing liveried waiter.
‘In the end I told Michael there would be something for him in the will, but… on the understanding he got on with his life and let me get on with mine. Any request, however cloaked, for an advance on that money would result in me completely lifting up my drawbridge – one strike and out. He really has had no choice but to comply and not risk upsetting me. Nice to have the upper hand.’ Jane grinned.
‘I imagine he’ll be absolutely furious when I pop my clogs and he finds out how little I’ve left him.
I wish I could be around to see it.’ She chuckled, full of mirth.
She wouldn’t feel guilty. Clifford had been overly generous with his son in his lifetime.
Michael had had much more than he deserved from them already.
‘You’re having a good time then on your travels?’ Grace asked, but it was a stupid question really because the answer was obvious.
‘Yes, straight off one ship, straight onto another. Or a plane. Hotel rooms in between. It’s very liberating not having possessions.’
‘Well, you look great on it,’ said Frank, meaning it.
‘How’s young Roo doing?’
‘She’s fine and dandy,’ Frank replied, fond smile on his lips. ‘Settled in like a dream, organising everyone, got herself a boyfriend. He’s the builder we use. And he’s doing a bit of boxing with me. Big handsome lad, treats her like a goddess.’
‘Name?’
They both knew what she meant.
‘Robinson. Roo Robinson would pass muster, wouldn’t it?’
‘It would indeed.’ Jane nodded.
‘Comedy Club’s up and running, she’s put her heart and soul into making it work and it’s really taken off now the summer’s come in. She’s performing, making us all laugh, like a pig in muck she is.’
‘Please give her my fondest regards,’ said Jane.
‘Tell her not to be too starry-eyed that she forgets to email me occasionally. There are computers on ships, I use them quite a lot, as I’ll come to in a moment.
And how is… everything else?’ She looked pointedly at Grace, who dived into her handbag and pulled out her phone, pressed the photo icon.
‘That’s me and Billie. That’s Frank and me and Billie… all five hundred pictures. I won’t bore you but I think you get the gist.’
It had taken Grace a few weeks to build up the courage to see Billie. Jane had left for her cruise by then. Time was moving on and she didn’t want another month to slip by so on 1 March, she and Frank made the journey to Cromer together.
Grace would always remember the moment she was sitting on the sofa in Ella’s front room and in walked Billie May.
Her eyes were brightest blue, just like her Billy’s when he was that age, she was so like him.
And when the little girl reached up to cuddle her hello, it was as if Grace were holding her son again.
All the love she had stored inside her finally found its home.
‘Had a message from Tim,’ said Frank. ‘He asked me to send his love when he heard we was meeting up. He’s off next week back to New Zealand. I think he’ll end up living there. His daughter’s pregnant again – a little girl on the way this time.’
‘He told me,’ said Jane. ‘He emails. He sent me a picture of him throwing a prawn on the barbie.’
‘Yes, us too.’
He’d obviously staged the photo to make them laugh and they had.
He’d sent them all photos of him holding his grandson on the day he was born too. He got there just in time in the new year.
‘Roo’s always in touch with Elizabeth,’ said Grace.
‘Dear Elizabeth,’ said Jane with a happy sigh. She’d wondered if what she’d said to her about not settling for a life without love had some bearing on what had happened when Vincent drove her back up to Durham. My, it was a good job she won that whistle in the cracker.
Jane’s fingers came up to touch her own cracker gift, as they so often did: the orange enamel charm she wore on a chain. That big orange of life was certainly supplying a lot of juice and it wasn’t done yet.
‘I’m in contact with Elizabeth too because we are soon to be in business together.
She’s found the premises and we’re just debating over the name of our bookshop.
She wants to call it Wutheridges, I suggested Dudley and Wutheridge, but she doesn’t want to use her family name – and I can’t say I blame her after they cut her off like a gangrenous limb, although I’d argue the limb was healthy and it was the rest that was rotten. ’
‘Well, I shouldn’t say but I’m going to.’ Frank leaned in close as if the people he was about to talk of were in earshot. ‘Vincent was asking me where I thought would be the most romantic place to propose.’
‘Diamond and Wutheridge… that sounds good. I like that very much,’ said Jane.
The coffees arrived. Frank took one sip, coughed and said that it would either put some more hairs on his chest or strip off the ones that he’d got already.
‘I have to say, for romance, this place takes some beating,’ said Grace.
Frank’s eyes roved over the ceilings, the lights, the mirrors and artwork and sighed wistfully. ‘The people that must have come into this café and sat here over the years. Thousands. Makes you wish you could rewind time and just be a fly on the wall.’
Jane nodded slowly. ‘Funny you should say that, Frank, about time. And why I was so delighted that our itineraries overlapped.’
Coincidence.
Accept the mystery, Jane.
She had their attention.
‘Have you heard from Henry?’ she asked.
‘Nothing,’ said Frank. ‘Not a dicky bird. I really thought we would have.’
‘We keep looking on the internet but can’t find anything,’ added Grace. ‘Then again, there are an awful lot of Henry Smiths but you would have thought there would be something somewhere, given his story.’
‘I hoped he might have let us know if he’d been released.
We took from his silence that something had gone wrong and he was back inside and maybe they have to block stuff like that on the net.
’ Frank sounded genuinely sad about it. ‘I thought everything and everyone was on there. We couldn’t even find mention of the bleedin’ train.
I suppose that if you’re that rich and don’t want anyone to know anything about your business you can pay to stop any unwanted coverage.
Like them celebs having a bit of how’s your father with people they shouldn’t. ’
Jane sipped from her cup. Oh, where to begin.
‘I’ve also been trying to trace Henry. There are a lot of sea days on ships and I buy data packages, look things up on the internet. Easy to go down a rabbit hole when you have time on your hands, and I have been down a very, very deep one these past months.’
She reached down to her cavernous handbag and took out some papers.
‘You might have found something about the train if you hadn’t looked for it by name.’
Frank and Grace exchanged glances, wondering if they knew what Jane meant, but both were as confused as each other.
Jane unfolded one of the A4 sheets in her hand and put it on the table, the copy facing them. It was a printout of an old newspaper. The headline:
PLEDD brIDGE DISASTER
It was dated 29 December, 1950.
It was hard to read, the typeface not conducive to eyes without glasses so Frank pulled his out of his shirt top pocket.
‘You can take that with you to pore over the details later but I’ll fill you in with the pertinent points for now.
On the twenty-third of December 1950, a privately owned train – it doesn’t give its name, possibly because it wasn’t registered as having one at the time – was heading to Scotland to pick up its passengers when it was held up in a heavy bout of unforecast snow which interfered with the braking system, and so it had to sit there unmanned for four days between Derringbury and Eskford until there was enough of a thaw so it could be worked on. ’
‘Bloody hell, that’s a coincidence,’ said Frank, attempting to read.
‘After Eskford – nowadays – the train line next stops at Helthorpe then off to Scotland via Middlesbrough. But once upon a time trains heading for Scotland would call in at St Hilda, Pleddington, Follyhead, all manner of tiny stations, along what was known as the Lochlann line, which doesn’t exist any more.
None of those stations exist any more. They haven’t actually existed since the 1960s, because the route was one of many to fall under Dr Beeching’s axe for being unprofitable, duplicated and underused. ’
Jane paused to let that sink in, though she could see that it hadn’t really.