This Summer's Secrets, page 16
Violet stroked it with her fingertips. ‘Last time I wore this, a man proposed to me. Can you imagine? Asked me to marry him. I’ve always thought of this dress as my lucky charm.’
Martha’s eyes were wide. ‘Oh! What happened?’ She remembered the letters and decided not to mention them.
‘I said yes.’ Violet breathed quickly in and out.
‘So why –?’ Martha stopped when she realized what the reason might be. Tears sprang to her eyes again.
Violet nodded. ‘All our stories are sad, I’m afraid, darling. I’m sorry. Including this one. Still want to hear it?’ Martha nodded. ‘Let’s get back into bed. We’ll freeze out here.’
When they were tucked under the blankets, Violet said, ‘I was quite old to get married and had almost given up hope, and there he was. This lovely man who loved me back. I wore my dresses, and we had wonderful times. We were so happy. I loved him so very much. But it wasn’t to be. He died too, not so long ago. In this war. Like your daddy.’ She drew in a deep breath. ‘You might already know this, Marth. I know Betty was reading my letters. They’re so precious. That’s why I was angry. They’re all I’ve got left of him.’
They were both quiet for a long time, and then Martha said, ‘I didn’t know. She just said you had a sweetheart. What was his name?’
‘Edward. You’d have liked him, Marth.’ She shook herself. ‘Oh, the dresses were supposed to cheer us up! Sorry, my darling. One day you’ll wear lovely clothes and go to parties. You might not feel like it now, but you’re going to be a grown-up lady, invited to soirées, meet interesting people and wear beautiful dresses. You’ll proposed to by exciting men.’
Martha wouldn’t do those things. She would work in a factory. She knew that Violet didn’t understand what life was like at home. It was hard to remember, even for Martha, from here. She could see that she had changed. Even her voice was changing; she didn’t talk in the same way she had at home. She didn’t talk like the local children, either, although she loved their voices. But she could tell she was starting to talk more like Violet, like the voices on the wireless.
‘You said you had an idea,’ said Martha, putting her cold feet against Violet, who gasped, and smiled, then reached down and rubbed them.
‘I do. All right,’ said Violet. ‘Marth, how would you like me to take you to London? To see your mother and Daphne? We’d travel by train. You can’t make that journey on your own, and I know you need to see them, so I’ve decided we should go together, have an adventure. May can look after the other children here. I’d like to meet your mother and tell her what a darling girl you’ve been and how brave. Perhaps we could stay in London for a few days? Then we can come back together afterwards because you really can’t be there for long. It’s too dangerous.’
Martha stared at her, though she was really just a shape in the dark bedroom. She couldn’t believe Violet had been making a plan to take her home. To see Mother and Daphne. To hug them, to talk about Daddy. Violet knew what she needed. Martha loved Violet so much.
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
She tried to work out how to say it. ‘Our house in London … well, it’s small. I sleep in the same bed as Daphne, like this, but it’s because there’s not enough space, not because I’m sad.’ She thought about it. ‘And the bed’s a small one,’ she added.
She could hear the smile in Violet’s voice. ‘Darling, I’m not inviting myself to your house. Don’t worry. I’ve got places to go and stay in London. I’ll drop you off and then come back for you three days later, do you think? Would that be all right? I know you absolutely have to see them, and they must be longing to see you too. It’s brutal that at a time like this you can’t hug your mother and sister. I’ve been thinking and thinking of the best way to get you there.’
Martha thought about Mother and Daphne. She pictured them at home without Daddy and without herself, and she needed to run to them. Cornwall was a strange other world, and she loved it, but London was home. Violet and Betty weren’t the same as Mother and Daphne.
The worst thing about going home would be having to leave it again.
‘Yes,’ she said, and she felt the tears coming again. ‘Oh yes, please, Violet.’
‘There,’ said Violet. ‘Think about that. You’re going to go home for a few days. We’ll arrange it all tomorrow, or rather today. Now, see if you can sleep.’
Daddy had been thirty-five. Mother was thirty-three. Just as Martha was drifting into sleep, she wondered whether Violet was the same age, and how old Edward had been.
‘How old are you?’ she muttered.
She could hear the laugh in Violet’s voice.
‘Me? Forty-one,’ she said. Martha felt surprise. She was about to say so when she froze.
Aubrey was screaming. He was shouting very bad words loudly. She pulled the blanket over her head and tried to block it out.
16
‘I’m going down to check in on Martha.’ I remembered that Felicity was paying me to keep an eye on her, and I felt bad about the six of us having fun so close to her, while ignoring her. Particularly after she’d been so brilliant about the party.
I felt Rik’s eyes on me as I got up, put on a big shirt I’d found in my new bag of clothes, pulled on my shorts and set off down the drive. I wished he’d stop looking at me. I threw him a stony look, and he shifted over to sit with Meg, as he should have done. I saw him reaching over to touch her arm, taking her attention away from Josie.
It was late in the afternoon, and the shadows were so long, the light so golden, that I felt I was living in a film. Everything was honey-coloured.
I remembered what it was really like here. Most of the time the sky was grey, the wind wild. It was cold. It rained. From time to time there was random hail. It wasn’t usually like this; there wasn’t often a fairy-tale blast of summer.
But that didn’t matter. I loved it like that too. I loved it all. The low winter skies, the rain that made the landscape bright green. This was my place. I knew Josie was itching to get away, but I wasn’t. I didn’t think I’d ever stray far from West Cornwall. I ran down the driveway, the white stones crunching under my feet.
I knocked, then let myself in; Martha had reached the top of the stairs when I called up to her. She glided down, looking regal in a fluffy dressing gown, and I helped her to her armchair.
‘Sorry to disturb you.’ I realized I didn’t quite know what time it was; when I checked her oven clock, it was nearly five. ‘You weren’t asleep, were you? Tell me if I woke you up, and I’ll go away.’
‘Me? No, Senara darling. I was looking out of the window and thinking. Just drifting really. I was three-quarters in the past, to be honest. I find it hard to ground myself sometimes. I drift off, like a balloon. It scares me.’
It scared me too: I didn’t want Martha drifting off like a balloon. I needed her to stay the same, always here, always wise and funny and present.
I walked into the kitchen and held up the kettle. She nodded, and I started making tea. Weak Earl Grey with lemon felt like just the thing after an afternoon of sunshine and random dehydrating drinks, so I made one for myself too.
‘Which bit of the past were you in?’
She gave a little smile. ‘Never mind.’
Then she looked at me with something like panic in her pale blue eyes and spoke quickly. ‘Tell me things, Senara. Tell me about now. About you. You kids. What’s going on? I saw those Londoners this morning. Are they as agitated as they seemed?’
I didn’t want to go into the Holly thing again, but Martha clearly needed entertaining so I told her anyway. She was, of course, horrified.
‘What a so-and-so!’ she said. ‘I hope Clemmie put him right.’
‘She did actually. And he was, like, so, so, so embarrassed. It blew over, kind of, and we’ve had a brilliant afternoon.’ I paused. ‘And guess what, Martha – here’s some distraction. You know how I never meet anyone I like? Well, there’s something even worse than that. It turns out that in spite of everything I just said I do actually like Rik. I felt it the moment I saw him.’ I remembered his face filling the screen of the entryphone. ‘Maybe not the first moment, but as soon as he was near me. Then I hated him, and now I still hate him.’
I took a deep breath and wondered whether to go on. Because it was Martha, I did.
‘But there’s something about him. I never thought I’d be drawn to someone like that, and he’s with Meg, so it’s impossible anyway. I hate myself for feeling attracted to him because his girlfriend is right there, and I don’t even like him.’
She leaned forward. Her eyes were different now. She was sharp, focused.
‘How long have they been together? Is it very serious?’
‘I guess so. I mean, I have no idea. But they’re on holiday together, and they went to St Mawes together last year, and Clem treats them as a unit.’
‘Does he give you all the smouldering eye contact behind her back?’ She demonstrated, and I burst out laughing, even though underneath it didn’t make me happy.
‘Tries to,’ I said. ‘Yeah.’
‘Sorry, my dear, but the boy’s a wanker.’
It was nice to laugh, and I couldn’t argue with her logic.
‘Yes. It’s classic, isn’t it? I meet someone, and I hate him, and then it turns out he’s a Martha-certified wanker.’ I remembered her talking about Barney. ‘What would you have done if Barney had been one? It’s quite a risk deciding you’ll marry the next presentable person you meet, and then doing it. I was going to give it a go with the next half-interesting person I met because you inspired me. But now I can’t because it’s Rik.’
‘If Barney hadn’t been up to scratch, I wouldn’t have given him the time of day. I mean, I probably ignored other contenders along the way.’ Martha’s expression softened. ‘But he was, Senara. He very much was.’
She sighed, and I could see that she was drifting away again. ‘I think of the other people in my life all the time. I just sit here and think about them. My parents, my darling sister Daphne. Violet. Her brother … Well, Aubrey left us a few years after the war ended. And then came Barney, and I was widowed at fifty. That probably sounds ancient to you, but it’s not. It’s half my lifetime ago. Then Leon, my baby. My actual baby. I can’t help feeling that I’m doomed to carry on alone forever while they all die around me. It’s like a fairy-tale curse. Destined to sit here for the rest of my days, useless, outliving all the people I love.’
She took a deep breath and her tone changed. ‘That’s why I’m looking forward to your party. It’s why I need life in the old house. Youth. Future. Possibility. I’m not going to outlive you lot, and that’s a fact.’
‘Oh, Martha.’
She had such a capable manner, and she was so funny; I’d never realized how much she missed everyone, even though, of course, she must. Her husband and her only child had died, and I’d never given it more than a moment’s thought.
I sat next to her and patted her arm, feeling useless, and tried to say the right things. ‘You’ve been through so much. You’re not cursed. You’re really strong and healthy, I guess.’
I looked down at my hands. Hands were strange things. They were just there, tools on the ends of your arms, flexible and easy to command, with opposable thumbs. I flexed my fingers and crunched them into fists. They were incredible things to have, and I took them for granted all the time.
If I lived long enough, my hands would become like Martha’s. They would shake, seize up, grow liver spots. They would stop working properly. I wouldn’t be able to pick up a kettle of boiling water; I’d have to rely on other people to make my tea, and they’d probably do it wrong. I wondered whether I would have children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren like Martha, or no one at all.
I asked her the first question that came into my head, something I’d always wondered.
‘Why do you call your mum Violet? Why don’t you call her Mum?’
Martha was gazing out of the window. She didn’t look at me. ‘For a very good reason,’ she said. ‘She wasn’t my mother.’
‘Oh sorry! I didn’t realize.’ I thought of what she’d just said: My parents, my darling sister Daphne. ‘Was she your … aunt?’
‘A kind of adopted aunt, I suppose. Really just the greatest friend I could ever have had.’ She turned to me, her eyes unreadable. ‘Haven’t I told you this before, Senara? I came here when I was ten. As an evacuee.’
‘An evacuee? Were you from London?’
She didn’t answer for a long time.
‘The crack in my life was too much for me to deal with, and I was scared of what would happen to me if I let it in, so I shut it out. But, yes, I spent the first ten years of my life as a Londoner. We had no money … I can barely remember it, you know, but when the memories come I hang on to them and go back in there. That’s what happens when I drift off sometimes. I’m going back to Ridley Street. The older I get, the more I find myself able to do it. It’s like going home.’
I looked into her face and saw that even now she was only half focused.
‘I came down here with my whole school,’ she said. ‘I thought I would go home, but I never did. I was both extraordinarily lucky and so unlucky that I’ve never been able to look at it straight on. Honestly, darling – it’s like the sun. It’s always there in the corner of my vision, but I’m grateful that I seem to have made it through the rest of my life without ever quite looking directly at it. These days you’d have had counselling and all that, but back then you just got on with things because you had to …’
I felt she needed me to ask a concrete, trivial question, so I said, ‘Did you have a label and a gas mask?’
I watched her pull her focus back with a smile.
‘Both. Arriving here is one of the strongest memories of my life. You don’t often get a day like that, when you wake up in one life and go to sleep in another. We came down on the train. It’s a long journey even now, but in those days a train full of confused London kids who had no idea at all where we were going – can you imagine? I was terrified when I saw a cow.’
‘That must have freaked you right out,’ I said.
I tried to imagine it, to reframe Martha as a confused young Londoner, rather than the local landowner I’d always imagined her to be. A bewildered child arriving with a gas mask as protection against biological weapons. For the first time I realized that giving children gas masks wasn’t cute. It was a sign of a barbaric, brutal world.
‘We were put on different buses. My first piece of luck was being assigned to the Pentrellis bus. Being picked out by Violet was the luckiest thing that ever happened in my whole life. I knew it too. As soon as I saw her, I felt it: I had to go home with her. Her brother Aubrey was unpredictable – poor man – but when he was good there was no one better. And Violet managed to be everything we all needed.’
‘Why was he troubled?’
‘Shell shock from the Great War. When he was on form, he’d be so funny. He did little puppet shows and put on silly voices. But most of the time he stayed in his room, and he’d scream. Blood-curdling. To this day I’ve never known anything like it. Poor Aubrey.’ She nodded a few times. ‘So, yes. Although it wasn’t his fault, I did learn that it’s difficult living with an unpredictable man. An unpredictable person. Man or woman. Before I married Barney, I made sure he was gentle and steady above all else. And he was.’
‘Shell shock,’ I said. ‘That’s PTSD?’
‘Oh, they’re always changing the names of things.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Everyone forgets I was an evacuee. It might be because I forget to tell them. I spend most of my life believing that Martha Roberts is a real person. Isn’t that funny? When she shouldn’t have existed at all.’
17
Everyone was gathering things up at the pool when I got back. They looked purposeful. They were packing towels into bags rather than just taking stuff inside.
‘I didn’t know Martha was from London originally,’ I said as I approached.
‘Oh yeah,’ said Clem. ‘Her evacuee thing. It’s cute, isn’t it? Coming here with her little suitcase and taking the family name. She’s not really one of us at all.’
‘Clem,’ I said, ‘she’s your ancestor. You’re descended from her. Of course she’s one of you. You’re part of her.’
‘Gareth, grab that. Yeah, but we’re the real Robertses. The Campion-Robertses. We’ve been here forever. Tin-mining money, and then Gran married well because the tin mining stopped, so without Barney she would have been poor. You can look it up. The Roberts family go back for generations.’
‘All families go back for generations,’ said Josie. ‘I mean, where do you think the rest of us came from? We didn’t just jump down from a tree. We literally all go back to the moment life crawled out of the ocean.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘Not really,’ said Josie, and there was a moment of tension, which Rik broke.
‘We’re going to the beach,’ he said. ‘I mean, me and Meg are so far beyond the point of needing to sleep after our crap sleep on the train, and we’ve been looking over the fence, and it’s literally the ocean.’
‘So it feels a bit lame to stay here in the pool all day, like we just did, and ignore the fact that there’s a beach right there and an ocean that goes all the way to America,’ said Meg.
‘Lame?’ Clem was obviously feeling combative this afternoon – maybe Gareth hadn’t been paying her enough attention. ‘Well, excuse me. Sorry that you find my house and garden lame. Jeez.’
‘Not your house, you twat. It’s the least lame house ever. Not your garden. Not your pool. Us.’
Clem looked out towards the ocean. This was my favourite time of day, with intense honey-tinted light, and the water was entirely flat. She looked as if she was going to say something, but for once she didn’t. I watched her face as she changed her mind.
‘When this is mine,’ she said instead, ‘I’m going to put a zip wire in. So we can go to the beach from here without having to walk miles in the wrong direction, all the way down the drive, first, and then all the way back.’
