Last Letter Home Read online

  ‘My ma and pa, Sir Henry and Lady Kelling,’ Mrs Clare said, quietly.

  ‘And that’s you?’ A much younger version of Lady Kelling sat next to her mother in the picture, her expression startled as a fawn’s.

  ‘You are clever. Yes, that’s me. I always hated being photographed.’

  ‘Who were all these other people?’ Briony continued. ‘I mean, I know they must be staff.’

  ‘That’s Mrs Thurston, the cook,’ Mrs Clare murmured, ‘and Jarey, the butler, he was a sweetie. I don’t remember everyone’s name.’ There was a housekeeper, several maids, a terrified waif of a kitchen girl, seven or eight men and boys, two with smart jackets and short hair trained into side partings identifiable as house servants, and four more muscular outdoor types of varying ages including a callow lad Mrs Clare said was Sam, the apprentice gardener.

  Sitting next to the young Robyn was a slight, middle-aged woman with a pinched expression, simply dressed in a close-fitting dark dress. Who was she? Briony asked, since the old lady didn’t mention her.

  ‘She was a relative of my mother’s who came over from Germany in the late thirties, after her husband died. I can’t say I often saw her because we were away in London so much. Cousin Barbara, that’s it. Her family name was, goodness, it was something German-sounding.’

  Briony looked up in amazement. ‘Was it Hartmann?’

  ‘That’s right. How did you know that?’

  ‘I saw her grave in the churchyard. And did she have a son, Paul?’

  ‘Yes! He had a kind smile, I remember that. Did you say you were staying in the Lodge? That’s where they both lived—’

  ‘May I see? Is she this one?’ Aruna interrupted and leaned in to gaze at Barbara Hartmann’s face.

  Briony stared, too, and was struck by how sad the woman appeared to be. ‘Which one is Paul, then?’ She began to examine the faces of the men again.

  ‘I don’t think he’s there, is he? No. I wonder in fact if it wasn’t he who took the picture.’

  ‘Oh.’ Briony felt a rush of disappointment.

  ‘It was a sudden whim of my father’s to have the photograph taken, one morning shortly before war was declared. I think he had some presentiment that things would change, and he desperately wanted them to stay the same. It was a horrible summer, I do remember that. The waiting, the certainty that something awful was about to befall us. After the war they said horrid things about my father, that he’d been a Hitler lover, but he wasn’t, he simply desperately wanted English life to continue as he thought it always had been. He hated the idea of the old order with its old values being lost. He knew it might mean the end of Westbury Hall.’

  ‘But the Hall is still here,’ Luke said gently. ‘What would he have thought of it now?’

  ‘He’d have hated it,’ Mrs Clare said.

  A silence fell over the room.

  The old lady turned to gaze out of the window, gripping the sill with one frail hand. Outside it was raining and the scent of wet foliage reached them.

  Briony wondered at how strange it must be to see your childhood home bought by developers and so utterly transformed. How could Robyn Clare bear to live here still?

  Again, as though she was in tune with Briony’s thoughts, the old lady spoke. ‘I never wanted to live anywhere else. If I’d married anyone but Unwin I’d have had to leave Westbury Hall, so I’ve always been very thankful at the way things turned out. This apartment used to be our drawing room and when I saw how nicely they’d converted it I had to have it. My son thinks I’m ridiculous, he wanted me to go and live with them, but I could never have borne a Barbican flat. All that concrete. No, I belong here. I plan to end my days quietly with Lulu. If I go first, then Lewis promises to adopt Lulu, so I’m not worried on that score.’

  ‘I can understand your feelings,’ Luke said gently. ‘I felt dismal when my parents sold my childhood house in South London and moved to Norfolk. Sometimes I have to drive past the old place and I hate the things the new people have done to it. Shutters instead of curtains, ugly dormer windows, that sort of thing. It doesn’t look as though it wants me any more.’

  ‘You should never go back, I keep telling you, Luke,’ Aruna said waspishly. ‘Oops, Mrs Clare, that sounds rude, but I’m quite different from you and Luke. I couldn’t wait to leave the house where I was brought up.’

  ‘Why was that, may I ask?’

  ‘I felt trapped there, and my town was a place you’d want to get away from if you had any ambition. I go back to see Mum and Dad of course, but everyone’s exactly the same. My sister even married her boyfriend who lived down the road. Her two kids will go to the same school as we all did, I expect.’

  ‘I understand your point of view. What about you, dear?’ Mrs Clare asked Briony. ‘Do you revisit your childhood home?’

  ‘My father still lives there with my stepmother,’ Briony said hesitantly. ‘Maybe if I hadn’t lost my mum when I was fourteen I’d want to go back more often.’ She felt a lump in her throat, could never get used to the way grief could strike you afresh even after years and years. She added hastily, ‘We probably ought to leave you in peace, Mrs Clare.’

  ‘Yes, thank you for showing us the picture.’ Luke gave Mrs Clare one of his best smiles.

  ‘Not at all. We like to see young people, don’t we, Lulu?’ The dog licked its chops and began to pant, gazing adoringly at its mistress. It wasn’t a very lovable-looking animal, but still, Briony hoped that dog and mistress would not ever have to live long without one another.

  ‘Do come and see me again if you have a spare moment while you’re here,’ the old lady said to Briony. ‘Though I’m afraid I talk about the past a great deal.’

  ‘That’s exactly what interests me,’ Briony replied. ‘I’d love to.’

  ‘Penny for ’em,’ Luke observed as they made their way back to the cottage.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I saw your face when Mrs Clare mentioned the name Hartmann.’

  ‘It’s astonishing, isn’t it, to think that she knew Paul, even slightly. I should have asked her more about him.’

  ‘So you’ll go back to see her?’ Aruna asked, sounding disbelieving.

  ‘Of course.’ She bit her lip. ‘And I didn’t ask if she knew my grandfather.’

  ‘You should definitely go back,’ Luke said.

  Aruna said little for the rest of the visit and Briony wondered what was wrong. Perhaps she was simply tired. Never mind, she’d loved having them both today. The three of them got on so well, with Luke always the mollifier, so easy to have around to offset Aruna’s spikiness. Yes, the couple were a good balance for one another. She was happy for Aruna to have found someone special.

  Later, when they left, she walked up to the van to wave them off.

  ‘We’re in Norfolk for a couple more days,’ Luke told her, after giving her a hug. ‘Mum said to ask you over to a meal. Would tomorrow evening suit?’

  ‘That’s so nice of her. I’d love to, thanks.’

  ‘Great! I’m texting you the address now. It’s fairly easy to find. There!’

  As Briony watched the van disappear through the great arched gate, a nameless melancholy washed over her. Usually she felt perfectly reconciled to her own company, but as she walked back to the cottage alone, wrapping her fleece tightly against the cool of the evening, she knew it to be loneliness. Perhaps it came from thinking about her mum.

  Once upon a time her family had been a close little unit, loving, supportive. Both sets of grandparents lived nearby and she remembered seeing a lot of them when she was small, though Grandad Wood, her father’s father, had died when Briony was five or six.

  Grandpa Andrews, her mother’s father, she remembered because he’d been so busy and active in his retirement, either up and repairing something in the house or garden, or out and about with the Rotary Club or the Ramblers. He was a sociable soul, but when he came home he liked Granny to be there, calm, reassuring, the heart of the house, sewing, or enter
taining friends to tea. If she was out he’d be like an abandoned dog, ears pricked, listening for her to come home.

  The Woods were a family who were always arguing about small things, but rarely discussed the large ones. Neither Briony nor her brother rebelled, so far as she could remember. Each of them had their own passions. Birchmere wasn’t far from Gatwick airport and her brother, two years her junior, had always been fascinated by the planes whose noise infuriated everyone else. He would always rush out to spot Concorde on its evening flight and badgered their father constantly to take him to air shows. He and Briony had little in common with one another apart from family ties, and just as it was natural for him to have become an engineer with British Airways, so it was for her to follow her obsession with the past. She loved to lose herself in a world when flight had been no more than a fantasy for humans. And with their father constantly working long shifts at the paper it was their mother who had held them all together, encouraging their separate interests. During the months of her illness they all felt helpless, unable to communicate with one another. When she died, a silence fell between them all. Was this why she was alone now, Briony had asked Grace, her counsellor; because aloneness felt natural to her? Or was the seed of it from somewhere even further back? Grace hadn’t been able to tell her.

  Eighteen

  June 1939

  Sarah hacked ferociously at the stump of ivy, then dug the fork under it again, trying to loosen the roots, but it would not shift.

  ‘Damn you,’ she told it, wiping her brow with the back of her hand.

  ‘Having problems?’ a voice called. She looked up, shading her eyes against the sun to see a man in uniform striding across the lawn. It was Ivor.

  ‘Good morning, nice to see you back.’ She had heard he was home on leave. ‘It’s a battle to the death here, but one I’m determined to win!’ She gave the stump a kick.

  ‘Let me try.’ He took the fork out of her hand and she watched him sink it into the soil, far deeper than she’d been able, and brace himself against the roots. The ivy gave creaks of protest but did not budge.

  ‘Wait a minute.’ Expression grim, he flung his jacket over a chair, rolled up his sleeves and returned to the job. He dug out the network of smaller roots, and this time, when he plunged the fork in under the stump, it broke away suddenly with a series of snaps and groans. ‘That’s settled him.’ He mopped his brow, his eyes bright with triumph.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, seizing the stump and dragging it free. ‘Alas, poor Yorick.’ She held it aloft in imitation of a skull, before tossing it into the wheelbarrow. When Ivor laughed, she thought, Mummy’s wrong about me, I’m not in the least stand-offish.

  After a cool spring, the first week of June had been sunny and warm, not comfortable for this kind of exertion, but following a difficult conversation with her mother that morning, Sarah had needed to take out her frustration on something and the recalcitrant ivy, a gnarled great-grandfather of creepers, whose leaves encompassed the whole rear wall of the house, had seemed a suitable adversary.

  She’d first broken the news to Mrs Bailey about applying for gardening college back in April, and the reaction had been exactly as she’d feared; that she was needed here in Norfolk with her mother and sister and it was extremely selfish for her to think about doing anything else.

  Diane’s reaction depressed her even more. Her sister looked so pitiful that it twisted Sarah’s heart. Still, though, Sarah wouldn’t change her mind. She wrote back to the college, expressing interest in a place, and a fortnight later was invited to Kent for interview.

  She had liked the principal very much. Miss Agatha Trot was a trim, handsome woman in her prime, who had travelled widely in her younger days, hunting for new plants in South and Central America, which had given her a ready host of stories to tell. When a letter offering a definite place arrived a day or two later, Sarah’s first instinct was to accept immediately and enclose a cheque for the deposit. But doubts quickly began to set in. If there were to be a war. Those were the words that entered any conversation now about the future. It was difficult for anyone to make plans. In the end she had sent a holding letter in reply.

  This morning’s argument had followed the arrival of another letter from the college administrator enquiring whether Miss Bailey intended to take up her place, and if so, would she please supply the deposit as requested.

  ‘You’ll be wasting your money,’ Mrs Bailey snapped, ‘but I suppose you must do what you choose. You usually do.’ This was particularly unfair; Sarah felt stung.

  There had followed a moment’s silence, during which Mrs Bailey read a note that had arrived from Margo Richards. ‘Apparently Ivor is returning today for a visit,’ she said, over her spectacles. ‘I expect he’ll call. You know, Sarah, he does seem very interested in you. I can’t think why, you’re always so stand-offish with him.’

  ‘I am not!’ She was particularly surprised as she found it easy to be friendly to him. She felt sorry for Ivor because of the weight of his father’s expectations on him and he was good company, always interested in what she was doing. In turn, she found his views on politics thoughtful and well-informed. However, her mother’s pointed comment confirmed something that she’d privately been beginning to wonder herself. He hadn’t been home very much at all recently, but when he had he’d made a point of coming to Flint Cottage almost immediately.

  On this occasion it was telling that he hadn’t even taken the time to change out of his service dress.

  ‘You shouldn’t be doing this heavy work,’ he said, reclaiming his jacket and hooking it over his shoulder. ‘Mind you, the garden’s looking splendid. Do you have any help? I’m sure we could send Hartmann down.’

  ‘Jim Holt who does the vicar’s garden comes in once a week. I wouldn’t bother Mr Hartmann. He has enough to do.’

  Did she imagine the satisfaction with which Ivor nodded? Because of her mother’s remark she found herself watching him with new eyes, and wondering about her own reaction to him. She was aware of his glowing demeanour, the brightness of his gaze.

  ‘How is Aldershot?’

  ‘Chaotic. We’re training the new recruits we’ve been sent. Pretty raw, most of them.’

  ‘One of Mrs Allman’s nephews in Ipswich has signed up. Her sister’s very concerned.’

  ’Tell her not to be. There’s no sign of anything happening at the moment.’

  ‘No, but it’s hard not to fear that something might.’

  Ivor’s tone had been light, but the way he avoided her eye betrayed his underlying fear. Sarah, who made a point of reading a daily paper and listening to the news, knew about the increase in defence spending and the plans for a Women’s Land Army to improve food yields. Slowly but surely the country was creaking into war mode. And yet ordinary life was going on as usual. Mrs Allman said that her sister had told her about a German hockey team that had visited and played in Ipswich recently, and what did Mrs Bailey think of that? A week ago, at Whitsun, Sarah and Diane, taking the train to Norwich, had found the station platform packed with excited families heading for the coast. A bank holiday was a bank holiday, after all, and why shouldn’t the children have donkey rides and ice cream?

  A knocking sound. She and Ivor looked up to see Diane, struggling to open the conservatory door, which was swollen by damp and always caught. Ivor marched over and tugged it open and Diane emerged in her dainty, fawnlike manner, her blue eyes huge and anxious. ‘How lovely to see you, Ivor,’ she said gravely and held out her hand. He shook it carefully and asked how she was keeping.

  ‘Very well, thank you,’ she replied, but her eyes darted to Sarah now, reproachful.

  ‘You’ve heard my sister’s news, I expect,’ she asked him, a sharpness in her voice.

  ‘No, what news is this?’ He turned enquiringly to Sarah.

  ‘Oh really,’ Sarah murmured. Diane should have left it to her to explain in her own time.

  ‘She’s leaving us,’ Diane said, her chin jutting.


  ‘I’m not going anywhere quite yet, Ivor. It’s simply that I might be going away to study.’ She explained about Radley. ‘I want to do something with my life, be useful and, as you know, I love growing things.’

  ‘I see. Has Hartmann put you up to this?’

  ‘No, of course not. Why would he?’

  ‘Simply what my father said. That he’d seen you together.’ Ivor’s eyes glittered.

  ‘Well, it wasn’t anything to do with Mr Hartmann. It was my own idea.’

  ‘I don’t think she should go, Ivor, do you?’ Diane said. ‘Oh, I wish you wouldn’t, Sarah. I would be so lonely.’

  ‘Diane,’ Sarah warned. ‘Don’t embarrass poor Ivor. And you wouldn’t be lonely. You have plenty of friends. Jennifer Bulldock’s always inviting you to things.’

  She couldn’t rid herself of a sense that everyone was lining up against her: her mother, Diane, Paul Hartmann and now Ivor, too, for he was regarding her with lips pressed together. I may not go if there’s a war. She’d have said that to Ivor, but not with Diane there. She and her mother had an unspoken agreement not to speak about politics in front of Diane, knowing how she hated it.

  She worried about Radley all that day, then come evening she wrote the letter accepting the place and enclosing a cheque. Only after she had dropped the envelope into the box outside the post office did she feel a sense of peace. The decision had been made.

  Nineteen

  It was July, the House of Lords was in recess for the summer and the Kellings had come home to Westbury. In church the Baileys sat two rows behind the Kelling family pew. They were tall and thin, all three Kellings, Sir Henry with his clever, grave face and salt-and-pepper hair, elegantly dressed Lady Kelling with her striking hawkish looks, and between them their daughter, The Hon. Robyn, a girl of Diane and Jennifer’s age, her still, pale face and colourless hair almost ghostly in the grey light. They left smartly after the service, stopping merely to address a few words to the Reverend Tomms and no more than nodding to the Bulldocks, who had gathered eagerly to speak to them outside. Robyn trailed obediently after her parents, trained to do so no doubt by her stern mama.