“Tell me more about this book you’re thinking of writing,” I say, propping my chin on my hands as I look at Elliot across the slightly threadbare pillows. “Do you think you’ll actually do it?”
By way of answer, he jumps up and crosses the room to where a battered leather holdall is sitting on top of the equally battered wooden dresser. He rummages inside the bag, then leaps back onto the bed, hanging me a thick cardboard folio stuffed with loose leaf paper.
“Chapter One… “I read, pulling out the first page, then lowering it so I can look at him over the top. “Oh my God, Elliot,” I squeal, scanning the closely typed words. “You’re not just thinking about it; you’ve actually done it!”
“Well, not quite.” He chuckles self-deprecatingly. “I’ve made a start on it. What you’re holding there is the first four chapters. I wrote most of it when I was back home, but I wanted to bring itwith me, so I could read over it. There’s quite a few things I need to check. And it’s —”
He frowns, a small crease appearing between his dark eyebrows.
“I feel like there’s something missing with it,” he tells me. “I’m just not sure what it is, yet. I was hoping coming here, to Bramblebury, would help me figure out what it is. This is where it’s set, you know? I figured I should probably see the place if I’m going to write about it.”
“Sure.” I lie back down, snuggling into his side again as I scan the pages in my hand. “And it’s about your great-grandfather?”
“Yeah. Well, it’s based on what I know about his time here during the war,” he replies. “Which isn’t a lot, to be fair. So it’s mostly fiction, really. I liked the idea of it, though; you know, the American in England, the fish out of water. Which I assume he must have been; at least at first. Although he did make friends here. I have photos of some of them, actually…”
He throws the covers back and bounds out of bed again, rummaging through the bag until he finds what he’s looking for; a small leather wallet, from which he produces a handful of photos.
“Here you go,” he says, rejoining me. “Most of these seem to have been taken at the army base, but there’s one or two I think might have been taken here…”
I flick carefully through the photos, which are fragile and yellowed with age. Elliot’s great-grandfather looks back at me; a solemn-eyed young man with Elliot’s curly dark hair, who looks impossibly young to have been sent away from home to serve in some faraway war.
My heart contracts with pity for him.
“It’s okay,” says Elliot, watching me. “He came home. He was almost 90 when he died.”
“That’s good to know,” I reply, grateful to him for having read my mind. “You know how much I appreciate a happy ending.”
The next photo is the one Elliot thought might have been taken here in Bramblebury. I recognize the village square right away, although there’s no war memorial — obviously — and the sepia-tinted streets surrounding the square look oddly bare without the various trees and shrubs that have grown up since this was taken.
The photo is one of those ones taken by a street photographer. I remember Mum showing me some similar shots of her own relatives. Most people couldn’t afford cameras in those days, she’d explained. So professional photographers would hang out in busy streets and snap photos of the passers-by, which they’d then try to sell to them. Most of them probably bought them, too; for some, they might have been some of the only photos they had of themselves.
In the photo in my hand, Elliot’s great-grandfather is striding through the square, wearing a US Army uniform (Or I assume that’s what it is), and with a huge smile on his face. And no wonder he’s smiling, because on one arm, there’s a young woman, her head tilted back as she looks up at him, as if she’s hanging on his every word.
The woman is in uniform too, although I don’t know enough about the era to know what kind. But she wears a smart skirt and matching jacket, with sensible looking shoes and a peaked hat. The photo is so old and faded that a lot of the detail has been lost, but she has a pretty, heart-shaped face, and dark, arched eyebrows, like a movie star.
“I’m guessing this isn’t the great-grandma from Boca Raton, then?” I say, passing the photo back to Elliot, and moving on to the next one, in which the same woman poses in front of a Christmas tree, wearing a thick wool coat with a swishy skirt, which makes me wonder why people stopped dressing so well.
“Nope. They didn’t meet until after the war. I don’t know who this woman is, actually. As far as I can gather, he never mentioned a girlfriend — if that’s what she was.”
“Oh, I’d say that’s definitely what she was,” I reply, my curiosity piqued by the young couple who look so happy in their photo together, but who were doomed to spend the rest of their lives apart. “I wonder who she was? And what happened to her after the war?”
I wonder what happened to her after he left her, is what I really want to say here. Because he must have done, given the little Elliot knows about the man in the photo. We know he went back to America. We know he married someone else. And now Elliot wants to write his story, but all I can think about ishers.
I flick quickly through the rest of the photos, finding two more of the movie star woman tucked in among shots of the village. She’s beautiful, whoever she is.
I wonder what her story is?
“Can I read this?” I ask, picking up Elliot’s manuscript and leafing through the pages.
“I thought you’d never ask,” he says with a grin. “Of course you can. I’d be honored. Maybe you can help me figure out where I’m going wrong with it. That missing piece of the puzzle.”
“Oh, I’m not sure about that,” I reply. “I just read books. Well, and sell them. I don’t know anything about writing them.”
“Well, that makes two of us, then,” he says lightly, taking the pages from me and throwing them onto the table by the bed. “Anyway, we can talk about the book later. Right now, I’ve got other plans for us…”
We spend the rest of the morning lying curled around each other in the lumpy little hotel bed, watching the snow fall lazily outside the window.
“This is so nice,” I say, as the light starts to fade, and we still haven’t left the room. “You’reso nice.”
