I give Lucy a warning look to say we really ought not to stand around here much longer, but even she’s getting drawn in by the black-and-white image of our village hall, back when the whole room was wrapped in its murals. There’s bunting strung along the walls too, and a big crowd of people.
‘Is it a party?’ Fern asks.
‘Saturday night dancing. Nineteen sixty-five.’
‘Who’s he?’ Fern asks, and my shoulders drop. Poor Izz.
Fern has her pearl-varnished, clipped-short fingernail against the glass, pinning the boy in the picture right beside the young Izz.
It’s an image I’ve examined myself many times. The pair of them, Izz and the man, are squashed arm against arm for the photo, and they’re both beaming, only if you really look closely – if you’ve an eye for detail and romance; if you’re someone like, say, Fern Brash of Brambledown Farm – you’ll spot it: the thing they thought they were getting away with. Their hands are clasped together between them, almost hidden in the folds of Izz’s dress. The telltale sign that these two had a secret to hide, but there it is for the eagle-eyed to see, nailed to the wall.
Izz clears her throat, her eyes fixed upon the faces smiling back at her. ‘That’s Alexi Thorne.’ Her voice is dry and cracking like the name is escaping a locked vault after years hidden away, and I suppose that’s exactly what is happening.
It would be impossible to forget the night she told me about Alexi, the only man she ever loved. It was years ago now and after a lot of Chardonnay, back when Chardonnay was the ‘in’ thing, so you know how long ago that must have been. It came out of a boozy conversation at Izz’s when she asked me if I ever thought I’d marry again. My first husband, John, had been long gone by that point. I told her I couldn’t see it happening, marriage isn’t for everyone, and she fell quiet, and the curiosity inside me finally took over, and I had to ask her if she’d ever had anyone special that she’d have liked to marry.
Instead of laughing and shrugging it off like my happy-go-lucky, breezy old Izz I thought I knew so well, I watched her considering the question for a moment, then her face crumpled, and a soft sob burst out. She threw a hand to her mouth to stop any more escaping, but it was three glasses of wine too late. Within five minutes she’d told me the whole thing. And after that, she never mentioned it again, except for the next day when she made me promise not to dwell on it, it was all forgotten and in the past, silly really.
Yet, here she is now, telling her story to a stranger. Maybe it’s something about the soft, innocent Fern, a girl not entirely unlike wide-eyed, light-hearted Izz, now I come to think about it.
‘We were neighbours. Honestly, we were,’ Izz says, and there’s amusement in her voice. ‘He was the boy next door, Alexander. A few years older than me, enough for me to have thought nothing much about him. Well, not until he was suddenly very handsome indeed and marrying a factory girl from out Oxfordshire way. We’d been friendly, he and I, but not in the way he’d been with her. I was just a child.
‘I watched them walk down the aisle and everything, not really thinking much of it, other than it was a shame the village’s best-looking lads were all wedding their sweethearts, and I watched him go off with some of the other boys for national service a week later, and that was it. He liked the army life and was soon stationed in Malta. Only, his wife – she was young herself – got bored living here with Alexi’s mum and went home to her parents and her pals.
‘I didn’t pay him any mind, not until he passed out after two years’ service. His wife wasn’t waiting for him when he got here so he gave the perfume he’d brought home for her to me.
‘He was alone a lot, at a loose end most days, looking for work, doing bits and bobs here and there, and I’d finished my schooling and was helping Mum around the house. And it just happened. The falling in love. We kept it to ourselves, of course. Imagine the scandal around here if folks knew. You can’t imagine what a whispering place Wheaton used to be.’
I can’t help reacting to that. ‘Used to be?’ But Izz ignores me. She doesn’t agree that people round here are still gossiping about me and Don, but why would she? It’s me that gets the funny looks.
‘Anyway,’ she goes on, ‘after a while, his wife just admitted it was a rum do and wrote to tell him so. She was never coming back. Of course, I thought my luck was in. But his mum twigged what we was up to and said he must either go after his wife or make himself useful somewhere out of harm’s way, me being the harm.’
‘What did he do?’ Fern’s eyes are as round as saucers. ‘What happened?’ The spell breaks. Izz blinks like she’s waking from a dream.
‘He enlisted again. Took another posting to Malta. That’s what his postcard told me, anyway. And that was that. Stayed in the services out there, as far as my mother could glean from his mum, Mrs Thorne, next door. He never did come home, not even after his mum passed. Something good must have been keeping him away from Wheaton. Or someone.’
‘But…’ Fern begins, and I wish I could cut her off. ‘You loved him?’
Izz’s eyes mist. ‘Loved each other. Beyond doubt. You’ll know all about it one day. When it happens, there’s no denying it’s there.’
‘Oh, I know,’ Fern says, her cheeks turning pink. ‘I have a girlfriend. Shell.’
‘You do?’ I say it out loud before I can check myself. ‘What does Tommy Brash think of her?’ I’m struck by the sudden realisation Fern might have her own family problems to deal with, but I needn’t have concerned myself. She’s smiling.
‘They’re in the big sheds together right this minute, tending the early ewes.’
Izz presses her hands together delightedly, and I find I’m the one getting misty now. If Tommy Brash, the last of the miserable Brashes, has moved into the twenty-first century, then Wheaton really has changed vastly for the better.
My heart warms for Fern and her open-heartedness. Nothing’s private with these young ones, and it’s quite refreshing really. I expect she lives half her life on a live stream to strangers, sharing her world with them. She’s grown up in a time where young people are encouraged to talk about their inner world and their worries, and goodness knows they’ve had a lot of things to worry about in recent years.
I wish Lucy had this kind of frankness so maybe I could help her out more, make her happier. She’s barely mentioned Craig since she got here, but the breakup must be getting to her.
‘That’s enough storytelling for one day,’ Izz says, giving Alexi’s picture one last glance.
We all make our way out into the December twilight and down the hall steps. The rain’s stopping and there are a few more cars about. Everything is dripping and the rain has chased away the frost, warming the air a fraction.
Fern says she’s getting picked up, so we leave her, but not before I catch sight of the phone screen in her palm where there’s a close-up of Izz and her fella holding hands and facing the probing lens with their secret burning behind their eyes. It seems a strange thing for her to want to keep a memento of. As much as it’s a heart-rending moment between Izz and her Alexi, it’s still a reminder of a thwarted love, one that would have been allowed to blossom had it happened nowadays.
At Izz’s gate, I ask her if she’ll be all right.
