“Hmm?” She scowled at the ribbon that had knotted itself in her fingers.
“There’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Hmm?”
“About Mum.”
A look so sharp it scratched. “She all right?”
“Oh yes, fine. It’s nothing like that. I’ve just been thinking a bit about the past.”
“Ah. That’s different then, isn’t it, the past. Which particular bit of the past were you thinking of?”
“The war.”
She set down her little bag. “Well now.”
I proceeded with caution. Auntie Rita loves to talk but this, I knew, was a touchy subject. “You were evacuated, you and Mum and Uncle Ed.”
“We were. Briefly. Ghastly experience it was, too. All that talk of clean air? Load of bollocks. No one tells you about the stink of the countryside, the piles of steaming shite every place you care to tread. And they called us dirty! I’ve never been able to look at cows or country folk the same way since; couldn’t wait to get back and take my chances with the bombs.”
“How about Mum? Did she feel the same way?”
A swift, suspicious flicker. “Why? What’s she told you?”
“Nothing. She’s told me nothing.”
Rita returned her attention to the little white bag, but there was a self-consciousness in her downturned eyes. I could almost see her biting her tongue to stop the flow of things she wanted to say but suspected she shouldn’t.
Disloyalty burned in my veins but I knew it was my best chance. Each of my next words singed a little: “You know what she’s like.”
Auntie Rita sniffed sharply and caught the whiff of allegiance. She pursed her lips and regarded me sidelong a moment before inclining her head towards mine. “She loved it, your mum. Didn’t want to come home again.” Bewilderment glistened in her eyes and I knew I’d struck an old and aching nerve. “What kind of a child doesn’t want to be with her own parents, her own people? What kind of a child would rather stay with another family?”
A child who felt out of place, I thought, remembering my own guilty whispers into the dark corners of my cousins’ bedroom. A child who felt as if they were stuck somewhere they didn’t belong. But I didn’t say anything. I had a feeling that for someone like my aunt who’d had the good fortune to find herself exactly where she fitted, no explanation would make sense. “Maybe she was frightened of the bombs,” I said eventually. My voice was rocky and I coughed a little to clear the gravel. “The Blitz?”
“Pah. She wasn’t frightened, no more than the rest of us. Other kids wanted to be back in the thick of things. All the kids in our street came home, went down into the shelters together. Your uncle?” Rita’s eyes took on a reverence befitting the mention of my feted Uncle Ed. “Thumbed his way back from Kent, he did; he was that keen to get home once the action started. Arrived on the doorstep in the middle of a raid, just in time to shepherd the simple lad from next door to safety. But not Merry, oh no. She was the opposite. Wouldn’t come home until our dad went down there himself and dragged her back. Our mum, your gran, she never got over it. Never said as much, that wasn’t her way, she pretended like she was glad Merry was safe and sound in the countryside, but we knew. We weren’t blind.”
I couldn’t meet my aunt’s fierce gaze: I felt tarred by the brush of disloyalty, guilty by association. Mum’s betrayal of Rita was real still, an enmity that burned across the fifty-year gulf between then and now. “When was that?” I said, starting on a new white bag, innocent as you please. “How long had she been away?”
Auntie Rita drilled her bottom lip with a long baby-pink talon, a butterfly painted on the tip. “Let me see now, the bombs had been going awhile but it wasn’t winter because my dad brought primroses back with him; he was that keen to soften your gran up, make everything go as easy as it could. That was Dad.” The fingernail tapped a thinking rhythm. “Must’ve been sometime in 1941. March, April, thereabouts.”
She’d been honest in that, then. Mum had been gone for just over a year and had come home from Milderhurst six months before Juniper Blythe suffered the heartbreak that destroyed her, before Thomas Cavill promised to marry her, then left her stranded. “Did she ever—”
A blast of “Hot Shoe Shuffle” drowned me out. Auntie Rita’s novelty stiletto telephone jittered away on the counter.
Don’t answer it,I pleaded silently, desperate that nothing be allowed to disturb our conversation now that it was finally up and flying.
“That’s as like to be Sam,” said Rita, “spying on me.”
I nodded and the two of us sat out the last few bars, after which I wasted no time steering us back on track. “Did Mum ever talk about her time at Milderhurst? About the people she’d been staying with? The Blythe sisters?”
Rita’s eyes rolled like a pair of marbles. “It was all she’d talk about at first. Gave us the pip, I can tell you. Only time I saw her looking happy was when a letter arrived from that place. All secretive she was; refused to open them until she was alone.”
I remembered Mum’s account of being left by Rita in the evacuation line at the hall in Kent. “You and she weren’t close as kids.”
“We were sisters—there’d have been something wrong if we didn’t fight now and then, living on top of each other like we did in Mum and Dad’s little house … We got on all right, though. Until the war, that is, until she met that lot.” Rita speared the last cigarette from the packet, lit up, and shot a jet of smoke doorwards. “She was different after she got back, and not just the way she spoke. She’d got all sorts of ideas, up there in her castle.”
“What kind of ideas?” I asked, but I already knew. A defensiveness had crept into Rita’s voice that I recognized: the hurt of a person who feels themselves to have suffered by unfair comparison.
