My heart had started to race as Theo’s story overlay so neatly with the cast of my own. “Do you remember the girl’s name?”
“He never told me.”
The frustration winded me. “He was adamant that he had to meet her family first. I can’t tell you how it’s plagued me over the years,” he said. “If I’d only known who she was, I might’ve had a place to start searching. What if she went missing too? What if the pair of them were in an accident together? What if her family has information that might help?”
It was on the tip of my tongue then to tell him about Juniper, but I thought better of it at the last. I couldn’t see that there was any point in raising his hopes when the Blythes had no additional information on the whereabouts of Thomas Cavill, when they were as convinced as the police that he’d eloped with another woman. “The letter,” I said suddenly, “who do you think sent it, if it wasn’t Tom? And why? Why would somebody else do such a thing?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll tell you something. Tom didn’t marry anyone. I checked with the Register Office. I checked the death records, too; I still do. Every year or so, just in case. There’s nothing. No record of him after 1941. It’s like he just disappeared into thin air.”
“But people don’t just disappear.”
“No,” he said with a weary smile. “No, they don’t. And I’ve spent my whole life trying to find him. I even hired a fellow some decades ago. Waste of money that was. Thousands of quid just to have some idiot tell me that wartime London was an excellent place for a man who wanted to go missing.” He sighed roughly. “No one seems to care that Tomdidn’twant to go missing.”
“And the advertisements?” I gestured to the printout, still on the seat between us.
“I ran those when our little brother Joey took his turn for the worse. I figured it was worth a shot, just in case I’d been wrong all along and Tom was out there somewhere, looking for a reason to come back to us. Joey was simple, poor kid, but he adored Tom. Would’ve meant the world to him to see him one more time.”
“You didn’t hear anything though.”
“Nothing but some lads making prank calls.”
The sun had slipped from the sky and early dusk was sheer and pink. A breeze brushed my arms and I realized we were alone again in the garden, remembered that Theo was an old man who ought to be inside contemplating a plate of roast beef and not the sorrows of his past. “It’s getting cool,” I said. “Shall we go in?”
He nodded and tried to smile a little, but as we stood I could tell that the wind had left his sails. “I’m not stupid, Edie,” he said as we reached the door. I pulled it open, but he insisted on holding it for me to pass through first. “I know I won’t be seeing Tom again. The ads, checking the records each year, the file of family photographs and other odds and sods I keep to show him, just in case—I do all that because it’s habit, and because it helps to fill the absence.”
I knew exactly what he meant.
There was noise coming from the dining room—chairs scraping, cutlery clanging, the mumbles of congenial conversation—but he stopped in the middle of the corridor. A purple flower wilted behind him, a humming came from the fluorescent tube above, and I saw what I hadn’t outside. His cheeks shone with the spill of old tears. “Thank you,” he said quietly. “I don’t know how it is you chose today to come, Edie, but I’m glad you did. I’ve been blue all day—some are like that—and it’s good to talk about him. I’m the only one left now: my brothers and sisters are in here.” He pressed a palm against his heart. “I miss them all, but there’s no way to describe Tom’s loss. The guilt”—his bottom lip quivered and he fought to wrest it back under control—“knowing that I failed him. That something terrible happened and no one knows it; the world, history, considers him a traitor because I couldn’t prove them wrong.”
Every atom of my being ached to make things right for him. “I’m sorry I didn’t bring news of Tom.”
He shook his head, smiled a little. “It’s all right. Hope’s one thing, expectation’s quite another. I’m not a fool. Deep down I know I’ll go to my grave without setting Tom to rest.”
“I wish there were something I could do.”
“Come back and visit me some afternoon,” he said. “That’d be marvelous. I’ll tell you some more about Tom. Happier days next time, I promise.”
ONE
MILDERHURSTCASTLEGARDENS,SEPTEMBER14, 1939
THEREwas a war on and he had a job to be doing, but the way the sun beat hard and round in the sky, the silver dazzle of the water, the hot stretch of tree limbs above him; well, Tom figured it would’ve been wrong in some indescribable way not to stop for a moment and take a plunge. The pool was circular and handsomely made, with stones rimming the outside and a wooden swing suspended from an enormous branch, and he couldn’t help laughing as he dropped his satchel onto the ground. What a find! He unstrapped his wristwatch and laid it carefully on the smooth leather bag he’d bought the year before, his pride and joy, kicked off his shoes and started unbuttoning his shirt.
When was the last time he’d been swimming? Not through all of the summer, that was certain; a group of friends had borrowed a car and taken off for the sea, a week in Devon during the hottest August any of them could remember, and he’d been all set to join them until Joey took his fall and the nightmares started and the poor kid wouldn’t go to sleep unless Tom sat by the bed and made up stories about the Underground. He’d lain in his own narrow bed afterwards, heat thickening in the room’s corners as he dreamed of the sea, but he hadn’t minded; not really, not for long. There wasn’t much he wouldn’t do for Joey—poor kid, with his big man’s body turning to flab and his little-boy laugh; the cruel music of that laugh made Tom ache and knot inside for the kid Joey’d been, the man he ought to have become.
He shrugged out of his shirtsleeves and slipped his belt free, shed the sad old thoughts, then his trousers too. A big black bird coughed above him and Tom stood for a moment, craned to glimpse the clear blue sky. The sun blazed and he squinted, following the bird as it glided in graceful silhouette towards a distant wood. The air was sweet with the scent of something he stood no chance of recognizing but knew he liked. Flowers, birds, the distant burble of water scooting over stones; pastoral smells and sounds straight from the pages of Hardy, and Tom was high on the knowledge that they were real and he was among them. That this was life and he was in it. He laid a hand flat on his chest, fingers spread; the sun was warm on his bare skin, everything was ahead of him, and it felt good to be young and strong and here and now. He wasn’t religious, but this moment certainly was.
Tom checked over his shoulder, but lazily and without expectation. He wasn’t a rule breaker by nature; he was a teacher, he owed his students an example, and he took himself seriously enough to attempt to set them one. But the day, the weather, the newly arrived war, the smell he couldn’t name that sat on the breeze like that, all of it made him bold. He was a young man, after all, and it didn’t take much for a young man to find himself infused with a fine, free sense that the earth and its pleasures were his to be taken where found; that rules of possession and prevention, though well intentioned, were theoretical dictates that belonged only in books and on ledgers and in the conversations of dithering white-bearded lawyers at Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Trees encircled the clearing, a changing room stood silent nearby, and the hint of a stone staircase led somewhere beyond. Across it all lay a spill of sunlight and birdsong. With a deep, contented sigh, Tom decided the time was upon him. There was a diving board and the sun had warmed the wood so that as he stepped onto it his feet burned; he stood for a moment, enjoying the pain, letting his shoulders bake, the skin tighten, until finally he could stand it no longer and took off with a grin, jumping at the end, drawing his arms back and launching, cutting like an arrow through the water. The cold was a vise around his chest and he gasped as he came to the surface, his lungs as grateful for air as a baby’s on drawing first breath.
He swam for some minutes, dived deeply, emerged again and again, then he lay on his back and let his limbs drift out from his body to form a star. This, he thought, isit,perfection. The moment Wordsworth and Coleridge and Shelley were on about: the sublime. If he were to die right now, Tom was sure, he would die content. Not that he wanted to die, not for at least seventy years. Tom calculated quickly: the year 2009, that would do nicely. An old man living on the moon. He laughed, backstroked idly, then resumed his floating, closed his eyes so that his lids warmed. The world was orange and star-shot, and within it he saw his future glowing.
He would be in uniform soon; the war was waiting for him and Thomas Cavill couldn’t wait to meet it. He wasn’t naive, his own father had lost a leg and parts of his mind in France and he entertained no illusions as to heroics or glory; he knew war was a serious matter, a dangerous one. Neither was he one of those fellows keen to escape his present situation, quite the opposite: as far as Tom could see, the war offered a perfect opportunity for him to better himself, as a man and as a teacher.
He’d wanted to be a teacher ever since he realized he’d grow up one day to be an adult, and had dreamed about working in his old London neighborhood. Tom believed he could open the eyes and minds of kids like he’d once been, to a world far beyond the grimy bricks and laden laundry lines of their daily experience. The goal had sustained him right through teacher-training college and into the first years of Prac until finally, through some silver-tongued talking and good old-fashioned luck, he’d arrived exactly where he wanted to be.
As soon as it had become clear that war was coming, Tom had known he’d sign up. Teachers were needed at home, it was a reserved occupation, but what sort of an example would that set? And his reasoning was more selfish too. John Keats had said that nothing became real until it was experienced and Tom knew that to be true. More than that, he knew it was precisely what he was missing. Empathy was all well and good, but when Tom spoke of history and sacrifice and nationality, when he read to his students the battle cry of Henry V, he scraped against the shallow floor of his own limited experience. War, he knew, would give him the depth of understanding he craved, which was why as soon as he was sure his evacuees were safely settled with their families he was heading back to London; he’d signed up with the 1st Battalion of the East Surrey regiment and with any luck he’d be in France by October.
