Going to her bed, she sat heavily down on it. She felt exhausted, despite her long sleep, and disorientated, unanchored by fear and grief.
‘I’ve been torturing myself with whether Hans might have been up there,’ said Clare. ‘I’m scared it was him who killed Lewis and the boys.’ She looked down at his letters. ‘I want to write to him. I’ve been trying to all day, but can’t seem to find words.’ A tear escaped her. ‘I don’t feel like he’s here any more.’
‘Clare, you can’t know that.’
‘Can’t I?’ said Clare, closing Hans’s box, laying her hands atop it.
‘No,’ said Iris.
Clare didn’t reply.
She rested her head against the window, her eyes moving to the base, and the eight empty dispersal points lining the distant perimeter.
Iris would remember that too: how lost she was, staring down at it all that afternoon.
How resigned.
She’d try to guess, over and over again, what else she, so silent and contemplative, had been thinking.
What else she might have been sensing.
I rather think we might have all fallen before.
Whether she had, even then – even if only subconsciously –known.
Chapter Twenty-One
Claudia and Iris
21 November 2018, Day 19 of the shoot
&
October 1943
It’s a mild, grey Wednesday morning, with a forecast of heavy rain.
I’m not working.
Everyone else is.
Last night, we reshot the scene I messed up when I fell, and today – Emma’s last on set – they’re all preparing to film her finale, which I can’t bring myself to watch.
Mum’s back down in London. She went on Sunday, reluctantly, but I told her I needed her to let me get on with things.
‘Promise me you’ll stay offline,’ she said.
‘I’ll stay off,’ I said.
And I have, by and large, kept away from all that.
I’ve pored over that photo of Nick kissing that woman more than enough.
I don’t need to keep doing it.
He moved into Mum’s room on Sunday so that I could have ours to myself. I haven’t been sleeping there though.
I’ve been sleeping in the attic.
