And now I’m here, in the drawing room of this house on the green, reeling from my realisation that the woman I’ve come to see is none other than the woman I noticed staring at me in The Heaton Arms, eating her Ploughman’s lunch. Not only that, but it’s hit me that I’ve seen her other places too, in othertimes: back in Bettys, and up at the top of RAF Doverley’s control tower stairs. She was younger then, of course, with blonde rather than white waves in her hair, but still unmistakeably her, with the same knife-sharp cheekbones, piercing eyes, and pointed chin. I can’t get over it. Can’t believe it’s taken me this long to realise.
I’ve told her that I saw her before I fell.
Too electrified to keep it to myself, I mentioned it as soon as I arrived.
‘I grabbed your arm,’ I said, as she showed me into this drawing room.
‘Really?’ she replied, in much the same way as she might have responded to me passing comment on the weather.
She was eighteen in 1943.
She’s ninety-three now.
When I used to visit her, thirty years ago, she was in her sixties, and doesn’t look like she’s aged a day since: a living, breathing advertisement for the age-defying powers of cold cream, and always wearing a sunhat.
She’s asked me to call her Ellen.
‘Let’s do away with the Mrs, shall we?’ she said, gesturing for me to sit in the armchair I’m currently ensconced in. ‘I’m not married, and –’ her lips twitched – ‘it’s always been doctor anyway.’
She was a WAAF at Doverley during the war.
‘The last of us left,’ she said, settling herself into the chair opposite mine. ‘I’d be grateful though, Claudia, if we could keep that between us. I’ve no interest in being hounded for my memories by voyeuristic strangers. I was very clear with Tim that he was to keep me out of his stories to Ms Hale. I’ve hadmany ambitions in my life, but featuring as a character in a novel has never been one of them.’
In spite of everything, I found myself smiling at her candour.
‘You’re in touch with Tim then?’ I asked her just now.
‘Yes, very much so.’
‘Were you friends with Iris?’
‘You don’t recall?’ she says, deadpan.
And I study her, trying to work out whether she’s making fun.
I don’t think she is.
She’s really not the teasing kind.
I find I’m remembering more about her, the more we talk. Nothing detailed. But her mannerisms feel familiar. Her forthrightness does. I’m pretty sure she was like this with me even when I was four, and I think it was probably her directness that I liked most about her. How seriously she took me.
I can’t decide whether I like her now.
Instinctively, I trust her, but I haven’t immediately warmed to her.
She’s very buttoned up.
Proper.
‘Iris and Clare used to call me Prim,’ she says, in such a close echo of my thoughts, that laughter bursts from me.
It comes out strained.
Nervous.
Hand to my mouth, I swallow it, and Ellen arches a perfectly drawn brow.
‘That can’t have been very nice,’ I say.
