‘Heaton and Iris?’ He nods. ‘I suspect so. Iris’s mother worked for Heaton during the first war, when she fell for Iris, and he owned the cottage they lived in. Iris would never have had it though. I think she much preferred the idea of a father who’d had no choice but to abandon them. She loathed Heaton. Even more so once he saved her life. Certainly at first.’ Breathlessly, he tells me she was taken to hospital after the accident, where a doctor set her wrist, and reported her pregnancy to Doverley’s adjutant. ‘Ambrose had her dishonourably dismissed.’ He sinks his head back against his chair. ‘He was a … vengeful … creature. But Beth and Ellie didn’t let him win. They got a hold of Iris’s file, destroyed her records. Ambrose was killed himself, by a V2 rocket. We bombed that factory.’ He closes his eyes. ‘Lewis and his boys went down that night.’
He’s starting to drift.
Seeming to realise, he jerks his eyes open, and pushes himself on, saying that Iris moved to East Grinstead, where he was in a burns hospital. ‘She got a job in their office,’ he says. ‘Ellie had the idea that the vicar in Heaton should give her a wedding certificate and reference. Not with Robbie’s name on it. That would have been too risky.’ He breathes in, out. ‘She took her gran’s maiden name instead.’ Another breath. ‘Reeves.’
For a beat, I stare, stunned all over again.
Then, ‘That was my father’s name,’ I hear myself say.
Except my voice doesn’t feel like my own.
My lips don’t.
‘Yes,’ says Tim.
And my brain works, doing the sums.
My father was born in 1965, the same year as my mother.
Iris would have been forty-seven.
Too old, surely, to be a mother again herself.
Not without the kind of help that didn’t exist back then.
But …
Was she too young to be a grandmother?
I look to Tim, my heart pounding faster than ever, my mind fighting what I suddenly want to be true, much too much.
‘I’ve watched you in the pictures for years, thinking you had a look of her,’ he says. ‘I told Imogen that. It’s your eyes.’Windows to your soul. ‘Your smile.’ He smiles himself, with infinite sadness. ‘Until I read your letter, I never imagined it could be anything but coincidence.’
‘But it’s not a coincidence?’ I say, desperately.
‘No.’ His dark gaze swims. ‘It’s not.’
The baby was a girl.
She arrived, in the maternity wing of East Grinstead’s cottage hospital, eight-and-a-half months after the sultry August morning Iris and Robbie had been so careless in their cottage, and a month before D-Day, filling the sun-filled dawn with her cry.
Iris held her. She held her for hours, looking into her eyes,windows to her soul,wondering if it was possible that she might actually be feeling the first shattered parts of her heart starting to knit back together. Life, the entire business of living, still felt overwhelming – more so, now that she had this child,their daughter, to look after – but she was, at last, grateful that she was still here to do it.
Happy, even, that when Heaton had offered to drive her home that morning, she hadn’t said no.
Tim came to see them that afternoon, arriving with the firstclang of the visiting bell. He’d only recently had another graft, and his face was shrouded in bandages.
‘I don’t want to scare her,’ he said, cradling Robbie’s daughter in his arms.
‘You won’t scare her,’ said Iris.
‘She’s perfect.’
‘Isn’t she?’
‘What will you call her?’
‘Clara,’ said Iris, watching her watching Tim: intent, but not afraid. ‘For Clare, but different enough that she’ll only ever be herself.’
