‘Once in a while,’ I say, and smile too, through the ache in my cheeks.
‘Perhaps the actress will pay you a visit,’comes Iris’s echo.
‘She joked that the actress would come to see me,’ says Tim. ‘She told me that I had to get through the war, because you’d need me to help you.’ His face trembles with emotion. ‘It’s you I need to help me, though.’ His gaze holds mine. ‘Can you? Please? Make it right, like you said in your letter?’
‘Of course I can,’ I say, and don’t need to ask him how he wants me to make it right.
It’s not what I wanted when I wrote him my letter.
It’s cutting me in two, accepting that I really can’t save any of them.
But I have now accepted it.
I’ve seen it: the final truth I’ve been searching for, and which Ellen was at such pains to convince me of.
On this stage, forourpresent, what’s past is past. The only true agency I now have is in shaping what comes next.
And I can give Tim some peace at last.
Rewrite his ending.
‘How should we start?’ I ask.
‘With a swim,’ he says, so quickly I can tell he has it all worked out. I think perhaps he has for decades. ‘All of them together. Not alone.’
‘Not alone,’ I agree. ‘Then, a boat?’
‘A German boat.’
‘And a kind officer?’ I guess.
‘Yes,’ he tells me, his body sagging with relief. ‘He takes the boys prisoner. But Ames escapes and finds his way to Mabel in France.’
‘They remain hidden,’ I say, burying my knowledge of Mabel’s true end, just before D-Day, care of a Gestapo noose. ‘Safe.’
‘Safe,’ Tim echoes. ‘Rob and the others get taken to a camp in Germany. They’re liberated in 1945.’
‘Like Fred,’ I say, thinking now of 96’s first group captain, who went down during the Battle of the Ruhr, and came back from the dead at the end of the war, delighting his wife and daughter by suddenly appearing in Kent, at his wife’s parents’ home.
‘Just like Fred,’ says Tim, letting more tears go. ‘Rob comes back to England, looking for Iris and Clara.’
‘I can see him now,’ I say, my own eyes stinging with the vividness of the image. ‘Iris has taken Clara to Doverley, to see the cottage … ’
‘Yes,’ Tim says, unsurprised that I know about it.
And I see the cottage too: not in ruins, crumbled by weather and time, but still whole, its front path dappled by soft spring sunshine.
‘A little girl in the village tells Robbie where they are,’ I say, thinking of my gran as a child in Heaton, certain she’d want to play this role. ‘He sets off, and finds them in the cottage’s garden.’
‘He surprises them,’ says Tim.
And neither of us go on.
We don’t need to put words to what Robbie says next.
We both know.
I can’t hear it, because it never happened.
