The day, this day, was still waiting to be written.
It was here though.
It was starting.
Nearly ten years after she and Robbie had so unwittingly said their last goodbye, they were finally going to see one another again.
The two of them had been just six years old when Robbie’s family had moved to Heaton in the autumn of 1924.
‘All the way from London,’ Mr Johnson, the village school master, had announced to the class on Robbie’s first day, and Iris had turned, peeking at Robbie, sat beside Tim Hobbs on the boys’ side of the room. She could still picture them as they’d been then: Tim with his knee socks around his ankles, and his thick blond hair, that his mother had hated cutting, out of control; Robbie, by contrast, had had his dark hair tamed into a neat side-parting, whilst his sturdy body had been packed into immaculately pressed shorts, waistcoat, and shirt. He’d appeared older than Tim, older than them all, with a shadow lurking in his blue eyes that had seemed to speak of things seen; mattersknown.There’d been a bruise purpling his cheekbone, too, but Iris hadn’t really marked that. She’d been too caught up in the wonder of Robbie having come from the mythical-seeming London.
It had felt like a foreign country to her. At that stage, the furthest she’d travelled from Heaton had been to York with her mum for birthday teas at Bettys. She’d only ever had one home, in the rented cottage she’d been born in. It hadn’t occurred to her that she’d ever have cause to leave that cottage – although she had, even then, had some vague awareness that the narrowness of her horizons had made her somehowlessin the eyes of others: those who’d owned the grand Georgian houses on the village green, and employed Iris’s mother to clean for them.
‘It’s honest work,’ Iris had once overheard her gran scolding her mother, when they’d both believed her in bed. But Iris had often used to resurface and listen to them talking in the candlelit kitchen, preferring to hover in the cottage’s cold hallway, close to her mum, than remain warm, and alone, upstairs. ‘You should be proud of yourself,’ her gran had gone on, and Iris,hidden in the hallway, had pictured her wagging her arthritis-twisted finger. ‘Proud of what you do for Iris and me.’
‘I wanted more, Mum … ’
‘Too late for that. You’re the one who lifted her skirts.’
Iris hadn’t really understood what her gran had meant by that. But she’d guessed it had probably had something to do with her father, an army colonel who she’d known better than to ever mention, but who she’d liked to think had been a courageous war hero – albeit one who’d failed to marry her mum before he’d disappeared in the trenches.
Iris hadn’t known many others with fathers who’d fought. Most of her classmates had been the children of farmers and miners, reserved from conscription. But Tim’s dad had served, as a surgeon in Flanders, where he’d vanished too. And Robbie’s father, like Iris’s, had been in the trenches, only hehadreturned, with a lame left leg, and an abhorrence of noise that had eventually made life in London – amongst so much else – intolerable to him. That was why, in 1924, when Lord Heaton had begun his doomed fight to hold on to Doverley by selling off the first of his estate’s assets – the dower house on the outskirts of Heaton – Robbie’s father had bought it. Iris hadn’t questioned where he’d sourced the money from. She had, after all, only been six. But eventually she’d learnt that everything he’d had, had come from Robbie’s beautiful, harrowed mother, who hadn’t often appeared anywhere around the village, because she’d had bruises, too.
Perhaps it had been Iris and Robbie’s shared awareness of coming from homes with guarded secrets that had first drawn them together. Or perhaps it had been that Iris’s tiny cottage, and Robbie’s dower house, had lain at opposite ends of the same winding lane, leading them to constantly run into one another on their ways to and from school. Or maybe it had simply been that Iris’s gran had always packed her jam sandwiches for lunch (Robbie’s favourite), where Robbie’s cook had most usually given him ham and cheese (Iris’s!), so they’d got into the habit of swapping. Looking back, Iris honestly couldn’t pinpoint the moment when she’d realised that this thoughtful, funny, sometimes naughty, always brave boy from London had started to become her best friend. What she did recall was that, on Robbie’s first day in Mr Johnson’s classroom, Mr Johnson had noticed the way that she’d been staring at Robbie and rapped her on the knuckles for being so brazen. Furious, mortified, she’d pulled a face at Mr Johnson behind his back, then, catching Robbie’s smile, beamed at him, her pain forgotten, just because that was the kind of smile Robbie had.
For five years, they’d run wild together, with Tim too.
He’d been Iris’s first friend.
‘Do you ever get sad about your dad, even though you never knew him?’ he’d asked Iris in the playground, the day they’d started school.
‘Sometimes,’ she’d said, taking his chubby hand in hers.
He’d smuggled her a boiled sweet after Mr Johnson’s knuckle-smacking, and nodded his approval when she’d snuck it into her mouth.
‘I made it last,’ she’d said at the end of that day, sticking out her tongue to show him the sliver still left.
‘You didn’t need to,’ he’d replied, grinning. ‘I’d have given you another.’ Then, ‘Want to come looking for conkers with Robbie and me?’
She had wanted to do that. She’d always relished playing with Tim. He’d used to dream up such elaborate dares: painting the feathers of the vicar’s chickens; using the same paint to renumber Heaton’s herds of sheep; removing the laces from Mr Johnson’s outdoor shoes; that kind of thing. His home had been one of those on the green, but his mum had had live-in help, so Iris’s mother had never worked for her. Even if she had,Iris knew Tim wouldn’t have made anything of it. Permanently muddy, always the first to race from the classroom when the bell rang – his pockets stuffed with those boiled sweets, given to him by his mother – all he’d cared about was having fun. That, and talking with Iris from time to time about their dads.
He’d carried a picture of his in his pocket, along with his sweets.
‘I’m sorry you don’t have a photo,’ he’d said to Iris, one rainy Saturday, when they’d been waiting on Iris’s front step for Robbie. ‘Do you think your mum might ever tell you his name?’
‘No,’ Iris had said, kicking her heel at a loose rock. ‘It makes her upset to talk about him.’
‘My mum likes talking about my dad.’
‘Maybe because he remembered to marry her. And gave you your house.’
‘Who gave you your house?’
‘No one. We pay to borrow it from Lord Heaton.’
‘Oh.’ Tim had looked towards Doverley. ‘Wasn’t he a colonel in the war, too?’
‘Just a silly show one, my gran says.’ Iris had shrugged. ‘He never went to France like our dads.’
