“But if you don’t know what you want, you can’t reach for it.”
She wanted to tell him that reaching hard for something you thought you must have, having it nearly in your grasp, and risking all to get it, could lead you straight to the heart of utter ruin.
But what would Isabel Crofton know of that?
“Want to meet in Oxford for the New Year?” he asked.
Emmy coughed to hide the breath he had stolen from her.
“I don’t mean at a hotel, Isabel. I mean at a party. A friend of mine in London has family there. It would be fun.”
Her eyes were watering at the curious exchange of air and breath and voice taking place in her throat.
“Maybe,” was all she could say.
But Mac did not make it to the party in Oxford on New Year’s. London was bombed two days before New Year’s Eve with such intensity that a firestorm swept across the city and nearly swallowed the East End whole. Five days passed before Mac rang Emmy and told her he was all right.
And so began 1941, the second year of the war.
Twenty-nine
THEoccupants of Thistle House spent 1941 adjusting to the odd sense of subtraction that was the war. Every day it seemed there was the loss of some small thing, like no more lemon curd or brass cleaner or toilet paper. Heeding the national call to plant a victory garden, Charlotte and Emmy doubled the size of the vegetable patch that spring, and they cared for it and the orchard trees all summer. They harvested, canned, and distributed in the fall and winter, making many trips to Moreton in Charlotte’s coughing blue car with crates of food to be sent to the cities where the need for food was greatest. Hugh and Philip were the caretakers of the chickens and roosters, and they walked to town every morning on their way to school with two dozen eggs that Charlotte gave away. The reports from London and beyond tutored everyone to keep a perpetual eye to the sky as itseemed the enemy would soon be screaming over Gloucestershire as it had elsewhere and rain down its wrath.
An RAF airbase had been constructed near Moreton and a fleet of Wellington bombers was now taking off and landing only a few miles away, a new development that the boys loved as much as Emmy hated. She had heard enough of planes.
Emmy kept to herself and the house. She ventured out now and then to meet Mac in Oxford, but only in the company of other people. As the second year of the war ended and 1942 began, Mac made it clear he was hoping for more than just friendship from Emmy. He wanted to date her, for lack of a better word. Did anyone still date? Did the war allow for that? Emmy didn’t know. And she didn’t want to know. She was afraid to give her heart over to Mac. He assured her more than once that he didn’t just want to take her to his bed. He also wanted the deeper emotional intimacy that a loving, caring physical relationship would bring to what he hoped was a very serious friendship with potential for much more. As the buried Emmeline within her aged, Emmy became aware of a pounding ache to be desired in that way. But how could she give herself body and soul to a man who had no idea she was an imposter?
Emmy finally told Mac she was not the woman for him, not the one he wanted to be with inthatway, but that she very much treasured his friendship. And she did. He was still the only friend she had or wanted as she had purposely kept her circle of loved ones small. Charlotte. Rose. Hugh. Philip. Mac. No one else.
An awkward few months followed after that conversation when Mac didn’t ring her up. She started to thinkher circle was down to four. But in the end, Mac agreed to friendship only, if that was what she wanted. He told Emmy he understood the war kept her from risking her heart on love, but that maybe when it ended, she would feel differently.
Emmy let him think what he wanted as it kept him from abandoning her completely. Perhaps shewouldfeel differently in the distant future. She wanted to believe that maybe she would.
Mac did not come for Christmas dinner in 1942. Everything had changed for Americans, even those stationed abroad. Pearl Harbor had been bombed by Japan, and the United States had entered a war that now stretched around the globe.
The next two years were spent in a mindless routine, of “mend and make do” and hoping against hope that the forces united against the Allies would break and the beast be rendered powerless. As 1944 came to a close, it began to seem possible that the dark hand of war might lift.
It was wonderful to imagine that the madness and violence would end, peace would be restored, and simple joys like sugar and ham and nuts would find their way back to the pantry at Thistle House. And yet Emmy didn’t want her time there to end. There was nothing for her in London, and she had given up hope of finding out what had happened to Julia, though whenever she saw a blond little girl, she did a double take. Emmy did not know what Isabel Crofton could do with a life not dictated by war. She didn’t know what she was capable of doing as Isabel other than surviving.
Mac was only so much help in this regard. He and Emmy had come to an understanding of sorts. She told him she couldn’t see ever leaving the Cotswolds; it wasas if she was tethered to the area now. And he could not wait for the war to end so that he could return to America. They still enjoyed each other’s company, but he no longer made romantic overtures toward her. What was the purpose? Emmy could see there was no future for them as a couple.
Mac began to see other women: a nurse he met at a triage center, a secretary he encountered at a cocktail lounge, a ballet dancer with whom he huddled in a Tube station during an air raid. He didn’t parade them in front of Emmy, but he wanted her to know about them so that she would not find out another way. He did come for Christmas that year, but their easy camaraderie had been dealt a blow when she rejected his deeper affections. Mac was still her friend, but it was different. It was hard to describe how other than there was no expectancy. Nothing to anticipate.
The war was waning. Emmy’s relationship with Mac was waning. Her time at Thistle House was waning. If she just stood still, would the walls of her existence fade to gossamer and then to nothing? Would she disappear into whatever world Julia had been spirited away to when she vanished?
Emmy had called herself Isabel for four years. No one knew her as Emmy except for Mrs. Howell in Moreton, and she had long since stopped paying Emmy any mind since she had aged out of the evacuation scheme for children several years earlier. And while at the beginning the ladies in Stow who knew Charlotte best also knew that Isabel’s real name was Emmy, they seemed to forget it as the years passed. Isabel had proved to be a helpful companion to the aging sisters and their evacuees. And Emmy surmised that even though she seemedstandoffish whenever she had to be in town, these women chalked it up to what the war had taken from her—a sister and a mother. So what if the Londoner wanted to be called Isabel.
Which was why on February 11, 1945, a cold, windy day, Emmy was surprised to receive a thick envelope in the post from Mrs. Howell, addressed to Isabel Crofton née Emmeline Downtree.
Hugh, just turned twelve, had collected the post that morning from the box at the driveway. He’d dropped it into the empty fruit bowl on the kitchen table on his way outside to work on a sailboat of tree bark that he and Philip were making at the edge of the pond.
Emmy saw the thick envelope peeking out from behind the smaller bills and letters and pulled on it to see what it was.
That Mrs. Howell would use Emmy’s former name so publicly annoyed her for only a second, for that was the time it took Emmy to realize that perhaps inside the envelope there was news of Julia. She brought the envelope into the privy before anyone saw her with it so that she could open it and deal with its contents in private.
Emmy’s hands were shaking as she slit the letter open and withdrew a sheet of paper and another sealed envelope. The piece of paper—a note signed by Mrs. Howell—notified her that a certified letter that had been crisscrossing the south of England had finally found its way to Emmy. Mrs. Howell hoped that it was good news.
Emmy laid the letter down on the sink and turned the other envelope over. It was addressed to Emmeline Downtree, at the old address in Whitechapel. The return address was a law firm in Chelsea.
