Another letter clearly sent to a much younger Emma includes a copy of a Spanish poem about a goat trying to find its way to the sea. Next is a fatter envelope, on the outside of which her grandmother added an afterthought in English,Ask your Papa to read this to you, I wrote it in a hurry in Spanish.
Emma pulls the letter out, and with it comes a photograph slipped between the sheets of a second piece of paper.
She stops breathing.
She is looking at a black and white photograph of four figures on the deck of a ship. She recognises the couple from old photo albums as her great-grandparents. The man holds the hand of a child who must be Granny Maria– her eyes were always so merry. The little girl is staring up at a young woman, her hand held in hers.
The young woman is Violet Jessop.
There is no mistaking her. She is in a stewardess’s uniform and is smiling at the camera. She has one hand up, shielding her eyes against the sun.
Emma gulps in a huge breath of air. She turns the photo over and sees the date– yes, Granny Maria would have been about three. There is a handwritten note on the back, too. It isn’t her grandmother’s handwriting– she knows that. Was it her great-grandmother who wrote this?
The girl who shared the secret of pillow post with us. What a surprise! We thought she had died.
Pillow post? Emma has so long associated pillow post with her father that she had half forgotten Granny Maria used it, too, leaving letters under her pillow when she came to stay. She had called it pillow post, too, always using the English translation– maybe liking the sound of the language? Perhaps phrasing it the way it had been said to her?
Emma opens the letter and starts reading her grandmother’s letter:
Dearest Emma,
You asked me in your last letter what I was like when I was little, so I thought you would like to see this photo . Here I am! And what a lot of hair I had, don’t you think? I am in the picture with my parents, your great-grandparents. My father was a doctor and my mother a nurse. They met when their families spent a year in Argentina (ask your father to look that up in the Atlas for you).
The other person in the photograph is a stewardess who worked on the ship we were sailing on. My parents had a big surprise when they saw her, because they had known her a long time ago. They had last seen her when she was a little girl and was very ill in hospital. They had always thought she had not got better.
Emma smiles as she reads this, knowing Granny Maria hadn’t wanted to write that the girl might have died.
But she did get better and when they saw her again, they asked if they could take a photograph of her. And here it is.
When she was ill in hospital as a little girl, she told my parents about pillow post. She said it was a game, that they could hide letters to each other under her pillow. They did, and guess what? They fell in love!
I must go now,mi niña, and get to the post, but I send you lots of love.
Emma stares at the photo and letter in her hands. What was it Alistair had said about Violet as a little girl? That she had been ill and hidden love letters between a doctor and nurse.
The paper of Granny Maria’s letter feels brittle in her fingers. She cannot remember this letter, at all. She looks at the date at the top of the letter. She would have been seven when she received it so perhaps that wasn’t surprising. But something about that photograph must have stayed with her. Shehadrecognised Violet when she saw her.
‘Oh, Violet, Ididknow you,’ Emma says out loud, smiling at the young woman in the picture.
She reaches out and gently touches her grandmother’s hand where it held Violet’s. All these years she has been using pillow post, and telling others about it, she never thought about where the idea came from. She was looking for a connection to Violet through blood and genes, and yet it was there all the time in an idea passed on from her, as she has passed it on to others.
She thinks of Will, of Tamas, and Betty’s son, Ben– writing to his son, Zac, a little boy confused and upset by the arrival of a baby sister. Hadn’t these people been helped by the spread of a simple idea– the idea of how to communicate with someone you loved when it felt like the spoken word wasn’t enough, or when you just couldn’t say those words. An idea passed on to her great-grandparents by Violet Jessop.
She wonders how far and wide that simple idea has been spread by others in their turn. She knows from her scientific work how viruses and disease could spread, but couldn’t good things spread, too?
Her mind buzzing, Emma absentmindedly picks up the thin piece of paper that was wrapped around the photograph. It is still marked by the creases made by a little girl’s hospital pillow.
Dr Paulo Garcia
Buenos Aires. 12th August 1898
My love, Christina,
This will be my last letter to you. I cannot stay any longer in a place where you are promised to another and our families are lined up against us like an armed band. I do not blame them– your fiancé can offer riches and status that I will never possess. My father believes that by continuing to visit you, I dishonour our family name.
I write this in the garden and the scent of the freesias distracts me. I could never mistake that clean, sweetness for any other flower. I will always recognise it, as my heart recognised you when I first saw you.
I see our go-between in her bed under the trees. She is so sick, that little one– I see her fading, disappearing. One day, with the flutter of a white sheet, she will be gone. Do you think I was wrong to move her bed into the garden among the flowers?
