Facing the Light (18 page)

Bertie the cat pushed at the half-open door and came into the room. He considered possible places to settle and chose Leonora's lap. ‘Come on, then, Bertie,' she said. ‘Let's sit here for a minute.' She stroked the pale orange fur and suddenly remembered Mr Nibs, the black and white cat who'd lived at Willow Court during the war and just after it. Nanny Mouse had named him. Leonora closed her eyes and listened to the silence. No one would miss her if she stayed here for a while. If only it weren't so cold.

The fire in the drawing room was making no difference at all. Flames leapt and blazed and struggled to heat more than the space immediately around the hearth, but it was so cold that Leonora could see her own breath rising like white ribbons and drifting about in front of her face. Mr Nibs, the cat, hardly moved from the rug directly in front of the flames. He was elderly now, and spent most of his time asleep.

Leonora was sitting at the window, looking out at the snowy garden. The inside of every pane had a border of lacy frost around it, and she was wearing two cardigans and some woolly socks over her stockings, which made her feel like a child again. On her hands, the knitted gloves she wore in order to avoid freezing up entirely had their fingers cut off, but drawing was still rather difficult. She held the sheet of paper down on the hard cover of her atlas with one hand and sketched with the other.

The terrace steps, the stone urns, and the icy lawn in the background looked inadequate on the page, not what she wanted them to be like at all. Cross-hatching. Perhaps that would help to make shadows appear in the right places, make everything seem more solid. She began to stroke the pencil again and again over the paper.

Just before lunch was the best part of the day for drawing. Today, a thin, pale light came from a sun that seemed drained of every bit of its warmth. Each blade of grass was crusted with white; the trees were stiff, and
their leafless branches stood out black against the iron-grey sky. By tea time, darkness covered everything, and there was nothing to do except go to bed early and shiver under the blankets, trying to remember what spring was like, and praying for it to come.

Leonora's father sat very near the fire, wrapped in a shawl. She could feel his presence behind her, even though he wasn't saying anything. He spoke very little at the best of times and these times were certainly not the best. Not good at all, in fact. Daddy had grown more and more cross and quiet lately and whatever Leonora did to try and cheer him up didn't help. He stared at her sometimes as though he didn't quite remember who she was. His eyes were as blue as they'd ever been, but his hair was white now. When had it happened? Leonora wasn't quite sure. She still thought of her father as dark and handsome, and catching sight of him these days, stooped, and much slower on his feet than he used to be, shocked and saddened her.

We must be the only people in the whole country, she thought, who miss the war. Willow Court had been a convalescent home for officers, and for five years the drawing room was a dormitory and the corridors had been full of soldiers, laughing, shouting, groaning sometimes because of the pain of their wounds, but in any case bringing some life to the house.

Leonora was fourteen in 1941 when the iron bedsteads were brought in. The servants had rolled up the carpets, and taken all the pictures off the walls, and moved them upstairs to the Studio. No one had put them back, and now the drawing room looked strangely bare and chilly with only picture-shaped spaces on every wall, and no colour anywhere. The carpets were in place, and some of the chairs and the sofa, but desert-like space stretched between one piece of furniture and the next. Leonora
often mentioned the paintings and asked for them to be rehung, but Ethan Walsh was having none of it.

‘Nothing but dust-traps, those pictures,' he'd say. ‘Much better off where they are.'

‘But, Daddy, aren't you proud of them? Don't you want everyone to see them? To admire them?'

He would look at her most strangely then, and say, ‘I'm better off without them. And so are you.'

Leonora sometimes opened her mouth to object; to say
how could anyone be better off with nothing to look at on their walls?
but her courage would fail her and she said nothing.

She herself had not been up to the Studio for years and years. Not since she was a little girl. She'd almost forgotten those days, but she remembered that Ethan had caught her up there and frightened her so much that she'd tried to put all thoughts of the room (and, with it, her father's painting) out of her mind. Thinking about it now, she realized with a shock that he hadn't actually produced anything since that time. Could that be? Leonora racked her brain to think of something, some sketch or canvas – anything at all really – that would indicate her father was still working. She couldn't remember a single instance.

Of course, the war had stopped a lot of people from going about their normal lives, but surely she had some memory of her father working before the war? No, there was nothing. She was almost sure he was no longer painting.
Almost
, because of course it was possible that he crept up to the Studio when she was asleep and worked away there through the night, but she doubted it. One of the servants would have said something. No, the sad truth was that his wife's death and the coming of war had combined to end Ethan Walsh's career. He'd never
had
to paint for a living, because the money left to him by his father in stocks and shares made certain that he
always had an income. He boasted occasionally that his pictures were worth a fortune, but as he never tried to sell any of them, Leonora suspected that this was one of his fantasies.

The war had been in the background for all the years that she was growing up. The fighting, the battles, the bombs and fires and ruined buildings were all far away, so far that it had been hard for her to imagine them, even though she'd listened every night with Daddy and Nanny Mouse to the news on the wireless.

At first, when the wounded soldiers arrived, she couldn't bear to look at some of their injuries. Missing legs and arms in particular brought horror to her dreams and she woke sweating and disgusted and ashamed that she could be so squeamish when the soldiers were so brave. They laughed a great deal and liked chatting to her whenever she came into the ward. That was what the nursing staff called the drawing room, and where the men went at first while they needed most care. Later, when they were on the mend, they moved up into some of the bigger bedrooms.

There was a billiard table in the dining room, and when the weather was fine the terrace was crowded with wheelchairs, and crutches propped up against the wall while their owners lounged on benches in the sun, getting better.

Leonora had loved the house when it was full of soldiers. They'd all liked her and made a fuss of her.

‘You remind them of their own children, I dare say,' Nanny Mouse remarked.

‘They're not much older than I am, some of them,' Leonora answered.

‘Don't go getting ideas, young lady.' Nanny Mouse was frowning. ‘They're far from home, most of them, and lonely. Don't go leading them on, now. Very easily led, young men are.'

‘You're being silly,' Leonora said, blushing. ‘They don't think of me in a sweetheart sort of way at all. Lieutenant Gawsworth said I reminded him of his little sister.'

Nanny sniffed and Leonora had changed the subject. Part of what she'd liked about the men was the admiration she saw in their eyes. She had gone to a girls' grammar school where she didn't have very many close friends, because of the shyness that her contemporaries thought of as stand-offishness, but she did have two special friends who lived nearby, Bunny Forster and Grace Wendell. They were forever grumbling about their looks (
my hair is too curly, my legs are too short, just look at my complexion
 …) and Leonora quickly realized that it was the done thing to pretend you weren't pretty even if you were.

And I was, she thought. A robin had appeared on the terrace, and Leonora quickly sketched it in. I
was
pretty and I still am. I have good skin and Daddy's green-blue eyes and my hair is as dark and shiny as his used to be. Perhaps pretty's the wrong word.
Gorgeous
. Peter used to say that. Quite ridiculous. Leonora blinked. I mustn't think about Peter, she said to herself. Not any more. He's not coming back. It's more than three years since I had a letter from him and it's five years since I last saw him. He could have decided he wants nothing more to do with me, because he's found someone more interesting. Someone he loves better than he loves me.

Leonora felt dreadfully guilty, but secretly she preferred the hideous option of Peter's death in action, and whenever the idea of that crossed her mind, she quickly prayed, oh, God, don't listen. I don't mean it. Please don't let him be dead.

She kept the letters he'd written to her, dozens of them, in an old biscuit tin, and every night before she fell asleep, she opened it and took out one or another of
Peter's short messages to read to herself before she settled down to sleep. The letters were a secret from Daddy, of course. They would arrive in envelopes addressed to Nanny Mouse, who pretended to be slightly disapproving, but Leonora knew she thought the correspondence romantic. Perhaps Daddy wouldn't have minded a soldier writing to his daughter, but she hadn't felt she could take the risk of arousing his anger. What if he'd forbidden her to write back? She would never have been able to defy him.

She smiled as she read. Peter wasn't a very good writer, but she'd rather have had his words than anyone else's in the world.

It won't be long before I come back to you, Leonora my darling … sometimes I close my eyes and imagine your face and that makes me feel better … can't say much but you know what I want to write, don't you?

Three of the letters were different from the others. Leonora had no idea why this should be so, and thought sometimes that Peter had been drunk when he'd written them, but it was as though something had been loosened inside him. She knew these messages by heart and wondered if the sensible thing to do would be to tear them up or burn them, but she could no more destroy them than take a pair of scissors to her own flesh. She'd hidden them in the dolls' house, under the carpet that her father had laid in every room. No one would ever think to look there. Even Leonora had to work at the tiny carpet tacks with a nail file to lift a corner and pull out the tightly folded paper.

I want to kiss you all over your white skin. I think of touching you, your breasts, your neck, and your mouth open under mine. I think of this until I'm nearly mad with wanting you. We'll wake up together, Leonora, and we won't be able to tell where one of our bodies ends and the other begins … there are other women here, my
darling, and I can't bear to look at them. It's you. Wait for me, Leonora. We will do nothing but make love all day long when I come back. All day long.

Stop it, she said to herself, shivering. Don't think of that now. Think of something else. She closed her eyes and allowed herself the luxury of hearing Peter's voice in her head. The first time he'd ever spoken to her she was in the scullery all by herself, peeling a few potatoes that Tyler, the ancient gardener, had managed to dig out of the kitchen garden.

‘I say, frightfully sorry, but I think I'm a bit lost. I'm looking for Sister Coleridge.'

‘I'll take you, shall I?' Leonora could see that the young man at the door was struggling with his kit-bag. His left arm was in a sling and his head was bandaged. ‘I can carry the bag, too, if you can't manage it.'

He'd smiled and his eyes that were somewhere between brown and grey looked straight into Leonora's and she felt something moving in her chest, a kind of fluttering under her ribcage. He had red hair. Leonora and Bunny and Grace had discussed red hair at great length and decided that it was lovely on girls but a little strange on boys. One look at this soldier had changed her mind for ever. He was tall and slim and he looked, Leonora thought, like a very handsome fox turned by some enchantment into a human being. His smile made his strangely coloured eyes light up and his teeth really did shine, white in a rather sun-tanned face. His copper-coloured hair fell over his brow, and he tossed his head to push it back because he couldn't use his hand.

‘No, I'll manage, thanks. Not such a crock that I have to have gorgeous young ladies carrying my kit. What's your name?'

‘I'm Leonora Walsh.'

‘And I'm Peter Simmonds. Delighted to meet you. Walsh. Isn't that the name of the chap who owns the
house? Decent of him to turn it over to the Army. Jolly decent, actually. Don't know if I'd relish having the military running wild over my ancestral acres.'

‘The men are very nice and don't run wild at all, really. They play the gramophone rather loudly, it's true, but I love the music. And sometimes they make rather a lot of noise at mealtimes, but I don't mind. Ethan Walsh is my father.'

‘Then he's a lucky man,' Peter said. He'd smiled at her as Sister Coleridge came out of the drawing room and made her way towards them.

‘I hope you get better very quickly,' Leonora said, and went back to peeling the potatoes.

‘Cheerio!' said Peter. ‘Thank you for your help.'

Leonora knew from that moment that she loved him. It wasn't quite love at first sight. She'd taken about two minutes to decide. I shan't tell anyone, she thought, not even Bunny and Grace, because they won't believe me. They'll say I've got a crush on him, or something. Everyone thinks children don't know what proper love means, but they do. Puppy love, calf love – grown-ups gave the feelings silly names to make them seem less important, less interesting, less true. She longed for Peter Simmonds to stay at Willow Court for months and months, and immediately felt guilty at wanting such a dreadful thing. Fancy wishing someone wouldn't get better! How selfish she was!