I'll Be Seeing You (6 page)

‘I should think so. Not much point hanging around, is there?'

‘They may think it's better to wait until the spring.'

‘It'd have to be looked after and we're both busy with other things. Best to get on with it. When will you go back to London?'

‘Probably the day after – I need to do some work. The students have said they'll keep an eye on things for us and the agents can have a key.'

‘That other business . . . Ma's letter. Much the best, Ju, if you forget all about it.'

‘Easier said than done, as I'm discovering,' I said drily. ‘And it's not your paternity that's in question, Drew. Is it?'

‘I know, but there's no sense upsetting yourself when it's almost certainly not true.'

‘Oh, I think it's true all right. I found their marriage certificate in the desk. I was a very premature baby indeed.'

‘Still doesn't prove anything. Maybe they jumped the gun.'

‘Unlikely, I'd say, wouldn't you? Not Da's style at all. By the way, Ma left a sketchbook too – I came across it in the bottom drawer of her desk.'

‘Oh? I didn't know she could draw.'

‘She couldn't. She was hopeless. Da couldn't either. Remember his matchstick people? It must have been the Yank's. They're sketches of life on an American wartime airfield. Good ones, as a matter of fact. Remember what Ma said in the letter – that I get my talent from him?'

‘Not necessarily. It might have come from a grandparent, or a great. Talent can skip generations.'

‘Odd it skipped to me, not to you. And that I missed out completely on the maths. Don't you think?'

‘Still no proof, Ju.'

‘It's funny,' I said. ‘We've swopped places, Drew. At the start, you were telling me it could be true while I was denying it. Now, it's the other way round.'

‘Well, I was wrong before.'

I said, ‘No you weren't. She left a record too.'

‘A record? What sort of record?'

‘The kind you play. An old 78. The St Hilda students say she played it quite often on the old radiogram.'

‘I expect she liked it.'

‘I'd say it was rather more than that. I think it meant something very special to her. Do you mind if I have the radiogram, by the way? It's rather a nice old thing.'

‘God, no.' He frowned. ‘Ju, none of this makes any difference to us, you know.'

‘You mean that we might only be half a brother and half a sister? No, of course it doesn't, Drew. Not in the slightest. You didn't say anything to Sonia, did you?'

‘Definitely not.'

‘Because she asked me if something was wrong.'

‘Well, she smelled a rat. You know what she's like. A sixth sense. She'd've been burned as a witch two hundred years ago.'

‘I'm not telling Flavia, by the way. Not yet, anyway.'

‘Wise decision.' He took off his glasses and polished them hard with his handkerchief. I could see that he was still worried. ‘You really
ought
to forget all about it, Ju. It could destroy your peace of mind, if you're not careful.'

‘I can't forget it. You see, I'm curious now.
Very
curious. If some Yank's my father, I want to find out more about him.'

‘I don't see how you can. You've only got that old photograph and you don't even know for sure which one he is.'

‘The one you pointed out. He's obviously the pilot.'

He put the glasses back on and looked at me. ‘It would be almost impossible to trace him without a name. You realize that?'

‘I know,' I said. ‘But I'm going to try.'

Later on, when I was alone, I read the letter that Aunt Primrose had given to me. She'd been right about there being no mention of the station – but there was a date: 14th February 1943.

I put the letter back in the envelope, disappointed. No mention of the pilot. No helpful clues at all in the letter, except, perhaps, one. A local pub called the Mad Monk. With such an unusual name, it should be possible to track down the Suffolk village and, therefore, the airfield, close by. It wasn't much to go on, but it was a start.

I drove back to London two days later, having left the Oxford house in the hands of the estate agents and made removal arrangements for the bureau and the old radiogram and some boxes of books and pictures. The semi-detached house that I had bought with the divorce settlement was in Putney, not far from the river. When I had first moved in, the tree-lined street had been run-down and seedy, the house cheap, but since then the other houses had been bought up and done up and now cost several times the price I had paid.

I found a parking place, with difficulty – the street being car-lined now as well as tree-lined. As I let myself in, the drone of some afternoon TV programme downstairs told me that Callum was at home ‘resting'. I collected my post from the hall table and went on to my flat upstairs: bedroom, sitting room, kitchen, bathroom and, in the attic above, my studio.

The attic had attracted me to the house originally and kept me there ever since. In the beginning it had been nothing more than a loft, accessed through a trapdoor in the ceiling by an expanding ladder. The cold-water tank had gurgled away in one corner and there had been a cobwebbed collection of rubbish – boxes and boxes of empty jam jars, leftover rolls of hideous linoleum and fruit-frieze wallpaper, moth- and mouse-eaten carpeting. But as soon as I saw it from the top of the ladder, probing with a torch beam into the blackness, I knew what it could become. The loft extended the whole length and breadth of the roof, the ceiling easily high enough for a person to stand upright and the floor sound.

The ladder was eventually replaced by a spiral staircase, the rubbish was cleared away, the water cistern boarded in, and a dormer window inserted into the north side of the roof, together with two Velux skylights. Electricity, central heating and a phone line were extended upwards, and running water to a nice old sink that I had rescued from the garden, while the spaces between the roof beams were filled in with plasterboard and painted white. I bought sisal matting for the floor, a big trestle table, a comfortable office chair that could be adjusted to different heights, a side table, bookshelves, cupboards, lamps . . . and, hey presto, the loft became my studio. I could work up there for hours, undisturbed, with the London sparrows and the pigeons for company and a wonderful view over chimney pots and tree tops all the way down to the river.

I had brought a bundle of unopened letters of condolence with me from Oxford and there were several more among the post from the hall table. I took them all into the sitting room. The letters invariably made me weep: so many kind words, so much sympathy, so much affection expressed for my mother, and so many good memories told of her. They were intended to console and they did, but they also made hard reading. Among them was one from the ex-WAAF who had been at the funeral. There was an address in Leeds and a name at the bottom: Joyce Atkins.

I found her phone number through Directory Enquiries. She sounded surprised that I'd called her but I invented the excuse of trying to trace another old wartime friend of Ma's.

‘She served on the same station in Suffolk as her, before the Americans arrived. I hoped you might be able to tell me the name of it.'

‘I'm sorry . . . I just can't remember, you know. It was a nice sort of name – I do know that. The village name, I suppose.'

‘Apparently, the local pub was called the Mad Monk.'

‘Was it? What an odd name for a pub! I've never been to Suffolk myself – it's a bit too much off the beaten track.'

I persisted. ‘You said my mother wrote to you occasionally. Perhaps the name of her station would have been on her letters.'

‘Oh, I'm afraid those would have been thrown out years ago. My late husband was never keen on a lot of clutter. He used to insist on regular clear-outs of everything. He always said it was a fire risk.'

I went on doggedly. ‘You mentioned that she met an American she was rather keen on.'

‘Did I? Oh, yes. A pilot, I think he was. I don't think she ever told me his name. He was killed, though – I'm sure of that. A lot of the American air crew were, you know, especially when they first came over. The Luftwaffe fighters used to shoot them down like flies, before they got the Mustangs to escort them. Were you hoping to trace him, too?'

‘I was just curious. I don't seem to know anything about my mother's service life. It's rather a pity.'

‘Well, some people never stop going on about what they did in the war – half of it invented, of course – and others, like your mother, aren't the sort to say anything much. The WAAF did a wonderful job, you know, and
I
don't mind saying it. They made all the difference to the RAF. Well, so did the women in
all
the services, but it's never been properly acknowledged. No statues, or anything like that.' A deep sigh. ‘You might be able to trace that WAAF through the MOD records, if you've got her name. They won't let you have her address but they'd let her know you'd like to get in touch, and leave it up to her. It's worth a try.'

‘Thank you.'

‘Lucky it's not the American you're after. One WAAF I knew wanted to find a GI she'd got engaged to during the war, but she never did. Their service people wouldn't help her at all. Quite nasty to her about it. She gave up in the end – probably just as well. He can't have been very keen, can he?'

‘Do you still keep in touch with other ex-WAAFs?'

‘One or two. I used to go to the reunions, but I can't be bothered any more. There aren't many of the WAAFs I knew still attending. A lot of the others who go are post-war and don't know anything about those days, though they try to pretend they do.'

‘If you should happen to come across anyone who knew my mother, would you let me know?'

‘Of course I will. And if I ever remember the name of that place in Suffolk I'll be sure to tell you.'

I went up to the studio and tried to get down to the work waiting for me on the trestle table: watercolour illustrations for a children's book of nursery rhymes. I had been delighted with the commission – the first of its kind for me – and had settled down happily to put new pictures to old favourites from my own childhood. I had a collection of old toys that I often used as models. Some of them were my own, kept from my childhood, and others I had found abandoned in dusty corners of junk shops or charity shops or at jumble sales. Teddies, dolls, golliwogs, dogs, elephants . . . anything that tugged at my heartstrings. I was using a particularly fine old knitted frog dressed in a green tailcoat and yellow waistcoat as a model for ‘A Frog he would A-wooing Go'. I had rescued him from the bottom of an Oxfam bin and now I reassembled water, brushes and paints to continue with the hopeful suitor and his encounters with Mr Rat, Mrs Mousey, a Cat and her Kittens, and the lily-white Duck.

The work absorbed me for a time. Mark had been right, of course, about small children focusing so intently on the pictures. Certain images, as we discover, can remain fixed somewhere in the mind's eye for ever, and seeing a favourite illustration again as an adult, years and years later, brings back our childhood like magic. Cosy cuteness is not necessarily a requirement. The bunnies have their place but children can take the rough with the smooth – witches being shoved into ovens, cats pouncing on mice, foxes devouring hens, and, in this particular case, poor Froggy being gobbled up by the lily-white Duck, one webbed foot left sticking forlornly out of the duck's yellow beak.

I worked on during the afternoon, mixing colours, rinsing and wiping brushes, putting paint to paper. As it grew darker, I switched on the daylight lamp beside the table. Normally, I would have continued until early evening, but I found myself starting to lose concentration, my mind wandering from the work in hand. I took a break, made a mug of coffee and drank it, standing at the dormer window. It was almost dark, street lamps lit, lights glowing at other windows, the river gleaming blackly through bare trees, here and there white patches of slushy London snow.