Jubilee
Authors: Eliza Graham
Jubilee
PAN BOOKS
Rachel
Silver Jubilee day, 1977, and June 2002.
By the time the kitchen clock struck seven I knew that my cousin wouldn’t be coming back. I abandoned my rehearsal of the cool response I’d planned for her return:
I always knew you were just mucking about, Jess . . .
While we waited for the men to finish searching the hedgerows and the white snaky curve of the Ridgeway path above us, I watched my aunt. Evie sat at the kitchen table twisting the fabric belt
of her new dress as though she was trying to wring the anxiety out of herself. She caught me staring at her and managed to twist her features into something halfway to a smile. This attempt to
reassure me made me feel even more frightened. ‘Come back!’ I shouted silently at my cousin. ‘It’s not a game any more.’
I was still clutching my Silver Jubilee mug with its Queen’s head and coat of arms. I wished I could go upstairs and put the mug away but I felt bound to stay here at the table with my
aunt, as though any movement could jinx the search for Jessamy. We sat in silence, listening to the kitchen clock tick-tocking until the noise seemed to drill itself into my chest.
‘I’m going out,’ I blurted out after five more minutes had passed. ‘I’m going to check the stables again.’ I put down the mug and rose.
Evie gave a start. ‘No.’ She reached across and grabbed my wrist. ‘Stay there.’
I wriggled my wrist free. ‘Let me. Please.’
She ran her hands over her face. ‘Rachel, we’ve looked a dozen times. We’ve been all over the farm.’
‘There are places we hide . . .’
‘I know them all. The elm the lightning hollowed out.’ She sounded almost fierce. ‘The little hollows in the sheep field. Your father and I used to hide in them,
too.’
She gave another of the strained smiles. ‘We’ve combed this place, every inch. And you and I need to stay here, in case she comes back. Imagine if she returned, cold, tired, scared .
. .’ Her voice cracked a little on the last word. ‘And there was nobody here.’
I stared hard at the kitchen table. Jessamy and I had been making Union Jacks out of red, white and blue Plasticine and they still sat at the end of the table. I reached across for one of them
and squashed it in my hand. Some of the blue Plasticine squelched into the white strips. I clenched my fist again. The red ran into the white and now it didn’t look like a flag at all. I kept
on squeezing it until I held a dirty grey ball in my palm. ‘We need to check on the ponies,’ I said.
She put a hand to her mouth. In the field outside the house stood a new chestnut, a surprise for Jessamy. Evie had arranged for him to arrive while we were at the Jubilee party.
Eventually I must have fallen asleep, the spoiled Plasticine still in my hand, because I came to with my head resting on the oak table. ‘. . . again in daylight,’ a man was
saying.
‘Thank you.’ Evie’s voice sounded like a stranger’s: polite, detached.
But in the morning they found only half a dozen deflated Jubilee balloons and some crumpled Union Jack paper napkins, blown into ditches and hedges.
I returned to Winter’s Copse six weeks after the Silver Jubilee party, when my summer holidays began. My father, Evie’s twin brother, Charlie, had done what he
could to protect me from the newspaper and television coverage of the disappearance but I’d caught a few glimpses of myself, huddled behind Evie as she stood in the kitchen doorway, before
Dad could switch off the television. ‘Craven villagers are still perplexed by the disappearance of Jessamy Winter,’ the reporter started.
Whenever I could escape the insistent tones of a school teacher I let my cousin’s image drift back into my mind.
This evening Evie was making me tea: scrambled eggs on toast, and I was laying the table. I set three places. Evie turned from the range with the saucepan of eggs, and her eyes widened at the
sight of the three table mats and sets of cutlery.
She let out a quiet moan. The saucepan in her hand dipped so that the yellow contents slopped on to the table. ‘Sorry,’ she said, raising her other hand to her mouth. ‘Oh God,
I’m sorry, Rachel. It’s just . . .’ The words seemed to jam in her throat. She rocked herself backwards and forwards; more of the scrambled egg spilled out of the pan, pattering
to the scrubbed kitchen floor.
It was then that the fact of Jessamy’s disappearance hit me with an almost physical violence. I stared at the stupid, wretched, third place I’d set and knew that she would never lift
the knife and fork, never drink from the water glass again. She’d never ride that new pony still waiting for her. It was my birthday next week and I was going to be ten. Jess wouldn’t
be there when I cut my cake. If there was a cake. Perhaps there would never be cakes again.
These days, in my job as a freelance marketing consultant, I write copy and do a bit of simple design work. I work with sophisticated photo enhancement programs on the
computer. It’s possible to excise an image and replace it with something else: an unwanted wedding guest can become a tree or bush. But before you carry out the replacement you’re left
with a cut-out of the missing person’s body, filled only with an amorphous grey vacuum.
As Evie’s scrambled eggs splattered out of the saucepan I saw my cousin’s outline at the third table setting, with a vacuum where her body – that vital, energetic mass –
had been. And that outline followed me round my life as I progressed to all the places where Jessamy should also have been: university matriculations and graduations, weddings and funerals.
But eventually life filled in the vacuum so that I started to look through it. But nothing could fill in the vacuum for Jessamy’s mother.
The Golden Jubilee was approaching; only weeks away now. Evie had already sent me the invitation to the village party, with its official Jubilee logo on the top. Twenty-five
years since my cousin had disappeared. Everyone watched old film coverage of the Coronation and the Silver Jubilee on television. Parties were planned; bunting was ordered.
But for Evie the anniversary could only ever be that of the last time she’d seen her daughter.
Evie
Coronation Day, 2 June 1953
The red jelly in the half-eaten trifle looked like drops of blood against the yellow custard and real cream on the top. Splashes of orange squash had stained the white
tablecloths and the balloons tied to the fence had already started to deflate.
Evie clutched the table and closed her eyes for a second. A metal coil tightened round her head. When she opened her eyes again the jelly still looked like blood. She swallowed hard and looked
away. The children were eating more slowly now, their eyes glazed as though they were inebriated, tin-foil crowns sliding down their heads. One or two would almost certainly be sick. Several of the
adults also looked a little green, though that might have been the cask of best ordered especially for the party, rather than the food.
Sandwiches, cold sausages, cold beef, lemonade, tea, fairy cakes, buns, trifle, chocolate cake: a cornucopia to celebrate the new queen, the new hope, the modern age. All consumed within an
hour. Perhaps these new Elizabethans would never again feel that desperation to taste something sweet and rich in the mouth that Evie remembered from the years of rationing.
New Elizabethans. To distract herself from the spoiled food and her throbbing head Evie rolled the phrase silently round her lips. She liked the idea of being a New Elizabethan. The old
Elizabethans had been a vivacious lot: explorers, pirates and poets. Perhaps their twentieth-century kin would be equally entertaining. Her headache seemed to subside. Feeling better, she looked
along the table for her next chore. Some of the older folk were sitting back in their chairs, eyes slightly glazed. Hard to imagine them exploring and writing sonnets. But the children . . .
Perhaps they’d live great lives. Perhaps she herself might be a writer. But if she’d been going to do something clever in her life she’d have made a start by now. It was too late
now: twenty-three, married, with this—
‘Evie!’
Day-dreaming again. The earthenware teapot in Evie’s hand was needed at the far end of the trestle table. Fiona Fernham gave her a fierce wave. ‘That tea will be good and stewed now.
Give me the pot if you’re just going to stand there staring at nothing.’ She gave Evie the kind of glare that one of her illustrious land-owning forebears might have given a
retainer.
‘Sorry.’ Evie walked over and handed the pot to Fiona. If you were female and aged between sixteen and sixty and resident in the village of Craven you weren’t granted a day of
leisure to celebrate your new monarch’s anointing at Westminster Abbey. It fell to you to decorate tables, drape bunting, shell hard-boiled eggs, cut sandwiches, refresh tea-pots, and walk
backwards and forwards all afternoon bearing heavy trays.
Relaxation was only for the young, the old and the male. Still, at least these exertions meant there was no time to brood.
Matthew caught her eye and he gave her a long, slow wink. ‘Pay attention, Eve.’ His face was tender. He must have overheard the exchange. For all his softness she knew he
wouldn’t have liked hearing her spoken to like that. She was a Winter, by marriage at least. The Winters were landowners, successful farmers, even through the gloomy interwar years.
Evie flipped her apron at him and made a face to lighten the moment. Matthew’s mother sat beside him, a small dribble of tea falling down her chin. But her eyes were bright. Perhaps she
was remembering the Coronations of the past: the Georges and Edwards. VE Day. And VJ Day, too, though that had been more muted because the boys weren’t home yet. All this remembering. There
were things Evie preferred to forget. Her hand shook as she picked up an empty plate.
She didn’t feel sick, exactly. Just exhausted, with the occasional throbbing head and hot stabbing pains beneath her navel. Oh God, if only she could go home and curl up somewhere warm.
But she couldn’t because people – she meant Fiona – would guess what was wrong with her. Pregnancy was the desirable condition for someone eighteen months’ married. To be
incapable of keeping a baby until term was reprehensible, especially if your husband needed someone to hand his farm—
‘At least try and clear up that mess!’ Fiona was almost shouting now, pointing at the jelly splodges on the table as though Evie herself had spilled them on the cloth. Matthew used
his knife to scrape up the worst of it onto his plate. ‘Oh not you, Mr Winter! I meant Evie.’ The coldness in Fiona’s voice when she said Evie’s name showed that the dislike
was more than purely social.
‘No trouble for me to help,’ Matthew said in his slow, deep voice. ‘You ladies have been working all afternoon.’
But Matthew was Male and not intended by Providence for drudgery. Evie eyed him. He looked calm enough but you could never tell. Sometimes too much noise distressed him. And large numbers of
people eating at the same time were difficult for him, too. She noticed the crumpled-up paper napkin beside his plate and wondered whether he’d hidden half a bun in it. Sometimes she still
found food hidden in drawers or placed behind the cushions on the parlour sofa. At first she’d thrown it away but now she simply left it where it was and never mind the mice.
Evie took a cloth from her pinafore pocket and dabbed at the red stains on the cloth. You could never get them out, not completely. Even after a boil wash pinkish tints would remain. She felt
her husband’s gaze on her and looked up to see Matthew regarding her with that expression that was peculiarly his own: half quizzical, half sad. She never knew sad for what, exactly.
He’d lit a cigarette now that the meal was over and blew gentle puffs of smoke and his face was still soft as he watched her.