Postcards from the Past (2 page)

Ed, feeling his sister’s tension, said politely: ‘Perhaps we will understand when we’ve met…’ he stumbled over the words ‘this man’ or ‘him’ and settled rather waveringly on ‘Andrew’. ‘When we’ve met Andrew,’ he finished more strongly.

Their mother made tea, though Billa could see that her hands were shaking. ‘And,’ she said, in a special voice, as if this was an extra bonus, ‘and Andrew has a son of his own, called Tristan. He’s ten, two years younger than you, Ed, and I’m sure we shall be very happy together. A proper family again. They will both live with us here at Mellinpons.’

Billa and Ed were stunned into silence: a boy of ten. Tristan. Living here in their house.

Out of sight, under the table, Billa’s hand stretched out to Ed and fastened round his wrist. They stared stonily at their mother as she came across the kitchen and put their tea on the table.

*   *   *

Ed pushes Billa’s coffee cup towards her and stares at her, bending down a little to peer at her more closely.

‘Are you OK?’ he asks.

She looks back at him, frowning, and then nods. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I went off there for a minute. I was just remembering Mother telling us that she was going to marry ghastly Andrew.’

‘I suppose he wasn’t that bad,’ Ed says. ‘It can’t have been easy for him, either.’

‘We were just the wrong ages,’ says Billa reflectively. ‘Fourteen is no age to watch your mother falling passionately in love. Of course he was very attractive in an edgy kind of way, but she was so mad about him that it was embarrassing, especially in public. I stopped telling her about events at school because I couldn’t stand the humiliation. Girls can be so cruel.’

‘It was easier for me.’ Ed sits down at the table. ‘Andrew was quite clued up about things like rugby and cricket. It was that little tick Tris that I couldn’t stand. He was such a stirrer, wasn’t he?’

Billa is silent, thinking of the postcard, panic twisting again in her gut. ‘Mmm,’ she says, not wanting to talk about Tristan, bending her head over her cup lest Ed should see her expression. After a moment she gets up, picking up her coffee mug. ‘I’m going to check emails,’ she says.

Ed continues to drink his coffee and Bear comes to lean heavily against his chair, which shunts slowly sideways across the big rug flung down over the slate floor until Bear collapses gently to the floor. Miles Davis’ trumpet fades into silence and Ed stands up, bending to blow out the candles, and begins to clear away the supper. As he sorts the plates that will go into the dishwasher from the more delicate pieces – the Spode and Clarice Cliff – he broods on Billa’s preoccupation. All day she’s been on edge but he knows that any kind of questioning or concern will evoke a quick denial that anything is wrong. And on those rare occasions when she shares some anxiety or fear with him she’ll immediately add: ‘But it’s fine. It’s fine, really,’ hurrying away from any comfort he might offer, turning the conversation.

Even as a child, once their father died, she shouldered her own burdens; made her own decisions. He’d relied on her so much when they were small. Her eager, passionate vitality lent colour to his quiet, subdued personality, investing it with some of her own brilliance. She made him brave, laughing at his terrors, spurring him beyond the modest limits he set himself.

*   *   *

After their father died suddenly, one cold March day, she was silent with shock for weeks, her face rigid with suffering. She was just nine years old, Ed was seven, and the quality and depth of her grief frightened him, diluting his own sense of loss. He subsumed his pain, his terror of death, into focusing on the life that continued to riot heartlessly around him. The cold sweet spring: how vital and generous it was, almost profligate in its abundance. He began to notice that many of the wild flowers were yellow and for the first time – the first of many – he made a list. It became a test; a challenge. It wonderfully concentrated his mind.

Catkins – he wrote in his round childish hand – cowslips, daffodils, primroses, dandelions, buttercups, celandines, kingcups. Alongside each name he drew a picture of the flower and painted it carefully, noting nature’s wide range of the colour yellow: egg-yolk, lemon, cream. Pussy willow might be a bit of a cheat, being more grey than yellow, but he put it in anyway. Billa watched him, clenched in her misery.

‘What are you doing?’

‘It’s a list of all the yellow flowers I’ve seen,’ he said, defensively, lest it might be seen as too light-hearted an occupation under the circumstances. ‘Nearly all the wild spring flowers are yellow, Billa.’

He could tell that she was trying to think of some that weren’t, to prove him wrong, but even this seemed beyond her – which frightened him even more.

‘What have you got so far?’ she asked dully.

He read his list to her and watched while she racked her brain to think of something he’d forgotten. He willed her onward, longing for the old, vital Billa who kept him up to the mark.

‘Gorse!’ she cried at last, triumphantly – and he felt quite weak with relief, as though some important corner had been turned. ‘And forsythia.’

She spelled it for him, and he wrote obediently, although he forbore to say that forsythia was not a wild flower but a tame garden shrub. Nevertheless, his heart beat with ungovernable joy: their roles were reversed and he’d drawn her back from the edge of the abyss. But it was Dom who really saved them from their despair.

‘Dominic is a kind of relation,’ their mother told them. She looked uncomfortable, as though she would rather not discuss it, but Ed and Billa had been full of the news that Mrs Tregellis’s grandson had come to stay with her at her cottage down the lane.

‘He’s twelve,’ Billa had told her, ‘and he came all the way from Bristol on the train on his own. And he and Ed look alike. It’s so odd. Mrs Tregellis says that we’re related.’

And that’s when their mother said, ‘Dominic
is
a kind of relation.’ Colour burned her cheeks a dull red, and her mouth compressed into a thin line, but they were too excited to notice much. The arrival of Dom distracted them from their grief and gave them something new to think about.

*   *   *

The sharp trill of the telephone bell cuts across Ed’s thoughts. As he dries his hands and reaches for the handset the bell stops and he knows that Billa has picked up the extension. It will probably be one of her co-workers from the charity. He pours himself some more coffee and takes the Miles Davis CD from the player. He puts it away, hesitating at the shelf on which other CDs are piled, and then chooses a Dinah Washington recording.

*   *   *

Billa finishes her conversation with the treasurer, replaces the handset on its stand and stares at the computer screen. The small room off the kitchen is now her office. An old pine washstand is her desk and Ed’s tuck box, which accompanied him to school, is her filing cabinet. She is amazingly untidy. Even Ed, who is not methodical, is silenced by the disorder of Billa’s office.

‘However did you manage when you were working?’ he asked once, awed by the magnificence of such chaos.

‘I had a PA and a secretary,’ she answered briefly. ‘I wasn’t paid to do the filing. I was paid to have ideas about how to raise money.’

Pieces of paper, books, letters, are piled on the floor, on the desk, on the Lloyd Loom chair, on the deep granite windowsill. At intervals she has a tidying session.

‘Thank heavens so much is now done by email,’ she’d say, coming into the kitchen with her short fair hair on end and her shirtsleeves rolled up. ‘Be a duck and make me some coffee, Ed. I’m dying of thirst.’

Now, she stares at an email about fund-raising at an event in Wadebridge and thinks about Tristan. Her first instinct is to protect Ed; her second is to talk to Dom. All her life – since her father died and her sense of security irrevocably shattered – she’s turned to Dom for advice and for comfort. Even when he was working abroad in South Africa, and after he was married, she’d write to him, sharing her woes and her joys. She feels inextricably linked to him. From the beginning it was as if their father had come back to them in the form of a boy.

*   *   *

He built dams across the stream and a tree house high in the beech tree in the wood – though not too high because of Ed still being little – and showed them how to light a campfire and cook very basic meals. All that long summer – the summer after their father died – Dom was with them. He was tall and strong and inventive, and they recognized that look of his, the way he laughed, throwing back his head, the way he used his hands to describe something, shaping it out in the air. How safe they felt with him; just as if their father was back with them – but young again, and reckless and fun.

Their mother was cool in response to their enthusiasm – and they were too conscious of her grief to want to upset her – and, anyway, Dom preferred the cosiness of his granny’s cottage and the wild countryside beyond it to the old butter factory and its grounds.

‘I wonder how we’ll manage now,’ Billa said to Dom as they watched Ed splashing in the quiet, deep pool behind the dam. ‘Without Daddy, I mean. Ed’s too little to be able to be in charge yet, and Mother is…’

She hesitated, not knowing the right word for her instinctive awareness of their mother’s neediness and dependence on others; for her emotional swings between tears and laughter; her instability.

Wood pigeons cooed comfortably amongst the high leafy canopy that dappled their camp with trembling patterns of sunlight and shade; tall foxgloves clung in the stony crevices of the old footbridge that spanned the stream where tiny fish darted in the clear brown shallows.

‘My father’s dead, too,’ Dom said. ‘I never knew him. He was in the navy in the war and he got killed when I was very small.’

And here again was another wonderful coincidence. ‘Our father was in the navy, too,’ she said. ‘He might have been killed but he was only injured. That’s why he died, though. It was the injury and then he had a heart attack. I don’t know what Mother will do without him.’

She didn’t mention her own overwhelming sense of loss and pain.

‘My mother works,’ Dom said. ‘She’s working now. That’s why I’ve come on my own. She says I’m old enough now.’

‘I’m glad you’ve come,’ Billa said. ‘We both are. And we’re glad you’re a relation.’

He looked at her then, his face serious. ‘Funny, though, isn’t it?’ he murmured, and she felt a little shock of fear – and excitement. He was so familiar, yet a stranger. She wanted to touch him, to be close to him always.

*   *   *

Now, on an impulse, Billa picks up the telephone and presses buttons.

‘Dominic Blake here.’ Dom’s voice, cool, impersonal, calms her at once.

‘It’s me, Dom. I was just wondering if I could come down and see you in the morning.’

‘Billa. Yes, of course. Everything OK?’

‘Yes. Well…’

‘You don’t sound too certain.’

‘No. The thing is,’ instinctively she lowers her voice, ‘we’ve had a postcard from Tristan.’

‘
Tristan?
’

‘Yes. Weird, isn’t it, after all these years?’

‘What does he want?’

‘That’s the whole point. It just says that he might come down and see us.’

In the silence she can imagine Dom’s face: that concentrated, thoughtful expression that narrows his brown eyes; his thick hair, black and grey badger-streaked like Ed’s, flopping forward; his straight brows drawn into a frowning line.

‘What does Ed say?’

‘I haven’t told him. I didn’t want to worry him.’

She hears the tolerant, amused snorting sound with which Dom acknowledges her ingrained sense of responsibility for Ed’s wellbeing.

‘You assume there’s something to worry about, then?’

‘Don’t you? Fifty years of silence and then a postcard. How did he know we’d both still be here?’

‘What’s the postmark?’

‘Paris. Is Tilly with you?’

‘Yes. We’ve just finished supper.’

‘Will she be there tomorrow morning?’

‘She should be gone by about ten.’

‘I’ll come down about eleven.’

‘OK.’

Billa sighs with relief. As she puts the phone back on its rest, she can hear Dinah Washington singing ‘It Could Happen to You’. She passes through the kitchen to the hall where Ed is piling logs on the fire whilst Bear lies in his favourite place across the cool slates by the front door. Billa watches them, filled with overwhelming affection for them both.

Tomorrow she will talk to Dom: all will be well.

CHAPTER TWO

Dom stands still, arms folded across his chest, his face thoughtful. Tristan: Ed and Billa’s stepbrother. In his mind’s eye he calls up the boy’s face: thin, sharp, attractive; frosty grey eyes that stare with a bland challenge. Dom was eighteen when he first met Tristan Carr and never before had he been so aware of the capacity for destruction in one so young. Even now, more than fifty years later, Dom remembers the shock of that meeting; the sensation of a fist in the guts.

*   *   *

He was back in Cornwall with a place at the Camborne School of Mines to study mining engineering. He felt strong and proud and free, and he couldn’t wait to see Billa and Ed; especially poor Billa, who’d written to him telling him about the disaster of their mother’s second marriage.

‘Wait till you meet the ghastly Tris,’ she wrote. ‘He’s utterly loathsome. I’m glad Ed and I are away at school all term. Ed’ll never be able to compete with Tris. Nor will I…’

He wrote back, trying to comfort her, to make light of her antagonism.

‘He can’t be that bad, can he?’ he replied. ‘Didn’t you say he’s only ten? I’m sure you’re more than a match for a ten-year-old…’

And now, as he walked along the lane to the old butter factory, a shadow moved beneath the ash tree and a wiry, russet-haired boy stepped out into Dom’s path. This boy stared for a moment – he had to look up at Dom but that didn’t faze him – and then his left eyebrow shot up and his lips quirked as though in amused recognition.

‘So you’re the bastard,’ he said lightly.

Even now, all these years later, Dom’s hands ball into fists at the recollection of that meeting. Memories hurtle back, fragmented and random: the little house in Bristol where he and his mother lived with a cousin, and how the three of them huddled beneath the kitchen table when the bombs fell. His father, James Blake, was away, they told him, he was at sea, at war – and then, he was dead. Later, there was the little school round the corner and, when Dom was eight and the war was long over, there was the interview at the cathedral school. He won a scholarship, sang in the choir, grew taller. And, all the while, there was a shadowy presence of someone in the background who sent money and supported them.