Читать книгу The Girl from the Island - Lorna Cook - Страница 7

Guernsey, Spring 2016

The short flight hadn’t been long enough to drink the miniature bottle of warm wine bought when the drinks service had eventually reached her at the back of the plane. Lucy had only drunk half of it by the time the captain told crew to prepare the cabin for landing, so she screwed the lid back on the bottle and put it inside her bag. She’d see her older sister Clara in a matter of minutes; she might need to save the remaining half for that ordeal.

It was only an hour in the air from London, but Guernsey felt a whole lifetime away. Perhaps that’s what being far from home did to you after years away – gave you a false sense of time and distance. It had been too long; she knew that. But there’d always been a valid reason why she couldn’t return, and on the occasions she had it had only ever been for a night, and then she’d always had to go back to the mainland the next day. Lucy thought back. Perhaps it had been three years, maybe four, since she’d been to Guernsey. Her niece’s christening – that was the last time she’d been back. And before that it was Clara’s wedding a few years prior. Although she’d seen them all when they’d come across visiting her on the mainland.

Only official events that came with expectant invitations attached had the power to draw Lucy back to Guernsey. But now, the reason to return was merely logistical: a funeral to arrange for an elderly relative Lucy barely remembered and an uninhabited house to sell. No matter how hard she thought back to family events over years gone by, memories would barely surface of her elderly first cousin once removed: Dido. Of course, Dido hadn’t been elderly when Lucy had been young, but she had always seemed it.

Once the upcoming funeral was over, Lucy, for once, wouldn’t be leaving in less than twenty-four hours. Clara had instructed Lucy to stay and hear the will read, help Clara sort out Dido’s affairs and get the house ready to go on the market on behalf of their father, Dido’s nearest relation, who would inherit the bulk of the estate. Then, and only then, according to Clara, was Lucy permitted to get off the island and return to the mainland.

Lucy’s mum and dad had hotfooted it to warmer climes last year, after retirement. They’d bought a house in Barbados, and kissed goodbye to the Channel Island where they’d lived their whole lives, which did rather leave Lucy and Clara to fend for themselves in this matter. When Lucy had joked to Clara that in their early thirties they weren’t adult enough to plan a funeral, Clara had replied, ‘Speak for yourself,’ and that had been an end to it.

The plane banked and Lucy glimpsed the island’s imposing, concrete fortifications on the coast before the runway came into view. To the uninitiated, the winding borders of grey concrete wall installed by Hitler’s war machine all those years ago must offer a surreal first glimpse of the Guernsey coastline. To Lucy, while it hadn’t always felt like home, especially recently, it had always been home.

‘Have you been waiting long?’ Lucy asked as Clara stepped forward to embrace her in the arrivals terminal. The sisters looked relatively alike. Brunette, brown eyes.

‘No, not long,’ her older sister replied, glancing down at Lucy’s holdall. ‘Is that all you’ve brought? One bag?’

‘Yes. I’m not staying long, I don’t think. And you’ve got a washing machine so I can just …’ Lucy stopped as she watched Clara’s look of horror.

‘Are you staying with me?’ Clara asked.

Lucy paused, unsure if her sister was joking. ‘Am I not staying with you then?’

‘Well, you didn’t ask if you could,’ Clara said as they left the terminal and walked into the bright sunshine towards the car park. ‘So I assumed you weren’t. I assumed you’d made other arrangements. A hotel or … something.’

How had it become like this between them? Not too long ago Clara would have thrown open her doors for Lucy but now …

‘I’m a freelancer, not a millionaire,’ Lucy started and then: ‘But it’s fine honestly, I’ll book into a hotel.’

‘No, I’m not saying that,’ Clara was quick to cut in. ‘Stay for a couple of days first to spend some time with your niece and then after that it might be easier if you find somewhere.’

Lucy smiled to herself and held her tongue, silently congratulating Clara on having won a game Lucy hadn’t even known they were playing.

‘Molly misses you,’ Clara continued in a softer tone. ‘She’s excited to cook you dinner. She’s just learnt to make fajitas at school and we’ve had them three nights on the trot. Tonight will be the fourth.’

‘I miss her too,’ Lucy said as Clara drove the car barely five minutes through the country lanes and down into the little winding valley in the Forest parish. And then: ‘Dido’s house?’ she asked as they passed crumbling plinths that should have held a wrought-iron gate. It was no longer on its hinges but placed upright inside the boundary. A sign that told visitors the name of the house – Deux Tourelles – was also no longer on the plinth but propped up against the front of it.

‘How long has it been since you were here at the house?’ Clara asked as she pulled up in the long gravel driveway, littered with weeds.

‘Not for years.’

The house was part French country house, part Georgian manor. At either end were tall turrets from which the house got its name. The double-fronted bay window frames were peeling paint horribly and layers of thick green ivy had blanketed over the grey brick frontage on one side. It looked rather pretty. In autumn it would turn a russet colour and for a reason she couldn’t pinpoint that comforted Lucy.

‘God, I hate ivy, don’t you?’ Clara asked. ‘It’s just the worst kind of weed. I don’t know what possesses people to grow it.’

Lucy smothered a laugh. ‘Why are we here?’

‘The undertaker needs a nice outfit in which to dress Dido.’

Lucy turned cold. ‘What was she wearing when she died? Can’t she just wear that?’

‘She died in her sleep. She was wearing a nightie.’

‘And it’s not all right to bury someone in their nightie?’

Clara adopted a horrified expression. ‘No, it bloody isn’t,’ she replied, battling with the key until the lock gave way and the door yielded to the pressure, swinging open slowly. ‘Someone needs to grease these hinges,’ Clara said absent-mindedly.

A strong smell of damp and dust penetrated Lucy’s senses and it took her a minute or two to adjust to the smell of the old property. Inside the blinds and shutters were closed, but early evening sunshine fell through the doorway onto a circular wooden table in the middle of the hall. An oversized, empty vase cast droplets of sunlight like a prism, offering a bewitching effect. Clara switched on the overhead light and the prism was gone. The empty vase was the only ornament in the entrance hall but a stack of mail had been placed on the central table. Nosily, Lucy picked it up but there was nothing of interest as she rifled through, just circulars, bills and parish newsletters.

Glancing into the two front rooms that led off either side of the hall, Lucy saw they looked equally sparse. Where was all the stuff? Why no plethora of ornaments out on sideboards? Why no bundles of family photographs on top of the mini grand piano that sat at the far end of the sitting room? Why was she here to help clear out all the knick-knacks if there weren’t that many to clear?

It really had been years since Lucy had been inside Deux Tourelles. She didn’t remember the interior layout at all, barely remembered the exterior although she was sure it hadn’t looked quite so ramshackle whenever it was she’d last been here.

Clara called down from the stairs she’d begun climbing. ‘Are you coming up or standing there all day?’

Lucy followed her sister to the first floor. ‘How do you know where you’re going?’

Clara flicked the light switch at the top of the stairs and the first-floor corridor lit up in a yellow haze from an old-fashioned light bulb in a rather tatty shade. There were at least six doors, all closed, and Clara turned right and went to one of two rooms facing the front of the house and opened the door.

‘I popped in to fetch things for Dido when she went into hospital but it was a bit late for all that. She’d passed away by the time I made it there.’

Lucy stepped inside the dark room while Clara busied herself switching on a table lamp and starting to look through the large mahogany wardrobe for a suitable dress. Lucy opened the thick damask curtains by the window and let the evening sunshine stream into the room, sending dust motes flying and whirling around her. She looked down the front drive towards the broken gate and then out towards the winding lanes and small field that abutted Dido’s house. She could see the edge of a cottage hidden behind trees and its own track of driveway that she’d not seen from the road. She wondered who lived there, if they’d known Dido, or if it was just a little holiday cottage these days.

‘You don’t miss it at all, do you?’ Clara said, interrupting Lucy’s thoughts. It sounded kindly meant but the words had sharp edges. Like most things Clara said in Lucy’s direction, the sharp edges were meant to dig in deep, probe hard.

Lucy turned, smiled guiltily. ‘Guernsey? I’m not sure that I do. Not really. I don’t really think about it. Is that the wrong thing to say?’

‘Not if it’s the truth.’

Lucy wasn’t sure how to reply so simply chose not to.

It was met with silence in return from Clara. A quiet battle; both standing their ground by avoiding discussion entirely. It was so easy to avoid Clara when Lucy was back on the mainland. But here, not so much.

Lucy changed the subject. ‘So Dad gets this old place, given he was the nearest relation. Did she have any others?’

‘Any other what?’

‘Relations? She had no children, no siblings?’

‘Not sure,’ Clara said distractedly. ‘Not any that are living, I don’t think. There was mention of a sister, I vaguely remember, a while back.’

‘A sister?’ Lucy looked at the back of Clara’s head as she rifled in the wardrobe, pulling hangers noisily along the metal rail, and waited for more. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Mmm. She mentioned it when we were at someone’s funeral a few years back. She was surprised she’d been asked to attend. She said she’d thought everyone she’d ever known had already died.’

‘Macabre.’ Lucy shuddered as she sat on the bed, made up tidily with a rose bedspread. ‘Such a shame, being so alone.’

Lucy looked at Clara and felt grateful she had her, even if they had become more distant as the years rolled on. ‘What happened to the sister?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Was she older or younger?’ Lucy asked, glancing out towards the little cottage, watching the smoke plume from the chimney.

‘I don’t know,’ Clara said exasperatedly.

Lucy switched her attention from the cottage to the room and looked properly around. The only items in frames were floral watercolours. ‘Where are all the family photographs? Her parents, sister and the like?’

‘How should I know? Are you going to help?’ Clara snapped.

Lucy stared at her sister’s back and then walked over to the wardrobe. ‘Maybe they grew apart. It’s easy to drift apart when people lead such busy lives.’

‘You certainly do,’ Clara teased. ‘I see your social media feed. How many parties can one girl go to each week? I’m exhausted just looking at it.’

Lucy opened her eyes wide in surprise. Clara never clicked ‘like’ on any of Lucy’s posts. Not one. But she’d admitted she’d seen them. Lucy would work that one out later. ‘When you live alone you need to get out and about,’ Lucy justified. ‘Dinner with friends or a microwave meal for one … I know which I prefer.’

Clara looked at her as she moved away from the wardrobe, a navy two-piece suit in her hands in which to bury the elderly woman they’d not really known. ‘If you say so. How can you afford it?’ Clara probed.

‘I earn OK money and I’ve only got myself to worry about.’

‘You must be up to your eyes in student debt, though?’

Lucy sighed, pulled her brown hair up into a ponytail. They’d been over this before and she couldn’t do it again. ‘Righto, what else do we need to get? Do we need a pair of shoes for the … thing?’

‘The funeral director just said an outfit,’ Clara replied with a tinge of horror in her voice. ‘I hadn’t thought about shoes.’

Lucy opened the wardrobe doors and got on hands and knees to look at the assortment of different-coloured shoeboxes piled on top of each other. ‘Oh,’ she exclaimed as she began lifting the lids to peek inside.

‘What?’ Clara asked, the outfit folded in her arms.

‘These aren’t all shoeboxes, or rather, they are shoeboxes but they don’t all contain shoes. Some have got other things in them.’ Lucy lifted lids at random.

‘Such as?’ Clara asked with an uninterested tone.

‘Letters, newspaper clippings, photos.’ Lucy rifled. ‘I thought it was a bit odd there were no photos at all in the house. They’re all in here.’

‘Photos?’ Clara sounded interested now. ‘Why would they be hidden in a box?’

Lucy shrugged and held a little stash of photographs out for her sister who put the outfit down, dipped to her knees and sat beside her, flicking through the square, sepia images. They were mostly scenery from before the war, Lucy realised, the garden at Deux Tourelles in better days, the local beaches – the concrete fortifications yet to have been built when these were taken. She pulled out a sepia image of four young people laughing on a beach. Two teenage girls, wet hair falling about their shoulders and two young men, all of them in old-fashioned bathing suits and looking as if they were jostling each other good-naturedly for space in front of the lens. Lucy couldn’t help but smile back at them.

She turned the photograph over and read the caption on the back. ‘Persephone, Jack, Stefan and Dido. Summer 1930.’

‘Persephone? What a mouthful of a name,’ Clara said.

‘It’s Greek,’ Lucy replied, turning the photograph back over and looking at the foursome on the beach. ‘Persephone was queen of the underworld in ancient mythology.’

Clara looked at Lucy, amused. ‘How do you know that?’

‘Pub quiz. It came up once. I didn’t know the answer though. I’m mostly in charge of literature and celebrity gossip.’

Her sister laughed. It was a lovely sound, and Lucy knew right then that deep down she missed Clara. She would tell her. Later.

‘Now I think about it, Dido is from ancient mythology as well,’ Lucy said thoughtfully. She ran her finger over the faded ink on the back of the photo. History lessons at school in Guernsey had taught her that roughly a decade after this picture was taken the Germans invaded the Channel Islands and Hitler’s obsession with Guernsey and the surrounding archipelago, nestled in between England and France, had begun in earnest. But she knew, or rather she remembered, very little about the islands’ history before that time. She traced the name Persephone with her finger. ‘What a beautiful name. Do you think she’s the sister? She has to be the sister. Bit coincidental to have two girls with ancient Greek first names unless two sets of parents were being particularly pretentious,’ Lucy mused.

‘You should hear some of the ridiculous names of the kids that Molly’s at school with. I can’t spell half of them,’ Clara said.

‘She looks older than Dido,’ Lucy said, examining the teenage girls in their bathing costumes, wet hair around their faces.

‘She looks taller, which is not always the same thing,’ Clara reasoned, looking at Lucy who was two inches taller than Clara and always had been since they were sixteen. Clara looked at her watch. ‘Molly and John will probably be hopping up and down wondering where we are.’

Lucy opened the lid of another box. This one was older, sturdier, browning with age. Inside was a stash of papers, wafer thin, carbon copies as if ripped hastily from a receipt pad. Each page was filled tightly with indiscernible lines, swoops and squiggles. Lucy groaned, recognising it at once as shorthand, something she had half-heartedly toyed with learning almost a decade ago on her graduate trainee course when she’d temporarily been a journalist on a local newspaper. But she’d bunked off from most of the classes, realising she could type faster than she could compile shorthand.

Clara peered down at the papers. ‘What on earth? Was someone blind drunk when they wrote this?’

‘It’s shorthand.’ Lucy laughed. ‘Strokes and loops represent words. Phonetically I mean. At first glance I can’t work out any words on this page and …’ Lucy looked at the next one. ‘Maybe only one on this one. I’m so rusty.’ She didn’t dare tell Clara she’d skipped most of the classes.

‘What’s the one word you can make out?’ Clara asked as she stood.

Lucy studied the pen marks. ‘I think I’m guessing more than anything.’

‘Go on …’ Clara said.

Lucy folded the papers up gently and replaced them in the box. ‘I’m not sure but … I think, possibly, it says “resistance”.’