The Hidden Women: An inspirational novel of sisterhood and strength
The Hidden Women: An inspirational novel of sisterhood and strength
Kerry Barrett
From the bestselling author of The Girl In The Picture comes a beautiful new timeslip novel.Readers love Kerry Barrett:‘All Kerry Barrett's books are brilliant’‘I'd highly recommend this: detective fiction, historical fiction, powerful, moving, thrilling, sometimes comic, always very human.’‘A beautiful story which kept me hooked’‘I would definitely recommend this read, but be warned, you won't want to put it down.’‘Loved the whole story, couldn't put it down’‘Will definitely read more from this author’
About the Author (#uc52d779b-fc8c-5c3c-be7f-68878f6af926)
KERRY BARRETT was a bookworm from a very early age and did a degree in English Literature, then trained as a journalist, writing about everything from pub grub to EastEnders. Her first novel, Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, took six years to finish and was mostly written in longhand on her commute to work, giving her a very good reason to buy beautiful notebooks. Kerry lives in London with her husband and two sons, and Noel Streatfield’s Ballet Shoes is still her favourite novel.
READERS LOVE KERRY BARRETT (#uc52d779b-fc8c-5c3c-be7f-68878f6af926)
‘All Kerry Barrett’s books are brilliant.’
‘I’d highly recommend this: detective fiction, historical fiction, powerful, moving, thrilling, sometimes comic, always very human.’
‘A beautiful story which kept me hooked.’
‘I would definitely recommend this read, but be warned, you won’t want to put it down.’
‘Loved the whole story, couldn’t put it down.’
‘Will definitely read more from this author.’
Also by Kerry Barrett (#uc52d779b-fc8c-5c3c-be7f-68878f6af926)
Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered
I Put a Spell on You
Baby It’s Cold Outside
I’ll Be There For You
A Spoonful of Sugar
A Step in Time
The Forgotten Girl
The Girl in the Picture
The Hidden Women
KERRY BARRETT
HQ
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2019
Copyright © Kerry Barrett 2019
Kerry Barrett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
E-book Edition © January 2019 ISBN: 9780008318529
Version: 2018-11-29
Table of Contents
Cover (#uc148675f-e37f-52c9-a7eb-8321479332ad)
About the Author (#u10d57f09-8b7d-5859-a5bb-a8ccdf68668f)
Readers Love Kerry Barrett (#udcf06689-7166-5f81-8b5e-9cc4144e58db)
Also by Kerry Barrett (#ue5376dd4-c4d7-546f-812c-8b04666e44be)
Title Page (#u7033c0ea-9725-58d8-8824-700e996c4561)
Copyright (#u5c858030-8a01-5dcb-8e4c-016c05ad1ef0)
Dedication (#u6caa3dbe-5727-5cfa-b683-d3b091df55dd)
Prologue (#u1f13a345-4278-5fe1-90ae-ab91f10b4ba4)
Chapter 1 (#udef36671-493d-5b2d-af4f-ec162fa7bc9d)
Chapter 2 (#u85ea4088-04de-5561-9315-4582ae10861c)
Chapter 3 (#ub43302ff-5d32-5870-a360-a73eaffc98f0)
Chapter 4 (#uf7d1f564-ebe6-5d8c-93ef-7a73aae39fa1)
Chapter 5 (#uaafa5d81-abcb-59cf-b2af-a535f7cb6bb2)
Chapter 6 (#u7fa10d38-0908-5f8b-b119-ac7653103778)
Chapter 7 (#uc1a4fe79-0f7a-58c9-bb2d-ccb004c7b91c)
Chapter 8 (#u3e64edc7-4ad0-5e3c-b06b-a62ffd27ea2d)
Chapter 9 (#ue66395a1-4dad-59a7-8cb8-228f1f058fe6)
Chapter 10 (#ue1ae0b24-34f3-5ff7-a2f4-4bee0ab08b48)
Chapter 11 (#uafedc321-b812-5779-8478-0276ceda8817)
Chapter 12 (#u6fa0fe66-4daf-52e9-8113-d55b156dbe60)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
The Next Book From Kerry Barrett Is Coming in 2019 (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Dear Reader (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
For Petrova Fossil, the original Attagirl
Prologue (#ulink_5a78cbef-95f1-5893-b6f6-6ecd252eaa85)
Helena
April 2015
‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ I said, watching Greg’s stony face for any sign of happiness.
‘Well I’m not.’ His expression softened, just a bit, and he sat down next to me on the sofa and took my hand.
‘It’s just too soon,’ he said.
‘We’ve been together for five years, Greg,’ I snapped. ‘It’s not like we just met.’
He had the grace to look at least slightly ashamed.
‘I meant for me, not us,’ he said. ‘It’s too soon for me. And you. We’re still young. We should be out having fun, not at home with a squawking baby.’
‘We’re in our thirties; we’re not kids,’ I said, resting my head against the sofa cushions. I felt sick and I didn’t think it was just because of my unexpected pregnancy.
I’d done the test that morning, and showed Greg the unmistakeable dark line as he brushed his teeth.
‘It’s positive,’ I’d said, feeling a tiny shiver of excitement mixed with fear. ‘I’m pregnant.’
Greg had glanced at the plastic stick and then kissed me, his breath minty fresh.
‘I need to run,’ he’d simply said. ‘We’ll chat tonight.’
And now we were chatting and it wasn’t going the way I’d thought it would.
‘I thought we were set,’ I said. ‘I thought we were a team.’
‘We are a team,’ Greg said. ‘You and me.’
‘You and me and our baby,’ I said.
Greg winced. He tried to cover it up by pretending to cough, but I’d seen it.
‘I don’t want to have a baby, Helena,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, but that’s just how I feel.’
I couldn’t speak.
‘There’s a clinic,’ Greg said. ‘Max at work told me about it. His girlfriend went there a while back. He gave me the card, hang on …’
He dug about in his pocket while I let my fingers drift down to rest on my stomach.
‘I need some air,’ I said, ignoring his outstretched hand clutching a business card. ‘I’m going for a walk.’
I grabbed my jacket from the arm of the sofa, and stumbled my way out of the front door.
‘H,’ Greg said. ‘Don’t be like this. It’s hormones; you’re not thinking straight.’
I didn’t answer. I walked a little way down the road and then I sat at a bus stop and took my phone out.
‘Miranda?’ I said, when my sister answered. ‘I need your help. I’m having a baby and I think I’ve just left Greg.’
Chapter 1 (#ulink_4205170b-0fbf-575e-a627-4211b00fe6b5)
Helena
May 2018
‘Here?’ I said, staring at my boss Fliss in astonishment. ‘Jack Jones is coming here?’
‘Yes, here,’ she said, resting her hand on her computer keyboard as though to warn me I was about to lose her attention. ‘Apparently he’s very interested in social history and he wants to know how you work. It’s no biggie.’
‘But I’ve got a system,’ I said, knowing it was no good protesting when Fliss had decided something. ‘I don’t want him to mess it up.’
‘He’s not taking over, Helena, he just wants to know how you’re getting on.’ Fliss sounded impatient. ‘He’ll be here after lunch.’
I forced a smile. ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll get some stuff together.’
I wandered back to my desk feeling wrong-footed.
‘What’s with the face?’ asked my colleague Elly as I sat down. ‘Did Fliss tell you off?’
I wiggled my mouse to wake up my screen. ‘No,’ I said gloomily. ‘She told me Jack bloody Jones is coming in this afternoon to see how I’m getting on with my research.’
‘Shut. Up,’ said Elly, spinning round in her chair to face me. ‘Shut. Up.’
I blinked at her. Did she really mean me to be quiet?
‘Jack Jones is coming here? THE Jack Jones? We never get to meet the celebs,’ Elly was beginning to babble. ‘I’ve worked on this show for five years and I’ve never met one single person whose family history I’ve researched. Have you met anyone?’
‘No,’ I said. She was right. I’d not worked on Where Did You Come From? as long as Elly had, but I’d researched the family trees of lots of celebrities and not been so much as introduced to anyone.
‘And it’s Jack Jones?’ Elly went on. ‘Jack. Jones.’
I nodded. ‘It’s an interesting one, actually. His great-grandfather was at the Somme …’
I trailed off as Elly waved her hand to shush me.
‘He’s gorgeous,’ she said. ‘Properly handsome. And I’ve heard he’s going to be in that new superhero film soon so he’ll be a massive Hollywood star.’
I nodded again. I knew who Jack Jones was of course – star of the latest Sunday night detective drama that was wowing audiences, and tipped for superstardom – and Elly was right, he was gorgeous. In any other circumstances I’d love to meet him. But I had a certain way of working, and a system, and a process, and I didn’t appreciate interference or anyone checking up on me, however handsome they were.
‘Will you come with me?’ I asked Elly. ‘To the meeting?’
She gaped at me. ‘Seriously?’ she said. ‘The meeting with Jack Jones?’
I couldn’t help laughing at her face. ‘Yes, the meeting with Jack Jones,’ I said. ‘I could do with the help.’
Elly was getting up from her chair. She pulled on her coat and picked up her bag as I looked on in confusion.
‘Is that a no?’ I said.
‘It’s a yes,’ she threw back over her shoulder as she headed for the lift. ‘I’m going to buy a new top and get my hair blow-dried.’
Chuckling to myself I turned back to my screen. We worked on more than one celebrity story at a time and I was currently tracking the maternal line of a breakfast TV presenter. I’d got right back to the early 1800s and I thought I might be able to go further if I was clever about it.
I clicked on to the census web page I used, intending to get back to work, though I couldn’t concentrate on Sarah Sanderson properly with the news that Jack Jones was coming into the office weighing on my mind. I absolutely loved my job and I considered myself to be really lucky that I’d landed this role on Where Did You Come From? Social history may have been my passion but it wasn’t exactly well paid – so making the jump into television was brilliant for me – and I enjoyed the research as well as seeing the process of the show being made. My colleagues were lovely, and Fliss was very understanding when it came to having to rush off on time each evening to collect Dora from nursery, or working from home when she was ill.
Spinning round in my chair, I surveyed my shelves of neat brown folders, each with the name of the celebrity written along the spine and arranged in alphabetical order. I ran my finger along them until I found J and pulled out the Jack Jones file. I’d found out quite a lot about his family already so I had things to tell him. But today I was supposed to be working on Sarah Sanderson’s family history. Giving up an afternoon to Jack Jones was going to throw everything out.
I opened the folder and looked at the picture of him clipped to the front cover. I liked to have a photo of each person so I knew whose family I was researching – especially for those celebs I didn’t really know much about. It helped them become real for me, and then their families became real, too.
Elly was right, Jack Jones was really handsome. He had glossy brown hair that was longish and curlyish and flopped over his forehead, and a smile with a hint of mischief. I felt a brief flicker of excitement. Though I wasn’t a massive fan of the whole celeb thing – I couldn’t name the Kardashians or the members of One Direction – I had really enjoyed the detective series that Jack had starred in. I wondered if it would be weird to discuss the cryptic ending with him and decided it would be a bit fangirl. Mind you, I thought, not as fangirl as Elly getting her hair done.
I picked up my phone, smiling at the picture of Dora wearing my sunglasses on my home screen, and took a photo of Jack’s picture, then added it to my siblings’ group chat.
‘Guess who I’m meeting this afternoon …’ I typed.
Almost straight away, my baby sister Imogen replied. ‘OMG!’ she wrote. ‘Is that Jack Jones? I love him!’
I grinned. Before I could reply, a message arrived from my other sister, Miranda. ‘I have no idea who that is,’ she wrote. ‘But he’s easy on the eye.’
I smiled again. My sisters were nothing if not predictable.
‘Has anyone heard from Andy?’ Another message pinged through from Miranda. ‘I can’t see if he’s getting these. Immy manages to reply all the way from Africa and he can’t be bothered to keep in touch from Scotland.’
I made a face at my phone. I adored my big sister Miranda but she could be a bit of a mother hen. Not surprising, I supposed, when you thought about what she’d had to take on when we were kids, and I’d never forget how she’d been there when I needed her when Dora was born.
‘He’s probably not on Wi-Fi,’ I typed. Andy was on an archaeological dig somewhere on a windswept island in the North Sea – hardly hanging out in a coffee bar in Glasgow as Miranda obviously thought. ‘He’ll check in when he can.’
I threw my phone into my bag and pulled out my make-up. If Elly was dolling up to meet Jack Jones, then perhaps I should do the same.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_2c6a6925-1d9d-5d7e-8ede-2310dabe6700)
Jack Jones was nothing like I’d expected. For a start he arrived by himself. No entourage, no publicist, not even a driver. He just got off the tube and sauntered into the office, scruffy bag thrown over his shoulder and hair unwashed. Elly was not impressed by his distinctly un-starry appearance. She went down to reception to meet him, giddy with excitement, while I went into the meeting room, laid out some biscuits on a plate and made sure the coffee machine was working.
I put my folders of research on to the table and waited for them to arrive, nervously tapping my fingers on my knee. What if he messed up my notes? What if he questioned my methods? I wasn’t comfortable about this at all.
‘This is your researcher, Helena Miles,’ Elly said, standing at the door of the room and ushering Jack Jones inside. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’
I stood up.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ I lied, holding out my hand for Jack Jones to shake. Wait. Elly was leaving us to it? What? I caught her eye over Jack Jones’s shoulder. She wrinkled her nose up at his back and flicked her newly blow-dried hair in a disdainful shrug. Jack Jones obviously didn’t live up to her expectations. Horrified at the idea of entertaining a bona-fide celebrity by myself, I widened my eyes pleading with her to stay, but she spun round and headed back to her desk.
‘Is everything okay?’
I dragged my eyes from Elly’s retreating back and looked at Jack Jones, who was still holding my outstretched hand.
‘Oh,’ I said, awkwardly, dropping his hand like it was hot. ‘Sorry, Mr Jones. Sorry.’
Jack Jones smiled at me. ‘Call me Jack,’ he said. ‘Is it okay if I call you Helena?’
I liked the way he said my name in his clipped, period-drama accent.
‘Of course,’ I said.
He smiled at me again, a sort of wonky, half-smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes. He looked straight at me and I looked back and my stomach flipped over. He was gorgeous. At least his face was. For the first time I took in what he was wearing – scruffy jeans, battered trainers and a scuffed leather jacket. His brown canvas bag was slung across his body and his hair was a mop of dirty curls, very different from the hair that artfully fell across his forehead in the picture at the front of his file.
Unable to help myself, I glanced down at the photo on the folder. Jack saw me looking and grinned again.
‘Photo shoot Jack,’ he said, pulling out a chair and sitting down. ‘Not my real self.’
Embarrassed that he’d caught me looking and still feeling weak at the knees thanks to his smile, I collapsed into the chair next to him and moved it ever so slightly further away.
‘So,’ I said, all business. ‘I understand it’s your dad’s family you’re interested in?’
He nodded. ‘I didn’t really know them,’ he said. ‘My dad was around a bit when I was little, and apparently I did meet my grandparents a couple of times, though I don’t remember. But they’ve passed away now, and then Dad died last year – though I’d not seen him since I was ten.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ I said. His story sounded painfully familiar to me, making me think of Greg and how he’d not seen Dora more than a handful of times.
Jack shrugged. ‘He was like a stranger to me,’ he said. ‘It was just me and Mum when I was growing up.’
‘No brothers or sisters?’ I asked. Again I was struck by how similar his story sounded to Dora’s – and how different it was from my own chaotic, busy childhood home.
He shook his head. ‘Just me.’
I looked at his impish face, and felt so sad for the little boy he’d once been that I almost threw my arms round him and hugged him. My sister Imogen would have done. But thankfully, I remembered I was Helena Miles who did not do things spontaneously, unless you counted walking out on my boyfriend when I was pregnant.
Instead I opened the folder and showed Jack his rough family tree.
‘So, this is your dad’s family,’ I said, tracing the line with my forefinger. ‘Your grandfather was a pilot in World War Two, and your great-grandfather fought at the Somme.’
Jack was looking at me in wonder. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘Tell me more.’
Putting all thoughts of Sarah Sanderson’s maternal line out of my head, I sat with Jack all afternoon and explained what I’d found out so far. I always did the initial research, then passed my findings on to specialists – in Jack’s case we’d send him off to speak to an expert on World War One about his great-grandfather. And I was in the process of tracking down someone to speak to about his grandad too, who’d been too short-sighted to join the regular air force but who’d flown for the Air Transport Auxiliary, transporting planes from factories to airfields all over Britain. It was a great family story all round.
Jack was thrilled. He asked all the right questions and wrote endless notes in his scrawling handwriting, on a notepad he pulled from his tatty bag. At one point, he got so excited talking about the trenches that he threw out his arm and knocked over his cup of coffee. I leapt for the folder he had been reading and got it out of harm’s way just in time.
He was very sweet and enthusiastic and every time he smiled he made my hands tremble. But oh my goodness, he was the clumsiest, scruffiest, bulldozer of a man I’d ever met. My carefully ordered notes were pulled out of the folders and spread across the table as the edges of the papers folded over and curled. There was the coffee incident, as well as biscuit crumbs scattered everywhere, and a similar hairy moment when Jack’s biro leaked all over his hand and he left sticky blue fingerprints on a photocopy of his great-grandfather’s service record.
Eventually, to my absolute relief, Jack looked at his watch – which appeared to have Mickey Mouse on it – and stood up.
‘I’m late,’ he said. ‘I have to dash.’
‘Okay,’ I said, possibly a bit too eagerly. ‘I’ll show you out.’
Jack pulled on his leather jacket and surveyed the table, which was covered in notes and screwed-up tissues where he’d wiped the biro off his fingers, and biscuit crumbs.
‘God what a mess,’ he said. ‘I’ll help you clear up.’
‘No need,’ I said, desperately wanting him gone. ‘I’ll do it.’
But I was too late. He was already scooping up all my notes – no longer in any sort of order – and stuffing them back into a folder.
‘Really,’ I said, gritting my teeth. ‘I can do it.’
I went to take the folder from him and there was a small tug-of-war as we tussled over it for a second, then it fell to the floor scattering papers everywhere.
I closed my eyes briefly and when I opened them, Jack was on his hands and knees picking up bits of paper.
‘Ooh look,’ he said, flinging one sheet at me from his position down on the floor. ‘This says Lilian Miles on it. Have you been doing your own family tree and got them mixed up?’
I looked at the paper he’d given me. It was a document about the Air Transport Auxiliary.
‘No, it’s yours,’ I said, bristling at the suggestion that I’d get papers muddled. ‘Frank Jones is mentioned – look.’
I pointed at the bottom of the page, where I’d highlighted Jack’s grandfather’s name.
‘It’s saying he’d been cleared to fly the class of planes that included four-engine bombers,’ I said.
‘And so had Lilian,’ Jack said, showing me the name at the top of the page. ‘No relation of yours?’
I chewed my lip, thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps,’ I said. Then I shook my head. ‘It must just be a coincidence.’
Which was exactly what I said to my parents about what I’d seen at our regular Friday evening family dinner.
‘And there, right at the top, was the name Lilian Miles,’ I said, helping myself to more pilau rice – we always got takeaway on Fridays because neither of my parents could cook and Miranda, my sister who’d done all the cooking when we were growing up, was usually knackered from work.
‘I thought it had to be a coincidence,’ I carried on. ‘But isn’t it strange?’
Dad shrugged. ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘Like you say, probably just a coincidence.’
‘But what about Great-Aunt Lil?’ Miranda fixed Dad with a look that told me she wasn’t impressed with his response.
Mum smiled at the mention of Lil. She was very fond of her.
‘Yes, what about Lil?’ she said.
‘What about her?’ Dad asked, snapping a poppadom in half with a crack and scattering crumbs across the table. I fought the urge to sweep them up with my hand.
‘Could the Lilian Miles on the list be our Lil?’ Miranda asked.
‘It won’t be her,’ I said. ‘There were lots of women named Lilian back then; trust me, I’ve seen a million birth certificates in my time.’
‘But not lots of women named Lilian Miles,’ Miranda pointed out.
‘Is it just a coincidence?’ Mum said. She looked thoughtful. ‘Robert, what do we know about what Lil did in the war?’
Dad had just shovelled some more rice into his mouth but he sat up a bit straighter when Mum spoke.
‘Planes,’ he said eventually, once he’d swallowed. ‘Definitely something to do with planes. I remember her buying me a toy when I was a kid.’
‘Do you think it could be her, Nell?’ Miranda said, using my childhood nickname. ‘Maybe you could investigate?’
Mum and Dad exchanged a glance. Just a quick one and I had no idea what it meant. But I saw it and it intrigued me.
I shook my head. This was exactly what I’d been worried could happen.
‘We’re not allowed. We can’t use company time or resources to research our own families. I had to sign a thing, when I joined, saying I wouldn’t do it. And we can only access all the genealogy sites from work.’
‘But how would they know what you were looking up?’ Miranda said. She was like a dog with a bone when she got something in her head.
‘They’d know,’ I said darkly, though I thought she was probably right. Fliss could check what searches we did. In fact, we could all see everyone’s searches because we all shared a login. But we never paid much attention to what the others were researching and I supposed no one would know whether I was looking up my own family or someone else’s. ‘More naan?’
The conversation moved on. And if it hadn’t been for that look between my parents, I’d probably have forgotten all about the mention of Lilian Miles in my research. But that little glance, and the way Dad had suddenly sat up when he remembered Lil had done something with planes, stayed with me. I wondered what it meant and why it had captured his interest so much.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_dcdc7a1a-0c8b-5db9-9f7b-4c5b60631a04)
Lilian
June 1944
‘That’s your brother isn’t it? And is that his wife?’
Rose was peering over my shoulder at the photograph I kept stuck on the inside of my locker.
‘He looks like you, your brother.’
I gave her a quick, half-hearted smile and reached inside my locker for my jacket.
‘And is that their little lad she’s holding?’ Rose went on, undeterred by my lack of responses. ‘What a sweetheart. He looks like you as well. You’ve all got that same dark hair.’
Rose was one of the most infuriating people I’d ever met. Back when we’d been at school together my mum had told me to be nice.
‘She just wants to be your friend,’ Mum would say. ‘She’s not as good with people as you are.’
Back then, I’d been one of the class leaders. Confident and a bit mouthy. Able to make anyone laugh with a quick retort, and to perform piano in front of all sorts of audiences. But that was before.
I’d not seen Rose for a few years and I was finding her much harder to deal with now. For the thousandth time I cursed the luck that had sent my old school friend to join the Air Transport Auxiliary, and at the same airbase as me.
I pulled my jacket out with a swift yank and slammed the locker door shut, almost taking off Rose’s nose as I did it.
‘Got to go,’ I said.
I shrugged on my jacket, heaved my kitbag on to my shoulder, and headed through the double doors at the end of the corridor and out into the airfield. It was a glorious day, sunny and bright with a light wind. Perfect for flying. I paused by the door, raised my face to the sun and let it warm me for a moment.
The airfield was a hubbub of noise and activity. To my left a group of mechanics worked on a plane, shouting instructions to one another above the noise of the propellers. Ahead of me, a larger aircraft cruised slowly towards the runway, about to take off. It was what we called a taxi plane, taking other ATA pilots to factories where they’d pick up the aircraft they had to deliver that day.
My friend Flora was in the cockpit and she raised her arm to wave to me as she passed. I lifted my own hand and saluted her in return. A little way ahead, a truck revved its engine, and all around, people were calling to each other, shifting equipment and getting on with their tasks. I smiled. That was good. It was harder to organise things when it was quiet.
Glancing round, I saw Annie. She was loading some tarpaulins on to the back of a van. Casually I walked over to where she stood.
‘Morning,’ I said.
She nodded at me and hauled another of the folded tarpaulins up on to the van.
‘I’m going to Middlesbrough,’ I said, dropping my kitbag at my feet. I picked up one of the tarpaulins so if anyone looked over they’d see me helping, not chatting. ‘Finally.’
She nodded again.
‘I’ve left the address in your locker with my timings,’ I went on. ‘She’s waiting to hear from you so send the telegram as soon as I take off.’
‘Adoption?’ Annie said.
I nodded, my lips pinched together. ‘Older,’ I said. ‘Three kids already. Husband’s in France.’
Annie winced. ‘Poor cow.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Her mum’s helping.’
‘How far along is she?’
‘About seven months. She reckons she can’t hide it much longer. I’ve been waiting for one of us to be sent up there.’
Annie heaved the last tarpaulin on to the van.
‘Best get going then,’ she said.
I gave her a quick smile.
‘Thanks, Annie,’ I said.
A shout from across the airfield made me look round. ‘Lil!’
One of the engineers was waving to me from beside a small single-engine Fairchild.
‘Looks like mine,’ I said to Annie.
She gave my arm a brief squeeze. ‘It’s a good thing you’re doing here,’ she said.
‘You’re doing it too.’
Without looking back at her, I picked up my bag and ran over to the plane.
‘Am I flying this one?’ I said. We all took it in turns to fly the taxi planes, but I did it more often than some of the others; I loved it so much.
The engineer – a huge Welsh guy called Gareth who I was very fond of – patted the side of the plane lovingly.
‘You are,’ he said. ‘She’s a bit temperamental on the descent so take it easy.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘Gareth,’ I said. ‘I know what I’m doing.’
I opened the cockpit door and flung my bag inside.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Take me through all the pre-flight checks.’
I’d been in the ATA for two years now, and I was cleared to fly every kind of plane – even the huge bombers that many people thought a woman couldn’t handle, but I never took anything for granted. I always went through checks with the engineers and did everything by the book. I liked feeling in control and I didn’t want to put my life in anyone else’s hands. Not again.
The taxi flights were quick – normally twenty minutes or so as we headed to the factories to pick up our planes. Today was the same. So it wasn’t long before we’d landed at South Marston, and I was ready to take off in the Spitfire I was delivering to Middlesbrough.
I climbed up into the plane and checked all the instruments, even though I’d flown hundreds of Spitfires and it was as familiar to me as the back of my own hand.
I loved flying. I loved feeling the plane doing what I asked it to do, and the freedom of swooping over the countryside. I’d spent two years hanging round the RAF base near where I lived in the Scottish borders before I joined up. I’d learned everything I could about flying, without actually piloting a plane myself. And then, as soon as I was old enough to sign up I’d applied to the ATA. I’d loved it straight away and I knew I was a good pilot. I’d raced through the ranks and completed my training on each category of plane faster than anyone else.
And yet every time I went on one of my ‘mercy missions’ as Flora called them, I was risking it all.
Putting all my worries aside, I focused on the plane. I watched the ground crew as they directed me out on to the runway, then thought only of the engine beneath me as I took off northwards.
Once I was up, I relaxed a bit, and took in the view. The day was so clear, I could see the towns and villages below. I imagined all the people going about their lives – hearing my engine and looking up to see me as I passed. Because it was a brand new plane, there was no radio, no navigation equipment – nothing. I liked the challenge that brought. It meant my brain was always kept active and I had no time to brood.
Middlesbrough was one of our longest flights and by the time I landed it was afternoon and the heat of the summer day was beginning to fade.
I slid out of the cockpit and headed to a man with a clipboard, who appeared to be in charge.
‘Spitfire,’ I said. ‘Made in South Marston.’
He nodded, without looking at me. ‘Where’s the pilot?’ he asked. ‘I need him to sign.’
‘I’m the pilot,’ I said, through gritted teeth. ‘Do you have a pen?’
Now the man did look up. He rolled his eyes as though I’d said something ridiculous and handed me a pen from his shirt pocket.
I scribbled my signature on the form he held out. ‘Is there a flight going back?’
‘Over there,’ he said, gesturing with his head to where a larger Anson sat on the runway. ‘But there are a few of you going. Be about an hour?’
I breathed out in relief. An hour was more than enough. ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Can I grab a cuppa?’
He pointed his head in the other direction. I picked up my bag and went the way he’d indicated. But instead of going inside the mess hut, I slipped round the side of the building and out towards the main gate. I hoped the woman would be here – I didn’t want to risk missing my flight back; that would lead to all sorts of trouble.
‘Just going for some cigarettes,’ I told the bored man on the gate. He barely acknowledged me as I sauntered past and out on to the road. It was quiet with no passing traffic. Across the carriageway, a woman stood still, partly hidden by a tree. She was wearing a long coat, even though it was summer, and she was in her late thirties. Her hair was greying and she had a slump to her shoulders that made me sad. She looked at me and when I raised my hand in greeting, she smiled a cautious, nervous smile. Confident she was the person I was meant to meet, I ran across the road to her.
‘April?’ I said.
She nodded, looking as though she was going to cry.
‘I’m Lil.’
‘Lil,’ April said in a strong north-east accent. ‘I need to go. I went early with my others and I’m sure this one’s no different. I can’t be here when the baby arrives. I can’t.’ Her voice shook.
I took her arm. ‘I’ve got a family in Berkshire,’ I said. ‘Lovely woman. She’s wanted a baby since they got married ten years ago but it’s not happened. Her husband’s a teacher – so he’s not off fighting. They’ve got a spare room for you.’
April flinched and I looked at her.
‘He was a teacher,’ she said. ‘The man. The baby’s father.’
I stayed quiet. Sometimes mothers wanted to talk and sometimes they didn’t but whatever they wanted, it was easier for me to stay silent.
‘He was so nice,’ April went on. ‘Charming. Kind to my boys. Helpful to me. You know?’
I nodded.
‘And then one day he wasn’t so nice,’ she said. ‘And I know I should have told him to stay away, that I was married. I should have made it clearer. But I missed Bill, you see. And I know it’s my fault.’
She paused.
‘It’s my fault.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ I said, wondering how many times I’d said that and why it was easy to tell others that and not myself. ‘And it’s not the baby’s fault.’
I unzipped my bag and pulled out an envelope.
‘Your train tickets are in here,’ I said. ‘And the name and address of the family. You need to change at Birmingham and they’ll meet you at Reading station – they know what train you’ll be on.’
Looking a bit stunned, April took the envelope. ‘Why do you do this?’ she asked. ‘What’s in it for you?’
I shrugged. ‘It’s the right thing to do,’ I said.
April looked doubtful but she didn’t argue.
I glanced at my watch.
‘I have to go,’ I said. I took her hand and squeezed it. ‘Good luck.’
Chapter 4 (#ulink_8610bbfa-4887-5cdf-8146-907e96b113fc)
Helena
May 2018
After dinner I cornered Miranda in the kitchen as we washed up.
‘What was all that about?’ I asked her.
‘Should we club together and buy the parents a dishwasher,’ she said, squirting washing-up liquid into the sink.
‘I can’t afford it,’ I said. ‘And they wouldn’t use it anyway.’
Miranda frowned. ‘True.’
I elbowed her in the ribs as I passed her a stack of dirty plates.
‘Miranda, focus. Did you see Mum and Dad look at each other when I mentioned Lil?’
She elbowed me back like we were still ten and twelve, not thirty-four and thirty-six.
‘That was a bit weird, wasn’t it?’ she said.
‘What was weird, darling?’ Mum wandered into the kitchen clutching two empty wine glasses. ‘Is there another bottle?’
I thought Miranda might burst with the effort of not rolling her eyes. ‘In the fridge,’ she said, through gritted teeth. ‘You watched me put it in there.’
Mum blew an air kiss in her direction. ‘Don’t get snappy, Manda,’ she said, mildly. ‘What was weird?’
‘Work stuff,’ I said. ‘Manda was telling me about some really important deal she’s doing. Worth millions. Trillions even.’
Miranda was the youngest ever head of international investment at Ravensberg Bank and also the first woman to do the job. I was fiercely, wonderfully proud of her and in total awe of her skills. Our anti-capitalist parents, however, thought it was terrible. They always appeared faintly ashamed of Manda’s money, which I thought was ironic considering she’d honed her financial management skills by organising the family budget before she hit her teens. And she still invested both of our parents’ erratic income wisely and made sure they never ran short.
In fact, thanks to Dad composing the scores for huge blockbuster films since the Nineties, and Mum’s enthusiastic love of art history earning her spot as an expert on an antiques valuation television show, my parents were both pretty wealthy. Not that they’d ever admit it. If they even knew. They shared a vague ‘it’ll all work out’ approach to money and mostly ignored anything Miranda said about it.
‘Urgh,’ said Mum, predictably. ‘It all sounds so immoral somehow, finance chat.’
I grinned at Miranda over Mum’s shoulder and she scowled at me.
‘Take the bottle into the lounge,’ she said to Mum. ‘We’ll be in when we’re done.’
‘Is Dora asleep?’ I asked. Friday nights were dreadful for my daughter’s carefully crafted routine. She absolutely adored my parents and tended to run round like a mad thing for the first half of the evening, then drop.
‘Curled up on the sofa like an angel,’ Mum said, soppily. The adoration went both ways.
‘And Freddie?’
‘Playing piano with your father,’ Mum said.
Freddie was Miranda’s seven-year-old son who could be adorable and vile in equal measures but who had apparently inherited Dad’s musical talent – much to our father’s delight.
Mum opened the fridge, took out the bottle and retreated. I turned to Miranda, who’d finished the washing up.
‘So, you saw the look, right?’
She nodded.
‘What do you think it meant?’
Miranda shrugged. ‘Probably something completely unrelated, knowing them,’ she said. ‘They were interested though. Dad especially. Do you think it is our Lil?’
‘No,’ I said, though I wasn’t as sure as I sounded.
‘Where did you see her name?’ Miranda asked. She pulled out the wooden bench that lived under the kitchen table and sat down with a sigh. ‘I’m exhausted. Freddie was up half the night.’
I didn’t want to talk about Freddie; I wanted to talk about Lil.
‘On a list of people approved to fly bombers,’ I said.
‘Did women fly planes in the war?’
I nodded. ‘I don’t know a whole lot about it, but it seems so. Not in combat, obviously.’
‘Obviously,’ said Miranda drily. ‘It’s funny that Lil’s never mentioned this because it sounds amazing. Flying bombers?’
‘Not just bombers,’ I said. ‘The records I found are from something called the Air Transport Auxiliary. They flew all the planes. Took them from the factories where they were built to wherever they were needed.’
‘And it was women doing this?’
‘Mostly,’ I said. ‘But men did it too. Jack Jones’s grandad did it because he was too short-sighted to join the regular RAF, which is faintly terrifying.’
Miranda chuckled.
‘But yes, mostly women. They called them the Attagirls.’
‘I like that,’ Miranda said. ‘It’s clever. And only a tiny bit patronising.’
It was my turn to laugh. ‘They were really impressive,’ I said.
‘What’s incredible,’ Miranda said, shaking her head, ‘is that I’ve never even heard of these women.’
‘I’ve not heard much about them either,’ I admitted. ‘And it’s literally my job.’
‘If it was our Lil, I can’t believe she’s never talked about it,’ said Miranda. ‘It strikes me as something you’d want to talk about. It sounds wonderful.’
‘She’s always been vague when I’ve asked her about the war. Never really told me what she did.’
‘She’d have only been about to turn sixteen when the war started,’ Miranda said. I was impressed; I’d been sneakily counting on my fingers trying to add it up. ‘And only twenty-one at the end.’
‘Old enough to be doing something,’ I pointed out. ‘I had an idea she did office work.’
Miranda screwed up her nose. ‘I can’t believe we’ve never been interested enough to ask her for the details,’ she said. ‘That’s terrible of us. You’re a historian, Nell. You should be ashamed of yourself.’
I stuck my tongue out at her. ‘I’ve asked her lots of times,’ I said. ‘She’s always told me how boring it was and how she couldn’t wait for the war to finish so she could travel.’
‘Sounds like she was trying to make it sound dull enough so you wouldn’t keep asking,’ Miranda said.
I blinked at her. ‘Oh God, it actually does sound like that,’ I said. ‘Do you think she saw some awful stuff? Or did some really brave things?’
‘Lil?’ Miranda said with a glint in her eye. ‘Brave? I’d say so, wouldn’t you?’
I thought about our great-aunt, who’d been the only person to step in when things were really tough for us back in the Nineties. Lil, who hated being in one place for long, but who’d stayed in London until she knew Miranda and I were okay and that our family wasn’t about to fall apart. Lil, who regularly phoned Dad throughout our childhood and reminded him about parents’ evenings, and exams, and even birthdays. I smiled.
‘Definitely,’ I said.
I perched on the table next to where Miranda was sitting on the bench, and put my feet up next to her. She frowned at me and I ignored her.
‘The ATA girls flew every kind of aircraft,’ I said. ‘Massive bombers, and tiny fighter planes, and everything in between.’
‘Do you think they got a hard time from people who didn’t think they were capable?’ Miranda asked, well aware of what it was like to be a woman in a man’s world. ‘I have lost count of the times someone’s asked me to take minutes in a meeting, or fetch coffee.’
‘Because you’re the only woman?’ I said, shocked but not entirely surprised. ‘What do you say when that happens? Do you go?’
‘It doesn’t happen now because I’m in charge.’ Miranda allowed herself a small, self-satisfied smile. ‘But when I was starting out, I used to just do it – go and get the drinks, or hand round the biscuits.’
I winced. ‘And when you weren’t just starting out?’
‘Once,’ said Miranda coolly, ‘I asked if I was expected to take the minutes with my vagina.’
‘No, you didn’t.’
‘I did,’ she said, laughing. ‘That was one chief exec who never asked me to do that again.’
I was amazed by her bolshiness and said so. ‘You definitely share that with Lil,’ I pointed out. ‘I expect she had to be bolshie if she was flying planes all over the place, just like you had to be a bit gobby to make it in your job.’
‘She’s definitely bolshie, our Lil. But I suppose we don’t even know for sure the Lilian Miles on this list of yours is her,’ Miranda said. ‘It actually could be a coincidence, like you said.’
We both stayed quiet for a second, then Miranda spoke again.
‘We should ask her,’ she said.
‘Ask her?’
Miranda nodded. ‘Ask her.’
Chapter 5 (#ulink_7912707c-0401-5796-9e22-a58a477f8c7f)
Lilian
June 1944
It was late when I finally landed back at base. The sunny skies that had made flying such a joy were now chilly and as I slid out of the back of the Anson, I scanned the horizon. It was a clear night, which meant a good view for German bombers, and I wondered if there would be a raid later.
Once I’d signed the plane in and reported to the officer on duty, I picked up my bag and headed off towards the entrance of the airfield. I was tired and I wanted to get back to the digs that I shared with Annie and Flora. We needed to go over all the details of April’s case, and I wanted to check if anything else had come up today.
‘What’s in your bag?’
The voice made me jump. I squinted into the lengthening shadows round the side of the mess hut.
‘Who’s there?’
‘It’s me.’ The shadows changed into the shape of a man and out from the side of the building came Will Bates – one of the RAF mechanics who worked on the base. He was funny and charming and I knew Rose was quite sweet on him.
‘Hello, Will,’ I said, gripping my bag slightly tighter. There was nothing incriminating in it; I’d given everything to April, but his level stare was making me nervous.
‘You’re always carrying a load of stuff,’ he said. ‘I just wondered what you were lugging around the whole time.’
We all carried overnight bags whenever we went on a trip because sometimes we couldn’t get back to HQ. But the way he said it made me feel uncomfortable. I raised my chin.
‘Been watching me, have you?’
To my surprise, Will looked a bit sheepish. ‘I have as it happens,’ he said.
I narrowed my eyes and stared at him. ‘Why?’
He coughed in a sort of nervous way and I relaxed my grip on the straps of my bag, just a bit.
‘Because you’re pretty,’ he muttered. ‘And you look fun. I thought you might like to go dancing one evening, when we’ve both got the same day off.’
I closed my eyes briefly, feeling relief flood my senses.
Will smiled at me. He was a good-looking chap, with dark red hair and deep brown eyes. When he smiled, I got a glimpse of the little boy he’d once been – probably thanks to the sprinkling of freckles across his nose. I couldn’t help but smile back.
‘Dancing?’ I said.
‘Dancing.’
I leaned against the rough wall of the mess hut and took a breath.
‘Will,’ I began. Oh, how to even start explaining the mess my head was in, and the difficult feelings I had about men and women and the relationships between them.
‘I’d like that,’ I said. ‘But maybe we could go as part of a group?’
Will studied me closely. ‘A group,’ he said.
‘At first, at least.’
He grinned again. ‘You’re on,’ he said. ‘See you later.’
He pulled a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one, the flare from the match shining on the curl of his lip and the twinkle in his eye.
‘Bye, Lil,’ he said, sauntering away across the airfield.
I watched him go. ‘Bye,’ I said.
But as I turned towards the barracks, he stopped.
‘Oh, Lil,’ he said, with that boyish grin again. ‘I know you’re up to something.’
Unease gripped me, but I pretended I hadn’t heard. I shifted my bag up my shoulder and carried on walking away from him. I didn’t look back.
* * *
‘He said what?’ Annie said, when I told her about the conversation.
‘That I was up to something,’ I said. I was lying on my bed in my nightgown, even though it was still early. Missions like tonight’s always exhausted me, and Will’s appearance hadn’t helped.
‘You are up to something,’ Flora pointed out. She was on my bed too, sitting by my feet. She had a sheaf of paper on her lap.
‘That’s why I’m so nervous,’ I said. ‘Between Rose sniffing around and Will Bates lurking in the shadows, I’m worried people are starting to suspect.’
‘I am positive Will Bates knows nothing,’ Annie said. ‘He’s just teasing you. Flirting.’
I scowled at her.
‘I’m positive,’ she repeated. ‘He may be pretty …’
She paused to give Flora and me time to appreciate Will’s handsome face in our imaginations.
‘… but he’s not the sharpest tool in the box.’
I smiled at Annie’s bluntness. She certainly told it how it was and she did not suffer fools gladly. Her sharp brain made her a real asset to our little group, while Flora’s organisational skills kept the whole thing running smoothly. I’d lost count of how many times I thanked my lucky stars that they’d both joined the ATA instead of using their skills in the War Office or behind a desk somewhere.
The first time we’d helped a woman, it was just by chance. Back in 1942 when we’d been doing our training in Luton there had been a girl in our pool called Polly. One evening we’d all been out – it was fun there, and there were a lot of army regiments stationed nearby, lads doing basic training just like us. Their presence always made for a good night. But that one evening, Polly didn’t come home. She eventually arrived, much later, with her dress torn. She hadn’t told us what had happened – she didn’t have to. Quietly, me and Annie gave her a bath and cleaned her up, and tried not to wince at the bruises on her thighs.
A few weeks later, Annie caught Polly being sick in the toilet and realised she was pregnant.
‘What am I going to do?’ Polly had hissed at us in the bathroom that day, her face pale and her forehead beaded with sweat. ‘I can’t have a bloody baby.’
She’d gagged, just with the effort of speaking.
‘I didn’t even know his name.’
‘We need to help her,’ I told Annie.
‘But what can we do?’
I’d shaken my head. ‘I don’t know,’ I’d said. ‘But we need to do something.’
I’d not known Annie long at that time, but I already knew she was someone I’d trust with my life.
‘Someone helped me once,’ I’d admitted. ‘Not like this, not …’
Annie’s eyes had searched my face. I’d squeezed my lips together in case I cried.
‘And now you think we should help Polly?’ she’d said.
I’d nodded.
‘We’ll find a way.’
And that’s where Flora came in. She knew someone in Manchester. Someone who’d helped a friend of her sister. A doctor. At least, that’s what he said he was and we never checked. Flora made the arrangements, Annie and I worked out the logistics and the transport, and Polly went off to Manchester just a fortnight later. She came back even paler, but after a couple of days’ rest – we told our officers that she was having some women’s troubles and they didn’t push it – she was fine again.
We had thought that was it. But it wasn’t. Polly told someone what we’d done for her, and quietly, word got round. Turned out there were women all over the place who needed help of one sort or another and it seemed we were the ones to help them. Gradually we built up a network of people, all over the country. Truth was, the network had existed long before we came along. We were just lucky that we could put people in touch with each other. Doctors who could do what we needed them to do, women desperate to adopt a baby, others willing to shelter a pregnant woman for a few weeks – or nurse someone who’d picked up an infection after their, you know, procedure.
We criss-crossed the country delivering planes, and sharing information or arrangements with women while we did it. In two years, we’d helped eleven women – April was number twelve. We’d seen five babies born and adopted and the rest, well, they’d been sorted. And we’d had one death, a young woman called Bet who lost too much blood after her op, and who’d been too scared to go to hospital in case she got into trouble. We didn’t use that doctor again and we’d made sure we checked out new places now, but we were all haunted by Bet’s death. Never thought about stopping though. Not once. And if losing one of our women wouldn’t stop us helping others, nor would Will Bates and his clumsy flirting.
I sat up in bed and looked across at Annie, who was lying on her own bed next to mine.
‘April’s going to let us know when the baby comes,’ I said. ‘Don’t reckon it’ll be long.’
Annie nodded. ‘Glad we got there in time.’
Flora was opening letters. We had a box at the local post office where people could contact us.
‘Too late for this one, though,’ she said, scanning the paper. ‘She wrote this last month and she says she was already eight months gone then. She’ll have had the baby by now.’
Annie shrugged. ‘Can’t help ’em all.’
But I wished we could.
Chapter 6 (#ulink_304672d5-ff96-5bab-922d-987aacd23212)
Helena
May 2018
It seemed Miranda and I weren’t the only ones to be thinking about Lil. On Monday morning, just before lunch, the office receptionist phoned me to say I had a visitor.
‘This is a nice surprise,’ I said as the lift doors opened and I saw it was my dad. ‘Are you working nearby?’
We were based in Soho, and Dad often worked close by when a film he’d composed the music on was in post-production. It wasn’t unusual for him to pop by and say hello when he was in the area, but he normally phoned first.
Now he gave a vague nod over his shoulder. ‘Nearby,’ he said.
‘I’m a bit busy at the moment but we could go for lunch in about half an hour if you like?’
But Dad shook his head. ‘I wanted to ask you something,’ he said. ‘Could we nip into another room, perhaps?’
Behind his back, I saw Elly studiously bashing away at her keyboard, pretending not to be listening.
‘Of course,’ I said, a flicker of unease in my stomach. ‘Follow me.’
I led him into the meeting room where I’d met Jack Jones the week before, and shut the door.
‘Are you okay? What’s the matter? Is Mum okay?’
Dad smiled. ‘Nothing’s the matter,’ he said. ‘We’re both fine. Fit as fiddles.’
He gave a little skip as though to prove how fit he was even though he was approaching eighty. Mum wasn’t far off seventy.
I raised my eyebrow at him and he pulled out a chair and sat down. I did the same.
‘So what’s up?’
‘I wanted to ask you a favour,’ he said.
‘Go on.’
‘I know you said you weren’t supposed to do your own research, but any chance you could have a quick look into this Lil stuff for me?’
‘Dad, no,’ I said. ‘I can’t.’
‘It’s important.’
I stared at him. ‘Why?’ I said. ‘Why is it important?’
Dad looked at his hands. ‘No actual reason that I can put into words,’ he said. ‘I’d just like to know more about my family. Before it’s too late.’
He took a breath.
‘I never really asked my parents much about the war, and that generation just didn’t talk about it, did they?’
I shook my head. More than once I’d come across the most amazing stories in the course of research that had never been mentioned in the family.
‘I think the war was so awful, more awful than we could ever imagine, and those who lived through it found it hard to talk about,’ I said.
‘My father – your grandfather – was in the RAF.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen his medals.’
Dad nodded. ‘Never mentioned it, not really,’ he said. ‘Not to us, at least not often. He had some old air force friends I remember him meeting up with, and I imagine they talked about what they’d done.’
‘Their own version of group therapy,’ I pointed out. ‘Must have helped.’
‘I wish I’d asked him more about it,’ Dad said. He looked really sad and I thought suddenly that even though my grandpa had been dead for more than twenty years, he must still miss him.
I reached out and took his hand. ‘He might not have talked, even if you’d asked,’ I said. ‘Did Grandma ever say anything?’
‘Not about Dad in the air force,’ Dad said. ‘But, of course, I remember bits about the war. Not much, because I was very small. But I remember living with Mum, and not really knowing Dad when he came home.’
He paused.
‘And I remember Lil,’ he said.
‘What do you remember?’ I asked, intrigued by this little insight into my own family history.
‘I remember her wearing a uniform,’ Dad said slowly. He tilted his head to the left and looked far away over my shoulder. ‘I remember sitting on her lap and playing with a toy plane and her arm round me felt scratchy, the material I mean. It was a uniform.’
‘How old were you?’
He shrugged.
‘About four, perhaps? I loved that plane.’
‘Was that the one Lil brought you?’
‘I always thought my father gave it to me,’ he said. ‘But now I really think about it, I seem to remember Lil bringing it. It’s such a long time ago.’
‘Uniforms and toy planes sound to me like that was our Lil on my list,’ I said.
Dad nodded. ‘That’s what I thought.’
‘Give me a minute,’ I said.
Leaving him in the meeting room, I dashed back to my desk and found the Jack Jones file – now with all the papers back in the correct order.
‘Everything okay?’ Elly said, super-casually.
‘Dad worked with Jack Jones,’ I said, sort of truthfully. Dad had indeed done some music for the TV show Jack had starred in – though he never met the actors as a rule. ‘On that detective thing. He wanted to check something.’
Elly looked dubious but she didn’t say anything.
I took the folder back to the meeting room and showed Dad the list with Lilian Miles on it.
‘So, she flew planes?’ Dad said in awe. ‘Bloody hell.’
I nodded. ‘Amazing, right?’
‘Could you check her records?’
‘Dad,’ I said, in a warning tone.
‘There must be service records,’ he said, not put off by my frown. ‘Surely they’d help us find out if it’s her? We know her date and place of birth; it shouldn’t be hard to cross-reference.’
‘I can’t, Dad,’ I said. ‘It’s completely verboten to do our own research. I could lose my job.’
I grinned at him.
‘You could do it, or Mum. She knows about research. Though it’s expensive to subscribe to some of the databases.’
Dad shook his head. ‘Oh, Nell, you know what we’re like with computers. We just don’t have the skills,’ he said. ‘I’m not bad on the email business but anything more complicated just flummoxes me. I’m no spring chicken.’
I patted his hand reassuringly. ‘You do brilliantly,’ I lied, knowing he was right. He and Mum struggled to work their television.
‘What about if you did it outside work?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It just feels so wrong because I found the information at work. It’s not right to use company resources for personal searches. I could get into trouble.’
‘Your boss wouldn’t know, Miranda said,’ Dad pointed out.
I shrugged. ‘I can’t,’ I said again. ‘Why are you so interested?’
‘I told you, I just want to know about my family,’ Dad said. But he didn’t meet my eyes when he said it. What was he hiding?
‘There is something we can do, though,’ I said, watching him carefully.
Dad looked hopeful. ‘What?’
‘We could ask her.’
‘Ask her,’ Dad repeated, just as I’d done when Miranda suggested it.
Before I could continue, there was a knock on the door of the meeting room and Fliss stuck her head round, her long blonde hair swinging.
‘Sorry, Helena,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d booked this room?’
Guiltily, I gathered up the Jack Jones papers I’d been showing Dad and smiled. ‘Just an unplanned meeting,’ I said. ‘We’ll get out of your way.’
I went to hustle Dad out of the room, before Fliss realised I’d been mixing up work and personal stuff, but it was too late. She was looking at Dad curiously.
‘Fliss Hopkins,’ she said, holding out her hand for him to shake.
‘Robert Miles.’
She beamed at him. ‘Helena’s father?’
‘Indeed,’ said Dad giving her a dazzling smile. He was such a charmer.
‘I was just going over some Jack Jones research when Dad popped in to see if I was free for lunch,’ I said.
‘But Helena tells me she is far too busy to join me, so I will bid you farewell,’ Dad said smoothly making me wonder if he’d always been such a good liar.
‘Nice to meet you,’ said Fliss.
She stood back to let us leave the room then entered herself, leaving the door open.
‘Let me think about it,’ I said as I showed Dad to the lift, hoping Fliss hadn’t realised I had been showing Dad my Jack Jones research and that she didn’t decide to have a look at it herself. ‘I can’t search Lil’s records, not without putting my job at risk, but I’ll have a think about what else we can do.’
Dad kissed me goodbye. ‘Thanks, Helena,’ he said. ‘It means a lot to me.’
Chapter 7 (#ulink_ea0c4447-8c2f-5a25-9054-c9deeb90b746)
Lilian
September 1939
I cycled as slowly as I could through the village, wobbling on my bike because I wasn’t going fast enough to keep my balance.
‘Morning, Lil,’ Marcus the postman called. ‘Mind how you go.’
I ignored him, concentrating on keeping my legs going round. I had an ache in my stomach and my limbs felt heavy and hard to control.
‘By lunchtime it’ll be over,’ I whispered to myself over and over as I cycled. ‘By lunchtime it’ll be over.’
I could see the house up ahead, squatting at the end of the village like a slug, and growing bigger as I approached. I slid off my bicycle and chained it to the fence, and then, dragging my heels, walked up the path to the front door. Before I could knock, it opened. My piano teacher’s wife stood there. She was dressed to go out, wearing her hat and holding her gloves in one hand and her handbag in the other. I wanted to cry.
‘Lilian,’ she said, beaming at me ‘How nice to see you. He’s in the music room – go on through.’
I forced a smile. ‘Thank you, Mrs Mayhew,’ I muttered, slinking past her. She was so pretty and fresh-looking in her summer dress. I felt her eyes on me as I went and wondered if she knew. If she could tell. I felt dirty. No, not dirty. Filthy.
At the music room door, I paused. Then I lifted my hand and knocked.
‘Come,’ said Mr Mayhew. Taking a breath, I went.
Mr Mayhew was sitting at the piano, making pencil notes on some sheet music that was on the stand.
‘Ah, Lilian,’ he said. ‘You’re late.’
He turned round on the stool and gave me a dazzling smile. My breath caught in my throat. Always when I wasn’t with him, he became a monster in my head. Then, when I saw him again – saw his dark, swarthy good looks and his broad shoulders – I wondered what I had been worrying about.
‘Come and sit,’ he said, shifting over on the padded stool. ‘Let’s play something fun to get warmed up.’
I put down my music case and settled myself next to him. I felt the warmth of his body as his thigh brushed mine when I sat, but I couldn’t move away because the stool was too small.
Mr Mayhew – I couldn’t call him Ian, even though he’d told me to – moved a sheet of music to the front of the bundle on the stand. It was a Bach piece that had been one of my favourites, long ago when I was still a child.
He turned to me, his face just inches from mine. I smelled coffee on his breath and tried not to recoil as nausea overwhelmed me.
‘Ready?’ he said.
I nodded, putting my hands on to the keys.
‘Two, three, four …’ he counted us in.
I knew the music by heart, so as I played I shut my eyes and imagined I was anywhere but in this stuffy room, with Mr Mayhew’s body heat spreading through my thin cotton frock.
At the end of the piece, Mr Mayhew stood up and I felt myself relax. Slightly.
‘Good,’ he said, strolling over to the window and gazing out into the garden. ‘Now let’s go through your examination pieces. Start with the Brahms.’
I relaxed a bit more, realising he wanted to concentrate on music today.
‘Could you open a window, please?’ I asked. ‘It’s very warm.’
He nodded and pushed the sash upwards. ‘Are you feeling well?’ he asked me, his brow furrowed in concern. ‘You’re very pale.’
I swallowed. ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘It’s just the heat.’
Mr Mayhew came over to where I sat and stood behind me. Gently, he reached out and stroked the back of my neck.
‘Lilian,’ he said gruffly. ‘Is something wrong?’
I froze. My stomach was squirming and I wasn’t sure I could put how I was feeling into words. How could I tell him I’d wanted his approval for months, so badly that I almost felt a physical ache when I played a wrong note. That when he smiled at me my heart sang with the most beautiful music. That when he told me I was special to him, I wanted to throw myself into his arms and stay there forever. And yet, as spring had blossomed into early summer, and he had kissed me for the first time, I’d gone home feeling confused and guilty. When, just a week later, he had put his hand up my skirt while I played, his fingers probing and hurting, I’d gasped in fear and he’d nodded.
‘Like that?’ he said, his voice thick. ‘I thought you would. I knew what you wanted from the day you walked in here.’
I’d stayed still, not understanding what he was doing. Not wanting to upset him by asking him to stop. Because I had wanted this. Hadn’t I?
Now, after our lessons he would kiss me, and touch me – and make me touch him too. I didn’t know how to say no. Because I’d started this, hadn’t I? And sometimes he came to school to meet me at the gate and give me music he’d copied for me by hand – see how much cared – and we walked home the long way through the woods. And he’d take me by the hand and lower me into the soft moss below one of the trees and unbuckle his belt and …
I found that by imagining playing the piano I could pretend it wasn’t happening. And then when it was over, Mr Mayhew would always be so kind. He would brush leaves from my hair, and tell me how precious I was. I never cried until I was alone.
Now, feeling his fingers on the back of my neck, I waited for what he would do next.
‘Are you cross with me?’ he murmured. ‘Because I wanted you to play first?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I want to play.’
‘You tease me,’ he said. He trailed his fingers over my collarbone and down to my bust, and I closed my eyes.
And then the front door banged shut and he pulled away as if my faded cotton dress was prickly.
‘Ian,’ Mrs Mayhew called. ‘Ian, are you there?’
She came into the music room without knocking, which she never did. Mr Mayhew was very strict about that. Not a surprise, I supposed, given what we were often doing instead of playing piano.
Mrs Mayhew’s hat was askew and her hair was escaping from its roll. She had a streak of dust across the front of her dress and her forehead was beaded with sweat. I’d never seen her look so flustered; she was normally perfectly groomed.
‘Oh, Ian,’ she wailed. ‘Ian, have you heard the news?’
Mr Mayhew stiffened next to me. ‘He’s done it, has he?’ he said. ‘He’s bloody gone and done it?’
A tear rolled down Mrs Mayhew’s face, leaving a clean track in the grime on her cheek.
‘I ran all the way from the village,’ she said. ‘They were talking about it on the street. Mrs Armitage was sitting at the war memorial, just weeping.’
I felt sicker than I had moments before. Mrs Armitage had lost both her sons in the Great War. The war we’d been told would end all wars. The war that my own father never talked about.
‘What does this mean?’ I stammered. ‘Is it Hitler? What has he done?’
Mr Mayhew patted me on the head distractedly, his full attention on his wife.
‘He’s sent his troops into Poland,’ he said. ‘And Mr Chamberlain promised that if he did that, then …’ His voice trailed off.
‘I need to go home,’ I said. ‘I need to find Bobby.’
Mrs Mayhew looked at me for the first time. I didn’t think she’d even realised I was there before then.
‘Bobby,’ she said vaguely. ‘Who is Bobby?’
I was already halfway out of the door. ‘He’s my brother,’ I said over my shoulder. ‘I need to find my brother.’
Chapter 8 (#ulink_0ec2638d-2013-51ff-a183-b1cf60a92604)
Helena
May 2018
Work was crazily busy for the next few days and I didn’t have any time to think about Lil for a while. Until Jack Jones turned up at the office again – much to my surprise.
‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ he said when I went down to reception to see him. ‘I was having lunch with my agent nearby, and thinking about everything you’d found out and I wanted to see how you were getting on.’
I gave him a small, forced smile. ‘Yeah, all good,’ I said vaguely. I was getting on pretty well with his research, but I wasn’t happy about him checking up on me in this way.
‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘Does this look like I’m checking up on you?’
He was so close to what I was thinking that I stared at him in horror.
‘It does a bit,’ I admitted, unable to think of anything else to say but the truth. ‘The celebs aren’t normally this interested.’
He grinned at me, pushing a lock of his curls out of his dark eyes, and I felt myself melting, just a bit.
‘I’m being a nightmare,’ he said.
‘It’s fine.’ I was feeling slightly odd. ‘Do you want to come upstairs?’
I took him up to the office and we sat in the same meeting room as before. Elly was at lunch, thank goodness, else she’d have been hovering to see what Jack wanted.
I offered him a coffee and tried to disguise my relief when he turned it down.
‘I had an early start today so I’ve had more than enough caffeine already,’ he said, with the same cheeky grin. ‘It makes me a bit bouncy.’
‘I wish you’d bounce my way,’ I thought to myself and then blinked in surprise. What was happening here? I’d barely looked at a man since Greg and I had fallen apart. Being a heartbroken single mother hardly made me a catch. And yet, here I was, fluttering my eyelashes at a real-life celebrity who was as likely to fancy me back as – well, as Greg I supposed.
I swallowed. ‘I’ve found out quite a lot about your grandparents, and your great-grandparents,’ I said carefully looking away from where his T-shirt hugged his broad chest. ‘It’s relatively simple to research just one or two generations back.’
I leafed through my folder to find the right documents.
‘Do you not know any of this already?’
Jack shook his head.
‘My maternal grandparents came over from Jamaica in the Fifties,’ he said. ‘They had one daughter already, and my mum was the first of their children to be born here. She’s the middle child – I’ve got two aunties.’
I nodded, interested. We’d not researched his maternal family at all so this was all new to me.
‘My grandad was a bus driver and my gran was a nurse. They worked really, really hard and they wanted a better life for their kids – my mum and my aunties.’
I nodded again.
‘And then Mum decided she wanted to be a writer, which wasn’t really in their plan,’ he said with a smile. I could see he was really proud of his family and my heart swelled a tiny bit more. ‘But they were so supportive of her. And she worked all the way through university to pay for herself.’
‘They all sound amazing,’ I said.
‘Then Mum met my dad,’ Jack said. ‘And it all went a bit wrong for a while.’
‘Wrong, how?’
‘He wasn’t a bad bloke, by all accounts. He seemingly loved Mum and they planned to get married. But she found out she was pregnant and he got scared, I think.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘Same old story,’ I said sharply.
Jack looked at me with interest. ‘Sounds like you mean that,’ he said.
I gave him a grim smile. ‘Happened to me,’ I said, wondering why on earth I was sharing my story with him and yet somehow unable to resist.
‘My boyfriend legged it when I got pregnant,’ I said. ‘Well, I legged it actually but only after he’d given me a brochure for an abortion clinic.’
‘Ah,’ said Jack.
‘Ah.’
‘And did you, erm …?’
I smiled properly this time and showed him the photo on my phone. ‘Dora’s two,’ I said. ‘And she’s not seen Greg for more than a year. He took a job in Canada.’
Jack winced. ‘What a douche,’ he said.
I suddenly felt uncomfortable, sharing so much with a stranger. ‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘We’re fine.’ I smiled. ‘Show me a family that doesn’t have a baby born with the whiff of a scandal and I’ll show you a family that knows how to keep secrets.’
Jack nodded sadly. ‘My dad’s family were quite traditional and a mixed-race grandkid born out of wedlock didn’t really work for them.’
I patted his hand, trying hard to fight the temptation to gather him up into my arms. He looked so sad.
‘I met them a few times, and my dad was around a bit when I was younger, but he got married to someone else and his visits got less and less frequent. By the time I was ten, I never saw him at all.’
‘Did you miss him?’ I was fairly sure Dora never gave Greg a second thought but I worried she would as she got older.
He shook his head. ‘I’d never had a proper relationship with him.’
‘How did you find out he’d died?’
‘Solicitor,’ Jack said, shrugging. ‘He left me some money.’
‘So he was thinking about you after all.’
‘I think that makes it worse,’ Jack said. ‘Because he could have just rung, you know? And I’m doing okay, in my career. I didn’t need his money – but I needed a dad.’
I breathed out. This was so sad. I hoped he’d be as honest with the camera crew when they filmed his story – it would make a great episode.
‘And you want to know more about his family now?’
‘I know lots about my Caribbean side. I know everything. I’ve met everyone. I know the recent history and I know further back – the murky bits. The nasty, horrible, slavery bits.’
I nodded again.
‘And I’m really aware that I can only go so far back on that side of my family. We will never be able to go much further than a few generations because no one kept records. I don’t know where we came from, or what my ancestors did, and I will never be able to find out.’
‘So now you’re filling the gap on the other side instead?’ I said, understanding now where his drive to discover his family came from.
‘That’s the plan.’ He gave me a little sheepish smile. ‘Sorry to be so demanding.’
I smiled back at him and for a second we stayed that way, eyes locked, smiling at each other, until I dropped my gaze. What was I doing?
‘I don’t mind at all,’ I said honestly. ‘Happy to help.’
‘Did you find out anything about your own family mystery?’
I didn’t understand what he was talking about. Did he mean Greg? I knew where he was. I looked at him blankly. ‘What mystery?’
‘Your Lilian Miles,’ he said.
‘Oh, Lilian. No, not really. I don’t think there’s anything mysterious about it all …’
‘But?’
‘But there was a look between my parents, when I mentioned what I’d found.’
Jack sat up a bit straighter. ‘And?’ he said.
‘And my dad turned up here and asked me to research her some more.’
‘Interesting,’ said Jack, raising his eyebrows.
‘I chatted about it with my sister …’
‘You’ve got a sister?’
‘I’ve got two,’ I said, finding the way his mind darted between subjects a bit disconcerting. Maybe he had drunk too much coffee. ‘And a brother.’
‘Awesome,’ Jack said. ‘So what did your sister say?’
‘She said I should ask my great-aunt what she did during the war and whether this Lilian Miles is her.’
‘Seems reasonable enough.’
‘I suggested that to Dad,’ I went on.
‘And what did he say?’
I frowned. ‘He didn’t really say anything because we were interrupted. He was very keen for me to research her, though. I don’t understand why.’
‘I understand,’ Jack said.
I stared at him. ‘You do?’
‘I understand what it’s like not to know about part of your family,’ he explained. ‘Maybe your dad feels the same.’
‘Perhaps,’ I said, doubtfully. ‘But he knows all about Lil. She even lived with us for a while. She’s hardly an enigma.’
Jack grinned. ‘But you don’t know about her war.’
‘Well, no …’
‘So she is an enigma. At least part of her life is.’
I shook my head, feeling like he’d just backed me into a corner. ‘Dad was hiding something,’ I said thoughtfully, almost to myself. ‘It was like he didn’t want to tell me the real reason he was so keen.’
‘You have to find out more,’ Jack said.
Eagerly, he took my hand and I felt a jolt like the electric shocks I always got off the dodgy lift buttons in the office. Surprised, I pulled my hand away and he looked embarrassed.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have done that.’
‘No, don’t apologise,’ I blustered. ‘I just got an electric shock is all.’
He smiled at me. ‘Sorry,’ he said again. ‘Next time I take your hand, I’ll warn you in advance so you can earth yourself.’
‘Next time,’ I said, sounding robotic and as though I didn’t really understand the words, like Eleven from Stranger Things.
We smiled at each other and I felt myself flush.
‘So, yeah,’ I said briskly, to break the awkward moment. ‘Dad wants me to look at the service records but I explained I’m not allowed. Fliss is very strict about us not researching our own family history at work.’
‘Use my research,’ Jack said.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Use my family as a cover. Find Frank Jones in the ATA and look up Lil while you’re at it.’
‘I really don’t think that’s a good idea,’ I said. ‘It’s too risky. We can all see each other’s searches. What if someone twigs I’m looking up my family? I can’t lose my job.’
Jack shrugged. ‘Just an idea,’ he said. ‘No need to decide now. Why not think about it?’
I smiled despite my misgivings. ‘Okay, then,’ I said. ‘I’ll think about it. But for now, I’m just going to talk to Lil.’
Jack grinned again. His smile was infectious.
‘Great,’ he said. ‘Let me know how you get on.’
Chapter 9 (#ulink_af4bb8de-4351-5222-b60d-017758aee766)
I thought about how best to approach the subject with Lil all weekend. Several times I picked up the phone to speak to her in her care home down in Surrey, then changed my mind. I’d go and see her in person, I thought. And anyway, I didn’t know for sure yet that she was the Lilian Miles on the ATA list. The only way to find out was to double-check the service record – under the cover of checking Frank Jones of course. If – and it was a big if – I decided to go down that road, I couldn’t do it until I was back at work on Monday and had access to all the databases.
Work, as always, was busy that week. Filming was starting on the next series of the show and it was all hands on deck to check the last few details. I was kept busy all day Monday and most of Tuesday going over the royal connections of a Sixties’ pop star who was a distant relation of Lady Jane Grey, while Elly raced round trying to find a historian who was an expert in prostitution to talk to a celebrity chef whose ancestor ran a high-class brothel in Victorian Manchester.
Late on Tuesday afternoon, the phone on my desk rang.
‘Helena?’ I recognised those clipped tones immediately.
‘Jack,’ I said, ignoring the way my heart thumped. ‘Hello.’
Next to me, Elly raised an eyebrow.
I spun round in my chair so I had my back to her.
‘What’s up?’ I asked Jack.
‘I’ve been doing a bit of research,’ he said. ‘Thought you might like to see it.’
‘Research?’ I said, sounding a bit stupid. ‘What kind of research?’
‘I tracked down my uncle. My father’s brother.’
‘You did? That’s wonderful. Was he pleased to hear from you?’
I could hear Jack smiling at the other end of the phone.
‘He actually was,’ he said. ‘Turns out he’s a big fan of Mackenzie.’
Mackenzie was the detective show Jack starred in.
‘I’m so pleased,’ I said. ‘Are you going to meet up?’
‘We are. He says he’s got some photos to show me.’
‘That’s great,’ I said, honestly. ‘Do you think he’ll chat to you on camera? It’s always good to get social history from people who have actual memories.’
‘I’m sure he’d be game,’ Jack said. I scribbled down a note to mention it to the director of his show.
‘… service records,’ Jack was saying.
‘I’m sorry, I missed that,’ I said. ‘What was that about service records?’
‘I thought we could check them together, to find out more about my grandfather’s time in the ATA,’ he said. Then he lowered his voice, even though no one but me could hear him. ‘We could see if my grandad knew Lilian Miles. Maybe they worked together. Have you spoken to her yet? Did you find out if she’s one of your relatives? Wouldn’t that be utterly amazing?’
‘You are the keenest celebrity I’ve ever worked with,’ I said.
Jack laughed. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t apologise – it’s nice,’ I said. ‘And I understand why you’re so eager. It’s just unusual.’
‘So did you speak to her?’
‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘But I’m planning to.’
I paused, aware of my colleagues – especially Elly of course – all around me.
‘What you said, about the service records,’ I said, choosing my words carefully. ‘Perhaps we could check them.’
‘Of course.’ Jack sounded pleased. ‘I’m guessing it will be better for our cover story if we do it together.’
‘I agree,’ I said cautiously, still nervous about the plan. Was I going to regret this? Especially considering the chaos he’d brought with him when he came to the office last week. Though, I thought, he’d been far less disruptive when he came in the second time. And I found I really wanted to see him again.
Mentally I started checking my plans for the week. I’d finished with the Sixties’ pop star now, so tomorrow and Thursday was more Sarah Sanderson research, and I’d planned to set aside Friday to look into Jack’s research. Maybe Jack could pop by the office late on Friday afternoon and we could look it all up together, and have a sneaky look at Lilian Miles while we were at it. I could duplicate all our findings and make him his own file to take away, so he wouldn’t mess up my own folders. And I could get Mum to collect Dora from nursery and take her back to theirs for our Friday dinner.
‘How about Friday afternoon?’ I said. ‘About fourish?’
‘Sorry, no can do.’ Jack sounded genuinely fed up. ‘I’m filming on Friday.’
‘Oh that’s a shame. I can email you anything I find out …’
‘Are you free now?’
‘Now?’
‘Let’s do the research now. Unless you’re snowed under?’
Elly prodded me in the back and when I glanced over my shoulder at her, she made a kissing face. I stuck my tongue out at her.
‘Erm,’ I said. ‘I suppose so.’
‘I can be there in half an hour?’ Jack said.
‘Great,’ I said, feeling a little bit railroaded. ‘See you then.’
It was more like an hour and a half later when Jack strolled into the office. Most of the researchers, including Elly much to my relief, had gone home, and I’d had to call Mum in a panic and ask her to get Dora for me. I was, for the gazillionth time, thankful that I’d chosen to live so close to my parents when Greg and I split up. It may have seemed a backwards step – though not as backwards as staying in Miranda’s annexe while she was between au pairs had seemed – but it had been a good decision.
Jack looked completely different from how he was last week. His hair was swept back off his face, and he was wearing good jeans, a black T-shirt, and a nice leather biker jacket. He really was gorgeous. I felt slightly wobbly when he grinned at me as he approached my desk. Then his face fell as he clocked that there was no one else around.
‘God,’ he said. ‘Am I making you work late?’
‘No,’ I lied. ‘I had some things to do anyway.’
Jack peeled off the jacket, bundled it up and threw it down on the floor under Elly’s desk. I itched to shake it out and hang it up, but I didn’t. Then he sat down in Elly’s chair and spun round so he was facing me.
‘What do we do first?’ he asked.
My head was spinning – and not just from the way he looked or the smell of his aftershave. He was like a whirlwind, coming into my carefully ordered space and throwing everything around, metaphorically and literally I thought as his elbow caught a book that was on my desk and sent it crashing to the floor.
‘Oops,’ he said. He picked it up and put it on Elly’s desk, then turned his attention back to me.
‘How come you’ve not spoken to your aunt yet?’
Completely unable to think straight with his eyes trained on me, I opened my mouth like a guppy and nothing came out.
‘Your Aunt Lilian?’ Jack said carefully. ‘You were going to speak to her.’
‘I’ve not really had a chance,’ I said. ‘I’ve been busy.’
Jack sat back in Elly’s chair and put his feet up on her desk. He looked at me with a cheeky smile and said: ‘Sounds like there’s something holding you back. Tell me everything.’
So I did.
Well not everything. But I explained that Lil was very special to me and my siblings, so it was strange we didn’t know she’d been a pilot. Jack listened intently.
‘Miranda – that’s my sister, remember I mentioned her before? She’s very black and white and she can’t see why I won’t just ask Lil,’ I told him. ‘Dad’s the same. But I’m worried this could be something traumatic for her. If she is the Lilian Miles on the list, there has to be a reason for her not mentioning it for over seventy years. She’s quite frail now and I don’t want to upset her.’
‘You want to make sure it really is her before you go to her,’ Jack said, nodding. ‘I get that.’
‘There could be something in the records that gives us a clue about why she might not have mentioned it,’ I said. ‘Sometimes we find reports of actions that might have been upsetting. Maybe someone died – as far as I know some of the ATA did die. Amy Johnson, for one.’
‘I’ve heard of her,’ Jack said in delight. ‘She was in the ATA was she?’
I nodded. ‘Crashed in bad weather,’ I told him. ‘Obviously Lil didn’t die, but maybe she lost a friend? Or was in some sort of accident? It could be anything.’
‘You’re very caring,’ Jack said.
He pulled his chair closer to mine and I got another whiff of his aftershave.
‘You look different,’ I said, unable to resist commenting, and wanting to shift his attention off me.
‘I was doing a press conference for the new series of Mackenzie,’ he said, pulling at his T-shirt self-consciously. ‘My agent always makes me dress up for them.’
He leaned closer to me.
‘I just wear what she tells me to wear,’ he said, in a low voice even though there was no one around to hear him. ‘I’m hopeless with fashion and stuff. She gets a stylist to buy me clothes.’
He looked down at himself and then back at me with a funny, embarrassed grin. ‘What do you think?’
‘Of the clothes?’ I stammered. ‘Oh, nice. You look, erm, great.’
Jack smiled properly now. ‘So do you,’ he said.
I felt a blush crawl up my neck and on to my face so I turned away. ‘Service records,’ I said hurriedly. Thank goodness I never met the celebrities if I developed thumping big crushes like this one on them all.
‘Service records,’ Jack echoed.
We had access to so many databases, that it was hard to keep track. We used most of the Second World War ones often, but I’d never had the need to search the ATA archive before. I hoped that meant none of my colleagues checked it very often either and no one would notice me searching for a Miles family member.
It took me a while to find the right site, then check the folder where we stored all our shared logins and type it in.
When the site eventually loaded, I breathed out in relief. It was formatted exactly like most of the Forces sites. ‘It’s all very easy,’ I explained. ‘We just need to search for the name and the dates. Your grandfather …’
‘No, do Lilian first,’ Jack said. ‘Go on – I really want to know if she’s your aunt.’
With hands that trembled slightly, knowing I was doing something wrong and that Fliss would be furious if she caught me, I typed Lilian Miles and 1940–45 into the search bar and pressed return.
It took a while, but it brought up just one result. Lilian Miles, it said, 15/10/23, Air Transport Auxiliary. I gasped.
‘That’s her,’ I said. ‘That’s Lil’s date of birth.’
‘Click on it,’ Jack urged.
I shook my head, wobbling again over what I was doing. ‘I don’t need to,’ I said. ‘We know it’s her now. We don’t need to know any more.’
‘You said you might be able to work out if there was anything upsetting from looking at the records,’ Jack pointed out.
‘I don’t want to,’ I said.
But Jack leaned across me and clicked on Lil’s name, and the screen filled with details. It had Lil’s personal information – her date and place of birth, her age when she joined up, and where she did her basic training.
I glared at him, but I wasn’t really cross. It was too interesting.
I scanned the page, trying to take it all in. Lilian had done so much when she had been so young. And then, right at the bottom of the screen was what I assumed was the reason for Lil never mentioning her time in the ATA.
Jack saw it at the same time as I did.
‘Ah,’ he said.
There, in large capital letters, it said: DISHONOURABLE DISCHARGE.
Chapter 10 (#ulink_84566a58-c6d0-58d9-8e5d-fb968e5e9eff)
Lilian
June 1944
I stayed stock-still as Flora drew a line up the back of my calf.
‘It tickles,’ I giggled.
‘Don’t move,’ she warned. ‘I’ve got very steady hands but I can’t keep it straight if you wiggle. There, done.’
I twisted round so I could see her handiwork. I’d covered my legs in gravy browning. Flora’s addition – which was more gravy browning, but made up to a thicker paste – made it look like I was wearing nylon stockings.
‘Not bad,’ I said, approvingly. ‘Shall I do you now?’
‘Make sure it’s straight,’ Flora said. She hitched up her skirt and I took the narrow brush from the pot and started to draw.
‘Are you excited?’
I concentrated on keeping the line straight. ‘I love dancing,’ I said. ‘You know I love music.’
‘Maybe you can get up on stage with the band.’ Flora chuckled. ‘Show them all how it’s done.’
‘Maybe,’ I said, wishing I could. I missed playing piano more than anything else. There was a church hall in the nearby village with a rackety old upright in the corner and sometimes I sneaked in there, but it wasn’t the same.
‘When this bloody war is over, I’m going to play the piano every single day,’ I told Flora.
She smiled over her shoulder at me. ‘I’m going to wear stockings that dogs don’t want to lick,’ she said.
From across the hut, Annie joined in. ‘And I’m going to wear clothes that fit,’ she said, hitching her belt a notch tighter. Our rations didn’t seem to be going as far any more and we were all far skinnier than we’d been when the war started.
‘All done,’ I said, finishing Flora’s seams.
She peered over her shoulder and clapped her hands in pleasure. ‘Gorgeous, darling,’ she said. ‘Are you sure you don’t mind us tagging along with you and Will?’
I shook my head vigorously. ‘Not in the least,’ I said. ‘He seems nice enough, but I don’t want to be getting into romance and complications. Not here. Not now.’
Flora turned round and gazed at me, her blue eyes unblinking. I thought she was going to ask me if I was being completely honest, but she didn’t and I was grateful. Instead she squeezed my hand.
‘We’ll stick together,’ she said. ‘Like the Three Musketeers.’
I grinned. ‘One for all and all for one,’ I said. I threaded my arm through hers and then through Annie’s and we walked to the door, ready to go and meet Will.
He was waiting by the mess hut, laughing with a couple of other mechanics and smoking a cigarette.
‘Evening, ladies,’ he said, straightening up as we approached. ‘Lilian.’
I nodded to him. ‘Will,’ I said.
We fell into step as we walked down the short road to where the dance was being held. We could hear the music as we got closer and my spirits lifted a bit.
‘Like dancing?’ Will said.
I smiled. ‘I love it.’
Inside the hall was pulsing with life. We’d all been flying non-stop for weeks, getting planes in position for the landings on the beaches in France. We’d not known what was happening of course – we only found out afterwards. But we were proud to have played a part in something so important. The hard work of the last few weeks, though, meant everyone was desperate for some fun – and from the look of the hall they were already having it.
The men mostly wore RAF uniforms. They were jiving with girls in bright red lipstick, their hair shining and, I saw with a relieved smile, gravy browning on their legs. There were a few GIs; I guessed they were passing through. They were getting a lot of attention with girls flocking round them like bees round a honey pot. Some of those girls, I couldn’t help noticing, wore actual Nylon stockings. On the stage was a small band with a pianist, a drummer, a trumpet player and a female singer. Like I always did – and knowing I was being stupid – I scanned their faces, pausing a second longer on the pianist, just in case.
Will steered us over to a table in the corner. ‘Have a seat,’ he said. ‘I’ll get some drinks.’
‘Want to dance?’ Flora said.
I shook my head. ‘Not yet, I just want to sit here and soak it all up.’ It was ages since there had been a dance near enough for us all to go to. ‘You go – I’ll be fine.’
‘Sure?’ Flora looked concerned.
‘I’m sure,’ I said. ‘Will’s just gone for some drinks and you’ll be right over there.’
Flora, Annie and Will’s friends swirled off to the dance floor and I sat drinking in the atmosphere. I loved everything about it. The heat coming off the dancers, the cloud of smoke from people’s cigarettes, the buzz of conversation fighting with the music from the band. Everything. I thought I’d like to play in a dance band one day. If I ever got tired of flying.
‘You look happy,’ Will said, handing me a glass of something.
I smelled it – cider I thought – and took a suspicious sip. It was sweet and slightly fizzy.
‘I love this,’ I said to Will as he drew up a chair next to me. ‘I love how the music just makes everyone forget about their worries and throw off their responsibilities.’
‘The music and the cider,’ Will said, with a wink.
I laughed.
‘So, Lilian Miles,’ Will carried on. ‘Tell me your story.’
I blinked at him. What did he mean?
‘Not much to tell,’ I said airily.
‘How did you end up in the ATA?’
‘Oh, just thought it sounded fun,’ I said vaguely. ‘My brother’s in the RAF and I didn’t think he should be the only one who got to fly.’
Will looked impressed. ‘Must be in your blood,’ he said. ‘You’ve certainly got the knack.’
I bristled, just a little bit. ‘I’ve worked hard.’
‘Course.’ Will caught the edge to my voice and changed the subject.
‘Let me tell you about something Gareth did earlier …’ he began.
As he told the funny story, I started to relax. Will was very easy to be with – he had a sharp eye for people’s quirks and a funny way of telling stories. I laughed as he told an anecdote about some of the RAF officers on the base. He was a lovely man, I thought.
‘Dance?’ he eventually suggested and I nodded. He took my hand and led me out to the floor, swinging me round as another jive track started. He wasn’t the best dancer but what he lacked in skill he made up for in enthusiasm, whirling me backwards and forwards across the floor until I was breathless and giddy.
‘Having fun?’ Annie spun past me, on the arm of one of Will’s friends, called Frank.
‘Lots of fun,’ I gasped. I was happier than I’d been for ages. Months. Years, perhaps. Not for the first time in my life, I marvelled at just how wonderful music was at making everything seem better.
‘Come with me,’ Annie said, grabbing my hand. ‘Will, you get us some more drinks.’
Will saluted Annie jokingly and, giggling madly, Annie, Flora and I crowded into the lav where two women were checking their hair at the mirror.
‘So?’ said Flora, craning her neck to check her seams were still in place on the back of her legs.
‘So what?’ I looked at my reflection. My hair was coming loose and my cheeks were flushed.
‘Do you like him?’
‘Will?’
‘No, Father Christmas. Of course, Will,’ Annie said.
I leaned against the wall. ‘He’s lovely,’ I said. ‘He’s so funny, and charming. And he loves to dance.’
‘Uh-oh,’ said Flora. ‘I think someone has a crush.’
I felt myself blush. ‘That’s just the thing,’ I said with a sigh. I waited for the two girls who’d been doing their hair to leave so it was just the three of us. ‘I don’t.’
Annie looked at me. ‘Really?’
I shook my head, sadly. ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I wish I felt something – a spark or something – but I don’t.’
Flora draped an arm round my shoulder. ‘Darling Lil,’ she said. ‘I know you play your cards close to your chest.’
‘And a lovely chest it is,’ Annie drawled. She sat up on the sink next to me and lit a cigarette as Flora nudged her to be quiet.
‘When I joined up, I never thought I’d be lucky enough to meet two girls like you,’ Flora went on. ‘I was so bloody scared and you made it better.’
I smiled at her. I felt the same.
‘And I know you don’t want to talk about what happened to you,’ she said. I dropped my eyes from hers. It was too hard to think about and I was grateful the girls knew something was wrong inside of me, but never pushed me to elaborate. Flora squeezed me a bit tighter. ‘But I also know that we are all a bit damaged. Some more than others. That’s just life. And if you don’t want to be with Will, then don’t force it. Maybe it’ll happen later, maybe it won’t. It’s fine either way.’
I felt tears heavy behind my eyelids and blinked them away. ‘Thanks,’ I whispered.
Annie jumped down from the sink. ‘Thank God none of us are flying tomorrow,’ she said, stubbing out her cigarette. ‘I’m more than a bit tiddly.’
‘It’s a shame, though,’ Flora said. ‘Because if one of us had been on that trip to Newcastle, we could have …’
‘Shh,’ said Annie covering Flora’s mouth with her hand. She nodded towards the cubicles. The one at the end was shut. Flora’s eyes widened in shock.
‘Bloody hell,’ I breathed. None of us had noticed that someone else was in the lav with us.
We all stared at each other for a second, grateful Annie had noticed when she did and stopped Flora before she said anything incriminating.
‘Let’s go home,’ I said.
As we turned to leave the tiny toilet, we heard whoever it was in the cubicle pull the chain.
‘Let’s go,’ I said again, suddenly desperate to be out of there. ‘It’s past my bedtime.’
Chapter 11 (#ulink_51f264fe-fffc-54d8-afe4-b94e3f4109c2)
Helena
May 2018
I was too surprised to do anything but stare at the screen. Above the red stamp declaring that Lil had been dishonourably discharged, it also said Lil had been court-martialled and found guilty of contravening standing orders. It was completely bewildering and I wasn’t sure what to do. Luckily, Jack took over.
‘This is a shock,’ he said. ‘Do you need to get back for Dora?’
I shook my head, touched he’d remembered her name.
‘She’s with my mum.’
‘Well, how about we print this out, take all the info we’ve got to the pub, and chat about it all over a drink?’
I felt shaky. What had Lil done that deserved a court martial? Had she broken the law? Had she gone AWOL? I shook my head again, more vigorously this time.
‘None of this makes sense,’ I said. ‘This doesn’t sound like Lil.’
Jack was bustling around me, stuffing pieces of paper into the folder. I found I didn’t even care that he was putting them in upside down and back to front. Instead I just stared at the screen.
‘It must be a mistake. Lil has always been a bit of a free spirit, but she’s not a bad person.’
Jack paused in his gathering. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get out of here and you can tell me all about her. She sounds interesting.’
‘Oh, she’s interesting, all right,’ I said. I looked at him standing there, clutching the folder, with bits of paper hanging out of it, and smiled. ‘Thanks. You’re being very nice.’
‘I feel like it’s all my fault,’ he admitted. ‘You’d have been none the wiser if I’d not turned up and started poking around your research.’
He wasn’t wrong, but somehow I was pleased. Finding out more about Lil’s war felt like the right thing to do – even if she’d kept it a secret all this time.
Jack grinned at me and I squinted at him.
‘Can you go to the pub?’ I said. ‘Like a normal person?’
He frowned.
‘I am a normal person.’
‘I mean, you’re famous. Won’t you get mobbed?’
‘Nah,’ Jack said. ‘No one ever thinks it’s me. I think it’s because I’m so scruffy. People usually just tell me I look like Jack Jones.’
I laughed and gestured to his immaculate T-shirt. ‘But you’re all dressed up,’ I said.
With a grin, Jack pulled a tatty hoodie out of his bag and shoved it over his head. Then he jammed a faded baseball cap on top of his curls, balled up the beautiful leather jacket and squished it into his rucksack – much to my distress – and looked at me in triumph.
‘Better?’ he said. ‘I’m in disguise.’
I laughed again because he looked so pleased with himself.
‘Better,’ I agreed.
‘So let’s go,’ Jack said. ‘I’m dying to know more about Lil.’
‘If you want to know more about Lil, you really need to meet my sister Miranda,’ I said. ‘Mind if I give her a ring?’
It wasn’t a total lie. If I adored Lil, Miranda adored her even more and she could definitely talk about her until the cows came home. But I could do that myself, so I didn’t need Miranda to paint a good picture of our aunt. Instead I thought I wanted her there as a kind of shield. My attraction to Jack seemed to be growing by the second and I wasn’t completely comfortable with being alone with him. I thought having Miranda there might force me to be more professional and stop gazing at him with my tongue hanging out like a thirsty puppy.
Unfortunately, Miranda’s reaction was predictably similar to mine. She arrived in the bar at a trendy hotel near the office just after we did. Jack was ordering the drinks and I was sitting in the semi-circular booth he’d chosen.
‘We’ll have more room here to spread out all the papers,’ he’d said when we arrived, turning round to catch a waiter’s eye and knocking the folder off the table with his bag. I’d caught the file before everything fell out and put it back on the table top without him noticing. ‘Stay here, I’ll get some drinks.’
Miranda slid in next to me.
‘Is that him?’ she said, watching Jack at the bar with ill-disguised longing. ‘Oh, my.’
I elbowed her, hard. ‘Stop it,’ I said. ‘You’re married. And too old for him.’
‘Window shopping,’ Miranda said. ‘And I am not too old.’
Then she stopped looking at Jack and turned her stare to me instead.
‘Hang on,’ she said. ‘This isn’t just banter, is it?’
‘Jack’s getting wine, I think.’
‘Don’t ignore me. You like him.’
I felt myself flushing again. ‘He’s nice,’ I muttered. ‘And handsome.’
‘Ohhhh,’ Miranda breathed. ‘You’ve got a crush.’
I gave her a fierce look. ‘Have not,’ I said.
‘You are allowed,’ she said. ‘It’s not a crime. It’s ages since you broke up with Greg. It’s definitely time to get back on that horse.’
‘Jack is not a horse.’ I frowned at her, to warn her he was approaching. ‘And it’s unprofessional to have a crush on someone I’m researching. And how can I date anyone? I’ve got Dora to think about.’
‘Lot of excuses, there, Nell,’ Miranda said. ‘Protesting too much, I think …’
She stopped talking as Jack approached. He put a tray of drinks down, slopping some of his beer on to the table, and beamed at Miranda.
‘Hello, hello, hello,’ he said, gleefully shaking her hand. ‘I’ve heard lots about you from Helena.’
Again with the way he said my name. I imagined him saying it to other people. ‘Have you met my wife – Helena?’ and smiled to myself.
‘Nell,’ Miranda said, giving me a shove. ‘Are you with us?’
I blinked, startled out of my daydream. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I was just thinking about Lil.’
‘Oh yes, tell me more,’ Jack said. He began taking the drinks off the tray and I helped him, trying to make sure he didn’t spill any more than he already had. I handed Miranda a wine glass and a napkin to wipe up splatters and poured some Pinot Grigio for us both.
‘Is Lil your dad’s sister?’ Jack drank a mouthful of beer.
‘No, she’s Dad’s aunt, actually,’ Miranda said. ‘Our parents are both only children. But Lil was the baby of her family, so she’s not really that much older than Dad.’
‘You said she was very special to you?’ Jack prompted.
Miranda and I looked at each other. We didn’t often talk about when we were growing up.
I took a breath. ‘We had a bit of an unconventional childhood,’ I began.
‘And you have two other siblings, am I right?’
He’d remembered what I’d told him. Miranda, obviously impressed, smiled. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘There’s Andy and Imogen, too.’
‘Andy’s nearly thirty, and Immy’s twenty-six,’ I added.
Jack nodded. ‘I always wanted brothers and sisters when I was growing up,’ he said. ‘I’d like to have lots of kids.’
Miranda gave me a meaningful look and I spluttered on my wine. Jack thumped me on the back.
‘Easy there,’ he said. ‘No need to gulp.’
Miranda, looking chic and businesslike in what seemed to be a very expensive suit, with her curly hair pulled back into a neat twist, leaned back in the booth and carried on talking while I wiped my mouth with the napkin Jack offered.
‘Our parents are both creative and a bit scatty,’ she said.
I snorted. ‘Scatty,’ I said. ‘Forgetful, more like.’
‘When we were growing up they weren’t great with money,’ Miranda went on. ‘Bills often went unpaid. The electricity would go off. They weren’t poor. Just disorganised.’
‘But when we were really small, it was all fun,’ I said. ‘We were too little to know any different and all we knew was they loved us.’
‘But when Mum had Imogen, things changed,’ Miranda said. ‘Postnatal depression, I guess. Though it took a while for it to really get a hold of her.’
Jack nodded. ‘I have a friend who has depression,’ he said. ‘It’s like a gradual creeping up with him.’
‘That’s it exactly,’ Miranda said. ‘She didn’t just wake up depressed one morning, it was more like a downward spiral.’
I let Miranda talk. She was two years older than me so she remembered it better.
‘Once, Mum left Andy in my classroom when she dropped me at school, instead of taking him to nursery,’ she continued. ‘When my teacher noticed him, she rang Mum to come and get him. She was so upset.’
‘Andy wasn’t remotely bothered of course,’ I added, wanting to make Mum sound less awful.
‘But that’s when things started to go downhill. Mum wasn’t really functioning and Dad – well, like I said, he was “scatty”.’ Miranda made quote marks with her fingers. ‘Things got a bit messy for a while.’
Jack smiled at me. ‘Did your mum work?’ he asked.
‘She still does,’ I said. ‘In fact, you might know of her – she’s an art historian.’
‘So that’s where you get it from,’ Jack said to me. I felt like a flower opening up in sunshine as he turned his gaze to me.
Miranda butted in and I almost tutted because I was enjoying having Jack’s attention.
‘She’s an expert in Victorian painting and she’s often on those daytime antiques shoes. She’s brilliant, actually, on screen. She’s so enthusiastic and because she’s been a university lecturer forever she explains things really well. She writes books, too. We’re very proud of her, because it’s not been easy for her.’
Jack was staring at Miranda. ‘I know her,’ he said, excitedly. ‘She’s got hair just like you but in a cloud round her face, right?’
Miranda laughed. ‘That’s her,’ she said. ‘And she wears glasses like Helena’s.’
I pushed my black-rimmed specs up my nose and grinned. ‘I don’t have the hair,’ I said, gesturing to my own poker-straight style. ‘But I did inherit the dodgy eyesight.’
I felt we were giving Jack an unfair picture of our mother so I carried on. ‘Mum’s wonderful. She’s a brilliant grandmother to Dora, and Miranda’s little boy. She’s helped me out so much. I wouldn’t have been able to go back to work without knowing she was round the corner.’
Miranda nodded. ‘She is fab,’ she said. ‘We’re lucky she got over her depression and that it never came back – not like it was.’
‘And what about your dad?’
I felt a bit like Jack was researching us rather than me him, but somehow I didn’t mind.
‘Dad’s a composer,’ Miranda said. ‘He writes music for films and TV shows, and adverts sometimes too.’
I shifted in my seat. ‘He did some of the music for Mackenzie,’ I said, wondering if I should have mentioned this before. ‘Not the theme but some of the incidental music.’
He gaped at me in astonishment. ‘No,’ he said. ‘My Mackenzie?’
‘The very same.’
Jack chuckled. ‘Isn’t it a small world, eh?’
‘Isn’t it,’ said Miranda. ‘Dad’s career was just taking off in the Nineties, when we were growing up. He worked long hours. And when Mum got ill, he wasn’t completely able to cope with four kids.’
Jack nodded. ‘And Lil?’
‘She was a musician, like Dad,’ I told him. ‘Piano, mostly, but she’s the sort of person who can play anything. She was a session musician and she travelled all over the world playing with different bands or singers. Six months on a cruise ship here, a year in a jazz club in New York, there. Recording an album with the Rolling Stones one day, hanging out with Fleetwood Mac the next.’
‘Sounds incredible.’
‘She’s got some brilliant stories,’ I agreed.
‘But when we were kids and Mum was poorly,’ Miranda said, ‘Lil stepped in and made sure we were being looked after.’ She drained her wine glass. ‘I’m not sure what we would have done without her.’
‘Blimey,’ Jack said, topping up Miranda’s empty glass. ‘You are really close?’
I nodded. ‘I thought so,’ I said. ‘And yet she’s never mentioned her time in the ATA.’
I looked at Miranda. ‘Manda, we found Lil’s service record.’ I picked up the folder Jack had brought with him, which was now splattered with beer and something that looked like tomato ketchup, even though we’d not eaten. ‘Look at what happened.’
I handed her the sheet of paper and watched as she read the lines at the bottom.
‘Oh shit,’ she said. ‘Dishonourable discharge?’
‘What do you think, Manda?’ I said. ‘Do you still think we should speak to her about it?’
Miranda made a face. ‘I’m going to Paris on Friday for a week,’ she said. ‘So I can’t help. But yes, I think you should go and see her. Find out what it was all about.’
‘She might not want to talk,’ I said. ‘What if it upsets her? She’s really old.’
‘She’s tough as old boots,’ said Miranda. ‘I really think you should try to talk about it. We can’t pretend that we don’t know now – she’d see through that in a flash.’
I nodded. That was true.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll go and see her at the weekend.’
Chapter 12 (#ulink_99b5b0f6-8a9e-5e54-b6ec-ebca0b143459)
The following Saturday, Dora and I sat on a train heading out through the leafy suburbs of south-west London to see Lil. She was ninety-four now and very frail, so she lived in a care home. It was an amazing place, funded by an entertainers’ charity. All the residents of the home had once made their living as performers of one kind or another and now saw out their days reminiscing together and – too often for my liking – providing their own entertainment. They had mostly been jobbing actors, or, as Lil had been, session musicians, but there was the occasional recognisable face and they all loved to put on a show.
I normally phoned ahead when I visited, but today I’d not told Lil I was coming. After everything we’d found out, I was nervous about seeing her, which was strange considering how much I loved her. And for some reason I didn’t want to warn her – though quite why I needed to be so sneaky about it all, I wasn’t sure. It wasn’t like I was expecting to walk in and catch her piloting a Spitfire around the residents’ lounge.
What I actually found, when we walked into the residents’ lounge, was one of the actors – a man who once trod the boards at the RSC and had been a regular on the West End stage – standing in the middle of the room, reciting a speech from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
I paused by the door, scanning the room for Lil and clocked her sitting in the corner watching the ageing actor with barely disguised amusement. Our eyes met and she smiled.
‘Hello,’ she called, ignoring the fact that the actor was still going. ‘I wasn’t expecting you today.’
Dora jumped up and down. She loved Lil. ‘Hello!’ she shouted. ‘’Lo, Lil!’
Like a small bullet, she swerved the gesturing arms of the Shakespearean chap, and hurtled over to my aunt. I followed and sat down next to her.
‘Surprise!’ I said. ‘Careful of Lil’s legs, Dora.’
Dora clambered up on to my knee and beamed at Lil. ‘’Lo, Lil,’ she said again.
‘Hello, my darling girl,’ Lil said to her, twirling one of her curls round her finger. ‘I think you’ve grown again.’
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Kerry Barrett
From the bestselling author of The Girl In The Picture comes a beautiful new timeslip novel.Readers love Kerry Barrett:‘All Kerry Barrett's books are brilliant’‘I'd highly recommend this: detective fiction, historical fiction, powerful, moving, thrilling, sometimes comic, always very human.’‘A beautiful story which kept me hooked’‘I would definitely recommend this read, but be warned, you won't want to put it down.’‘Loved the whole story, couldn't put it down’‘Will definitely read more from this author’
About the Author (#uc52d779b-fc8c-5c3c-be7f-68878f6af926)
KERRY BARRETT was a bookworm from a very early age and did a degree in English Literature, then trained as a journalist, writing about everything from pub grub to EastEnders. Her first novel, Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, took six years to finish and was mostly written in longhand on her commute to work, giving her a very good reason to buy beautiful notebooks. Kerry lives in London with her husband and two sons, and Noel Streatfield’s Ballet Shoes is still her favourite novel.
READERS LOVE KERRY BARRETT (#uc52d779b-fc8c-5c3c-be7f-68878f6af926)
‘All Kerry Barrett’s books are brilliant.’
‘I’d highly recommend this: detective fiction, historical fiction, powerful, moving, thrilling, sometimes comic, always very human.’
‘A beautiful story which kept me hooked.’
‘I would definitely recommend this read, but be warned, you won’t want to put it down.’
‘Loved the whole story, couldn’t put it down.’
‘Will definitely read more from this author.’
Also by Kerry Barrett (#uc52d779b-fc8c-5c3c-be7f-68878f6af926)
Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered
I Put a Spell on You
Baby It’s Cold Outside
I’ll Be There For You
A Spoonful of Sugar
A Step in Time
The Forgotten Girl
The Girl in the Picture
The Hidden Women
KERRY BARRETT
HQ
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2019
Copyright © Kerry Barrett 2019
Kerry Barrett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
E-book Edition © January 2019 ISBN: 9780008318529
Version: 2018-11-29
Table of Contents
Cover (#uc148675f-e37f-52c9-a7eb-8321479332ad)
About the Author (#u10d57f09-8b7d-5859-a5bb-a8ccdf68668f)
Readers Love Kerry Barrett (#udcf06689-7166-5f81-8b5e-9cc4144e58db)
Also by Kerry Barrett (#ue5376dd4-c4d7-546f-812c-8b04666e44be)
Title Page (#u7033c0ea-9725-58d8-8824-700e996c4561)
Copyright (#u5c858030-8a01-5dcb-8e4c-016c05ad1ef0)
Dedication (#u6caa3dbe-5727-5cfa-b683-d3b091df55dd)
Prologue (#u1f13a345-4278-5fe1-90ae-ab91f10b4ba4)
Chapter 1 (#udef36671-493d-5b2d-af4f-ec162fa7bc9d)
Chapter 2 (#u85ea4088-04de-5561-9315-4582ae10861c)
Chapter 3 (#ub43302ff-5d32-5870-a360-a73eaffc98f0)
Chapter 4 (#uf7d1f564-ebe6-5d8c-93ef-7a73aae39fa1)
Chapter 5 (#uaafa5d81-abcb-59cf-b2af-a535f7cb6bb2)
Chapter 6 (#u7fa10d38-0908-5f8b-b119-ac7653103778)
Chapter 7 (#uc1a4fe79-0f7a-58c9-bb2d-ccb004c7b91c)
Chapter 8 (#u3e64edc7-4ad0-5e3c-b06b-a62ffd27ea2d)
Chapter 9 (#ue66395a1-4dad-59a7-8cb8-228f1f058fe6)
Chapter 10 (#ue1ae0b24-34f3-5ff7-a2f4-4bee0ab08b48)
Chapter 11 (#uafedc321-b812-5779-8478-0276ceda8817)
Chapter 12 (#u6fa0fe66-4daf-52e9-8113-d55b156dbe60)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
The Next Book From Kerry Barrett Is Coming in 2019 (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Dear Reader (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
For Petrova Fossil, the original Attagirl
Prologue (#ulink_5a78cbef-95f1-5893-b6f6-6ecd252eaa85)
Helena
April 2015
‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ I said, watching Greg’s stony face for any sign of happiness.
‘Well I’m not.’ His expression softened, just a bit, and he sat down next to me on the sofa and took my hand.
‘It’s just too soon,’ he said.
‘We’ve been together for five years, Greg,’ I snapped. ‘It’s not like we just met.’
He had the grace to look at least slightly ashamed.
‘I meant for me, not us,’ he said. ‘It’s too soon for me. And you. We’re still young. We should be out having fun, not at home with a squawking baby.’
‘We’re in our thirties; we’re not kids,’ I said, resting my head against the sofa cushions. I felt sick and I didn’t think it was just because of my unexpected pregnancy.
I’d done the test that morning, and showed Greg the unmistakeable dark line as he brushed his teeth.
‘It’s positive,’ I’d said, feeling a tiny shiver of excitement mixed with fear. ‘I’m pregnant.’
Greg had glanced at the plastic stick and then kissed me, his breath minty fresh.
‘I need to run,’ he’d simply said. ‘We’ll chat tonight.’
And now we were chatting and it wasn’t going the way I’d thought it would.
‘I thought we were set,’ I said. ‘I thought we were a team.’
‘We are a team,’ Greg said. ‘You and me.’
‘You and me and our baby,’ I said.
Greg winced. He tried to cover it up by pretending to cough, but I’d seen it.
‘I don’t want to have a baby, Helena,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, but that’s just how I feel.’
I couldn’t speak.
‘There’s a clinic,’ Greg said. ‘Max at work told me about it. His girlfriend went there a while back. He gave me the card, hang on …’
He dug about in his pocket while I let my fingers drift down to rest on my stomach.
‘I need some air,’ I said, ignoring his outstretched hand clutching a business card. ‘I’m going for a walk.’
I grabbed my jacket from the arm of the sofa, and stumbled my way out of the front door.
‘H,’ Greg said. ‘Don’t be like this. It’s hormones; you’re not thinking straight.’
I didn’t answer. I walked a little way down the road and then I sat at a bus stop and took my phone out.
‘Miranda?’ I said, when my sister answered. ‘I need your help. I’m having a baby and I think I’ve just left Greg.’
Chapter 1 (#ulink_4205170b-0fbf-575e-a627-4211b00fe6b5)
Helena
May 2018
‘Here?’ I said, staring at my boss Fliss in astonishment. ‘Jack Jones is coming here?’
‘Yes, here,’ she said, resting her hand on her computer keyboard as though to warn me I was about to lose her attention. ‘Apparently he’s very interested in social history and he wants to know how you work. It’s no biggie.’
‘But I’ve got a system,’ I said, knowing it was no good protesting when Fliss had decided something. ‘I don’t want him to mess it up.’
‘He’s not taking over, Helena, he just wants to know how you’re getting on.’ Fliss sounded impatient. ‘He’ll be here after lunch.’
I forced a smile. ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll get some stuff together.’
I wandered back to my desk feeling wrong-footed.
‘What’s with the face?’ asked my colleague Elly as I sat down. ‘Did Fliss tell you off?’
I wiggled my mouse to wake up my screen. ‘No,’ I said gloomily. ‘She told me Jack bloody Jones is coming in this afternoon to see how I’m getting on with my research.’
‘Shut. Up,’ said Elly, spinning round in her chair to face me. ‘Shut. Up.’
I blinked at her. Did she really mean me to be quiet?
‘Jack Jones is coming here? THE Jack Jones? We never get to meet the celebs,’ Elly was beginning to babble. ‘I’ve worked on this show for five years and I’ve never met one single person whose family history I’ve researched. Have you met anyone?’
‘No,’ I said. She was right. I’d not worked on Where Did You Come From? as long as Elly had, but I’d researched the family trees of lots of celebrities and not been so much as introduced to anyone.
‘And it’s Jack Jones?’ Elly went on. ‘Jack. Jones.’
I nodded. ‘It’s an interesting one, actually. His great-grandfather was at the Somme …’
I trailed off as Elly waved her hand to shush me.
‘He’s gorgeous,’ she said. ‘Properly handsome. And I’ve heard he’s going to be in that new superhero film soon so he’ll be a massive Hollywood star.’
I nodded again. I knew who Jack Jones was of course – star of the latest Sunday night detective drama that was wowing audiences, and tipped for superstardom – and Elly was right, he was gorgeous. In any other circumstances I’d love to meet him. But I had a certain way of working, and a system, and a process, and I didn’t appreciate interference or anyone checking up on me, however handsome they were.
‘Will you come with me?’ I asked Elly. ‘To the meeting?’
She gaped at me. ‘Seriously?’ she said. ‘The meeting with Jack Jones?’
I couldn’t help laughing at her face. ‘Yes, the meeting with Jack Jones,’ I said. ‘I could do with the help.’
Elly was getting up from her chair. She pulled on her coat and picked up her bag as I looked on in confusion.
‘Is that a no?’ I said.
‘It’s a yes,’ she threw back over her shoulder as she headed for the lift. ‘I’m going to buy a new top and get my hair blow-dried.’
Chuckling to myself I turned back to my screen. We worked on more than one celebrity story at a time and I was currently tracking the maternal line of a breakfast TV presenter. I’d got right back to the early 1800s and I thought I might be able to go further if I was clever about it.
I clicked on to the census web page I used, intending to get back to work, though I couldn’t concentrate on Sarah Sanderson properly with the news that Jack Jones was coming into the office weighing on my mind. I absolutely loved my job and I considered myself to be really lucky that I’d landed this role on Where Did You Come From? Social history may have been my passion but it wasn’t exactly well paid – so making the jump into television was brilliant for me – and I enjoyed the research as well as seeing the process of the show being made. My colleagues were lovely, and Fliss was very understanding when it came to having to rush off on time each evening to collect Dora from nursery, or working from home when she was ill.
Spinning round in my chair, I surveyed my shelves of neat brown folders, each with the name of the celebrity written along the spine and arranged in alphabetical order. I ran my finger along them until I found J and pulled out the Jack Jones file. I’d found out quite a lot about his family already so I had things to tell him. But today I was supposed to be working on Sarah Sanderson’s family history. Giving up an afternoon to Jack Jones was going to throw everything out.
I opened the folder and looked at the picture of him clipped to the front cover. I liked to have a photo of each person so I knew whose family I was researching – especially for those celebs I didn’t really know much about. It helped them become real for me, and then their families became real, too.
Elly was right, Jack Jones was really handsome. He had glossy brown hair that was longish and curlyish and flopped over his forehead, and a smile with a hint of mischief. I felt a brief flicker of excitement. Though I wasn’t a massive fan of the whole celeb thing – I couldn’t name the Kardashians or the members of One Direction – I had really enjoyed the detective series that Jack had starred in. I wondered if it would be weird to discuss the cryptic ending with him and decided it would be a bit fangirl. Mind you, I thought, not as fangirl as Elly getting her hair done.
I picked up my phone, smiling at the picture of Dora wearing my sunglasses on my home screen, and took a photo of Jack’s picture, then added it to my siblings’ group chat.
‘Guess who I’m meeting this afternoon …’ I typed.
Almost straight away, my baby sister Imogen replied. ‘OMG!’ she wrote. ‘Is that Jack Jones? I love him!’
I grinned. Before I could reply, a message arrived from my other sister, Miranda. ‘I have no idea who that is,’ she wrote. ‘But he’s easy on the eye.’
I smiled again. My sisters were nothing if not predictable.
‘Has anyone heard from Andy?’ Another message pinged through from Miranda. ‘I can’t see if he’s getting these. Immy manages to reply all the way from Africa and he can’t be bothered to keep in touch from Scotland.’
I made a face at my phone. I adored my big sister Miranda but she could be a bit of a mother hen. Not surprising, I supposed, when you thought about what she’d had to take on when we were kids, and I’d never forget how she’d been there when I needed her when Dora was born.
‘He’s probably not on Wi-Fi,’ I typed. Andy was on an archaeological dig somewhere on a windswept island in the North Sea – hardly hanging out in a coffee bar in Glasgow as Miranda obviously thought. ‘He’ll check in when he can.’
I threw my phone into my bag and pulled out my make-up. If Elly was dolling up to meet Jack Jones, then perhaps I should do the same.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_2c6a6925-1d9d-5d7e-8ede-2310dabe6700)
Jack Jones was nothing like I’d expected. For a start he arrived by himself. No entourage, no publicist, not even a driver. He just got off the tube and sauntered into the office, scruffy bag thrown over his shoulder and hair unwashed. Elly was not impressed by his distinctly un-starry appearance. She went down to reception to meet him, giddy with excitement, while I went into the meeting room, laid out some biscuits on a plate and made sure the coffee machine was working.
I put my folders of research on to the table and waited for them to arrive, nervously tapping my fingers on my knee. What if he messed up my notes? What if he questioned my methods? I wasn’t comfortable about this at all.
‘This is your researcher, Helena Miles,’ Elly said, standing at the door of the room and ushering Jack Jones inside. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’
I stood up.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ I lied, holding out my hand for Jack Jones to shake. Wait. Elly was leaving us to it? What? I caught her eye over Jack Jones’s shoulder. She wrinkled her nose up at his back and flicked her newly blow-dried hair in a disdainful shrug. Jack Jones obviously didn’t live up to her expectations. Horrified at the idea of entertaining a bona-fide celebrity by myself, I widened my eyes pleading with her to stay, but she spun round and headed back to her desk.
‘Is everything okay?’
I dragged my eyes from Elly’s retreating back and looked at Jack Jones, who was still holding my outstretched hand.
‘Oh,’ I said, awkwardly, dropping his hand like it was hot. ‘Sorry, Mr Jones. Sorry.’
Jack Jones smiled at me. ‘Call me Jack,’ he said. ‘Is it okay if I call you Helena?’
I liked the way he said my name in his clipped, period-drama accent.
‘Of course,’ I said.
He smiled at me again, a sort of wonky, half-smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes. He looked straight at me and I looked back and my stomach flipped over. He was gorgeous. At least his face was. For the first time I took in what he was wearing – scruffy jeans, battered trainers and a scuffed leather jacket. His brown canvas bag was slung across his body and his hair was a mop of dirty curls, very different from the hair that artfully fell across his forehead in the picture at the front of his file.
Unable to help myself, I glanced down at the photo on the folder. Jack saw me looking and grinned again.
‘Photo shoot Jack,’ he said, pulling out a chair and sitting down. ‘Not my real self.’
Embarrassed that he’d caught me looking and still feeling weak at the knees thanks to his smile, I collapsed into the chair next to him and moved it ever so slightly further away.
‘So,’ I said, all business. ‘I understand it’s your dad’s family you’re interested in?’
He nodded. ‘I didn’t really know them,’ he said. ‘My dad was around a bit when I was little, and apparently I did meet my grandparents a couple of times, though I don’t remember. But they’ve passed away now, and then Dad died last year – though I’d not seen him since I was ten.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ I said. His story sounded painfully familiar to me, making me think of Greg and how he’d not seen Dora more than a handful of times.
Jack shrugged. ‘He was like a stranger to me,’ he said. ‘It was just me and Mum when I was growing up.’
‘No brothers or sisters?’ I asked. Again I was struck by how similar his story sounded to Dora’s – and how different it was from my own chaotic, busy childhood home.
He shook his head. ‘Just me.’
I looked at his impish face, and felt so sad for the little boy he’d once been that I almost threw my arms round him and hugged him. My sister Imogen would have done. But thankfully, I remembered I was Helena Miles who did not do things spontaneously, unless you counted walking out on my boyfriend when I was pregnant.
Instead I opened the folder and showed Jack his rough family tree.
‘So, this is your dad’s family,’ I said, tracing the line with my forefinger. ‘Your grandfather was a pilot in World War Two, and your great-grandfather fought at the Somme.’
Jack was looking at me in wonder. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘Tell me more.’
Putting all thoughts of Sarah Sanderson’s maternal line out of my head, I sat with Jack all afternoon and explained what I’d found out so far. I always did the initial research, then passed my findings on to specialists – in Jack’s case we’d send him off to speak to an expert on World War One about his great-grandfather. And I was in the process of tracking down someone to speak to about his grandad too, who’d been too short-sighted to join the regular air force but who’d flown for the Air Transport Auxiliary, transporting planes from factories to airfields all over Britain. It was a great family story all round.
Jack was thrilled. He asked all the right questions and wrote endless notes in his scrawling handwriting, on a notepad he pulled from his tatty bag. At one point, he got so excited talking about the trenches that he threw out his arm and knocked over his cup of coffee. I leapt for the folder he had been reading and got it out of harm’s way just in time.
He was very sweet and enthusiastic and every time he smiled he made my hands tremble. But oh my goodness, he was the clumsiest, scruffiest, bulldozer of a man I’d ever met. My carefully ordered notes were pulled out of the folders and spread across the table as the edges of the papers folded over and curled. There was the coffee incident, as well as biscuit crumbs scattered everywhere, and a similar hairy moment when Jack’s biro leaked all over his hand and he left sticky blue fingerprints on a photocopy of his great-grandfather’s service record.
Eventually, to my absolute relief, Jack looked at his watch – which appeared to have Mickey Mouse on it – and stood up.
‘I’m late,’ he said. ‘I have to dash.’
‘Okay,’ I said, possibly a bit too eagerly. ‘I’ll show you out.’
Jack pulled on his leather jacket and surveyed the table, which was covered in notes and screwed-up tissues where he’d wiped the biro off his fingers, and biscuit crumbs.
‘God what a mess,’ he said. ‘I’ll help you clear up.’
‘No need,’ I said, desperately wanting him gone. ‘I’ll do it.’
But I was too late. He was already scooping up all my notes – no longer in any sort of order – and stuffing them back into a folder.
‘Really,’ I said, gritting my teeth. ‘I can do it.’
I went to take the folder from him and there was a small tug-of-war as we tussled over it for a second, then it fell to the floor scattering papers everywhere.
I closed my eyes briefly and when I opened them, Jack was on his hands and knees picking up bits of paper.
‘Ooh look,’ he said, flinging one sheet at me from his position down on the floor. ‘This says Lilian Miles on it. Have you been doing your own family tree and got them mixed up?’
I looked at the paper he’d given me. It was a document about the Air Transport Auxiliary.
‘No, it’s yours,’ I said, bristling at the suggestion that I’d get papers muddled. ‘Frank Jones is mentioned – look.’
I pointed at the bottom of the page, where I’d highlighted Jack’s grandfather’s name.
‘It’s saying he’d been cleared to fly the class of planes that included four-engine bombers,’ I said.
‘And so had Lilian,’ Jack said, showing me the name at the top of the page. ‘No relation of yours?’
I chewed my lip, thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps,’ I said. Then I shook my head. ‘It must just be a coincidence.’
Which was exactly what I said to my parents about what I’d seen at our regular Friday evening family dinner.
‘And there, right at the top, was the name Lilian Miles,’ I said, helping myself to more pilau rice – we always got takeaway on Fridays because neither of my parents could cook and Miranda, my sister who’d done all the cooking when we were growing up, was usually knackered from work.
‘I thought it had to be a coincidence,’ I carried on. ‘But isn’t it strange?’
Dad shrugged. ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘Like you say, probably just a coincidence.’
‘But what about Great-Aunt Lil?’ Miranda fixed Dad with a look that told me she wasn’t impressed with his response.
Mum smiled at the mention of Lil. She was very fond of her.
‘Yes, what about Lil?’ she said.
‘What about her?’ Dad asked, snapping a poppadom in half with a crack and scattering crumbs across the table. I fought the urge to sweep them up with my hand.
‘Could the Lilian Miles on the list be our Lil?’ Miranda asked.
‘It won’t be her,’ I said. ‘There were lots of women named Lilian back then; trust me, I’ve seen a million birth certificates in my time.’
‘But not lots of women named Lilian Miles,’ Miranda pointed out.
‘Is it just a coincidence?’ Mum said. She looked thoughtful. ‘Robert, what do we know about what Lil did in the war?’
Dad had just shovelled some more rice into his mouth but he sat up a bit straighter when Mum spoke.
‘Planes,’ he said eventually, once he’d swallowed. ‘Definitely something to do with planes. I remember her buying me a toy when I was a kid.’
‘Do you think it could be her, Nell?’ Miranda said, using my childhood nickname. ‘Maybe you could investigate?’
Mum and Dad exchanged a glance. Just a quick one and I had no idea what it meant. But I saw it and it intrigued me.
I shook my head. This was exactly what I’d been worried could happen.
‘We’re not allowed. We can’t use company time or resources to research our own families. I had to sign a thing, when I joined, saying I wouldn’t do it. And we can only access all the genealogy sites from work.’
‘But how would they know what you were looking up?’ Miranda said. She was like a dog with a bone when she got something in her head.
‘They’d know,’ I said darkly, though I thought she was probably right. Fliss could check what searches we did. In fact, we could all see everyone’s searches because we all shared a login. But we never paid much attention to what the others were researching and I supposed no one would know whether I was looking up my own family or someone else’s. ‘More naan?’
The conversation moved on. And if it hadn’t been for that look between my parents, I’d probably have forgotten all about the mention of Lilian Miles in my research. But that little glance, and the way Dad had suddenly sat up when he remembered Lil had done something with planes, stayed with me. I wondered what it meant and why it had captured his interest so much.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_dcdc7a1a-0c8b-5db9-9f7b-4c5b60631a04)
Lilian
June 1944
‘That’s your brother isn’t it? And is that his wife?’
Rose was peering over my shoulder at the photograph I kept stuck on the inside of my locker.
‘He looks like you, your brother.’
I gave her a quick, half-hearted smile and reached inside my locker for my jacket.
‘And is that their little lad she’s holding?’ Rose went on, undeterred by my lack of responses. ‘What a sweetheart. He looks like you as well. You’ve all got that same dark hair.’
Rose was one of the most infuriating people I’d ever met. Back when we’d been at school together my mum had told me to be nice.
‘She just wants to be your friend,’ Mum would say. ‘She’s not as good with people as you are.’
Back then, I’d been one of the class leaders. Confident and a bit mouthy. Able to make anyone laugh with a quick retort, and to perform piano in front of all sorts of audiences. But that was before.
I’d not seen Rose for a few years and I was finding her much harder to deal with now. For the thousandth time I cursed the luck that had sent my old school friend to join the Air Transport Auxiliary, and at the same airbase as me.
I pulled my jacket out with a swift yank and slammed the locker door shut, almost taking off Rose’s nose as I did it.
‘Got to go,’ I said.
I shrugged on my jacket, heaved my kitbag on to my shoulder, and headed through the double doors at the end of the corridor and out into the airfield. It was a glorious day, sunny and bright with a light wind. Perfect for flying. I paused by the door, raised my face to the sun and let it warm me for a moment.
The airfield was a hubbub of noise and activity. To my left a group of mechanics worked on a plane, shouting instructions to one another above the noise of the propellers. Ahead of me, a larger aircraft cruised slowly towards the runway, about to take off. It was what we called a taxi plane, taking other ATA pilots to factories where they’d pick up the aircraft they had to deliver that day.
My friend Flora was in the cockpit and she raised her arm to wave to me as she passed. I lifted my own hand and saluted her in return. A little way ahead, a truck revved its engine, and all around, people were calling to each other, shifting equipment and getting on with their tasks. I smiled. That was good. It was harder to organise things when it was quiet.
Glancing round, I saw Annie. She was loading some tarpaulins on to the back of a van. Casually I walked over to where she stood.
‘Morning,’ I said.
She nodded at me and hauled another of the folded tarpaulins up on to the van.
‘I’m going to Middlesbrough,’ I said, dropping my kitbag at my feet. I picked up one of the tarpaulins so if anyone looked over they’d see me helping, not chatting. ‘Finally.’
She nodded again.
‘I’ve left the address in your locker with my timings,’ I went on. ‘She’s waiting to hear from you so send the telegram as soon as I take off.’
‘Adoption?’ Annie said.
I nodded, my lips pinched together. ‘Older,’ I said. ‘Three kids already. Husband’s in France.’
Annie winced. ‘Poor cow.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Her mum’s helping.’
‘How far along is she?’
‘About seven months. She reckons she can’t hide it much longer. I’ve been waiting for one of us to be sent up there.’
Annie heaved the last tarpaulin on to the van.
‘Best get going then,’ she said.
I gave her a quick smile.
‘Thanks, Annie,’ I said.
A shout from across the airfield made me look round. ‘Lil!’
One of the engineers was waving to me from beside a small single-engine Fairchild.
‘Looks like mine,’ I said to Annie.
She gave my arm a brief squeeze. ‘It’s a good thing you’re doing here,’ she said.
‘You’re doing it too.’
Without looking back at her, I picked up my bag and ran over to the plane.
‘Am I flying this one?’ I said. We all took it in turns to fly the taxi planes, but I did it more often than some of the others; I loved it so much.
The engineer – a huge Welsh guy called Gareth who I was very fond of – patted the side of the plane lovingly.
‘You are,’ he said. ‘She’s a bit temperamental on the descent so take it easy.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘Gareth,’ I said. ‘I know what I’m doing.’
I opened the cockpit door and flung my bag inside.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Take me through all the pre-flight checks.’
I’d been in the ATA for two years now, and I was cleared to fly every kind of plane – even the huge bombers that many people thought a woman couldn’t handle, but I never took anything for granted. I always went through checks with the engineers and did everything by the book. I liked feeling in control and I didn’t want to put my life in anyone else’s hands. Not again.
The taxi flights were quick – normally twenty minutes or so as we headed to the factories to pick up our planes. Today was the same. So it wasn’t long before we’d landed at South Marston, and I was ready to take off in the Spitfire I was delivering to Middlesbrough.
I climbed up into the plane and checked all the instruments, even though I’d flown hundreds of Spitfires and it was as familiar to me as the back of my own hand.
I loved flying. I loved feeling the plane doing what I asked it to do, and the freedom of swooping over the countryside. I’d spent two years hanging round the RAF base near where I lived in the Scottish borders before I joined up. I’d learned everything I could about flying, without actually piloting a plane myself. And then, as soon as I was old enough to sign up I’d applied to the ATA. I’d loved it straight away and I knew I was a good pilot. I’d raced through the ranks and completed my training on each category of plane faster than anyone else.
And yet every time I went on one of my ‘mercy missions’ as Flora called them, I was risking it all.
Putting all my worries aside, I focused on the plane. I watched the ground crew as they directed me out on to the runway, then thought only of the engine beneath me as I took off northwards.
Once I was up, I relaxed a bit, and took in the view. The day was so clear, I could see the towns and villages below. I imagined all the people going about their lives – hearing my engine and looking up to see me as I passed. Because it was a brand new plane, there was no radio, no navigation equipment – nothing. I liked the challenge that brought. It meant my brain was always kept active and I had no time to brood.
Middlesbrough was one of our longest flights and by the time I landed it was afternoon and the heat of the summer day was beginning to fade.
I slid out of the cockpit and headed to a man with a clipboard, who appeared to be in charge.
‘Spitfire,’ I said. ‘Made in South Marston.’
He nodded, without looking at me. ‘Where’s the pilot?’ he asked. ‘I need him to sign.’
‘I’m the pilot,’ I said, through gritted teeth. ‘Do you have a pen?’
Now the man did look up. He rolled his eyes as though I’d said something ridiculous and handed me a pen from his shirt pocket.
I scribbled my signature on the form he held out. ‘Is there a flight going back?’
‘Over there,’ he said, gesturing with his head to where a larger Anson sat on the runway. ‘But there are a few of you going. Be about an hour?’
I breathed out in relief. An hour was more than enough. ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Can I grab a cuppa?’
He pointed his head in the other direction. I picked up my bag and went the way he’d indicated. But instead of going inside the mess hut, I slipped round the side of the building and out towards the main gate. I hoped the woman would be here – I didn’t want to risk missing my flight back; that would lead to all sorts of trouble.
‘Just going for some cigarettes,’ I told the bored man on the gate. He barely acknowledged me as I sauntered past and out on to the road. It was quiet with no passing traffic. Across the carriageway, a woman stood still, partly hidden by a tree. She was wearing a long coat, even though it was summer, and she was in her late thirties. Her hair was greying and she had a slump to her shoulders that made me sad. She looked at me and when I raised my hand in greeting, she smiled a cautious, nervous smile. Confident she was the person I was meant to meet, I ran across the road to her.
‘April?’ I said.
She nodded, looking as though she was going to cry.
‘I’m Lil.’
‘Lil,’ April said in a strong north-east accent. ‘I need to go. I went early with my others and I’m sure this one’s no different. I can’t be here when the baby arrives. I can’t.’ Her voice shook.
I took her arm. ‘I’ve got a family in Berkshire,’ I said. ‘Lovely woman. She’s wanted a baby since they got married ten years ago but it’s not happened. Her husband’s a teacher – so he’s not off fighting. They’ve got a spare room for you.’
April flinched and I looked at her.
‘He was a teacher,’ she said. ‘The man. The baby’s father.’
I stayed quiet. Sometimes mothers wanted to talk and sometimes they didn’t but whatever they wanted, it was easier for me to stay silent.
‘He was so nice,’ April went on. ‘Charming. Kind to my boys. Helpful to me. You know?’
I nodded.
‘And then one day he wasn’t so nice,’ she said. ‘And I know I should have told him to stay away, that I was married. I should have made it clearer. But I missed Bill, you see. And I know it’s my fault.’
She paused.
‘It’s my fault.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ I said, wondering how many times I’d said that and why it was easy to tell others that and not myself. ‘And it’s not the baby’s fault.’
I unzipped my bag and pulled out an envelope.
‘Your train tickets are in here,’ I said. ‘And the name and address of the family. You need to change at Birmingham and they’ll meet you at Reading station – they know what train you’ll be on.’
Looking a bit stunned, April took the envelope. ‘Why do you do this?’ she asked. ‘What’s in it for you?’
I shrugged. ‘It’s the right thing to do,’ I said.
April looked doubtful but she didn’t argue.
I glanced at my watch.
‘I have to go,’ I said. I took her hand and squeezed it. ‘Good luck.’
Chapter 4 (#ulink_8610bbfa-4887-5cdf-8146-907e96b113fc)
Helena
May 2018
After dinner I cornered Miranda in the kitchen as we washed up.
‘What was all that about?’ I asked her.
‘Should we club together and buy the parents a dishwasher,’ she said, squirting washing-up liquid into the sink.
‘I can’t afford it,’ I said. ‘And they wouldn’t use it anyway.’
Miranda frowned. ‘True.’
I elbowed her in the ribs as I passed her a stack of dirty plates.
‘Miranda, focus. Did you see Mum and Dad look at each other when I mentioned Lil?’
She elbowed me back like we were still ten and twelve, not thirty-four and thirty-six.
‘That was a bit weird, wasn’t it?’ she said.
‘What was weird, darling?’ Mum wandered into the kitchen clutching two empty wine glasses. ‘Is there another bottle?’
I thought Miranda might burst with the effort of not rolling her eyes. ‘In the fridge,’ she said, through gritted teeth. ‘You watched me put it in there.’
Mum blew an air kiss in her direction. ‘Don’t get snappy, Manda,’ she said, mildly. ‘What was weird?’
‘Work stuff,’ I said. ‘Manda was telling me about some really important deal she’s doing. Worth millions. Trillions even.’
Miranda was the youngest ever head of international investment at Ravensberg Bank and also the first woman to do the job. I was fiercely, wonderfully proud of her and in total awe of her skills. Our anti-capitalist parents, however, thought it was terrible. They always appeared faintly ashamed of Manda’s money, which I thought was ironic considering she’d honed her financial management skills by organising the family budget before she hit her teens. And she still invested both of our parents’ erratic income wisely and made sure they never ran short.
In fact, thanks to Dad composing the scores for huge blockbuster films since the Nineties, and Mum’s enthusiastic love of art history earning her spot as an expert on an antiques valuation television show, my parents were both pretty wealthy. Not that they’d ever admit it. If they even knew. They shared a vague ‘it’ll all work out’ approach to money and mostly ignored anything Miranda said about it.
‘Urgh,’ said Mum, predictably. ‘It all sounds so immoral somehow, finance chat.’
I grinned at Miranda over Mum’s shoulder and she scowled at me.
‘Take the bottle into the lounge,’ she said to Mum. ‘We’ll be in when we’re done.’
‘Is Dora asleep?’ I asked. Friday nights were dreadful for my daughter’s carefully crafted routine. She absolutely adored my parents and tended to run round like a mad thing for the first half of the evening, then drop.
‘Curled up on the sofa like an angel,’ Mum said, soppily. The adoration went both ways.
‘And Freddie?’
‘Playing piano with your father,’ Mum said.
Freddie was Miranda’s seven-year-old son who could be adorable and vile in equal measures but who had apparently inherited Dad’s musical talent – much to our father’s delight.
Mum opened the fridge, took out the bottle and retreated. I turned to Miranda, who’d finished the washing up.
‘So, you saw the look, right?’
She nodded.
‘What do you think it meant?’
Miranda shrugged. ‘Probably something completely unrelated, knowing them,’ she said. ‘They were interested though. Dad especially. Do you think it is our Lil?’
‘No,’ I said, though I wasn’t as sure as I sounded.
‘Where did you see her name?’ Miranda asked. She pulled out the wooden bench that lived under the kitchen table and sat down with a sigh. ‘I’m exhausted. Freddie was up half the night.’
I didn’t want to talk about Freddie; I wanted to talk about Lil.
‘On a list of people approved to fly bombers,’ I said.
‘Did women fly planes in the war?’
I nodded. ‘I don’t know a whole lot about it, but it seems so. Not in combat, obviously.’
‘Obviously,’ said Miranda drily. ‘It’s funny that Lil’s never mentioned this because it sounds amazing. Flying bombers?’
‘Not just bombers,’ I said. ‘The records I found are from something called the Air Transport Auxiliary. They flew all the planes. Took them from the factories where they were built to wherever they were needed.’
‘And it was women doing this?’
‘Mostly,’ I said. ‘But men did it too. Jack Jones’s grandad did it because he was too short-sighted to join the regular RAF, which is faintly terrifying.’
Miranda chuckled.
‘But yes, mostly women. They called them the Attagirls.’
‘I like that,’ Miranda said. ‘It’s clever. And only a tiny bit patronising.’
It was my turn to laugh. ‘They were really impressive,’ I said.
‘What’s incredible,’ Miranda said, shaking her head, ‘is that I’ve never even heard of these women.’
‘I’ve not heard much about them either,’ I admitted. ‘And it’s literally my job.’
‘If it was our Lil, I can’t believe she’s never talked about it,’ said Miranda. ‘It strikes me as something you’d want to talk about. It sounds wonderful.’
‘She’s always been vague when I’ve asked her about the war. Never really told me what she did.’
‘She’d have only been about to turn sixteen when the war started,’ Miranda said. I was impressed; I’d been sneakily counting on my fingers trying to add it up. ‘And only twenty-one at the end.’
‘Old enough to be doing something,’ I pointed out. ‘I had an idea she did office work.’
Miranda screwed up her nose. ‘I can’t believe we’ve never been interested enough to ask her for the details,’ she said. ‘That’s terrible of us. You’re a historian, Nell. You should be ashamed of yourself.’
I stuck my tongue out at her. ‘I’ve asked her lots of times,’ I said. ‘She’s always told me how boring it was and how she couldn’t wait for the war to finish so she could travel.’
‘Sounds like she was trying to make it sound dull enough so you wouldn’t keep asking,’ Miranda said.
I blinked at her. ‘Oh God, it actually does sound like that,’ I said. ‘Do you think she saw some awful stuff? Or did some really brave things?’
‘Lil?’ Miranda said with a glint in her eye. ‘Brave? I’d say so, wouldn’t you?’
I thought about our great-aunt, who’d been the only person to step in when things were really tough for us back in the Nineties. Lil, who hated being in one place for long, but who’d stayed in London until she knew Miranda and I were okay and that our family wasn’t about to fall apart. Lil, who regularly phoned Dad throughout our childhood and reminded him about parents’ evenings, and exams, and even birthdays. I smiled.
‘Definitely,’ I said.
I perched on the table next to where Miranda was sitting on the bench, and put my feet up next to her. She frowned at me and I ignored her.
‘The ATA girls flew every kind of aircraft,’ I said. ‘Massive bombers, and tiny fighter planes, and everything in between.’
‘Do you think they got a hard time from people who didn’t think they were capable?’ Miranda asked, well aware of what it was like to be a woman in a man’s world. ‘I have lost count of the times someone’s asked me to take minutes in a meeting, or fetch coffee.’
‘Because you’re the only woman?’ I said, shocked but not entirely surprised. ‘What do you say when that happens? Do you go?’
‘It doesn’t happen now because I’m in charge.’ Miranda allowed herself a small, self-satisfied smile. ‘But when I was starting out, I used to just do it – go and get the drinks, or hand round the biscuits.’
I winced. ‘And when you weren’t just starting out?’
‘Once,’ said Miranda coolly, ‘I asked if I was expected to take the minutes with my vagina.’
‘No, you didn’t.’
‘I did,’ she said, laughing. ‘That was one chief exec who never asked me to do that again.’
I was amazed by her bolshiness and said so. ‘You definitely share that with Lil,’ I pointed out. ‘I expect she had to be bolshie if she was flying planes all over the place, just like you had to be a bit gobby to make it in your job.’
‘She’s definitely bolshie, our Lil. But I suppose we don’t even know for sure the Lilian Miles on this list of yours is her,’ Miranda said. ‘It actually could be a coincidence, like you said.’
We both stayed quiet for a second, then Miranda spoke again.
‘We should ask her,’ she said.
‘Ask her?’
Miranda nodded. ‘Ask her.’
Chapter 5 (#ulink_7912707c-0401-5796-9e22-a58a477f8c7f)
Lilian
June 1944
It was late when I finally landed back at base. The sunny skies that had made flying such a joy were now chilly and as I slid out of the back of the Anson, I scanned the horizon. It was a clear night, which meant a good view for German bombers, and I wondered if there would be a raid later.
Once I’d signed the plane in and reported to the officer on duty, I picked up my bag and headed off towards the entrance of the airfield. I was tired and I wanted to get back to the digs that I shared with Annie and Flora. We needed to go over all the details of April’s case, and I wanted to check if anything else had come up today.
‘What’s in your bag?’
The voice made me jump. I squinted into the lengthening shadows round the side of the mess hut.
‘Who’s there?’
‘It’s me.’ The shadows changed into the shape of a man and out from the side of the building came Will Bates – one of the RAF mechanics who worked on the base. He was funny and charming and I knew Rose was quite sweet on him.
‘Hello, Will,’ I said, gripping my bag slightly tighter. There was nothing incriminating in it; I’d given everything to April, but his level stare was making me nervous.
‘You’re always carrying a load of stuff,’ he said. ‘I just wondered what you were lugging around the whole time.’
We all carried overnight bags whenever we went on a trip because sometimes we couldn’t get back to HQ. But the way he said it made me feel uncomfortable. I raised my chin.
‘Been watching me, have you?’
To my surprise, Will looked a bit sheepish. ‘I have as it happens,’ he said.
I narrowed my eyes and stared at him. ‘Why?’
He coughed in a sort of nervous way and I relaxed my grip on the straps of my bag, just a bit.
‘Because you’re pretty,’ he muttered. ‘And you look fun. I thought you might like to go dancing one evening, when we’ve both got the same day off.’
I closed my eyes briefly, feeling relief flood my senses.
Will smiled at me. He was a good-looking chap, with dark red hair and deep brown eyes. When he smiled, I got a glimpse of the little boy he’d once been – probably thanks to the sprinkling of freckles across his nose. I couldn’t help but smile back.
‘Dancing?’ I said.
‘Dancing.’
I leaned against the rough wall of the mess hut and took a breath.
‘Will,’ I began. Oh, how to even start explaining the mess my head was in, and the difficult feelings I had about men and women and the relationships between them.
‘I’d like that,’ I said. ‘But maybe we could go as part of a group?’
Will studied me closely. ‘A group,’ he said.
‘At first, at least.’
He grinned again. ‘You’re on,’ he said. ‘See you later.’
He pulled a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one, the flare from the match shining on the curl of his lip and the twinkle in his eye.
‘Bye, Lil,’ he said, sauntering away across the airfield.
I watched him go. ‘Bye,’ I said.
But as I turned towards the barracks, he stopped.
‘Oh, Lil,’ he said, with that boyish grin again. ‘I know you’re up to something.’
Unease gripped me, but I pretended I hadn’t heard. I shifted my bag up my shoulder and carried on walking away from him. I didn’t look back.
* * *
‘He said what?’ Annie said, when I told her about the conversation.
‘That I was up to something,’ I said. I was lying on my bed in my nightgown, even though it was still early. Missions like tonight’s always exhausted me, and Will’s appearance hadn’t helped.
‘You are up to something,’ Flora pointed out. She was on my bed too, sitting by my feet. She had a sheaf of paper on her lap.
‘That’s why I’m so nervous,’ I said. ‘Between Rose sniffing around and Will Bates lurking in the shadows, I’m worried people are starting to suspect.’
‘I am positive Will Bates knows nothing,’ Annie said. ‘He’s just teasing you. Flirting.’
I scowled at her.
‘I’m positive,’ she repeated. ‘He may be pretty …’
She paused to give Flora and me time to appreciate Will’s handsome face in our imaginations.
‘… but he’s not the sharpest tool in the box.’
I smiled at Annie’s bluntness. She certainly told it how it was and she did not suffer fools gladly. Her sharp brain made her a real asset to our little group, while Flora’s organisational skills kept the whole thing running smoothly. I’d lost count of how many times I thanked my lucky stars that they’d both joined the ATA instead of using their skills in the War Office or behind a desk somewhere.
The first time we’d helped a woman, it was just by chance. Back in 1942 when we’d been doing our training in Luton there had been a girl in our pool called Polly. One evening we’d all been out – it was fun there, and there were a lot of army regiments stationed nearby, lads doing basic training just like us. Their presence always made for a good night. But that one evening, Polly didn’t come home. She eventually arrived, much later, with her dress torn. She hadn’t told us what had happened – she didn’t have to. Quietly, me and Annie gave her a bath and cleaned her up, and tried not to wince at the bruises on her thighs.
A few weeks later, Annie caught Polly being sick in the toilet and realised she was pregnant.
‘What am I going to do?’ Polly had hissed at us in the bathroom that day, her face pale and her forehead beaded with sweat. ‘I can’t have a bloody baby.’
She’d gagged, just with the effort of speaking.
‘I didn’t even know his name.’
‘We need to help her,’ I told Annie.
‘But what can we do?’
I’d shaken my head. ‘I don’t know,’ I’d said. ‘But we need to do something.’
I’d not known Annie long at that time, but I already knew she was someone I’d trust with my life.
‘Someone helped me once,’ I’d admitted. ‘Not like this, not …’
Annie’s eyes had searched my face. I’d squeezed my lips together in case I cried.
‘And now you think we should help Polly?’ she’d said.
I’d nodded.
‘We’ll find a way.’
And that’s where Flora came in. She knew someone in Manchester. Someone who’d helped a friend of her sister. A doctor. At least, that’s what he said he was and we never checked. Flora made the arrangements, Annie and I worked out the logistics and the transport, and Polly went off to Manchester just a fortnight later. She came back even paler, but after a couple of days’ rest – we told our officers that she was having some women’s troubles and they didn’t push it – she was fine again.
We had thought that was it. But it wasn’t. Polly told someone what we’d done for her, and quietly, word got round. Turned out there were women all over the place who needed help of one sort or another and it seemed we were the ones to help them. Gradually we built up a network of people, all over the country. Truth was, the network had existed long before we came along. We were just lucky that we could put people in touch with each other. Doctors who could do what we needed them to do, women desperate to adopt a baby, others willing to shelter a pregnant woman for a few weeks – or nurse someone who’d picked up an infection after their, you know, procedure.
We criss-crossed the country delivering planes, and sharing information or arrangements with women while we did it. In two years, we’d helped eleven women – April was number twelve. We’d seen five babies born and adopted and the rest, well, they’d been sorted. And we’d had one death, a young woman called Bet who lost too much blood after her op, and who’d been too scared to go to hospital in case she got into trouble. We didn’t use that doctor again and we’d made sure we checked out new places now, but we were all haunted by Bet’s death. Never thought about stopping though. Not once. And if losing one of our women wouldn’t stop us helping others, nor would Will Bates and his clumsy flirting.
I sat up in bed and looked across at Annie, who was lying on her own bed next to mine.
‘April’s going to let us know when the baby comes,’ I said. ‘Don’t reckon it’ll be long.’
Annie nodded. ‘Glad we got there in time.’
Flora was opening letters. We had a box at the local post office where people could contact us.
‘Too late for this one, though,’ she said, scanning the paper. ‘She wrote this last month and she says she was already eight months gone then. She’ll have had the baby by now.’
Annie shrugged. ‘Can’t help ’em all.’
But I wished we could.
Chapter 6 (#ulink_304672d5-ff96-5bab-922d-987aacd23212)
Helena
May 2018
It seemed Miranda and I weren’t the only ones to be thinking about Lil. On Monday morning, just before lunch, the office receptionist phoned me to say I had a visitor.
‘This is a nice surprise,’ I said as the lift doors opened and I saw it was my dad. ‘Are you working nearby?’
We were based in Soho, and Dad often worked close by when a film he’d composed the music on was in post-production. It wasn’t unusual for him to pop by and say hello when he was in the area, but he normally phoned first.
Now he gave a vague nod over his shoulder. ‘Nearby,’ he said.
‘I’m a bit busy at the moment but we could go for lunch in about half an hour if you like?’
But Dad shook his head. ‘I wanted to ask you something,’ he said. ‘Could we nip into another room, perhaps?’
Behind his back, I saw Elly studiously bashing away at her keyboard, pretending not to be listening.
‘Of course,’ I said, a flicker of unease in my stomach. ‘Follow me.’
I led him into the meeting room where I’d met Jack Jones the week before, and shut the door.
‘Are you okay? What’s the matter? Is Mum okay?’
Dad smiled. ‘Nothing’s the matter,’ he said. ‘We’re both fine. Fit as fiddles.’
He gave a little skip as though to prove how fit he was even though he was approaching eighty. Mum wasn’t far off seventy.
I raised my eyebrow at him and he pulled out a chair and sat down. I did the same.
‘So what’s up?’
‘I wanted to ask you a favour,’ he said.
‘Go on.’
‘I know you said you weren’t supposed to do your own research, but any chance you could have a quick look into this Lil stuff for me?’
‘Dad, no,’ I said. ‘I can’t.’
‘It’s important.’
I stared at him. ‘Why?’ I said. ‘Why is it important?’
Dad looked at his hands. ‘No actual reason that I can put into words,’ he said. ‘I’d just like to know more about my family. Before it’s too late.’
He took a breath.
‘I never really asked my parents much about the war, and that generation just didn’t talk about it, did they?’
I shook my head. More than once I’d come across the most amazing stories in the course of research that had never been mentioned in the family.
‘I think the war was so awful, more awful than we could ever imagine, and those who lived through it found it hard to talk about,’ I said.
‘My father – your grandfather – was in the RAF.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen his medals.’
Dad nodded. ‘Never mentioned it, not really,’ he said. ‘Not to us, at least not often. He had some old air force friends I remember him meeting up with, and I imagine they talked about what they’d done.’
‘Their own version of group therapy,’ I pointed out. ‘Must have helped.’
‘I wish I’d asked him more about it,’ Dad said. He looked really sad and I thought suddenly that even though my grandpa had been dead for more than twenty years, he must still miss him.
I reached out and took his hand. ‘He might not have talked, even if you’d asked,’ I said. ‘Did Grandma ever say anything?’
‘Not about Dad in the air force,’ Dad said. ‘But, of course, I remember bits about the war. Not much, because I was very small. But I remember living with Mum, and not really knowing Dad when he came home.’
He paused.
‘And I remember Lil,’ he said.
‘What do you remember?’ I asked, intrigued by this little insight into my own family history.
‘I remember her wearing a uniform,’ Dad said slowly. He tilted his head to the left and looked far away over my shoulder. ‘I remember sitting on her lap and playing with a toy plane and her arm round me felt scratchy, the material I mean. It was a uniform.’
‘How old were you?’
He shrugged.
‘About four, perhaps? I loved that plane.’
‘Was that the one Lil brought you?’
‘I always thought my father gave it to me,’ he said. ‘But now I really think about it, I seem to remember Lil bringing it. It’s such a long time ago.’
‘Uniforms and toy planes sound to me like that was our Lil on my list,’ I said.
Dad nodded. ‘That’s what I thought.’
‘Give me a minute,’ I said.
Leaving him in the meeting room, I dashed back to my desk and found the Jack Jones file – now with all the papers back in the correct order.
‘Everything okay?’ Elly said, super-casually.
‘Dad worked with Jack Jones,’ I said, sort of truthfully. Dad had indeed done some music for the TV show Jack had starred in – though he never met the actors as a rule. ‘On that detective thing. He wanted to check something.’
Elly looked dubious but she didn’t say anything.
I took the folder back to the meeting room and showed Dad the list with Lilian Miles on it.
‘So, she flew planes?’ Dad said in awe. ‘Bloody hell.’
I nodded. ‘Amazing, right?’
‘Could you check her records?’
‘Dad,’ I said, in a warning tone.
‘There must be service records,’ he said, not put off by my frown. ‘Surely they’d help us find out if it’s her? We know her date and place of birth; it shouldn’t be hard to cross-reference.’
‘I can’t, Dad,’ I said. ‘It’s completely verboten to do our own research. I could lose my job.’
I grinned at him.
‘You could do it, or Mum. She knows about research. Though it’s expensive to subscribe to some of the databases.’
Dad shook his head. ‘Oh, Nell, you know what we’re like with computers. We just don’t have the skills,’ he said. ‘I’m not bad on the email business but anything more complicated just flummoxes me. I’m no spring chicken.’
I patted his hand reassuringly. ‘You do brilliantly,’ I lied, knowing he was right. He and Mum struggled to work their television.
‘What about if you did it outside work?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It just feels so wrong because I found the information at work. It’s not right to use company resources for personal searches. I could get into trouble.’
‘Your boss wouldn’t know, Miranda said,’ Dad pointed out.
I shrugged. ‘I can’t,’ I said again. ‘Why are you so interested?’
‘I told you, I just want to know about my family,’ Dad said. But he didn’t meet my eyes when he said it. What was he hiding?
‘There is something we can do, though,’ I said, watching him carefully.
Dad looked hopeful. ‘What?’
‘We could ask her.’
‘Ask her,’ Dad repeated, just as I’d done when Miranda suggested it.
Before I could continue, there was a knock on the door of the meeting room and Fliss stuck her head round, her long blonde hair swinging.
‘Sorry, Helena,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d booked this room?’
Guiltily, I gathered up the Jack Jones papers I’d been showing Dad and smiled. ‘Just an unplanned meeting,’ I said. ‘We’ll get out of your way.’
I went to hustle Dad out of the room, before Fliss realised I’d been mixing up work and personal stuff, but it was too late. She was looking at Dad curiously.
‘Fliss Hopkins,’ she said, holding out her hand for him to shake.
‘Robert Miles.’
She beamed at him. ‘Helena’s father?’
‘Indeed,’ said Dad giving her a dazzling smile. He was such a charmer.
‘I was just going over some Jack Jones research when Dad popped in to see if I was free for lunch,’ I said.
‘But Helena tells me she is far too busy to join me, so I will bid you farewell,’ Dad said smoothly making me wonder if he’d always been such a good liar.
‘Nice to meet you,’ said Fliss.
She stood back to let us leave the room then entered herself, leaving the door open.
‘Let me think about it,’ I said as I showed Dad to the lift, hoping Fliss hadn’t realised I had been showing Dad my Jack Jones research and that she didn’t decide to have a look at it herself. ‘I can’t search Lil’s records, not without putting my job at risk, but I’ll have a think about what else we can do.’
Dad kissed me goodbye. ‘Thanks, Helena,’ he said. ‘It means a lot to me.’
Chapter 7 (#ulink_ea0c4447-8c2f-5a25-9054-c9deeb90b746)
Lilian
September 1939
I cycled as slowly as I could through the village, wobbling on my bike because I wasn’t going fast enough to keep my balance.
‘Morning, Lil,’ Marcus the postman called. ‘Mind how you go.’
I ignored him, concentrating on keeping my legs going round. I had an ache in my stomach and my limbs felt heavy and hard to control.
‘By lunchtime it’ll be over,’ I whispered to myself over and over as I cycled. ‘By lunchtime it’ll be over.’
I could see the house up ahead, squatting at the end of the village like a slug, and growing bigger as I approached. I slid off my bicycle and chained it to the fence, and then, dragging my heels, walked up the path to the front door. Before I could knock, it opened. My piano teacher’s wife stood there. She was dressed to go out, wearing her hat and holding her gloves in one hand and her handbag in the other. I wanted to cry.
‘Lilian,’ she said, beaming at me ‘How nice to see you. He’s in the music room – go on through.’
I forced a smile. ‘Thank you, Mrs Mayhew,’ I muttered, slinking past her. She was so pretty and fresh-looking in her summer dress. I felt her eyes on me as I went and wondered if she knew. If she could tell. I felt dirty. No, not dirty. Filthy.
At the music room door, I paused. Then I lifted my hand and knocked.
‘Come,’ said Mr Mayhew. Taking a breath, I went.
Mr Mayhew was sitting at the piano, making pencil notes on some sheet music that was on the stand.
‘Ah, Lilian,’ he said. ‘You’re late.’
He turned round on the stool and gave me a dazzling smile. My breath caught in my throat. Always when I wasn’t with him, he became a monster in my head. Then, when I saw him again – saw his dark, swarthy good looks and his broad shoulders – I wondered what I had been worrying about.
‘Come and sit,’ he said, shifting over on the padded stool. ‘Let’s play something fun to get warmed up.’
I put down my music case and settled myself next to him. I felt the warmth of his body as his thigh brushed mine when I sat, but I couldn’t move away because the stool was too small.
Mr Mayhew – I couldn’t call him Ian, even though he’d told me to – moved a sheet of music to the front of the bundle on the stand. It was a Bach piece that had been one of my favourites, long ago when I was still a child.
He turned to me, his face just inches from mine. I smelled coffee on his breath and tried not to recoil as nausea overwhelmed me.
‘Ready?’ he said.
I nodded, putting my hands on to the keys.
‘Two, three, four …’ he counted us in.
I knew the music by heart, so as I played I shut my eyes and imagined I was anywhere but in this stuffy room, with Mr Mayhew’s body heat spreading through my thin cotton frock.
At the end of the piece, Mr Mayhew stood up and I felt myself relax. Slightly.
‘Good,’ he said, strolling over to the window and gazing out into the garden. ‘Now let’s go through your examination pieces. Start with the Brahms.’
I relaxed a bit more, realising he wanted to concentrate on music today.
‘Could you open a window, please?’ I asked. ‘It’s very warm.’
He nodded and pushed the sash upwards. ‘Are you feeling well?’ he asked me, his brow furrowed in concern. ‘You’re very pale.’
I swallowed. ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘It’s just the heat.’
Mr Mayhew came over to where I sat and stood behind me. Gently, he reached out and stroked the back of my neck.
‘Lilian,’ he said gruffly. ‘Is something wrong?’
I froze. My stomach was squirming and I wasn’t sure I could put how I was feeling into words. How could I tell him I’d wanted his approval for months, so badly that I almost felt a physical ache when I played a wrong note. That when he smiled at me my heart sang with the most beautiful music. That when he told me I was special to him, I wanted to throw myself into his arms and stay there forever. And yet, as spring had blossomed into early summer, and he had kissed me for the first time, I’d gone home feeling confused and guilty. When, just a week later, he had put his hand up my skirt while I played, his fingers probing and hurting, I’d gasped in fear and he’d nodded.
‘Like that?’ he said, his voice thick. ‘I thought you would. I knew what you wanted from the day you walked in here.’
I’d stayed still, not understanding what he was doing. Not wanting to upset him by asking him to stop. Because I had wanted this. Hadn’t I?
Now, after our lessons he would kiss me, and touch me – and make me touch him too. I didn’t know how to say no. Because I’d started this, hadn’t I? And sometimes he came to school to meet me at the gate and give me music he’d copied for me by hand – see how much cared – and we walked home the long way through the woods. And he’d take me by the hand and lower me into the soft moss below one of the trees and unbuckle his belt and …
I found that by imagining playing the piano I could pretend it wasn’t happening. And then when it was over, Mr Mayhew would always be so kind. He would brush leaves from my hair, and tell me how precious I was. I never cried until I was alone.
Now, feeling his fingers on the back of my neck, I waited for what he would do next.
‘Are you cross with me?’ he murmured. ‘Because I wanted you to play first?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I want to play.’
‘You tease me,’ he said. He trailed his fingers over my collarbone and down to my bust, and I closed my eyes.
And then the front door banged shut and he pulled away as if my faded cotton dress was prickly.
‘Ian,’ Mrs Mayhew called. ‘Ian, are you there?’
She came into the music room without knocking, which she never did. Mr Mayhew was very strict about that. Not a surprise, I supposed, given what we were often doing instead of playing piano.
Mrs Mayhew’s hat was askew and her hair was escaping from its roll. She had a streak of dust across the front of her dress and her forehead was beaded with sweat. I’d never seen her look so flustered; she was normally perfectly groomed.
‘Oh, Ian,’ she wailed. ‘Ian, have you heard the news?’
Mr Mayhew stiffened next to me. ‘He’s done it, has he?’ he said. ‘He’s bloody gone and done it?’
A tear rolled down Mrs Mayhew’s face, leaving a clean track in the grime on her cheek.
‘I ran all the way from the village,’ she said. ‘They were talking about it on the street. Mrs Armitage was sitting at the war memorial, just weeping.’
I felt sicker than I had moments before. Mrs Armitage had lost both her sons in the Great War. The war we’d been told would end all wars. The war that my own father never talked about.
‘What does this mean?’ I stammered. ‘Is it Hitler? What has he done?’
Mr Mayhew patted me on the head distractedly, his full attention on his wife.
‘He’s sent his troops into Poland,’ he said. ‘And Mr Chamberlain promised that if he did that, then …’ His voice trailed off.
‘I need to go home,’ I said. ‘I need to find Bobby.’
Mrs Mayhew looked at me for the first time. I didn’t think she’d even realised I was there before then.
‘Bobby,’ she said vaguely. ‘Who is Bobby?’
I was already halfway out of the door. ‘He’s my brother,’ I said over my shoulder. ‘I need to find my brother.’
Chapter 8 (#ulink_0ec2638d-2013-51ff-a183-b1cf60a92604)
Helena
May 2018
Work was crazily busy for the next few days and I didn’t have any time to think about Lil for a while. Until Jack Jones turned up at the office again – much to my surprise.
‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ he said when I went down to reception to see him. ‘I was having lunch with my agent nearby, and thinking about everything you’d found out and I wanted to see how you were getting on.’
I gave him a small, forced smile. ‘Yeah, all good,’ I said vaguely. I was getting on pretty well with his research, but I wasn’t happy about him checking up on me in this way.
‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘Does this look like I’m checking up on you?’
He was so close to what I was thinking that I stared at him in horror.
‘It does a bit,’ I admitted, unable to think of anything else to say but the truth. ‘The celebs aren’t normally this interested.’
He grinned at me, pushing a lock of his curls out of his dark eyes, and I felt myself melting, just a bit.
‘I’m being a nightmare,’ he said.
‘It’s fine.’ I was feeling slightly odd. ‘Do you want to come upstairs?’
I took him up to the office and we sat in the same meeting room as before. Elly was at lunch, thank goodness, else she’d have been hovering to see what Jack wanted.
I offered him a coffee and tried to disguise my relief when he turned it down.
‘I had an early start today so I’ve had more than enough caffeine already,’ he said, with the same cheeky grin. ‘It makes me a bit bouncy.’
‘I wish you’d bounce my way,’ I thought to myself and then blinked in surprise. What was happening here? I’d barely looked at a man since Greg and I had fallen apart. Being a heartbroken single mother hardly made me a catch. And yet, here I was, fluttering my eyelashes at a real-life celebrity who was as likely to fancy me back as – well, as Greg I supposed.
I swallowed. ‘I’ve found out quite a lot about your grandparents, and your great-grandparents,’ I said carefully looking away from where his T-shirt hugged his broad chest. ‘It’s relatively simple to research just one or two generations back.’
I leafed through my folder to find the right documents.
‘Do you not know any of this already?’
Jack shook his head.
‘My maternal grandparents came over from Jamaica in the Fifties,’ he said. ‘They had one daughter already, and my mum was the first of their children to be born here. She’s the middle child – I’ve got two aunties.’
I nodded, interested. We’d not researched his maternal family at all so this was all new to me.
‘My grandad was a bus driver and my gran was a nurse. They worked really, really hard and they wanted a better life for their kids – my mum and my aunties.’
I nodded again.
‘And then Mum decided she wanted to be a writer, which wasn’t really in their plan,’ he said with a smile. I could see he was really proud of his family and my heart swelled a tiny bit more. ‘But they were so supportive of her. And she worked all the way through university to pay for herself.’
‘They all sound amazing,’ I said.
‘Then Mum met my dad,’ Jack said. ‘And it all went a bit wrong for a while.’
‘Wrong, how?’
‘He wasn’t a bad bloke, by all accounts. He seemingly loved Mum and they planned to get married. But she found out she was pregnant and he got scared, I think.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘Same old story,’ I said sharply.
Jack looked at me with interest. ‘Sounds like you mean that,’ he said.
I gave him a grim smile. ‘Happened to me,’ I said, wondering why on earth I was sharing my story with him and yet somehow unable to resist.
‘My boyfriend legged it when I got pregnant,’ I said. ‘Well, I legged it actually but only after he’d given me a brochure for an abortion clinic.’
‘Ah,’ said Jack.
‘Ah.’
‘And did you, erm …?’
I smiled properly this time and showed him the photo on my phone. ‘Dora’s two,’ I said. ‘And she’s not seen Greg for more than a year. He took a job in Canada.’
Jack winced. ‘What a douche,’ he said.
I suddenly felt uncomfortable, sharing so much with a stranger. ‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘We’re fine.’ I smiled. ‘Show me a family that doesn’t have a baby born with the whiff of a scandal and I’ll show you a family that knows how to keep secrets.’
Jack nodded sadly. ‘My dad’s family were quite traditional and a mixed-race grandkid born out of wedlock didn’t really work for them.’
I patted his hand, trying hard to fight the temptation to gather him up into my arms. He looked so sad.
‘I met them a few times, and my dad was around a bit when I was younger, but he got married to someone else and his visits got less and less frequent. By the time I was ten, I never saw him at all.’
‘Did you miss him?’ I was fairly sure Dora never gave Greg a second thought but I worried she would as she got older.
He shook his head. ‘I’d never had a proper relationship with him.’
‘How did you find out he’d died?’
‘Solicitor,’ Jack said, shrugging. ‘He left me some money.’
‘So he was thinking about you after all.’
‘I think that makes it worse,’ Jack said. ‘Because he could have just rung, you know? And I’m doing okay, in my career. I didn’t need his money – but I needed a dad.’
I breathed out. This was so sad. I hoped he’d be as honest with the camera crew when they filmed his story – it would make a great episode.
‘And you want to know more about his family now?’
‘I know lots about my Caribbean side. I know everything. I’ve met everyone. I know the recent history and I know further back – the murky bits. The nasty, horrible, slavery bits.’
I nodded again.
‘And I’m really aware that I can only go so far back on that side of my family. We will never be able to go much further than a few generations because no one kept records. I don’t know where we came from, or what my ancestors did, and I will never be able to find out.’
‘So now you’re filling the gap on the other side instead?’ I said, understanding now where his drive to discover his family came from.
‘That’s the plan.’ He gave me a little sheepish smile. ‘Sorry to be so demanding.’
I smiled back at him and for a second we stayed that way, eyes locked, smiling at each other, until I dropped my gaze. What was I doing?
‘I don’t mind at all,’ I said honestly. ‘Happy to help.’
‘Did you find out anything about your own family mystery?’
I didn’t understand what he was talking about. Did he mean Greg? I knew where he was. I looked at him blankly. ‘What mystery?’
‘Your Lilian Miles,’ he said.
‘Oh, Lilian. No, not really. I don’t think there’s anything mysterious about it all …’
‘But?’
‘But there was a look between my parents, when I mentioned what I’d found.’
Jack sat up a bit straighter. ‘And?’ he said.
‘And my dad turned up here and asked me to research her some more.’
‘Interesting,’ said Jack, raising his eyebrows.
‘I chatted about it with my sister …’
‘You’ve got a sister?’
‘I’ve got two,’ I said, finding the way his mind darted between subjects a bit disconcerting. Maybe he had drunk too much coffee. ‘And a brother.’
‘Awesome,’ Jack said. ‘So what did your sister say?’
‘She said I should ask my great-aunt what she did during the war and whether this Lilian Miles is her.’
‘Seems reasonable enough.’
‘I suggested that to Dad,’ I went on.
‘And what did he say?’
I frowned. ‘He didn’t really say anything because we were interrupted. He was very keen for me to research her, though. I don’t understand why.’
‘I understand,’ Jack said.
I stared at him. ‘You do?’
‘I understand what it’s like not to know about part of your family,’ he explained. ‘Maybe your dad feels the same.’
‘Perhaps,’ I said, doubtfully. ‘But he knows all about Lil. She even lived with us for a while. She’s hardly an enigma.’
Jack grinned. ‘But you don’t know about her war.’
‘Well, no …’
‘So she is an enigma. At least part of her life is.’
I shook my head, feeling like he’d just backed me into a corner. ‘Dad was hiding something,’ I said thoughtfully, almost to myself. ‘It was like he didn’t want to tell me the real reason he was so keen.’
‘You have to find out more,’ Jack said.
Eagerly, he took my hand and I felt a jolt like the electric shocks I always got off the dodgy lift buttons in the office. Surprised, I pulled my hand away and he looked embarrassed.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have done that.’
‘No, don’t apologise,’ I blustered. ‘I just got an electric shock is all.’
He smiled at me. ‘Sorry,’ he said again. ‘Next time I take your hand, I’ll warn you in advance so you can earth yourself.’
‘Next time,’ I said, sounding robotic and as though I didn’t really understand the words, like Eleven from Stranger Things.
We smiled at each other and I felt myself flush.
‘So, yeah,’ I said briskly, to break the awkward moment. ‘Dad wants me to look at the service records but I explained I’m not allowed. Fliss is very strict about us not researching our own family history at work.’
‘Use my research,’ Jack said.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Use my family as a cover. Find Frank Jones in the ATA and look up Lil while you’re at it.’
‘I really don’t think that’s a good idea,’ I said. ‘It’s too risky. We can all see each other’s searches. What if someone twigs I’m looking up my family? I can’t lose my job.’
Jack shrugged. ‘Just an idea,’ he said. ‘No need to decide now. Why not think about it?’
I smiled despite my misgivings. ‘Okay, then,’ I said. ‘I’ll think about it. But for now, I’m just going to talk to Lil.’
Jack grinned again. His smile was infectious.
‘Great,’ he said. ‘Let me know how you get on.’
Chapter 9 (#ulink_af4bb8de-4351-5222-b60d-017758aee766)
I thought about how best to approach the subject with Lil all weekend. Several times I picked up the phone to speak to her in her care home down in Surrey, then changed my mind. I’d go and see her in person, I thought. And anyway, I didn’t know for sure yet that she was the Lilian Miles on the ATA list. The only way to find out was to double-check the service record – under the cover of checking Frank Jones of course. If – and it was a big if – I decided to go down that road, I couldn’t do it until I was back at work on Monday and had access to all the databases.
Work, as always, was busy that week. Filming was starting on the next series of the show and it was all hands on deck to check the last few details. I was kept busy all day Monday and most of Tuesday going over the royal connections of a Sixties’ pop star who was a distant relation of Lady Jane Grey, while Elly raced round trying to find a historian who was an expert in prostitution to talk to a celebrity chef whose ancestor ran a high-class brothel in Victorian Manchester.
Late on Tuesday afternoon, the phone on my desk rang.
‘Helena?’ I recognised those clipped tones immediately.
‘Jack,’ I said, ignoring the way my heart thumped. ‘Hello.’
Next to me, Elly raised an eyebrow.
I spun round in my chair so I had my back to her.
‘What’s up?’ I asked Jack.
‘I’ve been doing a bit of research,’ he said. ‘Thought you might like to see it.’
‘Research?’ I said, sounding a bit stupid. ‘What kind of research?’
‘I tracked down my uncle. My father’s brother.’
‘You did? That’s wonderful. Was he pleased to hear from you?’
I could hear Jack smiling at the other end of the phone.
‘He actually was,’ he said. ‘Turns out he’s a big fan of Mackenzie.’
Mackenzie was the detective show Jack starred in.
‘I’m so pleased,’ I said. ‘Are you going to meet up?’
‘We are. He says he’s got some photos to show me.’
‘That’s great,’ I said, honestly. ‘Do you think he’ll chat to you on camera? It’s always good to get social history from people who have actual memories.’
‘I’m sure he’d be game,’ Jack said. I scribbled down a note to mention it to the director of his show.
‘… service records,’ Jack was saying.
‘I’m sorry, I missed that,’ I said. ‘What was that about service records?’
‘I thought we could check them together, to find out more about my grandfather’s time in the ATA,’ he said. Then he lowered his voice, even though no one but me could hear him. ‘We could see if my grandad knew Lilian Miles. Maybe they worked together. Have you spoken to her yet? Did you find out if she’s one of your relatives? Wouldn’t that be utterly amazing?’
‘You are the keenest celebrity I’ve ever worked with,’ I said.
Jack laughed. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t apologise – it’s nice,’ I said. ‘And I understand why you’re so eager. It’s just unusual.’
‘So did you speak to her?’
‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘But I’m planning to.’
I paused, aware of my colleagues – especially Elly of course – all around me.
‘What you said, about the service records,’ I said, choosing my words carefully. ‘Perhaps we could check them.’
‘Of course.’ Jack sounded pleased. ‘I’m guessing it will be better for our cover story if we do it together.’
‘I agree,’ I said cautiously, still nervous about the plan. Was I going to regret this? Especially considering the chaos he’d brought with him when he came to the office last week. Though, I thought, he’d been far less disruptive when he came in the second time. And I found I really wanted to see him again.
Mentally I started checking my plans for the week. I’d finished with the Sixties’ pop star now, so tomorrow and Thursday was more Sarah Sanderson research, and I’d planned to set aside Friday to look into Jack’s research. Maybe Jack could pop by the office late on Friday afternoon and we could look it all up together, and have a sneaky look at Lilian Miles while we were at it. I could duplicate all our findings and make him his own file to take away, so he wouldn’t mess up my own folders. And I could get Mum to collect Dora from nursery and take her back to theirs for our Friday dinner.
‘How about Friday afternoon?’ I said. ‘About fourish?’
‘Sorry, no can do.’ Jack sounded genuinely fed up. ‘I’m filming on Friday.’
‘Oh that’s a shame. I can email you anything I find out …’
‘Are you free now?’
‘Now?’
‘Let’s do the research now. Unless you’re snowed under?’
Elly prodded me in the back and when I glanced over my shoulder at her, she made a kissing face. I stuck my tongue out at her.
‘Erm,’ I said. ‘I suppose so.’
‘I can be there in half an hour?’ Jack said.
‘Great,’ I said, feeling a little bit railroaded. ‘See you then.’
It was more like an hour and a half later when Jack strolled into the office. Most of the researchers, including Elly much to my relief, had gone home, and I’d had to call Mum in a panic and ask her to get Dora for me. I was, for the gazillionth time, thankful that I’d chosen to live so close to my parents when Greg and I split up. It may have seemed a backwards step – though not as backwards as staying in Miranda’s annexe while she was between au pairs had seemed – but it had been a good decision.
Jack looked completely different from how he was last week. His hair was swept back off his face, and he was wearing good jeans, a black T-shirt, and a nice leather biker jacket. He really was gorgeous. I felt slightly wobbly when he grinned at me as he approached my desk. Then his face fell as he clocked that there was no one else around.
‘God,’ he said. ‘Am I making you work late?’
‘No,’ I lied. ‘I had some things to do anyway.’
Jack peeled off the jacket, bundled it up and threw it down on the floor under Elly’s desk. I itched to shake it out and hang it up, but I didn’t. Then he sat down in Elly’s chair and spun round so he was facing me.
‘What do we do first?’ he asked.
My head was spinning – and not just from the way he looked or the smell of his aftershave. He was like a whirlwind, coming into my carefully ordered space and throwing everything around, metaphorically and literally I thought as his elbow caught a book that was on my desk and sent it crashing to the floor.
‘Oops,’ he said. He picked it up and put it on Elly’s desk, then turned his attention back to me.
‘How come you’ve not spoken to your aunt yet?’
Completely unable to think straight with his eyes trained on me, I opened my mouth like a guppy and nothing came out.
‘Your Aunt Lilian?’ Jack said carefully. ‘You were going to speak to her.’
‘I’ve not really had a chance,’ I said. ‘I’ve been busy.’
Jack sat back in Elly’s chair and put his feet up on her desk. He looked at me with a cheeky smile and said: ‘Sounds like there’s something holding you back. Tell me everything.’
So I did.
Well not everything. But I explained that Lil was very special to me and my siblings, so it was strange we didn’t know she’d been a pilot. Jack listened intently.
‘Miranda – that’s my sister, remember I mentioned her before? She’s very black and white and she can’t see why I won’t just ask Lil,’ I told him. ‘Dad’s the same. But I’m worried this could be something traumatic for her. If she is the Lilian Miles on the list, there has to be a reason for her not mentioning it for over seventy years. She’s quite frail now and I don’t want to upset her.’
‘You want to make sure it really is her before you go to her,’ Jack said, nodding. ‘I get that.’
‘There could be something in the records that gives us a clue about why she might not have mentioned it,’ I said. ‘Sometimes we find reports of actions that might have been upsetting. Maybe someone died – as far as I know some of the ATA did die. Amy Johnson, for one.’
‘I’ve heard of her,’ Jack said in delight. ‘She was in the ATA was she?’
I nodded. ‘Crashed in bad weather,’ I told him. ‘Obviously Lil didn’t die, but maybe she lost a friend? Or was in some sort of accident? It could be anything.’
‘You’re very caring,’ Jack said.
He pulled his chair closer to mine and I got another whiff of his aftershave.
‘You look different,’ I said, unable to resist commenting, and wanting to shift his attention off me.
‘I was doing a press conference for the new series of Mackenzie,’ he said, pulling at his T-shirt self-consciously. ‘My agent always makes me dress up for them.’
He leaned closer to me.
‘I just wear what she tells me to wear,’ he said, in a low voice even though there was no one around to hear him. ‘I’m hopeless with fashion and stuff. She gets a stylist to buy me clothes.’
He looked down at himself and then back at me with a funny, embarrassed grin. ‘What do you think?’
‘Of the clothes?’ I stammered. ‘Oh, nice. You look, erm, great.’
Jack smiled properly now. ‘So do you,’ he said.
I felt a blush crawl up my neck and on to my face so I turned away. ‘Service records,’ I said hurriedly. Thank goodness I never met the celebrities if I developed thumping big crushes like this one on them all.
‘Service records,’ Jack echoed.
We had access to so many databases, that it was hard to keep track. We used most of the Second World War ones often, but I’d never had the need to search the ATA archive before. I hoped that meant none of my colleagues checked it very often either and no one would notice me searching for a Miles family member.
It took me a while to find the right site, then check the folder where we stored all our shared logins and type it in.
When the site eventually loaded, I breathed out in relief. It was formatted exactly like most of the Forces sites. ‘It’s all very easy,’ I explained. ‘We just need to search for the name and the dates. Your grandfather …’
‘No, do Lilian first,’ Jack said. ‘Go on – I really want to know if she’s your aunt.’
With hands that trembled slightly, knowing I was doing something wrong and that Fliss would be furious if she caught me, I typed Lilian Miles and 1940–45 into the search bar and pressed return.
It took a while, but it brought up just one result. Lilian Miles, it said, 15/10/23, Air Transport Auxiliary. I gasped.
‘That’s her,’ I said. ‘That’s Lil’s date of birth.’
‘Click on it,’ Jack urged.
I shook my head, wobbling again over what I was doing. ‘I don’t need to,’ I said. ‘We know it’s her now. We don’t need to know any more.’
‘You said you might be able to work out if there was anything upsetting from looking at the records,’ Jack pointed out.
‘I don’t want to,’ I said.
But Jack leaned across me and clicked on Lil’s name, and the screen filled with details. It had Lil’s personal information – her date and place of birth, her age when she joined up, and where she did her basic training.
I glared at him, but I wasn’t really cross. It was too interesting.
I scanned the page, trying to take it all in. Lilian had done so much when she had been so young. And then, right at the bottom of the screen was what I assumed was the reason for Lil never mentioning her time in the ATA.
Jack saw it at the same time as I did.
‘Ah,’ he said.
There, in large capital letters, it said: DISHONOURABLE DISCHARGE.
Chapter 10 (#ulink_84566a58-c6d0-58d9-8e5d-fb968e5e9eff)
Lilian
June 1944
I stayed stock-still as Flora drew a line up the back of my calf.
‘It tickles,’ I giggled.
‘Don’t move,’ she warned. ‘I’ve got very steady hands but I can’t keep it straight if you wiggle. There, done.’
I twisted round so I could see her handiwork. I’d covered my legs in gravy browning. Flora’s addition – which was more gravy browning, but made up to a thicker paste – made it look like I was wearing nylon stockings.
‘Not bad,’ I said, approvingly. ‘Shall I do you now?’
‘Make sure it’s straight,’ Flora said. She hitched up her skirt and I took the narrow brush from the pot and started to draw.
‘Are you excited?’
I concentrated on keeping the line straight. ‘I love dancing,’ I said. ‘You know I love music.’
‘Maybe you can get up on stage with the band.’ Flora chuckled. ‘Show them all how it’s done.’
‘Maybe,’ I said, wishing I could. I missed playing piano more than anything else. There was a church hall in the nearby village with a rackety old upright in the corner and sometimes I sneaked in there, but it wasn’t the same.
‘When this bloody war is over, I’m going to play the piano every single day,’ I told Flora.
She smiled over her shoulder at me. ‘I’m going to wear stockings that dogs don’t want to lick,’ she said.
From across the hut, Annie joined in. ‘And I’m going to wear clothes that fit,’ she said, hitching her belt a notch tighter. Our rations didn’t seem to be going as far any more and we were all far skinnier than we’d been when the war started.
‘All done,’ I said, finishing Flora’s seams.
She peered over her shoulder and clapped her hands in pleasure. ‘Gorgeous, darling,’ she said. ‘Are you sure you don’t mind us tagging along with you and Will?’
I shook my head vigorously. ‘Not in the least,’ I said. ‘He seems nice enough, but I don’t want to be getting into romance and complications. Not here. Not now.’
Flora turned round and gazed at me, her blue eyes unblinking. I thought she was going to ask me if I was being completely honest, but she didn’t and I was grateful. Instead she squeezed my hand.
‘We’ll stick together,’ she said. ‘Like the Three Musketeers.’
I grinned. ‘One for all and all for one,’ I said. I threaded my arm through hers and then through Annie’s and we walked to the door, ready to go and meet Will.
He was waiting by the mess hut, laughing with a couple of other mechanics and smoking a cigarette.
‘Evening, ladies,’ he said, straightening up as we approached. ‘Lilian.’
I nodded to him. ‘Will,’ I said.
We fell into step as we walked down the short road to where the dance was being held. We could hear the music as we got closer and my spirits lifted a bit.
‘Like dancing?’ Will said.
I smiled. ‘I love it.’
Inside the hall was pulsing with life. We’d all been flying non-stop for weeks, getting planes in position for the landings on the beaches in France. We’d not known what was happening of course – we only found out afterwards. But we were proud to have played a part in something so important. The hard work of the last few weeks, though, meant everyone was desperate for some fun – and from the look of the hall they were already having it.
The men mostly wore RAF uniforms. They were jiving with girls in bright red lipstick, their hair shining and, I saw with a relieved smile, gravy browning on their legs. There were a few GIs; I guessed they were passing through. They were getting a lot of attention with girls flocking round them like bees round a honey pot. Some of those girls, I couldn’t help noticing, wore actual Nylon stockings. On the stage was a small band with a pianist, a drummer, a trumpet player and a female singer. Like I always did – and knowing I was being stupid – I scanned their faces, pausing a second longer on the pianist, just in case.
Will steered us over to a table in the corner. ‘Have a seat,’ he said. ‘I’ll get some drinks.’
‘Want to dance?’ Flora said.
I shook my head. ‘Not yet, I just want to sit here and soak it all up.’ It was ages since there had been a dance near enough for us all to go to. ‘You go – I’ll be fine.’
‘Sure?’ Flora looked concerned.
‘I’m sure,’ I said. ‘Will’s just gone for some drinks and you’ll be right over there.’
Flora, Annie and Will’s friends swirled off to the dance floor and I sat drinking in the atmosphere. I loved everything about it. The heat coming off the dancers, the cloud of smoke from people’s cigarettes, the buzz of conversation fighting with the music from the band. Everything. I thought I’d like to play in a dance band one day. If I ever got tired of flying.
‘You look happy,’ Will said, handing me a glass of something.
I smelled it – cider I thought – and took a suspicious sip. It was sweet and slightly fizzy.
‘I love this,’ I said to Will as he drew up a chair next to me. ‘I love how the music just makes everyone forget about their worries and throw off their responsibilities.’
‘The music and the cider,’ Will said, with a wink.
I laughed.
‘So, Lilian Miles,’ Will carried on. ‘Tell me your story.’
I blinked at him. What did he mean?
‘Not much to tell,’ I said airily.
‘How did you end up in the ATA?’
‘Oh, just thought it sounded fun,’ I said vaguely. ‘My brother’s in the RAF and I didn’t think he should be the only one who got to fly.’
Will looked impressed. ‘Must be in your blood,’ he said. ‘You’ve certainly got the knack.’
I bristled, just a little bit. ‘I’ve worked hard.’
‘Course.’ Will caught the edge to my voice and changed the subject.
‘Let me tell you about something Gareth did earlier …’ he began.
As he told the funny story, I started to relax. Will was very easy to be with – he had a sharp eye for people’s quirks and a funny way of telling stories. I laughed as he told an anecdote about some of the RAF officers on the base. He was a lovely man, I thought.
‘Dance?’ he eventually suggested and I nodded. He took my hand and led me out to the floor, swinging me round as another jive track started. He wasn’t the best dancer but what he lacked in skill he made up for in enthusiasm, whirling me backwards and forwards across the floor until I was breathless and giddy.
‘Having fun?’ Annie spun past me, on the arm of one of Will’s friends, called Frank.
‘Lots of fun,’ I gasped. I was happier than I’d been for ages. Months. Years, perhaps. Not for the first time in my life, I marvelled at just how wonderful music was at making everything seem better.
‘Come with me,’ Annie said, grabbing my hand. ‘Will, you get us some more drinks.’
Will saluted Annie jokingly and, giggling madly, Annie, Flora and I crowded into the lav where two women were checking their hair at the mirror.
‘So?’ said Flora, craning her neck to check her seams were still in place on the back of her legs.
‘So what?’ I looked at my reflection. My hair was coming loose and my cheeks were flushed.
‘Do you like him?’
‘Will?’
‘No, Father Christmas. Of course, Will,’ Annie said.
I leaned against the wall. ‘He’s lovely,’ I said. ‘He’s so funny, and charming. And he loves to dance.’
‘Uh-oh,’ said Flora. ‘I think someone has a crush.’
I felt myself blush. ‘That’s just the thing,’ I said with a sigh. I waited for the two girls who’d been doing their hair to leave so it was just the three of us. ‘I don’t.’
Annie looked at me. ‘Really?’
I shook my head, sadly. ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I wish I felt something – a spark or something – but I don’t.’
Flora draped an arm round my shoulder. ‘Darling Lil,’ she said. ‘I know you play your cards close to your chest.’
‘And a lovely chest it is,’ Annie drawled. She sat up on the sink next to me and lit a cigarette as Flora nudged her to be quiet.
‘When I joined up, I never thought I’d be lucky enough to meet two girls like you,’ Flora went on. ‘I was so bloody scared and you made it better.’
I smiled at her. I felt the same.
‘And I know you don’t want to talk about what happened to you,’ she said. I dropped my eyes from hers. It was too hard to think about and I was grateful the girls knew something was wrong inside of me, but never pushed me to elaborate. Flora squeezed me a bit tighter. ‘But I also know that we are all a bit damaged. Some more than others. That’s just life. And if you don’t want to be with Will, then don’t force it. Maybe it’ll happen later, maybe it won’t. It’s fine either way.’
I felt tears heavy behind my eyelids and blinked them away. ‘Thanks,’ I whispered.
Annie jumped down from the sink. ‘Thank God none of us are flying tomorrow,’ she said, stubbing out her cigarette. ‘I’m more than a bit tiddly.’
‘It’s a shame, though,’ Flora said. ‘Because if one of us had been on that trip to Newcastle, we could have …’
‘Shh,’ said Annie covering Flora’s mouth with her hand. She nodded towards the cubicles. The one at the end was shut. Flora’s eyes widened in shock.
‘Bloody hell,’ I breathed. None of us had noticed that someone else was in the lav with us.
We all stared at each other for a second, grateful Annie had noticed when she did and stopped Flora before she said anything incriminating.
‘Let’s go home,’ I said.
As we turned to leave the tiny toilet, we heard whoever it was in the cubicle pull the chain.
‘Let’s go,’ I said again, suddenly desperate to be out of there. ‘It’s past my bedtime.’
Chapter 11 (#ulink_51f264fe-fffc-54d8-afe4-b94e3f4109c2)
Helena
May 2018
I was too surprised to do anything but stare at the screen. Above the red stamp declaring that Lil had been dishonourably discharged, it also said Lil had been court-martialled and found guilty of contravening standing orders. It was completely bewildering and I wasn’t sure what to do. Luckily, Jack took over.
‘This is a shock,’ he said. ‘Do you need to get back for Dora?’
I shook my head, touched he’d remembered her name.
‘She’s with my mum.’
‘Well, how about we print this out, take all the info we’ve got to the pub, and chat about it all over a drink?’
I felt shaky. What had Lil done that deserved a court martial? Had she broken the law? Had she gone AWOL? I shook my head again, more vigorously this time.
‘None of this makes sense,’ I said. ‘This doesn’t sound like Lil.’
Jack was bustling around me, stuffing pieces of paper into the folder. I found I didn’t even care that he was putting them in upside down and back to front. Instead I just stared at the screen.
‘It must be a mistake. Lil has always been a bit of a free spirit, but she’s not a bad person.’
Jack paused in his gathering. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s get out of here and you can tell me all about her. She sounds interesting.’
‘Oh, she’s interesting, all right,’ I said. I looked at him standing there, clutching the folder, with bits of paper hanging out of it, and smiled. ‘Thanks. You’re being very nice.’
‘I feel like it’s all my fault,’ he admitted. ‘You’d have been none the wiser if I’d not turned up and started poking around your research.’
He wasn’t wrong, but somehow I was pleased. Finding out more about Lil’s war felt like the right thing to do – even if she’d kept it a secret all this time.
Jack grinned at me and I squinted at him.
‘Can you go to the pub?’ I said. ‘Like a normal person?’
He frowned.
‘I am a normal person.’
‘I mean, you’re famous. Won’t you get mobbed?’
‘Nah,’ Jack said. ‘No one ever thinks it’s me. I think it’s because I’m so scruffy. People usually just tell me I look like Jack Jones.’
I laughed and gestured to his immaculate T-shirt. ‘But you’re all dressed up,’ I said.
With a grin, Jack pulled a tatty hoodie out of his bag and shoved it over his head. Then he jammed a faded baseball cap on top of his curls, balled up the beautiful leather jacket and squished it into his rucksack – much to my distress – and looked at me in triumph.
‘Better?’ he said. ‘I’m in disguise.’
I laughed again because he looked so pleased with himself.
‘Better,’ I agreed.
‘So let’s go,’ Jack said. ‘I’m dying to know more about Lil.’
‘If you want to know more about Lil, you really need to meet my sister Miranda,’ I said. ‘Mind if I give her a ring?’
It wasn’t a total lie. If I adored Lil, Miranda adored her even more and she could definitely talk about her until the cows came home. But I could do that myself, so I didn’t need Miranda to paint a good picture of our aunt. Instead I thought I wanted her there as a kind of shield. My attraction to Jack seemed to be growing by the second and I wasn’t completely comfortable with being alone with him. I thought having Miranda there might force me to be more professional and stop gazing at him with my tongue hanging out like a thirsty puppy.
Unfortunately, Miranda’s reaction was predictably similar to mine. She arrived in the bar at a trendy hotel near the office just after we did. Jack was ordering the drinks and I was sitting in the semi-circular booth he’d chosen.
‘We’ll have more room here to spread out all the papers,’ he’d said when we arrived, turning round to catch a waiter’s eye and knocking the folder off the table with his bag. I’d caught the file before everything fell out and put it back on the table top without him noticing. ‘Stay here, I’ll get some drinks.’
Miranda slid in next to me.
‘Is that him?’ she said, watching Jack at the bar with ill-disguised longing. ‘Oh, my.’
I elbowed her, hard. ‘Stop it,’ I said. ‘You’re married. And too old for him.’
‘Window shopping,’ Miranda said. ‘And I am not too old.’
Then she stopped looking at Jack and turned her stare to me instead.
‘Hang on,’ she said. ‘This isn’t just banter, is it?’
‘Jack’s getting wine, I think.’
‘Don’t ignore me. You like him.’
I felt myself flushing again. ‘He’s nice,’ I muttered. ‘And handsome.’
‘Ohhhh,’ Miranda breathed. ‘You’ve got a crush.’
I gave her a fierce look. ‘Have not,’ I said.
‘You are allowed,’ she said. ‘It’s not a crime. It’s ages since you broke up with Greg. It’s definitely time to get back on that horse.’
‘Jack is not a horse.’ I frowned at her, to warn her he was approaching. ‘And it’s unprofessional to have a crush on someone I’m researching. And how can I date anyone? I’ve got Dora to think about.’
‘Lot of excuses, there, Nell,’ Miranda said. ‘Protesting too much, I think …’
She stopped talking as Jack approached. He put a tray of drinks down, slopping some of his beer on to the table, and beamed at Miranda.
‘Hello, hello, hello,’ he said, gleefully shaking her hand. ‘I’ve heard lots about you from Helena.’
Again with the way he said my name. I imagined him saying it to other people. ‘Have you met my wife – Helena?’ and smiled to myself.
‘Nell,’ Miranda said, giving me a shove. ‘Are you with us?’
I blinked, startled out of my daydream. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I was just thinking about Lil.’
‘Oh yes, tell me more,’ Jack said. He began taking the drinks off the tray and I helped him, trying to make sure he didn’t spill any more than he already had. I handed Miranda a wine glass and a napkin to wipe up splatters and poured some Pinot Grigio for us both.
‘Is Lil your dad’s sister?’ Jack drank a mouthful of beer.
‘No, she’s Dad’s aunt, actually,’ Miranda said. ‘Our parents are both only children. But Lil was the baby of her family, so she’s not really that much older than Dad.’
‘You said she was very special to you?’ Jack prompted.
Miranda and I looked at each other. We didn’t often talk about when we were growing up.
I took a breath. ‘We had a bit of an unconventional childhood,’ I began.
‘And you have two other siblings, am I right?’
He’d remembered what I’d told him. Miranda, obviously impressed, smiled. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘There’s Andy and Imogen, too.’
‘Andy’s nearly thirty, and Immy’s twenty-six,’ I added.
Jack nodded. ‘I always wanted brothers and sisters when I was growing up,’ he said. ‘I’d like to have lots of kids.’
Miranda gave me a meaningful look and I spluttered on my wine. Jack thumped me on the back.
‘Easy there,’ he said. ‘No need to gulp.’
Miranda, looking chic and businesslike in what seemed to be a very expensive suit, with her curly hair pulled back into a neat twist, leaned back in the booth and carried on talking while I wiped my mouth with the napkin Jack offered.
‘Our parents are both creative and a bit scatty,’ she said.
I snorted. ‘Scatty,’ I said. ‘Forgetful, more like.’
‘When we were growing up they weren’t great with money,’ Miranda went on. ‘Bills often went unpaid. The electricity would go off. They weren’t poor. Just disorganised.’
‘But when we were really small, it was all fun,’ I said. ‘We were too little to know any different and all we knew was they loved us.’
‘But when Mum had Imogen, things changed,’ Miranda said. ‘Postnatal depression, I guess. Though it took a while for it to really get a hold of her.’
Jack nodded. ‘I have a friend who has depression,’ he said. ‘It’s like a gradual creeping up with him.’
‘That’s it exactly,’ Miranda said. ‘She didn’t just wake up depressed one morning, it was more like a downward spiral.’
I let Miranda talk. She was two years older than me so she remembered it better.
‘Once, Mum left Andy in my classroom when she dropped me at school, instead of taking him to nursery,’ she continued. ‘When my teacher noticed him, she rang Mum to come and get him. She was so upset.’
‘Andy wasn’t remotely bothered of course,’ I added, wanting to make Mum sound less awful.
‘But that’s when things started to go downhill. Mum wasn’t really functioning and Dad – well, like I said, he was “scatty”.’ Miranda made quote marks with her fingers. ‘Things got a bit messy for a while.’
Jack smiled at me. ‘Did your mum work?’ he asked.
‘She still does,’ I said. ‘In fact, you might know of her – she’s an art historian.’
‘So that’s where you get it from,’ Jack said to me. I felt like a flower opening up in sunshine as he turned his gaze to me.
Miranda butted in and I almost tutted because I was enjoying having Jack’s attention.
‘She’s an expert in Victorian painting and she’s often on those daytime antiques shoes. She’s brilliant, actually, on screen. She’s so enthusiastic and because she’s been a university lecturer forever she explains things really well. She writes books, too. We’re very proud of her, because it’s not been easy for her.’
Jack was staring at Miranda. ‘I know her,’ he said, excitedly. ‘She’s got hair just like you but in a cloud round her face, right?’
Miranda laughed. ‘That’s her,’ she said. ‘And she wears glasses like Helena’s.’
I pushed my black-rimmed specs up my nose and grinned. ‘I don’t have the hair,’ I said, gesturing to my own poker-straight style. ‘But I did inherit the dodgy eyesight.’
I felt we were giving Jack an unfair picture of our mother so I carried on. ‘Mum’s wonderful. She’s a brilliant grandmother to Dora, and Miranda’s little boy. She’s helped me out so much. I wouldn’t have been able to go back to work without knowing she was round the corner.’
Miranda nodded. ‘She is fab,’ she said. ‘We’re lucky she got over her depression and that it never came back – not like it was.’
‘And what about your dad?’
I felt a bit like Jack was researching us rather than me him, but somehow I didn’t mind.
‘Dad’s a composer,’ Miranda said. ‘He writes music for films and TV shows, and adverts sometimes too.’
I shifted in my seat. ‘He did some of the music for Mackenzie,’ I said, wondering if I should have mentioned this before. ‘Not the theme but some of the incidental music.’
He gaped at me in astonishment. ‘No,’ he said. ‘My Mackenzie?’
‘The very same.’
Jack chuckled. ‘Isn’t it a small world, eh?’
‘Isn’t it,’ said Miranda. ‘Dad’s career was just taking off in the Nineties, when we were growing up. He worked long hours. And when Mum got ill, he wasn’t completely able to cope with four kids.’
Jack nodded. ‘And Lil?’
‘She was a musician, like Dad,’ I told him. ‘Piano, mostly, but she’s the sort of person who can play anything. She was a session musician and she travelled all over the world playing with different bands or singers. Six months on a cruise ship here, a year in a jazz club in New York, there. Recording an album with the Rolling Stones one day, hanging out with Fleetwood Mac the next.’
‘Sounds incredible.’
‘She’s got some brilliant stories,’ I agreed.
‘But when we were kids and Mum was poorly,’ Miranda said, ‘Lil stepped in and made sure we were being looked after.’ She drained her wine glass. ‘I’m not sure what we would have done without her.’
‘Blimey,’ Jack said, topping up Miranda’s empty glass. ‘You are really close?’
I nodded. ‘I thought so,’ I said. ‘And yet she’s never mentioned her time in the ATA.’
I looked at Miranda. ‘Manda, we found Lil’s service record.’ I picked up the folder Jack had brought with him, which was now splattered with beer and something that looked like tomato ketchup, even though we’d not eaten. ‘Look at what happened.’
I handed her the sheet of paper and watched as she read the lines at the bottom.
‘Oh shit,’ she said. ‘Dishonourable discharge?’
‘What do you think, Manda?’ I said. ‘Do you still think we should speak to her about it?’
Miranda made a face. ‘I’m going to Paris on Friday for a week,’ she said. ‘So I can’t help. But yes, I think you should go and see her. Find out what it was all about.’
‘She might not want to talk,’ I said. ‘What if it upsets her? She’s really old.’
‘She’s tough as old boots,’ said Miranda. ‘I really think you should try to talk about it. We can’t pretend that we don’t know now – she’d see through that in a flash.’
I nodded. That was true.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll go and see her at the weekend.’
Chapter 12 (#ulink_99b5b0f6-8a9e-5e54-b6ec-ebca0b143459)
The following Saturday, Dora and I sat on a train heading out through the leafy suburbs of south-west London to see Lil. She was ninety-four now and very frail, so she lived in a care home. It was an amazing place, funded by an entertainers’ charity. All the residents of the home had once made their living as performers of one kind or another and now saw out their days reminiscing together and – too often for my liking – providing their own entertainment. They had mostly been jobbing actors, or, as Lil had been, session musicians, but there was the occasional recognisable face and they all loved to put on a show.
I normally phoned ahead when I visited, but today I’d not told Lil I was coming. After everything we’d found out, I was nervous about seeing her, which was strange considering how much I loved her. And for some reason I didn’t want to warn her – though quite why I needed to be so sneaky about it all, I wasn’t sure. It wasn’t like I was expecting to walk in and catch her piloting a Spitfire around the residents’ lounge.
What I actually found, when we walked into the residents’ lounge, was one of the actors – a man who once trod the boards at the RSC and had been a regular on the West End stage – standing in the middle of the room, reciting a speech from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
I paused by the door, scanning the room for Lil and clocked her sitting in the corner watching the ageing actor with barely disguised amusement. Our eyes met and she smiled.
‘Hello,’ she called, ignoring the fact that the actor was still going. ‘I wasn’t expecting you today.’
Dora jumped up and down. She loved Lil. ‘Hello!’ she shouted. ‘’Lo, Lil!’
Like a small bullet, she swerved the gesturing arms of the Shakespearean chap, and hurtled over to my aunt. I followed and sat down next to her.
‘Surprise!’ I said. ‘Careful of Lil’s legs, Dora.’
Dora clambered up on to my knee and beamed at Lil. ‘’Lo, Lil,’ she said again.
‘Hello, my darling girl,’ Lil said to her, twirling one of her curls round her finger. ‘I think you’ve grown again.’
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Kerry Barrett
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 25.04.2024
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О книге: From the bestselling author of The Girl In The Picture comes a beautiful new timeslip novel.Readers love Kerry Barrett:‘All Kerry Barrett′s books are brilliant’‘I′d highly recommend this: detective fiction, historical fiction, powerful, moving, thrilling, sometimes comic, always very human.’‘A beautiful story which kept me hooked’‘I would definitely recommend this read, but be warned, you won′t want to put it down.’‘Loved the whole story, couldn′t put it down’‘Will definitely read more from this author’