Facing the Light (20 page)

Mentally, she added
and just you try and stop me, and see what you get!
Almost, she was longing for him to try and prevent her so that she could scream at him again; tell him that she was nearly of age and it was absolutely none of his business what she did and if he didn't treat her better she'd leave Willow Court and see how well he managed without her. He didn't say a word. Leonora sometimes thought that she could disappear from the face of the earth and he wouldn't even notice.

‘He's not properly got over your mother's death,' Nanny Mouse used to say, whenever she needed an excuse for his bad behaviour and Leonora would answer, ‘Well, he should have, surely. That all happened years and years ago. I've got over it, and it was worse for me. Don't you think it's worse, Nanny? Losing a mother?'

Every time she asked the question, she knew that it couldn't really be worse in her case, because her mother had hardly looked after her at all. Nanny Mouse had brought her up. Leonora could barely remember the person called Maude Walsh. They'd played with the dolls' house, and those times together were the only memories she had left. All through her childhood, she'd
had to keep asking Nanny Mouse to remind her of things her mother used to do or say and she'd come to the conclusion that Maude Walsh had been a distant, rather quiet person. Leonora couldn't in all honesty say that she missed her. Her father, in spite of his infuriating ways, filled the whole landscape of her childhood and left hardly any room in her head for memories of her mother. When I have children, she thought, I'll look after them myself and we'll play together and talk to one another all the time. I shall love them more than anything. And I shall never, never, interfere with them when they're in love. I shall never meddle in their lives the way that Daddy has meddled in mine. Tears of rage sprang to her eyes once more as she walked into the hall.

She put on her coat, a pair of wellington boots, her gloves, a knitted hat and a scarf and, holding her mother's ice-skates, she made her way out of the front door. The cold was like another element, so sharp that breathing hurt her chest. Whenever she thought of what Ethan had done, fury boiled up in her. Then she grew a little calmer and wondered whether it would now be possible for her to find out where Peter was. She could write to the colonel of the regiment and find out if he was alive. The pale sun was sinking towards the horizon. Every blade of grass under her feet as she walked was iced white and the sky above the black branches of the trees was like a lid squashed down over everything. She could see the lake now, silver in the remaining daylight, with the swans huddled together on the far bank. The gardener's lads had to break up the ice near their nest each day so that the birds had a little open water to swim on. I must be the only person in the world who loves the lake all frozen, when it isn't like itself at all, Leonora reflected. She hardly ever came down to walk around it in the summer, and she couldn't really think why that was. Now that the water had gone to ice, though, it was
transformed into a landscape that wouldn't have seemed out of place on the moon.

Leonora sat down on a tree stump to put on her skates. This took much longer than it should have done because she didn't dare remove her gloves. At last, though, she managed to do up the laces and went out on to the ice, sliding and skimming across the surface. She looked down, and saw that the lake water had turned into a mass of blueish-white bubbles, impenetrable and smooth. The only sound in the whole world was the ssshing noise of steel blades on ice, and the occasional cry of a bird.

I won't think about Daddy, she thought, and the cold was so intense that it was easy to put all other thoughts out of your mind except, keep moving. Keep your circulation going. If she went round and round on the ice long enough, her anger and disappointment would dissolve. That was her hope.

She wondered about her father and thought that even if his writing to Peter was inexcusable, perhaps he really did think he was acting to protect her. I don't care, Leonora thought. I'll never forgive him for it, no matter what his motives were. And he's trampled on all my dreams. Did he realize, she wondered, how much he would hurt her, and do it anyway, or did he truly not know what effect his words had on her? And what was she supposed to do with her life? She'd never wanted to be an artist, not exactly, but now that she knew it was out of the question, she felt a sort of emptiness she couldn't quite explain.

Something caught her eye, a figure coming towards her over the lawn, through the wild garden. Who was it? She didn't recognize the person at first glance but whoever it was was bundled up in a heavy coat and scarf and wore a hat. A man, that was certain, but no one from the house. Perhaps it was Daddy, coming to apologize. She dismissed that idea at once. Nothing would get him to stir
from the fire. As far as she knew, he hadn't left the house for weeks, and she'd never heard him say he was sorry for anything.

‘Leonora!' The figure was calling to her. ‘Leonora … it's me!'

She slid to the nearest tree and stopped moving. There was a time between hearing the voice and knowing, feeling, who it was, that seemed to go on and on for so long that she had the sensation of falling into somewhere white and quiet and empty where an echo lived that came from years ago. A sound that had been here at the lake perhaps, trapped between the willow branches, trying to reach her, came to her now, flying through the cold, waking memories, filling her with hope and love and warmth: Peter's voice. She looked intently and recognized the set of the shoulders, the way Peter walked, his head held high always. It was him.
He's come back, he's not dead, he's come back
. Every other thought in her head disappeared, and she skated over to where he was now standing, beside another tree almost on the very edge of the ice, certain it was him yet hardly daring to hope.

‘Peter? Is it you? Really?' Her breath as she spoke rose up in front of her face and she moved her hands to brush it away, so that she could see more clearly. Yes, it
was
Peter, older, his skin paler now in winter and the freckles more visible, his long straight nose, above lips a little chapped from the cold now. Otherwise, he was just as she'd remembered him all these years – that tawny gaze, something of the wild about him.

‘I said I'd come, didn't I?' Now that he was there, in front of her, Leonora didn't know what to do, what to say, where to go, and she pushed off again on to the ice, faster and faster so that she could think, so that she could collect her emotions. His voice followed her:

‘Leonora! Don't go. Come back to me. Please come back to me. Leonora!'

She came, sliding to a halt right in front of him. He had to catch hold of her to prevent her from stumbling.

‘It's you. It's really you, Peter,' she whispered. ‘I can't believe it. I've dreamed about you coming back so often that I expect this might be a dream as well.
Are
you real?'

Peter said nothing, but put out his gloved hand and Leonora took it.

‘Come here,' he said. ‘We can talk later. I can't believe that after everything I'm with you again. And you're so beautiful, my darling.'

‘Oh, Peter,' Leonora wanted to say so many things, but all she could manage was his name over and over again. ‘Peter … Peter … I thought you were dead.'

‘No, I wouldn't have, couldn't have, died without seeing you again. I've been waiting, that's all. Waiting for you to be nearly of age. Your father wrote to me and told me to keep away till then. Not to write. I expect he told you all about it.'

‘No. I've only just found out. I came out here because I was so angry that I couldn't even look at him. I couldn't abide him sitting there so smugly when he'd done that. Prevented you from writing to me. And I went on and on sending letters off, as I thought, for months. I expect he found those, too, and destroyed them. Oh, it's too horrible to think about! You must have thought I'd stopped thinking of you. But I haven't. I think about you all the time.'

‘Oh, my poor darling. That's terrible, it's too ghastly for words.'

‘It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now you're here.'

He hugged her to him. ‘Kiss me, Leonora. Kiss me.'

‘I'm a bit wobbly on my skates.'

‘I'll hold you steady,' Peter said, and put his arms around her. ‘I won't let you fall.'

They kissed for a long moment and then Peter stepped away from her.

‘It doesn't matter any longer about the letters. You waited for me. And you're grown-up now, aren't you?'

Leonora nodded. ‘Quite grown-up. I've been dreaming about you coming back for five years. I'm so happy.'

‘You ought to take your skates off, Leonora. We should go back to the house or we'll freeze to death.'

He gave her his hand, and as she sat on the tree stump, he helped her to undo the laces on her skates, and put on her wellington boots again. He was kneeling in front of her, so that all she could see was the top of his hat.

He raised his head and looked at her and said, ‘Now that you are grown-up, and now that I seem to be kneeling at your feet, I can ask you what I've wanted to ask you for so long. Will you marry me, Leonora?'

‘Yes!' she cried. ‘Of course I will. As soon as possible. Oh, Peter, I love you so much. Will you love me for ever and ever?'

‘Absolutely!' he laughed and stood up. ‘For ever and ever and even longer. We'll live happily ever after like those chaps in the fairy tales.'

A thought occurred to Leonora. ‘My father doesn't know you're here, does he? You didn't go up to Willow Court first?'

‘No, I came straight to the lake. I saw someone skating on it as I walked up the drive and I knew it was you. We'll go and find him now and I shall ask him formally for your hand in marriage. Sort of thing he'd like, I suppose.'

‘Yes,' said Leonora, ‘I suppose it is. But I'm still furious with him, and I'll marry you whether he gives us his blessing or not. I'll be twenty next year.'

They started to make their way together through the wild garden towards Willow Court. Their feet made a crunching noise in the snow, and they left prints side by side in the white space, her smaller ones keeping pace with his, right beside him every step of the way. There
were so many things she wanted to say to Peter but she found she couldn't speak. All the words she wanted to shout out were blocking her throat, her windpipe, so that she could scarcely draw breath. Just before they reached the house, Peter bent down and kissed her again. She could feel herself thawing out, feel the years and years of waiting and holding herself together falling away. I haven't been breathing, she thought. For five years, I've not been living at all. Not properly. I'm going to be happy now. For ever. I'm going to be warm and happy for ever and ever.

———

On her way down to lunch, Leonora tried to remember where exactly in this house, whose walls were hung with paintings, she'd put the photograph cut from the pages of the
Illustrated London News
, all those years ago. It's in the downstairs cloakroom, she thought, feeling pleased at how quickly she'd recalled its exact location. She found herself hurrying, wanting suddenly to look at it again, and hoping that no one else would be around to whom she'd have to explain what she was doing. The downstairs cloakroom was normally reserved for visitors to the house, and Leonora hardly ever went in there.

She stepped into the small room and locked the door behind her. There it was, on the back of the door, a large sepia photograph showing some young men, smiling broadly, and all lined up in wheelchairs or standing on crutches or bandaged about the head. There were four nurses, two at each end of the row, and a couple of doctors, bending over their patients. Ethan Walsh, unsmiling, stood behind everyone else. The men, who were, Leonora knew, all soldiers, looked amazingly cheerful, which was the whole point of the photograph. It was posed around a bench on the terrace of Willow Court, and you could see the darkened drawing room
windows in the background. She brought her head close to the picture so that she could read the caption underneath: ‘Artist Ethan Walsh pictured with some of the servicemen who are recuperating at his country home, Willow Court.'

One of them was Peter. That one, second from the left, and even after all the years, Leonora found tears springing to her eyes. Peter. Even in sepia you could see how he would light up a room just by coming into it. She remembered how Ethan himself, within twenty minutes of Peter asking to marry her, had seemed to change from the cross, silent old man she'd left when she went out to skate on the frozen lake into someone who almost resembled the kind father of her early childhood.

*

‘I can quite understand, sir,' Peter had said, with a shy smile and pushing his hair back off his forehead, ‘that my letters to Leonora must have been a little, well, I suppose not exactly the sort of thing a father would be happy to read, so I did understand when you forbade me to write again. But I promise you that in the fighting, when I didn't know whether I was going to be alive or dead the next day, I wasn't thinking about anything but how much I loved her. Reckless, you might call it. I can't apologize for my feelings, sir, though I confess I wish you hadn't seen them.'

‘Where were you, during your service?' Ethan asked, pleased to be called ‘sir'. He seemed more lively than he had for years at the casual mention of life and death and war and all the things he'd managed to shut out of his thoughts as he skulked around Willow Court. Peter sat down on the chair on the other side of the fire, and began to tell stories from the front line. Leonora listened and saw it all – the darkness and sudden flare of gunfire. She heard the screams of the dying and the wounded in Peter's measured and unsensational account.