Letters to the Lost (6 page)

The porch floor was deep in drifts of leaves and crisp packets. Noticeboards lined the walls. Shaking the rain from her hair she peered through the gloom at these, to see if there was any mention of Miss Price on the flower arranging rota or list of Sunday School helpers. There wasn’t. The door to the main body of the church was slightly ajar, and cautiously she looked through the gap.

The space was huge and completely still, dimly lit by great glass lanterns miles above the aisle. She pushed the door open enough to slip through and took a few tentative steps, which echoed around the high walls. Her breath hung faintly in front of her face, and above the smell of cold stone and furniture polish the enticing aroma of coffee reached her.

A little area behind the far row of pews had been claimed as a sort of domestic space, with a square of red carpet on the floor, two wicker chairs, a shelf of books and a yellow plastic box of toys. A length of kitchen worktop had been fitted against the wall, and on this there was a coffee machine. As she got closer, drawn by the smell, she saw the plate of biscuits beside it, and a notice on the wall above, written in flowing, churchy writing:

Please Help Yourself.

She put the carrier bag down on one of the wicker chairs and looked around. There was no one to be seen. She read the notice again, wondering if it was some kind of trick, but the lure of caffeine and sugar was too strong to resist. Cups and saucers were set out on the worktop. She took one and filled it with coffee, helped herself to one biscuit, then another. She was just reaching for a third when the sound of brisk footsteps made her drop it back onto the plate.

‘Ahh, you found our refreshments. Good, good. I hope the coffee’s still drinkable. I made it this afternoon, but if it sits too long it tastes like burnt mud.’

The most striking thing about the man who’d spoken was that he was wearing the most hideous jumper imaginable; oversized and hand-knitted in uneven, garishly coloured stripes. The second most striking thing was his smile, which was wide and white against his dark beard.

‘N-no, it’s fine. Thank you.’

‘In that case, if you’re not just being polite, do help yourself to another cup. There’s no choir practice or anything on tonight, so I shall just be pouring it down the sink if you don’t. I’m Tony, by the way. Tony Palmer.’

He leaned across and held out a hand. She shook it timidly, trying not to stare at the neck of the jumper to work out if that was a dog collar beneath it, or just an ordinary shirt. He seemed very friendly for a vicar. Very normal.

‘Are you—?’

‘The vicar here, that’s right.’ He stepped past her and poured himself a coffee, then balanced a biscuit on the saucer. ‘Do you mind me asking your name? You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’

She didn’t particularly, but since she was drinking his coffee and eating his biscuits it seemed rude to say so. ‘Jess,’ she said. ‘Jess Moran.’

‘Nice to meet you, Jess, and welcome to All Saints. Although on a cold night like this I’d be the first to admit that it’s not the most welcoming place.’

He shivered elaborately in his ugly jumper and smiled again. It was a nice smile, but she steeled herself against it. She didn’t want him to mistake her for a churchgoer. She and Gran never used to miss an episode of
Songs of Praise
but they only watched it for the singing – joining in with the words at the bottom of the screen was how Jess had first discovered she had a voice. But the church itself was full of busybodies, Gran said; women with too much time on their hands and nothing better to do with it than arrange flowers and pass judgement on those who were just struggling to get on with things.

She shrugged. ‘I’m not religious or anything. I was just . . . passing.’

‘That’s OK. People come in for all sorts of reasons, and they’re all welcome. Except the ones that come in to nick the candlesticks – those ones I could do without – but everyone else is, whether they’re after a chat or a sit down in the quiet, or a cup of not very nice coffee. Churches need people. When they’re empty they’re just buildings.’ Tony Palmer took a sip of coffee and said ruefully, ‘Mostly people don’t feel like they need churches these days, which is why we have to work at keeping them going. Here we run toddler groups and a book club and an art class and a lunch club for the old people, all without mentioning the G word.’ He looked heavenwards and mouthed, ‘
God
.’

Jess thawed a little. The old people’s lunch club reminded her of why she’d come in. ‘You don’t know anyone round here called Miss Price, do you? An old lady. She might come to your lunch club?’

‘Miss Price . . .’ He considered it. ‘The name sounds familiar, though I can’t put a face to it. I don’t think she comes to the lunch club, but I’ve only been here for eighteen months so she may have been previously. Is she a relative of yours?’

Jess put her cup down and shook her head. ‘A friend of a friend, that’s all. It doesn’t matter.’ She picked up her bag of shopping from the chair. ‘Thanks for the coffee. And the biscuits.’

‘Anytime.’

Aware of his eyes following her, she tried to walk as normally as the too-big shoes and her painful ankle would allow. She’d almost reached the door when he called out to her.

‘Jess? Just a thought—’

She turned round. He came towards her, tapping a finger against his bottom lip. ‘Look, I don’t know how you’re fixed with work or other commitments, but you’d be very welcome to come along to our lunch club – then you could ask some of the other members about your Miss Price. It’s on Mondays and Thursdays, in the church hall.’ He grinned sheepishly. ‘Of course, when I say you’d be very welcome, what I really mean is it would be great to have some younger blood. It gives the older folk a real lift to see a fresh face. You’d get a free lunch, of course. Hot food, and plenty of it.’ He patted the slight paunch beneath the jumper.

‘OK . . . Thanks.’

She had been going to make some excuse, but she was so hungry that the prospect of a free hot lunch was simply too tempting to turn down. It was only as she walked away that it occurred to her that he’d known that. It was that, rather than anything to do with old folk or young blood, that had prompted him to ask her.

The thought was strangely unsettling.

4

1942

The autumn days were getting shorter. At five o’clock Stella gave up struggling to peer through the gloom and did the blackout. It seemed such a shame; the sky was still streaked with ribbons of pink, against which the church’s terracotta roof tiles looked like a frill of black lace, but it was just another thing to add to the list of wartime privations she supposed. Oranges. Chocolate. Soap. Autumn sunsets.

She went into the hallway to knock on the study door and ask Charles if he’d like her to do his blackout too, but the thread of light beneath the door told her there was no need. The meeting had gone on for most of the afternoon. An hour ago she’d taken in a tray of tea and eggless sponge, made especially in honour of the bishop who enjoyed the status of a Hollywood matinee idol in Charles’s eyes. They had stopped their conversation while she set it down on the table, and the bishop had said – in a particularly loud, hearty voice so that Reverend Stokes, who was elderly and deaf, would hear – ‘So this is the lovely Mrs Thorne. With cake! Something of a water and wine miracle, given the circumstances. Well done, my dear!’ She’d retreated, glowing at praise from such an elevated source, pleased as much on Charles’s behalf as her own.

The kitchen was warm after the gusting draughts in the passageway, and deliciously scented with the beef she’d been cooking slowly all day. Brisket, stringy with sinew and unpromising in its paper wrapping, but Ada Broughton, queuing behind her in Fairacre’s the butchers, had told her that done on a low heat for long enough it would make a nice stew. Stella hoped so, since it was their meat ration for the week. She’d decided Woolton pie and cheese bake would be worth suffering for one special Saturday night meal, and had gone to some effort to lay the table in the dining room and the fire in the sitting room.

In truth she’d suffer a lot more than Woolton pie and cheese bake to breach the wall that seemed to have sprung up around Charles. Since they’d returned from Brighton he had slipped further and further from her reach so that she felt that their relationship was even more like that of employer and housekeeper than it had been before the wedding. Perhaps a quiet dinner – something less depressing than their usual dreary fare – and then the concert on the wireless afterwards, by the light of the fire . . .

Perhaps . . .

She shoved her feet into her ugly utility lace-ups and slipped out into the damp indigo evening. The air was scented with earth and cold and smoke from chimneys as she picked up fallen apples from beneath the tree, holding her apron up like a basket to collect the good ones. There weren’t many; the season was almost at an end, and the harvest had been shared. There was hardly a household in King’s Oak that hadn’t had an apple pie this autumn, though the apples were green and sour and devoured valuable sugar. Stella had been terribly mean with what she’d put in the sugar bowl on the tea tray earlier, so she’d have enough to make a good crumble, and custard. Charles was too thin. The hollows beneath his cheekbones had got deeper, the angle of his jaw sharper, which she couldn’t help taking as direct evidence of her inadequacy as a wife.

Before going back inside she paused on the back step, gazing out towards the city. Saturday night. The sky had lost its pink tinge now and was a deep, soft purple, scattered with a few stars and a waxy yellow harvest moon. A Bombers’ Moon they used to call it, though the nights of the raids seemed a long time ago now and everyone had become quite blasé about the possibility of them returning. She thought of Nancy, who would be dolling herself up for a night on the town with her friends from the salon. Several times she’d invited Stella to join them – ‘you’re a wife, not a prisoner, aren’t you?’ – but Stella always found an excuse. She remembered that crush of bodies, the measuring stares. It wouldn’t seem right to be in that atmosphere now that she was a married woman.

She and Nancy had met up for the pictures last week though; Clark Gable and Lana Turner in
Somewhere I’ll Find You
. There had been a useful film before the main picture, featuring recipes for stale bread. When Stella had scribbled one of them down on the back of her ration book Nancy had laughed so hard that the woman behind had tapped her on the shoulder and hissed at her to shut up.

In the light of the kitchen she saw that the apples were bruised and worm-eaten. What was left after she’d cut out the unusable bits would only be enough for the smallest of crumbles, but at least it would use up less sugar. She left the fruit stewing on the stove and went to check that everything was ready in the dining room.

It gave her a little beat of pleasure to look at the table, spread with an old cloth she’d discovered in a drawer and embroidered with bunches of daisies to cover the scorch marks. She’d sensed Charles’s disapproval of her spending three evenings on such a frivolous project when she could be knitting socks for sailors. She knitted too, but couldn’t quite believe that the endless supply of scratchy socks she turned out would make any real difference to the war, while the embroidered daisies had an immediate and discernible effect on morale on the home front. Against them even the green Vicarage china looked nice, and Miss Birch’s rose bowl made a lovely centrepiece, though it was filled with dying hydrangea heads instead of roses. In a moment of impulse Stella took down the two brass candlesticks from the mantelpiece and placed them on either side of the rose bowl, then went to the sideboard for candles.

Opening the drawer, she hesitated. Would Charles think she was trying too hard? A framed photograph from their wedding stood on top of the sideboard, the one Fred Collins had taken of them cutting the cake. Picking it up, looking at it, she was transported back to the moment, and felt the fine hairs rise on her arms as she remembered Charles’s hand covering hers and the secret thrill of anticipation his touch had given her.

Anticipation that had come to nothing, as it turned out. She put the photograph carefully back in its place and took a step back, though she couldn’t seem to drag her gaze away from it. The girl in white with the wide, dark eyes already seemed like a naïve stranger – what a lot she’d learned in two short months. Like how to launder a clerical collar and make a milk pudding from stale bread and water, and that a white wedding isn’t necessarily the start of happy-ever-after, like it always was in the picture house.

That time she’d gone with Nancy she’d averted her eyes from the screen during the parts where Clark took Lana into his arms and kissed her thoroughly and passionately. Nancy had nudged her at one point and asked if she was all right and she’d nodded dumbly, glad that they were in the dark cinema with the cross woman behind them and that she couldn’t answer properly. She had missed her chance at honesty now; it had come when they’d returned from Brighton and Nancy had been agog to find out how it had gone. How
‘it’
had gone. Her curiosity had been so laden with expectation that Stella had found it impossible to tell her the truth; that the bedroom part had been a dismal failure and the blushing bride had returned from her honeymoon every bit as virginal as when they’d driven away from the wedding.

It sounded so hopeless. She could just imagine the pity (and scorn?) in Nancy’s eyes as she tried to explain about the first night, when they were both tired from the wedding and the journey and a little overwhelmed at the strangeness of finding themselves alone together in the huge and rather bleak hotel room. Charles’s parents had insisted on treating them to the honeymoon suite, and the landlady had showed them in with much lascivious smirking – off-putting in itself. It had been late, but Stella had disappeared to the bathroom next door and, shaking with nerves and a sort of excited trepidation, changed into the silk camisole. When she’d returned the bed was still empty and neat. Charles was sitting, fully dressed, at the table by the window, his head in his hands.