Some Day I'll Find You (18 page)

Diana thought. ‘It might be five minutes – perhaps a little more.’

‘Then I suggest you put in three francs,
madame
.’

Diana did so, and as the last coin dropped through the slot, she heard the familiar double ringtone of a British telephone.

Oliver and Gwen’s marriage had survived the double hammer-blow of that terrible day, but only just.

They dealt with their grief in entirely different ways. For Mr Arnold, a kind of salvation and peace was to be found in ceaseless activity. After the first few weeks of deep mourning for his son
– a period spent almost entirely in the Dower House and which he now struggled to recall with any clarity – he had compulsively taken on any responsibility which would distract his
thoughts and prevent them from dwelling on what had happened.

But the dreadful reality broke through often enough. The senselessness of his son’s death caused him much pain. To some extent, he and Gwen had prepared themselves for the worst during
Dunkirk, and as Mr Arnold watched the subsequent Battle of Britain unfold in the skies above him, he sometimes thought that John’s death would have been a little easier to bear if he had died
in his cockpit defending his country, rather than in a random, meaningless road accident. At least James’s end had a degree of purpose to it. Heroism was conferred on the steadily rising
number of pilots killed in battle; poor John had been denied even that.

His grief was mostly for his son, but like Gwen, his heart ached for Diana. He and Gwen hadn’t really had long enough to get to know James, but they were fully aware of how much their
daughter had loved him.

In many ways, the double tragedy hit Diana hardest of the three of them. At a stroke, she had lost two men that she adored. Her grief for her husband and brother made her almost catatonic. She
was indifferent to her developing pregnancy and lost interest entirely in her studies. Diana hadn’t returned to Girton.

Her parents had taken the news of the coming baby with initial enthusiasm, even atavistic relief that amid so much death, new life was growing. Diana had told them her news one evening over
supper when she was quite sure of the matter, but her tone had been listless and resigned. She felt completely in the thrall of fate, powerless to shape her own destiny. After a few weeks her
almost complete disinterest in the pregnancy infected her parents too, and they gradually abandoned their attempts to raise her spirits. Their own were low enough.

Sally had come down from Cambridge during the Christmas holidays to comfort Diana, and try to persuade her to return with her to Girton.

‘I’m sorry, Sal, I know you mean it for the best, but the thought of going back to college just seems pointless,’ Diana told her after listening to her arguments. ‘James
is dead, my brother’s dead, I’m nearly six months’ gone now . . . everything’s utterly changed. Anyway, how would I manage university with a baby in tow?’

‘You could leave it here with your parents, Di,’ Sally said. ‘You’ve only a few months left to do now. I’ll help you catch up on everything you’ve missed this
autumn.’

Diana shook her head. ‘It’s no good, Sal, really it isn’t. I don’t even
want
to come back. I feel utterly miserable, and the thought of opening my books again
makes me slightly sick. Anyway, you know neither of us will get a degree; none of us girls will. It’s ridiculous. I can’t think why I ever got involved in the whole absurd process in
the first place.’

It was a difficult weekend and Sally departed, defeated, promising to write.

Gwen withdrew into her own world after the deaths. She was distressed beyond measure to see how her daughter was suffering, but felt helpless to alleviate it. She was in so
much pain herself.

Gwen experienced terrible guilt over her son’s death. She knew she was being irrational, even superstitious, but she couldn’t help believing that if only she had finished the
portrait of John she had begun when he was fighting above Dunkirk, he wouldn’t have been taken from them.

‘It was because I was lazy and didn’t finish his painting,’ she repeatedly told Oliver. ‘I said I would paint something special, just for him, and give it to him when he
came back to us. But I didn’t, did I? I didn’t keep my side of the bargain.’

What bargain?
Mr Arnold silently screamed at his wife. He seethed with anger and resentment, and one awful afternoon a month after John and James were killed, he vented his rage in a
terrible scene after Gwen again blamed her unfinished portrait.

‘What possible bloody difference would one of your stupid paintings have made, Gwen? What are you
talking
about? Can you hear yourself? How typical of you to put your damned
painting at the heart of the situation, any damned situation, let alone one as wretched and God-awful as this . . . dear Christ, the
vanity
of it! Do you seriously believe your oils and
brushes and canvases have the slightest bearing on how the universe functions? Even unto the power of life and death? Your . . . your
conceit
. . . well, it takes my breath
away.’

Utterly crushed, Gwen left the room without a word. When her husband tried to apologise later, she covered her ears with her hands, and when he persisted, she walked out of the house. She
wandered the surrounding lanes for hours before returning. Neither of them exchanged a remark of any kind for weeks.

It was at this time that Mr Arnold began an almost manic phase of activity. He took on far more work at his chambers than he needed, and was one of the first men in line at his local police
station to sign up for the newly formed Local Defence Volunteers, which would later become the Home Guard. He was scarcely at the Dower House at all and the three of them could have been on
different continents, so seldom did they speak to each other.

The Christmas of 1940 passed almost unnoticed in this bleakest midwinter for the Arnolds. Oliver volunteered for Christmas Day guard duty at the local electricity sub-station
(‘someone’s got to do it’) and Gwen and Diana spent most of the day in their rooms. Lucy the maid went home to her mother and brother who had made it safely back from Dunkirk. She
was gone for a week.

The dam holding back the lake of suffering had to be breached at some point, though, and with almost biblical resonance, it did so the day Diana’s waters broke. Her parents, galvanised by
one of nature’s unstoppable events, drove her into Tunbridge Wells Hospital and stayed with her there – Gwen holding her daughter’s hand, Mr Arnold patrolling the corridor outside
– until, just after dawn on a frosty March morning, Stella Blackwell was brought into a world at war.

The impact of the birth overwhelmed all three of them. Diana felt a wave of intense, maternal love and possessiveness wash over her from the first moment her baby was placed on her breast.

For Gwen and Oliver, it was as if a glorious, roaring fire had suddenly been lit in a vast, freezing room. Their interior worlds were transformed, and unified, by the arrival of new life.

Smiling shyly at each other for the first time in almost a year, the Arnolds could scarcely credit their newfound happiness.

‘It’s as if James has sent her to me from wherever he is now,’ Diana said, staring at the tiny face that lay in the crook of her arm. ‘He’s saying,
“It’s all right . . . you can start again, start again with our little girl.” Can you feel it, Mummy and Daddy? I’m not being ridiculous, am I? This is real. This feeling is
real.’

And it was. It was elemental and unmistakable and irresistible. Much later, lying in the bed next to his wife where they had been sleeping like two strangers, back to back, for so long, Mr
Arnold was astonished to find tears suddenly coursing down his cheeks. He had not once been able to weep for his boy but now grief and pain and loss poured unstoppably from him. Gwen lay holding
him tightly for what seemed like hours, until the torrent gradually subsided.

‘I’m so sorry, Gwen,’ he finally managed to say.

She knew he wasn’t speaking of his tears.

‘So am I, Oliver,’ she whispered. ‘We haven’t been much use to each other, have we?’

He shook his head in the darkness. ‘No. We haven’t. I wasn’t. I was just so . . .
angry.
I took it out on you. I’ve behaved appallingly.’

Gwen held him tighter. ‘I don’t think either of us had any choice in how we behaved, did we? I know I didn’t. It was like being possessed, I think. Possessed, utterly and
completely, by a monstrous shadow.’

He stroked her head as they lay silent for a while.

‘Stella won’t cure everything, you know,’ he said eventually.

‘I know,’ Gwen replied. ‘But look at us now. She’s given us a start, hasn’t she? We’ve made a start.’

Mr Arnold heard the phone ringing in the hall from where he sat in the breakfast room, reading an air-mailed letter that had arrived that morning from California. It was from
Lucy. Immediately after the war she had married an American army sergeant and was now living in Los Angeles, from where she wrote the Arnolds frequent letters extolling the virtues of life on
‘the coast’ as she had taken to calling it. In her latest letter she was describing her father-in-law’s orange groves that her husband had returned home to tend, after surviving
unscathed the carnage of the American D-Day landings on Omaha Beach.

Everywhere seemed sunnier, warmer and more prosperous than England, Mr Arnold thought grumpily to himself as he tossed down Lucy’s letter. He was sick of hearing about oranges, be they
Californian or Provençal. Maybe it was time he and Gwen took a cruise somewhere hot. They could certainly afford to.

He moved quickly towards the jangling telephone. Considering that he was now the wrong side of fifty-five, Mr Arnold was in good shape. Five years’ service in the Home Guard had a lot to
do with that. In the years after James’s death, Mr Arnold had thrown himself vigorously into his part-time military life, volunteering for the more demanding training courses and assignments.
By the time the service was stood down at the end of the war, he felt fitter and healthier than he had when he returned home from France in 1918. Hardly surprising, given his gruelling years on the
Western Front.

He’d ended up as Area Commander, after getting off to a chequered start on day one in the LDV. Like many former World War One officers, Mr Arnold had ‘forgotten’ to return his
service revolver and ammunition to stores after the Armistice, and rather nervously produced them, complete with leather holster, on the evening of the first LDV roll-call and parade. He knew it
gave him a certain cachet, even authority, amongst the other men, but there had been a sticky moment.

The local police sergeant, who was signing volunteers into a register, gave Oliver a measured look.

‘Have a permit for that, do you, sir?’

Mr Arnold felt slightly clammy. ‘Er . . . no. No, Sergeant, I’m afraid not.’

‘Hmm. Well, see about it, would you? Let’s do everything right and proper from the start, shall we?’

Mr Arnold nodded with relief. ‘Right you are, Sergeant.’

But the other wasn’t finished. ‘
Army
property, I take it, sir?’

Mr Arnold felt his queasiness return. ‘Um . . . yes. Yes, I s’pose it is, really.’

The policeman nodded slowly. ‘Then just you be sure to return it when we’ve won the war, sir.’

‘Yes, Sergeant.’

He reached the telephone on the fifth ring. The hairline crack in the Bakelite was still there, a mute reminder of Diana’s excitement on the day her brother rang to tell them all to come
and watch him fly his Spitfire.

‘Sevenoaks two-three-six.’

‘Daddy!’

‘Diana! To what do I owe the pleasure? We only spoke last night. Don’t tell me there’s some problem with the oranges down there? A freak frost, perhaps, that has overnight
withered them on the trees?’

‘Daddy, stop. Listen to me. Something’s just happened. Something so peculiar I truly don’t know what to think.’

Mr Arnold dropped his bantering tone and sat down on the little wicker chair next to the telephone table.

‘Where are you calling from?’

‘The Negresco – the big hotel on the promenade in Nice. It’s—’

‘Yes, yes, I’ve heard of the Negresco. Why are you there at this time of day?’

There was a silence at the other end.

‘Diana? Are you still there?’

‘Yes. Just give me a moment to collect myself, Daddy. This is incredibly difficult for me.’

Mr Arnold waited, giving his daughter time. He listened to the occasional pop and crackle of static on the copper line that stretched, continuously and unbroken, from the Mediterranean, over the
Alps, across the great plains of France, under the English Channel and all the way to the Dower House.

He heard her sigh before she finally spoke again.

‘Right. Oh dear, this is going to sound insane. It’s about James . . . he
is
dead, isn’t he?’

Mr Arnold pulled the receiver away from his ear and stared at it for a moment. Then he put it back, and said very gently, ‘Yes. James is dead. You know he is. What is this?’

‘It’s just that something
so
strange has just happened here. About twenty minutes ago, if that. I hardly know where to begin. I’m wondering if I am not going mad, to
be honest.’

‘You don’t sound mad to me, Diana, but you do sound upset. Start from the beginning, darling. Take your time.’

And so, shakily to begin with, but in a voice increasing in confidence, Diana described her experience outside the café that morning. Her father listened patiently, and with growing
understanding.

‘They said he isn’t here,’ Diana finished, ‘but I heard him tell the taxi driver to bring him here and I
know
it was James. But of course he’s dead; of
course he is . . . I can’t think straight. I keep feeling I’m going to be sick, and back at the flower-market I nearly fainted on the spot. What’s
happening
to me,
Daddy?’

‘I can tell you exactly what it all means,’ Mr Arnold said. ‘You’ve just had a very, very common experience, my dear. It happens all the time; it’s happened to me
too, more than once, since John was killed.’