Jubilee (13 page)

Unable to settle, Evie switched off the television and stood. Above her on the mantelpiece stood the photo of the Winter brothers, taken in the camp in 1943. Something had happened out there in
the East, something that was more than just the quotidian horror and deprivation of those Japanese camps. It had left a mark on the brothers. It had been on her mind lately, even though she kept
telling herself that it was old history, distinct from the mystery of Jessamy’s disappearance.

Pilot whined to be let out and she roused herself.

Robert

Kanburi Camp, ? March 1943

Dear Evie,

I wish I knew the exact date. I think it’s March now. The turn of the year, Dad used to call it. You can start to see signs of winter ending at home. Mothering Sunday. Lent, Lady Day.
What’s happening on the farm now? How’s the farm manager getting on? Drilling. Lambing almost done. Perhaps a few days that feel like spring. Aconites and crocuses in the garden and the
daffodils just starting. I wonder if you pick them and put them in a vase for Mum. She loves those first flowers the most.

I know roughly where we are now: to the north/northwest of the last camp. I don’t know if knowing makes it better or not. Matthew needs quinine. He’s weak, weaker than I am.
Beriberi, dysentery and several more bouts of malaria. We need medicines. The hospital hut is really just somewhere they lay out the dying men. In the last camp the Japs let us trade with the local
Thais. At this one the Koreans who guard us push us away from the trading barges with the butts of their guns. On one of them sat a little girl of about your age, watching as the Koreans shoved us
off. A pretty thing, just like you. I dream of home every night. I dream that I come back to Winter’s Copse but nobody recognizes me. I keep saying it’s me, it’s Robert.
Eventually you all agree that it’s me. Then I try to tell you what has happened to us out here but you won’t believe me. ‘Don’t lie to me,’ Mother says.
‘Remember your commandments, Robert.’

Two days later

I promised you I would fight the dark, didn’t I? Something good has happened and I will tell you about it. We were allowed to go to the village to buy from the traders
with the baht we’ve earned. I had a list of things I needed: rice, eggs, soap. And medicine.

When we reached the village some guards came out and waved their guns at us, making it clear we couldn’t proceed. Macgregor tried to reason with them but got his answer in the form of a
bloody nose from a swung rifle.

As we trudged back to the camp I felt someone tap me on the back. When I turned I couldn’t see her at first: the child from the barge. She was tiny, shorter than you, Evie, though her
face appeared about the same age. She held up something: a small bag of rice. I glanced over my shoulder, the guards were lashing out at some poor Australian who wasn’t walking quickly
enough. They weren’t looking in my direction. ‘One baht,’ she said in English. I was so surprised I couldn’t even work out whether she was overcharging me. All I could think
was that Matthew could have boiled rice tonight. She opened the bag and showed me the rice, gleaming grains, not like the dirty stuff we have in the camp with its weevils and insects. I gave her
the money and she seemed to pocket it and hand me the rice in the same movement, vanishing into the trees on her shoeless feet.

Evie

A week after the Golden Jubilee party, June 2002.

Evie couldn’t get the Thai jungle out of her mind. She kept recalling the men coming back from the East, returning to the village, trying to pick up the threads of their
pre-war lives.

‘Matthew didn’t seem as changed by the camp as Robert,’ she told Freya Barnes the day after the Golden Jubilee. ‘But he’d never eat a complete meal. I found
half-slices of bread in drawers and apples behind books for years after we married. He could never bear to finish it all.’ She looked round at the loaded fruit bowls on Freya’s kitchen
dresser, the cake tins, biscuit barrels. ‘Eventually he stopped doing it.’

‘You gave him what he needed, Evie. He knew he was safe with you.’

‘I didn’t do more than any other woman would have.’

‘That I doubt. Matthew was lucky to have you.’ Freya let out a sigh. ‘What those poor men went through.’

Evie was sitting at the kitchen table, feeling, as she always did, comforted by the gleam of well-polished worktops and kitchen cabinets. While she was with Freya some kind of external
benevolent power still seemed a possibility. But perhaps that was just the after-effects of good coffee and home-made shortbread. ‘I don’t know why I keep thinking about those early
years.’

‘Remembering the Coronation probably brought it all back. It was still raw then, wasn’t it, the war in the Far East? I saw a programme saying they were the forgotten army. Most
people had no idea what the prisoners went through.’

‘We had a prisoner of war on the farm ourselves. Carlo. From Italy. At first we were a bit suspicious of him but after a month or so he felt like one of the family. Then he just
vanished.’ The same day that Robert had died in the barn fire. But she didn’t tell Freya that.

Freya glanced at her. ‘Did you ever meet Matthew before he went away to fight?’

‘Just once, briefly, when he came back before he was posted. He was only home for a few days, though, and most of that time was spent discussing the farm and the manager they were to
employ when Robert joined up too.’

‘Wasn’t farming a reserved occupation?’

Evie nodded. ‘The authorities tried to persuade Matthew and Robert that the country needed food as badly as it needed men in uniform. But they thought they should fight. Plenty of less
able-bodied men could manage the farm, especially with land girls and POWs to help out.’

‘And yet it meant so much to them.’

‘The Winters have always fought for their country, that’s what Robert said. And they were so pleased that they could stick together. The war against Japan hadn’t started then.
Nobody could have imagined what would happen to them in Singapore.’

She fell silent.

‘I’ll make you some coffee in a moment. And there are some scones and whipped cream.’ One of Freya’s hands wove its way through her dark curls while the other tapped on
the keyboard. She was writing her weekly column on household and rural matters for a small e-zine. She let out a sigh and leaned back. ‘Give me some ideas for what to do with all the Jubilee
party left-overs.’

‘Best to throw them away.’ Someone kind had brought Evie a plate of Jubilee fairy cakes, decorated with sugar flowers and pink icing and she couldn’t bear to look at them.

Freya eyed her. ‘Jessamy’s haunting you again, isn’t she?’

Evie looked away. Sometimes her friend saw more than was comfortable. ‘She’s on my mind most of the time at the moment.’

‘You want to talk about it?’

Evie shook her head. ‘It just makes the sadness spread if I talk about it too much. If I can keep it inside me it feels controllable.’

‘And that’s better?’

‘At least when it’s just inside me I don’t feel overwhelmed by it.’

Evie gave a shiver, remembering how once, years ago, the anger had filled her whole body, making her shake and her stomach flip within her. She’d banged her head on the wall by the piano
in the drawing room, trying to force out the rage before it consumed her. The dog, not Pilot but his grandmother, had risen from her bed, hackles rising, whining. It was only the sight of the
animal’s scared black eyes that had made Evie stop. Before she’d only thought of herself as sad, anxious, preoccupied, obsessed. Now the full force of her rage hit her again. She felt
the rank unfairness as a bitter taste in her mouth and took a mouthful of coffee to counter it. Her Jessamy ought not to have been taken from her. It went against all that was natural and just in
the world. She’d already lost Matthew. And Robert. And her mother.

Freya nodded. ‘Well, you know you’ve always got a listener here when you need one.’

‘Just being here in your house with you helps.’ She touched Freya’s arm, warm under the olive-green linen shirt. ‘Sorry for being such a bore.’

‘There is no need for sorry.’ Freya turned the pile of papers beside her and waved the printout of an email at Evie. ‘I’m already getting the nutters asking me about crop
circles.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘That’s the thing about this part of the world, you attract all the fools.’

‘You’re still thinking of Midsummer Eve last year?’ Despite herself Evie felt her lips twitch.

‘You think I’d forget a horde of hippies streaming through my back garden on the way up to Wayland’s Smithy?’

‘They certainly won’t forget you.’ Clad in her nightdress and waving a dishcloth, Freya had chased them off her lawn. Evie laughed for the first time in days.

‘I wouldn’t mind if they tidied up after themselves, Evie. If they had a respect for the land.’

‘You probably know more about this place and all the old myths and legends than any of the New Agers.’

Beneath Freya’s dark skin lay a repository of stories concerning the pale Norsemen and their myths.

‘My father certainly loved the old stories. And he taught me to love them too.’ Freya laughed. ‘Strange for a man who never even saw snow his whole life.’ She switched
off the laptop. ‘We should go for a walk up there one sunny afternoon, Evie. Do us good.’

Evie was remembering her own night up at Wayland’s Smithy, right at the end of the war. She’d never been back to the place in the nearly sixty years that had passed since the barn
fire. As she walked home she thought again about Wayland’s Smithy and Robert’s return from the POW camp.

For years she’d been waiting for him to reappear. She and Charlie had stayed at the farm under the supervision of old Mrs Winter and Mr Edwards, the new farm manager, and she’d
crossed the days off the calendar, knowing that she was coming nearer and nearer to . . . what? No correspondence had arrived from the Far East, just the original cards he and Matthew had sent
saying they’d been taken prisoner, and something from the Red Cross in 1942, briefly describing the brothers’ removal to Siam, or Thailand, as it was called now. Evie had read the
telegram to Mrs Winter. ‘Milk,’ she’d said. ‘To build them up.’ And Evie had agreed that they should be given milk on their return. Then there’d been silence for
over two years.

By the summer of 1945 she’d been fifteen, old enough for the crush to have taken on an even more passionate drive. She’d sat in the hayloft with the land girls and listened to them
chatting about men, and admired the photographs of their boyfriends in their various uniforms. And she’d felt a kinship with these older girls with their Coty lipsticks and waved hairdos. One
afternoon they’d been sitting there and talking about one of these trivial things when Mr Edwards had rushed in. Clasped in his hand was a telegram. ‘I’ve taken it straight up to
Mrs Winter and she already knows, but it’s good news!’

Evie jumped down from the ladder where she perched. ‘What?’

‘Both the Winter brothers are safe. Matthew was liberated from a camp in Siam. Robert was found back at Changi in Singapore. We don’t know why they were separated.’

‘When will they come home? How long will it take them?’ She was gabbling questions while her startled mind tried to make sense of it all: they were coming back, Robert and
Matthew.

‘The telegram doesn’t say. I imagine they’ll send them by train to Rangoon, I expect. And on by ship to Bombay and from there to Cape Town. It could all take some
time.’

‘Robert’s coming back?’ Evie hadn’t heard Martha approach. Beneath the turban she wore over her hair while she worked her face was flushed. ‘Let me see that.’
She pulled the telegram from Mr Edwards’s fingers. He tried to retain it.

‘It’s really Mrs Winter’s telegram.’

‘Robert would want me to know.’ Martha frowned at it. ‘Doesn’t say much, does it?’

‘It’s a telegram.’ Evie heard the acid in her own voice. ‘I expect they’ll write.’

‘Robert will want me to know what’s happening.’ Martha stuffed the telegram back at Mr Edwards, with a glare at Evie.

Evie sat on her bed that evening and examined Robert’s photograph. She must have dropped the frame at some stage because a small screw at the back was loose. In the
morning she took it into the workshop out in the barn to find a screwdriver. She placed the picture on the workbench while she searched the little drawers of nuts, bolts and screws on top of the
cupboard. A shadow passed over the doorway as Evie found the right-sized screwdriver. She turned to see Martha standing there. ‘Morning,’ she said to the older girl.

‘Morning.’ Martha examined her with those curious light eyes of her. ‘Whose photo is that?’

Evie picked up the frame. Not quickly enough.

‘It’s Robert.’

She started tightening the little screw on the back as Martha came closer.

‘Why’ve you got his photo?’ There was a sharp note to her question.

Evie shrugged. ‘To remember him while he was away.’

‘You wanted to remember him?’ Martha gave a short laugh. ‘And why would that be? He’s not going to be thinking about
you,
Eve Parr, is he? You’re just a
kid.’

She cast the photograph a passing look of scorn and walked out.

Evie examined Robert’s face again. ‘She’s waiting for you,’ she told him. ‘And so am I.’

Robert

Kanburi Camp, end of March 1943

Dear Evie,

The little Thai girl’s name is Noi. She came up to me again this evening as we marched back to camp. In her hands were two duck eggs, a pale blue like a winter sky at home. I thought of
you collecting eggs in the farmyard, coming in triumphant when you found them all. I handed Noi the coins and once again she took the money and passed me the food in one single graceful movement.
‘Noi,’ she said, pointing at herself. ‘Robert,’ I said, pointing at my tatty shirt. I put the eggs in my pocket and made a gesture to suggest we should both sit down. I
rested my back against a tree and put up a hand to push aside a slim swaying branch by my face. She called out and her face was white. I’d been about to brush aside a snake! I had the
quickest impression of a browny/greeny form that hissed at me before I rolled onto my side and away from its
fangs.