Jubilee (3 page)

Evie’s feet pulled her into a run uphill, towards the ribbon of clear sky forming over the grey skies. She passed Martha Stourton’s cottage and was careful to take quiet steps, in
the shadows, until she was outside the view of anyone looking out of a window. Her lungs protested as she dashed forward but she kept going. It started to rain and almost immediately her frock
became a cold flapping sheet around her legs. Evie headed slowly back down the hill towards the farm, her head bowed down, her mind dipping backwards into the past. She found herself standing by
the back door again and rubbed the raindrops off her face.

From the drawing room came the sound of Richard Dimbleby’s voice, still narrating the Coronation from Westminster Abbey. A blast of trumpets snarled out. She could slip off this bloodied
dress and leave it to soak. Lucky she’d planned to wear the New Look-style frock she’d made to the party on the green.

It could be as though it had never happened.

Robert

Camp at Ban Pong, Thailand, November 1942

Dear Evie,

I lost the earlier letters I wrote: they must have dropped out of my pack as we marched out of Changi camp in Singapore for the last time. I could rewrite them from memory but haven’t
the heart to list it all. How Matthew and I were redeployed from the Berkshires when we reached India and sent out with men from other regiments to Singapore. The last days trying to hold out
against the Japs, hiding out in a small village when the fight was over, capture, humiliation (they made us line the roads and drove their dignitaries past us to laugh).

This will be another letter I write but can never send to you. But just pretending you read what I write helps me enormously. You’re just a kid of twelve so perhaps it’s as well
you don’t. Perhaps it’s a bit odd, me writing to you rather than to Mum. Or Martha. But when I think of you I feel calm, like I used to.

We’d seen bad things in Changi, but when we heard the rumours that the Japanese wanted to build a railway between Burma and Thailand, I assumed that was all it was: a rumour.

But it wasn’t.

November now, not sure of the exact date. I think about you back on the farm. Have you slaughtered a pig? Is the farm manager ploughing? Have you had frosts? I love the first frost, the way
it makes your cheeks glow and makes the horses toss their heads when we take them out in the harness. I would give anything for just an hour’s frost to refresh us. ‘Never thought
I’d miss the cold,’ Matthew said just this week. ‘I used to hate getting up when the windows had frozen up inside. But imagine sleeping in a room where you know no insects will
bother you.’ Good old Matthew. We’ve done our best to stick together, joining the same regiment and then managing to get me sent to Singapore with him when he was redeployed. Otherwise
I’d be with the Berkshires in India. Most of the officers are very sympathetic but warn us that it’s up to the Japs as to whether we stay in the same camp.

A thousand miles in a goods wagon to Ban Pong in Thailand, the nearest point on the Thai railway system to the coastal plain of southern Burma, two hundred miles away across the mountains.
The Japs want to cut a railway across these peaks. Even we British couldn’t do it. They’re insane, Evie. Just writing that sentence could get me shot so I must hide these letters very
carefully. Even just having this blank exercise book is dangerous. I pulled it off a desk at the school in Singapore we were holed up in and somehow I managed to keep it with me. How long ago that
seems now. But I can’t face writing about what happened back there again, so I’ll just start from here, from the start of our work on the Burma railway.

When we reached Ban Pong they marched us through the town. The Thais stared at us without much curiosity. From the gardens of the bigger houses came the scent of tropical blossom and flowers.
I smelled something I recognized: jasmine. I tried to hold on to that smell, Evie, so that I could draw on it when we reached the camp and they stood us outside the stinking hut that was to be our
quarters. Someone started laughing. ‘Look,’ he said, pointing up to the tall teak trees. We looked up and saw the black vultures in the branches. ‘They know they’ll be
fed.’ Then we were all laughing, but it wasn’t laughter like there is at home when the cricket club piles into the Pack-horse on a Saturday evening after a match. I looked at us in our
filthy clothes, already thin, some shaking from the effects of disease, and I wondered if we were actually already dead and hadn’t realized. Perhaps this was hell. Matthew managed to grab a
bed-space next to me. Thank God, thank God for letting him be here with me. ‘No snoring, Bobby,’ he said. And we might have been on Scout Camp on Boars Hill.

Our nearest neighbour, i.e. the person just inches away on the next mat, is a man called Macgregor, a Savile Row tailor in peacetime. ‘Could you measure me for a new dinner
jacket?’ Matthew asked. ‘This one seems to have lost its shape.’ He pointed to the ragged shirt he wore and even Macgregor, a solemn Scot, laughed. ‘Aye, you’ll be
needing to take in the seams a little, too.’

A few days later. Haven’t written because I have had my first attack of malaria – that stagnant pool beside the hut, I suspect. Not too severe. Poor Matthew,
he’s still not right after his bout at Changi. When I had the fevers I dreamed I was at home, at Winter’s Copse. I ran out onto the lawn at the front of the house in bare feet, and it
was cool and lush. I fell down and rolled over and over in the dew until I was soaked through.

Then I woke and saw I was lying in sweat-drenched clothes and instead of the coo of wood pigeons the harsh shrieks of the guards filled my ears.

Rachel

March 2003

One click of the DVD remote and Jessamy stood before me.

The television screen showed me a giggling, prancing nine-year-old with a mop of dark hair. I could almost feel electricity crackling round her. This film must have been shot in ’76, the
year before the Silver Jubilee party. I guessed it must be early June because the lawn was still a soft, almost fluorescent, green and lush; it would have felt like a silk carpet under
Jessamy’s bare feet. In fact, 1976 was later to turn into the year of the drought. I, too, was only nine that summer, but I remember how later on the heat enveloped the village, trapping us
all inside the oven it created.

Looking at this DVD, such oppressive sunlight seemed impossible; everything on the screen was soft, the light radiant rather than glaring.

Winter’s Copse itself looked much as it does these days, sheltered by the oak, chestnut and beech trees which had given it its name, its chalk walls and muted orange brickwork unchanged.
The smaller size of the plants and shrubs in the garden was the only clue that we were looking back over a quarter of a century. Evie had been a busy gardener back then, always hoeing, digging and
mulching. But it was Jessamy who grabbed all the viewer’s attention. She grinned at the camera and lifted her arms above her head like a ballerina, bending a slim leg. Then she sprang forward
into a cartwheel, legs perfectly straight as they moved through the air, and another and another before cantering towards the apple tree. She made a graceful jump up to the lowest bough, catching
it with her hands and swinging her legs through the O she’d made with her arms and flipping her body through so she was standing again. She always was quick to take a risk if she thought it
would be exciting. Her legs and arms had attracted many bruises and cuts from failed attempts to scale walls or jump water troughs and her knees were seldom without scabs. These never seemed to
detract from the grace of her limbs, though.

I wondered who was taking the film. Perhaps Matthew, Jessamy’s father. He’d once owned a cine camera, I recalled. It hadn’t been used since his death from lung cancer in 1972.
Perhaps Evie hadn’t known how to use the camera. More likely she’d never had the time to learn: after the shock of her husband’s death there’d been the farm to deal
with.

Jessamy released the bough, with another smile at the camera, and darted towards something outside the frame. I knew it must be the hutches beside the fence which housed her beloved guinea pigs.
As she ran she turned and called out over her shoulder. There was no sound to this film so her words were lost, but I imagined she was pleading for them not to stop filming her. Jessamy always
loved being the centre of attention, the star, the focus. And that’s what she was for her mother. Not surprising, really, after such a long wait for her birth. Her mother had married Matthew
Winter in 1952 and Jessamy hadn’t arrived until 1967. But I didn’t want to think about Evie’s problems conceiving.

I’ve noticed that there’s always one child in each clan who’s the golden one, the one your eye is drawn to. Jessamy held that position in our family. I’ve noticed, too,
how these children seem more likely to end up prematurely dead or involved in some tragedy. Maybe the gods really do love them too much. Or else they envy those shining faces and supple limbs.

I couldn’t watch this footage without my eyes pricking. Perhaps we were all once children playing outside on a sunny lawn in some endless, blissful summer, adult worries hidden beyond the
dark shrubs at the bottom of the garden.

Yet there was a shadow falling on Jessamy in this film, a real shadow, not a metaphorical one. It wasn’t that of the person holding the camera, as far as I could calculate; it fell from
someone observing the scene at some distance to the right of the camera. Not Matthew: he’d died four years earlier. The shadow might have been Evie herself but I could make out the edge of
her peony-printed dress at the other side of the garden. She must have been tying back an early rose or pulling bindweed from a shrub. Evie was never one for pushing herself forward into the frame,
even though her beauty usually drew all eyes to her. Her modesty was one of the things I loved most about my aunt. Perhaps she’d never shaken off her sense of being an incomer in this
village, even though she’d lived at the farm for over sixty years. ‘I wasn’t born here,’ she’d said once. ‘Not like you, Jessamy.’ And Jessamy had wriggled
with pride. ‘I’m a native, aren’t I, Mum?’ And Evie’s smile had been full of love.

I’d felt a prick of jealousy. Like my aunt, I hadn’t been born on the farm. I was only a visitor. But Evie had spotted my discomfort. ‘You’ve been coming to stay since
you were a baby, Rachel. You belong here too.’ And Jess had flung her arms round me.

‘I wish you could live here all the time.’ And her breath had been warm against me, scented with the Heinz tomato soup we’d had for supper. Her hug was so tight I could barely
tell where I stopped and she started. Sometimes this lack of boundaries pushed me into situations I found frightening: she’d put me up on her pony and insist I rode at a jump I knew I
wouldn’t manage. Or she invented one of her terrifying games and made me join in: climbing out of the bedroom window, or running across the field the bull lived in. But I could never resist
the lure of that wide grin, those sparkling eyes. ‘C’mon, Rachel, dare you!’

But now the shadow in the film was preoccupying me. Whose was it? I tried to assess its height and breadth. But my efforts came to nothing. It might just be that of a passing neighbour, come to
drop off a cake or collect eggs. Anyway, it was hard to concentrate on its grey outline because Jessamy was moving again, turning cartwheel after cartwheel, her limbs long and tanned, her movements
smooth and accomplished for such a young child. The shadow swayed slightly as she passed over it. I found myself clenching my hands, willing its darkness away from the girl.

But I was also feeling another reaction to the film, an emotion I tried to push aside as it was unworthy and immature. Where was I when this film was shot? I told myself I was being ridiculous.
It was too early in the summer for me to have come to stay at Winter’s Copse for the school holidays. And this obviously wasn’t one of the weekends Dad drove me over for a brief visit.
None of this logic soothed me. I was jealous, envious of Jessamy’s life at the farm without me. ‘There’s always a home for you here,’ Evie had told me more than once.
‘We miss you so much when you go back to school.’ But nobody in this film seemed to be missing the absent niece and cousin. Perhaps they never thought of me at all when I was away.
Uncle Matthew had died and Evie and Jessamy had drawn even closer together in their loss.

I wasn’t going to let myself revert to being a prickly little girl. ‘I’m going to pull myself together,’ I’d told Luke as I left the flat to come down here.
‘Sorting out the house will be cathartic. And when I come home again you’ll find me a changed woman. No more weeping. No more hormones. I shall redecorate our bedroom and book an exotic
holiday for us. And I’ll reinvigorate my business. Clients will come flooding in.’

He’d looked down at the suitcase he was carrying to the car for me. ‘I’m worried it’ll all be too much for you.’

‘No.’ I took the suitcase. ‘I can manage.’

‘I don’t doubt that.’ He sounded sad.

‘You know what I’m like: I need to keep busy.’ I patted my jeans pocket to make sure I’d got paracetamol with me. At least I didn’t have to worry about taking
painkillers now.

‘Are you sure you’re OK to drive?’

‘It’s been twelve hours since my last drink.’ My head gave a rebuking throb.

‘I didn’t mean the alcohol.’

I knew he didn’t.

‘Do you really have to do this now, Rachel? Couldn’t it wait?’

‘I need to start clearing the house.’ I picked up my suitcase. ‘And plan the funeral now we can go ahead.’

‘You could plan it from here. You don’t need to be in Oxfordshire to make phone calls.’

My hand tightened on the handle and I laid the case in the car boot. ‘There’s the dog. I need to find a home for him. I need to talk to letting agents. I need . . .’

I need to be at Winter’s Copse, I wanted to say. I need to feel my aunt and cousin are close by. Even if they’re both dead. I need to come to terms with the shock of Evie’s
death, so sudden, so unexpected. Perhaps something of Evie will still linger in the house. Perhaps there will be answers.