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Ralph was back. Nicky.

The front door opened and Nicky came in, his face white and drained.

‘Is she upstairs still?'

The boy began taking the stairs, two at a time.

‘Nicky, don't.'

He didn't pause.

‘Nicky! She's not here.'

He stopped dead. Turned.

‘What do you mean? Where is she then?'

‘This morning, before we woke up. Just before dawn. I think she might have left. I can't find her anywhere.'

Nicky shot him an angry, bewildered look, then ran up to check her room. Patricia passed him coming down the stairs, asking Peter where Sarah was. Did he know she wasn't in her room?

After a further search of the house, all of them taking part, Nicky went up to the village and looked for her; no sign of her.

They convened in the kitchen, Nicky distraught. ‘Well, where can she be? Tell me what happened. Tell me exactly what happened.'

‘We don't know, Nicky,' said Alice. ‘She was fine, and then suddenly she wasn't. She lost her voice. We called the doctor. She slept. And then this morning we got up and, well, now this.'

‘It doesn't make any sense. You're not making any sense. Start from the beginning, Mum.' He was waving his hands, chopping the air into blocks. His auburn hair was tousled and on end, the blue tinge that could make his lips violet hued was marked now. ‘What happened? What did you say to her? Mum?'

‘Nicky! I didn't say anything.'

Peter broke in. ‘It must be almost six hours since I heard the door
closing, and I think that's when she left, last night. If only I'd got up. But what is really worrying at this moment is why she wouldn't have phoned by now, let us know something.' Peter swallowed, looked over at his wife. ‘Perhaps we should call the police?'

Patricia began to cry.

The doorbell sounded. Nicky leapt up to answer it. Alice followed, the others gathering in the doorway behind them. It was Barbara with the post, a handful of wedding cards for Nicky and Sarah.

Barbara looked gleeful. ‘Maureen says she's bringing the cake round tomorrow morning. She's really done a lovely job. And I'll come by with the others from the village to help with the flowers in church first thing on the big day. And Sarah was up bright and early this morning. Saw her getting on the first bus to Stanford. Off to town to get last-minute things I expect. It never ends with a wedding, does it?'

‘The first bus? What time was that?' said Patricia.

‘Oh, about six. I saw her from the window. With the birds waking me up I can never get back to sleep on summer mornings, and I thought, Well, there's Sarah, up and about already. I must say she's a keen one.'

Alice waited till Barbara was crunching away up the gravel, waved to her as she went and then shut the door.

Nicky was already gathering up the car keys. ‘I'm going into Stanford to look for her.'

‘I'll come with you,' said Peter. ‘We can both look.'

‘Wait.' It was Alice speaking. ‘What are we going to do, all the people planning to turn up for a wedding in forty-eight hours?'

A silence. No one wanted to think about it, let alone make a decision.

‘Let's give it a little longer,' said Ralph.

Alice pressed her lips together.

As they left, Nicky wound down the car window and called out,
‘I'll ring you from Stanford, in case she's called while I'm gone. You'll listen out for the phone, yes?'

The car moved away up the drive, turned into the village. Alice caught a glimpse of Peter's face through the side window and his set and anxious expression. For a moment she saw another day, a much younger Peter, a white face in the back window as the car pulled away, and she felt the shape of old regrets, stored somewhere under her breastbone.

She shouldn't have given up so easily.

CHAPTER 12

Buxton, 1940

Peter wheeled his bike round the back of the house and put it away in the shed. In the kitchen he got a drink of cold water from the tap. He left his books lying on the kitchen table and ran upstairs to hang his uniform on a coat hanger on the back of the door, and then changed into the shorts and shirt that he wore to help Maudey with the chores, rolling up his sleeves. It was stuffy up there under the eaves after a day of unusually warm spring weather. He opened the casement window. Cooler air and birdsong came in from the garden – and music.

Looking over to the top lawn he saw a figure spread out on a rug. Alice was back from Oxford. She was lying on her front, propped up on her elbows, reading a book. She wore a pretty, flowered dress and a cardigan. Next to her was the wind-up gramophone from the drawing room. Her feet were rubbing together in the air as Beethoven sounded out across the lawn – a little swell of pride because he knew the name of the music now.

He went to the sink and splashed cold water on his face, looked in the spotted mirror that hung on a string. He combed his hair, wetting it down, neat and shiny.

By the time he got downstairs Peter realised that he desperately wanted to do the gardening that Maudey had had in mind for him to do for the past week. So far he had sidestepped it with other tasks
around the kitchen; but now he really wanted to get out and begin, starting perhaps with the beds in the top terrace.

Maudey had a bowl full of three small lettuces from the greenhouse.

‘Be a good lad and wash those out for me, Peter. And you can pat them dry on that tea towel.'

Then there was the dining table to set, potatoes had to be peeled. Maudey was standing over the kitchen table puzzling over her recipe for ham and chicken pie. ‘I don't know how I'm supposed to make a nice pie for tonight, with not a shred of ham and precious little chicken. Ah well, there's lots worse off than us. It's a blessing Mr Hanbury has so many friends who want to give him presents.' She picked up an egg and cracked it into a bowl. ‘And I don't know what it is in those boxes that come from America, but it's not dried eggs like it says on the cover, I can tell you that.'

Peter left Maudey to her problems with the pie and fetched the trowel and trug from the garden shed. He decided not to put on the hessian apron. Far too hot.

He began digging at the dry dirt round the roses where feeble green weeds had started to appear. Alice turned her head but didn't call out her usual hello.

The last time she had left for Oxford Alice had shown him a shelf in her bookcase where she had collected together the books he should read while she was away:
David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Moby Dick, The Complete Works of Shakespeare
. Peter couldn't wait to tell her that he had read all of them, well, not all of the Shakespeare, but she looked too preoccupied, tapping her foot in the warm air in a way that seemed irritable. The chipping noise of the trowel made her glance over and frown as the music reached the third movement, the bit he liked best. He was dying to tell her that he knew the name of the one she was listening to now; he had sat in the school room and listened to a record of Beethoven's ‘Pastoral', trying to identify the
feelings that swept over him in waves – or trying sometimes to feel a little more noble in the long sleepy passages where the feeling he identified was very like boredom. In the evening, doing his homework at the kitchen table, he liked to leave the door open so that he could hear the Radio Three broadcasts that Mrs Hanbury listened to in the drawing room.

He'd popped into Alice's room to change his book quite often. He felt like a thief each time, even though her instructions to borrow the books had been clear. He knew that if he were caught he'd be in trouble; they'd forget what Alice had said. He would stand carefully on the Chinese silk rug by her bed, reading the book spines, easing one out reverently, putting it back, repeating the process several times with various books, taking a long time to make his choice.

The smell of the room would assert its presence, faded perfume and aired cotton and something a bit sad and musty. He couldn't help glancing around. He knew by heart every item on her dressing table, the glass candlesticks, the china rabbit in a blue coat, the silver hairbrush set on the glass top of the table, the curtain of flowered material where the stool was pushed against the cloth. He liked to admire the swirly reproduction of trees by Van Gogh – he'd seen the picture in a book of prints in the school library.

He hacked down round an embedded dandelion root. Alice had been turning the pages of her book abruptly, flicking her foot faster. Now she glanced over at him and frowned again. Peter got up and carried away his trug filled with weeds.

Over the next few days there was still no opportunity to ask Alice all the questions he had about her books. Alice seemed to have returned home caught in a black mood, angry and distant. Carrying the breakfast through to the table one morning, Peter found Alice explaining to her mother why the ballet – her father had taken them to see
Coppélia
in Manchester as a treat – had in fact been lacking in
many ways. Her mother burst into tears as he set the plate in front of Alice and said she didn't know why Alice always had to find fault with everything.

‘Honestly, Mummy,' Alice insisted. ‘If one can't give a perfectly sensible and intelligent critique.'

But Mrs Hanbury wasn't listening; she said that since Alice had been at Oxford, none of them were clever enough any more and she was always having to be horrid about something. Mrs Hanbury left her kipper unfinished to go upstairs and lie down.

Alice sat at the table, crossly buttering toast with a scraping sound until she let the butter knife fall with a clatter on her plate, saying, ‘Oh, but she always manages to make me feel so wretched,' to no one in particular, or Peter perhaps. She left with arms folded across her chest to follow her mother upstairs.

It took Peter a couple of days to understand that a disaster had happened. Richard had dropped Alice.

Peter carried the tea tray into the drawing room and Mrs Hanbury smiled a thank you. Not particularly quickly, but very carefully, Peter set the tea things out on the table.

‘Do pour, Peter. Thank you, dear.'

Mrs Hanbury took a sock from the basket of mending by her chair and spread the wool out with her hand to show a gaping hole. ‘It's not as if they're an especially grand family really. Nothing like the Devonshires. I hear his money was from Mustard.'

‘Oh Mummy, can't you leave that mending for Maudey to do? Really.'

‘But it's hardly fair on Maudey, darling, when she has to spend so much time queuing and it's quite impossible to find extra staff to help out now. With a war on, one would need to consider oneself terribly grand to be above darning a sock and spend all day doing needlepoint. She sniffed, no doubt remembering how Alice had praised Richard's
mother's needlepoint cushions. ‘Here, darling, if we can match the colour then these cotton stockings could be mended quite nicely. So hard to get new ones.'

With a look of distaste Alice slid her hand inside some dun-coloured hosiery and spread the hole in the toe with her fingers. She took the needle and thread from her mother and began to stitch angrily, her fair hair hiding her face as she bent over her task. Some dark drops fell on the cotton. Peter was horrified to realise that Alice was crying. Who was this Richard? He felt sure, if he were to appear right now, he could lay him out with a right hook. He might be skinny, but he'd stood up for Kitty before now when a boy was calling her names in the street.

He carried the empty tray out of the room, pausing quietly outside the door, as if he should stand guard in the hallway. At least Alice would cheer up once he told her how he'd read tons of her books. ‘Oh Peter,' she might say, ‘I knew you had it in you. Not all men are like Richard,' she'd say, happy and grateful.

He heard nose-blowing. Cooing from Mrs Hanbury. ‘I don't know what I'm crying about, Mummy. I don't even care about Richard any more. I just feel so angry, looking such a fool.'

‘I'm sure you've met lots of nice men in Oxford. Someone else who's special in some way?'

‘No, Mummy. And honestly, that's not why I'm at Oxford. Anyway, anyone half decent has already been called up.'

‘Oh darling, the right person will come along. You'll see. One has to wait for these things.'

Peter carried the empty tray back to the kitchen, holding it out in front of him as if it held a scroll with his entire future written on it. When he grew up he was going to look after Alice; nothing would stop him becoming worthy of the task.

When he went back later to collect the cups and cold teapot, it was just Alice in the room. She had pink patches on her cheeks.
She had evidently decided to work through the whole basket of mending.

Now would be a good time to speak.

‘Read all them books, miss, on the shelf.'

She flinched and tutted. Sucked her finger where the needle had jabbed it. ‘Gosh. All of them? You do read a lot, Peter. Oh and leave the plate.' There were a couple of Rich Tea biscuits still left on it. She took a snuffly bite at one of them, carried on stabbing the darning and chewing the biscuit mournfully. She sighed. ‘And look, well done. It's splendid of you, really it is. I'm sorry I'm in such a rotten stew just now.'

If that Richard ever turned up he'd definitely thump him, good and proper.