The Last Telegram

LIZ TRENOW
The Last Telegram

Copyright

AVON

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Liz Trenow 2012

Liz Trenow asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content or written content has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780007480821

Ebook Edition © September 2012 ISBN: 9780007480838

Version: 2018-07-17

In memory of my father, Peter Walters (1919–2011), under whose directorship the mill produced many thousands of yards of wartime parachute silk. All of it perfect.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Book Club Q&A for The Last Telegram, by Liz Trenow

About the Author

Also by Liz Trenow

About the Publisher

Chapter One

The history of silk owes much to the fairer sex. The Chinese Empress Hsi Ling is credited with its first discovery, in 2640 BC. It is said that a cocoon fell from the mulberry tree, under which she was sitting, into her cup of tea. As she sought to remove the cocoon its sticky threads started to unravel and cling to her fingers. Upon examining the thread more closely she immediately saw its potential and dedicated her life thereafter to the cultivation of the silkworm and production of silk for weaving and embroidery.

From The History of Silk , by Harold Verner

Perhaps because death leaves so little to say, funeral guests seem to take refuge in platitudes. ‘He had a good innings … Splendid send-off … Very moving service … Such beautiful flowers … You are so wonderfully brave, Lily.’

It’s not bravery: my squared shoulders, head held high, that careful expression of modesty and gratitude. Not bravery, just determination to survive today and, as soon as possible, get on with what remains of my life. The body in the expensive coffin, lined with Verners’ silk and decorated with lilies, and now deep in the ground, is not the man I’ve loved and shared my life with for the past fifty-five years.

It is not the man who helped to put me back together after the shattering events of the war, who held my hand and steadied my heart with his wise counsel, the man who took me as his own and became a loving father and grandfather. The joy of our lives together helped us both to bury the terrors of the past. No, that person disappeared months ago, when the illness took its final hold. His death was a blessed release and I have already done my grieving. Or at least, that’s what I keep telling myself.

After the service the house fills with people wanting to ‘pay their final respects’. But I long for them to go, and eventually they drift away, leaving behind the detritus of a remembered life along with the half-drunk glasses, the discarded morsels of food.

Around me, my son and his family are washing up, vacuuming, emptying the bins. In the harsh kitchen light I notice a shimmer of grey in Simon’s hair (the rest of it is dark, like his father’s) and realise with a jolt that he must be well into middle age. His wife Louise, once so slight, is rather rounder than before. No wonder, after two babies. They deserve to live in this house, I think, to have more room for their growing family. But today is not the right time to talk about moving.

I go to sit in the drawing room as they have bidden me, and watch for the first time the slide show that they have created for the guests at the wake. I am mesmerised as the TV screen flicks through familiar photographs, charting his life from sepia babyhood through monochrome middle years and into a technicolour old age, each image occupying the screen for just a few brief seconds before blurring into the next.

At first I turn away, finding it annoying, even insulting. What a travesty, I think, a long, loving life bottled into a slide show. But as the carousel goes back to the beginning and the photographs start to repeat themselves, my relief that he is gone and will suffer no more is replaced, for the first time since his death, by a dawning realisation of my own loss.

It’s no wonder I loved him so; such a good looking man, active and energetic. A man of unlimited selflessness, of many smiles and little guile. Who loved every part of me, infinitely. What a lucky woman. I find myself smiling back, with tears in my eyes.

My granddaughter brings a pot of tea. At seventeen, Emily is the oldest of her generation of Verners, a clever, sensitive girl growing up faster than I can bear. I see in her so much of myself at that age: not exactly pretty in the conventional way – her nose is slightly too long – but striking, with smooth cheeks and a creamy complexion that flushes at the slightest hint of discomfiture. Her hair, the colour of black coffee, grows thick and straight, and her dark inquisitive eyes shimmer with mischief or chill with disapproval. She has that determined Verner jawline that says, ‘don’t mess with me’. She’s tall and lanky, all arms and legs, rarely out of the patched jeans and charity-shop jumpers which seem to be all the rage with her generation these days. Unsophisticated but self-confident, exhaustingly energetic – and always fun. Had my own daughter lived, I sometimes think, she would have been like Emily.

At this afternoon’s wake the streak of crimson she’s emblazoned into the flick of her fringe was like an exotic bird darting among the dark suits and dresses. Soon she will fly, as they all do, these independent young women. But for the moment she indulges me with her company and conversation, and I cherish every moment.

She hands me a cup of weak tea with no milk, just how I like it, and then plonks herself down on the footstool next to me. We watch the slide show together for a few moments and she says, ‘I miss Grandpa, you know. Such an amazing man. He was so full of ideas and enthusiasm – I loved the way he supported everything we did, even the crazy things.’ She’s right, I think to myself. I was a lucky woman.

‘He always used to ask me about stuff,’ she goes on. ‘He was always interested in what I was doing with myself. Not many grownups do that. A great listener.’

As usual my smart girl goes straight to the heart of it. It’s something I’m probably guilty of, not listening enough. ‘You can talk to me, now that he’s gone.’ I say, a bit too quickly. ‘Tell me what’s new.’

‘You really want to know?’

‘Yes, I really do,’ I say. Her legs, in heart-patterned black tights, seem to stretch for yards beyond her miniskirt and my heart swells with love for her, the way she gives me her undivided attention for these moments of proper talking time.

‘Have I told you I’m going to India?’ she says.

‘My goodness, how wonderful,’ I say. ‘How long for?’

‘Only a month,’ she says airily.

I’m achingly envious of her youth, her energy, her freedom. I wanted to travel too, at her age, but war got in the way. My thoughts start to wander until I remember my commitment to listening. ‘What are you going to do there?’

‘We’re going to an orphanage. In December, with a group from college. To dig the foundations for a cowshed,’ she says triumphantly. I’m puzzled, and distracted by the idea of elegant Emily wielding a shovel in the heat, her slender hands calloused and dirty, hair dulled by dust.

‘Why does an orphanage need a cowshed?’

‘So they can give the children fresh milk. It doesn’t get delivered to the doorstep like yours does, Gran,’ she says, reprovingly. ‘We’re raising money to buy the cows.’

‘How much do you need?’

‘About two thousand. Didn’t I tell you? I’m doing a sponsored parachute jump.’ The thought of my precious Emily hanging from a parachute harness makes me feel giddy, as if capsized by some great gust of wind. ‘Don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe,’ she says. ‘It’s with a professional jump company, all above board. I’ll show you.’

She returns with her handbag – an impractical affair covered in sequins – extracts a brochure and gives it to me. I pretend to read it, but the photographs of cheerful children preparing for their jumps seem to mock me and make me even more fearful. She takes the leaflet back. ‘You should know all about parachutes, Gran. You used to make them, Dad said.’

‘Well,’ I start tentatively, ‘weaving parachute silk was our contribution to the war effort. It kept us going when lots of other mills closed.’ I can picture the weaving shed as if from above, each loom with its wide white spread, shuttles clacking back and forth, the rolls of woven silk growing almost imperceptibly thicker with each turn of the weighted cloth beam.

‘But why did they use silk?’

‘It’s strong and light, packs into a small bag and unwraps quickly because it’s so slippery.’ My voice is steadying now and I can hear that old edge of pride. Silk seems still to be threaded through my veins. Even now I can smell its musty, nutty aroma, see the lustrous intensity of its colours – emerald, aquamarine, gold, crimson, purple – and recite the exotic names like a mantra: brigandine, bombazine, brocatelle, douppion, organzine, pongee, schappe.

She studies the leaflet again, peering through the long fringe that flops into her eyes. ‘It says here the parachutes we’re going to use are of high quality one-point-nine ounce, ripstop nylon. Why didn’t they use nylon in those days? Wouldn’t it have been cheaper?’

‘They hadn’t really invented nylon by then, not good enough for parachutes. You have to get it just right for parachutes,’ I say and then, with a shiver, those pitiless words slip into my head after all these years. Get it wrong and you’ve got dead pilots.

She rubs my arm gently with her fingertips to smooth down the little hairs, looking at me anxiously. ‘Are you cold, Gran?’

‘No, my lovely, it’s just the memories.’ I send up a silent prayer that she will never know the dreary fear of war, when all normal life is suspended, the impossible becomes ordinary, when every decision seems to be a matter of life or death, when goodbyes are often for good.

It tends to take the shine off you.

A little later Emily’s brother appears and loiters in his adolescent way, then comes and sits by me and holds my hand, in silence. I am touched to the core. Then her father comes in, looking weary. His filial duties complete, he hovers solicitously. ‘Is there any more we can do, Mum?’ I shake my head and mumble my gratitude for the nth time today.

‘We’ll probably be off in a few minutes. Sure you’ll be all right?’ he says. ‘We can stay a little longer if you like.’

Finally they are persuaded to go. Though I love their company I long for peace, to stop being the brave widow, release my rictus smile. I make a fresh pot of tea, and there on the kitchen table is the leaflet Emily has left, presumably to prompt my sponsorship. I hide it under the newspaper and pour the tea, but my trembling hands cause a minor storm in the teacup. I decant the tea into a mug and carry it with two hands to my favourite chair.

In the drawing room, I am relieved to find that the slide show has been turned off, the TV screen returned to its innocuous blackness. From the wide bay window looking westwards across the water meadows is an expanse of greenery and sky which always helps me to think more clearly.

The house is a fine, double-bayed Edwardian villa, built of mellow Suffolk bricks that look grey in the rain, but in sunlight take on the colour of golden honey. Not grand, just comfortable and well-proportioned, reflecting how my parents saw themselves, their place in the world. They built it on a piece of spare land next to the silk mill during a particularly prosperous period just after the Great War. ‘It’s silk umbrellas, satin facings and black mourning crepe we have to thank for this place,’ my father, always the merchant, would cheerfully and unselfconsciously inform visitors.

Stained-glass door panels throw kaleidoscope patterns of light into generous hallways, and the drawing room is sufficiently spacious to accommodate Mother’s baby grand as well as three chintz sofas clustered companionably around a handsome marble fireplace.

To the mill side of the house, when I was a child, was a walled kitchen garden, lush with aromatic fruit bushes and deep green salads. On the other side, an ancient orchard provided an autumn abundance of apples and pears, so much treasured during the long years of rationing, and a grass tennis court in which worm casts ensured such an unpredictable bounce of the ball that our games could never be too competitive. The parade of horse chestnut trees along its lower edge still bloom each May with ostentatious candelabra of flowers.

At the back of the house is the conservatory, restored after the doodlebug disaster but now much in need of repair. From the terrace, brick steps lead to a lawn that rolls out towards the water meadows. Through these meadows, yellow with cowslips in spring and buttercups in summer, meanders the river, lined with gnarled willows that appeared to my childhood eyes like processions of crook-backed witches. It is Constable country.

‘Will you look at this view?’ my mother would exclaim, stopping on the landing with a basket of laundry, resting it on the generous windowsill and stretching her back. ‘People pay hundreds of guineas for paintings of this, but we see it from our windows every day. Never forget, little Lily, how lucky you are to live here.’

No, Mother, I have never forgotten.

I close my eyes and take a deep breath.

The room smells of old whisky and wood smoke and reverberates with long-ago conversations. Family secrets lurk in the skirting boards. This is where I grew up. I’ve never lived anywhere else, and after nearly eighty years it will be a wrench to leave. The place is full of memories, of my childhood, of him, of loving and losing.

As I walk ever more falteringly through the hallways, echoes of my life – mundane and strange, joyful and dreadful – are like shadows, always there, following my footsteps. Now that he is gone, I am determined to make a new start. No more guilt and heart-searching. No more ‘what-ifs’. I need to make the most of the few more years that may be granted to me.

Chapter Two

China maintained its monopoly of silk production for around 3,000 years. The secret was eventually released, it is said, by a Chinese princess. Given unhappily in marriage to an Indian prince, she was so distressed at the thought of forgoing her silken clothing that she hid some silkworm eggs in her headdress before travelling to India for the wedding ceremony. In this way they were secretly exported to her new country.

From The History of Silk, by Harold Verner

It’s a week since the funeral and everyone remarks on how well I’m doing, but in the past couple of days I’ve been unaccountably out of sorts. Passing the hall mirror I catch a glimpse of a gaunt old woman, rather shorter than me, with sunken eyes and straggly grey hair, dressed in baggy beige. That can’t be me, surely? Have I shrunk so much?

Of course I miss him, another human presence in the house; though the truth is that it’s been hard the last few years, what with the care he needed and the worry I lived through. Now I can get on with the task in hand: sorting out this house, and my life.

Emily comes round after school. I’m usually delighted to see her and keep a special tin of her favourite biscuits for such occasions. But today I’d rather not see anyone.

‘What’s up, Gran? You don’t usually refuse tea.’

‘I don’t know. I’m just grumpy, for some reason.’

‘What about?’

‘I haven’t a clue, perhaps just with the world.’

She looks at me too wisely for her years. ‘I know what this is about, Gran.’

‘It’s a crotchety old woman having a bad day.’

‘No, silly. It’s part of the grieving process. It’s quite natural.’

‘What do you mean, the grieving process? You grieve, you get over it,’ I snap. Why do young people today think they know it all?

She’s unfazed by my irritation. ‘The five stages of mourning. Now what were they?’ She twists a stub of hair in her fingers and ponders for a moment. ‘Some psychologist with a double-barrelled name described them. Okay, here we go. Are you paying attention? The five stages of grieving are,’ she ticks them off on her long fingers, ‘denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance – something like that.’

‘They’ve got lists for everything these days: ten steps to success, twenty ways to turn your life around, that kind of rubbish,’ I grumble.

‘She’s really respected, honestly. Wish I could remember her name. We learned it in AS psychology. You should think about it. Perhaps you’ve reached the angry stage?’

She goes to make the tea, leaving me wondering. Why would I be angry? Our generation never even considered how we grieved, though heaven knows we did enough of it. Perhaps there was too much to mourn. We just got on with it. Don’t complain, make the best of a bad lot, keep on smiling. That’s how we won the war, or so they told us.

Emily comes back with the tea tray. Along with knowing everything else she seems to have discovered where I hide the biscuits.

‘No school today?’

‘Revision week,’ she says, airily. ‘What are you up to?’

‘Packing. Sorting out stuff for the charity shop.’

‘Can I help?’

‘There’s nothing I’d like more.’

After tea we go upstairs to the spare room, where I’ve made a tentative start at turning out cupboards and wardrobes that have been untouched for years. Inside one of these mothball-scented mausoleums we find three of my suits hanging like empty carapaces. Why have I kept them for so long? Ridiculous to imagine that one day I might again wear a classic pencil skirt or a fitted jacket. It’s been decades since I wore them but they still carry the imprint of my business self; skirts shiny-seated from office chairs, jacket elbows worn from resting on the table, chin in hand, through many a meeting.

‘Now that’s what you call power dressing,’ Emily says, pulling on a jacket and admiring herself in the long mirror on the inside of the door. ‘Look at those shoulder pads, and such tiny waists. You must have been a looker, Gran. Can I keep this one? Big shoulders are so cool.’

‘Of course, my darling. I thought they went out in the eighties.’

‘Back in again,’ she says, moving the piles of clothes and black bin liners and sitting down on the bed, patting the empty space beside her. ‘You really enjoyed your job, didn’t you?’

‘I suppose so,’ I say, joining her. ‘I never really thought about it before. We were too busy just getting on with it. But I suppose I did enjoy it.’ I hear myself paraphrasing Gwen’s analogy, ‘It’s a kind of alchemy, you know. Like turning dull metal into gold. But better because silk has such beautiful patterns and colours.’

‘That’s rather poetic,’ Emily says. ‘Dad never talks about it like that.’

‘Neither did your grandfather,’ I say. ‘Men are never any good at showing their emotions. Besides, even with something as wonderful as silk, you tend to take it for granted when you work with it every day.’

‘Didn’t you ever get bored?’

I think for a moment. ‘No, I don’t believe I ever did.’

‘You didn’t seem especially happy when I asked you about parachute silk the other day.’

I wish the words would not grip my heart so painfully. ‘It’s only because I don’t like the idea of you jumping out of a plane, dearest girl,’ I say, trying to soothe myself as much as her.

‘I’ll be fine, Gran,’ she says breezily. ‘You mustn’t worry. We’re doing other stuff to raise money, too. If you find anything I could put in for our online auction when you’re turning out your cupboards, that would be amazing.’

‘Anything you like,’ I say. She turns back to the wardrobe and seems to be rummaging on the floor.

‘What’s this, Gran?’ comes her muffled voice.

‘I don’t know what you’ve found,’ I say.

As she pulls out the brown leather briefcase my heart does a flip which feels more like a double cartwheel. It’s battered and worn, but the embossed initials are still clear on the lid. Of course I knew it was there, but for the past sixty years it has been hidden in the darkest recesses of the wardrobe, and of my mind. Even though I haven’t cast eyes on it for decades, those familiar twin aches of sorrow and guilt start to throb in my bones.

‘What’s in it, Gran?’ she asks, impatiently fiddling with the catches. ‘It seems to be jammed.’

It’s locked, I now recall with relief, and the key is safely in my desk. Those old brass catches are sturdy enough to withstand even Emily’s determined tugging. ‘It’s just old papers, probably rubbish,’ I mutter, dazed by this unexpected discovery. I know every detail of what the case contains, of course, a package of memories so intense and so painful that I never want to confront them again. But I cannot bring myself to throw it away.

Perhaps I will retrieve it when she is gone and get rid of it once and for all, I think. Yes, that’s what I’ll do. ‘Pop it back in the wardrobe, darling. I’ll have a look later,’ I say, as calmly as I can muster. ‘Shall we have some lunch?’

After this little shock my enthusiasm for packing goes into a steep decline. I need to pop to the shop for more milk, but it’s just started raining, so I am hunting in the cupboard under the stairs for my summer raincoat when something catches my eye: an old wooden tennis racket, still in its press, with a rusty wing nut at each corner. The catgut strings are baggy, the leather-wrapped handle frayed and greying with mould.

I pull it out of the cupboard, slip off the press and take a few tentative swings. The balance is still good. And then, without warning, I find myself back in that heat-wave day in 1938 – July, it must have been. Vera and I had played a desultory game of tennis – no shoes, just bare feet on the grass court. The only balls we could find were moth-eaten, and before long we had mis-hit all of them over the chain link fence into the long grass of the orchard. Tiptoeing carefully for fear of treading on the bees that were busily foraging in the flowering clover, we found two. The third was nowhere to be seen.

‘Give up,’ Vera sighed, flopping face down on the court, careless of grass stains, her tanned arms and legs splayed like a swimmer, her red-painted fingernails shouting freedom from school. I laid down beside her and breathed out slowly, allowing my thoughts to wander. The sun on my cheek became the touch of a warm hand, the gentle breeze in my hair his breath as he whispered that he loved me.

‘Penny for them?’ Vera said, after a bit.

‘The usual. You know. Now shut up and let me get back to him.’

Vera had been my closest friend ever since I forgave her for pulling my pigtails at nursery school. In other words, for most of my life. By our teens we were an odd couple; I’d grown a good six inches taller than her, but despite doing all kinds of exercises my breasts refused to grow, while Vera was shaping up nicely, blooming into the hourglass figure of a Hollywood starlet.

I was no beauty, neither was I exactly plain, but I longed to look more feminine and made several embarrassing attempts to fix a permanent wave into my thick brown hair. Even today the smell of perm lotion leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, reminding me of the frizzy messes that were the catastrophic result of my bathroom experiments. So I’d opted instead for a new chin-length bob that made me feel tremendously bold and modern, while Vera bleached her hair a daring platinum blonde and shaped it into a Hollywood wave. Together we spent hours in front of the mirror practising our make-up, and Vera developed clever ways to emphasise her dimples and Clara Bow lips. She generously declared that she’d positively die for my cheekbones and long eyelashes.

In all other ways we were very alike – laughed at the same things, hankered after the same boys, loved the same music, felt strongly about the same injustices. We were both eighteen, just out of school and aching to fall in love.

‘Do I hear you sighing in the arms of your lover?’

‘Mais oui, un très sexy Frenchman.’

‘You daft thing. Been reading too much True Romance.’

More silence, punctuated by the low comforting chug of a tractor on the road and cows on the water meadows calling for their calves. School seemed like another country. A mild anxiety about imminent exam results was the only blip in a future that otherwise stretched enticingly ahead. Then Vera said, ‘What do you think’s really going to happen?’

‘What do you mean? I’m going to Geneva to learn French with the most handsome man on earth, and you’re going to empty bed pans at Barts. That’s what we planned, isn’t it?’

She ignored the dig. ‘I mean with the Germans. Hitler invading Austria and all that.’

‘They’re sorting it out, aren’t they?’ I said, watching wisps of cloud almost imperceptibly changing their shapes in the deepest of blue skies. That very morning at the breakfast table my father had sighed over The Times and muttered, ‘Chamberlain had better get his skates on. Last thing we need is another ruddy war.’ But here in the sunshine, I refused to imagine anything other than my perfect life.

‘I flipping well hope so,’ Vera said.

The branch-line train to Braintree whistled in the distance and the bruised smell of mown grass hung heavily in the air. It seemed impossible that armies of one country were marching into another, taking it over by force. And not so far away: Austria was just the other side of France. People we knew went on walking holidays there. My brother went skiing there, just last winter, and sent us a postcard of improbably-pointed mountains covered in snow.

The sun started to cool, slipping behind the poplars and casting long stripes of shade across the meadow. We got up and started looking again for the lost ball.

‘We’d better get home,’ I said, suddenly remembering. ‘Mother said John might be on the boat train this afternoon.’

‘Why didn’t you say? He’s been away months.’

‘Nearly a year. I’ve missed him.’

‘I thought you hated him,’ she giggled, walking backwards in front of me, ‘I certainly did. I’ve still got the scar from when he pushed me off the swing accidentally-on-purpose,’ she said, pointing to her forehead.

‘Teasing his little sister and her best friend was all part of the game.’ The truth was that like most siblings John and I had spent our childhood tussling for parental attention, but to me he was always a golden boy; tall like a tennis ace, with a fashionable flick of dark blond hair at his forehead. Not intellectual, but an all-rounder, good at sports, musical like my mother and annoyingly confident of his attractiveness to girls. And yes, I had missed him while he’d been away studying in Switzerland.

Vera and I were helping to set the tea in the drawing room when the bell rang. I dashed to the front door.

‘Hello Sis,’ John boomed, his voice deeper than I remembered. Then to my surprise, he wrapped his arms round me and gave me a powerful hug. He wouldn’t have done that before, I thought. He stood back, looking me up and down. ‘Golly, you’ve grown. Any moment now you’ll be tall as me.’

‘You’ve got taller, too,’ I said. ‘I’ll never catch up.’

He laughed. ‘You’d better not. Like the haircut.’ Reeling from the unexpected compliment, surely the first I’d ever received from my brother, I saw his face go blank for a second and realised Vera was on the step behind me.