So Many Ways to Begin

And then there were the good days. Sitting in the back room with the window wide open, holding on to each other after a hot and spoilt day, untightening their tensions with a bottle of wine. The air drifting in from outside, thick and heavy, hungry for rain. Children shouting, the sound carrying all the way from the park.

Eleanor leant forward to pour herself another glass of wine, reaching back to rest a hand on his knee. I was scared though, she said quietly, I really didn't know where he'd gone. He sat forward, looking over at the photograph of her father, listening to her story of being lost on the heath one summer. He stroked his hand up and down her back, finishing his glass of wine and passing it to her. He lifted the hem of her T-shirt and tucked his hand beneath it, pressing it flat against her skin.

So where was he hiding? he asked.

Out on the moor, her father on the top of the rise, his taut outline silhouetted against the raw blue sky. She watched him put a hand to his chest, catching his breath, and then she crouched down to peer into the heather, looking at a crack in the hard grey rock, wondering how deep it went, trying to squeeze her hand into the gap. She stayed there for a few moments, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the undergrowth's shade, and then she stood up. Hold up now! she called, brushing the dirt from her knees and her hands.

Her father's silhouette had disappeared. Everything seemed suddenly very quiet. The faint huzz of the insects, the occasional pop of a gorse pod in the midday heat, the distant crashes from the shipyard in the town below. But no voices. No sign of life besides her own anxious breathing.

She ran to the top of the rise and looked but he wasn't anywhere. Maybe he'd sat down somewhere for a rest and she just couldn't see him, she thought. Maybe he'd fallen asleep and that's why he couldn't hear her shouting. Or maybe this was him vanished for ever, like Bill's dad did that time, or Annie's. Or like Grandad Hamish who got lost at sea. She wondered if she'd be okay to find her way home. She wondered if her mother would be cross with her for losing him. She walked on, swinging her arms stiffly, turning her head from left to right, scanning the hot landscape for any signs of life. All she saw were butterflies, pure white ones and red-brown ones, lifting and falling and tumbling across the heather. All she heard were the insects, her breathing, her feet kicking the dry sand along the track.

She remembered when the teacher told the class about Bill's dad. Bill sat scowling, like it didn't matter to him, like it was no bother and if anyone wanted to say otherwise they'd have him to deal with. His dad had been missing two weeks when they found him on the tideline down at Cammachmore, and they wouldn't let Bill look at him. But he said that didn't bother him, what difference did it make, and whenever she saw him he was always scowling like that, for weeks and weeks and weeks.

She hadn't got very far when she stopped and called out again. Her small voice fell flat amongst the heather and the bracken. She stood and turned and looked all around her, clenching her fists and trying hard not to be very close to tears. Maybe if she went back now and told someone, they could fetch up a whole lot of men to look for him. They could spread right out across the heather, like when the beaters sent the birds up for the guns. He might be lying somewhere with a turned ankle, and she'd never find him on her own, not even if she kept looking until it was dark. It'd be too late then, maybe.

She heard something behind her and before she could turn around there was a pair of thick strong arms wrapping around her waist and lifting her into the air, the sky sprawling dizzily away, his laughter gasping into the back of her neck. She tried to pull away but he was holding too tightly. That was a good one, eh Ellie? he said. Had you wondering there, didn't I? She didn't say anything. He let go of her and she moved away, sitting with her back to him and her arms wrapped around her knees. His hat was lying on the track a few feet away, where it must have fallen when he leapt up to grab hold of her. She felt like rushing over and stamping on it, or picking it up and running with it all the way to the sea, throwing it in and watching it fill with water and sink beneath the surface. But she didn't. She just glared at it, hotly, her eyes stinging a little. Probably she got some sand in them when he pulled her over, she thought.

You alright petal? he asked. I didn't frighten you, did I? She didn't say anything, but rubbed the corner of her eye roughly with the bony heel of her hand. She heard him shuffle and fidget behind her. She heard the snap and hiss of a match being struck, the slow sigh he always made when he lit a cigarette. Aye well, I'm here now, he said quietly.

David watched Eleanor carefully while she told him the story; how it had seemed like hours that she'd stood there in the crackling silence and wondered where he'd got to and if she should go for help, how he'd suddenly leapt out behind her, laughing, and lifted her up into the air. I told him it wasn't funny, she said, smiling.

He lifted her T-shirt higher and pressed his mouth against the warm expanse of her back. Don't stop, he said. It was so rare for her to talk like that, even to mention her family, or her childhood, or anything north of the border; and especially not in that way, the memories coming easily, her body relaxed, laughter spilling out around the words. He didn't know why she'd brought it up then, why she'd rushed upstairs to find the rarely opened packet of photographs she kept at the bottom of the wardrobe somewhere. Some distant sense memory triggered by the heat of the day perhaps, or by the voices of children playing out in the streets. Some rip in the smothering comfort blanket those pills provided. A little more wine than usual. But just hearing her talk like that, with the slow evening closing in outside, with her leg lifted up on to his lap and his fingers climbing inside the ankle of her trousers, things seemed okay for the first time in months, things seemed okay and normal. A husband and wife talking about their families, their childhoods, the things that matter and the things that don't.

She stacked the photographs back up on the mantelpiece, and opened another bottle, and they waited for the taut closeness of the air to break into rain. And as the first fat drops slapped on to the path outside she put her glass down on the table, took his out of his hand, and leant over to kiss him. She stood up, a little unsteadily, and pushed her skirt to the floor.

Hey, she said. So, do you want to, her voice trailing off as though she'd forgotten how to put it, what to do, and she lowered her head to look down at herself.

He smiled, pulling at his belt and his trouser buttons, and he said do I want to what? She clambered on to the sofa, kneeling across him, clumsy with drink and banging her knee against his hip, leaving a bruise.

I'm not sure, she said, kissing his face and his neck, twisting away to reach for another mouthful of wine. Remind me, she said. And they made tired and uncoordinated love on the sofa, rain splashing in through the window, elbows banging into the wall, her soft voice whispering delightedly into his ear even as they shifted and adjusted the awkward fit of their hips across the narrow sagging sofa, stopping and starting as one or other of them said no, ow, you're squashing my arm,

you're pulling my hair, move round a bit, move back a bit; but between these uncomfortable readjustments they still found room to savour the taste and the feel of each other's bodies, to press warm skin against warm skin, to pinch and to kiss and to hold.

So it wasn't difficult, when the question arose, to know when the moment had come - to circle the day on the calendar, count off the weeks, to smile at the faint smell of stale red wine on the end of the cork he'd kept, to say, it was that night, you remember, it must have been then, of course, when else would it have been? There wasn't another time it could have been.

And something happened, something which stretched the boundaries of Eleanor's enclosed world much further than they had been stretched for a long time, some massive damburst of hormones, more effective by far than the powdery charms in those pills, roaring and singing through her body and bringing her back to life. She started to pull further and further away from the stifled stronghold of their house, setting herself targets - the park, the shops, the city centre - and when she met him one day at work, waiting outside with a cigarette in her hand and a proud smile on her face as she watched him coming down the steps, he dared to hope again that the worst might be over. She cleared out the spare room, stripping the wallpaper, repainting the walls and the ceiling, hanging up mobiles and alphabet charts, buying furniture and nappies and tiny sets of clothes. When he got back from work each evening, there was always something new in the house - a baby blanket, a set of feeding bottles, a row of toys lined up along the dinner table - and the kitchen always seemed to be full of the smells of her cooking, baking cakes and biscuits, preparing dinner, making up soups for him to take to work in a flask; and when he came in through the door she was always there to show him, taking him by the arm, saying look what I bought, isn't it lovely, isn't the baby going to love it, are you hungry now by the way, and kissing him, holding him tightly, pressing her face into the hollow between his shoulder and his neck, saying oh I'm so happy I'm so happy I'm so so happy now.

39 Hospital admissions card, 1945 (Discovered 1976)

The last time he went to see Julia, she didn't say anything at all. She gazed up at him from the bed, blankly, drifting in and out of a dream-drenched sleep, the covers pulled fretfully up to her chin, old before her time. Later, Dorothy told him that, four days before she died, she sat up in bed and had a suddenly lucid conversation with the doctor and her, asking who was looking after the house and whether Dorothy was still planning to take that trip to the Isle of Wight, asking how David was getting on at the museum and when he'd be down to visit her next. But nothing like that happened when he was there. She watched him coming into the room, following him with her eyes, her expression fearful and tense if it was anything. Her body gave up before she did, the muscles in her legs weakening until she could no longer stand, her bladder and bowel control faltering, her arms quivering and flailing into the air if they weren't tucked safely beneath the sheets.

I'd have been lost without her and no mistake, Dorothy told them, a few weeks after the funeral, when they were gathered at Julia's house to help Laurence sort through all the things she'd left behind. I couldn't believe it, she said, the first time she invited me here for dinner; gesturing around her as if to say, this house, I mean, just look at it. It wasn't what I was expecting, she said, laughing, not when everyone else lived in those dingy old nurse's rooms. They sat around the kitchen table, Dorothy, David and Eleanor, Susan, eating the sandwiches and cakes Laurence had laid out, and she told them all about when she'd first met Julia and how much Julia had helped her out. Laurence hovered in the background, listening, waiting to restock any empty plates, putting the kettle back on for a fresh pot.

They'd had little in common when they first met, making hospital corners on the beds of a whole wing of new wards, but that hadn't kept them from making friends almost immediately. Something just clicked with us, Dorothy said. I never knew what it was, she was like my sister more than anything else. She showed me round London, and introduced me to people, and toughened me up. I was only eighteen when I started nursing, I needed a bit of toughening up, she said, laughing, gathering up the last few cake crumbs on her plate. Laurence started to clear their plates away, asking if there was anything else anyone wanted. They shook their heads. I hated it for months, Dorothy went on, couldn't stand it, the work, and the people, and the effort involved in just getting from place to place, but I didn't dare go back. Where I came from, people didn't do that. She laughed again. I must have seemed like a real country girl when we first met, she said, but Julia soon fixed that. She turned me into a proper Londoner. I still feel like one even now, she said, shaking her head and smiling, running her thumb along the smooth worn edge of the table.

They sat quietly for a few moments more, and then David said well, should we? And they stood up, ready to get on with the job in hand, moving back through the musty hallway with its rolled-up carpets and stacked picture frames, working their way through each room and sorting everything into categories: boxes of clothes, boxes of bric-a-brac, magazines, newspapers, printed documents, handwritten documents, photographs, jewellery, items of value, items mentioned in the will. Laurence stood around awkwardly, collecting up the mugs from the table, walking back and forth between the rooms without really doing anything, picking up the occasional ornament and putting it back down, his hands hovering uselessly above papers and boxes he seemed unable to touch. Eleanor, seven months pregnant, did what she could and sat down whenever the others insisted. And although they all tried to keep each other moving, and tried not to stop and think, they each came across something which caught them out, something which snagged a loose thread of memory and tugged them to their knees. Julia's wedding dress, still wrapped in tissue paper in the attic. A photograph of Dorothy holding a one-year-old Susan, both of them clutching their thick rubber gas masks. A cigarette holder. The two telegrams. A birthday card David had made at school, with To Auntie Julia smeared across it in flaking orange poster paint. Her old nurse's watch. Half a dozen pairs of mislaid spectacles, gazing blindly up at them from beneath magazines, cushions, handbags. And towards the end of the afternoon, while everyone else was back in the kitchen drinking more cups of tea, he found what he'd been unknowingly looking for all along, tucked away at the bottom of a suitcase in the attic, waiting for him.

The suitcase was full of old papers - programmes from some of the plays Julia's mother had been in, a stack of appointment diaries, thick bundles of bank statements and tax certificates. But once he'd sorted it all into piles, ready to take downstairs, there was something left over. He listened to the voices of the others floating up from the kitchen, Susan saying something about the smell of Julia's tweed coats that she remembered from when she was a little girl, Dorothy laughing, and he thought, for only a brief moment, about putting the slip of card back where it had come from. He wondered if his mother even knew about it.

A hospital admissions card, headed Royal London White-chapel, 29th March 1945.

Brisk blue handwriting, the details spread neatly across the dotted lines.

Mary Friel. D.O.B. 14.11.11. Maternity.

There was an address, a King Edward Avenue in St John's Wood, but it had been crossed out in red pen, the words prob. false written above it. And there was a signature, Mary Friel, the writing scratched and faltering, the e and the / of Friel falling beneath the dotted line.

He sat slowly on the chair by the small dormer window and looked at it for a long time in the failing evening light. He tried to convince himself that it was something other than what he knew it must be. He tried the name for size, and it felt heavy and alien on his tongue. Friel. David Friel.