Into the Darkest Day

And neither did Abby now—she averted her eyes from a box of high heels, another one of sheet music, a dusty tennis racket and a pair of skis—things she wasn’t ready to look at, and didn’t think she ever would be. Normally when she came up here, she grabbed whatever she was looking for and hurried downstairs again, keeping her head tucked low. She didn’t move among the shadows, courting ghosts.

Yet now she was, picking her way through the uneven stacks, breathing in dust and regret, trying to ignore both the cobwebs and the memories. At the very far end of the room, behind a tottering pile of plastic crates and tucked under the eaves, she finally found what she’d been looking for. An old trunk, banded with worn leather, just as she’d remembered, its lock rusted and broken. She didn’t know whether anything of interest to Simon would be inside, and she felt reluctant to open and disturb the memories within, whatever they were.

What was she really doing up here, anyway? What was the point?

Abby glanced around at all the boxes and bags, the trunks and crates, the memories packed up and tucked away, an inner life she tried never to access, and yet where had it left her?

I’m happy, she told herself, and then wondered why she’d had to say it.

She knelt in front of the trunk, running her hands over its ridged lid. Then she opened it—or tried to. It resisted at first, nothing budging, making her wonder if it actually was locked, even though she could see it wasn’t.

Another tug, having to mean it this time, and then, finally, with a protesting creak, the lid lifted.

A sheet of tissue paper had been lain across the top, and she removed it carefully, laying it to one side, so she could put it back later. Underneath, she found things she would have expected—her grandmother’s wedding dress, folded and yellowed with age; her father’s baby shoes, the leather now speckled and cracked. There was an album of photos she’d never seen before, most of them dating from the fifties, when Tom Reese had been getting Willow Orchards going. He stood with his wife Susan in front of a dozen skinny saplings.

There was nothing, as far as Abby could see, about the war, and she wasn’t even surprised. Why would her grandfather keep something from a time he hadn’t wanted to talk about?

She lifted up the wedding dress to see what was beneath—a pair of men’s dress shoes, a checkbook from a savings and loan company that must have closed its doors fifty years ago—and then felt her fingers close around something silky and yet hard, its edges cutting into her skin through the fabric that it was wrapped in.

Abby took it out carefully, her heart turning over even though she didn’t know what she held. It was small and oddly shaped, fitting in the palm of her hand. Slowly, she unwrapped the handkerchief—a square of slippery silk in dark navy—and then blinked down at the object revealed.

It was an ornate cross with an eagle overlaid, hanging from a blue ribbon bordered with red and white trim. A war medal—another one—different from the Purple Heart Sophie Mather had had. Why had her grandfather kept one while he’d given another away?

She turned it over, and then blinked again at what was inscribed there. For Distinguished Service, May 1945, Awarded to Master Sergeant Matthew Lawson, 82nd Airborne.

Who, Abby wondered, was Matthew Lawson, and why had her grandfather had his medal?

Chapter Eight

January 1944

Lily worked in an office that was little more than a broom cupboard, in a forgotten corner of the Old Admiralty on Horse Guards, not far away from the bombproof Citadel of command where the real decisions were being taken, orders being carried out, a sense of urgency tautening the very air.

The typing pool of the Casualties Section felt like another world entirely, another war. The section was staffed by three girls, overseen by the determined Miss Challis, all of whom typed letters to families whose sons or husbands had been killed or presumed missing in action. Day after day, hour after hour, Lily and her two colleagues typed the same words, the same sentiments, for one faceless soldier after another.

On a good day—if it could be called such a thing—she might type fifty or sixty letters. Miss Challis was emphatic that the letters be perfect, with no mistakes or smears of ink, the paper crisp, not crumpled.

“This letter will be kept,” she told the girls severely, more than once. “It might be read many times, by many different people. It would be a sign of grossest disrespect not to have it in the most excellent condition.”

While Lily agreed with her in theory, she did not think the letter informing a family of their loved one’s demise would necessarily be kept. She was not sure she would wish to keep such a thing.

She imagined a heartbroken mother tossing it despairingly into the fire, or a wife ripping it into a thousand tiny pieces. She pictured it splotched with tears, or crumpled up and then smoothed out, as someone scanned it yet again, futilely hoping for a different message this time, as if the words on the page might rearrange themselves, or perhaps they’d just missed out a crucial not. Not missing in action. Not killed. As if they sent letters to say such things.

She’d envisioned faceless strangers receiving the letters so many times, she felt as if an army of mourners lived in her head. Sometimes she thought she could hear their muffled weeping, a constant litany of sorrow, the backdrop to her workday, her whole life.

Miss Challis had warned them that writing such letters could make some girls “nervy”. She said it was important they kept their chins up, and held onto their courage. The way she said it, Lily thought it sounded as if they were on the front lines, battling Germans rather than offering up ghosts to the bereaved.

Yet she understood what her supervisor meant, because some days she felt as if she’d rather do anything, anything than type another letter, saying that someone was dead. Some days, when she saw the stack of notices and names piling up in the wooden tray on her desk, she felt like either screaming or putting her hands over her ears, to stop the sobbing she knew she only heard in her head.

She knew better than to say any of this to anyone. Clara, one of the girls she’d worked with, had been transferred to another department because she’d started to become weepy and anxious during work. Miss Challis had been briskly sympathetic, but afterwards she’d given Lily and the other girl Iris another one of her chin-up lectures, insisting that what they did for the war effort was just as important as the girls in the factory making fighter planes, or any of the other many jobs women found themselves doing now that it was wartime.

“Not quite as important,” Iris, a girl with a beaky nose and a constant sniff, had answered, rolling her eyes. She nodded towards the overfull tray on her own desk. “After all, the war is over for these poor blighters.”

It was an unsettling thought. For eight hours a day, as she sat at her desk and typed, a sliver of weak sunlight filtering through the room’s one small, high window, Lily felt as if the war was actually over.

Then she emerged, squinting like a mole, into the frantic rush of central London, men in uniform everywhere, hoardings plastered with posters commanding her to “Work to Win” and to “Stamp Out Black Markets” and she realized it wasn’t over at all. It was all around her, surging and seething.

Whenever Miss Challis wasn’t present, Iris complained about the monotonous drudgery of typing such depressing letters, but she did it with an acerbic wit that both troubled and amused Lily in turns.