Each day now I feel a bit more of my strength returning, thanks to the sea air, good home-cooking and Caroline’s unstinting care. My legs are mending well after the operations. I have much to be thankful for, even if so much has been lost too.
And all that we have been through has brought me much closer to my father. Losing my mother has destroyed him, Ella – your heart would break to see him. But he has his two children beside him again now and so I pray that he can grow stronger too. The most worrying thing is that he no longer disapproves of my art! I never thought I would miss the days when he was so discouraging, but I do. It amazes me how time can make us look upon things so differently.
As I must look upon you differently too now.
Ella-from-Edinburgh, I wish you much happiness and much love. May your family flourish.
Christophe
1955, Edinburgh
‘Come on, Robbie, you don’t want to be late!’ Ella swept her six-year-old son into her arms and cuddled him to her as she tied the laces on his school shoes. They’d been brand new at the start of the week, the black leather gleaming, but already the toes were scuffed and she expected the laces would soon be frayed and knotted. She buried her nose in the soft warmth at the back of his neck, giving him the kiss that she knew he’d be too embarrassed to receive in public before he was much older.
Rhona, three years his elder, looked on from the doorway, with her coat already buttoned and her school satchel slung across one shoulder. She was a neat, organised child and she disapproved of her little brother’s tendencies towards chaos and mess, especially in the mornings. She sighed with impatience as he wriggled down from his mother’s lap and began to search for one of his plimsolls which had, inexplicably, removed itself from its rightful place in his gym bag. But then, distracted from the search, he picked up a Dinky car transporter and began pushing it towards the garage Daddy had made for him, making vrooming noises as he did so.
‘Come on, Robbie, you’re going to make us all late.’ Rhona’s annoyance spilled over and she marched across to him and pulled the toy from his hand, deliberately placing it on a bookshelf that she knew he couldn’t reach.
‘Hey!’ he protested. ‘Give it back! Mummy,’ he wailed, ‘she’s being horrible to me.’
Ella was lying on the floor, stretching an arm as far under Robbie’s bed as she could reach. She re-emerged, triumphantly, with the missing gym shoe and patted her stiffly lacquered hairstyle back into place. ‘Right, Robbie, put your coat on and, Rhona, don’t be a meanie. Here’ – she took the toy down from the shelf and put it beside the garage – ‘it’ll be waiting for you when you get home today. Now, let’s get going, we don’t want to miss the tram.’
She held both her children’s hands as they walked to the tram stop. They’d moved out of the flat in Marchmont when Robbie was born and bought their first family home at Fairmilehead, one of the last houses on the southern edge of the city, recently built and with a garden big enough for the children to play in and views out towards the Pentland Hills. It meant a lengthy tram ride to get to school and back, but Ella enjoyed every minute spent with her children, so she didn’t begrudge the time. Angus occasionally took them in the morning, although usually he left earlier to get into the office. He’d joined Ella’s father’s insurance business and, now that Mr Lennox had retired, he was running it and had ambitious plans for future expansion.
Their lifestyle was comfortable and secure. And if Ella was occasionally bored with her role as a housewife, being a mother made up for it. With memories of the horrors of the recent past still fresh in their minds, Angus and Ella both knew the value of the safety and freedom that they now enjoyed. They had a comfortable home and were able to afford a car and all the latest gadgets – a television set; a globe-shaped Hoover vacuum cleaner, which made cleaning their new fitted carpets so much easier; and a gleaming electric cooker for Ella to use in the kitchen. They were the envy of their many friends. There were members of their extended family who were close by to offer help and advice, whether it was looked-for or not. They were the perfect couple, with the perfect lives. And they both adored their children.
But there was something else too. Something not visible to anyone else. Something just below the surface which made them both tread carefully within their marriage.
Ever since that day when Caroline’s letter had arrived, things had been different. It was hard to pinpoint exactly how their relationship had changed – although the reason why it had done so was crystal clear. Christophe, alive in France, was a phantom whose presence haunted them both. He was there when Ella paused as she was hanging out the washing on the line to look south, to the distance beyond the gorse-clad hills, seeing, in her mind’s eye, a far-off island bathed in a clearer, warmer light; he was there when she dusted the jar of shells which sat on the windowsill in the bathroom, which Angus and the children had collected on west-coast beaches during their family holidays; and he was still there despite the fact that she’d taken some of his love letters from the cigar box hidden at the back of her wardrobe and fed them into the fire as part of her silent promise to her husband that she would be the very best wife to him that she could be.
The foundations of their relationship had been rocked and they had cracked. The family that they were building together upon those same foundations could easily topple and fall if she didn’t do all that she could to reinforce them again. So, Ella lived in a constant state of anxiety, treading carefully, looking ahead the whole time to try to spot anything that might further undermine Angus’s trust in her and taking steps to skirt around those potential pitfalls. How could she make him believe her love for him ever measured up when he knew what had gone before?
Most of all, she worried for Angus himself. There had been a subtle, seismic shift that day when she’d read Caroline’s letter and, although on the surface her husband appeared as strong and capable as ever, Ella sensed an almost imperceptible hesitation when he put his arms around her and, every now and then, she caught a glimpse of the doubt in his candid blue eyes.
Caroline still wrote from time to time and Ella was always careful to pass the letters to Angus for him to read, so that he’d know she wasn’t keeping anything to do with Christophe from him. Caroline only mentioned her brother very fleetingly every now and then in any case, as if she, too, realised how delicate the situation must be from Ella and Angus’s point of view.
Monsieur Martet had died in 1946, a few months after Christophe had returned to the Île de Ré. Caroline had written that she was just thankful that he’d known his son was still alive and had been able to bring him home; but his heart hadn’t been able to bear the sadness of losing Marianne and one night he had closed his eyes and gone to join her, death bringing the peace, at last, that he’d been denied towards the end of his life.
Caroline was alone now in the white house with the pale blue shutters, having decided to stay on the island rather than return to the house in Paris. She wrote that she’d opened a small art gallery in Sainte Marie where she displayed the work of some of the colony of artists who lived on the island, and she’d begun to have a degree of success in selling them to the summer visitors who wanted to take home with them a reminder of the glimpse of freedom and peace that they’d found there. Christophe, she wrote, had moved back to Paris where he was painting. And his work was beginning to gain recognition in the city and beyond.
But all of that was so far removed from Ella’s day-to-day existence that it felt as if she was reading a novel when she read the letters from Caroline, a story of people and places that couldn’t exist in reality.
And, so here she was, living her life with her husband and her children who anchored her in that reality every day.
She rumpled Robbie’s hair and he ran through the school gate to the boys’ entrance without a backward glance, dragging his gym bag along the playground floor in his wake, having spotted a group of his friends.
‘Remember to hand in the note about the trip to the Botanical Gardens today, won’t you?’ she said to Rhona, hugging her tightly, knowing that it was acceptable to do so as it was different for girls.