‘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?