She’d offered to wash his kit. He’d said he’d settle for a pint, and her world had remained steady until a new supply teacher had arrived one dark morning in January when half the staff were laid low with flu.
It had been like watching an approaching car crash that she was powerless to stop. The sudden silence as a new face had appeared in the staffroom. Tom, the first to step forward to welcome her—always, always so kind with new people. The contact had lasted no more than a second or two but time had seemed to stand still as their eyes met and, as Sarah looked on, she’d felt the scorching heat of the spark that leapt between Tom and Louise, and her world had shifted off its axis.
‘I’ll soon get to know people,’ she said. ‘Teaching isn’t a job you can do in isolation. And I’ll be in Rome,’ she stressed. ‘One of the most glamorous cities in the world.’
In one bound she’d freed herself from being the most pitied woman in the staffroom and become the most envied.
Not that she’d escaped entirely. She’d done her best to resist the Head’s suggestion that she write a blog about her experiences.
‘I know it’s been a tough few months, but things will look different after a break. I expect you back next year,’ he’d told her.
‘You don’t need me, Headmaster, you need Tom. Call him.’
‘And have everyone think I’ve got you out of the way so that I can bring him back? How would that look?’ he’d asked.
Dodgy, obviously, she thought, as the penny had dropped. That was why he wanted her to write the blog. So that it would look as if she was still part of the school.
Glowing references had, it seemed, to be paid for. And it wasn’t as if anyone would read it. The staff would be too busy and, as for the kids, well, why would they bother?
Sarah started as Lex took her hand.
‘It’s not far,’ she told him. ‘I’ll be home for visits so often you’ll be sick of me. Half term. The holidays.’
‘What for? To see an old man?’ His gesture was dismissive. ‘Don’t waste your time or your money. Enjoy Italy while you have the chance.’
‘I’ll have plenty of time to see everything.’ And she could travel with the money she’d been saving for her wedding, for the big dress. Her share of the deposit they had been saving for a house. One with a garden for the children they would have had one day.
‘There’s never enough time,’ he warned her. ‘Your life goes by in a flash. Enjoy every minute of it.’
‘Of course,’ she said, on automatic.
‘No, I mean really enjoy it.’ He regarded her with that thoughtful gaze that his patients would have recognised when he had still been in practice. The one that saw through the ‘headaches’ to the real problem. ‘I prescribe an affair,’ he said. ‘No falling in love, breaking your heart stuff, mind. Nothing serious,’ he warned. ‘A just-for-fun romance with some dark-eyed Italian. A memory to make you smile rather than weep. To keep you warm at night when you’re old.’
‘Lex! You are outrageous.’
He grinned. ‘Trust me. I’m a doctor.’
She laughed. ‘Outrageous and wonderful and I love you.’ They’d always been close. Her parents loved her, did all the parent stuff brilliantly. Her grandparents had spoiled her. But Lex was the one who never had anything better to do than tell her stories and, as he leaned back in his chair, his eyes on some unseen horizon, she knew exactly what he was going to say next.
‘Did I ever tell you about the time I was in Italy during the war?’
‘Once or twice.’ It had been a favourite story when she was a little girl.
How his plane had developed engine trouble and he’d had to bail out. How he’d nearly died of the cold.
It was a story that had grown with the years. With the telling. Embellished, embroidered. She’d never known her great-grandmother, but her grandmother had always claimed that he never spoiled a good story by telling the truth. Her mother had simply rolled her eyes.
‘Tell me again,’ Sarah urged him. ‘Tell me how you were saved by a beautiful Italian girl who found you half-dead in the snow. How she nursed you, hid you for months until the Allies arrived.’
‘You know it by heart.’
Maybe she did, but that was the point of a comfort story. Its familiarity.
‘Gran always said you made up most of it. That the lovely Lucia was really some tough old bird who hid you in her cow shed for a week,’ she said, knowing exactly how to get him going. And off her case.
‘Your grandmother knows nothing.’ Nearly ninety but still with a wicked twinkle in his eye. ‘The house had been grand before the Fascists reduced it to rubble. And Lucia was …’ He stopped. ‘Pass me my box and I’ll show you.’
‘Show me?’
There was always some new little twist to the story, some detail to be added: a new danger, a risk taken for food or warmth, a small pleasure to be found amongst the hardship. But this was totally unexpected.
‘The box,’ he repeated.
She’d seen the contents of the old tartan biscuit box a hundred times. There had never been a photograph of Lucia and, as she handed it to him, she half expected it to be a joke of some kind. But there was none of the usual teasing and when he opened the lid, instead of going through it—a memory recalled with each medal, photograph, memento collected during a long life, well-lived—he tipped it up, emptying everything on to the table beside him.
It was a small table and papers, coins, trinkets spilled over onto the floor. Sarah knelt to gather them up. Smoothed out the corner of the small sepia photograph of her great-grandma that he had carried with him through the war.
‘Leave those,’ he said. ‘Your nails are longer than mine. See if you can get this out.’
The base of the box was lined with a piece of black card, scuffed by years of wear. Now, as she eased it out, she discovered that it concealed a photograph.
He gave an awkward little shrug.
‘Not something to leave lying around where it would upset your great-grandmother.’
Upset?
It was an old grainy black-and-white photograph of a slender young woman with dark hair, dark eyes, dark brows, a full, sensuous mouth.
Scratched, carefully stuck together where it had obviously been torn into pieces—presumably by a very upset great-grandma—spotted with age, her face leapt out of the past.
‘She was lovely,’ she said, turning to catch a look of such tenderness in his eyes that she felt a lump rise to her throat. ‘I can’t begin to imagine how hard it must have been.’
It made her emotional hiccup seem pretty feeble in comparison.
‘Be glad of that,’ he told her, then seemed to drift for a moment, no doubt recalling the hardships. Or maybe it was Lucia’s beauty that he remembered.
She was sitting on a crumbling stone wall, her dark hair gleaming in the sun. Behind her were the remains of a house that might well have once been grand, but was now largely rubble.
It had not, after all, been a fairy tale but real and desperate. This woman had risked her life to save a stranger, shown courage it was hard to imagine.
Her full mouth was smiling and her dark almond-shaped eyes betrayed everything she felt for the man taking the photograph. Was this a secret memory that kept him warm at night?
‘I should have gone back,’ he