A Half Forgotten Song

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Zach was still standing in the little room upstairs at The Watch, staring all around, when Hannah came up to stand beside him. Squinting in the light, she put her hand on his arm, and he felt her fingers clench tightly. She drew breath as if to speak, but stayed silent.

“Are these… what I think they are?” he said at last. Dimity had been climbing the stairs behind them, but when she saw that the door was open, she froze, and a low wail rose from her throat; a startling lament of pure grief. Rozafa rushed to the old woman as she crumpled down onto the stairs, asking questions in her own language and glancing up at Zach in fright. Dimity stared at the open door, weeping, and Ilir joined Rozafa, weaving their lyrical, incomprehensible language around the old woman as if to comfort her. Hannah exhaled a long, steady breath.

“Aubrey pictures. Yes.”

“There must be… thousands of them.”

“Well, not thousands, perhaps, but a good few.” Zach tore his eyes from the contents of the room to give Hannah an astonished look.

“You knew about this?” he said. Hannah pursed her lips and nodded. She looked away uncomfortably, but there was no trace of guilt on her face.

“Why did you come in here?” she asked.

“It was a mistake. Dimity said to go to the left but… Rozafa didn’t understand.” Zach looked around the little room again, letting his eyes sweep slowly over everything. He couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. Hannah followed his gaze, and he felt a shudder pass through her. She clasped her arms tightly across her chest, but Zach was too distracted to ask what troubled her.

There was the little window in the far wall, opposite the door, with the broken pane of glass and the pale, shifting curtains. To the right of that a narrow bed sat against the wall, covered with grayish, rumpled sheets and blankets, and with a scooped indentation in the pillow as though somebody had only just risen from it. To the left of the window was a long wooden table with a simple, hard chair pulled up to it. The table was covered with papers and books, jars of pencils and brushes. The floorboards were dusty and bare save for a small, faded rag rug by the bed. Odd sheets of paper also lay scattered about the floor, and in a draft from the window, one shifted suddenly. Lifted itself up and scudded a few inches towards Zach. He jumped at the movement, nerves jangling. And all over the walls, pinned up and leaning against it, on almost every available bit of space, were pictures. Predominantly drawings, but some paintings, too. Beautifully, unmistakably, the work of Charles Aubrey.

“This is not possible,” said Zach, to nobody in particular.

“Well, that’s all right then. We’ve got nothing to worry about,” said Hannah with deadpan humor.

“Do you have any idea…” he said, but stopped. Awe had stolen the words he needed to finish the sentence. He walked slowly to the southern wall of the room, where most of the larger pieces were leaning, lifted the top ones, and looked at those behind. There were lots of Dennis. Both the Dennis he knew, the tantalizingly ambiguous young man whose portrait had recently sold several times over, and of other Dennises. Dennises who were wholly different-different face, different clothes, different stature. A wide variety of young men, all bearing the same name. Zach frowned, and tried to think what it could mean. Behind him he heard Dimity suddenly shout.

“Is he there? Is he in there?” There was a kind of wild hope in the question, and Zach looked over his shoulder as she appeared in the doorway with Hannah trying to hold her, to contain her.

“There’s nobody here, Dimity,” he said. The old woman’s face sagged into dismay. Her eyes scanned the room, as though not wanting to believe him. And then she knelt down on the floor and hugged her arms tightly around herself.

“Gone, then,” she said softly. “Truly gone, and forever.” There was such sorrow in the words that Zach felt it cool his excitement; felt it slow and sadden him.

“Who’s gone, Dimity?” Zach asked. He crouched down beside her and put one hand on her arm. Her face was wet with tears, and her eyes roamed the room as if still searching for someone.

“Charles, of course! My Charles.”

“So… he was here in this room? Charles Aubrey was here? When was that, Dimity?”

“When? When?” She seemed bewildered by the question. “Always. He was always here with me.” Zach looked at Hannah in confusion, and saw the way she kept her mouth firmly closed when she clearly had things to say. He turned back to the old woman.

“Charles went off to fight in the Second World War, Dimity. He went off to fight, and was killed near Dunkirk. That’s right, isn’t it? You remember?” Dimity looked at him with a slightly scathing expression, and when she spoke there was a trace of pride, and of defiance.

“He went off to war, but he didn’t die. He came back to me, and he stayed with me for the rest of his life.”

“That’s just not possible,” Zach heard himself say, but even as he did so his eyes were drawn up to Hannah’s, and she nodded.

“It’s true,” she said quietly. “He died six years ago. Here. He died here.”

“You mean…” Zach’s mind whirled, fighting to keep up, to understand the implications of what he was being told. “You mean… you saw him? You met Charles Aubrey?” He almost laughed, it sounded so outlandish to his own ears. But Hannah didn’t laugh.

“I saw him, yes. But we didn’t meet. He was… he was already dead, the only time I saw him.”

“Dead,” Dimity whispered, and her face sank again, her body seeming to fold in on itself, limp and boneless. Zach stared at her and then at Hannah, and then at the little narrow bed with the stained sheets and the head-shaped hollow in the pillow.

“I think… I think I need somebody to explain all this to me slowly and clearly,” he said, shaking his head in amazement.

Dimity sang “Bobby Shaftoe,” over and over. He’ll come back and marry me, bonny Bobby Shaftoe. The song became a chant, a tuneless, repetitive mantra, beating to the rhythm of her questing feet as she walked, and watched, and waited. Valentina heard her, and tried to beat the idea out of her. He’s gone, don’t you get it? He’s not coming back. But Dimity insisted that he would. That Charles would not leave her in Blacknowle. Forgotten about, cast aside. And slowly the words of the song trickled deeper and deeper into her mind and became the truth. He’ll come back and marry me… It became the truth; it became what lay in store for her, because the alternative was unbearable. The alternative was that crushing span of lonely time she had suddenly glimpsed, standing on the cliff top with Celeste. She knew she would not survive it, so she kept on singing, and believing.

But the next person to come looking for her, as the first frosts bit the air and the last apples were packed away in barrels, was not Charles Aubrey. It was a tall, elegant woman with chestnut hair combed into an immaculate twist at the back of her head. She wore a green twill coat and white kidskin gloves; her mouth a slick of scarlet lipstick. A taxi was parked behind her, its engine idling, and she stood on the doorstep of The Watch with a stern, unhappy expression on her face. When Dimity opened the door, she felt gray eyes sweep her from feet to face in quick appraisal.

“You’re Mitzy Hatcher?”

“I am. Who are you?” She studied the woman, and tried to guess. She was perhaps forty years old, not beautiful but handsome. Her face had the smooth, sculpted look of a statue.

“Celia Lucas. I was told in the village to come and talk to you… Delphine Aubrey has run away from school again. She’s been gone a week already, and they’re getting worried. I was told you were most likely to have seen her, if anyone had. If she’d come back this way, that is.” The woman looked around her, from the cliffs to the woods and the cottage, as if she couldn’t understand why anybody would. She spoke with cut-glass vowels.

“I have not seen her,” Dimity replied. She tried to take a deep breath, but her lungs felt like they’d shrunk. She tried again, and her head began to spin. “Where’s Charles? Why didn’t he come to look for her himself?” Celia’s gaze sharpened at once, and she stared into Dimity’s eyes for a moment.

“Don’t tell me you’re another one of his?” Her mouth pursed bitterly. Defiantly, Dimity nodded. “Well, well. They get younger all the time.” She spoke casually, but Dimity saw the way her hands gripped each other, so tightly that they shook. “And to answer your question, Charles didn’t come to look for her because the damn fool of a man has joined the army and gone off to fight in France. What do you make of that?” She arched her eyebrows, and beneath her sangfroid was the panic of a trapped animal. Dimity recognized it; she felt it, too.

“Gone off to fight?” she echoed breathlessly.

“Yes, quite my reaction, too. A lifetime of pacifism and high rhetoric about the evils of war, and at the first sign of a painful situation, off he trots.”

“To the war?” said Dimity. Celia frowned at her, and seemed to wonder how much more to say.

“Yes, dear, to the war. So whatever plans you thought he might have for you, I’m afraid you’re on your own,” she said blandly. “And I, it seems, must chase around the country looking for one of his bastard offspring. Poor child, indeed, but if the mother couldn’t be bothered to look after her, I find it somewhat hard that I should be expected to.” She pulled the lapels of her coat tighter together, her breath steaming damply in the frigid air.

“Are you… Delphine’s teacher?” Dimity asked, after a pause. She was fighting to understand, struggling to make sense of what she’d been told. The woman’s face registered irritation, impatience.

“No, child, I am Charles’s wife. So help me.” She looked out to sea, squinting at the horizon. “For how much longer I shall remain his wife, however, who can say?” Dimity stared at her. Her words were nonsense. The calm inside her head grew so profound that nothing could disturb it. The cut-glass vowels slid away from her like snowmelt. “Look, if you do see Delphine, call me and let me know, would you? Here’s my card. I’ll… I’ll write down Charles’s regiment and company on the back, so you can… look out for news of him. Or write to him, if you like. Odd that he didn’t let you know. But then, Charles is very odd these days. When I last saw him he could hardly string a sentence together.” She pressed her lips crisply, took out a pen, and wrote something on an oblong of card before putting it into Dimity’s limp hand. “Good luck to you. And try to forget about him. Difficult, I know, but for the best.” She turned and walked back to the waiting taxicab.

Later on, a song Dimity had known from childhood burst into her head and went around and around, like a caged thing, echoing in the empty spaces there. I heard a fair maid making loud lamentation, singing Jimmy will be slain in the wars I be feared… Jimmy will be slain in the wars, I be feared. The line rolled over and over, like wavelets breaking ashore. Charles had gone off to war. He was a hero now, a brave soldier, and she the poor wife left at home to worry. Neatly, seamlessly, Dimity wrote herself into this narrative. She was so tired that she took to her bed at four in the afternoon, and could neither sleep nor rise. She lay, and she hummed the words of that old song, and when Valentina came up to find out why there was no dinner, she found the smart, embossed card on the nightstand by the bed. Celia Lucas Aubrey.

“Who’s this then? Where’s this come from?” she demanded, sitting down on the edge of the bed. Dimity ignored her, watching the way the light from the bulb overhead made her fingertips glow. Valentina gave her a shake. “What’s the matter with you? Is this who came to the door earlier? Some relative of his?” She frowned at the card. It bore his name, or at least part of it. “Not… his wife?” she ventured. Dimity stopped singing and glared at her. Something scratched at the back of her eyes, at the back of her mind. Something with sharp little claws, which left stinging scratches. A rat? She sat up abruptly, checked the corners of the room. There were rats on the floor, twisting and writhing and bent backwards in pain. With a loud shriek Dimity clapped her hands over her eyes.

“No!” she shouted, and Valentina tipped back her head to laugh.

“His bloody wife came looking for him, didn’t she?”

“No!”

“Will you forget it now, eh? He’s not coming back, and even if he did, he’s married. He’s not going to marry you.” For a second, as Valentina looked at her daughter, something almost like kindness softened her face. “Let it go, Mitz. There’ll be others. No point turning yourself inside out over it.”

“He’ll come back for me. He’s coming back for me!” Dimity insisted.

“Have it your way, then.” Valentina stood abruptly. “You’re a bloody fool.”

Dimity waited out the winter; she waited out the spring. She fled the house when Valentina tried to introduce her to a gray-haired man, shifty and thin, who looked at her with such naked hunger in his eyes that his gaze felt bruising. She stayed out for two days and two nights that time, hardly eating, hardly sleeping. She sang her songs, she emptied her mind. She told herself over and over that Charles would come back to her. And so, eventually, he did.

It was close to summer before he made it. As dusk fell, Dimity stood on the rise above Littlecombe; stood for so long that her legs were tingling with pins and needles and her feet were aching from it. She stared for so long that she forgot why she was staring. By then, it was taking a long time for things to penetrate her calm-the things her mother said, the people she saw in the village; Wilf Coulson, who talked to her in a staccato rattle of sound that made no sense and irritated her ears, so that she turned and drifted away whenever she saw him. And so it was only after half an hour, rooted to the spot, that she realized what she was looking at. A light, gleaming out of an upstairs window at Littlecombe. A light that spoke of every wish coming true, and every prayer being answered. Dimity walked steadily down to the house. She did not need to rush. This time, he would stay. This time, he would not leave her, and they had all the time in the world. She let herself into the house, climbed the stairs, and pushed open the bedroom door. And there was Charles Aubrey, waiting for her, just as she’d known he would be.

The smell of him was everywhere. As she entered the room, this smell rose to greet her even though Charles did not. He was sitting in a small chair by the bed, his chin drooping to his chest, his hands clasped in his lap, his feet side by side like a schoolboy’s. His clothes were ruined, filthy and misshapen. A duffel jacket that was far too big; corduroy trousers torn at the knees; cracked boots with no laces. Underneath them he was thinner, more angular. His bones were sharp at shoulder and elbow, knee and jaw. His hair was matted with dirt, his cheeks covered by straggling whiskers. There was a cut along his right cheekbone, the blood from it still black and caked on the skin below. It looked deep, and angry-Dimity thought she saw the ghastly gray of bone showing through. Comfrey, she thought at once. Salt water to clean it and then comfrey to soothe it, once it was stitched. She went to him, knelt down, and laid her head in his lap. The smell was of shit and piss, of sweat and infection, of fear and death. Dimity didn’t care. She felt the press of his thigh bone through his trousers, and everything was perfect.

“I got away,” he said, after this long, suspended moment. Dimity looked up at him, and touched her fingertips to his ravaged face. Her whole heart was his, and beat only for him. She wanted to gather him up, never let him go. There was a strange, flat light in his eyes; a gleam she had never seen before. He looked as though he had seen things that he could never unsee. He didn’t say her name, or seem surprised to see her. “I got away,” he said again. Dimity nodded and bit back a storm of quick, happy sobs. He was free then, finally.

“You did, my love. And I am going to look after you now… I need to go back to The Watch to get some things for that cut on your face. I need a needle and thread, and salt to clean it…” He snatched at her wrist as she began to stand. As quick as a snake.

“Nobody must know! I can’t go back… I can’t go back, do you hear?” His voice was ragged with fear.

“Well, they can’t make you, can they?”

“They can… they can send me back. And they will! I can’t go!” His fingers were bruising her arm, the grip like an animal bite, hard and instinctive. She didn’t try to pull away, but only soothed him, stroking his hair and murmuring to him until he was calm again.

“I’ll hide you, my love. Nobody will know that you’re here, with me. I will keep you safe, I promise.” Gradually his grip loosened and then fell away, and he stared at the floor again, blank as a new canvas.

“You will come back, won’t you?” he said as she went at last to the door. Dimity felt stronger than she ever had; more certain, more complete. As softly and easily as snowfall, everything fell into its right place around her. She smiled.

“Of course, Charles. I’m only going to find a coat to warm you, and cover you as we go down to The Watch.”

Well, he can’t stay here, can he?” said Valentina, pinching her nose shut, eyes narrowed against the smell. Dimity ushered her mother out of her room, where Charles was lying down on the narrow bed, and shut the door softly behind her.

“He is staying here. He is my man, and I will look after him.” She stared at her mother, and Valentina stared back. Dimity took a short breath and let her arms hang loosely at her sides, sleeves pushed up, ready for battle. Her heart thumped, slow and deep.

“He’s not staying here. Got it? Harboring a deserter? People round here would jump at the chance to cause trouble for us. Don’t you get that? How long do you think you can keep him hidden, eh? People know everything around here. Someone’ll see him…”

“The only visitors we have are yours,” Dimity muttered.

“And don’t I bloody know it, girl! And let’s not go forgetting that it’s those visitors that keep this roof over our heads and food on the table, and scarce enough for two let alone with a useless man to feed as well.”

“They keep cider in your blood perhaps, but the food I’ll take some credit for!” Dimity was ready for the slap. She caught her mother’s hand before it could land and held it in midair, both of their arms shaking with the tension. Valentina curled her lip.

“So, I’ve finally found something you’ll fight for. That wreck in there? Really? The one that stinks of his own shit and jumps at the sound of a footstep? That’s what you’ll fight me for, after all these years?”

“Yes!” Dimity didn’t hesitate.

“You love him, or you think you do. I can see that. More fool you, when you’ve never even lain with the man-and there’s scant enough of novelty there, believe me. But I’ll tell you this so you’d better listen-this is my house, not yours, and there’s no place for a man in it. Least of all one who can’t earn and will get us all arrested. You hear me? He’s not staying here.”

“He is.”

“He’s not and you’d better get that through your thick head! Take yourself off to Littlecombe with him, if you want. You’ll be no great loss around here.”

“We can’t live there… people would notice for sure. The rent would have to be paid, people in the village would see the lights on…”

“Well, I don’t count that among my problems. God knows I have enough, but that man is not one of them. Do what you want with him, but he has to go.”

“Ma, please…” Dimity felt the words half strangling her. She knew how futile it was to beg, and only desperation made her try it now. Her insides curled. She hated it. She tried to grasp her mother’s hands, tried to make her see. “Please-” But Valentina snatched her hands away, raised an index finger in warning. The stained nail looked like a curse.

“He’s gone by the morning-him or the pair of you, I don’t mind which. Or I’ll turn him in myself. You got that?”

The night was long, and pitch-black. Dimity did not sleep. She bathed Charles from top to toe, with basin after basin of warm water and every washcloth and rag in the house. She washed the mud and grease from his hair, took a fine comb and cleared as many of the lice and eggs as she could. She smoothed the blood from the cut on his cheek and stitched it as neatly as possible. Charles didn’t wince when the thick needle pierced his skin. She cleaned every trace of dirt and stink from his skin, feeling a blush light her cheeks when she took off his trousers and saw his naked body for the first time. Charles seemed to find nothing amiss in this, and accepted her attentions calmly, obediently. She cut his toenails, and scrubbed the dirt from under his fingernails with a small brush. A tremor ran through his arms and hands, a constant shuddering. It brought with it a memory of Celeste, which Dimity carefully ignored. Her own hands were steady, entirely sure of themselves. His clothes would have to be burned, and new ones found for him. Straightaway she knew which washing lines she could pinch them from, easily and discreetly. When she was done Charles slept, as naked as the day he was born, with the blanket tucked around him tightly. Dimity gazed at him for a long time and ran her fingers softly down the contours of his face. She did not notice that he was too quiet; that there was an emptiness behind his eyes that hadn’t been there before. She did not notice that the fire that had once lit him, the quickness and surety of his movements and words, had burned out. She knew only that he was there, with her.

Eventually, she left him to sleep. There was no room for two in her bed, but she didn’t want to lie down anyway. She couldn’t remember when she’d last felt as awake as she did then. She tidied up the detritus of Charles’s extended bath, taking his clothes out into the backyard and dropping them onto the burning heap. It was close to dawn. A faint gray glow was seeping across the black sky. Almost midsummer, and the nights were short, sweet. The year was rising to its apex, and about to peak. An auspicious time, a time of change. Dimity felt it in her blood; in her bones. The Watch was silent, and she felt it watching. Thatch and plaster, wood and stone. And Valentina, the hard heart of the place. Sharp as a barking dog, watching her all the time. She poured herself a glass of milk, drank it slowly, then rinsed the glass and went up to her mother’s room.

Valentina was deeply asleep, with her arms thrown back above her head and her hair straggled out across the pillow. She had enough pillows for two people, as though the bed was always half empty and just waiting to welcome another occupant. Pale dawn light made her mother’s face silvery, made her hair shades of gray and white. She was almost beautiful, Dimity saw. Her cheekbones rose delicately beneath her eyes, her nose was fine and feminine, her lips still full. But even with her face slack and relaxed in sleep, the marks of her habitual expressions remained, etched into her skin. The furrow of her frown between her eyes; the scathing lines across her brow; the bitter brackets on either side of her mouth; fine lines along her upper lip, where she puckered her mouth around cruel words. Her chest rose and fell with perfect rhythm. Dimity looked down at her and thought how small she looked, how vulnerable. Never something she had thought about Valentina before, but there it was now, with sudden clarity. Vulnerable. Valentina had always been there; the bitter kernel at the center of life. You have always been there to make things worse, Dimity told her silently. Her mother’s chest rose and fell, her breath swept in and out, in and out. Dimity watched, and soon her own breathing moved to the same rhythm. For that short time, they existed in perfect harmony. But when she left the room a while later, with her fingers aching peculiarly, Dimity’s breath was the only song still singing.

Dimity hid Charles when the police came. She coaxed him out of her bedroom, down to the backyard, and sat him on the wooden seat of the privy. At first he didn’t seem to understand who was coming, why exactly he should hide. Then, when she explained, he thought that the police were coming for him, and that he would be taken back to the war. He was shaking all over when she left him, pressing a long kiss of reassurance onto his lips.

“They won’t find you. They’re not looking for you. I promise,” she told him. Sweat beaded his brow and ran down at his temples. With her heart aching for him, Dimity shut and latched the door, went back inside and waited for PC Dibden to arrive. PC Dibden was a young man whose mother knew Valentina well, although perhaps not as well as his father had known her, before he’d died of a heart attack scant hours after a particularly strenuous evening three years previously. The young man was awkwardly fascinated by her corpse, and kept glancing at it as he took Dimity’s statement and waited for his superiors to arrive.

Valentina lay in the same position in which she’d been sleeping-on her back with her arms flung up-and Dimity also glanced at her as she told the policeman that Valentina had had a visitor the night before but that she hadn’t seen his face, only the back of his head as he’d gone into the bedroom. She glanced at her mother to be sure that her chest remained still, that her breath had not returned. That her eyes were still shut. She did not trust Valentina to make anything easy for her. She gave a description of the man she’d supposedly seen. Medium height and build; short brown hair; wearing a dark-colored jacket of the kind every man within a fifty-mile radius possessed. PC Dibden wrote all this down dutifully, with an expression on his face that told her how useless it would be in finding the killer. There were no fingermarks on Valentina’s neck, no signs of violence. It was possible, said the policeman, that Valentina had died of natural causes and that her visitor had run off in panic. Dimity agreed that it was quite possible. She gnawed at her thumbnail until it bled, but even this could not bring tears to her eyes. Shock, said PC Dibden to the undertaker, as they took Valentina out later that morning and the police dusted the bedroom and the banister for fingerprints. There would be hundreds, Dimity knew. Hundreds and hundreds.

The funeral was quick and sparse. PC Dibden came along and stood a respectful distance from Dimity. Wilf Coulson was there, and his father, which came as a surprise to Dimity. None of Valentina’s other visitors had dared to show their faces. The Brocks from Southern Farm stood close together, hands clasped respectfully. Still Dimity did not cry. She cast the first handful of earth over the coffin, after the vicar had read a short sermon, and found herself praying that Valentina would stay down there. A sudden storm of fear swept through her, and she stumbled; stooped for another handful of earth and threw it after the first. If no one else had been there to see, she might have fallen to her knees and clawed the whole mound back in with her bare hands. Buried, buried. Gone. She clenched her fists for calm, and met nobody’s eye as she walked back to The Watch. No conversations, no wake. No words of sympathy. PC Dibden trotted up behind her and tried to give her an update on the case, but in truth there was nothing to update. He assured her they were doing all they could to find out who had been with her mother that night, but the apologetic look in his eye told her otherwise. They held out little hope of finding him, because they weren’t really looking all that hard. There were other, more important cases to solve. They weren’t even sure that a murder had been committed. Valentina’s suffocation could have been accidental, during whatever activity she’d been engaged in. And, in the end, the police didn’t really care. Valentina was no huge loss to the community, other than to her visitors, and they were content to stay silently anonymous. She got what was coming to her, Dimity thought, and knew she wasn’t the only one to think so.

When she got back to The Watch and rounded the corner of the cottage, out of sight of any onlookers, she pushed her shoulders back and straightened her spine, and a joyous smile broke out across her face. She had hidden Charles in the privy again, and he wept with relief when she let him out and told him that it was all over, that nobody else would be coming. He clasped her tightly and sobbed like a child.

“You must hide me, Mitzy! I can’t go back,” he mumbled. Dimity held him and sang to him until the fit passed; then they went back into the house together, slowly, like the walking wounded, and she shut the door behind them.

But… I heard somebody moving around in here. I heard it! I’m sure I did… you heard it, too, right, Dimity?” said Zach. He waited for a reply from the old lady, but she seemed lost in her own mind; her gaze settled on him when he took her hand but it was diffuse, absent. Hannah shook her head.

“You know how old houses move around and creak. Plus the window’s been broken for ages. I offered to get it fixed for her, but she point-blank refused. Because it meant opening the room, I guess. But the wind’s been blowing through here for months, shifting the papers around, making the floorboards damp…”

“No, I heard a person. I’m sure of it,” Zach insisted. Hannah threw up her hands and let them fall to her sides.

“You can’t have, Zach. Unless you believe in ghosts now.” She meant it as a throwaway remark, but Zach noticed Dimity’s eyes flicker as she said it, and then follow Hannah as she paced the room restlessly. Zach took a deep breath and wondered what surreal world he had stumbled into that night. An odd other world where he fled from place to place through a dark night, smuggling people, avoiding the law; where huge collections of art lay hidden, like buried treasure, left by a man who had lived far beyond his own death. None of it seemed quite real.

It was late, and Zach and Hannah sat at the kitchen table with cups of tea going cold in front of them. Ilir was in the living room, keeping vigil over his wife and son. Bekim was fast asleep, laid out on the sofa with a moth-eaten blanket draped over him. Rozafa sat by the child’s head with one hand on his shoulder, her head tipped back, also sleeping. Ilir curled his body over them protectively, as though now he had them back he would let nobody near them, and no distance come between them. Zach wondered how long Ilir had been in Dorset; how long had it been since husband and wife had seen each other. Dimity was still upstairs in the little room full of pictures. Zach had taken her some tea, but the old woman was quiet and still and would not come downstairs. Uneasily, he’d noticed the way her chest rose and fell, quick and shallow. Sipping at the air as if she couldn’t quite reach it.

“Tell me how you saw him. How he was. What happened that night,” said Zach. Hannah sighed, and got up.

“We need something stronger than tea,” she muttered, and pulled open kitchen cupboards until she found an ancient, sticky bottle of brandy. She poured a good measure into two mugs and brought them over to the table, sliding one to Zach. “Cheers.” She knocked hers back in one, then rolled her lips over her teeth in protest and shuddered slightly. “Mitzy came down to the farm late one evening. It was in the summer and it had only just got dark, so it must have been ten or half-past ten. She was confused, panicking. She asked for my grandmother at first, and didn’t seem to remember who I was until I explained. I knew at once something was up. She hadn’t come knocking on our door for… well, for as long as I could remember, anyway. She asked me to come back with her, and wouldn’t say why. Practically towed me out of the house. ‘I can’t do it by myself,’ was all I could get her to say. And so I went with her, and she brought me here, and up to that room, and there he was.” She exhaled heavily.

“Dead?”

“Yes. He was dead,” she said. “Mitzy said we had to get rid of him. Hide the body. I asked her why… why we couldn’t just call an undertaker. But she was convinced that the police would come, if anybody knew; and she was probably right. Sudden death and all that, and he wasn’t even supposed to be here. He wasn’t supposed to exist. I gathered this slowly, as she told me who he was.”

“But… he must have been ancient,” said Zach.

“Almost a hundred. But then, he’d lived a very… sheltered life. The latter part of it, anyway.”

“And you had no idea before that that anybody was living here with her? All those years and you didn’t suspect a thing?”

“All those years. Not so surprising when you consider how cut off her cottage is. The farm is the only place that looks onto it, and we never made a point of looking. And besides, he never came out of this room. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’d been inside The Watch before that evening, and I’d never been upstairs, not once. How would anybody have known?”

“Did you… Did you know who he was?”

“Not at first, no. But when Dimity told me… I’d heard of him, of course. My grandmother used to talk about him all the time. And then I saw the pictures, and I knew it had to be true. It had to be him.”

“But… how the hell did he get here? His body was buried on the Continent-it was found, identified, his death was recorded, and he was buried…”

“A body was found. A body was identified. A body was buried. I don’t know how much you know about the retreat to Dunkirk?”

“I’ve… seen films. Documentaries.”

“It was chaos. Thousands and thousands of men on the beach, waiting to be evacuated, and hundreds of small boats coming over from England to help. Fishing boats, charter yachts and pleasure boats, cargo ships. Charles got on one of those small ships. It brought him all the way back to England, and then he… slipped away. Made his way back to Blacknowle somehow.”

“You mean he deserted?”

“Yes. AWOL. Dimity told me… she told me he was quite happy to stay here. Very happy. That he insisted he couldn’t go back. He wouldn’t go back. Hiding for the next sixty-odd years might seem a bit extreme, but it sounds to me like he had a breakdown of some kind. Post-traumatic stress or something. And I guess once you’ve been hiding for a certain length of time, it stops feeling like hiding and starts to just feel like… the way you live.”

Hannah got up for the brandy bottle and topped up both their mugs, even though she was the only one who had emptied hers. Zach tasted it and grimaced.

“I can’t believe any of this,” he said, shaking his head. “How did he get back here? Who was buried in France if it wasn’t Charles?”

“Who was buried? Can’t you guess?” said Hannah. Zach thought hard, but could make no sense of it.

“No. Who was it? Who did they bury in 1940, thinking it was Charles?” Hannah studied him for a moment, her eyes switching rapidly back and forth across his face.

“Dennis,” she said eventually. “They buried Dennis.”

Charles told Dimity about it in one of his outpourings-his rare outpourings. Usually he would only talk about his drawings, or request art supplies, or tell her the odd food cravings he would get. Cherries one day, French onion soup the next. Once he wanted smoked salmon, and Dimity fretted and fussed and took days building a smoking barrel in the backyard, since there was none to be had in the shops and she could never have afforded it if there had been. The result was a tough and overdone trout, the flesh almost leathery, but Charles swallowed it down without complaint, smiling appreciatively. Dimity wondered then if she’d needed to bother-if she could have given him fresh herring and told him it was smoked salmon, and he would have eaten it with as much relish. But she would never try such a deception. She would always strive to give him whatever he asked for. Making him happy was all she could do for him, and all she could do for herself. Protecting him assuaged the feeling of falling that she still woke up with every single day.

But sometimes he had nightmares, and his shouts woke her and sent her rushing in to comfort him, both for comfort’s sake and in case, just in case, there was anybody outside to hear him. He would be up from the bed and pacing the room, clasping at his hair or wiping his hands down his body as though there was something on them that appalled him. She followed him and held him, even when he pushed her away, until he slowed and then sat down, the weight of her too much to resist. She tethered him back to the earth, to the Dorset coast, to where he was. Held him down until he could feel the sea booming through the bones of the house, and his body went limp. Then he would tell her what he had seen, and who had been to visit him in the darkness of sleep. A torrent of words, an outpouring like a purge. As necessary to healing as draining the poison from a wound.

And as often as not, it was Dennis he’d seen. The naked, charred remains of a young British soldier. The blast that killed him had burned the clothes from his body and left only his boots, which still smoldered. He was lying in the long grass a good thirty feet from the crater, and Charles tripped over him as he made his dogged and desperate way north, to the coast. No trace of his uniform and almost none of his skin. He was so badly burned that his eyelids were gone, as were his lips. His teeth ringed a mouth that sat slightly open, so that he appeared mildly surprised by his own death. One eyeball was charred black and ruined, but the left side of his face, which must have been turned away from the blast, was more intact. The iris was exposed and watchful. A rich brown color in a white stained yellow by the smoke. Charles stared into it and was reminded, grotesquely, of crème caramel. The man’s flesh was scarlet and orange and black; cracked, weeping, sticky, and raw. Flies had already begun to settle on him. Charles stayed with him for half an hour or more, because he could not look away from that one startled, piteous eye. The rest of Charles’s unit had moved away. He lay hidden, and felt the dread and panic of being left behind mingling with the terror of going forwards.

Gradually, things grew quieter, and a glint of color caught Charles’s eye. The sun, coming out from behind clouds and smoke, shone onto the green and red disks of the dead man’s identity tags. They had been flung around to his less-burned side, and lay against the top of his shoulder, still threaded onto a charred leather thong. There was nothing else to identify him. No badges, no papers. Charles ran his eyes the length of the man and guessed their heights to be roughly similar. He reached out to lift the tags, to read the man’s name, but they were stuck to his burned flesh. Nestled into it. He had to claw at the man’s shoulder with his fingernails, and pain and horror shot through his own body like electricity as he did so, because he could feel how much it must hurt.

He was whimpering by the time he got the tags free, and wiped the mess from them with his thumb to read the name. F. R. DENNIS. Beneath the twin holes where the tags had been, a whitish gleam of bone showed through the black and red. Charles lifted the bald, leathery skull to get the thong over it, then took off his own tags and put them around Dennis’s neck. He fitted them into the holes in his shoulder, covering the exposed bone. Then he put on Dennis’s tags and backed away, and felt something clinging to his hands and caught beneath his fingernails. It was shreds and chunks of Dennis’s burned skin and flesh, and he wiped them frantically on the long grass, whimpering, and then vomited until he fainted. When he made it to the beaches, to the chaos and the fire and the thronging men, he was bundled onto a small ship by an officer he didn’t know. Careful with this one, the officer said to someone else on board. I don’t know what happened to him, but I think he’s gone wackers.

F. R. Dennis? So… all these years the body lying in Charles Aubrey’s grave was in fact this F. R. Dennis?” said Zach. Hannah nodded. “I’ve been to his grave. I paid my respects-I took flowers. I almost prayed, for God’s sake!”

“I’m sure Mr. Dennis appreciated it,” said Hannah quietly. Zach tapped agitated fingernails on the tabletop, thinking rapidly.

“This is… this is incredible. That such an important man lived on for so long when the whole world thought he was dead…” He shook his head, and the scale of that secret made his pulse pick up. “It’s incredible… And the pictures?”

“All his work from the last sixty years of his life. Well, all except three or four pictures, that is.”

“The ones that were sold?” Zach asked. Hannah nodded. “You sold them for her?”

“For her, and for me. When we needed the money.”

“For you?” Zach stared at Hannah for a second and thought about this. “You mean… she gave you drawings, and you sold them?”

“Not exactly.”

“You took drawings?” Hannah said nothing. “Because if Dimity wanted it all kept secret, then I guess that gave you the leverage to take whatever you wanted, right? How could you do that?”

“It wasn’t like that! I… I had every right to. Besides, she needed the money, too, and she couldn’t have sold them without me.”

“I hardly think dealing with the auction house for her gives you the right to-”

“I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about… making the pictures saleable. Making them viable.” Zach shook his head in incomprehension, and Hannah fidgeted slightly. It was the first time he had ever seen her look guilty. She sighed suddenly. “A lot of them we couldn’t let anybody see, because they were of Dimity, but obviously later on in her life, when he supposedly couldn’t have known her, since he was meant to be dead. And a lot of them are scenes of war, so obviously they couldn’t be seen, either. That left some of Dennis, and some of Dimity while she was still young but… He never dated any of them. None of the pictures he did after he came back from the war were dated.”

“Why not?”

“Because, I suppose, he had no idea what the date was.”

“Christ. And you…”

“I wrote the dates on them,” she said. Zach drew in a steadying breath.

“I knew it! I knew the dates weren’t right!”

“You were right,” she said solemnly, and Zach’s moment of excitement faded. They sat in silence for a minute.

“You do a good imitation of his handwriting,” Zach told her, not sure how to feel. “You have a talent for that.”

“Yes. I know.”

Again they sat in silence for a while, each lost in thought. Outside, the wind had got up and it started to rain. It made a lonely sound, and Zach felt the sudden need to gather Hannah close to him, and warm her. But the shadows in the corners were too deep, too distracting. Years of lies and hidden things left so long that they’d hardened, ossified. Beside him, Hannah reached behind her head and pulled her hair out of its ponytail, and the familiar scent of it gave him a sharp, unhappy pang.

“You had no right, you know,” he said quietly. Hannah looked at him, and her gaze hardened.

“I think I did.”

“Those pictures don’t belong to you. They don’t even belong to Dimity! She was never his wife… she never had his child. Keeping somebody prisoner for sixty years doesn’t make you their common-law wife, if that’s what you’ve been thinking…”

“Prisoner? He was never a prisoner! If he’d wanted to leave, he could have.”

“So it was okay that she let the world think he was dead? That she let his family think he was dead?” Hannah pursed her lips; answered him in a clipped tone.

“If that’s what he wanted. Yes,” she said. Zach shook his head and Hannah seemed to wait. Waiting for his next attack, his next argument.

“Those pictures belong to Charles Aubrey’s next of kin,” he said, and to his surprise, Hannah smiled.

“Yes, I know that. And you’re looking at her.”

“I’m what?”

Dimity could hear them speaking downstairs, but she couldn’t understand their words, so she stopped trying, and let them wash over her like the blurred sounds of the wind and rain outside. None of it mattered anymore. The room was empty. Charles was gone. No way to explain to them that keeping the door closed had kept her heart beating. No way to explain that as long as she couldn’t see that he’d gone, she could dream he was still there. The shifting of the house that sounded like his footsteps, the breeze moving his papers that sounded like him working. She had come to believe it, over the last few years. Come to feel like he had not gone, and the long, happy years she had spent looking after him still continued. The sudden emptiness of the house was as cold and deep as death. She could hardly find the breath to go on living. The chill of his absence crept closer all around her, leaching the warmth from her blood and bones. Every limb felt heavy, every breath was a labor. Her heart was as vast and hungry as the sea; as empty as a cave. Life was just a burden, with the room upstairs sitting empty. The long debate of the young man and woman downstairs kept the other voices of The Watch quiet, at least. The living were louder than the dead. But there was a new face in the shadows; come to see her at last, come to haunt her. A silent reprimand of wide eyes, full of anguish. Delphine.

She came to The Watch one day. Out of nowhere, on a still, yellow autumn morning tangy with the smell of dew and dead leaves. The war went on, all unobserved. Charles had been with her for over a year and they had settled into their strange new life together, finding a rhythm to it, the comfort of habit. And for Dimity, the joy of having everything she ever wanted. A person to love, and be loved by; to be needed by.

“Hello, Mitzy,” said Delphine with a cautious smile, and all at once the ground yawned open at Dimity’s feet again, vertiginous as the cliff edge, just ready for her to teeter and fall. Delphine looked older. Her face was longer, and thinner. Her jaw followed an elegant curve; her hair was parted to one side, and swept back in gentle waves, soft and shiny. Her brown eyes were deeper than they’d been before. As deep as the earth; they seemed far older than the rest of her. “How are you?” she asked, but Dimity couldn’t answer her. Her heart was beating too hard, her thoughts clamored, and no words would come. Delphine’s smile faltered, and she fiddled with the clasp of her handbag. “I was… just hoping to see a friendly face. A familiar face, you know. And I… I wanted to make sure you know about… Father’s death. Last year. They sent me a telegram at school. Did you know?” she said, in a rush. Delphine’s eyes flooded with tears as Dimity nodded. “Well, I thought I should check. I thought you ought to know. Because… well, you loved him, too, didn’t you? I didn’t like it at the time, when Mummy told me. But why shouldn’t you love him, too, just because we did?”

“I… I loved him,” Dimity said, with a tiny nod of her head.

They faced each other across the step for a while, and Delphine seemed undecided about what to do or say next.

“Listen, I… Could I come in, for a while? I’d like to talk to you about-”

“No!” Dimity shook her head rapidly, as much in refusal as in denial-in response to the small voice at the back of her mind that was telling her that of all the wrong things she had done, turning Delphine away would be one of the worst. She buried the voice, stood firm.

“Oh,” said Delphine, taken aback. “Oh, right. Of course… Will you come out for a walk then? Down to the beach? I don’t want to go just yet. I don’t… know where to go next.” Dimity stared at her for a moment, and felt her careful emptiness deserting her; felt the falling start. But Delphine’s eyes were meek, imploring, and in the end she could not refuse her.

“All right. To the beach then,” she said.

“Just like old times,” said Delphine. But it wasn’t, and neither of them smiled.

They went down the valley, through Southern Farm’s fields, then onto the shore. They walked westwards into the late-season sun, weaving through the boulders to the shingle by the water’s edge. It was a flat sea that day, all silvery and pretty, as though the world was a calm and safe place. The two young women, as they walked, knew otherwise.

“How is your mother?” Delphine asked. “I think back a lot, you know. Over the time we all spent here. I think back and I can see, now, how hard it must have been for you, for us to just come and go. And I can… guess, now, how hard a time your mother must have given you. All the bumps and bruises you always had… I was so blind, at the time. I’m sorry, Mitzy,” she said.

“She’s dead now,” Dimity said hurriedly. She could not bear to hear Delphine apologize.

“Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be. I don’t miss her. Maybe that’s not what I should say, but it’s the truth.” Delphine nodded a little, and didn’t ask anything else about Valentina.

“But aren’t you a bit lonely now, up there all by yourself?”

“I’m not…” Dimity’s heart gave a jolt. She had been about to say that she wasn’t alone; she had been about to give herself away. She had to learn to think faster, to say less. “I’m not lonely,” she managed, her voice uneven because her blood was buzzing like insect wings. Delphine glanced at her and frowned, not believing her.

“When the war is over, things will be different,” she said. “When the war is over, you’ll be able to go wherever you want, do whatever you want.” She spoke with certainty, and Dimity stayed silent, wondering how on earth a bright girl could still think things like that.

They had come to a wide stretch of sand, smoothed by the tide, immaculately flat and even. Delphine stopped, and stared at the place with a frightening intensity.

“There-can’t you just see her?” she whispered.

“What? See who?”

“Élodie. Wouldn’t she have just loved this spot? She’d have written her name in the sand, or drawn a picture.”

“She’d have done cartwheels,” Dimity agreed, and Delphine smiled.

“Yes, she would. She’d have complained that we were walking too slowly, and that she was hungry.”

“She’d have told me I was a stupid know-nothing.”

“But she’d have listened to you, all the same. To your stories, and your folklore. She always listened, you know. She was just jealous of you-of how grown-up you were, and how free. And that Mummy and Daddy took to you so.”

“I was never free. And Élodie never liked me,” Dimity insisted.

“She was too young to know why not, though. It wasn’t your fault, or hers.” Delphine stared at the buff-colored sand, the silver waterline. “Oh, Élodie!” she breathed. Her eyes shone with tears. “When I think of all the things she’ll never do, and never see… I can hardly bear it. I can hardly breathe.” She pressed her fists into her ribs. “Have you ever felt like that? Like you’ll just stop breathing, and die?”

“Yes.”

“I dream about her sometimes. I dream that it’s Christmas, and she’s all grown up. I dream about how beautiful she would have been, how smart and sharp. She would have broken hearts, Élodie would. But I dream that she comes to me at Christmas, and we stand and talk beneath this huge tree, all covered with lights. She’s all lit up by fairy lights, in her eyes and in her hair. She wears a silver dress, and her hair is blacker than jet beads. We have a glass of champagne, and we laugh and swap secrets, and gossip about her newest beau. And I…” Delphine trailed off, gripped by a silent sob that stole her voice. “And I… wake up so happy from those dreams, Mitzy. So happy.” Delphine put her face in her hands, and wept. And Dimity stood beside her, and could not breathe, and felt like she would die.

For a long time they said nothing. They simply stood, and the sea broke quietly against the shore, unperturbed. Delphine stopped crying and lifted her wet face to the horizon. She looked as calm as the waters, numb and untouchable.

“Have you heard from Celeste?” Dimity asked, unsure if she wanted the answer. Delphine blinked, and nodded.

“She wrote to me, after I sent a telegram to grandmère. She wrote me a terrible letter. I keep it with me, and I keep reading it in the hope it’ll say something different. It never does, of course.”

“What does it say?”

“She says she loves me, but she misses Élodie too much to see me. But what it really says, underneath, is that she blames me. She won’t see me because she blames me. And she’s right, of course. I am to blame-I killed my sister, and I nearly killed my mother, too.” She shook her head violently. “I was so sure! I was so sure I’d picked the right things! How can I have made such a mistake? How?” She looked at Dimity, desperate, mystified. Dimity stared at her with her mouth fallen open. The truth hovered there, on her tongue, waiting. Wanting to be spoken. I had gone black inside, she wanted to say. My heart had stopped. I wasn’t me. But she stayed silent. “I thought I knew what I was doing. I thought I knew as much as you. I thought I was so clever.” Delphine voice was heavy with self-loathing.

“Why did you come back here?” said Dimity. It was an accusation, a plea for her to go. Delphine tore all the wounds wide open, wider than ever.

“I… I just wanted to… be where they had been. Mummy and Daddy, and Élodie. I’ve left school now, you see. I wasn’t sure where to go, or… any of it, really. I went to London but our house was… bombed out. Ruined. Like everything else. This was the last place I saw them. I was hoping… they might still be here. In some way.” Tears splashed onto her cheeks again, and Dimity wondered that she had any left to cry. “I wish I could remember what it felt like, back then. What life felt like, when we came here and played and messed about, and Father drew, and Élodie argued with Mummy, and you and I wandered around picking herbs and catching crabs. We’re the only ones left who know how good things were then. You and I. What did it feel like? Do you remember?” She stared at Dimity with an awful hunger, but didn’t wait for an answer. “What did we do wrong that our lives should be ruined like this? Ruined or finished, so soon? Why are we being punished like this?” she murmured. Dimity shook her head.

“Why don’t you go to your mother?”

“I… can’t. Not when she doesn’t want me.” Delphine paused and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “I can’t believe she left me behind, Mitzy. I can’t believe it. I never meant to hurt Élodie… she must know I never meant to.”

“If Celeste saw you, she would love you again. You should go to her,” Dimity urged. But Delphine shook her head.

“Well, I can’t, even if she wanted me to. Not with the war on. I don’t know what to do next, Mitzy.” She looked up then, her face a plea, but Dimity knew only that she could not stay in Blacknowle. She could not, because being calm, being happy, not letting the black tide and the rats take her over, would be impossible if Delphine was near. “Perhaps… do you think I could stay with you for a while, Mitzy? Now that your mother is… gone. Just for a short time, while I think about where to go, and what to do next?”

“No! You can’t stay here. Don’t stay here. Too many memories.” Dimity spoke in a clipped, alien voice. Delphine stared at her in dismay, and the hurt on her face burned like cigarette ash on Dimity’s skin. “You can’t!” she gasped. “It’s… unbearable to have you here!”

“Of course. I’m sorry.” Delphine blinked, and looked towards the sea. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. I might go for a walk, now. Before I leave. I’d like to… see some more of the places where we went, before. I’d like to remember how it was, for a while. How life was, when everything seemed so safe, and we were all so happy that we didn’t even realize how happy we were.” She sniffed and took a handkerchief from her pocket to blow her nose.

“Then you should leave here. This place will catch you, otherwise. It’s a trap, and it’ll keep you here, if it can. So go soon, before it gets a grip on you,” said Dimity. She wanted to grab Delphine and propel her away, far from Blacknowle. She could not have her friend near and live in peace, that much was clear.

“I understand,” said Delphine, though Dimity didn’t see how she possibly could. With another flash of excruciating clarity, she saw that Delphine had come to expect rejection, to expect to be unwanted.

“Don’t stay here, Delphine. Start over, somewhere new.”

“Yes, perhaps you’re right. It does no good, when those times are gone. But a walk, perhaps. To see them all again, one last time.” She took Dimity’s hand and squeezed it, then pulled her close and hugged her. “I wish you happiness, Mitzy Hatcher. You deserve some.” Delphine was walking away before Dimity could answer her, and Dimity was grateful for that.

She went back to The Watch at a steady pace, careful not to trip or stumble, careful not to startle herself in case she flew apart like a flock of sparrows. She went up to Charles’s room, where he was sketching the face of a young man, shut the curtains, and put the light on for him. He didn’t seem to notice. He didn’t know that his daughter had been at the door; that the warmth of her embrace still lingered on Dimity’s clothes. Again Dimity stood, and the truth was so heavy that she was sure it would drip from her mouth. His daughter. His daughter. A young woman who needed her father more than anything. But her father is dead, Dimity reassured herself.

“No one can know that you’re here,” she said, and Charles’s head came up from his drawing, quick and frightened.

“No one. No one can know that I’m here,” he whispered, eyes as wide as a child’s in a nightmare.

“No one will know, Charles. I’ll keep you hidden, my love.” He smiled when she said this, so grateful, so relieved. Dimity took a step back from the edge, felt his smile soothe and warm her. She breathed more easily and went downstairs.

All the rest of that day she watched from the windows, looking out for Delphine. She scanned the cliffs and the visible part of the beach, and had only just begun to relax and think her gone when she saw her, late in the afternoon, crossing the far paddock and into the yard at Southern Farm; knocking on the farmhouse door. From a distance she looked even less like a girl anymore-she looked like a woman, willowy, tall, and thin as a whip. She saw Mrs. Brock step out and hug Delphine. She hugged her for a long time, and then drew her into the house. And Dimity remembered the way Christopher Brock had always looked at Delphine, the way he’d smiled and dropped his gaze, abashed, and she knew with dreadful certainty that Delphine would never leave. The trap had closed, and she would always be there, like a wound that wouldn’t heal, to remind Dimity of what she had done, and what she should have done. To make the threat of Charles being discovered more pressing, more real. If Delphine found him, she would claim him. But she would never find him, Dimity resolved there and then. Delphine would never set foot inside The Watch, and Charles would never set foot outside it. She stood for a long time, staring down at the farm and knowing that she would not see Delphine leave. It was full dark before she finally roused herself, and realized that she could no longer see out through the window. She shook herself, took a deep breath; tried to remember what she had been so sad about, earlier that day, what had frightened her so. She shrugged it off, since it couldn’t have been important. Nothing was, apart from Charles. She hummed an old song as she began to prepare his dinner.

Zach stared at Hannah in complete amazement. She waited patiently for him to speak.

“I always said… I always felt that I recognized you. From the first moment I met you.”

“Yes you did. I thought it was a line.”

“No, it wasn’t a line. I did recognize you-you look like Delphine. But I only saw it at certain angles, because I only really know Delphine from certain angles. From the picture of her that I have, that I love… I’ve spent so long studying it, looking at it.” He shook his head incredulously. “Delphine was your grandmother?”

“She was. She came back to Blacknowle during the war, when she finished school. She ended up marrying the farmer’s son, Chris Brock, and the pair of them never left.”

“Nothing was ever written about her. Nobody ever mentioned what happened to her.”

“Well, I expect nobody really cared. She wasn’t a famous artist, after all-and Aubrey was dead. Delphine was only a teenager when the war broke out. I expect nobody was interested in finding her, or talking to her.”

“Is she… still alive?” For a moment, the thought of meeting the girl whose picture he had studied and loved so intensely made Zach’s mouth go dry, but Hannah shook her head.

“No. She died when I was still young. She was only just in her sixties, but she had cancer.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. Do you remember her? What was she like?”

“Of course I remember her. She was lovely. Always very kind, thoughtful. And softly spoken-I never once heard her raise her voice. But she was solemn, too. I hardly ever heard her laugh.”

“Well, her sister had died, and then she thought her father had, too, and her mother left her… Losses like that will leave a mark on you, I guess. Weren’t you angry when you found out that Aubrey had been alive all this time? Your great-grandfather? God, I still can’t believe it! It’s… unreal… But weren’t you angry? He was your family, after all.”

“No,” said Hannah lightly, as though the thought hadn’t occurred to her. “I never knew him. I lost nothing when he died.”

“But, on your grandmother’s behalf…”

“Yes, I suppose I should have been. Poor Delphine-she did always miss him, I know that much. But what’s the point of anger when something can’t be undone? No good can come from punishing people so long after the event-Delphine had been dead nearly twenty years before her father followed.”

“Did she ever talk about her mother? About Celeste? Did you ever meet her?”

“No. As far as I know, she never saw her again; certainly not after I was born-as far as I know. She never talked about her, either. It was like she’d died in the war, same as her father.”

“So… the pictures belong to you. As Charles Aubrey’s great-granddaughter. They belong to you now,” said Zach, looking up at Hannah and trying to work out what he felt. He was exhausted. He was overloaded, bewildered, excited. Hannah nodded slowly.

“What will you do?” he asked. At once, Hannah looked uneasy.

“Much more to the point, Zach, what will you do?” Puzzled, Zach didn’t answer.

The night seemed to have started years before, decades even. After a while, Zach went back upstairs to the small bedroom, where all the pictures were waiting. He looked at each and every one of them. Two hundred and seventeen finished works in total. There were pictures of Dimity in her twenties and thirties; in middle age; in old age. The slow, steady passing of her years, recorded a piece at a time in Aubrey’s vibrant sketches and paintings. There were scenes of violence and devastation, of chaos and the brutal, confusing ugliness of war, the likes of which Zach had never known Aubrey produce before. Aubrey, a man inspired above all else by beauty. Already he was cataloging them in his mind, arranging them into an exhibition, drafting the explanatory biographical notes that would accompany each piece. The art world had never known a story like this one, he realized. Everyone would want to come and see these pictures, and hear this story. And he knew, in that instant, that he wanted to be the one to tell it. But, of course, that wasn’t up to him. It was up to the owner of all the pictures. And if she wanted to lock this room and never open it again, then that was her right. The thought gave him a crushing feeling.

There were portraits of Dennis with a multitude of different faces, and Zach studied them all, under the weak light from the solitary bulb overhead. He looked at all of Aubrey’s possessions, the scattered items on the desk, touching each thing gently, reverently. Tubes of oil paint and a bottle of turpentine-the chemical smell that had been so instantly recognizable to him as he’d sat in the darkness earlier, with Rozafa. Beneath some loose papers he found a startling thing. Military ID tags, still threaded onto a stiff and twisted leather bootlace. British, not made of metal like American ones would have been. A round red disk and an octagonal green one, made of some tough fiber, with the name F. R. DENNIS and his regimental details stamped clearly onto the surface of each. Zach ran his fingertips over the lettering. Dennis. I’ve finally found you. You get to have a story now, too. There was bound to be a photo of him somewhere. In some old family album. Zach would be able to see the face that Aubrey had so struggled to imagine.

“Dimity told me once that he never forgave himself,” said Hannah. Zach hadn’t even heard her come into the room.

“For what?”

“Stealing that soldier’s identity. He used him to get home, to get away from the war and make a break for it. Ruined his name by deserting, and denied his family a body, a burial. He had nightmares about it all the time. About the war, and about Dennis.”

“Why are all the Dennis pictures of different men?”

“They’re not. They’re all of him. It was Aubrey’s way of… giving him his life back. He never knew what he looked like, you see. Dennis was already dead when Aubrey found his body and switched their tags. Dead and so badly injured that he had no idea what the lad had looked like in life. This was his way of… paying him back, I think. He tried to give him back his face.”

“The pictures of Dennis that have come up for sale lately… they were so similar, but I knew… I knew there was something different about each one.”

“Yes.” Hannah nodded. “You’re the only one who looked closely enough to see it, it seems. I picked the ones in which he looked most alike. Where Charles had clearly got an image in his mind and had drawn it several times before it shifted. But he never got it one hundred percent the same, because…”

“Because it was a fantasy. He had no model.”

“Yes. It was a risk, putting them up for sale, but they were the only ones that wouldn’t have… raised questions.”

“Why take the risk?”

“We needed money. Dimity to live on, me to… to help Ilir and his family.” Zach considered this for a second.

“That most recent Dennis picture, the one that sold the week before last. That paid for Rozafa and the boy to come over, didn’t it?” he asked, already knowing the answer when Hannah nodded.

“Ilir has been working for me for years, and saving up what I could afford to pay him. He sent some of it to them in France, as well. But when the French authorities started to break up the Paris camps at the beginning of the month, it was too soon. We hadn’t got enough between us. We needed more.” Her eyes were wide and calm, but they were searching, too. She was trying to see how he felt about it all, trying to explain all the secrets, and the lies. To explain her part in it. “I never actually lied to you, Zach,” she said, as if reading his thoughts.

“You wrote fake dates on his pictures, Hannah. That’s forgery. You denied all knowledge of Dennis, and the new pieces that were sold. You lied to me and to the whole bloody world,” he said, realizing only then how much it hurt.

“It wasn’t forgery! The pictures are by Charles Aubrey.”

“Yes. The lie you told the world wasn’t as big as the one you told me,” he said. Hannah pressed her lips together unhappily, but she did not say sorry.

“What did you do with his body? You never did say. Does Charles Aubrey have a true grave that I could go and see?” Zach asked. He had a sudden dark vision of an exhumation, of relocation to hallowed ground. Of soil caught in grinning teeth and insects hiding in bony eye sockets. Hannah had been fingering the fine bristles of a paintbrush standing in a jar on the desk. She dropped her hand guiltily, as though he’d slapped her wrist.

“No. There’s no grave.”

“But… Don’t tell me you… burned the body? Jesus Christ, Hannah…”

“No! Not that. You have to understand… Dimity was near hysterical when I got here. With grief and with fear. She was adamant that if people found out he’d been here all this time she’d be in some kind of awful trouble. She kept going on and on about secrets and bad things… she was hardly making sense. It wasn’t long after… after I lost Toby. I wasn’t in a clear and logical place myself… And he’d been dead a while, you understand. I think… I think she’d been in denial, or maybe she just wanted to be with him for as long as possible. But he was… he was starting to smell.” She broke off, swallowing hard at the memory. “It was nighttime and there was this dead body-my second dead body that year-and Mitzy was sobbing and chattering and going on and on, so I… I went along with what she suggested.” She looked up at him, still with those wide eyes; expectant now, ready for his reaction. On any day before that day he’d have been happy to see that vulnerability on her face.

“Which was?”

“We gave him to the sea.”

The night he died was blowy and dry, the breeze a restless whisper, like a song. Dimity’s back was aching from scrubbing the kitchen floor. For years she’d supported herself and Charles by cleaning houses; riding the bus to the homes of people outside Blacknowle, newcomers, people resettling after the war. People for whom the name Hatcher had no connotations. And as soon as she could draw her pension, she did so, stopping work and spending the whole of each day with Charles at The Watch. The cottage no longer felt like a prison but a home. A sanctuary. A place where she was happy and her heart was full. But that night her bones were aching, right through to the marrow, and after a while the hairs on the back of her neck began to prickle, and an awful, sick feeling gathered under her ribs. She hummed and she sang and she went about her chores, and made a dinner of lamb chops and mint sauce, but she put off taking it up to him for as long as she could. She knew; she knew. But she didn’t want to see, to have it proven. Each step of the stairs was a cliff face, each push of her muscles a marathon. She forced herself up to his room when the chops had long gone cold and the fat from them had congealed in a ring around the plate.

The room was in darkness and she put the tray carefully on the desk before crossing to the switch. The hand she raised to pull it was leaden; weighed more than all the rocks on the beach combined. And there he was, fully dressed but lying on the bed with his legs under the sheet, arms across his middle, tidy and organized. His head was nestled into the center of the pillow and his eyes were shut, but his mouth was not. It sagged open slightly, just enough for her to see his lower teeth, the swell of his tongue. A tongue that was no longer pink, but grayish pale. And then, in that second, the world stopped turning and everything seemed to fade to shadows; nothing was real or solid anymore. The air wasn’t fit to breathe, the light burned her eyes, and the ceiling pressed down on her until her knees buckled. The house, the world, and everything in it turned to ashes, and she tottered to the bedside, gasping at the pain. His skin was cold and dry, the flesh beneath it too firm, inhuman. The white wisps of his hair were soft and clean when she put trembling fingers up to touch them. The years had given him sunken cheeks and gaunt sinews to garland the length of his neck, but when she looked at him all she saw, all she had ever seen, was her Charles, her love. For a long time she lay crumpled there, with her cheek pressed to his still, silent chest.

New faces, new voices, came to fill the gray hollow where Charles had been. They were indistinct at first; they kept their distance. They were suggestions of movement, voices too quiet to hear. But then, almost a week after Charles had left, she caught a flash of blond hair in the hallway mirror as she passed it. Dyed yellow hair, long and coarse and split at the ends. Valentina. And then that evening a seizure gripped her, a shudder taking over her arms and shoulders that was not hers, but Celeste’s. The dead were drawn to their own, she knew, like wasps to a murdered comrade. Death was in the air at The Watch, the smell of it was spreading, getting stronger, tempting others to come and look, to come visiting. She ran up to his room in terror, and held his cold hands for comfort. They were soft again now, but in a wrong way. His whole body seemed to be sinking, settling lower into the mattress. His eyes had drawn back into his skull, his cheeks were even deeper and the strands of his neck even looser. The tongue nestling between his teeth had darkened, blackened. His skin was waxen and yellow. “Hawthorn,” she murmured to him in anguish, as the day got old and the sun went down. “You smell like May flowers, my love.”

When she had no other choice she went down to the farmhouse, and Delphine opened the door. For a moment Dimity accepted this, and then she was startled because it could not be. She had seen Delphine carried out, years before. It was not Delphine but the girl, the dark-haired one who had sometimes come knocking on the door of The Watch when she was small, to ask for sponsorship for Red Nose Day, or to sell raffle tickets for the Brownies. A small, angular thing with scraped elbows and knees, she had been, but now here she was, grave and solemn and lovely. Her breath was ripe with alcohol, her gaze scattered and bewildered. But Dimity took her hand and pulled her back to The Watch. She could not lift him by herself. The cottage was roaring with the voices of the dead, but Hannah didn’t seem to hear. They stirred Dimity into a frenzy of fear and desperation. They had to go, they all had to go, and take their secrets with them. Secrets that had to be kept; too many of them, and too grave, for even one to be spoken-the pebble that would start the landslide. No police, no undertaker, nobody else but the two women and the dead man. Hannah put her hand over her mouth as they went into Charles’s room, and gagged. Her eyes were darkly alight with horror.

Between them, they lifted him off the bed. Heavier than he looked; a tall man with good, strong bones. They carried him out of The Watch and down to the cliffs. Not above the beach, but behind the cottage, to where the land dropped vertically down into the inlet. The tide was high, Dimity knew. She knew it so well she didn’t even have to think to know; the currents, too, the tow that would pull him under and take him far out to sea. The wind was buffeting, lifting white crests to beat against the rocks. It carried away the smell of hawthorn blossom; it carried away the sound of her sobs. They swung him back and forth, once, twice. Released him on the third. And for a second, just for a second, Dimity almost followed him down. She wanted to keep hold of him, to go with him, for there seemed little point in staying on without him. But her body had other ideas, some gut instinct to live, and her hands let him go, and he flew into darkness. Swallowed by the surging water; gone. She stayed on the cliffs for a long time afterwards. The girl stayed with her; with her sweet, whiskey-scented breath, her hair fluttering, and the sure grip of her hands, as though she understood what Dimity might do otherwise. Where she might go. Then later she was back at The Watch, with no memory of moving, and the place was as dim and quiet as a grave.