Chapter 78

Chapter 78

Emma

Oxford

Emma lies under the apple trees, her fingers brushing a few long blades of grass that she missed when she mowed the lawn earlier. She had been asleep and had been dreaming in Spanish. She stretches her arms out wide, looking up at the sky through the branches. It is a clear May day, two years and two days since Will died.

She turns her head towards the greenhouse, where she can glimpse the tops of her young plantlings: blush-coloured hollyhocks, magenta poppies and lupins the colour of ice cream.

It has taken her longer than she imagined to find a date that everyone could make for lunch, but tomorrow is the day, and she is just about ready. She has been cooking for two days solid and all the crockery, tablecloths, glasses and cutlery are piled up in the utility room. Beside her, under the apple trees, the table and chairs are lined up ready. All she really has left to do is arrange the flowers for the tables and make up the spare room bed.

She sits up and looks out at her garden. Early white and purple aquilegia are standing guard by the gate and the peonies that line the drive look about to burst into life. Under the trees and in the (now tidy) flowerbeds, the last of the bluebells and cowslips bloom. Behind them, standing tall and proud, the foxgloves have returned.

Emma smiles at her garden– and she likes to think it smiles back at her. She couldn't have done it all without Les's advice and occasional manual labour, but she is a quick learner. After all, she comes from a long line of gardeners.

Les wouldn't accept any payment for his help or for the many plants he has given her, so instead, she has been giving him and Betty French conversation lessons over supper in her kitchen. They are planning another trip to Paris to celebrate their forty-first wedding anniversary. As Betty put it, ‘At our age, love, you can't hang around waiting for someone to ask you to dance'.

In addition to French, Emma now runs Italian and Spanish conversation classes at the garden centre, the new café being a perfect space for people to gather. On warmer evenings, they throw open the doors so they can have lessons on the veranda looking out over the downs.

Since returning from Seville, her time has been taken up with her garden, her three days a week in the garden centre and her burgeoning language classes. And the book idea has changed into something else. In the end, Emma decided to follow one of the lessons she learnt the previous summer: small contributions are worthwhile, too. So instead of writing a book, she ended up collaborating with Alistair on an academic paper exploring the flowers on the Titanic . The paper referenced the work of what they had concluded was a band of stewardesses– the florists on the Titanic – but it was dedicated to one in particular: Violet Jessop.

Alistair will be staying with her after the lunch tomorrow, while Clem will stay with Betty and Les, as will Mrs Pepperpot. Roberto and Philippe have organised accommodation in Oxford with friends and relatives. Tamas will be getting a taxi over.

Emma invited Berta, too– a shy but determined woman whom Emma has now met a few times– but she politely declined. She and Tamas are now spending more and more time with Betty and Les at the garden centre, and together they are drawing up plans for Tamas and Berta to take over some of the day-to-day management of the centre, freeing up time for Betty and Les to visit their son and for Les to concentrate on growing begonias and sweet peas for the local flower shows. Berta also has ideas for extending the market linked to the allotments, and she has enlisted her father's help to work up plans to make English wine.

Emma has finally tracked down the smiley girl from the library– who she now knows is called Ellie– and while she cannot join them for lunch she is going to call in for a drink (and pudding) in the afternoon. Her only slight sadness is that it is impractical for Guy to fly over for the lunch.

When Emma heads inside to tidy the spare room, she visits her own bedroom on the way, pausing by the perfume Phillipe sent her a few months ago. As she sprays it on her wrist, the fragrance fills the room with the promise of summer, with a hint of something that stirs old memories.

Once the spare room is prepared, Emma sits for a while on the edge of the bed, enjoying the satisfaction that everything is now ready. Absentmindedly, she pulls a drawer open in the chest beside her.

She glances at Will's old love letters, bundled up alongside the letters Granny Maria sent her over the years. Can she bear to look at them? Emma glances out of the window to the garden that she has come to love so much, and thinks, now, she can.

She pulls a pile of letters from the drawer and sits cross-legged on the floor, back propped against the bed. She unties the ribbon, takes a deep breath and starts to read.

There are the remembered phrases and endearments, written in small, rounded handwriting, which always made her think of Will, the little boy, sent away to boarding school at eight. There are lines from songs that reminded him of her; lyrics that take her back to evenings spent together shuffling through tracks on his iPod, squabbling over each other's taste in music, until they fell silent over one song they both loved.

One of the final letters she opens is still creased from where it lay under her pillow. There are the three words he chose for her: Brave, Bossy and Beautiful. She smiles as she reads on and cries afresh as she runs her fingertip over where Will signed his name.

He did love her. And she loved him.

When she can no longer see the pages for her tears, she puts the bundle away, and starts to read Granny Maria's letters instead.

Granny Maria wrote sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish, but always in a big loopy scrawl. The letters have been stored in no particular order and there seem to be hundreds of them. She finds advice to her twelve-year-old self about friends at school. Her grandmother's suggestions were centred around kindness, but with a sting in the tail: If they make you cry again, mi ni?a , I will come and beat them with my big stick.

Another letter clearly sent to a much younger Emma includes a copy of a Spanish poem about a goat trying to find its way to the sea. Next is a fatter envelope, on the outside of which her grandmother added an afterthought in English, Ask your Papa to read this to you, I wrote it in a hurry in Spanish .

Emma pulls the letter out, and with it comes a photograph slipped between the sheets of a second piece of paper.

She stops breathing.

She is looking at a black and white photograph of four figures on the deck of a ship. She recognises the couple from old photo albums as her great-grandparents. The man holds the hand of a child who must be Granny Maria– her eyes were always so merry. The little girl is staring up at a young woman, her hand held in hers.

The young woman is Violet Jessop.

There is no mistaking her. She is in a stewardess's uniform and is smiling at the camera. She has one hand up, shielding her eyes against the sun.

Emma gulps in a huge breath of air. She turns the photo over and sees the date– yes, Granny Maria would have been about three. There is a handwritten note on the back, too. It isn't her grandmother's handwriting– she knows that. Was it her great-grandmother who wrote this?

The girl who shared the secret of pillow post with us. What a surprise! We thought she had died.

Pillow post? Emma has so long associated pillow post with her father that she had half forgotten Granny Maria used it, too, leaving letters under her pillow when she came to stay. She had called it pillow post, too, always using the English translation– maybe liking the sound of the language? Perhaps phrasing it the way it had been said to her?

Emma opens the letter and starts reading her grandmother's letter:

Dearest Emma,

You asked me in your last letter what I was like when I was little, so I thought you would like to see this photo . Here I am! And what a lot of hair I had, don't you think? I am in the picture with my parents, your great-grandparents. My father was a doctor and my mother a nurse. They met when their families spent a year in Argentina (ask your father to look that up in the Atlas for you).

The other person in the photograph is a stewardess who worked on the ship we were sailing on. My parents had a big surprise when they saw her, because they had known her a long time ago. They had last seen her when she was a little girl and was very ill in hospital. They had always thought she had not got better.

Emma smiles as she reads this, knowing Granny Maria hadn't wanted to write that the girl might have died.

But she did get better and when they saw her again, they asked if they could take a photograph of her. And here it is.

When she was ill in hospital as a little girl, she told my parents about pillow post. She said it was a game, that they could hide letters to each other under her pillow. They did, and guess what? They fell in love!

I must go now, mi ni?a , and get to the post, but I send you lots of love.

Emma stares at the photo and letter in her hands. What was it Alistair had said about Violet as a little girl? That she had been ill and hidden love letters between a doctor and nurse.

The paper of Granny Maria's letter feels brittle in her fingers. She cannot remember this letter, at all. She looks at the date at the top of the letter. She would have been seven when she received it so perhaps that wasn't surprising. But something about that photograph must have stayed with her. She had recognised Violet when she saw her.

‘Oh, Violet, I did know you,' Emma says out loud, smiling at the young woman in the picture.

She reaches out and gently touches her grandmother's hand where it held Violet's. All these years she has been using pillow post, and telling others about it, she never thought about where the idea came from. She was looking for a connection to Violet through blood and genes, and yet it was there all the time in an idea passed on from her, as she has passed it on to others.

She thinks of Will, of Tamas, and Betty's son, Ben– writing to his son, Zac, a little boy confused and upset by the arrival of a baby sister. Hadn't these people been helped by the spread of a simple idea– the idea of how to communicate with someone you loved when it felt like the spoken word wasn't enough, or when you just couldn't say those words. An idea passed on to her great-grandparents by Violet Jessop.

She wonders how far and wide that simple idea has been spread by others in their turn. She knows from her scientific work how viruses and disease could spread, but couldn't good things spread, too?

Her mind buzzing, Emma absentmindedly picks up the thin piece of paper that was wrapped around the photograph. It is still marked by the creases made by a little girl's hospital pillow.

Dr Paulo Garcia

Buenos Aires. 12th August 1898

My love, Christina,

This will be my last letter to you. I cannot stay any longer in a place where you are promised to another and our families are lined up against us like an armed band. I do not blame them– your fiancé can offer riches and status that I will never possess. My father believes that by continuing to visit you, I dishonour our family name.

I write this in the garden and the scent of the freesias distracts me. I could never mistake that clean, sweetness for any other flower. I will always recognise it, as my heart recognised you when I first saw you.

I see our go-between in her bed under the trees. She is so sick, that little one– I see her fading, disappearing. One day, with the flutter of a white sheet, she will be gone. Do you think I was wrong to move her bed into the garden among the flowers?

When I visit her, I know I am wrong to think so much of you and to look for you by her bedside or hope for a letter under her pillow.

I will be at the train station at three o'clock tomorrow. I know I ask a lot of you. I wonder I can dare, but without you there is nothing, so my fear makes me brave. Please do not come and say goodbye. I believe that would destroy me, or worse still, shatter my resolve and make me stay. Only come if you mean to travel with me.

I have little to offer except my profession, my enduring love and freesias for your bridal flowers.

Ever yours, Paulo

Paulo, her great-grandfather; Christina, her great-grandmother.

Emma gazes at the words on the tissue-thin paper and imagines a young woman rushing along a hot, crowded platform to catch a train.

She thinks of the friends who will be joining her tomorrow for lunch under the apple trees. The thought of sharing these letters with them warms her like a shot of the plum vodka Berta and Tamas gave her for Christmas. She smiles at the photograph and the letters she holds in her hands.

Her only tiny regret is that she cannot deliver this news by pillow post.