I don’t believe it! I heard from Ma and Pa and they said you had actually been down to visit. I’ll ask how London is in a minute but first, do please write and give me your verdict on Ma. Pa wrote me a secret letter the other day—one she doesn’t know he’s written—to say how worried he is. Apparently her cough is “out of control”,’ as he put it. Is there anything you can do, with your fancy connections? When you were ill, didn’t you meet any useful doctors or professors, or deans of medicine?
If you’ve been home, then you’ll know about Alan. Ma and Pa will have filled you in with what I’ve told them. I expect they’re distressed—yes? Devastated, more like. They think I’m a silly girl who’s lost her head with some older man, etc.
It doesn’t feel like that. I’m not going to say what it does feel like, because I’m not sure I’m up to it, in pen and ink anyway. I’m trying to put it down in my notebook, because it’s all so new, and so wonderful, for me, and we’ll see how it goes. If I’m satisfied enough, I’ll maybe show you someday.
I wish you were here, Hal. It was such a frantic time when I was in London, all us girls dashed about everywhere, doing everything, as I think I lectured you that night we had dinner But although I thought my flatmates were friends, I don’t think of them that way so much now. You’re different. Your wound… don’t take this wrong, Hal… your wound makes you somehow more—well, approachable. As an older brother you were always a bit like a god to me when we were younger. Now you’re mortal. I like that.
Meeting Alan has changed everything for me. He’s a scientist. Yes, I know, he’s a doctor so he must be a scientist, but that’s not what I mean. I mean that he looks out on life as a scientist, in a very rational way. He says this war is going to last at least another two years because of the numbers of men committed but that it’s now not so much about winning as not losing. Fighting to avoid defeat, he says, is always the most vicious kind—we only have to look at animals defending their territory or their offspring.
Falling in love with Alan was never my intention—I ask you to believe that, Hal. But it has rescued me in more ways than one. The war was getting to me—I wasn’t sleeping well, I found it hard to get out of bed, I wasn’t finding the work as rewarding as I should have (“rewarding” isn’t the right word, not in wartime circumstances, but you know what I mean). But that’s all gone. I tell you, my life has changed.
Write to me, Hal. Tell me the truth about Ma, and tell me you are not distressed—not too distressed—by the news about Alan.
I haven’t asked about you and London but that doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about you.
Izzy
Later that year a zeppelin bomb dropped near the school where Sam taught. The school itself wasn’t hit but the roads around it were cratered and the school was closed for a week, until the rubble could be cleared and the buildings that had been damaged made safe. I had accumulated a bit of leave by then and so I suggested to Sam that we use the opportunity to take Will out of London for a short break. The problems that many of the children in her school were facing were getting to her and she leapt at the idea.
“But where will we go?”
“I know where I’d like to go … I’d like to see where you grew up, in Bristol.”
She was taken with the suggestion. “Can I bring Lottie?”
“If she wants to come, why not?”
But Lottie didn’t want to come. She didn’t say why; she just said she preferred to remain in London.
So the three of us took the train—the first train ride that Will remembered, and which he loved, though he was made a bit sick with the rocking of the carriages and the smell of smoke. We stayed at the Clifton, one of the best hotels in town.
“I never thought I’d ever get to see inside this place,” Sam said as we settled into bed for our first night away. “It was far too swish for us when we were growing up.”