this hour of the morning, but before he could, she said, “I need to see you.”
“I was just on my way to work.”
“I’m working too. Later. This evening.”
“Where’s Lionel?”
“Out. He won’t be back.” There was a short silence. “I need to see you, Max.”
They had spoken many times on the phone, but always in a vague sort of code in case one of the girls at the exchange were listening in. “I need to see you, Max” wasn’t code; it was a bald and brazen statement.
“I’m meeting Elliott this evening.”
“I’m sure you can rearrange it,” she said.
Under other circumstances, maybe.
“It’s not a moveable feast, I’m afraid.”
“My, it must be important.”
She was annoyed now, unaccustomed as she was to him calling the tune. He could picture the obstinate tightening of her jaw at the other end of the line.
“Just one of those things, I’m afraid.”
“Well, this is more than just one of those things,” she replied flatly. “So if you could find a moment in your busy schedule …”
He knew what she was like; she wasn’t going to give up.
“How late tonight?”
“I’m not going anywhere, and I believe you still have a key.”
If the girls at the exchange were listening in, there’d be a flurry of speculation. It was Mitzi’s way of saying she didn’t care.
“Okay.”
“I’m honored,” said Mitzi tersely before hanging up.
The key was where he had always kept it—in the drawer of his bedside table, along with the letters from home. There had been no mail in months, and the bundle of envelopes with their out-of-date news seemed only to deepen his sense of isolation. For all he knew, his father had finally seen sense and separated from his stepmother; Elizabeth was bearing the child of the stockman’s son; and Roland, well, there were any number of things he could wish upon Roland, syphilis springing readily to mind, but the irritating truth was that Roland would probably be kicking his heels with his regiment somewhere in southern England and sneaking as much leave as was humanly possible.
He spread the letters on the bed, searching for the one from his good friend Lucinda. There was no address, no stamp, only his Christian name, because she had handed it to him in person just a week before he’d gone abroad. He had taken the train to Lewes, where, in her own words, she was now living in sin with a painter old enough to be her father. If that was sin, then the devil really did have all the best tunes.
The painter was named Roger and the house was a large brick-and-flint-built affair on the edge of a hamlet at the foot of the South Downs. The garden was wild and unkempt, not unlike Roger’s hair.
They ate lunch outside on the terrace beneath a cotton awning slung between wooden posts. Roger’s son was away at boarding school, but his daughter, Clare, was there, with her sulky pout and downcast gaze, as befitted a thirteen-year-old. She attended the school in Lewes where Lucinda taught French.
“I was also Max’s teacher,” Lucinda explained. “Many, many moons ago.”
“La femme de Monsieur Dupont a les yeux bleus.”
“Excellent, Chadwick—give yourself a gold star.”
“We used to ascribe a whole load of other attributes to Madame Dupont when you weren’t listening. There’s nothing I don’t know about Madame Dupont.”
Roger had erupted in laughter, and even Clare had smiled.
Whenever Max was feeling down and desolate, he would think of the house and its garden bursting with blossom and lime-green loveliness on that warm day in early May. He could see it now as he pulled the four pages of paper from the envelope.
He hadn’t read Lucinda’s letter in a while, probably because he knew he had failed to live up to her kind and flattering words.
It started with a simple statement, barely legible. Her handwriting had always been atrocious, like a doctor’s scrawl.
Our friendship began with a letter, and this letter is all you shall have to sustain it over the coming months or, God forbid, years.
Well, God hadn’t been listening; it had been almost two years since she had handed him the letter on the platform at Lewes station as he’d been boarding the train back to London. He had waited till Haywards Heath before opening it, and he had still been pondering its contents when the train drew into Victoria station a good while later.
In the letter, she went on to say that she would not be writing to him again while he was away at war. Anything