I pressed Send on the email and a grain of sand caught my toe.
My shoulders dropped about two inches and my poor damaged heart, held together with not much more than a bit of frayed garden twine, broke into yet more fragmented pieces. My longing for James, as ever, was triggered by the most obscure of things … a photo, a song, a place or, in this case, a number – number 459.
James always left the house before me in the morning. He would often leave a post-it note stuck to the kitchen table with a random message written across it using text speak, which he knew I despised. On the morning he died, a bright pink note was stuck to the table with the numbers ‘459’ written across it – no words just, numbers. Utterly confused and smiling to myself, I sent him a text:
459?
An hour later, he replied:
It means, ‘I love you’ x
On the day of the funeral, I still had no idea why 459 meant ‘I Love You’, but learned later from a student that 459 transposes to the letters ‘ILY’ on a telephone keypad. I loved it.
I grabbed my phone, meandered through to the lounge and did something I’d done at least once a day since James died – I scrolled down the messages list until I found James’ name and opened up a long line of his old messages – his loving one-liners sent every single day. They were all committed to memory by now, and yet I still scrolled through them, smiling, aching, remembering. I sat in the lounge, warming my hands on the electric radiator by the window and glanced through the messages while looking up now and again to watch the sunset over the islands. My thoughts wandered from James to Juliet. This was the very window she looked out on that last day with Edward … the same window, the same view, the same sun. I thought of the letter she had sent to herself, the letter on the fridge – a reminder to never forget him – and I knew exactly what she meant. But perhaps, living this way, with one foot in the past, was not quite healthy, not anymore. It was one thing to remember, and to remember with happiness, but another entirely to stick a pin in the world and stop it. Had Juliet sat at this window, whiling her life away remembering, scrolling through old letters, or had she gone out and grabbed life and left her time for remembering to the later years?
Desperate to read on and discover how – if – their relationship had developed, and half-hoping to find the permission to grab my life back again from within the pages of Juliet’s story, I glanced at my watch and decided that one more excerpt from Juliet’s story without permission from Sam wouldn’t hurt, surely? After all, the elf was stuck in the kitchen and he would never need to know …
Chapter 14
Juliet
Along came 1940
Mabel Juliet Lanyon was born three months before the start of the war. I was in Yorkshire at Lottie’s side during the birth and knew from the moment Lottie held Mabel in her arms that she would never let her go, which was, for me, an absolute and blessed relief. Lottie argued (rather macabrely) that with the war with Germany practically unavoidable now, even if it lasted just a few months, by the end of it, lots of young women would find themselves widowed with fatherless children, and Lottie could easily be just another one of them. Her calculated approach confounded her mother, who had survived the accident and was convalescing at Lanyon, but was far too weak to argue.
It was decided that Lottie and Mabel would continue to lie low with the maiden aunt for a couple of years, and eventually the story would be passed around that Lottie had married in Harrogate after a whirlwind romance with an Army officer who had died in the war, and she would eventually return to Lanyon, legitimately – if fictionally – widowed.
After Charles and I wed, a significant part of my inheritance was handed to Pa Lanyon, which left Charles free to follow his own dream – to join the Royal Navy as a warfare officer. In September 1939, at the very beginning of a war no one could guess would be even longer than the last, I drove Charles to