as Fergus had lain catching his breath, smiling contentedly by her side. Surely that wasn’t what love was supposed to feel like, was it? The love she had read about in books and seen on the films once a month in the church hall.
After they’d parted that night, things had been different. She found she couldn’t trust him any more; they had gone into the barn that afternoon as lifelong friends and left as strangers.
Lizzie had felt thoroughly ashamed of herself. The whole incident would have been terrible enough. It would have been the unfortunate end of a friendship. But when she had found out she was pregnant, the whole thing had taken on a whole new seriousness.
The kettle whistled and jarred her from her memory. Pouring the water over the tea, she noticed that her hand was shaking again. Now she was older, Lizzie saw it for what it was: Fergus had manipulated her, making her feel guilty as though, somehow, she’d caused how he was feeling; but with age and hindsight she felt nothing but anger at him and self-loathing for not standing up for her own convictions: that would never happen again.
As the tea steeped, she slipped back into her room, where Diana sighed and turned over in her sleep. Lizzie pulled the newspaper clipping from her handbag and went back into the kitchen to read it one more time. She opened it and smoothed it out on the table. Three smiling faces looked up at her from the photograph. It was an article that had been in the local Scottish paper about the work that was being done for orphans all over the country. This story was about London orphans and how the orphanages were dealing with the influx of children that was happening because of the displacements during the war. When she’d first read it in her uncle’s newspaper, her heart had pounded in her ears because she’d recognized somebody in it. In the photograph was the woman who ran the orphanage, but next to her was an older woman in a nurse’s uniform who she’d recognized instantly as the nurse who had snatched her baby from her five years before. The woman who had been so cruel to her, and to the other young nurse who’d allowed her to hold her baby for a moment.
This had been the first clue she’d had about the whereabouts of Annie, the name she had given her daughter, since that day when she’d been taken from her arms, and here was a picture of that woman. The nurse she would never forget, who had stood in the doorway and looked at her with such cold contempt. Underneath the picture there was the name of the orphanage – St Barnabas. She reread it. It was down here in London, and she was determined to find it. As soon as she had leave, she was going to find Annie and make sure that she was all right. Tears sprang to her eyes again as she thought about her daughter, and as the world started to come to life outside Lizzie sipped her tea and came up with a plan. ‘I’m going to find you, Annie,’ she whispered into the empty kitchen.
8
After that first night when Julia had told them, the children seemed to come round relatively quickly to the idea of being sent to their great-aunt’s in the Cotswolds. It had helped that at school that week, a friend of Maggie’s had sent a letter to the teacher, who had read it out to the class, about all the marvellous things she was doing at the seaside since she’d been evacuated. Maggie had told Tom at supper and that had doubtless aided the situation and abated some of her children’s fears, and Julia had been grateful for the teacher’s clever idea.
Also, Julia had been spurred on by the ongoing discouraging news about the war in Europe. All week the papers had been full of the evacuation of Dunkirk in France, where hundreds of thousands of British soldiers had been rescued from the shores of Europe by the navy and a flotilla of small craft owned by everyday people. The fact that Europe was now defenceless added weight to current concerns that Britain could soon be invaded.
But too soon the day Julia had been dreading arrived. Early on Saturday, she rose before dawn to collect herself and finish any last-minute packing for her children. Sitting at her kitchen table, she wrote