He had a nine-to-five desk job at the Admiralty which kept him in London during the week, but he came home to Upstone Hall every Friday night. Sometimes he stayed with her until Monday morning, but sometimes he went sailing. Lydia, who had never forgotten that dreadful wartime voyage from Russia to Scotland, did not share his enthusiasm and did not go with him. Bobby and Tatty had been once or twice but they were so busy with their own friends and social engagements it did not happen often. When she asked him who was crewing for him, he said, ‘A friend I met at the Admiralty, you wouldn’t know them.’

If she wondered why she had never met this crewman, she did not voice it. And if he chose to spend his time away from her, who could blame him? It was her fault, she knew that. She had not loved him as she ought, certainly not as well as he deserved. She hadn’t exactly kept him at arm’s length, but neither had she cleaved to him, sharing his highs and lows as, in the beginning, he had tried to share hers. She was carrying too much emotional baggage and didn’t seem able to let go of it.


The school assembly hall was packed with parents and siblings come to watch their sons and brothers line up to receive their accolades, smart in their school uniforms, their hair slicked down and their ties straight. Cameras were flashing everywhere and Tatty took a picture when it was Bobby’s turn. Afterwards there was tea in the marquee put up on the green in front of the school, a word with the head and then home again.

‘Phew! I’m glad that’s over,’ Bobby said as he climbed into the back seat beside Tatty.

‘I thought it was a lovely afternoon,’ Lydia said. ‘And the head was very complimentary about your results.’

‘I worked damned hard for them,’ he said, over her shoulder. ‘I didn’t want to let Grandpa down.’

‘Grandpa’, Lydia noted, not ‘Father’, and looked sharply at Robert, but he was looking straight ahead, watching the road. Bobby could not have failed to notice that his father had rarely been at home during his childhood and even now, when he could have been at home more, he was more often sailing his yacht. Grandpa was the male adult to whom he had always turned.

As soon as they arrived home, Bobby changed out of his school uniform and into jeans and T-shirt. ‘You can send this lot to the charity shop,’ he said, bringing his flannels, blazer and white shirt down to the kitchen and dumping them on the table. ‘I shan’t need them again.’

‘There’s plenty of time for that. Take them off the table, I want to prepare dinner.’

He scooped the clothes up, took them into the laundry room next to the kitchen and dropped them on the brick floor. Lydia sighed in exasperation. ‘What are you going to do now?’

‘I think I’ll have a wander outside, see if anything’s changed while I’ve been gone. What time’s dinner?’

Lydia laughed. ‘Nothing’s changed. And dinner is at seven.’

‘OK. I’ll be back. I might even bring you a nice fat trout.’ And he was gone out of the back door, whistling tunelessly.

Her son loved Upstone Hall and its surrounds as much as she did. As soon as he arrived home at the end of every term, he would go out and walk round the grounds. It was a sort of proprietorial beating of the bounds. One day, she supposed, it would be his and Balfour Place would be Tatty’s. She put a chicken into the oven to roast, prepared the vegetables and then went out to find him. He was in a rowing boat on the lake. Seeing his mother, he wound in his line and rowed back to shore.

‘Have you caught anything?’ she asked.

‘Not a thing.’ He shipped the oars, jumped out of the boat and tied it up. ‘I wasn’t really paying attention.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Something on your mind? You’re not worrying about going to university, are you?’

He picked up his rod and line and walked beside her. ‘No, of course not. I was just wondering if I could have a party, you know, to celebrate the end of school. Most of my friends will be scattered all over the place next year and I thought it would make a good send-off. You’ll let me, won’t you?’

‘How many?’ she asked warily.

‘Oh, about fifty, perhaps a few more,’ he said airily. ‘There’s plenty of room, isn’t there? And we won’t make a mess.’

She laughed. ‘Fifty young men not make a mess! Impossible.’

‘Oh, go on, say yes.’

‘I’ll have to ask your father.’

‘He won’t care. He’s never here anyway.’

‘Bobby, don’t speak about him like that.’

‘It’s true. He’s obsessed with that boat.’

‘He loves the sea, Bobby, and there isn’t any sea about here, is there? I don’t begrudge him.’

‘So what about the party?’

‘We’ll see.’

‘You always used to say that when we were little, as if that would be enough to shut us up.’

She laughed, taking his arm. ‘It didn’t work, did it?’

‘No.’

‘Do you want me to mention it?’

‘Yes, please. It’ll be better coming from you.’


‘Bobby wants a party for his friends from school,’ Lydia said to Robert next morning at breakfast. Tatty and Bobby were still in bed.

Robert looked up from the newspaper he was reading. ‘Why not? That’s the usual thing, isn’t it? Do you mind?’

‘No. We used to have lovely parties here when I was young. I remember my twenty-first. Everyone came, old and young, all dressed up to the nines. It was when Papa had the Kirilov Star made into a pendant for me. We danced the night away.’

‘I am sure it was a glittering occasion,’ he said, laconically. ‘But young people nowadays don’t want that kind of do. They want music by the Beatles and dancing the rock and roll and the twist.’

She should not have said that about her party; it was before she met Robert, before she met Kolya even, but Alex had been there. And as usual Robert had detected the note of wistfulness in her voice. ‘We can manage that, can’t we?’ she said brightly. ‘He says they won’t make a mess.’

He gave a grunt of a laugh. ‘Believe that if you like.’

‘I was thinking we should leave them to it,’ she began tentatively. ‘That’s what most parents do nowadays. Bobby’s very responsible and we’ll only be in the way if we stay around. We could go to a show and stay the night at Balfour Place.’

‘No,’ he said, somewhat sharply, then moderated his tone. ‘I mean, it’s no change for me, is it? I’m there all week.’

‘Yes, silly of me. What about a run up to the Dales? We could tour around, have bed and breakfast, walk a bit.’

‘OK, you see to it.’ He folded the paper, laid it beside his plate and stood up. ‘I’ll be off now. There’s a spare part I need to get for the Merry Maid and then I’ve got to fix it. I’ll probably stay on the boat tonight.’ He had told her of that the day before, and though she had been disappointed, it came as no surprise. Their relationship was one born of mutual respect, parenthood, habit, a kind of fond contentment with no great highs and lows. It was not enough to keep him at home. He bent to kiss her. ‘See you Friday.’

She went to the door to see him drive away as she always did, then turned back indoors. Bobby was just coming downstairs wearing jeans and a sloppy jumper. ‘Dad just gone?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘Did you ask him about the party?’

‘Yes. He said you could organise it yourself.’

‘Great.’

‘But I want to know who’s coming, how many, and I want it all over by two a. m.’

‘Yes, Mum.’ He was grinning from ear to ear.

‘Your father and I are going to have a weekend away and leave you to it, so no funny business.’

‘Funny business, Mum?’ he queried, adopting an air of innocence. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Oh, yes you do.’ She turned from him and went into the kitchen, feeling somehow unsettled. It was as if this milestone in her son’s life was a turning point in her own and yet she could not see how that could be. Tatty came down in her dressing gown, rubbing sleep from her eyes, and Lydia left them helping themselves to breakfast and went up to her room, where she sat on the edge of her unmade bed and contemplated her reflection in the mirror on her wardrobe door. She was forty-five years old, there was grey in her hair, and yet inside she felt no older than the twenty-one-year-old who had danced with Alex, ignorant of what lay ahead. How happy she had been. And how foolish.

Suddenly making up her mind, she made the bed, put a light jacket over her cotton dress and left the house. She picked up some stale bread from the kitchen and walked down to the lake, where she stood breaking it up and throwing it to the mallards. In her mind she was the four-year-old refugee again – lost, bewildered, afraid. As clearly as if it had been yesterday, she heard Alex speaking in his half-broken voice. ‘Try not to be sad.’

‘I cannot help it.’

‘No, I suppose not. But you are a great deal better off than a lot of Russian émigrés. They are finding life in England hard, not speaking English and needing to work. Be thankful.’

Be thankful. Yes, she had a lot to be thankful for. She threw the last of the crumbs and turned back to the house. There it was, four-square and solid, her home, and though the grounds were only half the size they had once been, it was still surrounded by a small park and manicured lawns. It was hers. Thanks to Sir Edward she was wealthy and need never feel cold or hunger or cruelty, though she was well aware they existed. She had always done her best to mitigate some of that, giving generously to charity, helping in more practical ways when she could, especially those refugees from the other side of the Iron Curtain who needed something to get them started in Britain and help with learning the language. Alex’s words, uttered to a traumatised four-year-old had sunk deep. Everything he had ever said to her was etched in her memory. ‘You are not alone,’ whispered while she queued at Kiev station. ‘Sweetheart, you need me, and while you need me, I shall be at your disposal.’ That in Minsk. And at that heartbreaking parting in Moscow. ‘I will come back to you, you see, and I might even have Yuri with me.’

Other memories crowded in on her, more bitter-sweet: a feeling of loneliness – no, not so much loneliness as isolation; her adopted parents, one of whom had loved her more than the other; her first day at school and at college; Kolya, whom she did not want to remember, and Bob, who had been her prop when she needed one most; Yuri lying content in her arms, a chubby, dark-haired baby with surprisingly blue eyes, who had been learning to recognise her and smile a toothless smile. She had never seen his first tooth, never watched his first tottering steps, never sent him off to school with a satchel over his shoulder. He would have finished his education by now, a young man, making his way in the world. She refused to believe he had not survived the war.

And then there was Alex in white tie and tails dancing a waltz with her at the ball to celebrate her twenty-first birthday, even then binding her to him with silken threads which neither time, nor distance, nor death itself could ever sever; Alex in that dreadful uniform, grim with responsibility, torn between love and duty; Alex the lover. That most of all. Oh, how she still missed him!

What had happened to him after she left him in Moscow? What was he doing going back to Minsk when it was being attacked by the Germans? Had he wanted to die? Where had they buried him? Who was the man she had seen standing by the yew tree in the churchyard the day of her father’s funeral? She was still plagued by questions, none of which could be answered.

She went back to the house to hear Bobby and Tatty arguing hotly because Tatty wanted to invite some of her friends to his party and he was against it. ‘You’ll have your own party when the time comes; do you think I’ll want to muscle my friends in on that?’

Lydia acted as mediator, as she always did, telling Bobby he should invite some of Tatty’s friends so that she did not feel out of it, then decided to go and look round the shops in Norwich. Doing that might banish the nostalgia.

She was halfway there when she ran out of petrol. ‘Of all the stupid things to do,’ she muttered, switching off the engine and getting out of the car to find herself in a country lane which did not even have road markings. When and why she had turned off the main road she could not remember. Neither could she remember when she had last seen a signpost.