It didn’t mean he was not constantly in her thoughts. She would imagine him in his scruffy pullover, feeding pigs and chickens, hoeing between the rows of vegetables, striding across the heath to the pub, cooking for himself and eating at the kitchen table. And she would re-enact in her head every detail of their lovemaking, his hands caressing her, his lips all over her body, his murmured words of love. It was erotic and dangerous for her peace of mind. Pulling herself together, she drove on.

In Norwich, she drew into the car park behind the castle and they made their way to Bonds, where Tatty bought clothes and new toiletries to take to college, after which they spent some time wandering about the different departments, discussing what gift Tatty should buy for Claudia and Reggie. ‘It will be strange in the house without Claudia,’ Tatty said. ‘She’s been there my whole life. I can’t imagine her married.’

‘I can’t either, but Reggie is a nice man and he’s been patient a long time. What were you thinking of buying them?’ Robert and Lydia had promised, as their gift, to pay for the reception at Upstone Hall. Claudia had a host of friends in the village and there would be about a hundred guests.

‘I don’t know. Not crockery or cutlery or a toast rack.’ She pulled a face. ‘Horribly unoriginal. I thought something for their garden. Reggie was telling me he was looking forward to making something of that.’

‘What about a garden bench?’

‘Good idea. Let’s have a cup of tea and a cream cake and then go to the garden centre and order it.’

Lydia was tired but content when they returned to Upstone Hall about six o’clock. Her bad dream, though not forgotten, had been pushed to the back of her mind.


The church was packed for the wedding when Lydia and Tatty arrived, Tatty in lilac silk and a tiara of real rosebuds, Lydia in a petrol-blue dress with full sleeves and a floating panel. A picture hat with a white full-blown rose on the front of the brim served to shade eyes which sometimes betrayed too much of what she was thinking and feeling. Bobby was already there, acting as usher and showing people to their places. Lydia made her way into the church, leaving Tatty to wait in the porch for Robert and Claudia in the bridal car. Outside the bells rang joyfully and inside the organist played softly.

The congregation turned as the bride entered and came slowly down the aisle on Robert’s arm. Age meant nothing; she was radiant and the smile her bridegroom gave her was evidence of his devotion. They joined hands and turned to face the Reverend Mr Harrington.

‘Dearly beloved…’ he began.

Lydia, listening to the moving ceremony, prayed that Claudia would be happy married to her Reginald, that whatever highs and lows they had would be minor ones, easily overcome.

It was a wish echoed by Robert in his speech at the reception. Reggie’s reply had been carefully prepared and, though he made one or two attempts at a joke, it was on the whole a serious speech in keeping with his character. ‘He’s too stiff,’ Robert whispered to Lydia. ‘You’d think all that wine would have relaxed him.’

‘He’s nervous,’ she whispered back. ‘And at least he’s sincere.’

Everyone was clapping and they joined in. After the last of the speeches, there was dancing for everyone. When the bride and groom set off on their honeymoon in Scotland, the older guests said their goodbyes and left the younger generation to go on celebrating in their own noisy fashion.


‘Not like our wedding, was it?’ Robert said, when they were alone once more, surrounded by the debris. It was gone midnight.

‘It was wartime.’

‘Yes, but I meant we didn’t have a bean, or at least, I didn’t…’

‘Neither did I. I had a job, same as you. And it wasn’t our fault if the war kept us apart.’

‘It wasn’t only the war that did that,’ he said quietly. ‘There was never just the two of us, was there? There was always a third person standing between us.’

She was shocked and turned to face him. ‘Oh, Robert, I’m so sorry. I tried, I really tried.’

‘I know you did and that made it even harder to bear.’

‘Is that why you re-enlisted?’

‘One of the reasons. The other was that the sea is in my blood and Upstone is landlocked. I couldn’t bear not to be able to see it. And you wouldn’t leave Sir Edward and move to the coast. And now the place is yours.’

‘We’ve messed up really badly, haven’t we?’ she said after several moments of silent contemplation.

‘No, not really badly. We’ve been content in our way and we’ve got two wonderful children.’

‘But it’s not enough. Is that what you’re saying?’

‘It always has been.’

‘What an indictment of a marriage! What do you want to do about it?’ Her breathing was ragged as she waited for his answer.

‘Nothing. Anything else would break the children’s hearts and I couldn’t do that.’

‘Nor I.’

They were silent. Lydia’s head was spinning. Why had he brought the subject of their marriage up like that, especially as he seemed not to want to do anything about it? Was he telling her he knew about Alex being alive and living not twenty miles away? Or was he preparing her for his own announcement?

‘I’ll leave the clearing up until the morning,’ Lydia said. ‘I’m too tired to tackle it tonight.’

She was in their bedroom in the middle of taking off her finery when he joined her. ‘Let’s forget I spoke,’ he said, hanging his grey silk tie over the mirror and unbuttoning his shirt. ‘It was out of order. Seeing Claudia married and too much champagne made me maudlin.’

She did not answer.


Tatty was in the loft, searching for a suitcase to convey her belongings to Girton. It was a nostalgic trip. Toys, tennis rackets, dolls with arms and eyes missing, a doll’s house, an inflatable boat they had used on the lake until it sprung a leak. She remembered how she and Bob had been tipped into the water, but it was summer and they were wearing bathing costumes and could swim like fish, so they had towed it back to the shore. Fancy her mother keeping that! It was cracked and rotten. There were a couple of tents too, some old armchairs and a large cracked mirror. She went and stood in front of it and smiled at her distorted reflection. Was that how the past appeared to her mother: cracked and distorted? How many of her mother’s memories were clear? Had age distorted them as the mirror distorted all it reflected?

She bent down and lifted the lid of a tin trunk and then she was in another world. It was filled with things her mother had saved from their childhood. Baby clothes, some blue, some pink, some pale lemon and cream. Tiny little four-inch shoes with soft soles, mittens for tiny hands, little embroidered pillowcases, exquisite shawls, carefully knitted and crocheted, all lovingly wrapped in tissue and cotton. She took them out gently and held them up one at a time. Had Mum meant to pass them on? For a moment, she held one of the shawls against her cheek and felt its softness and felt her mother’s love for her and her brother which, in all the years, had never wavered.

Slowly she wrapped everything up again and laid it lovingly back in the trunk. As she began to close the lid she saw the lining was bulging and pulled it down. Out fell a large brown envelope. She sat on the floor and emptied it into her lap. It was a treasure trove. A pile of unopened letters fell out, all addressed in her mother’s neat handwriting to Yuri Nikolayevich Nahmov at an address she could not read. The envelopes were covered in Russian scrawl which she assumed said something like ‘return to sender’. The Russian date stamp on them covered a period from April to August 1961, only two years before. Yuri would have been twenty-two, she calculated, just coming into his stride as an adult. Had he sent them back himself or some unknown official?

‘Oh, Mum, how that must have broken your heart,’ she murmured, as tears filled her eyes. She could imagine her mother’s misery and disappointment at getting the letters back and her reluctance to destroy them, but at the same time she had not wanted to upset anyone else in the family and had hidden them away.

She set the letters aside, unwilling to open any of them, and turned to the rest of the contents, a few badly focused snapshots and some scraps of paper, one a certificate of Yuri’s birth and the other a certificate recording the union of Nikolay Nikolayevich Andropov and Lydia Stoneleigh, stamped by someone in Moscow. There was also an official-looking letter in Russian on which her mother had written: ‘Notification that Kolya is dead and I am a widow.’

She picked up the first of the snapshots. Her mother, looking incredibly young, was hanging on the arm of a young man, smiling into the camera. So this was Kolya. She studied his features. He was young too, not tall, but slightly taller than his bride and round-faced, looking very pleased with himself. How had he died? Had her mother mourned his death? There was so much she did not know. Another picture was of three adults, Kolya, Lydia and another woman, curvaceous and slightly older than Lydia. Kolya had an arm about each of them. There was another of her mother nursing a baby, wrapped in a shawl. This, she had no doubt, was her half-brother. It was difficult to tell his colouring in a black and white photograph, but he appeared dark-haired. He was asleep so she couldn’t see his eyes. The next was an old sepia picture of an aristocratic lady in a long evening dress. She was wearing a heavy necklace and long earrings and on her head a tiara on the front of which sparkled the Kirilov Star. And another of her mother with a handsome young man. Her mother was wearing a lovely evening dress and looking young and starry-eyed and she was wearing the Star as a necklace. Judging by other photographs she had seen, the man was Alex Peters. It must have been taken before her parents met and married. Why had this one been hidden away? Had her mother loved Alex? How had she felt when he died? What had Dad made of it? How much of it did he know? How much did anyone really know about other people? All had their secrets, even her most open and above-board mother.

It was a revelation; first her mother’s confidences about how she had felt about her baby, the full extent of which Tatty had never realised, and then to find these letters and pictures. Poor Mum! She could imagine her return to Upstone after that trip to Russia, the tears, the guilt and sorrow, the settling down again to life in England, knowing her baby was in Russia at a time when the Germans were sweeping all before them. She must have suffered unbelievable anguish. Carefully, she returned everything to the trunk and found another case for her purpose.


Bobby, in his second year at Peterhouse, drove himself back to Cambridge, his little sports car so loaded with clothes, books and sports equipment there was no room for Tatty. Robert and Lydia took her in the Bentley, settled her in her room and made a long list of things she was going to need which she had forgotten, and then drove home to an empty house: no Claudia, no Bobby, no Tatty. It was eerie and unsettling.

In the next couple of days, Lydia did her best to act normally, but she was beginning to wonder what normal was. Her conversations with Robert were stilted and confined to practicalities. He spent a lot of time in the garden, talking to Percy, and doing odd jobs about the house, his demeanour one of forced cheerfulness. Lydia wanted to talk to him about what he had said, but every time the opportunity arose, she simply could not find the right words. And so nothing was said which might have eased the tension.

In the middle of the week, as if he could stand it no more, he told her he was going to sail round to Plymouth. After he had gone she went into the kitchen to make lunch for herself. The house was empty and silent: no voices, no laughter, no clatter, no overloud pop music which Robert deplored. Nothing. For the first time in her life, she felt alone. She kept herself busy for the rest of the day, slept badly that night and rose next morning to more of the same. She had hoped Robert would ring her the next day and be his usual cheerful self but the telephone remained silent. By lunchtime the following day, she realised he must be well on his way and would not ring until he returned to Ipswich. Unable to stay in the house, she picked up her bag and car keys and left, not knowing where she was going. She drove to Swaffham and went to the cinema. Driving home afterwards, she was sorely tempted to drive straight to Northacre Green, and might have done if she had not seen Claudia in the village and stopped to talk to her.