Finding Henry Applebee
Celia Reynolds

One More Chapter

an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in ebook format by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Copyright © Celia Reynolds 2019

Cover design by Andrew Davis © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Cover illustrations © Shutterstock.com

Celia Reynolds asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Ebook Edition © August 2019 ISBN: 9780008336318

Version: 2019-09-04

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

Part One: ENCOUNTERS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Part Two: CONFESSIONS

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Part Three: SECRETS

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

To my mother, Joy,

&

especially, gratefully, Caroline and Brian, wherever you are – this is for you

‘It’s that—the thought of the few, simple things we want and the knowledge that we’re going to get them in spite of you know Who and His spites and tempers—that keeps us living I think.’

Dylan Thomas, The Collected Letters of Dylan Thomas

‘Periissem ni periissem.

I would have perished had I not persisted.’

Anstruther Clan Motto

Prologue

A Pollock on the Floor
KING’S CROSS STATION, LONDON, DECEMBER 6: DEPARTURE, 8:33 A.M.
Henry

What it all came down to, in the end, were the contents of a small brown suitcase, stored within stretching distance under the bed.

By Henry’s own admission the case itself was unremarkable. Scuffed and shabby, it had mouldered, half-hidden in the semi-darkness on a slightly dusty, carpeted floor. The handle, which was made of a robust, finely crafted cowhide leather, had grown ragged, and the once shiny metal clasps designed to spring open with a conspicuously satisfying click were tarnished and dull. And yet, Henry reminded himself, appearances can be deceptive; what mattered to him lay meticulously preserved within.

He kept a firm grip on the suitcase’s handle as he made his way onto the teeming concourse at King’s Cross train station. It was still early, the air charged with a melee of arrival and departure announcements, the throb of engines, the irritable drone of traffic from the nearby Euston Road. Henry felt a carousel of emotion crank into gear inside him. Focus! he told himself. Don’t let yourself get distracted until you’re seated on that train…

He drew to a stop in the centre of the concourse and placed his suitcase at his feet. Overhead, an indistinct mass of words blurred and flickered on the electronic departure board. Henry rubbed his eyes and tried desperately to remember his Mantra of the Day:

‘Applebee,’ he mumbled under his breath. ‘My name is Henry Applebee…’

Steadying himself with his walking stick, Henry lowered his gaze to the granite-grey concourse floor. Tiny spots of blood were raining down upon it, just inches from his black Derby shoes. It took him a moment to grasp where the blood was coming from, then he raised his hand to his face and realised with a start that it was trickling from his nose.

Henry’s heart sank. The sharp slick of red struck a violent chord of colour amongst an uninspiring sea of grey and black, navy and taupe – flat, wintry hues which hovered like low-lying clouds around the shoulders of the commuters who stood transfixed before the overhead departure board, or scurried backwards and forwards, zigzagging continuously across his path.

‘Whatever you do next,’ he said in a valiant attempt at calm, ‘DON’T PANIC!’

Henry’s eyes darted to the dizzying conveyor belt of faces sailing past him. One or two of his fellow travellers turned and cast a cursory glance in his direction. The majority, he noted, barely seemed to register him at all. He wondered if they were repelled. Perhaps they were just far too absorbed in the busyness of their own lives to notice an old man with a bloody nose?

He teetered, incredulous, as blood continued to gush in slow motion from his body and began to form an expanding pool of crimson on the floor.

It was out of his peripheral vision, as he detected the ferrous taste of metal trickling down the back of his throat, that he suddenly saw the figure of a girl running towards him. Henry scanned the outline of her face, caught the lightness and the ease with which she moved. For one brief instant, he debated whether she might be an angel. But then, as she drew closer, he saw to his relief that she was just a girl, an ordinary teenager like any other, probably seventeen or eighteen at most. Besides – now that he came to think of it – wasn’t an angel supposed to materialise in a nimbus of white light? Not arrive sprinting, dragging a wheelie bag behind her and spilling milky coffee from a paper cup onto the floor…

As she approached the centre of the ever-widening circle in which he now found himself, the frothy liquid splattered left and right, merging with the bloodstains on the ground.

Henry and the teenager stared in unison at what they had done.

‘It looks like a Jackson Pollock,’ he said, marvelling, despite himself, at the effect. He pointed at the evolving creation with his stick. ‘I think the technical term is “drip painting”.’

The girl scraped her long, mousey hair behind her back and tilted her head to one side. She was standing right next to him now, eyes narrowed, lips pursed in contemplation.

‘Looks to me like the inside of my head,’ she replied in a lightly accented voice. ‘When I’m having a bad day. A day full of demons.’

Henry thought this was an interesting analogy, but he was too distracted searching for something to stem the blood flow to express the fact out loud. He patted the pockets of his overcoat and noticed that the fringes of the girl’s multicoloured scarf were stained with thick, wet splashes of coffee.

Silently, he berated himself.

‘It’s dramatic, though,’ the girl continued. Her tone was attentive, her pale eyes keen, unwavering. ‘Like an explosion of light and dark.’

Turning at last to face him, she pressed a pocket-sized packet of tissues into Henry’s palm.

Henry fumbled, his stiff, papery fingers tugging clumsily at the slippery semicircle of perforated plastic.

The girl edged closer and cupped her hand around his arm. ‘Are you okay?’

Henry nodded. Instinctively, he felt that he should ask her name, discover the identity of this troubled, angelic stranger who had rushed, unbidden, to his aid, but his heart was still jackhammering beneath his ribs.

It was the damnedest thing… Half of him had expected to see his life flash before his eyes, and yet surely this wasn’t his time? Not here. Not now. Not when his journey was only just starting to unfold?

He blinked several times in succession in an effort to ground himself more fully in his surroundings.

The irony of the situation weighed on him like sin.

Here he was, once again in a bustling train station (albeit one on a much grander scale), ready to resume where he had left off all those years ago, the night of a snowstorm, and of a slow-curling flame…

Henry raised his head. Fixed his gaze on the soaring latticework of white metal girders which strained and arced, crisscrossing like a giant sugar cage high above the station concourse. He felt the girl take the tissues from his hand. There was a moment’s hesitation, and she began to wipe the trails of blood from his chin.

Henry kept his head held high and inched his foot discreetly along the ground, searching for his suitcase. He found its flat, armoured surface with his heel and gave an inner sigh of relief. It was still there. Everything was fine. His plan was all on track!

In the expectant space before him, Henry sensed the Pollock seeping into the concrete, morphing like a kaleidoscope and creating wondrous new forms, until the blood slowed into droplets, and finally into nothing at all, so that all that remained were shiny swirls of milk-white and scarlet and caramel-brown; a promising – if unexpected – explosion of light and dark on a once empty floor.

Part One

1

The Notebook
KENTISH TOWN, LONDON, DECEMBER 5: JOURNEY EVE
Henry

My name is Henry Arthur Applebee. I’m eighty-five and counting, with an arthritic knee, a healthy head of hair and all my faculties, though not all my own teeth. I’ve had a pretty good life, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have any regrets. Anyone who gets to my age and says they have no regrets is either deluded, or senile, or both. When all’s said and done, the facts remain as follows:

I may be old, but it doesn’t mean I don’t still have any dreams.

Who’s to say there’s an expiry date on achieving your goals?

Is it ever too late to right a wrong?

Now that Devlin’s gone, I’ve learned that establishing a focused and precise daily mantra can be a very effective way of ensuring your marbles are still intact. ‘Stay engaged in life!’ – that’s what they say when you retire. Then, as time hurtles by and everyone you know starts dropping around you like flies, it’s: ‘Keep your mind active. Cultivate a hobby. Join a community group!’

But for me, it all comes down to my notebook. The Revealer of Secrets. The Holder of Truths. The place where those I’ve loved reach out – right from between these very pages – and, grinning, take me by the hand and say, ‘Come in! Don’t be shy. You want us to show you something marvellous?’

It began, somewhat prosaically, with Adam Donnelly, a young man from Wyedean who called in to see me at the start of July. Banjo and I had been managing just fine on our own up until then. But visitors have an annoying knack of stirring things up; of reminding you there’s a whole sprawling world beyond the confines of the one you’ve learned to inhabit by yourself.

‘We’d like you to write an article for the Wyedean quarterly magazine,’ Adam D. said. ‘It’s for a retrospective we’re running on former members of the teaching faculty, and as our most senior contributor, we’ll be featuring you in our cover story. You’ll be the poster boy for excellence! For a life well and truly lived.’

A small weight snowballed inside me. ‘Will anyone still be interested?’ I asked. This was not false modesty; on the contrary, I was positively taken aback. The corners of Adam D.’s mouth veered upwards. ‘You’re one of Wyedean’s most esteemed former language teachers, Mr Applebee. The board thinks a self-penned profile will be illuminating not just for the current staff and pupils, but also for your peers.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I see. Are any of them still alive?’

I hadn’t heard from Wyedean in a long while and the request puzzled me. ‘What kind of illuminations are you looking for?’ I asked. ‘Anything uplifting,’ he replied. ‘Anecdotes, observations, greatest achievements. That kind of thing. It’s a tough world our pupils are facing. Hugely competitive. Our aim is to buoy them up with as much support and inspiration as we can.’ Adam Doolally drummed his fingers on the arm of my wing-back chair and smiled encouragingly once again.

Doubtful as to my ability to either illuminate or inspire, I nodded. Signed on the dotted line, as they say. It was only after he’d gone that the full magnitude of the task hit me: academic career aside, I couldn’t think of a single event in my life which might reasonably qualify as a ‘greatest achievement’. Nothing worthy of the inspiration-hungry readers of the Wyedean quarterly magazine, at any rate.

How in the name of all that’s holy does a senior citizen, occasional UFO spotter and Francophile reduce eight-and-a-half decades (and counting) of life to a fifteen-hundred-word article? It felt remarkably as though I were being called to account. ‘Impress us!’ Wyedean seemed to be saying. ‘Tell us what you know. What you’ve learned. Show us who you are.’

Bells of panic filled my chest. (Never a good sign at my age.) What Wyedean wanted was insights, the Happy Ever After. But what about the areas of my life where I’d failed so spectacularly? What on earth was I supposed to say about those?

I decided to narrow my focus and stick to the long, seamlessly interchangeable years spent teaching hormonally fuelled adolescents to conjugate French verbs. It was quite staggering, when I came to think about it. Entire decades had slipped by. Decades filled with page after page of Verlaine, Gide, Maupassant, Baudelaire. It was extraordinary, the degree to which I’d buried myself in those pages. Revelled in their majesty. Wallowed – privately – in their pain.

To Wyedean, I was still Mr Applebee: devoted (and, it would seem, fondly remembered!) former Head of French; but to me I was just Henry, the gauche, skinny teenager running around the streets of Chalk Farm with Devlin, yet to put on the uniform, yet to meet the girl.

When the article was finished, I dropped it, shamefaced, into the post box and tried desperately not to think of it as a lie. An evasion, maybe, but then how could they know it was the things I didn’t put in – the personal things, the things buried at the bottom of a dusty suitcase – which had defined me?

Changi… Sunburn so bad the skin peeled away from my chest in sheets. Everyone told me to keep quiet about that. It was a punishable offence. The officers would scrub the blisters with salt water if they got wind of it. I grew up so fast, I barely recognised myself when I arrived back home.

And then, when I did so, I climbed a staircase and there she was. The very last thing I was ever expecting to happen to me, Fra–

Henry’s hand jerked abruptly from the page. A noise (a grunt? A cough? A chuckle?) filtered through the wall from the spare room.

‘Devlin?’ he whispered. ‘Devlin, is that you?’

Henry cocked his good ear to one side, but all he could make out was the steady ticktock ticktock of the carriage clock on the mantelpiece. He held his breath, the curvature of his spine straightening by degrees until finally, he felt it: his brother’s voice, brushing like dew against his skin.

Evening, Henry. How’re things?

Henry wiggled his finger in his ear. Devlin. Where does one begin to capture the essence of a man whose character had been so large, so utterly irrepressible that even in death his exuberance couldn’t be contained?

Don’t keep me guessing, Devlin continued. How’s tricks? What’s going on?

Henry settled back into his chair and attuned himself to the frequency, as though he’d stumbled across some strange, transcontinental broadcast on the radio. ‘I’m fine,’ he replied to the room at large. ‘Fine, that is, aside from the fact I’m sitting here, in my living room, talking to you.’

He stared into the flat, empty space ahead of him and beamed.

Following up his Wyedean article with a notebook of ‘recollections’ (memoirs seemed too worthy a concept, too weighty, too proud) had been the result of an overwhelming urge to continue writing, only this time Henry was determined to do it for himself alone – no expectations, no limitations, no holds barred. What he hadn’t bargained on was the way the focused bursts of concentrated silence gave rise to many strange and wonderful occurrences, not least of all these fleeting, otherworldly conversations with Devlin, two years gone.

Occasionally, like today, Henry answered him out loud, but he didn’t like to make a habit of it in case he forgot himself and did it in public. Next thing you knew, if anyone saw him chuckling or talking to his dead brother while he was queuing for his pension at the post office, they’d be carting him off to the funny farm.

‘I’m going away,’ Henry ventured with a faint whiff of heroism. ‘And the truth is, I don’t think I’ve ever felt so simultaneously terrified and exhilarated at the prospect of anything in my entire life. I leave for Scotland tomorrow morning on the nine o’clock train.’

He lowered his gaze. Deep inside his chest, his heart began to quiver.

Away? Devlin’s voice, bolder now, slipped a little further beneath Henry’s skin. It’s her, isn’t it? The girl? Don’t tell me you’ve actually gone and found her after all this time?

Henry bristled. ‘She has a name, Devlin. And as to finding her, yes, it would seem to be the case.’

There was a momentary pause.

Hellfire. So what’s the problem?

Henry shifted in his seat. ‘Well – if you must know – I’ve had a premonition. But I won’t be stopped,’ he added in a tremulous voice. ‘Not by you. Not by anyone.’

Have you finally gone loco? Devlin shot back. When have I ever discouraged you from doing anything? The way I remember it, it was always you who’d be running after me! Ah Jesus, Hen, what’s with the premonition, anyway? I leave you alone for two minutes and you’re moonlighting as some kind of oracle? Sounds to me like someone’s got way too much free time on their hands!

There was another brief pause. Well go on. Let’s have it then.

Just the tiniest bit miffed, Henry cleared his throat. ‘That despite all my hopes and prayers for the contrary, nothing at all is going to go to plan.’

He sucked in his cheeks and waited for Devlin’s disembodied response. When it didn’t come he shook his head, waited, shook it again, but the signal – for want of a better word – was gone.

Alone once again, Henry slipped off his tortoiseshell glasses, rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and rose stiffly from his chair. He carried his notebook into his bedroom and placed it next to a jar of Vicks VapoRub on the bedside table. Banjo, his Parson Russell Terrier, padded into the room behind him and hovered at his side, his ears drawn back, his face full of mistrust.

‘Banjo, come on now, get out from under my feet,’ Henry said gently.

On the eiderdown, his small brown suitcase lay open and ready, the air around it lightly tinged with must. A faint tremor rippled upwards from Henry’s fingertips as he stepped towards it, and with painstaking care and attention proceeded to remove a series of bundles from the elasticated pocket running along its side:

1 1. a silver hair-slide, a pearl and diamanté butterfly perched on its tip, wings spread;

2 2. a uniform cap, field service, blue-grey;

3 3. a paper napkin the colour of turned cream, bearing the faintest imprint of coral lipstick;

4 4. a picture postcard, the back of which was filled with a seemingly random miscellany of words and phrases, each forward-sloping letter jostling against its neighbour like links in a tightly woven chain;

5 5. a jagged strip of dark red velour.

Henry unwrapped each item individually and turned it over in his hand. Raising his gaze, he cast a surreptitious glance at the alarm clock by his bed.

Twelve hours exactly to departure.

One memory at a time, Henry placed his past back in his case. His preparations complete, he made his way back to the living room and lowered himself into his wing-back chair with a cup of Ceylon Orange Pekoe and three custard creams.

‘Amended Mantra of the Day,’ he said, turning to Banjo’s upturned face. ‘No matter what age we reach, or however much our lives may settle beneath the inevitable cloak of familiarity, it is never, ever too late to be amazed.’

Henry wondered what the people from Wyedean would say if they knew the context behind his words. That he was a fool, probably. That after a lifetime of so-called academic excellence, how banal, how unoriginal of him to admit that what mattered to him most now was love.

He shifted his gaze to the antiquated furniture and mountains of yellowing books as though viewing everything for the first, or last, time. He would not return. The world could mock him all it liked, he wouldn’t give up until he’d said the words he needed to say to the only person alive who mattered to him now.

Henry’s hand drifted to an envelope peeking out from his cardigan pocket. Inside it: pre-purchased train tickets for Edinburgh. First Class. Two.

‘Perhaps it’ll be fine after all,’ he said, his spirits revived by a resurgent ray of optimism. He leaned over and rubbed the back of Banjo’s head. ‘And if it’s not fine, then stone me, at least it’ll be illuminating…’

2

Wide Awake
FINSBURY PARK, LONDON, DECEMBER 5: JOURNEY EVE
Ariel

Somewhere along a dusky stretch of track, Ariel felt her nerve waver. She drew her face back from the window as the train decelerated, leaving the grainy, urban blackness behind and easing its way beneath the vast, multi-arched roof of Paddington Station.

A stranger standing in the aisle purred into her phone: ‘We’re pulling in now… I’ll meet you in the usual place… Yes… Yes, me too.’

Ariel lowered her eyes and picked at a hangnail embedded in her thumb. If anything should happen to her over the next few days – some random accident, some freakish act of nature, or God, or destiny, or whatever – Linus would be the one to get a phone call. It could come from London, Edinburgh, or just about anywhere in between; the point was that a police officer would call with the news, and none of it would make any sense because she hadn’t told him the truth about where she was going. It would be a disaster. The worst possible way for him to find out she’d lied.

Actually, that she’d been lying to him for days.

She squeezed her eyes shut and tugged. A quick, sharp flare of pain and the hangnail came away in her fingers, a tiny droplet of blood mushrooming upwards and outwards over the rosy surface of her skin. Don’t be a wuss, she told herself. It’s two days! Forty-eight hours from now it’ll all be over.

At 20:37, Ariel stepped down onto a freezing cold platform, her wheelie bag in her hand. She pulled her multicoloured scarf tighter around her neck and joined a fast-moving line of passengers heading towards the ticket barriers. On instinct, she tilted her face upwards and breathed in the thick, metallic air. A faint murmur of danger (unspecified, intangible, largely cinematic in origin) caught at her chest. The pull of the city, she thought, her spirits lifting. A promise of adventure. Thank you, God! Now I remember.

The descent to the Underground led her into a frenzied warren of escalators and tunnels. Ariel negotiated her route to Finsbury Park with relative ease, surfaced at ground level and walked down a long, starkly lit passageway until she reached a busy sleeve of London high street. She emerged onto Seven Sisters Road and faltered. A dense knot of pedestrians scurried past her, snatching her breath away, their faces armed with hard-edged confidence – the kind of attitude, she decided, that only a city as awesome as London could produce.

She stepped to one side, flipped open the canvas bag slung over her shoulder and searched for Tumbleweed’s email on her phone. Mags is cool with you staying the night, he’d written. You’ll like her. Just don’t call her Magdalena. Crazy girl thinks it makes her sound like a disciple.

She memorised his directions, crossed over the road and set off to her right. A zigzag of turns, and she arrived at last at a steep run of concrete steps leading to a side-street basement.

Ariel lingered for a moment on the pavement and peered into the milky darkness. ‘Mag-da-le-na,’ she intoned, airing the word out, freeing it so it wouldn’t sneak up on her later and catch her unawares.

She dragged her wheelie bag to the bottom of the stairs and pressed her finger to a bronze buzzer. A light snapped on beyond the window, and a wiry cat, perched territorially on the windowsill, glowered at her with bilious green eyes.

‘Hi there,’ she said, backing carefully away from it.

Behind her, the door swung open. ‘You must be Ariel,’ said a girl with violet, asymmetric hair. ‘I’m Mags. Come in!’

The first thing Ariel felt was the music, slipping inside her, squeezing the air from her lungs like a vice. ‘Aladdin Sane,’ she said, dropping her shoulder bag to the floor. ‘Ziggy goes to America. 1973.’

Mags raised her eyebrows. ‘Yeah, it is! You a Bowie-head?’

Ariel tilted her hand from side to side. ‘Kind of, I suppose. I used to think I was the only person on the planet who thought it was called A Lad Insane until I found out the pun was intentional. Estelle – my mother – was a massive Bowie fan. It’s weird to hear it here. Reminds me of home.’

‘Shit. Sorry.’ Mags took an aborted step towards an old-school iPod and seemed to be weighing up whether or not to turn it off. ‘Tumbleweed told me what happened, I’m –’

‘It’s okay. It’s fine, don’t worry.’

Ariel smiled awkwardly and looked away, her throat thickening, an icy, sinking sensation billowing through her insides. She tried to distract herself by focusing on her surroundings: low ceiling; a lumpy sofa; floorboards bare apart from a shabby, oversized Persian rug; cheap lamps and mirrored cushions and a half-eaten pizza scattered at random intervals around the room.

The back wall was covered with what she assumed must be Mags’s artwork. Sketch after sketch of semi-naked, contorted torsos which somehow managed to look both fragile and disarmingly self-possessed.

‘Are those yours?’ she asked, moving closer. The hand-drawn charcoal figures were softer close up; less physically arresting. ‘They’re amazing! Seriously, I wish I could do that.’

Mags threw her an appreciative smile. ‘Gracias. They’re part of my coursework. I’m still working on my technique, but honestly, I’d rather look at those than at that hideous woodchip wallpaper underneath.’

Ariel pulled off her gloves and ran a finger over the pockmarked surface of the wall. She’d grown up in a house full of woodchip wallpaper, but this stuff looked original, like it had actually been there since the ’70s, long before she was born.

She took a step back and inhaled. The air smelled damp and faintly aromatic, an oddly comforting blend of the rundown and the exotic.

‘You’re a lifesaver for putting me up,’ she said, turning back to Mags. ‘Linus thinks I’m in Oxford with Tumbleweed, so at least being here with you makes me feel less guilty.’ She caught the look of curiosity on Mags’s face and shrugged. ‘It was a necessary lie. Given the circumstances.’

‘No worries. Any friend of my cousin’s. Who’s Linus, anyway? Your boyfriend?’

Ariel smiled. ‘No, he’s my dad.’

‘You call your dad by his first name? Wow. Progressive.’

Ariel rolled her eyes. ‘Trust me, you wouldn’t say that if you met him. The name thing’s just something I’ve done for a while. It’s no big deal, really.’

Her gaze drifted to the sofa.

‘That’s where you’ll be crashing, I’m afraid,’ Mags said. ‘Or if that doesn’t grab you, my boyfriend and I are going to a party in Kensal Rise. It might even turn into an all-nighter if the booze holds out, so don’t be surprised if we don’t come back…’ She paused. ‘You know, you’re welcome to come with us if you like?’

As she spoke, a tall, monobrowed guy in a donkey jacket slunk into view in the bedroom doorway. He looked over at Ariel and grinned. ‘Alright?’

Ariel held up her palm in greeting. She opened her mouth to answer Mags’s question, then faltered. A student party. In London. Cool, arty, interesting people her own age. No one to answer to but herself. Wasn’t that what eighteen-year-olds were supposed to do? Let their hair down and have some fun?

She took a breath, felt the sharp thud of a door slamming shut somewhere deep inside her, and slowly shook her head. ‘Thanks, Mags, but I have to leave early in the morning to get to King’s Cross. I can’t risk missing my train.’

When they’d gone it felt as though they’d taken every trace of oxygen from the room.

Ariel laid her coat and scarf on the arm of the sofa. She stood tugging at the sleeves of her jumper, trying to adjust to the stillness. In Oystermouth, she was used to it. At night, once the bay had grown cool and dark and secretive, not even the low roll of the waves carried to her bedroom at the back of the house. But here – in the city – it was unexpected. Unsettling, even.

She turned and searched for the iPod before remembering that it, too, was gone; swept into Mags’s pocket along with a packet of Rizlas and some gum. The only sounds now came from the street: the swoosh of passing traffic; the truncated slamming of car doors; the dull scrape of anonymous, torso-less feet on the pavement beyond the railings; low voices, muffled voices, distant, unintelligible all.

Alone in the city’s alien underbelly, Ariel watched the pulsing of her heart through her clothes, the first leg of her journey begun.

She settled herself cross-legged on the floor and unzipped her wheelie bag on the Persian rug. Her hands slid beneath the hastily packed layers of clothing until they found the large, padded envelope at the bottom. She lifted it out and placed it in her lap, contemplating, as she had done so many times before, the startling immediacy of Estelle’s handwriting etched across its front.

Ariel read the words out loud: ‘For E.M.H.’

Secured with a strip of Sellotape beneath it was a Post-it Note containing a phone number and an address on the outskirts of Edinburgh – some far-off village she’d never even heard her mother mention before. And below that, five words, their lettering markedly less defined: ARIEL, PLEASE DELIVER BY HAND.

Ariel ran her fingers over the words, held the package to her chest, closed her eyes. It was bad enough not knowing what was inside it, but now she’d had to lie through her teeth, too. ‘Promise me you won’t tell him,’ Estelle had asked her. ‘You must promise me you won’t tell Dad anything about this at all.’

Why???

‘Fuck.’ Ariel glanced at the low-rent transience of her surroundings. Here, in this abandoned basement, the package had mysteriously transformed itself into the most intimate object in the room…

She lowered it to her lap and slid it back inside her case.

The second envelope – the much smaller one containing a letter ‘inviting’ her to begin her journey – had arrived by post the previous week, addressed in an unfamiliar hand to Miss Ariel Bliss. It remained tucked away where she’d hidden it, in the inside pocket of her canvas shoulder bag.

Remained, as it turned out, an enigma, even after reading.

The bathroom, Mags had told her, could only be accessed by walking through the bedroom. (‘Cracks me up,’ she’d called as she headed out the door. ‘Whenever I want to blow people’s minds, I tell them my shitty rental has an underground en suite!’)

Ariel pushed open the bedroom door and switched on the light. Immediately to her right was a desk weighed down by a large pile of books on art and design. Alongside them were a couple of well-thumbed Ursula Le Guin novels. Half a dozen by Stephen King. She reached out her hand and touched the woody texture of their spines with her fingertips. Home, she mused, with an unexpected smile.

The bathroom itself, tucked away in the far corner of the room, was narrow, windowless, white; surely, she thought later, the least likely location on earth for what was to happen next. And yet it was right here, as she was bending over the sink – one hand drawing her hair back from her face, the other holding her toothbrush – that she suddenly felt a pair of hands brush against her shoulders from behind.

Ariel dropped her toothbrush into the basin and spun round. Every cheesy horror movie she’d ever seen flashed before her eyes. Slowly, she turned once more to face the mirror. The reflection staring back at her was her own, the backdrop nothing more than a plain, ceramic tile.

‘Holy shit,’ she said in a horrified voice. ‘Get a grip! Idiot.’

A shiver of recognition rippled along her spine. Ariel gasped, her eyes open wide. What she’d felt had been cold, fragile, and something else – something she almost didn’t dare articulate – something familiar. The invisible hands had lain on her body for the briefest of seconds, but they had been there, she was certain of it.

Just before dawn, a pair of car headlights sliced through the living room darkness with two exploratory beams of light. Ariel stirred and raised her head from the sofa. She listened for the sound of Mags’s key scraping against the door, the drunken rapping of knuckles on the window pane, but none came.

A shadow flitted briefly past the window. Bollocks. She hated being scared!

She stared up at the ceiling, her heart thundering in her chest, then reached her hand to the floor and fumbled for her phone. At her touch, the screen sprang to life, illuminating her face with a bright, neon glow. She tapped on the email icon and opened a new message. LONDON CALLING, she wrote in the subject line, then backed up and changed it to LONDON, WIDE AWAKE!

Hey Tee, it’s me. I’m at Mags’s place and I can’t sleep.

Confession 1: I’ve been thinking about Estelle and wondering if she can see me. If she thinks I’m doing a good job. If I said the right thing when I told Isaac she left us to become a star in heaven and light up the sky over Oystermouth Bay. He started looking for her every single night, and when he couldn’t see any stars he asked if she’d forgotten to shine for us. I panicked and told him Estelle’s star was so beautiful and bright, she was probably needed somewhere else…

Confession 2: My head’s been full of demons again. It’s kind of intense. There’s just so much pressure to be a fully formed person, straight out the gate. Maybe I’m losing it. Maybe it’s just me?

Confession 3: A secret scares the crap out of me. Do you think my promise to Estelle will make everything come right?

Ariel lifted her thumbs from the keypad. She entered Tumbleweed’s name in the To box. Scanned over what she’d written. Faltered.

Tapped Delete.

In the distance a car alarm began to wail.

She slid her legs from her sleeping bag and carried her phone to the woodchip wall of artwork. Shivering in the half-light, she ran her eyes over the shadowy rows of pictures until she settled upon a sketch of a woman, her arms loosely folded over her small, bare chest. The woman’s face was in profile, her expression hard to read. Ariel leaned her head to one side. From one angle, she thought she saw rapture; from another, grief.

‘What are you looking at?’ she whispered.

A thin wedge of light from the window shimmied across the floorboards. London was lonely at night, she decided. It wasn’t the great big adventure she’d been expecting.

‘Loneliness is nothing more than an illusion,’ she reminded herself. ‘Just like Frank said.’

She accessed the camera function on her phone and held it up in front of her. ‘Anyway, I’m not here for an adventure,’ she added in a purposeful voice. ‘I’m here because of a promise.’

Ariel stared at the wall ahead. Then again, what if her cross-country mission brought her closer, somehow, to Estelle?

She snapped a photo of the woman in the picture and sent it to Tumbleweed.

Somewhere nearby, in the city of shadows, a clock struck five.

Her train to Edinburgh was at eight…

She made her way back to the sofa, zipped herself inside her sleeping bag and dropped her gaze to her canvas bag lying nearby. The person who’d sent her the letter – summoning her to Scotland in such a polite, cryptic way – had no idea Ariel would be arriving early. And that was just the way she liked it.

In fact, it was about the only part of this entire weird undertaking that was perfectly fine with her.

3

The Tower
BLACKPOOL, FEBRUARY 1948
Henry

Henry’s jaw drops. The moment he steps inside, he can smell it: something raw; and electric; and alive.

The entrance hall at street level is bigger, grander than he’d imagined; high-ceilinged, ablaze with light, fizzing with expectation. He joins the queue behind a man in a flamboyant silk tie and gazes overhead, cap raked at an angle, hands resting casually in the trouser pockets of his uniform. The new year is six weeks old. He’s back in Britain at last. He is almost, but not quite, home.

Henry roots his feet to the floor, his grey eyes drinking in the wonderment of it all. Lined up ahead is a medley of earnest faces, young men and women like himself, each more dedicated than the next to the business of having a good time. His thoughts flit impatiently to the music, to the chance to finally kick back and relax. He sucks in his cheeks and whistles, long and low. This is it, he thinks. This is something marvellous indeed!

In the shelter of the foyer it’s warm, too. Outside, a blistering wind tears along the promenade, snapping at the skirts of a group of girls who bustle through the open doorway behind him, giggling, a saucy glint in their eyes, their cheeks rouged raw by the chill. He reaches inside his jacket for a cigarette and pulls his hand out empty. Damn it. He gave his last one to Davy Hardcastle. ‘Good luck!’ they’d called out to him. ‘See you back at the billet! Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’

Henry smiles to himself. The Tower Ballroom. It had been his idea to come here all along, but the others had their own plans. O’Malley (it was always O’Malley; was there any place on earth the guy didn’t know?) had heard of a bar where the girls kicked up their heels, danced a merry jig on the tables, and if you were lucky, let you run the tips of your fingers up and down the finely stitched seams of their stockings, all the way to no-man’s-land where the gossamer silk ended, and a narrow strip of quivering bare flesh lay waiting to lead you all the way to heaven…

Henry pays his entrance fee and makes his way up a vast staircase, two steps at a time, all the way to the top floor. The dull click of his right knee as he climbs. The heavy drag of his boots. He tries not to think about how disorientated he feels, how the heft of his body would fall slack and clumsy from lack of sleep if he let it. As he rounds a bend, the muscles in his calves protest and contract beneath his skin. He keeps his eyes fixed on the turn ahead. Pushes on.

The scent of perfume, of anticipation, clouds the air. He wishes his uniform didn’t hang so loosely on his diminished frame, but there’s not much he can do about that now. Back at the billet he’d stumbled upon a hollow-eyed stranger in the mirror – a human coat-hanger – no body inside to speak of, just his air force blues suspended like a phantom before him. Henry tugs at the hem of his jacket and pulls himself upright. It’s an automatic movement, ingrained by now. But there are no commanding officers here. No roll call awaits. Just soaring melodies, couples whirling like spinning tops on the dance floor, and eight shimmering glitter balls rotating overhead.

He reaches the top floor, passes through a pair of double doors and enters the ballroom at balcony level. A blast of music rains against Henry’s skin, and a sweet, invigorating rush of adrenaline surges like nectar through his limbs. To his left, row upon row of plush, upholstered seats fan out vertiginously one behind the other, each arranged to afford the best possible view of the dance floor. It takes a moment for his eyes to adjust to the low-level lighting, but he can tell at once that he made the right decision to come upstairs – there are far fewer people up here, and the spectacle is magnificent, like a view from Mount Olympus itself.

‘Bet you any money the Café de Paris never had anything on this.’

Henry turns, sees the man in the silk tie standing in the shadows to his right.

‘The place in London,’ he continues. ‘Piccadilly. Got bombed in the Blitz?’

‘I never went there,’ Henry replies. He shrugs, his mouth curling into a smile. ‘I wasn’t old enough to get in at the time.’

‘Wouldn’t have stopped me,’ the man says with a wink. He leans in. ‘You’re a Londoner, aren’t you?’

Henry, unsure where this is leading, smiles again. ‘I am.’

‘Thought so. I hear the London girls can give guys like you and me the runaround. They can be – you know, standoffish. Stuck-up. But let me tell you something, my friend, they go stark raving mad for it here. It’s the electromagnetism. A couple of spins on the dance floor, and the music releases all their inhibitions. Know what I mean?’

His breath smells faintly sour, and, Henry detects, there’s an unnatural glassiness to his eyes. ‘Hey, fella,’ he says, nudging Henry’s arm, ‘I can spot a rookie a mile off. It’s your first time here, am I right?’

Henry concedes a grin. ‘Maybe. Or then again, maybe I’ve just got a rookie kind of face.’

The man sidles closer. ‘Well, Rookie, take it from me… if you’re looking for a pretty girl to dance with, you’re wasting your time up here. I suggest you follow my lead and make your way downstairs.’

Henry takes a discreet step backwards. ‘Thanks for the tip,’ he says lightly. ‘I’ll bear it in mind.’

He waits for the man to leave and looks around for a place to sit. Immediately ahead of him the first half-dozen rows are almost entirely empty, with the notable exception of one young woman seated alone in the front row. At first, all Henry can make out is the hazy outline of her silhouette. Her bird-like frame is perfectly still, her back draped in shadow, her head tilted forwards over the shiny gold barrier towards the dance floor below. He slips his hands into his pockets and waits to see if anyone joins her, but there are only a handful of spectators milling around, and behind him, two or three couples, lost in their own private dominions, quietly ensconced in the upper rows.

Henry glances towards the staircase. He wonders if perhaps he should go downstairs and get something to drink, when some force – some strange, visceral, magnetic pull – draws his attention back to the young woman. Henry trains his eyes on the back of her neck. And yet she herself doesn’t look round once… She must be totally engrossed; he’s never seen such powers of concentration in a dance hall!

Go over to her, he tells himself. Introduce yourself. Find out who she is.

He takes a step and falters as the light from a glitter ball sweeps firstly over him, then over the girl. He can see her more clearly now: the lush India green of her dress, cinched at the waist; narrow shoulders; soft waves of sandy brown hair swept up in a bun and held in place by an array of decorative clips which glint and sparkle in the beam of light circling above them. Henry counts ten seconds exactly until the glitter ball completes its circuit of the room. The association is inevitable, instantaneous. Like a spotlight in a POW camp, he thinks. Thank Christ I never had to see the inside of one of those.

Slowly, he makes his way along the second row until he’s no more than a foot or two away from her. As he nears the back of her seat, Henry flicks his eyes in her direction. A fine layer of down curves upwards from the nape of her neck, as though reaching for the light. And, he realises with delight, she’s not sitting still after all – she’s moving! Both hands tapping out the rhythm of the music against her thighs.

Henry continues to the end of the row and glances behind him. The girl tips her head further over the barrier and a strand of waved hair slips loose from her bun and bounces against her cheek. He watches, transfixed, as with an almost hypnotic display of ease, she raises both arms to her head and clips it casually back into place.

‘Who is this girl?’ he mumbles under his breath.

He can’t understand it. He hasn’t even seen her face, and yet all he can think about is how intoxicating it must feel to be on the receiving end of such an intense gaze. Like looking into a lighthouse. Like dancing a waltz with the sun!

He doubles back along the front row until finally, somewhere between taking off his cap and smoothing down his hair, he comes to a stop beside her.

‘Wait!’ she cries, holding up her palm.

Henry freezes.

‘This is the absolute best bit! See the couple in the centre of the dance floor? They come here all the time. They dance for half an hour like they own the place, then they’re gone. I thought they might be partners in the romantic sense, too, but Daisy downstairs in the cloakroom said someone told her they’re twins. It’s all just rumours, though. Either way, they’re definitely professionals. Look how perfectly they’re holding each other! No one else can touch them!’

Henry turns and sees a handsome, dark-haired woman staring with queenly confidence into the fiery eyes of a swarthy, Mediterranean-looking male. Their bodies are pressed so closely together, you could barely thread a shoelace between them. As a couple, they’re flawless, incandescent. Henry hates them already.

‘Oh yes,’ he says, as the pair smoulder their way provocatively across the dance floor. ‘Not bad. Absolutely nothing intimidating about them at all.’

To his surprise, the girl responds with a hearty laugh.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ he continues, cursing himself – inwardly – for his inopportune timing, ‘but is this seat taken?’

She turns her head and extends him an appraising gaze. She’s about his age – nineteen or twenty, twenty-one at most – with a peaches and cream complexion, a lively expression, and the most extraordinary liquid blue eyes he’s ever seen. Henry freezes a second time. Oh God, he thinks, she’s beautiful. What now?

She scans his eyes and casts a brief, sideways glance over his shoulder. In the interminable moment it takes for her to respond, Henry manages to convince himself that all she wants is a little peace and quiet to enjoy the dancing. Why else would she be sitting up here all alone?

Who or what, if anything, she sees or doesn’t see, he can’t be sure, but gradually her mouth softens into an irresistible smile.

‘The seat’s free,’ she replies. ‘Sit down. It’s so quiet up here today we’ve got the entire row to ourselves.’

Henry grins and lowers himself beside her. The second his buttocks hit the chair he’s overcome by a violent urge to face her, to win her over before he’s even learned her name. Instead, he does as she does, only with considerably less grace – pinioning his eyes to the dynamos on the dance floor, his hands clamped like barnacles to his knees.

‘Venus and Adonis,’ she says, after a beat.

Henry stares into the gaping void before him. He didn’t think it was possible he could feel any more affronted by this unbearably slick, depressingly accomplished couple if he tried.

‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ he replies. He turns mechanically to meet her gaze.

‘What?’

‘You’re not seriously telling me they’re called Venus and Adonis? If they are professionals – and with names like that, I pray to God for their sakes that they are – then Venus and Adonis have to be stage names. I mean, it’s a bit over the top, isn’t it? You do realise their real names are probably Shirley and Ken?’

The girl stares at him for a stunned five seconds, then bursts into a helpless fit of giggles. Her laughter is so infectious that soon Henry is laughing, too. In fact, the suppressed nervous tension that’s been building inside him from the moment he sat down quickly runs riot, and before long they’re both laughing so hard, they’re practically doubled over.

She leans towards him and, still giggling, holds up a thin, pink hand. ‘No! I’m not talking about the dancers. I’m talking about that… right there… the inscription engraved in the stonework above the stage. Can’t you see it?’

Instantly sobering, Henry follows her gaze. ‘Sorry?’

She leans a fraction closer. ‘Straight ahead of you… I asked Jimmy the doorman where it comes from and he told me it’s from Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. I’d never heard of it, much less read it, but it made me laugh how it’s wound up here, in a dance hall. Must be a reference to the music, don’t you think?’

Henry sees it now; frankly, it’s impossible to miss when she’s pointing at it so prettily, the graze of her voice just inches from his face. He clears his throat and reads the quote out loud:

‘“BID ME DISCOURSE, I WILL ENCHANT THINE EAR…” Yes,’ he says, trying his utmost to compose himself, ‘I’d say it is. It might refer to the music, or maybe to a fellow music lover, like you?’

He peels his hand from his knee and holds it out towards her. ‘I’m sorry – you had me distracted there for a moment – I should have introduced myself. I’m Henry Applebee. It’s a pleasure to meet you.’

‘You don’t need to apologise.’ She gives him a dizzying smile. ‘Honestly, I haven’t laughed so much in ages.’

Henry casts an anxious glance at Shirley and Ken, who (to his immense annoyance) are still lording it over the dance floor. If that’s what he’s up against, then what he’s about to say next could quite possibly result in the most mortifying ten or fifteen minutes of his life…

‘Would you like to dance?’ he ventures, regardless. ‘I must warn you, though, I’m not much of a dancer. It’s the music I enjoy most of all.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t let them put you off,’ she replies. Her expression, her voice, are utterly forgiving, wholly kind. ‘Music lovers make the best dancers of all. My nan told me that. She had polio when she was a lass and she’s been weak in her legs all her life, but no one loves a tune more than she does. It’s worth dropping by for tea just to see her doing the rumba around her kitchen.’

Henry laughs, then remembers she hasn’t yet accepted his invitation.

She holds his gaze, her blue eyes appraising him once again. ‘I haven’t seen you here before. Are you stationed at Kirkham?’

His hand, still reaching towards her, starts to shake. ‘I am, yes. Actually, I just arrived today. From the Far East.’

‘You arrived today and you’re already at the Tower Ballroom? You really are a music fan, Henry!’

Henry grins. ‘Certified. Have been my whole life.’

‘Me too. Hook, line and sinker!’

She smoothes down the skirt of her dress. ‘How long are you here for?’

‘Forty-eight hours,’ he replies. ‘Then it’s demob for me.’

‘Oh.’ Her voice gives nothing away. ‘In that case, we’d better get moving.’

Henry glances back over the barrier. ‘There’s just one thing… If you expect me to share a dance floor with Venus and Adonis down there, could you at least tell me your name?’

‘Of course! But we have to be quick if we want to get downstairs before this song finishes. Come on, I’ll tell you my name on the way.’

She rises from her seat, and as she edges past him, the hem of her dress brushes against his knees. All at once, the possibility of holding her in his arms on the dance floor scatters Henry’s thoughts like bowling pins. His heart batters furiously against his ribs.

It is then, without warning, that it begins…

She takes his hand and everything around him starts to disintegrate. Henry feels his feet slide from under him as a sharp, violent jolt yanks him against his will by an invisible chain, back, far back along a dark, dank tunnel. The swell of music fades, and as the light from the glitter balls begins to dim, Henry finds himself struggling to retain the receding image of her face. He strains, forcing himself to stay present, but while sound and vision distort, the warmth of her hand and the touch of her skin remain both elusive, and at once, agonisingly real.

Henry’s body jerks and tenses. He’s in Kentish Town, in his bedroom, the only sounds the contented sighs and snuffles of Banjo’s nocturnal breath.

Willing himself back along the thin, dark tunnel, Henry silently repeats the words over and over:

Don’t wake up. Don’t wake up. Don’t wake up.

He keeps his eyes firmly closed. There is a moment’s grace, a final glimpse beyond the velvet darkness, and then, from far away, her voice:

‘Don’t worry, I’m not much of a dancer either, but I could happily watch everyone else dancing all day long. It’s nice to meet you, Henry. I’m Francine, by the way.’

4

The Glass Wall
KING’S CROSS STATION, LONDON, DECEMBER 6: DEPARTURE
Ariel

Ariel closed the basement door behind her and dragged her wheelie bag back up the concrete steps. She followed the zigzag of turns in reverse and retraced her steps to Finsbury Park tube station. As she neared the entrance, a crowd of commuters with misery splattered across their faces came pouring towards her.

‘Has something happened?’ she asked a woman in a camouflage parka and bright orange boots.

The woman sighed. ‘There’s a security alert at Victoria. The entire line’s been closed. Don’t even bother trying to get on the Piccadilly Line… the platform’s rammed. It’s total chaos down there.’

Ariel’s heart sank. ‘Are there any buses? I have to get to King’s Cross.’

‘Sure, if you’re willing to spend the rest of the day getting pushed around in a queue with everyone else here.’ She flicked her eyes to Ariel’s wheelie bag. ‘It’ll be a bun fight to get on them, though, especially with that. Personally, I’m calling it quits and going home.’

Ariel looked up and down the length of Seven Sisters Road. If taxis ever drove along it, they weren’t doing so today.

She checked the time on her phone. If she didn’t get to King’s Cross in the next thirty minutes, she wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of catching her train.

She stared back at the entrance to the tube station. ‘Sod it,’ she said, to anyone who cared to listen. ‘I’m going in.’

Tightening her grip on her wheelie bag, Ariel threw herself into the fray – one more nameless face (or so it seemed to her), caught up in the slipstream of the day, the rush hour crush eventually propelling her onto a heaving Piccadilly Line platform, its force pressing in around her, relentless, immense.

Five trains came and went before she finally managed to squeeze herself through the doors of a carriage which was already bursting at the seams. Her wheelie bag dug into her legs, as well as those of the strangers squashed up close and personal against her. ‘Sorry,’ she kept saying, over and over. ‘God, I’m so sorry.’

‘’S’alright, love,’ one man replied with a resigned grimace. ‘This is London. We can take it.’

Ariel gave him a nervous smile. All she could think about as the tunnel closed around them was that she wasn’t going to make it. No way was she going to make her train.

At King’s Cross, she spilled out of the tube train door and jostled her way through a scrum of commuters funnelling upwards into the mainline railway station.

The time on her phone showed 8:26.

‘Shit.’

She stepped off the escalator and paused to orient herself. A young boy with a freckled face and a mop of unruly hair crossed in front of her, tripping over his shoelaces, shooting her a curious stare. Hey, you look just like my brother, Isaac! she almost called out to him. But the crowd swept them onwards, the momentum carrying her all the way to the central concourse, where the boy disappeared from view.

Positioned high against the back wall, the electronic departure board displayed running updates on an array of trains bound for the north. Ariel scanned the screen until she found the one she was looking for:

Destination: Edinburgh. Departure: 9a.m. Status: On Time. Platform: Not Yet Allocated.

She glanced over her shoulder and spotted a Starbucks to her right. Weaving her way towards it, she placed her order at the till and moved to the end of the counter to collect her drink. Her hand slipped inside her canvas bag while she waited and wrapped itself around her phone. She toyed with it in the palm of her hand, then fished it out and saw that a message from Tumbleweed had just that second come in.

Ariel opened it. A close-up shot of a pair of bright purple running shoes – primed and ready for action in the middle of a sun-drenched field – filled the screen. As usual, there was no message; the rule was they always let the pictures do the talking. (‘Sounds like a cop-out to me,’ Linus liked to tease her, but then in her humble opinion, her father had always been overly fixated on words.)

‘Grande cappuccino for Ariel?’ A dough-faced barista slid her cup across the counter and winked. ‘Is that Ariel as in “brilliant cleaning every time”?’

‘Yes,’ she replied with a well-practised smile. ‘That’s me. I haven’t heard the washing powder reference in a while, actually. Lately, it’s either been Sylvia Plath or The Little Mermaid.’

A large, floor-to-ceiling window separated the interior of the coffee shop from the station concourse beyond. She dragged her wheelie bag towards it and turned her attention back to her phone. The implication of Tumbleweed’s message seemed to be that someone – she – was running.

But in which direction? she wondered. And towards, or away from, what?

‘So what are you going to do?’ he asked her.

‘What am I going to do about what?’

For the past quarter of an hour, Ariel and Tumbleweed had been sitting on a stretch of gorse-covered cliff top; a long, rugged cummerbund of land which leaned, and eventually fell in jagged increments, to the sea. Behind them lay the billowy green contours of the Langland Bay Golf Course. Ahead, the bay itself, languid, flecked intermittently with wispy bursts of spray.

‘The package Estelle gave you,’ he replied. ‘Don’t you want to know what’s in it?’

Ariel shrugged. ‘Yes. No. I don’t know. Not really.’

She clamped her arms across her chest and reminded herself to breathe. It was the previous November, two days since Estelle’s funeral, and all she felt was numb. Was this normal? she asked herself. Everyone had told her it would bring closure. Relief. It was, she’d discovered, a lie. To her, it felt more like the ceremony’s solemn finality had brought with it a kind of shutting down – a formal sealing in, in a way – of everything that was ransacked, and empty, and broken.

Linus, Ariel, Isaac: they were three now. It didn’t fit, would never fit, she was sure of it. The void in her heart was indescribable. The last thing she wanted to think about was the package when it was as much as she could do to reorient herself on solid ground.

‘You’re still in shock,’ Tumbleweed said. He leaned his long, rangy body against his elbows. Tossed a hank of straw-coloured hair from his eyes. ‘My bad. I shouldn’t have brought it up.’

‘This sucks,’ Ariel replied. She gave him a placatory smile. ‘Sorry.’

She hadn’t been out on the cliffs in weeks. Once, when she was small, Linus had brought her not far from where they were sitting now in search of lost golf balls. He told her he’d be able to sell them on for extra cash, though as it turned out, the payout was barely more than negligible. She’d trailed along behind him, stopping every few paces to gaze at the mountains of bright yellow gorse. It was only when she felt a familiar pressure building between her legs that she remembered where she was.

‘Daddy, wait!’ she’d cried. ‘I need the toilet!’

Linus turned and gave a carefree wave of his hand. ‘Hurry up, then! We’ll stop off at the loos by the tennis courts on the way home!’

Ariel peered to her right. The gorse was almost as tall as she was, its prickly fronds rising just inches from her chin. Beyond it, she knew the earth sloped away to the edge of the cliff and a dense outcrop of rocks below.

Her legs froze.

‘Daddy, please come back and get me! I’m scared!’

Linus’s reply, breezy as the air itself, floated backwards on the wind. ‘What’s got into you? Come on, pet. I’ll wait for you on the path.’

She watched him plough ahead, hands on hips; his easy Sunday stride. Ariel lowered herself to her knees and began to crawl through the thick, briery grass. Overhead, a scalding sun beat down onto her shoulders as a warm trickle of urine seeped between her thighs. She dug her fingernails into the earth, determined not to cry. When she finally reached the path, Linus (who was oblivious still) caught her by the waist and swept her playfully into his arms.

‘I wish it could change things,’ she said. She turned back to Tumbleweed and brushed the memory aside. ‘But whatever the envelope contains, it’s not going to bring back Estelle.’

Ariel felt a tear forming in the corner of her eye. ‘And there’s something else… I don’t understand why she’d ask for pen and paper and then not write a single word to Linus. Or Isaac. Or – or me.’

Tumbleweed draped his arm around her shoulders. ‘Oh,’ he said gently, ‘that’s what’s bothering you.’

She shifted her gaze to the distant demarcation where the sky dripped down to meet the sea. ‘None of it makes any sense. Freaks me out when people find stuff out after someone dies.’

‘Seriously?’ Tumbleweed raised his eyebrows. ‘Like what?’

Ariel shrugged. ‘I don’t know… Affairs. Secret lives. Debts. Stuff like that.’

She saw him suppress a smile.

‘Come on, that’s not who Estelle was. And anyway, if you want to get to the bottom of that enigma, all you have to do is deliver the package like she asked. Either that, or open it yourself.’

‘No way, Tee!’ Ariel recoiled so fast, Tumbleweed’s arm plummeted like a dead weight to the ground. ‘I’m not going to open it when she specifically asked me not to. It would be –’ she paused, searching for the right word – ‘disrespectful.’

‘Fair enough. So then you know what to do. You’ll deal with it when you’re ready, right?’

‘Right.’

She watched the setting sun burn a hole in the sky, the dying embers of a red-hot fire which sparked and flared, and eventually extinguished itself as it slipped, still smouldering, into the bay.

‘Aw sod it,’ Tumbleweed cried. He raised himself up off the ground and pulled Ariel to her feet. ‘In my experience, things rarely turn out the way we think, anyway. Sometimes, my friend, they actually turn out better.’

Ariel tossed the plastic lid from her cappuccino into the waste bin and stared through the glass wall. The commuters who up until now had been congregated in a dense mass beneath the overhead departure board appeared to be mysteriously drifting apart. There was no pushing or shoving; no obvious threat, whispered or otherwise, of genuine alarm. Instead, what she was witnessing was far more subtle; more like a slow, insidious peeling away…

She moved closer to the window and followed the rift to its natural conclusion. Hovering at the end of it, about halfway between the coffee shop and the electronic screen, was a well-dressed elderly gentleman, a small brown suitcase at his feet. Judging from the empty space around him, he was alone, and to her horror, he was bleeding profusely.

‘Oh my God!’ she cried. ‘That man needs help!’

A handful of customers standing alongside her raised their heads, stared for a moment or two, looked away.

The man was leaning heavily on his walking stick, his expression dazed. The collar of his shirt and the cuffs peeking out of his coat sleeves were a brilliant white. His shoes glistened. Everything about him – from his elegant woollen coat, to his smart grey suit, pale blue shirt and tie – was immaculate; everything apart from the jarring sight of blood pouring from his nose.

‘What’s wrong with everyone? Why doesn’t anyone help?’ she muttered under her breath.

Tear-shaped droplets of blood were now running down the man’s neck and seeping into the edges of his shirt collar. Several splashes landed on his shoes. On the ground immediately before him, a widening circle of liquid was slowly beginning to pool.

Suddenly, Ariel started.

Frank…

A revolving zoetrope of images began to rotate in rapid-fire flashes to her brain:

The wound – jagged, gaping – running along the back of Frank’s head…

The blood – creeping like a scarlet inkblot between his shoulder blades, trickling along the crease of his trousers, all the way to the shards of broken glass at his feet…

The child’s face – her own face – streaked with tears, a protective grip on her arm warning her there was no permissible way to intervene…

Grabbing the handle of her wheelie bag with one hand, her cappuccino with the other, Ariel pushed her way through the door of the café and ran. Directly ahead of her, the old man lurched from side to side, as though on the brink of falling down. Ariel sped through the crowd towards him, hot coffee sloshing over the edge of her cup as she moved, burning her fingers, staining her clothes, splashing messily to the ground.

When she reached him, the old man’s eyes – a pale, muddled grey – met hers and widened in surprise.

Instinctively, they both looked down.

‘It looks like a Jackson Pollock. I think the technical term is “drip painting”,’ he said, pointing at the pooling canvas with his stick.

His voice was warm, and, Ariel noted with surprise, unexpectedly calm.

She turned the name over in her mind. Pollock. Linus would know him, she was sure; and yet ironically, during her most memorable visit to a gallery – the National Gallery, as it happened – Linus hadn’t been with them.

She thought back to the endless rows of paintings and the cathedral-like dimensions of the rooms. Now, so many years later, her most vivid recollection was of Estelle’s disappointment at finding Van Gogh’s vase of yellow sunflowers permanently obstructed by the shoulders, heads and hats of tourists conspiring to keep it hidden, on one side or another, from their view.

‘Looks to me like the inside of my head,’ she replied. ‘When I’m having a bad day. A day full of demons.’ She drew her hair back from her face and leaned her head to one side. ‘It’s dramatic, though. Like an explosion of light and dark.’

She pulled an unopened packet of Kleenex from her canvas bag and pressed it between the old man’s fingers. He was a full head taller than she was, and, she couldn’t help noticing, impressively upright for someone who was obviously more than a little reliant on his stick.

Ariel placed her hand behind his elbow and did her best to reassure him with a smile. ‘Are you okay?’

The old man nodded and tilted his head to the ceiling.

‘That’s it, keep your head back. Don’t look down.’ She slipped a tissue from its packet and began to wipe the smears of partially dried blood from his face. ‘Is there someone I can call for you? A friend or relative, maybe?’

‘No,’ he said quickly, ‘there’s no one to call. No one I want to bother, at any rate.’

His face was waxen and drawn, but his eyes seemed more focused close up – sharper, and somehow more determined.

He shifted his gaze an inch or two to the right, in the direction of the electronic screen. ‘I can’t understand what happened. It just –’ he paused, clicked his fingers – ‘came on like that! Right out of nowhere!’

Ariel guided his hand to his face and encouraged him to pinch the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. She noticed he wasn’t wearing a wedding band, but then she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen a man as old as he was wearing a ring. She tried to imagine what it must feel like not to have an ‘in case of emergency’ person to call. And yet he was on his way somewhere; there must be someone who cared enough to know if anything happened to him, surely?

‘Are you all right, sir? There’s an awful lot of blood. I’ll call an ambulance and have someone take a look at you.’

Ariel tightened her grip on the old man’s elbow. Standing alongside them was a middle-aged man with a Station Supervisor badge pinned to his lapel. He’d come armed with a folding plastic chair which he was already in the process of opening.

‘There’s no need for an ambulance,’ the old man said. He squeezed out a narrow smile. ‘It’s nothing serious, and the bleeding’s stopped now, as you can see.’

He took a concerted step away from the chair and lowered his gaze to the floor. He seemed far more interested in the whereabouts of his suitcase, which was still lying next to the Pollock at their feet. Bending very gently forwards, he caught hold of the handle and moved it an inch closer to his heel.

‘With respect, sir,’ the Station Supervisor resumed, ‘it’s my responsibility to ensure the safety and well-being of all incoming and outgoing visitors to the station. I’d be a great deal happier knowing someone had checked you over.’

The old man’s eyes darted once again to the electronic screen. Ariel followed his gaze and saw that the Edinburgh train was now ready for boarding on Platform 6.

‘Thank you,’ he replied, ‘but I’m afraid I have a train to catch. In fact, I really should be on my way…’

‘Sir, under the circumstances I’m not sure continuing with your journey would be wise.’ The Station Supervisor slipped a pen and notepad from his jacket pocket and gestured to the circle of blood glistening at their feet. ‘There’s clearly some sort of medical issue here… I’ll need to compile an incident report at least. May I take your name, please?’

‘You have to file a report?’ the old man cried. ‘For a nosebleed?’

Ariel gave him a discreet look of solidarity.

His arm tensed lightly beneath her hand.

‘I don’t have much time, but of course – if you need it – my name is Henry Applebee. From Kentish Town.’

‘Mr Applebee, are you travelling alone today? If so, I think it would be best if I alerted a relative before you board your train. You really should have someone meet you at your final destination.’

Ariel threw Henry another sidelong glance and saw that the first real flicker of alarm was now flashing across his face. His eyes flew from the darkening smears of blood on his clothes, to the thick, liver-coloured streaks on the backs of his hands and nails. He rubbed distractedly at a stain on the lapel of his coat, his chin sinking to his chest, his posture drooping, as though his entire being were buckling beneath the force of an impossible weight. The change was so pronounced, she wondered if he might be suffering from some sort of delayed shock.

‘What must I look like?’ he mumbled, seemingly to the ground.

And suddenly, she understood. What Henry was experiencing wasn’t shock, after all. It was shame.

Sliding her hand upwards from his elbow, Ariel squeezed the back of Henry’s arm.

‘Henry isn’t travelling alone. He’s with me,’ she said, looking the Station Supervisor squarely in the eye. ‘My name is Ariel Bliss. From South Wales. Thank you for your help, but we really have to get going.’ She turned to Henry and smiled. ‘We’ll be fine once we’re settled on the train.’

‘Absolutely!’ Henry said brightly. ‘We’ll be right as rain!’

The Supervisor gave her a hard stare. He seemed to be acknowledging her presence for the very first time, and didn’t appear overly impressed with what he was seeing. ‘I see.’ He made a low grunting sound at the back of his throat and bent over to retrieve his folding chair. ‘One last question,’ he said, pulling himself upright once again. ‘Could I just verify where you’re both travelling to today?’

‘Edinburgh,’ Henry replied at once. ‘We’re on the nine o’clock train.’

‘Edinburgh?’ The Supervisor raised his eyebrows. ‘That’s quite a journey!’

‘Oh yes,’ Henry said, reaching for his suitcase. ‘You have no idea.’

Neither of them uttered a word as they set off towards the ticket barrier, their suitcases at their sides. Ariel could feel the Station Supervisor’s eyes boring into the backs of their heads as they walked, tracking their progress through the crowd. She was sure Henry could sense it too, because the moment they were through the barrier he began to move more quickly, the acceleration of his footsteps accompanied by the heightened tap-tap-tap of his stick on the granite floor.

She glanced at the train, eager to depart, before them.

Promise me, a voice rang out in her head.

I promise, Mam.

Ariel tightened her hold on her wheelie bag. She focused on the soft, rhythmic rattle of its wheels, and kept one eye trained on the mysterious stranger at her side. She wondered who he was, where he was going. Most of all, she found herself wondering who or what could be so important to him that he was prepared to lie to catch his train…

Finally, as Henry leaned in and whispered the words, ‘Thank you,’ under his breath, she stopped wondering altogether, and knew only that she had done the right thing.

5

The Promise
BLACKPOOL, FEBRUARY 1948
Henry

The North Pier is almost deserted apart from Henry and Francine, who stand at its furthermost tip, four-penny bags of cod and chips in their hands, a crisp wind whipping about their ears. The sky is leaden and eerily still, while below them waves slosh and break repeatedly against the pier’s wooden ballasts. The water is washday grey, streaked with menace. Henry is aware it’s a testament to their desire to see each other again that they find themselves here at all, blown about like sea-drift, when most people have retreated indoors to the comfort of a cosy tearoom, a favourite armchair, a lover’s tender embrace.

Francine’s presence beside him feels rare, disarming. She’s wrapped in a powder-blue coat a shade or two lighter than her eyes. Her cheeks glow with a wintry flush, and a dab of soft-hued coral-coloured lipstick enhances the natural lustre of her mouth. Henry thinks she looks gorgeous. She took his arm when she met him at the station, and he – unsure whether she would be there or not, but hoping for the best – offered to take her to a restaurant for lunch, so they could chat and get to know one another better, but she said no, not to worry, fish and chips would do just fine.

‘I know a good place down by the pier,’ she said, a faint, nervous breathlessness to her voice. ‘You’d never find it without me. Come on, I’ll show you the way.’

They talk in quick, excited bursts. Like the day before, the conversation flows in an effortless current between them. It is, Henry thinks, a tacit commitment on both their parts to share as much of themselves as possible, conscious that they only have today before he has to return home to London and face the responsibilities of a brand-new civilian life.

Around them the wind thickens and roils in great swirling eddies, whisking the waves to a pearly-white froth. Between the cold and the lingering spectre of disorientation, Henry’s hunger is acute. He wolfs down the last of his chips, pausing only to steal shy, sideways glances at Francine. Lying on his bunk in Kirkham the previous evening, he was certain he’d be able to visualise every contour, every quirk and subtle complexity of her face. But it was her eyes – her fearless, wild, liquid blue eyes – which had branded themselves so indelibly on his brain.

‘I’m glad you came back today. I had a nice time yesterday,’ she says, squeezing in close against his arm.

At the gentle pressure of her body, Henry feels the gravitational pull between them intensify. His stomach flips, and a jolt of electricity sparks like tinder along his spine. He takes a breath. Reins it in.

‘I was looking forward to seeing you again,’ he replies. ‘In fact, I was afraid you might not be able to get the day off.’

When she told him what she did for a living she’d seemed almost apologetic at first. But then, in the delicate arching of her neck, in the involuntary upwards tilt of her perfectly formed chin, he’d seen a flash of defiance, of self-preservation. Being a waitress wasn’t something she’d aspired to, she told him, but it paid the rent, and it was better than doing the exact same thing for less in Sheffield where she grew up.

‘I always knew I’d like to try my luck somewhere new,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘And Blackpool seemed as good a place to me as any. Plus –’ she added with well-appointed irony – ‘at least here I can get a bit of sea air.’

The wind whistles through the railings and flies under the skirt of her coat, sending swathes of powder-blue fabric fanning like an accordion around her legs. Francine screams and grabs hold of Henry’s arm with one hand, while with the other she tries frantically to preserve her modesty by wedging a fistful of pleats between her knees.

‘Anyhow, you needn’t have worried,’ she says when she’s composed herself. ‘Getting time off wasn’t a problem. February’s off season. If it weren’t for the Americans and the lads like you visiting from Kirkham, Blackpool would be a ghost town at this time of year.’

Henry scrunches his empty chip paper into a ball and looks around for a waste bin. On the roof of the Pavilion Theatre immediately behind them, a turbo-sized gull stretches its wings and follows his movements with immense, twitching eyes. Henry slips a protective arm around Francine’s shoulders, and with a forced air of nonchalance says, ‘The Americans have always had more money to throw around than we have. I suppose here’s the obvious place for them to spend it.’

Francine stares evenly at the horizon. In the daylight, away from the twilight shadows of the Tower Ballroom, her skin appears even more radiant, even smoother and more unblemished than he’d recalled. And there’s a freckle, he sees now; a small brown beauty spot nestled just below her jawline at the side of her neck. Henry manages to stop himself from leaning in and kissing it. Instead, he tries to intuit what she’s thinking, what unknown visions are unfolding behind her eyes. He doesn’t want to think about all the other servicemen who’ve passed through the town as he is doing, least of all now, when his own uniform is due to be handed back in in just twenty-four hours’ time.

He leans his torso against the railings, swivels his head to catch her eye. ‘You look very pretty today, by the way.’

‘Thank you! It’s a new coat.’ She smoothes the fine, woollen fabric over her hips and smiles. ‘I’ve been saving up for it for ages. Mam says I like to kid myself I’m Rita Hayworth.’

‘Oh, Rita’s a bombshell all right,’ Henry shoots back, ‘but she doesn’t have your eyes.’ He sees the look of delight on her face and laughs. ‘I’m not sure where that came from… I mean I meant it, obviously – but I’ve never said anything smooth before in my life.’

‘Come on, I don’t believe it!’ she cries. ‘I’ve never met an airman yet who didn’t have a ready line, though that was a particularly flattering one, I’ll be honest.’

Henry shakes his head. ‘I’m serious! Despite all my brother’s efforts to educate me, I can guarantee that any smooth-talking genes in our family went exclusively to him.’

A small wound, calloused over the years, briefly makes its presence felt in Henry’s chest. It’s ingrained in him by now – this terrible ache of being in thrall to someone he looks up to so much, and yet can never match, never live up to, no matter how hard he tries. Devlin has always had such a seductive charm about him. Obstacles – be they romantic or otherwise – just seem to disintegrate in his path. Never in a million years could he know the agony, or inevitability, of always feeling second-best.

‘Well,’ Francine assures him with a smile, ‘I think you’re sweet.’ She throws him a long, penetrating gaze. ‘Henry? Can I ask you something?’

‘Of course.’

‘What time do you have to be back at your billet?’

All at once, her smile wavers. Henry catches her by the hand and pulls her towards him. ‘Not for hours and hours yet. Let’s not worry about that now. But we should get inside out of the cold. Your hands are freezing.’

They walk arm-in-arm along the pier towards the promenade, the pleats of Francine’s coat brushing against the side of Henry’s leg as she moves. On the beach below them a cocker spaniel races along the shoreline, pawing at the water, sending flecks of surf cartwheeling into the air. Francine turns to watch it, and the same lock of hair which slipped loose from her bun the day before tumbles against her cheek. It flutters momentarily in the breeze before whipping round and catching on her lipstick.

Henry grins.

‘Hey! What’s so funny?’ She digs him in the ribs, plucks the strand of hair from her mouth, and with the same relaxed ease clips it back behind her ear.

‘Have you ever had your tea leaves read?’ she asks, as they approach the entrance to the pier. Directly ahead of them is an elaborately painted sign advertising the clairvoyant skills of a woman with the rather dubious name of Madame Futuro. ‘A girl at work read mine the other day – just for fun. I didn’t believe what she told me, though.’

‘Why not?’ Henry replies. ‘Did she tell you that you were going to meet a handsome stranger?’

Francine draws to a stop. ‘Yes. One who would change my life. How did you know that?’

‘I don’t know…’ He clears his throat. ‘I mean, honestly, I was just kidding. Isn’t that what they tell everyone?’

‘Probably.’ Francine rolls her eyes. ‘She said I was going to meet a man in uniform. Which in this part of the world doesn’t exactly narrow it down… And then she said something about a farm, and that part made no sense to me at all. I just kept nodding. No way was I going to let on what I was thinking, and then –’ She breaks off, squeezes Henry’s arm.

‘And then what?’

‘Nothing I choose to believe in. I’m sure she was making it all up as she went along. Anyway, you’re from London, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ he replies. I’ve lived my entire life in a neighbourhood called Chalk Farm.

‘So I was right! It was all nonsense.’

‘Why?’ Henry asks, his curiosity getting the better of him. ‘What else did she say?’

For a second, the light in Francine’s eyes dims. She steps towards him and kisses him on the cheek. ‘I’m just really happy to see you.’ Her voice is so unexpectedly tender, it sends shivers along Henry’s spine. ‘Forget I mentioned it. It was silly of me to bring it up.’

They pull away from each other, and holding hands, leave the entrance to the pier. Henry weighs the silence – the first one he’s been conscious of since they met. He glances sidelong at Francine. Her gaze is fixed straight in front of her, her features composed, but Henry senses that whatever she’s left unsaid is lingering, still, between them.

‘Million-dollar question,’ he says, in an effort to lighten the mood. ‘You find a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. There’s a card attached with your name on it. What do you do?’

‘Anything?’ Francine says at once.

‘Anything.’

‘That’s easy. I’d open a dance school. I’d hire someone to teach me, then I’d run classes of my own. I’d be the Ginger Rogers of the North. I’d be in heaven, Henry! No one would even recognise me back home. Either that, or I’d give it all away and join the circus.’

Her delivery is so deadpan that Henry doesn’t dare ask her if she’s being serious.

‘I don’t see either one happening, though,’ she adds with a touch of sadness. ‘But the dreams themselves cost nothing, do they? What about you? What will you do when you leave the RAF?’

Her question, natural as it is, catches Henry off-guard. ‘I haven’t decided yet,’ he replies. He raises his hand to his neck and fiddles needlessly with his tie. ‘My father died not long after I volunteered, and my brother, Devlin, saw active duty in the end, though it was only for a few months. Thank God he made it back in one piece, his ego fully intact…’ He smiles, a rush of anticipation seizing hold of him. ‘So much has changed since I’ve been away. It’s the oldest cliché in the book, but whatever I end up doing, I’d like to make a difference if I can.’

The second the words are out of his mouth he fears he’s said too much, when in reality, he knows perfectly well he hasn’t said enough. He lowers his eyes and stares with studied intensity at the tips of his boots. Tell her. Tell her, you idiot. You know she’ll understand.

‘What is it, Henry?’

He lifts his head and smiles. ‘Before I volunteered I was doing pretty well with my studies. Devlin never showed much interest in school, but he’s always been charisma on a stick, so somehow it didn’t seem to matter.’

‘Charisma on a stick?’ Francine cuts in. ‘Are you sure you two are related?’

Henry bursts out laughing. ‘Yes – although Devlin was first in line when they were handing that out, too.’ A flicker of insecurity flares inside him all over again. ‘Trust me, I speak from experience when I say you’d understand if you met him.’

‘But I haven’t met him,’ she says. Her gaze zeroes in on him with laser-sharp focus. ‘I’m right here – with you. Anyway, I think charisma is for film stars, and highly overrated for everyone else.’

Henry realises he’s beaming like a prize fool.

‘Stop trying to distract me,’ she says, smiling back at him. ‘Go on, tell me what you were going to say about your studies.’

‘You really want to know?’

‘Yes!’

‘Okay, well, discovering I had a gift for languages was a revelation, almost like acting in a way – a chance to reinvent myself and shine. So I’ve been thinking I might go in for a career in teaching. Maybe then I can inspire others the way my teachers inspired me.’ He pauses. ‘I didn’t actually say that out loud, did I? God, the clichés are just pouring out of me today.’

‘No they’re not!’ Francine replies. ‘I think it’s wonderful.’ She steps towards him and presses her hands against his chest. ‘You have to promise me you won’t let anyone tell you otherwise. You’ve got that look about you, Henry! You might even be one of the greatest teachers London’s ever seen!’

She slips away and runs along the promenade. Henry chases after her, catches her by the waist and lifts her into the air. As he swings her round, her face, the pier, the sky, the Tower, blur and merge before him. Francine screams, and with a lightning swipe, she grabs hold of his cap and brandishes it like a trophy above her head.

‘Come on,’ he says, lowering her to the ground, ‘let’s go inside somewhere and have a cup of tea to warm up. What about over there?’

Henry motions towards an imposing building with an elegant red-brick façade on the opposite side of the road. The Shore Hotel looks decidedly grand, a watering hole for the privileged no doubt, a whiff of the silver spoon about them, but Henry doesn’t care – right now he’d be happy to go just about anywhere as long as he’s with Francine.

She follows his gaze and quickly shakes her head. ‘No, Henry, we can’t go there. That’s where I work. I don’t want my colleagues waiting on us. It wouldn’t feel right on my day off.’

‘Of course, how stupid of me. A film, then? Some place warm and cheery?’

‘Yes. The Winter Gardens! If we’re quick, we’ll be just in time for the matinee.’

She waits for a Fleetwood-bound tram to rattle past them, then she takes Henry’s hand and leads him in the opposite direction from the hotel. When they reach the other side of the road she comes to an abrupt stop and looks at him with an expression of such startling gravity, he wonders what can possibly have transpired to unsettle her in that briefest of journeys from one side of the promenade to the other.

‘What’s wrong, Francine? Have you changed your mind? We could always do something else if you prefer?’

Her arms fall like a rag doll’s to her sides. ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ she replies.

‘Then what is it?’

Henry scans her face. Her eyes are laced with such intricacy of emotion that every attempt he makes to interpret them proves utterly beyond him.

Francine glances at the pier, at the Shore Hotel rising large and grandiose behind them. Turning slowly to face him, she floors him with the most ingenuous of smiles.

‘Okay, Henry, here it is: I’ve never met a boy like you before. I’m just a regular Yorkshire lass, not like the London girls you’re used to. I don’t have fancy tastes. I’m smart, and I’m passionate about the things I like, but I’m not cultured or clever like you.’

She holds her palms out from her sides and shrugs. ‘I’m a waitress who scrubs up well and only owns one good coat, and this is it. But I wear my heart on my sleeve, and I swear it’s every bit as hopeful and fragile as the next girl’s.

‘You won’t break it, will you?’

6

The Return
KING’S CROSS STATION, LONDON, DECEMBER 6: DEPARTURE, 8:47 A.M.
Henry

The hairy trek between concourse and train with an unknown, if kindly, teenager was rapidly turning into the longest walk of Henry’s life. But then so far, nothing at all was going the way he had expected.

He moved steadily forwards, his vision trained in missile lock-on with the carriage door ahead. An invalid! He’d been made to feel like an invalid! And all he’d done was tell a little white lie about the fact he wasn’t travelling alone, and even that wasn’t an entire fabrication.

In Henry’s inside coat pocket a Basildon Bond envelope grazed lightly against his chest. Two tickets had been purchased at his niece, Amy’s, insistence, and yet barely ninety minutes had passed since she’d telephoned to say that she wouldn’t be able to accompany him after all:

‘I’m so sorry, Uncle Henry, but the twins woke up with chickenpox and Dan’s renovation job in Berkshire has overrun. I feel terrible about letting you down, but I’m going to have to stay home and take care of the girls. Will you be all right on your own?’

This, in a way, had been Spanner Number One, though Henry wasted no time at all in assuring her that he was more than capable of making the journey by himself. The point was, her intention to go with him had been there, so what difference did it ultimately make if instead of being here by his side, she was trapped at home in Ladbroke Grove?

As he manoeuvred himself one footstep at a time towards the waiting train, Henry briefly entertained the possibility that somehow, via a perverse twist of fate, he’d inadvertently willed the morning’s events into being. In truth, not once during the course of the last few tumultuous days had he considered it necessary for Amy to escort him – like some glorified minder! – on his trip. And yet, he acknowledged with a faint twinge of guilt, there was no denying that if it hadn’t been for her chance discovery, he wouldn’t now find himself at the epicentre of one of London’s busiest train terminals at all.

Henry brushed the thought from his head and reminded himself that he didn’t need a babysitter; his destination was Scotland, not the moon. And he wasn’t that incapacitated! Just because he was eighty-five (and counting) didn’t mean he couldn’t make it halfway across the country in one piece. Plenty of people his age would have driven!

He squeezed the handle of his suitcase and listened for the reassuring sound of the aged leather creaking beneath his fingers. His joints ached. His mouth, which still tasted ominously of blood, felt stale and dry.

If he could just get himself into his seat… If the guard would only blow his whistle and send the train wheezing and grunting out of the station… If he could put some distance at last between himself and the weary, winter-tide streets of cold, old, lonely London… Then and only then could he be certain that nothing and no one might prevent him from reaching his destination on time.

There had been all of eight days to digest the news, which in Henry’s world was less time than it took for the bulletproof avocados from his local corner shop to embrace their natural-born destiny and ripen. One minute he was pottering on the patio, mimicking the sound of the Papadopouloses’ chickens clucking in their homemade coop next door; the next, he was engaged in the most surreal telephone conversation of his life.

‘Uncle Henry, it’s Amy. I’m calling to say that I’ve found her. I think I’ve found the woman you’ve been searching for all these years.’

Henry pressed a finger to his ear and waited for the punchline, the dénouement, the inevitable Candid Camera reveal.

He stared at the framed reproduction of Monet’s sublime water lilies floating serenely on the hall wall. His instinct, once he’d had a second or two to process Amy’s words, was to gasp, but his jaw fell slack and all he could muster was an acute, ear-splitting silence.

He wrapped his hand around the empty glass vase on the bureau, moving it an inch this way, that way, keeping the pads of his fingers pressed to its cool, hard surface for no other reason than because it was the only object in his immediate line of vision that was solid, and tangible, and real.

A wave of longing rolled through his body. The sensation came close to overwhelming him until it was matched, molecule by molecule, by a slow-moving river of fear in his veins. What if there’d been a mix-up? What if this was all just another terrible mistake?

‘Uncle Henry, are you there?’

‘Yes, Amy,’ he replied. ‘I’m here.’

‘Good, because I need you to listen to this – it’s from an article in last night’s Evening Standard: “The inspiration for the novel came from the author’s mother, Yorkshire girl Francine Keeley, who in the aftermath of the Second World War worked as a waitress at Blackpool’s Shore Hotel.” Did you hear that? It’s her name. Her hotel. Same town. From everything you’ve told me, I don’t think there can be any mistake.’

Slowly, Henry let the vase go. Amy was right. The match was nothing short of perfect.

‘I’m sorry, Amy,’ he managed at last. ‘What exactly is this article about?’

There was a momentary pause.

‘Oh. Sorry, I should have said… It’s a spotlight on a new wave of debut authors, one of whom has written some sort of mystery-thriller set on the Lancashire coast in the 1940s. She credits her mother – “Francine Keeley” – and the Shore Hotel as the jumping-off points for her story. Honestly, you should thank the customer who left the paper behind in the café this morning, because otherwise I would never have seen it. I’ll drop it over to you after work and you can read it for yourself. In the meantime, I think it’s probably safe to assume that according to this, Francine is – or at one point was – married. Either way, the one thing we know for sure is that she has a daughter.’

Henry felt as though he were floating out of his shoes. He reached out his hand and grabbed the edge of the bureau before sinking in a state of burgeoning delirium onto the hallway chair.

Banjo raced in from the patio and began to paw frantically at Henry’s shins. Henry’s body slumped forwards, his elbows skidding to his knees. He was trying his damnedest to formulate a response, but his powers of expression were scrambled, his train of thought unclear.

‘I wouldn’t blame you for thinking it’s too late,’ Amy continued on the other end of the line. ‘It was practically a lifetime ago, after all. Then again – if she really is that important to you – if you make contact with her daughter, you’ll find Francine. The ball’s in your court, Uncle Henry. What do you want to do?’

Henry gripped the handle of his walking stick and pressed ahead. Determination coursed through every muscle of his body. He’d seen Francine in his dreams again last night, only this one was more real to him than most; so real he was sure he could even smell her perfume.

Her words haunted him still:

Francine.

Always and forever, Francine.

Even now, the memory cleaved Henry’s heart in two. Time, it seemed, had been cruel, and capricious. It had healed nothing.

One thing he’d learned for sure: digging around in his memories as he sat, pen in hand, bent over his notebook, was like sifting for gold; he never quite knew when the most precious nuggets of all – the ones with the power to steal his breath away – were going to filter up to the surface.

Catch me, Henry! – her arms beating wildly against her sides – Catch me if you can!

Her smile was electric. Sometimes it was a transitory feeling, gentle as a whisper, as intangible as a baby’s breath; at other times it was a profound ache that grabbed hold of Henry’s heart and tightened its grip like an iron fist. It astounded him how the human heart could remain so vital and complex with the passing of the years; an organ so unwaveringly loyal and pure and constant on the inside, while the outer body bowed to its inevitable decline.

And yet…

Henry glanced in renewed horror at his blood-splattered clothes. He’d experienced spontaneous nosebleeds once or twice before, but never like this. He wondered if it were a side effect of the medicine he’d been prescribed (but so rarely succumbed to taking) for one of his various ailments. He’d never placed much stock in doctors’ pills and potions; they handed them out far too readily for his liking, when mostly – just like every other lonely pensioner he knew – all he wanted was a chat and the opportunity for a bit of social interaction in the waiting room. And now look at him! A disgrace in his dove-grey suit! He wasn’t sure things could be going any worse. He must look like a decrepit Sweeney Todd!

Henry came to a stop alongside the train and placed his suitcase at the platform’s edge. Thank heavens for the girl: Ariel. Here she was standing right next to him telling him that she was travelling to Edinburgh, too:

‘I was supposed to be on the one that left at eight,’ she said, a little disconsolately. ‘But I had a total nightmare getting here on the Tube. I’m sure it’ll be fine if I just get on this one. I don’t suppose it’s full.’

As she spoke, a horde of passengers swarmed onto the platform behind them, and jostled past in a shamelessly undignified scramble to board the train.

‘Well, not completely full, anyway,’ Ariel added with a frown.

She turned and peered briefly through the First Class window. ‘Is this your carriage? It looks nice. Would you like me to see you to your seat?’

Henry smiled, partly at her kindness, but mainly at the expression of wonder on her face. He cast a discreet glance at the holes in her jeans, at her faded black plimsolls (just like the ones he and Devlin had worn in school!). At her side was what he assumed must be the hand-me-down exterior of her rather tired-looking suitcase on wheels. He didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but at her age he could never have afforded the luxury of first-class travel. More to the point, if it hadn’t been for her helpful intervention, in all likelihood he might not have been allowed to board the train at all…

‘My niece was supposed to be travelling with me today,’ he said in answer to her question. ‘But she’s been otherwise detained. Could I offer you her seat as a token of my thanks? Unless –’ he added somewhat doubtfully – ‘you already have a first-class ticket?’

He slipped the Basildon Bond envelope from his pocket and held out the tickets for Ariel to see. She looked down and regarded them with what appeared to be an expression of mild apprehension; or perhaps, it occurred to him with dismay, it was just sheer disbelief.

A violent rush of heat rose beneath his collar. ‘Of course,’ he muttered quickly, ‘if you’d rather not spend the entire journey in the company of an old man, and a bloody one at that, then I completely –’

‘Thank you, Henry.’ Ariel raised her head and gave him a shy, but none the less winning smile. ‘If you’re sure it wouldn’t be a problem, then yes, actually, that would be great.’

Relief flooded Henry’s face. ‘That’s settled then!’ he cried. ‘No sense in a perfectly good ticket going to waste!’

Ariel’s gaze shifted to the carriage steps, to his white-knuckled fingers curled around the handle of his stick. ‘Here, let me help you.’ Moving nimbly alongside him, she slipped her hand once more behind his arm.

Henry picked up his suitcase and stepped onto the train. The engine was already turning over, the microcosmic glow of the sleek, purring carriage firmly in his sights. The carriage door swung to behind him, gathering him up, buffering him in its steely embrace. He made his way inside, his heart pounding at the realisation that here, at last, was his return.

To his past…

And to the mistake that he’d give anything in the world to change.

Part Two

7

Train Hopping
DECEMBER 6: EN ROUTE
Ariel

Ariel slid her wheelie bag into the luggage area just inside the carriage door. As she released the handle, three words popped into her brain, imprinting themselves like a trail of skywriting on the inner trajectory of her gaze: embrace the unforeseen.

What, she asked herself, was that supposed to mean?

She repeated the phrase under her breath. It wasn’t exactly unfamiliar, but then neither could she remember where she might have picked it up. Maybe it meant she wasn’t supposed to be running after all? Maybe what she actually needed to do was surrender, and trust that what was meant to unfold would do so naturally, of its own accord?

Immediately ahead of her, Henry drew to a stop, double-checked his reservation, and with a contented, ‘Ah, here we are,’ placed his suitcase on his seat.

Ariel followed behind him and walked into the carriage’s immaculate interior.

‘Holy shit.’

Her eyes made a rapid tour of her surroundings. The lighting was calm and muted. The seats were spacious and spotlessly clean. Even the air seemed less dense. She glanced to her right and saw that her seat was opposite Henry’s at the carriage’s near end. Their seating area (a table for two designated for herself and Henry, and a table for four with an aisle in between) was quasi-separated from the remainder of the passengers by a dusky glass panel which stretched all the way to the ceiling. She wondered if it had been tacked on as an afterthought, or whether it had been purposely designed to offer a small corner of additional exclusivity. Either way, she liked the subtle degree of privacy it provided. Seems like the perfect refuge, she mused, for anyone with something to hide.

‘That’s you,’ Henry said. He gestured amiably to her seat. ‘Make yourself at home!’

‘Thanks, Henry,’ she replied.

She slipped off her coat. Her mohair jumper – which had long seen better days – wilted under her gaze. Shit, she said again – silently, this time. She could just see Linus shaking his head in horror, then covering it up with a smile. She – like the rest of her family as far as she was aware – had never had the pleasure of travelling anywhere First Class.

She tucked her canvas shoulder bag under the table and sat down. ‘It’s another world in here,’ she said, her voice shot with awe. ‘Lots of leg room. Actual metal cutlery. Nice.’

An invisible steward had laid the table with white china mugs, place mats, svelte silver spoons – all much too smart for a girl from Oystermouth wearing ripped jeans and a charity-shop jumper. Her fingers sought the ends of her sleeves and curled around them into a protective ball.

‘My niece persuaded me to treat myself,’ Henry replied. ‘Of course, that was when she thought she’d be travelling with me. It’ll be one less thing for the bucket list, I suppose!’

Ariel smiled, then glanced over her shoulder and furtively eyed the door. She wondered if Henry would be offended if she made an excuse and slipped back to her rightful place in Standard Class, where she belonged.

Something moved in the corner of her eye, a quick flash of blue. A guy in his mid-twenties was lounging behind the table for four across the aisle. He was dressed in a woollen beanie, faded black jeans, and an electric-blue fisherman’s jumper almost as threadbare as her own. A tangle of rope and leather cords snaked around his wrist. His dark hair was splayed out in a casual mess beneath his hat, and from the dusting of stubble on his chin, it was obvious he hadn’t seen a razor in days.

He looked over and met her gaze.

Ariel gave him a self-conscious smile and deflected her attention further down the carriage. A group of businessmen were staking out their terrain, visibly assessing the available table space between themselves and their neighbours. She stared at them in disbelief. It was like laptops at dawn! Did they seriously not have enough room?

‘Well, there’s plenty of room here!’ Henry said in a cheerful voice.

He removed his coat, folded it into a rectangle and placed it next to his walking stick in the luggage rack overhead. ‘How the other half lives! It’ll be walk-in closets for everyone next!’

He bent over and rummaged in his suitcase, which was now lying open on his seat. Ariel tilted her head and discreetly peeped inside. His belongings were arranged in neat piles and held in place by four crisscrossing elasticated straps which snapped together in the middle like a pair of gentlemen’s braces. The case’s lining – a soft, fuzzy turmeric – was patchy and worn, its edges stained with rusty blooms of ochre and brown. Overall, she got the impression the suitcase must be almost as old as he was.

‘Back in a jiffy,’ Henry said. He pulled himself upright, tucked a bundle of fresh clothing under his arm and retraced his steps through the sliding door.

A palpable air of mystery lingered in his wake, absorbing Ariel’s thoughts entirely before curling around her shoulders and settling on the now closed, tight-lipped surface of his suitcase.

‘Excuse me? If you don’t mind me asking, is the gentleman okay?’

Her neighbour in the woollen beanie was staring at her over a copy of the Time Out Guide to Edinburgh. His question – along with his American accent – caught her momentarily off-guard.

‘Oh. Yes, he’s fine, thanks. He had a nosebleed. A pretty bad one, but it seems to be under control now.’

‘Nosebleed, huh? That’s a relief. I thought maybe he’d been in a fight.’ Beanie Guy’s deadpan demeanour segued into a broad, easy smile.

She waited for him to return to his book, but he held her gaze, his inquisitive brown eyes watching her closely, like someone examining something curious, something foreign or unfamiliar under a microscopic lens. A moment later he shifted forwards in his seat, his palm pressed to his chest.

‘Hi, I’m Travis Farlan. I’m guessing we’re going to be sitting across the aisle from one another for the next four and a half hours, so I thought I may as well live up to the cultural cliché of the gregarious American and introduce myself.’

As he spoke, Ariel noticed a battered music case lying on the window seat beside him. The case was liberally plastered with a ragtag collection of stickers, the majority of which were scuffed and fraying at the edges. She caught the word ‘Chicago’ emblazoned across one; ‘Monterey’ on another. A couple of friends from school had wandered the hallways with stickered cases like that. Violins and flutes, mainly. The odd French horn. Every once in a while one or other of them would get pounced on in the schoolyard. One boy even had his viola tossed into the recycling bin. She never understood why they were targeted like that. She always thought they were cool.

‘If you’re the gregarious American, does that make me a classically reserved Brit?’ she countered with a smile.

Travis held up his hands and laughed. ‘Touché!’

Ariel leaned her elbows on the table, taking care not to disturb the precise alignment of the crockery any more than was absolutely necessary. ‘I’m Ariel Bliss, and he’s –’ she pointed vaguely towards Henry’s empty seat – ‘Henry.’

She hesitated, unsure what more to add, then decided the truth was as good as anything under the circumstances. ‘Henry and I met in the station this morning. I went over to make sure he was okay, and when he found out we were both travelling to Edinburgh he offered me his spare first-class ticket as a thank you.’

‘For real? That’s awesome! You and I are kindred spirits. My first-class ticket was a gift, too.’ He uttered a low chuckle. ‘We’re like a pair of high-class railroad bums. I guess both of us landed on our feet.’

‘Sorry?’

‘It’s a train-hopping reference. Or don’t you guys have that over here?’

Ariel gave him a blank stare.

‘Maybe not…’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘So…’

Travis seized his cue. ‘So basically, there’s this whole subculture of homeless people who ride freight trains all over the U.S. – illegally, obviously. They’re like modern-day hobos. They haven’t got any place to live, so they use the rolling stock as a means of putting a temporary roof over their heads. Some of them cover hundreds and thousands of miles a year hopping from one freight carrier to another. Some even travel with families, kids as young as five or six.’

‘Sounds dangerous.’

‘Uh-huh. Imagine risking your life every time you jumped! They’d argue it’s worth it just to have the chance to kick back in one of those old, open boxcar carriages and watch the world fly by. You need some balls to do it, though.’

Ariel nestled deeper into the folds of her multicoloured scarf. ‘Can’t say I’d be up for it on a freezing cold day like today.’

Travis rubbed the back of his neck and shrugged. ‘They stuff their clothes with newspaper to keep warm. Apparently.’

She shot him a questioning glance, but Travis just smiled and shook his head. ‘It’s not what you’re thinking… I’m a New Yorker, born and bred. I’ve done my fair share of cross-country travelling, but never like that. I’m a professional musician. There’s no way I could jump on and off moving trains and risk injuring my hands. I wouldn’t be much of a sax player without fully functioning fingers.’

He draped his arm affectionately over the top of his saxophone case and gave it a gentle pat. ‘Train hoppers have to contend with a shower of loose ballast if they fall between cars. They can lose limbs. Wind up dead. I like to think of myself as a free spirit, but those guys are fearless. I’m way too attached to life to risk it all for a cinema-screen view of the American landscape, no matter how awe-inspiring it might be.’

Their conversation was interrupted by the slamming of carriage doors and the piercing trill of the guard’s whistle. Ariel stared out of the window as the train began its slow, steady advance from the station.

‘Right on time,’ a voice announced at her side.

She turned to see Henry looking a million times better. ‘Hi, Henry. That was quick!’

Beneath his jacket he was now wearing a plain white shirt and light green tie. He’d washed his face and neck. Even wiped the specks of blood from his shoes. His complexion was still a little drawn, but overall she thought he looked pretty relaxed, considering.

He dropped his soiled clothing into a Tesco carrier bag which he flattened and slipped inside his suitcase, immediately above the elasticated straps. He clicked the case shut and bent over to lift it onto the luggage rack.

Travis sprang to his feet. ‘Can I help you with that?’

‘Oh, not to worry, I can manage. Thank you,’ Henry replied.

The loose, crêpey folds of skin on his neck stretched and tautened as he arched his back, and with quivering arms slid his case overhead. Lowering himself at last into his seat, he cast a final glance through the metal bars running above him.

‘We made it!’ he said to Ariel. ‘I don’t know why there’s always such a tangible sense of achievement about boarding a train. It almost makes you feel worthy of a medal just for negotiating your way to your seat.’

He clasped his hands in his lap, leaned his head against the back of his seat and closed his eyes.

Elsewhere throughout the carriage passengers shifted and settled; announcements were made over the loudspeaker; newspapers, books and laptops were opened; tablets switched on; earphones wedged in ears. Seduced by the rhythmic rocking of the train, a sea of heads lolled left and right.

Ariel gazed out of the window at the flat, industrial grey of the urban cityscape whizzing by. They were picking up speed now: ca-choo ca-choo, ca-choo ca-choo, ca-choo ca-choo.

Before long they slithered through a tunnel, and then, not even twenty minutes from King’s Cross, the train was flanked by a retinue of fields, and a bank of leafless trees rose to attention like balding consorts on either side of the track. The train barrelled onwards, the sun scrambling from behind a cloud to shine upon the trees’ outstretched branches, infusing them with an oddly mystical glow.

Exactly twenty-three minutes from London, the first cow lumbered into sight.

Ariel sank back into her seat.

The long journey north had begun.

It was dull and stuffy inside the shop, and she’d grown tired of sitting curled up in the window, her finger tracing the underside of the green and gold lettering on the far side of the glass.

She lifted the back of her hair and fanned her neck with her hand. Estelle was busy serving a woman with a sleeping baby strapped to her chest. Linus, huddled deep in concentration in the corner, was adding the finishing touches to a homemade display case for a brand-new delivery of dowsing pendulums. Of the handful of regular customers swaying like reeds among the shelves, all Ariel could see were their arched, round backs.

She blew a damp strand of hair out of her eyes and searched for Linus’s ancient Olympus behind the counter. The camera (her camera to be exact, now that she’d persuaded him to give it to her for her eighth birthday a few months earlier) was poised for action exactly where she’d left it the day before, on a concealed shelf below the till. She wanted to feel its sleek, black casing beneath her fingers and crouch down low like a photojournalist, whiling away the afternoon taking pictures of the tourists as they browsed, unsuspecting, among the stacks. White as death and slippery with factor fifty at the start of their holidays, by the end they’d be golden-fried and half a stone heavier from all the 99s, and the cockles and chips, and the drink.

But today, nothing.

Ariel trailed through the shop, along the cool, shady passageway leading to the back garden, and settled into a deckchair with a copy of The Adventures of the Wishing-Chair.

‘Hey, mind if I bring my coffee and join you?’ Frank shouted from the attic window. ‘It’s hotter than a Texan barbecue up here!’

She looked up, saw a smiling face, a crisp white T-shirt, a swirl of glossy, jet-black hair, and waved to Frank to come down. She hoped he might be wearing his stage clothes, but so far he hadn’t worn them once during the day, not in the whole two weeks he’d been lodging with them, not unless he was on his way out to do a show. And yet Frank managed to look like Elvis no matter what he wore, with his jutting cheekbones, his immaculately sculpted sideburns, his perfect, china-white teeth. According to Estelle, Frank wasn’t far off Linus’s age, but Ariel thought he looked years younger. Linus was in his early fifties and already had grey hair.

‘The mercury’s gotta be well up over eighty today,’ Frank said as he launched his six-foot frame through the back door. He ran a hand through his quiff and reached for a pair of aviator sunglasses in his back pocket. ‘At least out here there’s a trickle of fresh air!’

He crossed the lawn in four easy strides and lowered himself onto the grass next to Ariel’s chair. The turn-ups of his jeans rose to reveal a tattoo of an eagle on the inside of his left ankle. ‘I got that in Philly when I was eighteen,’ he said, rubbing his finger over the dull, black ink. ‘Thankfully, it’s pretty hidden away down there. I don’t like it so much any more.’

Ariel smiled and stared at her reflection in the mirrored lenses of Frank’s sunglasses. Her face looked small and oddly distorted beneath the sunhat Estelle insisted she wore to keep the heat off the top of her head. Whenever she became too hot, her head began to pound and she broke out in a prickly red rash on her chest and arms. She wasn’t supposed to be sitting out here at all at this time of day, but she liked slipping on her yellow Woolworth’s sunnies and gazing up at the cloud formations sailing overhead. She was convinced there must be other people like her somewhere on the planet, daydreaming beneath the rolling, marshmallow sky. Sometimes she invented stories about who they were and where they were living. Sometimes she imagined them inventing stories of their own about her.

Frank took a sip of his coffee and pointed a suntanned finger at her book. ‘Any good?’

Ariel’s smile widened so much, her cheeks began to hurt. ‘It’s brilliant! Do you read, Frank? I do it all the time. It’s one of my favourite things to do, but I don’t think it’s because we own a bookshop that I like books, because the books we sell aren’t really storybooks at all. I think it’s because when you’re reading it doesn’t matter where you are or what else is happening around you, it’s impossible to feel alone. Do you think that too?’

She was vaguely aware that her words had spilled out of her mouth in one long, breathless rush, but she hoped they made her sound smart all the same. She searched Frank’s face for a reaction, but it was difficult to tell what he was thinking without seeing his eyes.

‘Sure, I like reading!’ he replied. ‘But not as much as singing. That’s when I feel least alone in the world, when I’m singing and performing. Nothing can touch me then.’

‘What’s it like travelling around all the time? Don’t you miss home?’

Frank took another sip of his coffee and cocked his head to one side. ‘Being on the road can be lonely, I guess. But like I said, singing and performing is what I do. Sometimes you get lucky and make a new friend or two along the way. Cyn is with me most of the time, though, so it’s not very often I’m completely on my own.’

Frank’s girlfriend, Cynthia, was a Priscilla Presley lookalike. She may not have been American like Frank, but she was a living, breathing, raven-haired Barbie doll; the prettiest girl Ariel had ever seen. She still couldn’t believe they’d be renting their attic room for an entire month while they did their It’s Now or Never summer roadshow. It was the most exciting news she’d heard since Estelle and Linus told her they were at last expecting Baby Number Two.

‘I’m glad you’ve got Cynthia,’ Ariel said. ‘It must be nice to have a friend like that.’

Frank smiled. ‘Well, sure! But you have friends too, don’t you?’

Ariel pointed at her book. ‘Of course. My friends are in there. That’s why I’m not lonely.’

Frank looked from her face, to the book, then back again. ‘That’s cool, Ariel. But I was thinking more about real friends,’ he said gently. ‘The kind you can call up and invite round to play?’

Ariel shrugged. ‘They are my real friends. They’re always there for me when I need them and they never call me names.’

‘Why d’you say that?’ Frank’s voice tightened. ‘Has someone been calling you names?’

Ariel gave a slow nod. ‘Just some of the children in school. They call me a weirdo.’

‘A weirdo?’ Frank cried. ‘Why?’

‘I don’t know… because of the shop and stuff. They say my gym things smell of incense. Mam says I should ignore them, but one or two are really mean.’ She sighed. ‘They’re the ones living in fantasyland. I’m sure they think we sit around all day staring into crystal balls and talking to pixies.’

Frank ripped off his sunglasses and hurled them onto the lawn. ‘WHAT?! You mean the little fella with the pointed ears and the wings at the breakfast table this morning wasn’t real?’

Ariel burst out laughing. ‘See, that’s why I like you, Frank! You’re a weirdo like me!’

Frank held up his palm and high-fived her. ‘Loneliness is just an illusion, kid. Don’t let anyone dim your light! It takes an awful lot more courage to stand out than it does to blend in. When you’re older, you’ll understand. Anyway, where’s the fun in being ordinary?’

He shifted his attention to a giddy chorus line of geraniums soaking up the sunlight in the border along the side wall. He’d put his sunglasses back on, but Ariel could tell he’d adopted that far-off look that grown-ups got whenever they were trying to solve a problem in their heads.

‘Hey,’ he said, turning back to face her, ‘are you excited you’re going to have a baby brother or sister?’

Ariel almost squealed. ‘I’m nearly eight and a quarter! I thought it was never going to happen. A real-life brother or sister is going to be the best early Christmas present ever!’

Frank gave her one of his megawatt smiles, then dropped his gaze to the grass between his feet. He was still ruminating over something, she could tell by the way he was chewing on the side of his lip. She had a pack of cards under her deckchair and was about to ask him if he’d like to play a game of rummy, when he said, ‘Is your mom in the store today?’

Ariel nodded.

‘I’m just going to go inside and ask her something, okay?’

Frank pushed himself up off the ground and walked back to the house, his chest thrown out like a soldier on parade, his shoulders kneading the air. The grass where he’d been sitting looked flat and lifeless, as though some spectral hand had slipped, unnoticed, over the garden wall and combed it flush against the earth.

Ariel groped for her pack of cards and placed them alongside her chair where she could see them. She laid her book face down on her lap, made two circles with her thumbs and forefingers and held them up like binoculars to her face. She swivelled left and right, scanning the periphery of the garden from her seat.

It was quiet and empty as a church.

The only movement came from the plants, metronoming in the breeze, and her heart, which began to sink, gradually by degrees, when she realised Frank wasn’t coming back outside.

She pulled her hat over her forehead and watched a ladybird zigzag its way across the shiny turquoise cover of her book.

At its edge it tumbled, spread its wings, and flew away into the hot, yellow air.

The train let out a low, mechanical rumble, quietened, rumbled again.

Ariel extended her foot under the table and patted the carriage floor, searching for her canvas bag with her toes. Henry’s slumbering body jerked and resettled, his eyes quivering beneath shuttered lids, his expression placid and immutable as stone.

Gently, she withdrew her foot. Across the aisle, Travis was scribbling something in the margin of his guidebook. He’d raised his feet and legs onto the empty seat opposite and looked so damn chilled; like he didn’t have a care in the world.

She tried to look away, but her eyes kept returning.

She wondered if he knew she was looking at him.

His head bobbed back and forth, as though a private soundtrack was playing inside his brain. God, she wanted to speak to him.

She decided to wait until he’d finished writing and then ask him where he’d been to, where he was headed. What it felt like to be free.

Travis flicked his eyes to the window. When he turned and glanced expectantly in her direction, Ariel opened her mouth to speak, but her words lost their foothold and slipped back inside her, free-falling, like coins into a dusky well.

‘Ariel!’ Frank came bursting back through the garden door. ‘Your mom’s agreed to bring you along to the show today, kiddo! I told her the fresh air’ll do her good, what with her expecting and all. We’ll be leaving here together at three.’

Ariel stared open-mouthed as Frank disappeared inside the house to get changed. ‘I’m going to a concert,’ she said slowly. ‘Mam’s agreed to take me. Frank didn’t let me down after all!’

They set off in a cloud of hairspray, chugging along in Estelle’s second-hand Fiesta up the hilly Newton Road. Ariel wrapped her fingers around the Olympus and cradled it next to a bottle of orange Fanta, already turning tepid in the heat.

‘Frank says we can stand right down the front, Mam, near the stage. He says we can have free Mr Whippys on the way in.’

She looked at Frank over her shoulder and grinned.

‘Hey, it’s the least we can do!’ He tapped Cynthia on the arm. ‘Right, Cyn? It’ll be nice to see a couple of familiar faces cheering us on.’

Cynthia smiled. ‘You bet, babe.’

Frank’s hair was shiny and sleek, the sequins on his jumpsuit shimmering in a wide belt of sunlight streaming in through the rear window. Cynthia looked stunning as ever in a fitted lace dress and towering heels. She was holding on to the back of Ariel’s seat, her body bent forwards at the waist so that her hair – backcombed into oblivion – wouldn’t chafe on the Fiesta’s roof.

‘It feels so good to be out,’ Estelle said into the rear-view mirror. ‘Such amazing weather! I bet there’ll be an enormous crowd.’

Ariel looked at her mother sitting serenely behind the wheel. She smelled of something darkly sweet – a heady mix of fresh mint, patchouli and honeydew melon. Ariel breathed it in and stared at Estelle’s blossoming silhouette. Her mother was swollen-bellied and glowing in a loose cotton top and harem pants. An orange tie-dyed headband held her shoulder-length hair from her face, and a golden amber pendant dangled like a rising sun at her throat. She wanted to reach out and touch it, to feel the silky warmth of the stone between her fingers, but she was afraid she’d distract her mother from the road.

‘What’s up, poppet?’ Estelle flicked her eyes to meet hers. ‘Do I look all right?’ She lifted a hand from the steering wheel and smoothed it over the sweet, round spill of her stomach. ‘I think they call this hippo chic.’

‘You don’t look like a hippo!’ Ariel protested. She leaned in and smiled. ‘You look like an undercover angel.’

The first half of the show went off like a dream. But then, as Frank neared the mid-point of his set, Ariel heard a series of wolf-whistles and garbled shouts directed at Cynthia, who was perched on a stool at the side of the stage.

‘Who is it, Mam? What are they saying? I can’t see.’

Estelle scanned her eyes over the back of the audience enclosure. ‘It’s nothing. Just some boys being stupid, that’s all. Ignore them, poppet. Keep your eyes on the stage.’

The pungent tang of hot dogs, seaweed, and suntan oil hung heavy in the air. Ariel felt a flare of heat from the press of families packed in behind her. There’ll be plenty of kids in the audience, Frank had told her. Vacationers – here for a good time. I thought it might be nice for you to hang out with some of them. And a day away from the store with your mom will be cool, no?

Frank was serenading a woman in a giant straw hat standing a few feet away. Cynthia was beating one hand against her side in time to the music. In the other, she held a glass of iced water which she sipped at intervals through a red and white striped straw. She looks incredible! Ariel thought. Untouchable…

‘Hey! I’ll give you something to suck on, darlin’!’

Furious, Ariel spun round. The shout, like the others that had preceded it, had come from somewhere in the back row.

‘Oi!’ a man’s voice bellowed. ‘Watch your language, will you? The place is full of kids, for fuck’s sake! Let’s just take it easy and enjoy the show!’

Ariel raised herself up onto her tiptoes, but she was too short to see over the tops of the adults’ heads. ‘Why can’t you be quiet?’ she muttered under her breath. ‘Whoever you are, please stop shouting or go away.’

As she turned back to face the stage, a plastic water bottle sailed over the barrier and hit Frank in the centre of his chest. He stared at it for a moment in confusion, then picked it up and tossed it to one side.

‘Why would anyone do that, Mam?’ she asked. ‘Frank hasn’t hurt anybody.’

Before Estelle could reply, the crowd surged and Ariel felt herself being shoved up against the metal barrier separating the audience and the front of the stage.

‘What the –?’ Estelle cried. She reached down and caught hold of Ariel’s hand. ‘Okay, that’s it. Time for us to go.’

Ariel dropped to her knees and fumbled on the ground for the Olympus. ‘I don’t want to go, Mam. We can’t leave. We need to stay and wait for Frank and Cynthia.’

She clambered back to her feet and managed to pull her hand free of Estelle’s grip, but her mother caught her by the arm and began to manoeuvre her towards the exit at the side of the stage.

By now a full-blown scuffle had broken out behind them, and the troublemakers – whose faces Ariel still couldn’t see – were starting to hurl other objects into the air. Empty food packaging. Leftover scraps of food. It was disgusting. She saw Cynthia hovering warily in the wings. Frank’s backing music was still playing, but Frank wasn’t singing; he was striding towards Cynthia, motioning to her to leave the stage.

‘Please let me go,’ Ariel shouted. ‘I want to go and help!’

Estelle pulled her closer. ‘Listen to me – Frank will be fine. The event security team will make sure nothing happens to him or Cynthia, but we need to go back to the car now. Do you hear me?’

Ariel’s eyes filled with tears. ‘You’re just jealous! You’re jealous because Frank’s my friend and he arranged this treat for me, but you don’t care! You don’t care about anyone except yourself!’

She twisted away and stared over her shoulder at the stage.

‘Ariel,’ Estelle cried, ‘that’s enough!’

And that’s when it happened. Ariel called Frank’s name at the exact same moment a glass bottle, its edges serrated where it had already been smashed in two, shot through the air like a rocket and caught him squarely on the crown of his head. She stood and watched in horror as it pierced Frank’s scalp before tumbling, shattering into a million glittering pieces at his feet. For one agonising second nothing happened, then a stream of the brightest red she’d ever seen began to pour down the surface of his jumpsuit.

On it ran, over his collar, between his shoulder blades, trickling to the ground along the curve of his back and legs.

‘I’m sorry, Frank,’ she said when he arrived home from the hospital, his face drained, a bloodstained towel draped around his neck. ‘It was all my fault. You wouldn’t have been hit if I hadn’t called out to you.’

Frank tossed a painkiller into his mouth and knocked it back dry. ‘Hey, kiddo, there’s only one person to blame for what happened, and that’s the birdbrain who threw the bottle. You have nothing to apologise for. You’re my wing girl, you know that, right?’

Ariel stared miserably at the conspicuous expanse of bandage running across the top of Frank’s skull. The backs of her eyes began to prickle.

Frank placed his hand on her shoulder, then pulled it away again when he saw it was still smudged with blood. ‘Listen, when you work in this business as long as I have, you see it all sooner or later. I’ve had people throwing themselves at me in adoration, and other times, I’ve been called everything under the sun. Those teenagers today were high. A couple of bad apples from out-of-town, the police said. Don’t you give it another thought, okay?’

Ariel nodded. SHE WOULD. NOT. CRY.

‘Thank you for arranging it so I could come and watch you sing,’ she said in a muffled voice. ‘I really loved it. Maybe one day you’ll come back and visit us again?’

Frank brushed his quiff – which was now hanging lank and lifeless over his forehead – out of his eyes. ‘Sure! Why not? Never say never, that’s what I always say.’

Ten days later, he and Cynthia were gone. Ariel stood on the pavement and took a photo of them waving goodbye. The taxi beeped its horn and sped off to join a hazy stream of traffic snaking its way along the Mumbles Road. She lowered her hand and felt something sharp in the pit of her stomach; something wild and mournful, like a howl.

The following weekend, a postcard arrived for her from Blackpool. On the front was a cartoon image of a grinning donkey trotting along the beach dressed in high-tops, top hat and tails.

Ariel smiled and flipped it over:

Hello Ariel!

The fella on the front has the right idea – life’s too short to blend in! Don’t be lonely. And BOO to anyone who calls you a weirdo!

Chin up, and show ’em some razzle-dazzle!

Love from your wing man,

Frank x (and Cyn too x)

Ariel nearly screamed with happiness. She placed the razzle-dazzle donkey next to the lamp on her bedside table.

‘See you in the future, Frank,’ she said.

Which surprised her, given that she couldn’t have imagined – even for a second – the where, when, or why.

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