He waited.
‘Have you seen Beth?’ asked Edie.
‘I have. I had to — it was the right thing to do.’
‘Oh,’ said Edie, and everything inside her began swirling.
‘I wouldn’t have come if we couldn’t be completely free,’ he said. ‘Beth has her own life and it doesn’t include me. We’re having the marriage annulled. We never consummated it after the ceremony.’
‘Oh,’ said Edie.
‘Beth wanted a divorce — she thought it sounded more exotic.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Edie, ‘she wants to be a divorcee.’
‘But it turns out an annulment is quicker and easier with the judge. The hardest part was proving I’m still alive.’
‘Couldn’t you just walk in there and show them?’
‘I had to get the army to write that they had made a mistake and to list me as not dead and the army doesn’t like to admit to mistakes.’
‘Would we be … companions?’ Edie asked, looking down at her feet.
‘Good heavens no,’ he laughed. He took her face in his hands. ‘Edie, I want you good and proper as my good and proper wife and no other way.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Edie, her mind cluttered with images of Virgil.
‘I’ll wait,’ said Theo. ‘You know I can do that. You know I will wait for you forever, Edie.’
Everything she had felt for him as a young woman came pouring back into her soul. But she didn’t know if it was real or a memory.
Forty-Six
The Room
Wednesday, 27 August 1924, when ghosts are faced.
When John Appleby Junior appeared for his morning visit he found Lilly sitting up on the bed dressed in a sunflower dress that looked like spring, a straw hat on her head with a ribbon and that old Mister Cottingham sitting on the chair beside her.
‘You can discharge me now, young man. There is nothing wrong with my heart,’ she announced.
‘Maybe not, but you’ll catch your death if you go out in that thin dress,’ he said. Blast these old patients of his father’s who never treated him like a full-grown man and a doctor in his own right. ‘I’m the doctor,’ he said. ‘I’ll decide if you go home or not.’
The old woman smiled at the old man as though they would humour him if he insisted on it. He pulled out his stethoscope and listened to her heart over and over, from the back and from the front to make sure.
Finally he said, ‘Well, it’s a miracle beyond my understanding. You can go home if you can find something warmer to wear.’ She started to get up from the bed and he said, ‘And provided you have someone to look after you every hour of the day.’
‘Where is Theo?’ Old Cottingham asked her.
‘He’s coming and going, he says he has things to arrange and that he doesn’t know when he will be here or there,’ said Lilly.
‘Well,’ said Paul, ‘the doctor’s right.’
‘Thank you at last,’ said John but they merely looked at him as if he had rudely interrupted an important matter and continued without him.
‘You can’t go to your own home where you’ll be alone. You can have Lucy’s room and I won’t hear a word about it.’
John thought the old man must have been a formidable force when he was younger. The old lady submitted immediately to his decision and John would have too had it been required.
Paul wondered if he had just made a mistake. He had removed the boards from the window and doors many years ago but still none of them ever went into Lucy’s room.
When Paul arrived home with Lilly, Edie and Gracie had a day bed ready for her in the sitting room beside the fire.
‘She has to have plenty of rest,’ Paul said and he looked sternly at Lilly and said, ‘Doctor’s orders.’
Then he took Edie and Gracie into the hallway and Edie wondered what he needed to say that couldn’t be said in front of Lilly.
‘Now I need you girls to clean out your mother’s room for Lilly to stay in.’
Edie didn’t think she’d heard properly.
‘Edie, I need you to get your mother’s room ready for Lilly.’
Edie could feel herself staring at him like an idiot, as though she didn’t understand the question.
‘Sure,’ said Gracie and she pulled Edie down the hallway to the room that was never opened. Gracie had grown up with that room boarded up and had just accepted it. When she had asked about the room she had seen Paul’s and Edie’s faces stricken with pain and she soon realised it was better not to ask and just let it be. If she asked Beth about the room Beth would also become quiet and tell her that it was not her place to tell her. Her father had taken down the boards on peace day but still no one went inside.
Edie stood at the door of the room as if afraid to go in.
‘Are you okay?’ Gracie asked her.
‘I haven’t been in here for nearly nineteen years,’ said Edie. ‘It was our mother’s room and I think Papa was just so broken and sad at losing her that he couldn’t cope with the thought of anyone coming in here till now. I feel that when I walk in there I will find all the ghosts I don’t want to see.’
‘Well,’ said Gracie, ‘maybe you will find ghosts you do want to see, ghosts that will bring you comfort. But I will go first and scare all those horrid ghosts away so only the benevolent ones are left.’
Gracie walked in and pulled back the curtains and sunlight filled the room. It shone on the perfume bottle on the dressing table and on the gold thread in the bed cover and Gracie was overcome by the thought that here were all the things that had belonged to the
