Constance took a little sip of water from the glass on her bedside table. Those despised black shoes she saw were on the floor beside the bed, and it made her think of when she was young. As a girl, she’d sneak a look at dad’s feet in those sturdy polished black leather shoes of his sometimes. She’d wonder why it was his flat feet hadn’t saved him from having to serve that first time around. She’d never asked, and so she’d never known, but she knew instinctively raising the subject would be rocking the boat and she’d never been one for that. Well, leastways not until she grew older because Constance knew her advancing age had brought an uncaring nonchalance for what others thought when it came to most things.
It was during those latter war years that she’d come to understand why their father had chosen never to speak of what he went through on those muddy, blood-soaked fields far from home during the Great War. He wasn’t alone in this. She’d understood when the war that took Ted and so many others finally ended, why his lips had stayed sealed. Nobody wanted to speak of it not the soldiers, not the widows, not the mothers, no one. They were grateful for long-imagined peacetime and too frightened that talking about their experiences might somehow breathe life back into them once more. Awaken the nightmare once more.
Constance assumed it had been the same in 1918 when her father, Arthur Downer barely twenty-years-of-age had arrived home and got down on bended knee to ask his Eleanor to marry him. He’d decided to look to his future, not his past. It was the only way he could move forward and prove to himself that he had indeed lived through it. Those nightmares of his served to prove one could never outrun one’s history, however.
People were different back then, she mused. They were stoic and private and oh so very proud. The adage of the British keeping a stiff upper lip was indeed the case. These days everything was plastered all over the Internet and talked about until it had been dissected into microscopic pieces. Dignity was a dying word in her opinion. She blamed a large portion of it on television chat shows. It was compulsive viewing watching others air their dirty laundry publicly.
There’d come a time the same year the terrible news that Ted had died reached them when she too had tried to lock her experiences away. To pretend they’d never happened. But just like with her father they always crept back, beckoning to her in the darkness when her defenses were down. Her choices were taken away from her back then. She’d had no say in the way it all transpired. Things were different now, people’s sense of morality was different. Her life could have been so very different had the lyrics played a different tune in a different time.
The feelings that had consumed her sixteen-year-old self, however, were too powerful to contain, they refused to be boxed away and seemed to intensify daily. There was nothing for it and nowhere to vent, and so she set about her mundane routine at the factory hoping to still her mind. These confusing and frustrating new emotions consumed her the first time she laid eyes on Henry.
‘Henry,’ she whispered to the empty room where she still couldn’t quite believe she now lived. Her mouth forming the name she’d cherished so and her gaze settled on the framed certificate on the wall. It had been hung on the walls of the Downer family’s old haberdashery shop on the ground floor of Pier View House to state her father’s qualification as a tailor.
Pier View House had lived several lives since the days her parents had run A Stitch in Time in the ground floor space. These days it was a light and airy art gallery. Constance herself had converted it into an emporium of sorts a year or so after her parents passing. She had a talent; she’d discovered inadvertently one winter’s afternoon when having sourced an armful of comfrey from the side of a boggy riverbed. She happened across old Mrs Glyn, her headscarf knotted tightly under her chin to keep the biting wind off the Solent at bay.
Her varicose veins were playing merry hell with her she said after enquiring as to what Constance was up to with an armful of comfrey. ‘It’s no more than weed,’ she said, shaking her head with such vigour that the bread she’d just brought to make jam sandwiches for her and Mr Glyn’s supper threatened to slip from the bag. She readjusted it in her arms while waiting for Constance to explain herself giving her the once-over as she did so. What a woman pushing fifty was doing getting about in an ensemble so bright she could be stood on a rock at sea and used as a beacon for the passing ships was beyond her. She straightened her sedate tan coat. Mind, Connie Downer had always been a bit of an oddball.
‘I make a poultice with it to ease the ache in my knee, Mrs Glyn. This cold weather’s no good for it.’ Mrs Glyn might have
