Chapter Twenty-Two

I didn’t sleep.

When I got home the Browns had long since gone to bed. Walking into the kitchen I tripped over sacks of potatoes, tins of paint, a clothes horse, an old wash boiler – all things that had presumably been rescued from the cellar when the flood waters had soaked in. They brought the smell of mud and damp into the normally cosy kitchen and reminded me of Billy and Carol’s house.

There was a pan of warm milk sitting on the side of the stove waiting for me. I heated it up, made some cocoa and crept into the sitting room to the cupboard where the Browns kept a bottle of sweet sherry and another of brandy, for medicinal purposes. Sambo followed me, wrapped himself around my legs, unsettled by all the upset. I definitely needed medicine. It would be months before they got the bottle out. They wouldn’t notice. But it didn’t calm me.

I paced back and forth in the kitchen wondering what on earth I was to do next. Wondering why I was here. I was as confused – more confused even – than when I had first arrived. There was no future here for me and Billy.

OK, maybe I could have tempted him further, persuaded him into an affair, maybe even to leave Carol.

But it wouldn’t have worked. He was good and loyal. And – oh bitter bitter irony – that made me love him even more. He had made promises that he would keep even if his heart wanted to be elsewhere. Even if it left me in despair, you had to admire a man like that, you had to respect him. And his, well, decency I suppose. Now there’s an old-fashioned word.

But Billy was just Will in another age, other circumstances. And, I realised, quite suddenly, that I could trust Will too. In every way, with my life, my future. Why couldn’t I have seen that before? I had built up spiky little barriers all around me, afraid of letting him in, in case he let me down. But there was no need. He wouldn’t. I knew that now. Once Will committed himself to me, it would be for life. No question. As I would to him. If only I could get back to him to tell him so …

I finally went up to bed as dawn was breaking, but I still couldn’t sleep. When my alarm went off I dragged myself downstairs to get a cup of tea. But even wrapped in my huge blanket of a dressing gown, I was still shivering.

Mr Brown was out looking at the garden. It was a chaos of mud and branches where the river had flooded. Already the water level had dropped right down, but the devastation was clear.

‘I’ll never get that garden back the way it was now,’ said Mr Brown. ‘The bulldozers will be through here soon enough. Still, I might rescue a few of the early spuds.’ He went optimistically down the path to investigate.

I leant over the range, trying to get some warmth into my bones. And you’re not going anywhere today, young lady,’ said Mrs Brown. ‘You’re not well. You got yourself chilled with all that trailing about in flood water. Get yourself back up those stairs into bed and I’ll bring you up a hot-water bottle.’

She did too. And some more tea. And some toast cut into soldiers, which I couldn’t really face, but which was a nice thought. I heard the front door slam a little while later when she went out to work. Then I slithered gently down the pillows and gave up.

I thought about Billy, remembered the way we just fitted together as though we were meant for each other. I thought about Carol and the dark little house and what it must be like now after the river had raged through it. I thought of his kids, especially Peter, so like him, and little Libby. I couldn’t make sense of anything. Where did I go from here?

I tossed and turned, half slept, half woke, dreamt weird dreams, imagined worse. And sometimes when I closed my eyes I could hear Billy’s voice, calling to me from far away.

‘Rosie! Rosie! Are you there? Can you hear me?’

Eventually I got up, re-made my bed and went and had a bath, which warmed me a little. I had got dressed because I couldn’t stand getting back into my night clothes, when I heard a ‘Yoohoo!’ from downstairs. Nothing ghostly about this call.

Peggy had arrived.

‘I saw Mum and she said you weren’t well so I came around to see you. Did you write all the flood stuff?’

She was looking at The News. There was our story all across the front page, with George’s pictures. ‘By our News Staff, it said. I glanced at it. They seemed to have used plenty of it, but it hurt my eyes to read it.

‘I think George took most of those pictures,’ she said proudly. Then she looked up at me. ‘You look awful.’

‘Married life suits you then,’ I said, with only a little bit of cynicism.

‘Yes,’ she said matter-of-factly ‘It does.’

She poured me some tea and cut a slice of the cake her mum had baked for her homecoming. I couldn’t face it and let it sit untouched on the plate, though I managed some of the tea.

Already Peggy looked different. Partly it was because she was so obviously pregnant now and no longer trying to hide it. She’d gone past the early morning sickness stage and had that glow of pregnancy that seemed to light up the kitchen.

But more than that, she had the confidence of a married woman. As she fussed with the teapot and pushed the cake bossily towards me, there was an air about her … She knew she had a place in society, a standing. However it had been done, she had been chosen and someone had made a commitment to her. She was a respectable married woman, and I knew that even though I knew what I knew, she still somehow felt one better than me.

I couldn’t hack it.

But she was looking concerned.

‘Is it just the chill that’s making you feel bad?’

‘I don’t know.’ I was damned if I was going to tell her about Billy. She might have had a long affair with Richard Henfield but right now she was a paid-up member of the married women’s club, and I knew her loyalties had swapped right over without so much as a blush or a backward glance, so I didn’t even go there.

‘I suppose I’m wondering why I’m here really. What’s been the point of it.’

And that’s when I realised I’d got Peggy wrong, because she put down the teapot and gazed at me earnestly.

‘I don’t know where I would have been without you,’ she said. ‘Me and my baby and George, we’re a family now. And that’s thanks to you. If you hadn’t turned up … if you hadn’t got George to come looking for me … I don’t know what would have happened. We’re all here for a reason, Rosie, and I think that was your reason. You saved me and my baby.’

Was that the reason? Could that really be why I was there?

When Lucy went through the wardrobe to Narnia, she and her brothers and sister had a mission to save Narnia, the whole world, not just one person. Everyone who ever travelled in time had some great and noble mission. I didn’t know why I was there, but I knew all that it had really achieved was to make me realise how much I loved Will. And, too, what he was really like if he had the chance to show it.

If I ever got the chance to tell him, I would never let him go again.

I was still wondering how to reply to Peggy when we both heard a strange noise out in the street. We looked up, looked at each other, tried to work out what it was, when we heard it again.

‘It’s a car horn,’ said Peggy, and then, with a squeal of excited realisation, ‘Dad’s got the car!’

She rushed to the front door. Mr Brown was sitting at the wheel of a little black Morris Minor. ‘What do you think?’ he asked. ‘Isn’t it grand?’

Peggy had rushed out to look at it. I had sunk onto the wooden bench of the hallstand, my legs seemingly made of cotton wool.

‘Oh there’s Mum! Cooeee! Mum!’ yelled Peggy down the street. Soon Mrs Brown arrived home from work with a bulging basket.

‘Well, will you look at that!’ Mrs Brown walked all around the car. Mr Brown showed her the boot, the little finger-shaped indicators. He switched the lights on and off.

‘Can we go for a ride, Dad, please?’ asked Peggy, as excited as a two-year-old.

‘Ooh wait, let me get ready!’ said Mrs Brown. She ran into the house, dumped the shopping on the kitchen table and then started brushing her hair. Back in the hall, she took off her everyday beret that she wore to work and instead put on a slightly posher felt hat.

‘You don’t need a hat to go in the car!’ said Peggy.

‘It’s my first outing in our car. I have to look my best,’ replied Mrs Brown firmly.

‘Come on, Rosie,’ urged Peggy as she climbed into the car, ‘you’ve got to come too!’

I really didn’t feel like it. I wanted to crawl back to bed, but they were so excited that it seemed churlish to refuse. Mrs Brown had to get out again, to push the front seat forward for me to get into the back.

‘Right, where shall we go?’ asked Mr Brown. ‘We can’t go down near the quayside because there’s still a lot of water around.’

‘I know, Dad! Let’s go up to The Meadows and see where we’re going to live.’

‘Right you are then.’

Mr Brown turned the engine on. ‘Self starter motor,’ he said proudly. The car hiccuped a bit before we chugged off down the road.

In the weeks I’d been working on The News I had never yet been up to The Meadows. The estate was slightly above the town, the new road curving around from the end of the old High Street. Squashed in the back of the car next to Peggy, I couldn’t see much out of the small windows, though I could feel the car struggling up the hill with the four of us inside it. Ahead of us I could just make out a higher bit of hill full of lorries and cement mixers, but Mr Brown turned off onto the bottom road, the first of the new estate. There were just a couple of vans parked there as workmen were doing the last of the decorating or tidying up.

Peggy and I scrabbled out of the back of the car and I had a shock.

The view from The Meadows was tremendous. You could see down over the town, and the fine old parish church. Although the flood level had dropped you could see the river still overflowed its banks. The bottom half of the Market Place was a small lake, and there were fire engines down by Watergate. ‘Still pumping out the flood water,’ said Mr Brown.

The road we were standing in was like a scar on the hillside. The gardens were churned-up mud, but workmen were fitting in fences and the houses looked fresh and new. They hadn’t yet acquired that bleakness so typical of The Meadows as I knew it. ‘Isn’t this grand?’ said Mrs Brown, walking along. ‘They’re lovely houses, so new and clean. And look at the size of those windows! They’ll be lovely and light. No mouldy old cellars here.

‘Proper front gardens, and look, the gardens at the back are a tidy size. Plenty of room for your vegetables there, Frank. And not far to walk into town, Peg. Be a nice walk out when you’re pushing the pram! Oh and look, we’re almost in the countryside.’

True, at the end of the road was a field with horses, and beyond that some woods. ‘What a grand place to grow up. Oh it will be lovely for the baby here. And the air’s so clean. No smuts on your washing up here, Peg!

‘I just hope we get some good neighbours. These houses will be wasted on some of those people from Watergate. Bathroom! They wouldn’t know what to do with one. Keep pigeons in it I expect.’

Peggy laughed, ‘Well there’s you and my dad. Then there’ll be me and George and his mum. And Billy West and Carol and their three kiddies will be moving up here. So that’s a good start.’

I thought of Billy living up here with his family, making a new garden, playing football with his boys, riding his bike down the hill to work, his coat flapping behind him … The thought hurt so much, I bent double.

Peggy and her mum walked up the path of one of the houses and peered in through the windows. They enthused over the size of the kitchen, tiles around the fireplace, the boiler, the concrete shed by the back door. Everything met with their approval and delight.

Mr Brown was poking his toe into the soil in the garden. ‘I’ll get some potatoes in, get that clear, then I think it will do very nicely,’ he said. ‘We could have a bench out here, sit here of an evening and look out over the town.’

‘Come and look, Rosie!’ yelled Peggy. ‘If you look in through this window, you can see into the kitchen and through into the front room!’

Anxious to please and not wanting to dampen their enthusiasm, I started to walk up the path, but my head was hurting and my legs were like lead. Everything was out of focus. I was ill, I realised, really ill.

‘Can we go home please?’ I said quickly in as strong a voice as I could muster, though I knew it came out as a squeak. ‘Can we go home please? I don’t feel very well.’ Somehow I knew I was going to be ill, and I didn’t want it to be here. I didn’t want to spoil their delight and excitement in their new home.

Suddenly they were all fussing around me, squashing me back into the car. Peggy was holding my hand, rubbing it to get warm. I knew I was icy cold. I couldn’t stop shivering and I couldn’t keep my head up. It felt so heavy. As we bumped along in the car, I felt so sick, I didn’t know where to put myself to get comfortable, but I couldn’t move.

The car had stopped, I think. Hands were pulling me, helping me, trying to support me. Voices swirled above my head. They were telling me I’d be all right soon. That I could lie down. Get to bed. Get warm. Sleep. Suddenly I seemed to fall through all those helping hands. Everything was dark, and I was falling, falling, falling … and somewhere in the darkness, Billy was calling to me.