While Betty danced and kissed the night away, Elsie and William had lain in bed unable to sleep, each of them independently dreading the next day when they had planned to travel to Eastbourne and visit David’s mother. White-faced, anxious and sleep-deprived, they now sat together on the train in their smartest clothes, holding hands, fear of the unknown between them like a chasm.

‘So much land has been requisitioned for military use,’ Elsie said, gazing out of the window at the fields that were now under military control, ‘it’s a wonder the farmers are able to produce any food at all.’

‘Mmm,’ said William, not really listening. ‘Do you think it’s too much for me to just turn up at the door like this? Should I have written first?’

Elsie squeezed William’s hand reassuringly. In truth, she had no idea what to expect from David’s mother, who neither of them knew anything about. Elsie also had no idea whether, even if David’s mother was forgiving of William’s dilemma, it would ease his dreadful guilt. But it was worth a try. William needed to do it, to face his demons, and so she would stand by him.

‘I think it’s better you go and see her,’ Elsie said. ‘If she has questions, she can ask them, there and then. A letter can be misinterpreted or misunderstood. This is a brave thing to do, William. Very brave.’

She immediately regretted her words. Brave was the last thing he felt, she knew. He sighed and looked away from her, loosening his hand from her grip, and stared blankly out of the window. She had never meant to patronise him; tears rushed into her eyes and a painful lump in her throat made swallowing difficult. It felt impossible to get it right, but she must never give up. Blinking madly, she felt in her bag for the small tin of barley sugar that Audrey had given her.

‘Would you like one?’ she said, offering William the tin. ‘Audrey had two left over from Christmas. They’re still good, bit sticky maybe.’

‘I couldn’t eat a thing,’ he said curtly. For a moment she stared at the two sweets in the tin before putting the lid back on, pushing them into her bag, leaning her head against the seat and closing her eyes.

---

‘Do come in,’ said David’s mother, Alice Fielding, a tall, elegant woman dressed in mourning clothes. It was typical for widows to wear black for a year to eighteen months after the death of their husband, and for other close family to wear mourning dress for around six months. It had been over a year since David had been killed, but Elsie knew better than anyone that time wasn’t necessarily the best healer.

‘Thank you,’ said Elsie, briefly taking Alice’s cool fingers in hers as she and William entered the house. In the hallway, they stood for a moment, disorientated by the darkness. Many of the blinds in the house were drawn – a tradition usually followed for several days after a death to let neighbours know that a family were grieving – but these had obviously been closed for months and the house was dingy and airless. Alice gestured for Elsie and William to go on through to the small living room and sit on chairs that were set around an unlit fire, then quickly scooped up a handful of photographs from the rug on the floor and pushed them under a book.

‘Can I get you…?’ she said, her sentence trailing off to nothing.

‘No, not at all,’ said William hurriedly. ‘Thank you.’

Elsie scanned the living room. There was little in it: a walnut wood wireless with a little model of a boat resting on top of it, which looked like it may have been made by a child. In the corner stood an upright piano, covered with a dustsheet. On the mantelpiece were a clock and two vases displaying several peacock feathers. Above the fireplace, on the wall, was a photograph of a child who Elsie presumed was a young David. Pulling her eyes away from his joyful face, Elsie studied Alice, whose face was milky white and reminiscent of William’s pallor when he spent days on end in the bedroom, refusing to come out. Alice sat down with what seemed like tremendous effort, as if her skeleton ached.

‘So,’ she said, her face contorting as she tried to control her emotion, ‘you want to talk to me about my son.’

Feeling suddenly breathless and trapped by the sheer weight of grief in the room, Elsie longed to raise the blinds and throw open the windows; let sunlight flood the rooms, put on the wireless, fill the vases with daffodils and tulips – but of course she couldn’t. When William didn’t immediately answer and instead stared awkwardly at his hands as if they held the answer, Elsie spoke instead.

‘It’s good of you to see us,’ she said. ‘William has wanted to talk to you ever since he returned home.’

‘Returned home’ hung like a bad smell in the room and Alice sucked in her cheeks at the tactless words. William silenced Elsie with a glare and she stopped talking at once, giving Alice an apologetic shake of her head. Alice simply nodded slightly and turned to William.

‘As I mentioned on the doorstep, Mrs Fielding, I knew your son,’ said William. ‘We became good friends. He talked of you and of his home often. He said you were a great pianist. I’m desperately sorry for your loss. You must be… devastated.’

Alice remained perfectly still, her back as straight as a rod. She let out a short, exasperated sigh.

‘Do you know that when my husband was killed in the Great War, I was not allowed to attend his funeral?’ she said. ‘I was deemed too emotional by a doctor and was banned from going.’

She directed her words to William and Elsie, but her mind was focussed on a different scene – a moment in time burned onto her memory with a branding iron.

‘That’s simply dreadful,’ said William. ‘I’m so sorry to hear that.’

Though Elsie was desperate to make eye contact with William, each of them remained wholly focussed on Alice.

‘Just before he died I lost a baby,’ she continued. ‘So it was just David and me left here together. When the call-up papers came for David, I walked up to the bluebell woods about a mile away from here, out of his earshot, and I screamed. Do you know, there was another mother there from the town doing the exact same thing? We laughed together once we’d finished screaming. But I sensed it then, before he even left, that he would never return.’

William opened his mouth to speak, but Alice got up slowly from her seat and moved to a writing desk in the corner, where she opened a small drawer, reached inside and pulled out a letter. Returning to her chair, she unfolded the letter carefully and cleared her throat. Out of the corner of her eye, Elsie saw William grip the arms of his chair, his nails making indents in the velvet fabric. In the tense silence, Elsie hardly dared breathe.

‘Dear Mother,’ Alice read. ‘It’s not so bad here. I’m having an adventure of sorts and making new friends. One chap, William, from Bournemouth, is awfully good at the harmonica. His tunes help lift all our spirits. Don’t worry about me, Mother, I’ll be fine, I am fine. Love to you always. David.’

Without looking up, Alice placed the letter down on the table with shaking hands. Eventually she fixed William with her pale blue eyes and gave him the smallest smile.

‘Thank you, William,’ she said, her voice wavering. ‘For lifting my boy’s spirits.’

Visibly trembling, William rubbed his brow with the back of his hand. With sweat prickling her forehead and her heart hammering in her chest, Elsie didn’t know whether to stay quiet or interject. She desperately wanted for Alice to see and understand the real William, the man she’d fallen in love with, the man David had been friends with.

‘You’ve nothing to thank me for,’ he said, clasping his hands together and leaning forward in his chair. ‘Mrs Fielding, Alice, I need to explain to you what happened in France. Can you bear to hear it?’

Alice nodded once, lifting a white handkerchief to her mouth with a shaking hand. It was agonising to watch, and Elsie felt waves of nausea pass over her. How unimaginably unbearable it must be for a mother to lose her child.

‘We were on an exercise in a small forest, David and I,’ William started, every word clearly causing him pain. ‘We were making progress when suddenly I came across a young German soldier who was stranded in a hideout. He must have been no more than eighteen years old – he looked as if he could have been as young as fourteen. His skin was freckled, his hair flopped over his eyes. He looked like the kind of kid I was at school with. I lifted my gun to kill him, as we had been trained to do, but that day, I couldn’t shoot. It was his eyes. He seemed barely older than a child. I let him escape. David didn’t openly judge me, but I knew he thought I had been weak… but then, when I thought he was long gone, the German boy turned back.’

William exhaled and closed his eyes for a moment, as if gathering his strength.

‘The German boy turned back and he—’ William’s voice cracked as he tried to complete his story. ‘He shot David in the chest and stomach.’

Tears streamed down William’s face and off the end of his nose as he struggled to talk. He didn’t wipe them away.

‘David instantly collapsed next to me on the floor,’ he spluttered, breaking down into sobs. ‘I tried to stem his bleeding, but the blood was everywhere and the more I cried out for help, the more distant he seemed to become. In minutes he was dead. I have seen dozens of soldiers die, but when David died, it was as if a light went out. I carried his body as far as I could, but… it was no good, I was not strong enough.’

Alice was in floods of tears now, holding the handkerchief to her face.

‘I should have killed that soldier,’ William said, tears rushing from his eyes, his mouth contorted and the words coming out in between bursts of sobbing. Elsie glanced at her hands and realised she’d been squeezing her fists so tight she’d drawn blood in her palms.

‘If I had shot that soldier, your son David would be alive,’ he said to Alice, whose head was bent as she wept. Slipping from the edge of the chair onto his knees, in front of Alice’s chair, with his hand on his heart he cowered in front of her.

‘I killed him,’ he wept. ‘I’m so sorry. Your son was a brilliant young man and soldier. He was my friend. I killed him, I watched him die.’

Elsie screwed up her face. It was the most pathetic sight she had ever seen. Her heart felt utterly smashed and her head ached with pity for William and Alice – but she also burned with fury. William had not killed David and for him to say so was utter madness. Suddenly questioning the wisdom of this journey, she stood from her seat, wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands and moved to William to help him up from the floor.

‘I think,’ she said, to Alice, ‘I think we should leave.’

Alice suddenly stood up, knocking over the side table as she moved, and disappeared out of the room. A second later she came back, holding a shotgun.

‘Get out of my house,’ she said, pointing the gun at William. Elsie whimpered, but then gathered her wits. William continued to cry, his body limp.

‘Alice,’ she said steadily, ‘please, this won’t help. We will go. William wanted to tell you how your son died. He didn’t kill him. He’s suffering himself, he’s—’

Alice turned the shotgun to Elsie.

‘OUT!’ she roared at the top of her lungs, spittle flying from her lips. Elsie grabbed hold of William and more or less shoved him out of the room, into the dark hallway and towards the front door. Before leaving, she turned back to see Alice standing there with her shotgun, a woman wrecked by grief, a mother truly broken. Quickly, she closed the door behind them, grabbing William’s hand and pulling him onto the street.

After he’d staggered a few yards up the street on his crutches William pulled on her hand, gesturing that he needed to stop. Leaning his back up against a wall, he covered his face with his hand and slipped down to the pavement, where he sat in a wretched state, his shoulders heaving up and down as he wept. Kneeling by his side, Elsie prised his fingertips away from his face and lifted his chin to face her.

‘William,’ she said. ‘Stop now. You have to stop this now.’

‘I can’t,’ he said, his teeth chattering and his eyes staring into the far distance. ‘I can’t stop.’

Pure terror ripped through Elsie as she watched her once cheerful and handsome husband quiver and whimper in what she could only describe as hysteria.

‘She should have shot me,’ he said angrily, lifting his fingers and pushing them roughly against his temple, as if they were a gun. ‘If I had a gun, I’d do it myself.’

He almost spat his words at Elsie, pulling his lips over his teeth in a wild, furious state. Lifting his face up to hers, he shook his head before sobbing: ‘I’d rather be dead than live like this.’

Her actions were driven by pure instinct. She was usually the last person to resort to violence, but this wasn’t a rational decision. She lifted her right hand high in the air and brought it down swiftly across William’s cheek, slapping him round the face with some force.

‘Don’t ever say that again,’ she hissed. ‘Get up off the floor this minute and let’s go home.’

---

The train journey home was spent in exhausted silence. A group of drunken American GIs burst into their carriage at one point, but they must have read the atmosphere, because they left as quickly as they arrived. With her arms folded over her middle, Elsie gazed out of the window, allowing the rhythmic movement of the train to calm her fraught state. She thought of her father, Alberto, in the prisoner-of-war camp on the Isle of Man and the cheerful letters he sent home to her mother and the twins. She longed to speak to him and see him and talk to him about her life. A single tear escaped her eye and ran down her cheek. She didn’t – couldn’t – look at William, who she knew was either asleep or pretending to be asleep. She was too raw from everything that had happened to choose the right words.

Back at the bakery, without acknowledging her, William went to help John, while Elsie walked up the stairs to the kitchen with legs that were weighted with lead, gripping onto the bannister and pulling herself up. She could hear that Audrey was in the kitchen, pot-washing. Instructing herself not to put her worries on Audrey’s shoulders, she forced a smile onto her face as she entered the kitchen.

‘I’m just toasting a teacake,’ said Audrey. ‘Can I do you one? They’re still good. Then you can tell me all about it. And I’ll not have you spare me the details. I know that look. You’ve had a hell of a day, haven’t you?’

Elsie nodded, so grateful for the normality of Audrey and the warmth and rhythm of bakery life. With a deep sigh she allowed Audrey to coax the day’s horrible experience out of her and was relieved to reveal her deepest fears about William, though she knew it hurt Audrey terribly to hear of it.

‘Perhaps he needs proper medical treatment,’ said Elsie quietly. ‘Barbiturates, or the deep sleep treatment, something like that?’

Audrey sat back in her chair and massaged her bump, deep in thought.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t seem right for him.’

‘I think I should write to Mrs Fielding,’ said Elsie. ‘To explain.’

Audrey shook her head and smiled warmly at Elsie.

‘No, love,’ she said. ‘That poor lady can’t give you comfort, nor can you give her comfort. I would leave that wound alone now. Concentrate on helping to heal William.’

‘I thought I was,’ said Elsie, tears dripping down her face. Audrey grabbed her hand and squeezed it.

‘I know, love,’ she said, ‘and you have been helping him. Perhaps it’s just a matter of letting more time pass. We must be patient and gentle with him, not expect him to snap out of it.’

An image of herself slapping William round the face leapt into Elsie’s mind and she flushed with shame, rubbing her palm, which still stung a little from the slap. She should have been more patient and more understanding. But when the person you loved more than anyone else in the world could no longer see the point of living, when most folk were doing everything in their power to survive against the odds, it wasn’t always possible.