Briony was late into college on Monday morning after a breakfast meeting with her publisher, and two young female students with rucksacks on their backs were sitting on the bench outside her office like patient snails, bleary-eyed from the long term.
Inside, she sifted quickly through the post she’d snatched from her pigeonhole, noting a cheap white envelope addressed in a familiar round hand, before dumping it all on her desk as the first of the students entered. She sat down tentatively on the sofa, laying her essay on the coffee table. Briony joined her with an inward sigh, picked up the pages and began to read.
Although the girl’s written work was always excellent, with her pale mask of make-up and voice too tiny to hear well, the advice she most needed was to have faith in herself. It might have been her own younger self sitting there, Briony mused, and resolved to give this girl the support that a lecturer had once given her. ‘Trust yourself,’ the woman had urged her. ‘You have grown strong wings, now fly.’ It wasn’t so much the words themselves as the sense that the woman was there encouraging her, believing in her. This was the legacy she could pass on to her own students. She smiled at the girl and congratulated her on her work, and for a moment the young woman’s nervous expression was transformed by a smile.
At lunch break – a sandwich at her desk – Briony closed the door against visitors and finally, fingers trembling a little, slit the flimsy envelope and pinched open the single slip of paper inside. The message was short, but it was enough. There was a telephone number given. For a moment her hand hovered over the handset on her desk, then she snatched up the receiver and pressed the buttons. When the call was answered, there was some scuffling at the other end before a quavery old man’s voice spoke. A voice she knew from the tapes in the Norfolk Record Office.
Derek Jenkins lived on the third floor of a small block of flats on a modern estate Briony reached by the Central line going east towards Essex.
‘Hold on, I’m coming.’ A muffled voice, then a frail man in his eighties with shaking hands admitted her to the stuffy cheerfulness of his living room.
‘Nice to see children having fun,’ she said. A picture window looked out on a green where toddlers played on a blue-and-red climbing frame while mums laughed and chatted close by.
‘It’s as good as the telly, isn’t it? Even me grandsons are grown up now and I miss having kids around. Me and the wife, we wanted lots of them, but in the end only our Lindsay came along.’
‘How many grandsons do you have?’
‘Just the two, Euan and Ashley. That’s them.’ Derek nodded at some framed photographs on a narrow mantelshelf above an electric coal-effect fire that whirred away quietly. One of the young men wore a mortar board and black gown, the other, a real rogue, grinned from his seat astride a huge motorbike, the helmet under his arm.
‘You must be proud of them,’ she said.
‘I am. If only Pat was still around to see ’em. Ten years she’s been dead and I miss her every day.’ He hobbled over to the huge television, which dominated a corner of the room, and indicated another photograph hanging on the wall nearby. ‘Can you lift it down?’ he asked, ‘I’ll only drop it.’
She obliged and together they examined the colour print of a friendly-looking woman, somewhat stout, sitting behind a garden table spread with sandwiches and an elaborately decorated birthday cake. ‘That was her seventieth,’ Derek sighed. ‘And the next year she was gone.’
Briony murmured how sad this was and obediently returned the photograph to its hook. Leaning attentively in the easy chair where he bade her sit, she learned through gentle questioning about Derek’s life, his mother’s death in a bombing raid, his eventual return to London to live with his father, how he gave up school at sixteen for a series of jobs he hated, the short, failed marriage before he met Pat, then forty years as a telephone engineer. ‘I can’t say I liked every moment of it. I stuck with it for Pat and Lindsay’s sake. But you haven’t come because of any of that. You want to know how I got the letters.’ He fixed her with his bright-eyed gaze.
Briony nodded and he settled back in his chair and closed his eyes. For a moment Briony was worried that she’d tired him, but then he opened them, glanced at the portrait of his wife Pat as though to seek her reassurance and began to speak.
‘I liked Miss Sarah the best of them, apart from Mrs Allman the cook, she was very motherly. Mr Allman had died in the Great War and they’d never had any kids theirselves. She used to say it was like having her own boy, looking after me. As for Mrs Bailey, she did her best, that’s all I can say. She was good to me in her own way, but she didn’t like it if I cried and she had quite a tongue in her head. She wasn’t used to boys who walked mud into the house and were hungry all the time. Miss Diane was dainty and pretty in the way of one of them china dolls she kept in her bedroom. But my mate Alf’s ma said Miss Diane wasn’t right in the head, so I stayed out of her way.’