Briony drove down to Birchmere to see her father and stepmother the very next evening, taking all the letters with her and Paul’s final note sent via Harry and, after supper, spread them out on the floor of the living room. It took a long time to explain everything clearly. The faded pictures of the young Harry in Westbury, when placed beside the face of the men on the scrap of film on her laptop, were incontrovertible evidence. Briony’s brother Will did not look like Harry. It was, rather, the wary, dark young man who shared Will’s features and that man must have been Paul Hartmann.
‘Is it really possible,’ Martin Wood asked unhappily, ‘that Paul was, um, your mother’s father? I’m simply trying to think all round the question. The whole thing seems so . . . dramatic.’
‘Look.’ Briony opened the old family album and together they studied the photographs. The face of the man who called himself Harry Andrews was almost definitely Paul’s. ‘I’ve seen a photograph of Sarah’s sister Diane, too, and she does remind me of Granny.’ She pointed to a black and white photograph of Jean’s christening. There was her grandmother with an expression of joy, holding the bundle that had grown up to become Briony’s mother.
‘But your Granny’s name was Molly.’ Briony’s father was having difficulties coming to terms with this.
‘I don’t understand how someone official didn’t find out what they’d done.’ Lavender, who had said very little so far, spoke gently.
‘If there wasn’t a photograph on Harry’s identity card then it must have been easy,’ Briony told her. ‘Or perhaps Grandpa managed to change it. And there was general confusion at the time anyway. People must have had to ask for replacement cards for all sorts of reasons.’
‘Who is this?’ Briony’s father was looking at the christening photograph and pointed to a woman standing close behind Briony’s grandmother.
Briony screwed up her eyes. Lavender rose and opened a drawer in her writing desk in the corner and brought back a magnifying glass. ‘I use it to read small print. The leaflets that come with my medication are awful.’
Briony wondered what medication Lavender was referring to, but was too caught up with the matter in hand to ask. Under the magnifying glass the face became clearer. She was a middle-aged woman with a proud expression and the tightest of smiles as though she wasn’t used to smiling. A delicate hat crowned her coiffed greying hair. Only one side of her body was visible, but the glimpse of her elegant, corseted figure contrasted with Sarah’s soft curves. ‘Do you suppose,’ Briony said, ‘that this is Belinda, Sarah’s mother?’
‘They don’t look very alike,’ Lavender said. ‘Except maybe something about the eyes.’
If Belinda Bailey had been there at the christening, Sarah had obviously kept up the family ties. Though there was no sign of Diane anywhere. Was it loyalty to her new husband, Ivor, that had kept her away, or had the sisters fallen out? Belinda might have been married again by the time of Jean’s birth, but if so her husband hadn’t merited a place in the photograph, if indeed he’d been present. There were so many stories that had been lost and which Briony saw no way to recover. The type of stories that aren’t documented but passed from mouth to mouth as family myths and legends. Who snubbed whom, who was jealous, who fell out but were later reconciled.
‘So Will and you have a whole new family,’ Martin said, a little too brightly. Briony had described Greg and Tom to him.
‘I don’t think we’ll see much of them, though Will is welcome to if he wants.’
She’d promised to get back in touch with Tom, though. She supposed she wanted to reassure him that she wouldn’t allow his father’s name to be dragged through the mud. ‘Do you think I’m doing the right thing, Dad? By not ever writing about Ivor’s crime? My next book involves writing about Italy, but I’ve thought of a way of being general about it if needs be, presenting it as part of a number of incidents that showed British soldiers under terrible stress.’
‘In my work, too,’ Martin reminded her, ‘sometimes I had to make that sort of decision. I know you’re a person of integrity, love, but perhaps in this case you needn’t broadcast specifics like names.’
‘It’s not as though I’m deliberately hiding anything,’ she agreed. ‘I’ll keep all the letters and finish my transcript, and if a scholar wants to look at them, I expect I’ll let them.’ One day, after Tom and Robyn were dead, and perhaps with Greg’s agreement, she might do something more with her grandparents’ love story, a radio programme, for instance, though maybe not with Aruna, but for now, was it worth hurting people close to her by exposing the full tale?
Briony’s mind roamed to Italy, to Tuana, where a memorial plaque on the wall of the church symbolized the endurance of a past wrong still felt by the community. Perhaps she had some duty there and this made her uncertain again. There were people still alive who remembered young Antonio. Sometimes truth must be exposed even though it hurt, to allow reconciliation to take place.
She sighed as she closed the photograph album, still uncertain of what she should do.
When she looked up it was in time to see her father reach out and squeeze her stepmother’s hand. ‘Are you all right, love?’ he said and Lavender nodded and gave a watery smile.
‘Of course,’ she said, bravely.
‘What’s wrong?’ Briony asked, frowning, remembering the mention of medication. Lavender had never talked of needing any before.
Lavender sighed. ‘We weren’t going to say anything until we knew for definite. I have to have a little op, that’s all.’
‘Why?’ Briony felt a growing alarm. She remembered thinking that Lavender had been so tired recently.
‘They say it’s nothing to worry about. A little repair to one of the heart valves,’ her father murmured as though he were speaking about a car. But she could see the anxiety in his eyes.
‘Oh, Lavender,’ she whispered and went to put her arms around her stepmother. ‘You should have told me about it before.’
‘I didn’t like to,’ she whispered. ‘Your dad’s worried enough as it is. I didn’t want to make you and Will worried too.’
‘That’s nonsense, Lavender. We care about you too, you know! Don’t shut us out.’ She felt a rush of love for her stepmother that she’d never felt so intensely before. She remembered, too, how her mother had said little about her illness and how this had added to the shock of her death.
‘That’s lovely of you, Briony.’ And they hugged each other tightly again.
The following day Briony walked into Birchmere, noticing as ever how much had changed since her childhood. The big supermarket was new, the White Hart pub, scene of many a Saturday night gathering, was now called the Mulberry Tree, and there were three sets of traffic lights where previously there had been none. Still, there was enough to make her feel connected to the place; the classical portico of the bank, the clock tower looming above the main square, the bright canopies of market stalls and, where the shops petered out and the common began, the mere, fringed with birch trees and now securely fenced. Briony walked round it, smiling at a sturdy toddler with its father throwing bread to the ducks, before her memories beckoned her down a lane that led from the common into a grid of residential roads behind the high street. She hadn’t been this way for years and tried to remember the order of the roads, which were all named after trees, a connection maybe to the name of the town. Ash Grove, Hickory Avenue, Willow Way . . . then she came to Chestnut Close and her heart quickened. She turned down it.
It was a cul-de-sac and much shorter than she remembered it, though the detached family houses of a 1930s style were still impressive. Number 4 was half-hidden by a privet hedge, but when she stared up at the white-painted house she was reassured by its villa-style shutters and decorative balconies. It was where her grandparents had lived. Something was different, though. Some of the garden had been asphalted over to make room for cars, though there were none parked there today.
On impulse, she walked up the drive and rang the doorbell, listening to it resound through the house, but though she waited a couple of minutes there came no answer, so she turned away with a mixture of disappointment and relief. What she would have said to the current inhabitant she’d no idea.
As she left, she caught a glimpse of the back garden through the wrought-iron gate and couldn’t resist going to look through the bars. It was large, she’d forgotten that, and the beds were heaped with spring flowers and shrubs and she remembered how beautiful it had been, how often she’d visited to find Granny out there weeding the beds or in the greenhouse with her pots. There had been a plant she’d been particularly proud of which grew clusters of pink and white flowers, each one like a small trumpet. That’s what Briony had called it, she remembered, the fairy trumpet bush, but Granny had called it by another name, and now this came to her. It was a Hibiscus syriacus. Was it still there, she wondered, and had it anything to do with the cutting Granny had brought back from India? She felt suddenly heavy with sadness, burdened by confusion about her childhood past, now lost to her, and withdrew, suddenly glad to leave the house and its secrets.
She walked away, back to the busyness of the town and the present. It would be good, she thought, to spend the rest of the day with her father and stepmother, to whom she suddenly felt much closer. Lavender’s operation would be a fairly routine one, but it clearly worried her. Briony had learned something important. Any distance that had existed between her and Lavender had been closed over the last few months and she understood that she loved her stepmother more dearly than she would ever have believed. Lavender could never replace the memory of her mother in Briony’s heart, but then she had never tried to do that and never would. What she had done was to make them all a family again.