‘She clearly hated lessons, hated being stuck in the country. She longed for city life and excitement, to live in her father’s big white house in London and go to parties every night. There was an anxiety about her longing that was unsettling; it was as though whatever she was given she would always still want the moon. I think her father had done that to her, with his absences and the confusing way he’d treat her when he was there, flirting with her, but taking little notice of her as a person. Thoughts of London were all bound up with him and the glamorous life she thought she’d been excluded from by her parents’ rocky marriage.
‘Of course, none of this ended up quite as planned. Germany invaded Austria in March 1938, and there was much uncertainty about whether Angie should go to Paris at all. In the end she went, but when Hitler annexed the Sudetenland and Mr Chamberlain returned from Munich at the end of September brandishing a piece of paper that everyone knew was worth more than the promise written on it, her family rather wished she hadn’t.’
Beatrice was quiet for a moment and Lucy prompted, And you went to school.’
‘Not right away, no,’ Beatrice replied sadly. ‘But that was nothing to do with Hitler. During the summer holidays, I was volunteered by my mother to help with a children’s party at the tennis club. Several weeks later I woke with a fever and a terrible headache. By the end of the day I could hardly move, everything ached all over. The doctor was summoned and now it was my turn to be transferred to hospital. I’d caught polio, you see, from some child at the party.’
‘Polio? But that’s serious, isn’t it?’
‘Your generation doesn’t know about polio, thank God, the fear the word engendered.’
‘I know we’re immunized against it. The vaccine used to be given on sugar lumps.’
‘But not until after the war. Polio has been eradicated from large parts of the world now, but back then it was a terror.’
‘It’s a virus, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Along with diphtheria and TB and a host of other nasties, it was a potentially fatal illness. I remember my mother’s obsession with hygiene throughout my childhood. I wasn’t to drink from the same cup as other children, I must wash my hands before meals, I mustn’t take food that someone else had touched. Polio could be a devastating disease. If it got into the central nervous system it could paralyze or worse. I was lucky, since the version I got was relatively mild. But even after two weeks in hospital I was in bed for three months at home and very weak for some time after that.’
‘I suppose you were kept in isolation.’
‘That’s right. Rafe used to write me letters and send me little presents, but all the summer holidays he was forbidden from seeing me. When the worst was over, we’d have conversations, he standing in the front garden, me at my bedroom window, but even this tired me.’
‘So no school.’
‘Not until after Christmas. Instead I stayed in this house and frankly I was glad to. It was a long, slow recovery, but recover I did.’
Looking at Beatrice’s straight-backed figure, Lucy could well imagine that determination had been a major factor in that.
Beatrice picked up the battered photo album they’d been looking at earlier and turned the pages. When she got to the very last page she stared at it awhile, before passing the album to Lucy. The picture was of herself. She was posing with her back to the camera, looking over her shoulder, so one could see the trail of the long dress and the little gauze train.
‘You look really beautiful,’ Lucy breathed.
‘Don’t I?’ Beatrice said, with a touching trace of pride. ‘That was taken at Carlyon Manor at Christmas 1938. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow, but what was set in motion at that party proved far more devastating than any illness in my life.’
After leaving The Rowans, Lucy walked up the cliff path and took the turning for the beach. Twice a day, she thought, the tide washed everything away as though it had never been, but it was still easy, standing in the dunes, to imagine all the events that Beatrice had described. How the sea, today tranquil, could turn to fury in a moment, and take a cruel revenge on two unwary boys presuming to ride it in a fragile craft.
The tide was rising now, so she could not pass to the other cove and look for the secret steps. Instead she chose to cross the other headland, as Beatrice had often done, in the direction of the town. She paused at the highest point to see St Florian laid out before her, its buildings a colony of limpets clinging to the hillside. Down in the harbour the tide was rousing the boats from their sleep in the sand.