The Mistletoe Bride(56)

Finally, I found what I was looking for. Three headstones in a row, close to the back wall of the churchyard. The first commemorated Isobel Livett and her daughters Nancy, Hilda and Florence, who had died in the wreck of the Princess Alice on 3rd September 1878; the second was for Robert Livett and his second wife, Mary, who had died a year before him in 1925. And the third . . .

Tears pricked my eyes.

The inscription on the stone explained why the journal had suddenly stopped. The third grave remembered Alice Livett and her half-sister Grace, both of whom had lost their lives in the V2 bombing of the Woolworth’s Department Store on New Cross Road on 25th November 1944.

Tragedy had struck this one family twice. Alice, her mother, and all four of her sisters had been killed. No wonder Glaisher Street held the imprint of such sorrow.

I took a pencil from my pocket and added the dates of the day Alice and Grace had died to the front of the journal. It made no difference to the ending, of course, but it finished the story. Their deaths recorded properly, as they should be.

I closed the pages and looked around at the peaceful church, caught between the hum of traffic on Creek Road and the Broadway. I thought of all the lives lived in the tiny streets which lay beneath the modern roads. I thought I might donate the journal to a local history association who’d be glad to have it. And how the everyday lives of women and men mattered every bit as much as those of kings and queens and politicians. Should not be overlooked.

I was now certain that Alice’s house once stood where I had now made my home. That it was her I heard crying at night. How she wanted not to be forgotten.

And as I walked slowly home, I cast my eyes around, hoping again to see a glimpse of the thin, pale girl who had been at the market, perhaps who had even put her diary into my bag. Who had watched me in the café, seen me open the journal.

She wasn’t there.

Later, Rob and I found a restaurant on the water and watched the sun go down. He talked about his day and asked if I’d heard from the university. We shared a bottle of white wine.

At ten o’clock, we settled the bill and walked down Glaisher Street towards home.

‘If it’s really bothering you,’ he said a little awkwardly, ‘you know, the noise, I’ll speak to the caretaker. I’m sure there’s something he can do. No sense having sleepless nights.’

I threaded my arm through his and squeezed. ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I have a feeling it won’t be a problem any more.’

I didn’t think she would come again. Now I knew who she was and why she was stricken with such grief, she had no need.

‘You’ve found out where the sound’s coming from?’

‘Not exactly.’

Rob frowned. ‘But you know who she is?’

‘Yes,’ I smiled. ‘A girl who needs to be remembered, just like all of us. A girl called Alice.’



Author’s Note



Although this is a new story, it’s based on notes I made back in 1998. At that stage, I’d published two non-fiction books and two novels, both of them well enough received, but I hadn’t yet found my voice as a writer of fiction. Coming upon these scribbled notes fifteen years later, it’s interesting to see how I was starting to experiment with a style of writing that I was to develop in my Languedoc Trilogy and The Winter Ghosts: namely, the use of real history to inspire an imaginary story, the device of a timeslip – characters separated by more than a hundred years, but connected through living in the same place; the notion that stories come out of landscape (or, in this case, the cityscape); the hope that emotion will speak across boundaries of time and context, one generation to the next, the sense that the human heart does not change so very much.

Behind the notes was a conviction that history should be the story of us all, not simply a recitation of kings and queens and generals. Even the most significant events will, if not written down, fade from common memory. We were living in Deptford, in the south-east of London, when I came across the real history of the wreck of the pleasure steamer the Princess Alice. A huge catastrophe in 1878, and much covered by the contemporary newspapers, it is one of those pieces of local history that has since faded from public knowledge.



IN THE THEATRE AT NIGHT



Shaftesbury Avenue, London

November 1930





In the Theatre at Night





Things have their own lives here.





from ‘Dispossessions’

JANE COOPER

Soft the night and the watchman carries his lamp through the sleeping theatre.

The audience has gone home, in stoles and dress coats and gloves. Carriages and footfall along the Strand and Shaftesbury Avenue, heading to Hyde Park and Soho and Kensington. The velvet red is returned to its pristine condition in the stalls and the dress circle and the benches up in the gods. The footlights are dark, no flare of sulphur or blue spurts of gas. Glass and gilt, cerulean blues and peacock purples, the painted landscape of the safety curtain, all dull and flat without the lights to bring their colours to life.