The Girl from the Island. Lorna Cook
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followed her sister to the first floor. ‘How do you know where you’re going?’
Clara flicked the light switch at the top of the stairs and the first-floor corridor lit up in a yellow haze from an old-fashioned light bulb in a rather tatty shade. There were at least six doors, all closed, and Clara turned right and went to one of two rooms facing the front of the house and opened the door.
‘I popped in to fetch things for Dido when she went into hospital but it was a bit late for all that. She’d passed away by the time I made it there.’
Lucy stepped inside the dark room while Clara busied herself switching on a table lamp and starting to look through the large mahogany wardrobe for a suitable dress. Lucy opened the thick damask curtains by the window and let the evening sunshine stream into the room, sending dust motes flying and whirling around her. She looked down the front drive towards the broken gate and then out towards the winding lanes and small field that abutted Dido’s house. She could see the edge of a cottage hidden behind trees and its own track of driveway that she’d not seen from the road. She wondered who lived there, if they’d known Dido, or if it was just a little holiday cottage these days.
‘You don’t miss it at all, do you?’ Clara said, interrupting Lucy’s thoughts. It sounded kindly meant but the words had sharp edges. Like most things Clara said in Lucy’s direction, the sharp edges were meant to dig in deep, probe hard.
Lucy turned, smiled guiltily. ‘Guernsey? I’m not sure that I do. Not really. I don’t really think about it. Is that the wrong thing to say?’
‘Not if it’s the truth.’
Lucy wasn’t sure how to reply so simply chose not to.
It was met with silence in return from Clara. A quiet battle; both standing their ground by avoiding discussion entirely. It was so easy to avoid Clara when Lucy was back on the mainland. But here, not so much.
Lucy changed the subject. ‘So Dad gets this old place, given he was the nearest relation. Did she have any others?’
‘Any other what?’
‘Relations? She had no children, no siblings?’
‘Not sure,’ Clara said distractedly. ‘Not any that are living, I don’t think. There was mention of a sister, I vaguely remember, a while back.’
‘A sister?’ Lucy looked at the back of Clara’s head as she rifled in the wardrobe, pulling hangers noisily along the metal rail, and waited for more. ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘Mmm. She mentioned it when we were at someone’s funeral a few years back. She was surprised she’d been asked to attend. She said she’d thought everyone she’d ever known had already died.’
‘Macabre.’ Lucy shuddered as she sat on the bed, made up tidily with a rose bedspread. ‘Such a shame, being so alone.’
Lucy looked at Clara and felt grateful she had her, even if they had become more distant as the years rolled on. ‘What happened to the sister?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Was she older or younger?’ Lucy asked, glancing out towards the little cottage, watching the smoke plume from the chimney.
‘I don’t know,’ Clara said exasperatedly.
Lucy switched her attention from the cottage to the room and looked properly around. The only items in frames were floral watercolours. ‘Where are all the family photographs? Her parents, sister and the like?’
‘How should I know? Are you going to help?’ Clara snapped.
Lucy stared at her sister’s back and then walked over to the wardrobe. ‘Maybe they grew apart. It’s easy to drift apart when people lead such busy lives.’
‘You certainly do,’ Clara teased. ‘I see your social media feed. How many parties can one girl go to each week? I’m exhausted just looking at it.’
Lucy opened her eyes wide in surprise. Clara never clicked ‘like’ on any of Lucy’s posts. Not one. But she’d admitted she’d seen them. Lucy would work that one out later. ‘When you live alone you need to get out and about,’ Lucy justified. ‘Dinner with friends or a microwave meal for one … I know which I prefer.’
Clara looked at her as she moved away from the wardrobe, a navy two-piece suit in her hands in which to bury the elderly woman they’d not really known. ‘If you say so. How can you afford it?’ Clara probed.
‘I earn OK money and I’ve only got myself to worry about.’
‘You must be up to your eyes in student debt, though?’
Lucy sighed, pulled her brown hair up into a ponytail. They’d been over this before and she couldn’t do it again. ‘Righto, what else do we need to get? Do we need a pair of shoes for the … thing?’
‘The funeral director just said an outfit,’ Clara replied with a tinge of horror in her voice. ‘I hadn’t thought about shoes.’
Lucy opened the wardrobe doors and got on hands and knees to look at the assortment of different-coloured shoeboxes piled on top of each other. ‘Oh,’ she exclaimed as she began lifting the lids to peek inside.
‘What?’ Clara asked, the outfit folded in her arms.
‘These aren’t all shoeboxes, or rather, they are shoeboxes but they don’t all contain shoes. Some have got other things in them.’ Lucy lifted lids at random.
‘Such as?’ Clara asked with an uninterested tone.
‘Letters, newspaper clippings, photos.’ Lucy rifled. ‘I thought it was a bit odd there were no photos at all in the house. They’re all in here.’
‘Photos?’ Clara sounded interested now. ‘Why would they be hidden in a box?’
Lucy shrugged and held a little stash of photographs out for her sister who put the outfit down, dipped to her knees and sat beside her, flicking through the square, sepia images. They were mostly scenery from before the war, Lucy realised, the garden at Deux Tourelles in better days, the local beaches – the concrete fortifications yet to have been built when these were taken. She pulled out a sepia image of four young people laughing on a beach. Two teenage girls, wet hair falling about their shoulders and two young men, all of them in old-fashioned bathing suits and looking as if they were jostling each other good-naturedly for space in front of the lens. Lucy couldn’t help but smile back at them.
She turned the photograph over and read the caption on the back. ‘Persephone, Jack, Stefan and Dido. Summer 1930.’
‘Persephone? What a mouthful of a name,’ Clara said.
‘It’s Greek,’ Lucy replied, turning the photograph back over and looking at the foursome on the beach. ‘Persephone was queen of the underworld in ancient mythology.’
Clara looked at Lucy, amused. ‘How do you know that?’
‘Pub quiz. It came up once. I didn’t know the answer though. I’m mostly in charge of literature and celebrity gossip.’
Her sister laughed. It was a lovely sound, and Lucy knew right then that deep down she missed Clara. She would tell her. Later.
‘Now I think about it, Dido is from ancient mythology as well,’ Lucy said thoughtfully. She ran her finger over the faded ink on the back of the photo. History lessons at school in Guernsey had taught her that roughly a decade after this picture was taken the Germans invaded the Channel Islands and Hitler’s obsession with Guernsey and the surrounding archipelago, nestled in between England and France, had begun in earnest. But she knew, or rather she remembered, very little about the islands’ history before that time. She traced the name Persephone with her finger. ‘What a beautiful name. Do you think she’s the sister? She has to be the sister. Bit coincidental to have two girls with ancient Greek first names unless two sets of parents were being particularly pretentious,’ Lucy mused.