‘There’s enough here for a very large army,’ commented Annelise.
Stanley laughed. ‘I can assure you we didn’t have anything like this when I was in the army doing my National Service.’
She laughed too. ‘I remember how handsome you looked in your uniform when you came home on leave.’
‘And I remember you running out to meet me in the garden one day. You’d been helping Romily to pick raspberries and your mouth and fingers were ruby-pink with all the fruit you’d eaten.’
He remembered too how he’d swaggered along with his kit bag thrown over his shoulder wanting to impress her. He’d felt so grown up at the time, but looking back on it, he’d been nothing but a naïve child pretending to be an adult.
In a way he still felt much the same: pretending to be something he wasn’t. Perhaps being here in the village where so many people knew him was a mistake. Would he be better off moving away to reinvent himself, somewhere completely new? But would he feel even more of an outsider somewhere new and strange? Was that what he was destined always to be, an outsider?
‘You suddenly look very serious,’ Annelise said. ‘What are you thinking?’
He frowned. ‘About identity.’
‘Ah, that old chestnut.’
She gave the words an airy tone which he knew she did not feel when it came to discussing ‘this old chestnut’. It was something they had in common, this longing to fill in the blanks. Not that Stanley wanted to rekindle any sort of relationship with his mother.
‘Do you think we’ll go through the whole of our lives with a question mark hanging over us?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know if I’m honest,’ she said. ‘I want to believe I can accept what I do know as being enough and not worry about what I don’t know. I doubt it can ever be as easy as that. But at least you do know where you’re from, Stanley.
‘I do, and I don’t,’ he replied. ‘I know I’m from the East End of London and lived in a terraced house in Halifax Road, but that’s just bricks and mortar. What does that tell me about my place in life?’
She regarded him sceptically. ‘Perhaps you should look at it differently. What does that house really have to do with the person you’ve become and what you’ve achieved for yourself?’
The advice was much the same as Romily had once given him and which he’d tried, but failed to heed.
Not a soul had he told that whenever he was in London he would go to Halifax Road and take in where No.5 had once stood, before it was bombed to a pile of rubble. Sometimes he thought that if the Germans hadn’t bombed the house, he would have done so himself. Eventually the houses that remained were torn down and a die-cast works was built in their place.
Time and time again he would stare at the spot where he was convinced No.5 had been, trying to summon up just one memory that didn’t make him quake inside. The stupid thing was he didn’t know why he did it, why he should want to cling on to the hope that it hadn’t all been a miserable existence before he’d been put on a train for Suffolk as a nine-year-old boy. Sometimes he thought he was trying to punish himself by reliving those days of terror inflicted on him by a vicious and sadistic woman. It was as if he still wanted her to torture him.
If he closed his eyes he could hear the hatred in her voice as she screamed at him. He could also feel the pain of her stubbing out her cigarette on his skin and telling him it was what he deserved for being such a wicked son.
What had terrified him initially, being locked in the cellar while she spent the weekend with her latest boyfriend, soon became a respite from the worst of his mother’s violent mood swings. With only a candle for light, he would have to fend off the mice that tried to eat what little food she had given him.
He never knew how long he would be locked in the cellar, so he had to eke out what he had to eat and drink. What he hated most was the bucket she would leave for him to relieve himself into. More than once she returned and was so disgusted by the stench of the cellar, she called him every name under the sun and tipped the bucket over his head and locked him in there for another day.
‘You’re worse than an animal,’ his mother would say. ‘Is it any wonder that I have to treat you like a dog?’
His stomach churning at the memory, he looked around at the assembled guests in their finery and was suddenly consumed with the need to hide. To hide his guilty shame and dirty secrets. If they knew the ugly truth of him, they wouldn’t want him in their midst. He wasn’t worthy to be here. How could anyone love him? He wasn’t worthy of being loved. That was what his mother always said. He was nothing better than something she’d stepped in.
No one knew the extent of what had gone on inside No.5 Halifax Road, not even Romily or Florence, both of whom had seen the bruises and burn marks on his body when he’d run away from his mother. During his time of being evacuated from London, his mother had turned up at Island House to take him back home. He hadn’t wanted to go with her, knowing what it would be like all over again. But Romily had been unable to stop his mother from insisting that it was her right to have him with her. Some weeks later he had managed to run away in the middle of the night, and by hiding on a train he had found his way back to Melstead St Mary. For a long time he lived in fear of his mother showing up again to reclaim him, but she never did.
He suddenly shuddered and as his body began to shake with familiar dread, he gave in to the sensation of detaching himself from his surroundings, just as he had when his mother had beaten him. Squeezing his eyes shut and imagining that he was invisible had been his way of pretending she couldn’t hurt him.
Feeling something touching him, he started violently.
‘What is it, Stanley?’ Annelise asked, her hand on his arm where it had been before, her beautiful face wreathed in concern. The sheer loveliness of her made him recoil.
‘Nothing’s wrong,’ he said roughly.
How could she bear to look at him? How could she even contemplate being in his presence when she was so pure and perfect, and he was so disgusting?
He fought hard to stop the nausea in his stomach from rising up, to quell the shaking that was building. He swallowed hard and stepped away from Annelise.
He needed to get away. Out of this marquee. He needed fresh air.
‘Stanley,’ she said, her eyes wide with alarm, ‘whatever is it? Are you unwell?’
Unable to speak, his palms sweaty, his heart thundering in his chest, he fled.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Meadow Lodge, Melstead St Mary
October 1962
Annelise
Annelise chased after Stanley, convinced she had said something wrong, but not knowing what. She was appalled that she could have inadvertently upset him. She had just been on the verge of telling him about Harry, when she realised he wasn’t listening to her.