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1

       1920

      She should have told him long before this. When she held their firstborn in her arms she had said it would be, yet that baby was four weeks old now, and still he did not know. Nor had he asked. It was as if he had pushed that part of her life behind him; locked it in a small, secret corner of his mind, never to be spoken of again.

      ‘Whatever it was,’ Tom had said, ‘is in the past. It’s you I want, Alice. Just you.’ And in that moment she had known that one day she would tell him the truth of it, explain how it had been so he might understand – and forgive.

      ‘Very well, if you choose not to know. But since you are taking me on trust, I’ll make you a promise, Tom. The day I hold our firstborn in my arms, then you shall know – every last word of it …’

      Yet was this really the right day on which to tell him? Why not yesterday, or tomorrow? Why today, the first anniversary of their wedding?

      She dropped to her knees beside the cot. She spent so much time just gazing at her daughter, trying to believe the wonder of her birth, the ease of it and the joy. And Tom, eyes moist, holding her close, telling her how happy he was.

      ‘She’s so beautiful, so perfect.’ The tiny fingers had twined around his own and claimed his heart. ‘I thought newborn bairns were – well …’

      ‘Ordinary?’ she smiled. ‘They are. Every one of them. Pink and puckered, or looking as if they’ve been in a fist fight. But there’s one exception – your own. They are always born beautiful, and perfect.’

      ‘I love you,’ he’d said, huskily, and she knew that when the midwife came to shoo him from the room he would go to his hut, and weep. Tom was like that. Hard on the outside and given to sudden anger, yet soft and gentle inside.

      ‘And might a man be told his daughter’s name?’ Alice should choose, he’d always said, if they had a little lass.

      ‘Daisy Julia Dwerryhouse,’ she announced promptly.

      ‘Daisy Dwerryhouse.’ He liked the name, truth known. ‘And Julia for –?’

      ‘For my best friend – her godmother.’

      ‘You’ve asked her?’

      ‘No, but she’ll come. She didn’t get to our wedding. I want her here, for the christening.’

      That had been when the midwife bustled in, bearing a cup of sweetened gruel, announcing that the new mother needed to sleep and that he could come up, later, and see them again.

      Alice lifted the sleeping child, kissing her as she laid her in her pram, raising the hood against the bright August sunlight. She had wanted to buy the magnificent perambulator long before Daisy was born, but no! she had been told. Didn’t she know it was bad luck to have the pram in the house before the babe – the first babe, that was?

      So Alice had chosen a model in shiny black, with large wheels and the body suspended on leather straps and paid a deposit on it, explaining that it wasn’t convenient, yet, to have it delivered, and so flushed with excitement had she been that the awfulness of it only struck her on the way home.

      Five guineas, the pram would cost, to be paid for with her own money; her private money Tom didn’t know about – money Giles had given to her. Sir Giles Sutton, Julia’s brother, who died not of war wounds, but because of them; a stretcher bearer and the bravest of the brave. Giles, whose name reminded her that today she must tell Tom what she should have told him before they were married, yet had bitten back the words because she hadn’t wanted her secret to lie between them on their wedding night.

      She gazed at her child, a small smile lifting the corners of her mouth. Beautiful, her little one, with eyes blue as Tom’s and a newly-grown haze of hair that promised she would be as fair as he was. And did you ever see such a mouth; pink as a rosebud, puckering into little sucking movements as she slept.

      Reluctantly, Alice turned away. She had a man to feed and a cake to ice for the christening, Sunday week. It might have been nice, she thought, taking the cake from its tin, sniffing its richness, if the christening could have been tomorrow; the date on which they were married. But she wanted Julia to stand godmother and a christening on a wedding anniversary might seem they were flaunting their happiness in the face of a woman whose husband had not come back from the war.

      Julia did not travel south for their wedding. Alice had forbidden it. I love you dearly, she wrote, but my joy would be your sadness. Come instead when our babe is christened – if the good Lord grants us one quickly –

      Hastily, she rewrapped the cake, glad that food rationing was over. Eighteen months after the Armistice the very last commodity was de-rationed. Sugar, it had been, and many the housewife who spent the whole day baking cakes the likes of which had not been seen for five years. And with sugar on sale to all again, they could really put the war behind them – or try to, though with some the scars were slow to heal.

      She glanced through the window, smiling. The man who stood beside the pram never passed the gamekeeper’s cottage without stopping. Tom’s employer had been besotted by Daisy before she was a week old. ‘She is exquisite,’ he’d said as Daisy Dwerryhouse fixed him with her eyes, and since then Mr Hillier called often to peer into the pram and smile his pleasure. Once, he had held her, then passed her quickly back, shaking his head sadly.

      ‘Foolish of me not to marry and have children of my own, Mrs Dwerryhouse. Too busy making my way in the world,’ he’d whispered shakily, making for the door.

      Ralph Hillier. So rich that folk hereabouts said his pocket was bottomless. Poor, lonely man. Alice welcomed him with a smile.

      ‘Good morning, sir.’ She bobbed a curtsey. Not being servile, but mindful of her position and Mr Hillier’s position and to put their strange friendship onto its proper footing. To remind herself, too, that he owned the house in which they lived and paid her husband’s weekly wage. ‘She’s asleep – again.’

      ‘No matter. The vicar tells me she is to be christened next Sunday. Would you think me presumptuous if I gave her a small gift?’

      ‘Why, not at all! Thank you for your kind thought.’

      ‘Hmm.’ He liked his gamekeeper’s wife. There was a dignity about her he couldn’t fathom; that, and her way of speaking that lifted her above her class. ‘Daisy Julia, isn’t it to be?’ he asked, seeing in his mind’s eye the name and date inscribed on the silver christening mug he had already ordered from a Bond Street jeweller.

      He left, smiling almost shyly, raising his hat, thanking her, and she stood at the door until he reached the garden gate, nodding her head deferentially.

      Poor soul. Alone in that great house. Pity he couldn’t marry some war widow with children of her own; heaven only knew there were plenty of them around, Alice frowned.

      She looked at the watch pinned to her apron; the one she had looked at so often when nursing, in France. Tom would be home soon for his dinner; would arrive promptly at noon because that had been the time of their wedding. They were given no choice. There was to be a service of thanksgiving in the church at two, followed by sports for the children and a splendid tea for all, the vicar had said. She and Tom had chosen to marry, though they hadn’t known it at the time, on the day the entire British Empire was to celebrate the victory of the Great War – and another reason, she had conceded, for not asking Julia to be there.

      Alice raked the fire, then pulled out the damper to redden the coals, placing the vegetables on the hob to simmer. Last year, just about this time, she had been brushing her hair, twisting it into a knot, tilting her rose-trimmed hat this way and that before she was satisfied enough with its angle to secure it with a hatpin. A bride in waiting, ready to walk to the church, yet one year

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