Jubilee Read Free Page B

her he couldn’t have heard his mother murmur his brother’s name. Evie sat back again
and forced herself to breathe slowly. Mrs Winter was confused again; she couldn’t possibly have made out an individual in that throng.
    Robert was dead. That’s what they’d told Matthew when he’d come home from the hospital. Your brother died in a barn fire. He fell asleep and left a cigarette alight and the dry
hay caught fire. He is buried underneath one of the yews in the churchyard.
    ‘There,’ said Robert’s mother slowly again. Evie’d never even been certain whether Mrs Winter had understood that Robert had died those eight years ago. Impossible to
tell whether the information had pierced the old lady’s expressionless eyes.
    Evie touched her arm. ‘The picture’s not very clear, is it? You can’t make out the details?’ She gave the arm a gentle shake. ‘Where did you think you saw
him?’
    Mrs W’s eyes focused on the square box. The carriage had reached the Abbey now.
    ‘First the Duke of Edinburgh and then the Queen alight from the royal carriage,’ Richard Dimbleby said on the television.
    The old woman’s lips opened. ‘There,’ she said again, her eyes focusing somewhere in the direction of the television. Something about the flags and crowds must have made Mrs
Winter remember a previous Coronation. Perhaps Robert had enjoyed watching the news film at the cinema and that was why she was thinking about him now.
    ‘You’re right, mother, she’s there now,’ Matthew said. ‘Going in a young wife and mother and she’ll come out a queen. Doesn’t she look young? Barely
older than our Evie.’
    ‘There,’ the old woman said again.
    ‘I’m just going to check on that heifer.’ Evie stood, her eyes on the window behind the television. The room felt stifling, despite the unseasonable chill outside. Remembering
Robert was making her feel dizzy.
    ‘She’ll be fine, love. Leave her till later. You’ll want to watch the ceremony.’
    ‘I don’t mind.’ She left the room, praying he wouldn’t make a fuss, but he didn’t, Matthew never did unless something triggered one of his bad turns; then
he’d grow uneasy if she left his sight. She forced herself to walk unhurriedly through the house to the kitchen, where she swapped her court shoes for a pair of boots in which to negotiate
the muddy farmyard. The heifer looked up as she approached the shed, eyes no longer dull, nose damp and twitching. Good. She could go back inside now, into the companionable fug of the parlour. But
she didn’t. She found herself walking out of the yard. She needed space – her feet found their own way across the field and through the gate. The faint outline of a sheep track led up
to the Ridgeway. Years ago she and Charlie had stood up here looking down as smoke curled from the roof of the barn.
    Evie’s feet pulled her into a run uphill, towards the ribbon of clear sky forming over the grey skies. She passed Martha Stourton’s cottage and was careful to take quiet steps, in
the shadows, until she was outside the view of anyone looking out of a window. Her lungs protested as she dashed forward but she kept going. It started to rain and almost immediately her frock
became a cold flapping sheet around her legs. Evie headed slowly back down the hill towards the farm, her head bowed down, her mind dipping backwards into the past. She found herself standing by
the back door again and rubbed the raindrops off her face.
    From the drawing room came the sound of Richard Dimbleby’s voice, still narrating the Coronation from Westminster Abbey. A blast of trumpets snarled out. She could slip off this bloodied
dress and leave it to soak. Lucky she’d planned to wear the New Look-style frock she’d made to the party on the green.
    It could be as though it had never happened.
     
Three
    Robert
    Camp at Ban Pong, Thailand, November 1942
    Dear Evie,
    I lost the earlier letters I wrote: they must have dropped out of