adored by all, but she now had a secret, even if it wasn’t really a wicked one.
Rather to her surprise, the family was all in the kitchen when she arrived. As they all had slightly odd expressions she wondered for one ghastly moment if she had been discovered.
‘Mum!’ said her daughter, coming forward and kissing her. ‘You look great! Got your hair done?’ Isobel nodded. ‘Which is good because we’ve got a plan!’
‘We’re going out for dinner,’ said her husband.
Isobel beamed, her happiness and relief when she realised she hadn’t been discovered having lunch with another man. ‘How lovely!’
‘We realised you’ve spent most of the holiday looking after us, so today I’m taking you out,’ her husband said. ‘And Adam has kindly offered to take us and pick us up so we can drink.’ He smiled at her and she recognised the man she had once been madly in love with.
All she really wanted from life was with her right now. She didn’t really need a secret or a luscious Cornish house.
‘Lovely, I’ll go and get ready then.’
‘The table’s not booked until seven,’ said her daughter. ‘You can still help with bath time…’
‘I’d love to,’ she said.
Maureen Lee
MAUREEN LEE has had twenty-seven novels published, most of them family sagas, one of which won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award in 2000. In an earlier life she sold about 150 short stories to magazines all over the world. Her musical play, When Adam Delved and Eve Span, had a three-week run at the Mercury Theatre in Colchester. She is married to Richard and has three grown up sons. After writing, her main interests are politics and reading other authors’ books.
The sun came out, flooding the room with brilliant light. Although his eyes were closed, the man turned restlessly on the bed and uttered a little moan. The sudden light had disturbed him. His wife rose and hurriedly pulled the curtains together, then returned to her chair beside the bed. She smoothed his brow.
‘There, there, darling,’ she murmured.
‘Where are we?’ he asked in a deep young voice that surprised her.
‘Why, at home, Robert,’ she replied. ‘On the farm. It’s morning, the sun’s just appeared, and two of your grandsons have already telephoned to ask how you are.’
His son, their only child, had enquired merely from a sense of duty. He’d been a strict, unforgiving father, not at all well-loved. But with his grandchildren he’d been openly fond and caring.
He was old, in his ninetieth year, and he was dying. Everybody knew that, his wife most of all. She’d loved him since they’d first met: she had been sixteen and he more than twice her age. Her father had been a parish councillor and he’d come to the house about a planning matter. He was a farmer; sternly handsome, smiling rarely. He’d proposed within six months and she’d accepted gladly.
‘I’ll make some tea,’ she said, not that he would understand. He’d heard nothing for days apart from internal voices he would occasionally converse with, voices that belonged to people she had never known. She left the dining room and went into the kitchen –he’d been brought downstairs and the dining room had been turned into a bedroom.
Through the window, the modern bungalow –built for their son when he took over the management of the farm –throbbed with life. Her great grandchildren, two little girls, were spending the summer there, and were already playing on a swing in the garden. Dorothy, her daughter-in-law, was hanging washing on the line and Francis, the ‘Crown Prince’ as Robert sometimes called him in a rare moment of humour, was staring at the house where he’d been born as if wondering how his father was today. At some time this morning, he’d come over and enquire about his health.
She was tempted to wave, but Francis would come immediately out of a sense of duty and she would sooner he didn’t. He would argue that his father should be in hospital.
‘He loathes hospitals,’ she would insist. ‘He’d far sooner be at home.’
She made tea and took two digestive biscuits out of the tin –she’d make herself a proper breakfast later –and took them into the dining room where, to her utter astonishment, her husband was singing an old war song.
‘There’ll be bluebirds over…’ he sang, followed by unrecognisable murmurings.
‘The white cliffs of Dover,’ his wife offered. Then she sang the line in full, ‘There’ll be bluebirds over, the white cliffs of Dover.’
She was even more astonished when he opened his eyes and smiled at her, a brilliant, open, truly gorgeous smile that was totally unfamiliar.
‘Hello,’ she said, taken aback, overwhelmed by the feeling of aching sadness that she would shortly lose him.
‘Hello,’ Robert MacEvoy exclaimed, almost exactly seventy years earlier. It was late September, the war was just over a year old –it had only been predicted to last six months. He’d just woken from his afternoon nap in the hospital of an RAF camp on the Essex coast and she was standing beside his bed with a cup of tea. She wore a blue and white uniform. A new nurse!
She laughed and put the tea on his bedside cabinet. ‘Hello,’ she cried, adding, ‘You’ve got a lovely smile.’
‘You’ve got a lovely everything.’ She was outstandingly pretty, with dark curly hair and eyes the colour of forget-me-nots. He was twenty-one and had never spoken so frankly to a girl before –flirtatiously almost. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Moira. Moira Graham.’ She made a face, squinting her eyes and wrinkling her nose. ‘What’s yours?’
‘Robert. People call me Rob.’
‘Well, I shall call you Robert, if you don’t mind.’
‘I don’t mind a bit. Will you be at the dance tonight?’ Another first for him; virtually asking a girl for a date.
‘I will indeed. Shall I save the last dance for you?’ She spoke in a deep sultry voice like Marlene Dietrich while fluttering her eyelashes.
He nodded. ‘As well as the first and all the dances in between.’
‘There’s just one thing, Robert,’ she said.
‘And what’s that, Moira?’
‘Have you forgotten you have a broken leg? It’s why you’re in hospital.’
He looked down at his feet protruding from under the blanket. The right one was heavily plastered, leaving only his toes bare. His ankle was also broken and his knee shattered.
‘I hadn’t forgotten, no. I thought we could sit the dances out. You can take me in my wheelchair.’
She looked serious for a change. Perhaps she felt the same as he did; that something remarkable and truly wonderful had occurred.
‘Oh, all right, so we’ll sit the dances out.’
The dance was being held in the canteen, the tables folded in a corner, piled on top of one another. He could limp a bit, his wheelchair was outside, and they were holding hands and sitting on one of the benches tucked against the walls. He was keeping his leg well out of the way, not so much bothered that someone would fall over it but that they would stand on his unprotected toes. The big room was crowded and the band played ear