The Very White of Love Read online

  S. C. WORRALL was born in Wellington, England and spent his childhood in Eritrea, Paris, and Singapore. Since 1984, he has been a full-time freelance journalist and book author. He has written for National Geographic, GQ, The Times and the Guardian. He has also made frequent appearances on Radio and TV, including the BBC’s From Our Own Correspondent; NPR and PBS. He speaks six languages and has lived in or visited more than 70 countries. The Very White of Love is his debut novel.

  Copyright

  An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018

  Copyright © Simon Worrall 2018

  Simon Worrall asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9780008217525

  For Nancy and Martin

  Je lève mon verre

  Her hands are clasped in the blue mantle of heaven

  And the sea, her haven, is flecked with the white of love

  ‘OUR TRUE BEGINNINGS’ BY WREY GARDINER

  Foreword

  It was decorated with red roses and tied with a piece of red ribbon, a battered, cardboard chocolate box at the bottom of my mother’s wardrobe. I lifted the box out and put it on the bed next to a pile of her clothes we were donating to charity. Inside were bundles of love letters, yellow with age, tightly bound with string, fastened with tiny knots, as if those knots alone could hold them in place.

  Back at my cottage in Herefordshire, I erected a makeshift altar in the window of my study, which overlooked the pub garden and the Black Mountains beyond. For an altar cloth I laid one of my mother’s favourite blue shawls over the top of a chest of drawers, placed a vase of wild flowers and some mementos of her life: a silver bracelet she had bought in Singapore; some of her notebooks and poems; a photograph of her, aged five, sitting with a white, cotton bonnet on her head, in a field of daisies. At the back of this improvised altar, I placed the box of letters and two white candles.

  Her death was still new and raw. So the box lay unopened for almost two weeks. I sat by the kitchen window watching the river flow past, hoping it could take my sadness with it. I was a motherless child in my fifties. Divorced. Anchorless. Winter was coming. I went for long, lonely walks across frost-covered hills. In the evening, I doused myself with wine and nicotine, falling asleep to the sound of otters whistling on the riverbank, under a moon that shone like a silver penny on a bolt of black satin.

  Then, one rainy afternoon when I was stuck indoors, I untied the knots.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  Part One

  19 SEPTEMBER 1938: Whichert House

  14 OCTOBER 1938: Oxford

  22 OCTOBER 1938: Whichert House

  12 NOVEMBER 1938: London

  CHRISTMAS EVE 1938: Whichert House

  12 FEBRUARY 1939: Oxford

  25 APRIL 1939: The Oxford Union

  25 JUNE 1939: The River Isis, near Oxford

  3 AUGUST 1939: Whichert House

  5 AUGUST 1939: Whichert House

  6 AUGUST 1939: High Wycombe Railway Station

  3 SEPTEMBER 1939: Blythe Cottage

  23 SEPTEMBER 1939: Whichert House

  3 DECEMBER 1939: Whichert House

  13 DECEMBER 1939: Levant, Sussex

  CHRISTMAS DAY, 1939: Blythe Cottage

  16 JANUARY 1940: Newbury Racecourse

  18 JANUARY 1940: The English Channel

  1 FEBRUARY 1940: Wahagnies, France

  21 FEBRUARY 1940: Wahagnies

  10 MARCH 1940: Wahagnies

  11 MARCH 1940: Wahagnies

  13 APRIL 1940: Mousehole, Cornwall

  21 APRIL 1940: Whichert House

  22 APRIL 1940: Northern France

  6 MAY 1940: Wahagnies

  12 MAY 1940: Wahagnies

  14 MAY 1940: A Road Near the River Ath

  15 MAY 1940: Waterloo, Belgium

  19 MAY 1940: A Road Near Gaurain-Ramecroix

  19 MAY 1940: Tournai, Belgium

  20 MAY 1940: The Escaut Canal

  22 MAY 1940: The Escaut Canal

  23 MAY 1940: The Road to Hazebrouck

  24 MAY 1940: The Road to Hazebrouck

  25 MAY 1940: Hazebrouck, northern France

  Part Two

  3rd SEPTEMBER 1940: Blythe Cottage

  9 SEPTEMBER 1940: Blythe Cottage

  22 SEPTEMBER 1940: Blythe Cottage

  6 OCTOBER 1940: Blythe Cottage

  11 NOVEMBER 1940: Blythe Cottage

  CHRISTMAS DAY 1940: Blythe Cottage

  19 JANUARY 1941: Blythe Cottage

  9 FEBRUARY 1941: London

  29 APRIL 1941: Blythe Cottage

  27 MAY 1940: The Orphanage

  27 MAY 1940: The Orphanage

  6 SEPTEMBER 1941: Thurlestone Sands, Devon

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  About the Publisher

  Part One

  ENGLAND & FRANCE

  SEPTEMBER 1938 – MAY 1940

  19 SEPTEMBER 1938

  Whichert House

  Dear Aunt D.,

  I’ve fallen madly in love with Nancy Claire Whelan. You’ve every right to laugh when you read that, but I’m terribly happy to have found someone so fond of me, who leaves everyone else I’ve met in the cold. I’m sure you’ve seen her riding her bicycle about town. She lives down the road from you at Blythe Cottage. She is an only child – and a redhead! Her father is in the Revenue Department of the civil service. She was at school in Oxford so she knows it well and she has also lived in France and Germany. She speaks the languages, she sings and acts, she’s intelligent, pretty and, a thing I envy her for, has a good and interesting job.

  He lifts the pen and looks out of the window. Outside, a soft rain is falling. Just thinking of her makes him want to dance around the room. But he doesn’t want to tell his aunt everything.

  Meeting her was a strange and fateful coincidence . . .

  Martin opens his eyes. There’s a thudding pain in his head, as though someone has inserted a fist into the back of his skull and is trying to force the knuckles out through his eyeballs. He groans and rolls over. Fragments of the previous evening float to the surface of his alcohol-curdled brain, like bubbles in a pond. They’d started at the Red Lion, across the street from Whichert House, tankard after tankard of warm beer followed by shots of Bell’s. Hugh Saunders, who is also up at Oxford, had driven over from Gerrards Cross, one of a network of friends in south Buckinghamshire Martin got to know while staying with his Aunt Dorothy during the school holidays. As children, they rode bikes together, played golf and tennis, and later courted the same girls. A couple of old friends had
also come down from Aylesbury. It’s the holidays. Four weeks away from Oxford University where Martin is about to start his second year. Four weeks with no essays to write or tutorials to attend. Aunt D. and the rest of the family are off fly-fishing in Scotland. He can come and go as he pleases, stay up as late as he wants, drink too much.

  From the Red Lion they’d driven to the Royal Standard of England: a cavalcade of cars swerving down darkened lanes. Hugh bet him half a crown that he’d get to the pub first. ‘Nobody beats the Bomb!’ Martin shouted, as he leapt into his racing-green Riley sports car, pulled his goggles down and raced off down the narrow lanes, throwing the Bomb into blind corners at sixty miles an hour, Hugh’s headlights so close to his rear bumper that Martin kept thinking at any second Hugh’s Alvis would come crashing through the back window. On the hill down from Forty Green, the crazy fool had tried to overtake him! Their spoked wheels almost touching, it was all Martin could do to keep the Bomb from mounting the hedgerow.

  At the Royal Standard, they’d laughed and told stupid jokes about girls, but mostly they had talked about cricket. At closing time, Martin invited everyone back to Whichert House, where they stayed up most of the night, drinking Irish whiskey until they passed out in the living room. As the birds began to sing, Martin climbed the stairs to the little, yellow-painted room in the eaves where he’d spent much of his childhood.

  His eyelids are practically taped together. He squints at the framed painting on the opposite wall. A circus scene. A relic of childhood. During school holidays, he would lie here in bed counting the different animals. The tigers in their cage. The bear. The elephant on its chain. Now, his mouth feels like it has grown fur inside it during the night. His breath smells like a rotten cheese. He groans. Then he remembers. He has to get to the post before it closes.

  ‘Bugger!’ He leaps out of bed and throws on his clothes. ‘Bugger!’

  Splashing cold water on his face, his eyes stare back at him from the mirror, like two piss-holes in the snow. He tries to smooth his tousled hair, to no avail, then races down the stairs, three steps at a time; grabs the parcel and rushes towards the front door. Scamp, Aunt D.’s Jack Russell, races after him, his claws scratching on the flagstones and barking at the slammed door.

  Bright sunlight makes Martin’s eyes wince. It’s been crazy weather. Spring, the coldest on record; June, the rainiest; now, England is hotter than Spain. He grabs his bike and pedals down the drive, parcel in one hand, handlebars in the other, shoots out onto the Penn Road, spitting gravel and almost colliding with a furniture van. The driver blasts the horn, shakes his fist. Martin waves a cheeky apology, pedals on. It’s only a mile. If he hurries, he’ll make the post office before it closes.

  On the high street, stockbrokers with bellies that hang down like aprons waddle along proudly beside large, pink-skinned women with piano-stool calves. Shop girls in pencil skirts sashay arm in arm towards the Wycombe End – cheeky, giggling, up for it, as boys in boots and braces catcall after them.

  Martin throws the bike against a lamppost, sprints towards the entrance of the post office, put his shoulder to the door . . . and falls through empty air, across the floor. What he sees, when he looks up, seems a hallucination caused by a malfunction of the nervous system due to his overly enthusiastic intake of alcohol. A Fata Morgana. A phantom, dressed in a loose, blue and white cotton dress, cinched at the waist with a crocodile skin belt. Slender neck. A dusting of freckles. Kissable lips. Very kissable lips. What he notices most, though, in those brief seconds, is the cascade of chestnut-coloured hair tumbling over her shoulders. And those eyes. Clear, blue and full of hidden depths, like a cove he once swam in off Cornwall.

  ‘I’m so sorry!’ He struggles to his feet, clutching the parcel to his chest. Flicks his hair out of his eyes. Gawps.

  ‘I think that’s what’s called a dramatic entrance.’

  Her voice is bright, musical. Like a bell, or a harp.

  ‘I didn’t want to miss . . . ’ His furred tongue tries to form the next word, twists about in his mouth, like a worm doused with petrol.

  ‘The post?’ She tilts her head to where the line snakes back from the window.

  He flounders, tries to look tough, manly. Like the matinée idol, Douglas Fairbanks.

  ‘Well, if you hurry, you’ll still catch it.’ The girl pushes open the door and flounces out.

  Martin stares after her, noting the sway of her hips inside the blue and white summer dress; the proud, haughty bearing. He wants to dash after her.

  ‘Martin? Dorothy Preston’s nephew?’ A diminutive, white-haired woman comes through the door.

  ‘Hallo.’ He opens the door for her, stares over her shoulder. ‘Mrs Heal, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. How’s your aunt?’

  ‘Fly-fishing in Scotland.’ He holds up the parcel. ‘Sorry. Got to get this off to her.’

  ‘Do give her our regards . . . ’

  He joins the queue. Seconds turn into minutes. It’s one of the fixed laws of the universe. When you enter a post office, no matter where it is, in what country, time moves at a different speed. Post office time. He checks his watch. The queue shuffles forward. If he hurries, she might still be out on the street. One minute, two minutes, three minutes. His head is going to explode.

  ‘Parcel to Scotland, please.’ Martin drums on the counter with his fingertips.

  The counter assistant takes the parcel and weighs it. ‘That’ll be one shilling and five pence, please.’

  Martin pulls the money from his trouser pocket, pushes it under the window and runs out. The postmistress calls after him.

  ‘You’ve given me two pence too much!’

  But Martin is already out on the street. He looks left, looks right, grabs his bike and pedals off, scanning the crowds for that blue and white dress. Vanished. At the top of London End, he turns around and cycles back towards the post office, mutters to himself. This is really stupid, you know. You nearly knocked her over! She’s not going to talk to you. Don’t make a fool of yourself.

  He turns and begins to cycle slowly back towards Knotty Green. A gleam of chestnut hair. A blue and white dress. He whips round and pedals furiously back down the street, almost knocking over a small boy in a school blazer. She disappears cycling down an alleyway. Martin follows, at breakneck speed.

  ‘Hey! Watch where you’re going!’ A heavy-set man in a trilby shakes his stick in the air. ‘Bloody idiot!’

  ‘Sorry!’ Martin waves an apology, charges on between high brick walls. She is there now. Up ahead of him, just twenty yards away. A couple comes out of a jewellery shop. Martin swerves to avoid them, tips over, crashes into the opposite wall. The bike falls to the ground, wheels spinning. The couple snicker and walk on. Martin leaps back in the saddle, pedals furiously on.

  ‘Hallo again!’ he says, as he draws level with the girl. She stares through him. ‘The post office? I was the person . . . ’

  ‘Who almost knocked me unconscious?’ She pedals on.

  ‘I know. I’m so sorry, I . . . ’ Martin races after her. ‘Could I buy you a cup of tea?’

  ‘Not today.’ The girl increases her speed.

  ‘What’s your name?’ He draws level with her bicycle.

  She eyes him warily.

  ‘I’m Martin. Martin Preston.’ He holds out his hand.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Martin Preston.’ She increases her speed. ‘I’m Nancy.’

  ‘Have you got a surname?’

  ‘Everyone has a surname!’ She pedals off, with her beautiful, freckled nose in the air.

  Martin starts to follow but is blocked by a lorry. When he looks again, she has disappeared.

  Back at the house, Martin wanders around the garden, distracted. Scamp follows, sniffing, digging, peeing. The vegetable patch is bursting with fruit and vegetables. Martin stops by a tomato cane and pulls a fruit from the stalk. Raises it to his nose, smells it, then bites into it. The juice spurts into his mouth. ‘Nancy.’ He rolls the name aroun
d on his tongue, goes back into the house and picks up the phone, then dials his friend Hugh Saunders’ number.

  ‘Hugh? Yes. Martin.’ He pauses, unsure whether to proceed. ‘Look, I know this is going to sound ridiculous, but I just met this girl in the Old Town.’

  ‘Another one?’ Hugh chuckles.

  ‘Yes, another one.’ Martin laughs. ‘But this one, well, made quite an impression.’

  ‘That’s what you said about the last one, dear boy.’

  ‘I know.’ Martin laughs. ‘Thing is, Hugh, I didn’t get her name. Or at least, not her surname.’

  ‘So, what’s she called?’

  ‘Nancy.’ Martin sighs. ‘That’s all I know. Auburn hair. Blue eyes. Pretty. Very pretty.’

  ‘So how can I help?’ Hugh asks.

  ‘You know everyone around here . . . ’

  ‘I wish. But, sadly, I don’t know any Nancys.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Sorry I can’t help.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right. I’m just being foolish.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be the first time.’ Hugh chuckles. ‘How about a game of tennis to distract you?’

  ‘Tennis would be great.’

  ‘Tomorrow at eleven?’

  ‘Perfect.’ Martin puts down the receiver and stares out into the garden, thinking of the girl with the auburn hair.

  That night, he dreams he’s back in Egypt, in the Khan el-Khalili souk, in Cairo, where his father was posted for many years as a high court judge. The air smells of spice and sweat. Crowds throng the narrow passageways. He’s jostled from side to side. Up ahead of him, he spots the girl from the post office, pushes his way through the crowds. He can see her chestnut hair up ahead of him. He starts to run. But his feet won’t move. It’s like running in quicksand.

  Martin is an orphan of the Empire. His father, Arthur Sansome Preston, was a tall, flamboyant man with a long, angular face, silver moustache, and a taste for expensive clothes. He died a year ago. But even when he was alive, he was mostly absent from Martin’s life. Apart from trips together with his parents in the summer, usually to hotels in the Swiss Alps, they spent little time in each other’s company. His father’s life revolved around his work as a judge in Cairo, his racehorses, and the never-ending round of diplomatic parties. On the rare occasions they were together, they didn’t get along.