TWENTY-THREE

Take my ashes and . . . scatter them among the . . . what’s primevères, Dad?”

“Primroses.”

It’s late the next morning. I survived the night on Tom’s bed, he on his sofa downstairs. Now he’s sitting on the bedroom floor, the notebook open in his hand. “Okay. Among the primroses. He will know where. The hat he never saw. The same color, the same color.” He wipes his eyes. “What’s she saying?”

“There was a hat I never saw, that was the same color as the primroses.”

He stares at the ceiling. “I skipped through a couple of paragraphs with Philip Moore. Same with that guy, Sébastien. I mean, my mother. There’s some info I really don’t need.”

I’m standing up, and at this point I turn to face the window. Terrace houses and back gardens being easier to look at.

“But you’ve gathered enough.”

“Yeah. She didn’t . . .”

“No.”

I press the heels of my hands into my eyes; Tom has kept up a quiet steady snivel throughout his reading. Two Englishmen, utterly failing to keep their composure. Though I’m not being fair. We did the clinging together and the racking sobs ten years ago, a little boy and his daddy. We’re just not up to it today. My ribs, for one thing.

For another, Tom’s got no interest in hugging me at the moment.

Even when she wanted Philip, kissing him made her too sad to carry on. Suddenly Célia and Peter came to her mind. She’d sat in that cellar after the bombs came down, sat with Célia’s head in her lap. Afraid for her. She was loyal. She gripped on to all of us together.

“I shouldn’t have doubted her.”

“Well, I never did.” Tom’s sending me a dark look. I can feel it landing between my shoulder blades.

“And you’d have forgiven her if she had. So would I, as it happens.”

That takes him aback. When he speaks again, after some nose-blowing, it’s in a more mollified tone. “I remember now. She wrote about that hat. It was bombed, right? And she was reminded of it when you were walking down the lane by the playground. At Fulbrook. Because the primroses were the same color . . .” His eyes widen as it dawns on him. “Oh. She was talking about being scattered there. With Catherine.”

“Looks like it,” I say.

All that stuff she wrote about you.” Tom lifts his brimming pint to his lips, takes off about a third in one gulp. “The cannons. The prison camp. I never knew. I mean, I knew the facts. But not really what happened to you.”