think I should like that cigarette now please,’ she said.
Veronica and Freddie climbed the cliff path back to the house in silence. Freddie walked behind her on the narrow climb and she wondered what he was thinking but didn’t dare turn round to glance at him. Could he tell just by looking at her how she really felt, how she’d always felt about him? She knew he didn’t feel the same way. He never had done.
‘We have a couple of hours before dinner.’ She turned towards him as they both made their way inside the gothic porch. He was so close he almost bumped into her as she turned round. Her first instinct was always now to defend herself and, flinching, she put her hands up. But she was in no danger of an attack from Freddie. She knew that. Her hands were still on the thick wool of Freddie’s coat and he glanced down at her touch against his chest. She cursed herself for waiting a fraction too long before letting her hands fall. They stood under the arch, shielded from any possible onlookers. As he moved his hand a fraction, Veronica half-thought he might be reaching for hers, but he let it fall by his side and neither of them spoke. The expression on his face had softened. She wanted to pour her heart out. Even if he was long past caring now – even if he had never cared – she wanted to apologise for the way things had ended. There was nothing she could say that would undo the damage she’d caused.
She tried desperately to recover herself and recall what it was she’d originally turned to say to him. Eventually she remembered.
‘You’ll need to change for dinner, I’m afraid. Have you brought suitable things?’
‘Oh, good lord, Bertie still doesn’t go in for all that bother, does he? Is he not even marginally aware the world is drastically changing around him?’
‘He thinks if we uphold the old traditions then nothing will change.’
Freddie laughed and threw his hands up. ‘The house is being requisitioned. Everything is changing.’
Veronica hushed him. ‘Freddie, please,’ she begged. ‘You don’t know what he’s like. Don’t let him hear you.’
‘Fine, fine.’ Freddie looked down at his crumpled trousers and conceded defeat. ‘I’ll change.’
‘We have drinks at six and dinner at seven, precisely. Please don’t be late. Bertie doesn’t like it,’ Veronica said.
As she turned towards the front steps, she thought she saw Freddie roll his eyes.
Guy was at the front door of his grandmother’s bungalow, knocking for the fifth time in ten minutes. She wasn’t deaf or slow on her feet and he’d given her more than enough time to get to the front door from wherever she was inside the house. But now he was starting to get worried. He dialled his grandmother’s landline and heard the phone ring inside. It went to answerphone and he hung up. It was a blisteringly hot day and he wondered if she might be in the garden, so he tried the side gate and when it didn’t budge, he reached over and fumbled in vain for the bolt but couldn’t quite reach it. Moving back, he gave himself a few feet for a running jump and leaped up the gate, hooking the front of his shoes into the thick wooden cross-bar so he could vault over. He was half over when his grandmother’s neighbour appeared.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ the elderly man said. ‘Thought I could hear a lot of noise round here.’
‘Mr Hunter. How are you?’ Guy said from his awkward position, straddling the gate.
‘Looking for your gran?’ Mr Hunter asked. ‘No one told you?’
‘Told me …?’
‘She went in to hospital this morning. Fell over and broke her hip. Your mum was with her. Went in an ambulance she did.’
Guy wobbled on top of the gate. ‘No!’
‘She was talking and telling everyone to stop fussing, so I doubt she’s a corpse just yet. Had one of those little mask things on. Very annoyed at being stretchered into the ambulance though.’ Mr Hunter gave a chuckle.
‘Oh God,’ Guy said, throwing his leg back over and landing with a thud on the crazy paving. ‘Thanks.’ He rushed towards his car.
‘Get your mum to let me know how she is, will you?’ Mr Hunter called as Guy slammed the car door and sped towards the hospital.
Melissa had wandered around Tyneham again to soak in the atmosphere after Guy had left to have tea with his gran. And then she’d run out of things to look at and had forced herself into the car and back to the cottage. Hours later, she looked at her watch. Where was Liam? She exhaled loudly as she thought about what to say to him about the restaurant booking. And everything else. She had no idea how she was going to begin and yet she knew she couldn’t put it off any longer. She suddenly felt nervous and tried to think about something else.
And then Guy popped in to her head. He had promised to ask his gran where Veronica and Albert Standish had ended up after the army requisitioned the village. Melissa couldn’t now unsee Veronica’s eerie expression in the photograph. There was something about it that was bothering her and would do until she knew what had happened to the woman.
Veronica and Albert had probably gone to London and lived happily ever after, but Melissa just wanted to know now.
She pulled her laptop out of its case. With any luck, she could connect to the internet and wait the interminably long time for a page to load. One quick search would provide the answer to her short-lived quest to find out where Veronica and Albert Standish had gone.
While she waited for the laptop to connect with the online world, she went to the kitchen to flick the kettle on. It had been hours since she’d been at Tyneham and so she pulled her phone out of her jeans pocket to check for any messages, but there was still no news from Guy, so she shoved it back again and wandered over to the computer screen.
Melissa tapped ‘Veronica Standish’ into the search engine. Over 100,000 results appeared and Melissa clapped her hands together in anticipation until she reached page three of the search results and realised absolutely none of them were the Veronica Standish she was looking for. She added ‘1943’ to the search term and a few results appeared, but none of them looked particularly relevant. Then she deleted ‘1943’ and input the word ‘Tyneham’. A mention of Veronica and Albert in reference to the ‘ghost village’ of Tyneham simply listed them as among the two hundred and twenty-five residents who were displaced during the requisition of the Dorset village. There was nothing there that she hadn’t already found out from Guy or from the boards in the church.
She pulled her phone out to look again. Still nothing from Guy. Melissa clunked it face down on the table and then reached forwards and turned it over so she could see the screen. Just in case.
With no further information about Albert or Veronica Standish on the website, Melissa was left half wondering if she’d hit a dead end. She searched just for the husband’s name instead. A plethora of information came up.
‘Oh, here we go,’ Melissa said, and edged forward on the sofa to look at the results. There were a lot of parliamentary speeches he’d
