Liam's Story Read online

  Alarmed, thinking it was caused by fire, she darted forward across the cobbles. Before St William’s College she stopped short. There was no smell of burning, no sign of flames, but like smoke from some bloody but silent battlefield, the moving cloud drifted slowly towards her.

  Roofs and chimneys which had stood in stark silhouette were rapidly obscured. The carved relief of gothic masonry faded, insubstantial as a dream in that swirling mist. Images of death replaced it, so real she could almost hear the boom of the guns, smell the cordite. Men advanced and fell before her eyes, their silent cries an obscenity. She cringed, screwing her eyes tight shut against it, but when she dared to look again they were gone. White light dazzled her, and all over her body, her skin was tingling with tiny shocks. Surrounded by that drifting mist, the whole of the east end seemed to be moving, advancing and receding, pulsing with some great inner power. In the silence time was irrelevant, past and present were one, divided only by the pitiful awareness of five human senses. And it seemed those limitations were melting...

  For a moment, drawn forward, Zoe was convinced that if she walked into that mist, she would simply be absorbed by it, that she would cease to exist. On the verge of acquiescence she hesitated; she shivered, and the moment was gone.

  The touch of the mist was like a cold, damp shroud; trembling violently she turned away, fighting weakness and an urge to sink to her knees. Her eyes were stinging and her steps uncertain as she retreated towards the reassuring bustle of the everyday world.

  A tall man, wearing a light raincoat, gave her a searching glance as she hesitated beside him at the kerb; meeting his eyes, Zoe lifted her chin and glared, every muscle tensed against inner trembling and a ridiculous desire to flee.

  With another quick glance to the right, Stephen Elliott took in the line of high cheekbones and dark, tumbling curls, and despite the fierce look she had just bestowed, thought she was the prettiest young woman he had seen in a long time. The road cleared and she stepped across before him, a determined set to her shoulders, and aggression in her stride.

  Watching her round the opposite corner, he was intrigued. He had seen her standing there, watching the mist curl across the Minster roof, as fascinated by the evening’s freak weather conditions as he was himself. Others had paused briefly and then walked on, but she had been watching for several minutes, unnerved, he thought, by those curling fingers of mist. Drifting and sinking on cold currents of air, they looked like an army of ghosts advancing across the cobbles…

  Amused by his own fancies, Stephen crossed the street and headed for home. A moment later he was climbing the stairs to his own flat in Bedern. Glancing at the time, he stacked his purchases on the kitchen table, knowing he would have to hurry to finish his packing and meet that appointment for dinner with friends at Strensall.

  He picked up the telephone, calling first an old acquaintance with whom he usually left his car when going away, and with the arrangements made for its collection, called his sister’s number in Harrogate.

  Assuring Pamela that he was all packed and ready, he repeated his destination, told her the ship’s name, and said no, he was not at all sure where he would be over the festive season.

  ‘It might well be West Africa, since the ship’s been on that run for a while, but it’s impossible to say for sure. From Philadelphia we really could go anywhere – it all depends on the charterers and the price of oil...’

  Suppressing a sigh, Stephen listened while his sister indulged in the usual exhortations regarding correspondence – which with her was infrequent – and healthy eating, in his opinion a contradiction in terms when applied to most of what came out of a ship’s galley. But to point out what she already knew was a waste of time. Pamela was a teacher, and could not get out of the habit of lecturing people, himself particularly. He was holding onto his patience until she launched into the subject of sexually-transmitted diseases.

  ‘For God’s sake, Pam,’ he interrupted sharply, ‘I’m thirty-six, not sixteen! I do listen to the world news, I have heard of AIDS, and believe it or not, I do know what condoms are for!’

  His blunt response prompted outrage at the other end of the line. When her voice had settled to a bearable level, he said, ‘Look, Pam, I’m going away in the morning. I might not be back for another six months. Let’s part friends, shall we?’

  Reluctantly, she gave her assent. At last, having soothed her ruffled feathers, he was able to end the conversation and rescue his underwear from the tumble drier. Adding those final items to his suitcase, Stephen ironed a couple of shirts before going to shower and shave. Twenty minutes later he was backing his Jaguar from its garage and wondering how soon he could decently say his farewells and return for a good night’s sleep. By six in the morning he must be on his way to Philadelphia, and by this time tomorrow be taking over command of the 120,000 tonne tanker, MV Nordic.

  Two

  Lying awake at the top of the house on Gillygate, Zoe’s thoughts kept returning to the Minster, to the deep blue sky above, and the fog billowing around it like smoke. In the intervening hours, after a hearty meal and two glasses of good red wine, she had regained both nerve and logic. Natural phenomena, she told herself firmly, had created that rolling mist, and floodlights an illusion of light and movement. Better than any theatrical effect, although that vision of death could have had no bearing on weather conditions, freak or otherwise. As for that tingling sensation, warming her blood like a caress...

  She shied away from it, not wanting to examine her own reactions too closely. With something of an effort, Zoe pushed it to the back of her mind, concentrating instead on the pretty little bedroom with its daisy-patterned wallpaper and matching curtains. She wondered what it had looked like ninety years ago. Considerably more austere, she decided. On the top floor and without benefit of a fireplace, it had probably been part of the servants’ quarters, and in a house this size, servants would have been essential.

  Mrs Bilton, sadly, knew little of its history, but her interest had been aroused by Zoe’s questions, and she had obligingly shown her guest all the unoccupied rooms. She explained that extensive alterations had been made to the kitchens some ten years before, when the range had been ripped out, together with massive shelves and deep, floor-to-ceiling cupboards. The last owners, however, had seen the novelty of retaining the open fireplaces elsewhere, and Mrs Bilton was particularly pleased about that.

  Admiring the polished mahogany mantelpiece in the front sitting room, and imagining Letitia’s family gathered before a blazing coal fire, Zoe had asked, only half jokingly, whether the house was possessed of any ghosts.

  Her reply was in the negative, but Mrs Bilton had gone on to mention ghosts she did know about, from the well-documented Roman soldiers in the cellars of the Treasurer’s House, to other, less publicity-conscious apparitions. There was a story about ghostly children playing in Bedern, and at the rear of a shop down Gillygate, assistants sometimes saw a little old lady dressed in black – ‘as solid-looking as you and me, they say’ – crossing the yard...

  With her own strange experience still fresh in her mind, Zoe had shivered a little at that, but made no comment. Brought up between divorced parents and the hearty, no-nonsense tenets of an Anglican girls’ school, she tended to be wary of revealing too much to strangers, especially on this particular subject. Although in the past she had never seen anything untoward, she was always aware of place and atmosphere, sometimes acutely so. She tended to think that places absorbed events, in the manner of a sponge, and that strong emotions leaked back into the atmosphere, slowly, over hundreds of years. But it was no more than a feeling, which put into words sounded silly; although no more so than the idea of ghosts clinging to one place, perpetually re-enacting one moment from long and human lives which must have contained far more dramatic events than crossing the yard to bring in the washing.

  But York was old, with almost two thousand years of history behind it. Perhaps, as Mrs Bilton claimed, the city was a p
lace where the past had no means of escape. If ghostly figures were indeed as commonplace as she maintained, then possibly that experience by the Minster was less strange than she imagined. Part of the city, part of the place itself.

  Except that the last pitched battle York had witnessed was during the Civil War, some three hundred years ago; and the images Zoe had seen were not those of Roundheads and Royalists, but of men more modern than that, in uniforms of the Great War...

  Three weeks later, after several hours closeted within the charity-sale atmosphere of St Catherine’s House, Zoe fought her way home through the misery of a wet London rush-hour. There was fine, drizzly rain in the wind blowing off Kensington Gardens, but she lifted her face to it in gratitude as she stepped off the bus. Despite the chilliness of early December, for her it had been a hot, crowded, frustrating day, in which she had learned more about sharp elbows, territorial rights, and the extent of human obsessiveness, than she had so far learned about the Elliotts.

  Scorning her umbrella, she slowly walked the few hundred yards down Queen’s Gate. The policeman on duty at the middle-eastern embassy was one she knew. He said good evening as she passed, and touched his cap. Zoe continued smiling as she climbed the steps to her own door, knowing that she should not flirt so obviously yet with no intention of discontinuing the habit. Such old-fashioned manners seemed to match the dignity of these elegant, stuccoed terraces. She loved Queen’s Gate, loved the broad pavements, the porticoed houses, the tall plane trees, and the sheer, Victorian grandeur of it all. It was such a pity, she often thought, that the air of ease and confidence it exuded was no more than a lingering breath from another age. Family houses, with servants by the dozen, had mostly been split into apartments decades ago; and since then had come hotels and offices, and most recent of all, the embassies. Diplomats from oil-rich middle-eastern countries now occupied the former homes of men who had ruled an empire. Zoe found a certain irony in that.

  Four flights of broad, shallow stairs led to her flat, and it was a matter of pride to run all the way up, even though she usually fell through the door, gasping. This evening was no exception. As usual, she filled the kettle, switched it on, then collapsed on the sofa to recover while it boiled.

  Considering her scribbled notes over a pot of scalding coffee, it became apparent that the day had yielded little in the way of fresh information. The Reference Library in York had proved a gold-mine, while St Catherine’s House seemed full of dross where the Elliotts were concerned. Expensive dross, too. The birth certificates she had ordered were several pounds each, and she had only ordered those in pique at being unable to find the two she had set her heart upon.

  ‘So where were you born?’ she demanded of the sepia photograph on the bookcase; but two half-smiles returned her frown, and two pairs of eyes regarded her with silent amusement, as though they shared a private joke.

  The two young men in the photograph were Letitia’s brothers. Zoe knew because Letitia had said so, once, a long time ago, but without that information she might never have guessed. To begin with, they were not very much alike; and secondly, they were wearing the uniforms of different countries. In what seemed to be standard British infantry issue, one was seated in an armchair, a peaked cap resting against his knee, while the other, dressed in the uniform of the Australian forces, leaned against the arm. By comparison, he looked crumpled and scruffy, leather gaiters and boots appearing white and dull, as though covered in mud. His distinctive bush hat, caught up at one side, was pushed back, lending a slightly rakish air and revealing hair and brows which were much lighter in tone than his brother’s. He might even have been blond, whereas the other was dark, his hair close-cropped above a slender, handsome face.

  Nevertheless, despite that youthful perfection, Zoe found the Australian more attractive. Less obviously handsome, his features were broader, stronger, the mouth more full. It was the kind of mouth she would have liked to see drawn back in a hearty laugh. She had the impression that his smile in the photograph was a shade quirky, suppressing amusement which longed to burst forth over that studiously casual pose. As though the two of them had had a great day together, rounded off by a few drinks and a decision to have their pictures taken for the folks back home.

  She did not have to remove the frame to know what was written on the back of that cheap postcard sent from a small French town in the summer of 1916, it had been committed to memory years before. ‘Found each other at last! Congratulations on the wedding, Tish – wish we could have been there – Yours, Robin and Liam.’

  But which was which? And had either of them survived the war? Letitia never said, and Zoe had no way of knowing. Having possessed that photograph for more than half her life, until recently she had not given it much practical consideration. Hidden away for years amongst old sketchbooks and the reading matter of her youth, it had been resurrected during an attempt to dispense with rubbish and create more space.

  Strange, she thought, what a turn of the heart it had given her; like some forgotten memento of an old love-affair.

  She smiled, but at an age when the other girls at school were screaming over pop stars and busy joining fan clubs, Zoe had been sighing over this very photograph and reading Rupert Brooke. A strange passion for a young girl, some might have said; although in terms of accessibility, the two were about equal, and the war poets were as young and blighted as any chart-topping rock group. In those days the brothers had been her secret fantasy, part of a necessary insulation against the very public, overwhelming and lonely life of boarding school. They had fulfilled the roles of lovers and guardians, coming to her in the quiet times before sleep, listening to her thoughts and comforting her tears. To Zoe at that time, their presence had been unquestionable; only now, remembering, did she find that faintly disturbing. To appease herself, she put it down to adolescence and a peculiarly vivid imagination, which she had thankfully managed to harness to better use.

  It was odd, however, that her rediscovery of the old photograph and its companion – one of Letitia when she was in her twenties – should have set her wondering about the Elliotts as a family. Questions never before considered had leapt to mind and taken hold, becoming more insistent as the answers continued to elude her.

  Marian apparently knew nothing, and the more Zoe pressed, the more annoyed her mother became. She could not understand why Zoe wanted to know these things. The Elliotts were as remote to her as aboriginal tribesmen, and what they did, whether they were the landed gentry Letitia had once been known to claim, or paupers dying in the local workhouse, Marian neither knew nor cared. They were dead and gone, so what did it matter? What possible use could knowing about them be to people living now? Zoe should concentrate upon improving her social life, which was non-existent as far as Marian could see, and let the dead rest in peace.

  That pious sentiment cut no ice with her daughter. Marian did not wish peace upon the woman who had reared her after her parents’ untimely deaths; indeed, Zoe suspected that her mother would have liked to think of Letitia suffering in purgatory for her sins. And that irritation at being questioned only served to make Zoe more determined to unearth the answers. Family history was a popular hobby, apparently: there were books on the subject, offering guidelines to research amongst archives both accessible and remote.

  She would have the answers eventually. If frustrations were frequent, the satisfaction of discovery was equal to that of solving a complex detective story, with the added pleasure of knowing that the story would surely expand.

  Back-tracking from Letitia’s marriage lines, it had been easy to establish her birth, but her brothers were proving something of a problem. If not born in England – and Zoe was almost certain they were not – then it was possible that their parents had been living in either Scotland or Ireland at the time. Or even, she thought wryly, Australia. Nevertheless, wherever their travels had taken them, the family had been living in York by 1897, the year of their daughter’s birth.

  Pondering the pos
sibilities, Zoe reached for the notebook in which she had written up all the information gleaned so far. At the top were listed details taken from Letitia’s birth certificate: father Edward Elliott, Bookbinder; mother Louisa Elliott, formerly Elliott. Zoe had added a note that Edward and Louisa were possibly cousins, a supposition borne out later by information gathered in York.

  Before leaving the city, she had made a visit to the Reference Library, and, with the aid of a keen young assistant, managed to establish the tenancy of the house on Gillygate. Not all the street directories had survived, but of the half-dozen extant between the years 1880 and 1898, one Mary Elliott was listed as the householder. Having expected to see a man’s name, Zoe had been surprised; even more so to find that the house was described as a commercial hotel. Not a private residence at all, which rather deflated her illusion that the Elliotts had been living there in some style.

  She was struck, too, by the coincidence of the house having been a hotel then, as it was now. Only for the past ten years, but still...

  By 1902, however, ‘Elliott’s Commercial Hotel’ was in the possession of a Mrs Eliza Greenwood, who offered lodgings. Zoe could only assume that the Elliotts had left for larger premises.

  Intrigued by the identity of this Mary Elliott, Zoe had then bearded the young assistant afresh, and been delighted to discover that a look at the local census returns might throw light on the matter. The hundred-year block on those ten-yearly returns was something of an annoyance, and meant that the year 1881 was the latest available. She waited for the relevant microfilm to be found, and watched in fascination as it was set up for viewing. Finding Gillygate for herself was a time-consuming task, but eventually the street came to light, and at last she found what she was seeking.