The Forgotten Letters of Esther Durrant Read online

  Dedication

  For my great-grandmother Phoebe Sly.

  I wish that your story had ended differently.

  Epigraph

  Like the touch of rain she was

  On a man’s flesh and hair and eyes

  When the joy of walking thus

  Has taken him by surprise.

  “Like the Touch of Rain,” Edward Thomas

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One: London and Little Embers, Autumn 1951

  Chapter Two: Aitutaki, South Pacific, February 2018

  Chapter Three: London, Spring 2018

  Chapter Four: Little Embers, Autumn 1951

  Chapter Five: London, Spring 2018

  Chapter Six: St. Mary’s, Spring 2018

  Chapter Seven: Little Embers, Autumn 1951

  Chapter Eight: St. Mary’s, Spring 2018

  Chapter Nine: London, Spring 2018

  Chapter Ten: St. Mary’s, Spring 2018

  Chapter Eleven: Little Embers, Autumn 1951

  Chapter Twelve: St. Mary’s, Spring 2018

  Chapter Thirteen: Little Embers, Autumn 1951

  Chapter Fourteen: St. Mary’s, Spring 2018

  Chapter Fifteen: Little Embers, Autumn 1951

  Chapter Sixteen: Isles of Scilly, Spring 2018

  Chapter Seventeen: London, Spring 2018

  Chapter Eighteen: Little Embers, Autumn 1951

  Chapter Nineteen: Little Embers, Spring 2018

  Chapter Twenty: Little Embers, Autumn 1951

  Chapter Twenty-One: Little Embers, Spring 2018

  Chapter Twenty-Two: London, Spring 2018

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Little Embers, Autumn 1951

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Little Embers, Spring 2018

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Little Embers, Autumn 1951

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Little Embers, Spring 2018

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Little Embers, Autumn 1951

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Little Embers, Spring 2018

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Little Embers, Winter 1951

  Chapter Thirty: Little Embers, Spring 2018

  Chapter Thirty-One: Little Embers, Winter 1951

  Chapter Thirty-Two: St. Mary’s, Spring 2018

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Little Embers, Winter 1951

  Chapter Thirty-Four: St. Mary’s, Spring 2018

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Little Embers, Winter 1952

  Chapter Thirty-Six: St. Mary’s, Spring 2018

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: Little Embers, Spring 1952

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: London, Spring 2018

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: London, Spring 2018

  Chapter Forty: Little Embers, Spring 1952

  Chapter Forty-One: London, Spring 2018

  Chapter Forty-Two: Little Embers, Spring 1952

  Chapter Forty-Three: London and St. Mary’s, Spring 2018

  Chapter Forty-Four: Little Embers, Spring 1952

  Chapter Forty-Five: St. Mary’s, Spring 2018

  Chapter Forty-Six: Cornwall, Spring 2018

  Chapter Forty-Seven: Little Embers, Spring 1952

  Chapter Forty-Eight: Cornwall, Spring 2018

  Chapter Forty-Nine: Cornwall, Spring 2018

  Chapter Fifty: Little Embers, Spring 1952

  Chapter Fifty-One: London, Spring 2018

  Chapter Fifty-Two: Little Embers, Spring 1952

  Chapter Fifty-Three: Little Embers, Spring 1952

  Chapter Fifty-Four: London, December 1952

  Chapter Fifty-Five: London, Spring 2018

  Chapter Fifty-Six: St. Mary’s, Spring 2018

  Acknowledgments

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

  About the Author

  About the Book

  Also by Kayte Nunn

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  London and Little Embers, Autumn 1951

  It wasn’t their usual destination for a holiday and the timing was hardly ideal. John and Esther Durrant generally took a week in Eastbourne or Brighton in the final week of August, so the far southwest tip of England was an odd choice, even more so considering it was early November. John, however, had been adamant. “It’ll do you good,” he said to his wife, in a tone of false jollity, when he suggested—no, insisted on—the trip. “Put some color back in your cheeks. Sea air.” Never mind that a bitter cold gripped the nation with the kind of weather that you wouldn’t put the cat out in and Esther couldn’t have felt less like a week away even had she spent the previous year down a coal mine. She also didn’t understand why they were leaving Teddy behind with the nanny, but she couldn’t begin to summon the necessary enthusiasm for an argument.

  Before catching the train south, they dined at a restaurant near Paddington station. Esther wasn’t hungry, but she allowed John to decide for her nonetheless. After a brief perusal of the menu and dispatching their order to the black-clad, white-aproned waitress, he unfurled his Telegraph and spent the time before the arrival of their food absorbed in its pages. Winston Churchill and the Conservative Party had been returned to power she saw, noticing the headline on the front page. John was pleased, although privately she believed Mr. Churchill terribly old and probably not up to the job. They didn’t discuss politics anymore, for they saw the world quite differently, she had come to realize.

  Esther managed a little of the soup that arrived in due course, and half a bread roll, while John cleared his dish and several glasses of claret. Then Dover sole and tiny turned vegetables, all of which he ate with gusto while she pushed the peas and batons of carrot around on her plate, pretending to eat. Her husband made no comment.

  Esther declined dessert but John, it appeared, had appetite enough for both of them and polished off a slice of steamed pudding made with precious rationed sugar and a generous dollop of custard. He glanced at his watch. “Shall we make our way to the train, my dear?” he asked, wiping the bristles of his mustache on a starched napkin. She couldn’t help but be reminded of an otter who’d just had a fish supper: sleek, replete, and satisfied with himself. He was wearing the dark suit—his favorite—and the tie she’d given him several birthdays ago, when she had been expecting Teddy and the future felt as if it were the merest outline, a sketch, waiting for them to paint it in bold and vivid colors. Something to look forward to, not to fear.

  She nodded and he rose and reached for her hand, helping her to her feet. It was a short walk from the restaurant to the station, but Esther was glad of her thick coat and gloves. She’d not ventured from the house in weeks—the November weather had been simply ghastly—and she shivered as she felt the wind slice through her outer garments and numb the tip of her nose and lips.

  They entered the cavernous terminal and Esther was almost overwhelmed by the bustle and noise, the hissing of the giant steam engines and the raucous cries of porters as they effortlessly maneuvered unwieldy barrows top-heavy with luggage. It was as if they were part of the opening scene of a play, the moments before the main characters take the stage. She might once have enjoyed the spectacle, found the purposeful activity invigorating, but today she gripped John’s arm as he steered her toward Platform One. “We’ll be there in a jiffy,” he said, reassuring her.

  Everywhere she looked, lapels were splashed with poppies, blood-red against dark suits. A brief frown creased the pale skin of her forehead as it took her a moment to place them. Then she remembered: it would soon be Armistice Day. The terror, uncertainty, and deprivations of the recent war were a scarlet tattoo on every Englishman and woman’s breast.

  Eventually, the
train was located, tickets checked, and they were ushered to their carriage by a porter. She took careful steps along a narrow corridor and they found their cabin: two slim berths made up with crisp cotton sheets and wool blankets the color of smoke.

  She breathed a quiet sigh of relief that they would not be expected to lie together. In recent months John had taken to sleeping in his dressing room and she was still not ready for him to return to the marital bed. “I confess I am rather tired,” she said, pulling off her gloves. “I might settle in.” She opened a small cupboard, put her hat on the shelf inside, and hung her coat on a hook that was conveniently placed underneath.

  “I shall take a nightcap in the Lounge Car. That is if you don’t mind, darling,” John replied.

  He had taken the hint. So much between them went unsaid these days. Esther turned around and inclined her head. “Not at all, you go. I shall be perfectly fine here.”

  “Very well.” He left in a hurry, likely in pursuit of a dram or two of single malt.

  She sat heavily on the bed, suddenly too exhausted to do more than kick off her shoes and lie back upon the blankets. She stared up at the roof of the cabin as it curved above her, feeling like a sardine in a tin. It wasn’t unpleasant: if anything, she was cocooned from the activity going on outside and wouldn’t be bothered by it.

  Before long, a whistle sounded and, with a series of sudden jerks, the train began to move away from the station, shuddering as it gathered speed. After a few minutes it settled into a swaying rhythm and Esther’s eyelids grew heavy. She fought to stay awake. Summoning the little determination she still possessed, she rallied and found her night things. It would not do to fall asleep still fully clothed, only to be roused by her husband on his return from the lounge.

  John had asked their daily woman, Mary, to pack for them both, telling Esther that she needn’t lift a finger. Normally she wouldn’t have countenanced anyone else going through her things, but it had been easier not to object, to let them take over, as she had with so much recently. She had, however, added her own essentials to the cardigans, skirts, and stockings, and tucked away among her underwear was a small enameled box that resembled a miniature jewelry case. She found it, flipped the catch, and the little red pills inside gleamed at her like gemstones, beckoning. As she fished one out, she noticed her ragged nails and reddened cuticles. A different version of herself would have minded, but she barely gave them a second thought, intent as she was on the contents of the box. Without hesitating, she placed the pill on her tongue, swallowing it dry.

  She put the box in her handbag, drew the window shades, and changed quickly, removing her tweed skirt and blouse and placing them in the cupboard with her hat and coat before pulling a fine lawn nightgown over her head. After a brief wash at the tiny corner basin, she dried her face on the towel provided and ran a brush through her hair before tucking herself between the starched sheets like a piece of paper in an envelope. She was lost to sleep hours before John returned.

  * * *

  On their arrival in Penzance the next morning he escorted her from the train, handling her once more as if she were his mother’s best bone china. She didn’t object, for she knew he meant well. His concern for her would have been touching had she been able to focus her mind on it—or anything else for that matter—for more than a few minutes, but it was as if there were a thick pane of glass, rather like the ones in the train windows, separating her from him, the world and everything in it.

  In Penzance harbor, John engaged a small fishing dinghy—“hang the expense” he had said when Esther looked at him with a question in her eyes. “There is a ferry—the Scillonian—but there was a nasty accident last month, she hit the rocks in heavy fog by all accounts, and anyway it doesn’t call at the island we want to reach. I looked into the possibility of a flight—there’s an outfit that flies Dragon Rapides from Land’s End, which could have been awfully thrilling, but they only operate in fine weather.”

  Esther had no idea what a “Dragon Rapide” might be, but thought that a boat was probably the safer option. As he spoke, she glanced upward. The sky was low and leaden, the gray of a pigeon’s breast, and the air damp with the kind of light mist that softened the edges of things but didn’t soak you, at least not to begin with. She huddled further into her coat, hands deep in her pockets. What on earth were they doing here? The boat looked as though it would scarcely survive a strong breeze. The hull was patched and its paintwork faded; translucent scales flecked its wooden rails and it reeked of fish.

  “Shall we embark?” His face was hopeful.

  Esther did as she was bid and climbed aboard, doing her best to avoid stepping on the purple-red slime that stained the decking. It was definitely the guts of some sea creature or other.

  They huddled on a bench in the dinghy’s small cabin as the captain got them under way. Beneath a pewter sky and afloat on an even darker sea, she was reminded of Charon, the ferryman of Hades, transporting newly dead souls across the Acheron and the Styx. The air was undoubtedly fresh here though. Sharply scented. Briny. Far more pleasant than the filmy London fog, which coated your hair, your skin, even your teeth with a fine layer of dirt. It roused her a little from her somnambulant state and she glanced about the cabin, seeing a dirty yellow sou’-wester, a length of oily rope acting as a paperweight on a creased and frayed shipping chart.

  “Look!” John called out as they puttered out of Penzance’s sheltering quay. “St. Michael’s Mount. Centuries ago the English saw off the Spanish Armada from its battlements. At low tide you can walk across the causeway. Shame we didn’t have time for it.”

  “Perhaps on our return?” she offered, her voice almost drowned out by the roar of the engine and the sound of the water slapping against the hull of the boat.

  John didn’t reply, looking out to sea instead. Had he even heard her?

  “Oh look! Kittiwakes.”

  Esther raised her eyes toward the horizon; there were several gray and white gulls wheeling above them, their shrieks rending the air. To the left, a trio of torpedo-shaped birds whipped past. “And puffins!” he cried. The new sights and sounds had invigorated him, while she was already feeling queasy as the dinghy pitched and rolled. She registered their fat cheeks and bright orange bills and was reminded briefly of a portly professor friend of her father’s. She tried but failed to match John’s enthusiasm, pasting what felt like a smile on her face and swallowing hard to prevent herself from retching.

  The captain cheerfully pointed out the site of several shipwrecks but Esther did her best not to pay too much heed to his story of a naval disaster in the early eighteenth century, where more than fifteen hundred sailors lost their lives. “One of the worst wrecks in the whole British Isles,” he said with a kind of proud awe. As he spoke, a lighthouse, tall and glowing white against the gray sky, came into view. It hadn’t done its job then. But then perhaps it had been built afterward, to prevent such a tragedy happening again.

  They motored on as the rain thickened and soon a curtain of fog erased the horizon completely. Esther’s stomach churned and bile rose in her throat. Even John’s high spirits seemed dampened and they sat, saying nothing, as Esther fumbled in her pocket for a handkerchief and pressed it to her mouth, hoping that she was not going to empty the contents of her stomach onto the decking. She tried not to think about them mingling with the fish guts and saltwater that sloshed just beyond the cabin. She gritted her teeth against the spasms of nausea while her insides roiled and twisted as if she had swallowed a serpent.

  The boat pitched and heaved in the rising swell as the waves frothed whitecaps beside them. “It’s getting a bit lumpy,” said the captain with a grin. “Thick as a bog out there too.” John hadn’t mentioned the name of the particular godforsaken speck of land that they were headed for and Esther didn’t have the energy to ask. She tried to think of something else, anything but this purgatory of a voyage, but there were darker shapes in the yawning wasteland of her mind, so she forced herself
instead to stare at the varnished walls of the cabin, counting to five hundred and then back again to take her mind off her predicament. She was only vaguely aware now of John next to her and the captain, mere inches away at the helm. Outside, the sea appeared to be at boiling point, white and angry, as if all hell had been let loose, and she gripped a nearby handhold until her fingers lost all feeling. She no longer had any confidence that they would reach their destination. She had ceased caring about anything very much months ago, so it hardly mattered either way.

  Eventually, however, an island hove into view, and then another, gray smudges on the choppy seascape. Almost as soon as they had appeared they disappeared again into the mist, leaving nothing but the gray chop of the water. The captain’s expression changed from sunny to serious as he concentrated on steering them clear of hidden shoals and shelves. “They’d hole a boat if you don’t pay attention. Splinter it like balsa,” he said, not lifting his eyes from the horizon.

  All at once the wind and rain eased a fraction, the fog lifted, and they puttered alongside a small wooden jetty that stuck out from a sickle curve of bleached-sand beach. Like an arrow lodged in the side of a corpse, Esther imagined.

  The bloated carcass of a seabird, larger than a gull, but smaller than an albatross, snagged her attention. Death had followed her to the beach. Her thoughts were so dark these days; she couldn’t seem to chase them away. There was, however, some slight relief at having arrived, that the particular nightmare of the journey might soon be ended. For now that would have to be enough. “Small mercies,” she whispered. She tried to be grateful for that.

  The captain made the boat fast, then helped them and their luggage ashore, even as the boat bobbed dangerously up and down next to the jetty, its hull grinding, wood on wood, leaving behind flecks of paint. An ill-judged transfer and they would end up in the water. Esther stepped carefully onto the slippery boards, willing her shaky legs to hold her up.

  Once they were both safely on land, the captain slung several large brown-paper-wrapped parcels after them. “Pop them under the shelter and when you get there, let the doc know that these are for him—he can send someone down for them before they get too wet. The house is up thataway. A bit of a walk, mind, and none too pleasant in this weather. There’s not many that care to come this far.”