The Forgotten Letters of Esther Durrant Read online

  “So where were you before here?” she asked as Rachel sat down. Rachel explained her last assignment and Janice’s eyes rounded. “Ooh, that sounds very exotic. Heck of a sight warmer than here, that’s for sure.”

  “It’ll get better in summer though, won’t it?” Rachel asked hopefully.

  “Eventually,” Janice laughed, jangling again with a musical tone. “For at least a couple of weeks. But the islands will grow on you, mark my words. You’ll find it hard to leave. Almost everyone does.”

  Rachel decided that now was not the time to disagree and she took a sip of her beer.

  “I hope the cottage is suitable,” said Janice. “We had to scrounge around for some new furniture. The last resident did something dreadful to the sofa—best not to ask,” she said, as she caught the look of alarm on Rachel’s face. “But it was a stroke of luck that we were able to get a replacement from one of the guesthouses here; they’ve recently updated theirs. You’ll find that nothing goes to waste on the islands if we can help it.”

  Rachel nodded. “It’s lovely, thank you. And thanks for the sandwich and soup—they were very welcome.”

  “No problem, my dear. You’ll find the supermarket farther along the street here, and there’s a bakery and a greengrocer’s. A deli too, if you fancy something gourmet. The pâté’s really good, just make sure you ask for the pork and cognac one.”

  As Janice was telling Rachel about a weekly yoga class in the church hall—“It’s a great way to meet people,” she insisted. “We don’t bite.”—a group of men barreled into the room, taking over the last empty table. Wearing heavy fishermen’s sweaters and boat shoes, their hair windblown and crisp with salt, they had the healthy, raw complexions of those who spend a lot of their time outdoors.

  Rachel noticed them noticing her but kept her attention firmly on Janice. Most of the time she tied her long, dark hair back, but this evening she’d left it out and it fell like a waterfall almost to her waist, thick and glossy. Though she generally dressed for comfort rather than aesthetics, it didn’t seem to make any difference when it came to being noticed by the opposite sex. “I swear you must give off some sort of pheromone,” Mel, one of her friends at university used to complain. “How can they tell that you’re up for it?”

  “Probably because I am,” she had laughed.

  Perhaps, though, they could tell that she was a loner? Some of her lovers had found that a challenge. “You march to the beat of a different drum,” one had complained, only half-joking. A few had tried to pin her down, but sooner or later she had tired of them and slipped away, mercury in their grasp.

  She took another sip of her beer and glanced under her lashes at the men. One of them was looking directly at her and she finally returned his curious stare with a curve of her lips and a question in her eyes. He dropped his gaze. Janice—who had been in the middle of an anecdote about the local dentist and a recent wisdom tooth extraction—noticed and stopped talking. So did the other men at the table. In fact, the whole room went suddenly quiet.

  The man who had been staring stood up and came over to where they were sitting. “Hey, Janice. How’s the pottery going?”

  Rachel knew he was fishing for an introduction. He was tall, and broad-shouldered, with a pleasing huskiness to his voice and she liked the way his hair sprang away from his face, as if it had a life of its own. He wasn’t her type though: he was at least her age, if not a few years older, and more likely to be either a) married, b) looking for a wife or, c) had already found and lost one and was dragging his baggage with him. Younger men were generally far less complicated in her experience. He did, however, look familiar, as if she’d seen him somewhere before.

  “Not bad, thanks, Jonah. And yourself? Heard you had a call-out this morning?”

  “All good. Mrs. Henderson over on Bryher turned an ankle. We got her over to the doc’s and fixed up. Even gave her a ride home again.” He smiled, revealing a set of perfect white teeth.

  “Rachel, this is Jonah. He’s one of the islands’ ambulance officers, on the Star of Life,” Janice explained. “Rachel’s our new scientific research officer.”

  That was where she’d seen him before—unloading a passenger at the quay as she arrived.

  “Pleased to meet you, Rachel,” said Jonah, extending a hand and directing his smile at her. “Glad you’ve joined us. Perhaps I can show you around when you’ve got some time?”

  Janice coughed and lifted her glass to her lips to hide her smile.

  “Do you hike?” he added.

  Rachel nodded. She definitely preferred walking to yoga. “The best way to get an idea of a place.”

  “Then I’ll take you exploring if you like.”

  “Let the poor girl settle in, won’t you, Jonah?” Janice protested.

  “It’s fine, really,” said Rachel. “That’d be nice.”

  His smile widened and she noticed a faint fanning of lines at the corners of his eyes that only added to his rugged appeal.

  “But I do have a lot of work to do, and I’ll be fairly busy with that for the foreseeable future,” she added, giving him an apologetic grin.

  His face fell.

  “Well, perhaps a drink sometime then?” He wasn’t giving up.

  She inclined her head. “Sometime,” she echoed.

  There was a not-so-subtle cheer from his companions across the room. Rachel could have sworn she saw a blush rise up his cheeks, but he turned away and went back to his seat. She heard him telling his mates to “give it a rest” and grinned inwardly.

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” said Janice, interrupting her thoughts. “There’s a dinghy for you to use. I’ll show you where it’s moored tomorrow if you like.”

  “Excellent.” Dr. Wentworth had mentioned a boat.

  Chapter Nine

  London, Spring 2018

  Eve had grown up in awe of her grandmother. By the time she was old enough to remember, Grams had retired from mountaineering, though she still led groups of climbers, more often than not decades younger than her, on hiking tours of the Swiss and French Alps. Eve remembered one summer holiday she and her brother spent with Grams in the Valais. She must have been about twelve. Their pockets filled with barley sugar, they barely had time to stop and gaze in awe at the Matterhorn towering above them as Grams scampered along the track with all the speed and agility of a mountain goat, her hair in two silver plaits that gave her the look of an elderly Heidi. They scrambled after her, following the yellow signposts, Grams’s blue backpack a mere dot in the distance. More often than not, Eve and her brother would arrive, exhausted, at the hut that was to be their resting place for the night to find Grams bouncing from foot to foot, impatient for their arrival. “Come on slowcoaches,” she would tease, before rewarding their efforts with slabs of milk chocolate studded with hazelnuts.

  She always had a seemingly inexhaustible supply of chocolate.

  Grams taught them about the mountains, how to read the weather and tell when a storm was brewing by watching the light, high clouds that sometimes sat at the top of the jagged peaks, and which streams to collect icy, clear drinking water from. At night she taught them the names of the constellations and awed them with stories of climbing the famous peak that dominated the landscape. “The Matterhorn,” she would whisper, as if it were something sacred. “Did you know more than five hundred people have died attempting it?” Then she’d add in a louder voice, in her no-nonsense tone, “Of course, like any mountain, climbing it is the easy part. It’s descending where you can really get into difficulties. Time it poorly, or get stuck out there too long and you’re asking for trouble.”

  Eve also remembered other half-term holidays, in the Brecon Beacons, or, when they were older, getting the train to Scotland to bag Munros—summits over three thousand feet. Her last visit, when she had been sixteen and her brother more interested in his new girlfriend than chasing their grandmother up mountains, had been to Ben Nevis. Via the easier Pony Track than the cliffs of the north
face. The highest mountain in Great Britain. They’d gone over the May bank holiday weekend—“too early in the season really,” Grams had said as they set off, “but beggars can’t be choosers”—and were pelted with hailstones as solid and unforgiving as ball bearings. Hard-packed ice on their way to the summit made the going treacherous. “Just as well we’ve got our Gore-Tex on,” Grams had shouted into the wind that threatened to blow Eve sideways. They were hours from the top and Eve’s feet and fingers were frozen blocks of ice but Grams had a look of gritted-teeth determination that gave Eve the strength to keep going. There was no way she would quit if Grams wasn’t going to. It wasn’t until half an hour or so later that her grandmother noticed how much she was struggling. “Eve, darling, I think perhaps it’s not our day,” she called out. Even now, Eve could recall the reluctance in her voice. “Come on, let’s get out of this miserable place.” As they scrambled back down the unstable scree, Eve privately vowed that it would be her last such adventure, though she didn’t know how she would confess it to her grandmother.

  “It’s as much a mental challenge as a physical one. You have to put your icy boots back on and get out of the tent, even when it’s the last thing you want to do.” Grams’s voice brought Eve back to the present. “Of course, then our oxygen tanks weighed more than eighteen pounds—that was pretty much all we carried on the push for the summit. No fancy backpacks, no space for emergency rations. Even our ice axes weighed far more than they do now. Here—” she pointed over to the corner of the room. “Pass me mine, will you, darling?”

  Eve got up and retrieved the old-fashioned steel and wood axe that had been resting against the wall. It felt solid and heavy in her palm.

  “Hello, Socius, old friend.” Her grandmother caressed the worn handle lovingly. “My partner—for that’s what it was. I’d be long dead without it. It saved me from hurtling into a crevasse, never to be seen again, on more than one occasion. I wasn’t certain I’d ever make old bones.”

  “Weren’t you ever terrified, Grams?” Eve asked.

  “Almost always,” she said brusquely. “But most of the time I didn’t have the luxury of being able to think about it. My old boots are somewhere in the house as well, aren’t they? Fortitudo—courage, for that’s what they gave me when I laced them up. We didn’t even have proper harnesses—just a rope around our waists. If one of us were to fall there was nothing to take the strain and you’d be lucky not to fracture a rib, or worse.”

  “Did you ever fall?”

  “Of course,” she said. “But I was lucky never to break anything. A bit of frostbite is the worst I’ve had to put up with. I suppose,” she said, suddenly pensive, “anyone would say that I was extremely lucky.” She shifted in her seat and Eve half-rose to see if she could make her more comfortable, but her grandmother plowed on. “We wore wool underwear, a down jacket and pants, and then a windbreaker. We tied twelve-point crampons to our boots with string and our canvas tents were a darn sight heavier than today’s lightweight ones. I remember one storm where the wind tore a hole in my tent. Now when was that . . . ?” She leaned back, lost in the memories. Eve checked that the voice recorder was still working and waited.

  “Did I ever tell you about the time I was stalked by a snow leopard in Nepal? I think that was on the same expedition,” she said with a wink. If Grams had been any other old lady, she would have sworn she was making it up, but she’d heard even taller stories over the years and didn’t doubt the veracity of them, however outlandish, for a minute.

  Her grandmother sighed. “I’m getting ahead of myself . . . Back to the beginning. Now, not long after Wales, we spent a few weeks one summer in the Lake District, left your mother and uncle, who were only small, with a local woman while we went off tramping about. It was the first time either of us had ever done anything more than a scramble, and we were faced with a slab of sheer rock. Well, your grandfather didn’t think I’d manage it and had even arranged for me to be escorted back to the cottage where we were staying by a chum of his. He made the mistake of telling me this before we roped up, so of course I wasn’t going to back down, no matter how terrifying it might have been. After that first proper climb, I was hooked. I even learned to belay rather well actually, though I could scarcely flex my hands for days afterward and my palms had no skin left on them.” Her grandmother glanced ruefully at her knotted, arthritic fingers. “We used to try and get away for as many weekends as we could. In fact, I think our love of climbing helped mend the holes in our marriage. Especially after everything that happened . . .” A look of regret swam across her grandmother’s lined face, making her seem suddenly tired and vulnerable.

  Eve blinked. She’d always assumed Grams and Gramps had a rock-solid partnership, right up until her gramps’s death nearly fifteen years ago, though at the time she wouldn’t have been old enough to be aware of much if anything had been awry. It was disconcerting to discover this hadn’t always been the case. What had happened?

  Before she could probe further, Grams continued. “We’d meet outside the Park Lane Hotel on a Friday night for the bus to North Wales and stay in farmhouses in the valleys. Sometimes one of the other wives and I had to stay in the barn, as the men were all inside. We didn’t care. As long as we got to climb.”

  Eve was astonished. “It was really that sexist?”

  “Oh yes. That wasn’t the half of it. Climbing has long been the preserve of males. One of my favorites, the Grepon, in the French Alps, was climbed by two women, Miriam O’Brien Underhill and her partner, Alice Damesme, in 1929 if I remember correctly. After that some ridiculous French mountaineer—male of course—was reported to have said, ‘Now that it has been done by two women alone, no self-respecting man can undertake it. A pity, too, because it used to be a very good climb.’ Can you believe it? It made me absolutely furious when I heard the story. The prejudice even then was astounding. Women weren’t supposed to have the mental fortitude for high Alpine climbing, let alone the physical strength. But we proved them wrong.”

  Eve heard the satisfaction in her voice.

  “I remember my first summit of Mont Blanc. It was the hardest climb I’d ever attempted, and I certainly didn’t feel ready, but then I don’t think one ever does. Well, I never did anyway. We’d spent two nights acclimatizing at a local hut. I wished I had thought to bring earplugs—some of the men snored horribly, so any sleep I did manage was fitful at best, but at least the food was good. Though I would have eaten anything you put in front of me, truth be told. Climbing sharpens the appetite.

  “We descended to Chamonix for a night and prepared for the summit. As usual, we began the climb in darkness, to get as high up the mountain as possible before the sun softens the snow too much. As we reached the Grand Couloir, a snowstorm blew up and we couldn’t see where we were going. It was like iron filings on my cheeks. Our leader asked if anyone wanted to go back down, but everyone voted to keep going. We climbed through the couloir and then had a scramble upward for nearly half a mile. By this time it was beastly cold, but we kept on. There was a nasty cornice, I remember; I was worried it would collapse on top of us. Then, the storm disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived and the most glorious dawn broke. Orange and crimson tinged with gold.” Her grandmother coughed, wiped her hand over her mouth and continued. “I’ve seen more than my fair share of sunrises, let me tell you, Eve, but I’ve never forgotten this one. There were mountains as far as you could see, their peaks like needles piercing the sky. It was unbelievably, brutally beautiful. There was once a time in my life when I’d thought I’d never find beauty again.” Eve’s ears pricked up—what was her grandmother referring to? She was dropping hints like bread crumbs, but never elaborating. She didn’t have the chance to ask, as her grams continued.

  “We got to les Bosses, a ridge of ice just before the summit and I was forced to take a breath with every step, the air was so thin up there. I remember being terribly thirsty, but there was no time to stop to make a drink. Eventually we were ther
e, the whole of Europe spread out beneath us. Majestic is the only word I can think of to describe it, and that doesn’t even come close. It was quite literally breathtaking. The stillness up there, the quiet. The snow and ice dampen the sound. All you can hear is your own heart racing.

  “I’d been my father’s daughter, my husband’s wife, a mother . . .” She halted for a moment. “But never someone in my own right. Not until then.”

  Eve saw her grandmother close her eyes, letting out a slow breath.

  “Are you tired, Grams? Would you like to stop?” she asked.

  The old woman’s eyes flew open. “Not a bit.” Her voice was determined. “Now, where were we?”

  Eve glanced down at the notes she had made. “At the summit of Mont Blanc,” she replied.

  “Ah yes. Now, it had taken us longer to get there than planned and it had gotten late so we had to glissade some of the way down.”

  “Glissade?”

  “When you take off your crampons and slide down the slope, trying to use your ice axe to steer. If you find yourself going too fast you have to roll over and dig the point of your axe into the snow. When you’ve never done it before it’s quite terrifying.”

  Eve listened, fascinated, as her grandmother continued to describe their descent into the valley. She didn’t find it hard to picture her slip-sliding down a glacier.

  “Old age is a curse, Eve darling,” her grandmother said, changing tack again. “Almost everyone is gone now. And you’ve only the company of younger people, who get impatient when you can’t do things,” she added.

  Eve started to protest.

  “Don’t try and tell me otherwise. It’s true,” she said. “But then I’d be impatient with me right now. Blasted fall.”

  “You’ve had a life larger than many, Grams,” said Eve. “And you’ll get better again, even the doctor said you were a living marvel.”

  Her grandmother scoffed at this last remark.

  “Lucy Ambrose,” her grandmother blurted out. As she slipped from one anecdote to another, Eve could tell that her grams’s memories were becoming jumbled. She would do her best to make sense of them later. “One of the best. We used to climb together whenever we could. She became one of the country’s finest climbers. For a while we were known as the ‘housewife explorers,’ which of course ticked us off no end.”