He throws the covers back and bounds out of bed again, rummaging through the bag until he finds what he’s looking for; a small leather wallet, from which he produces a handful of photos.
“Here you go,” he says, rejoining me. “Most of these seem to have been taken at the army base, but there’s one or two I think might have been taken here…”
I flick carefully through the photos, which are fragile and yellowed with age. Elliot’s great-grandfather looks back at me; a solemn-eyed young man with Elliot’s curly dark hair, who looks impossibly young to have been sent away from home to serve in some faraway war.
My heart contracts with pity for him.
“It’s okay,” says Elliot, watching me. “He came home. He was almost 90 when he died.”
“That’s good to know,” I reply, grateful to him for having read my mind. “You know how much I appreciate a happy ending.”
The next photo is the one Elliot thought might have been taken here in Bramblebury. I recognize the village square right away, although there’s no war memorial — obviously — and the sepia-tinted streets surrounding the square look oddly bare without the various trees and shrubs that have grown up since this was taken.
The photo is one of those ones taken by a street photographer. I remember Mum showing me some similar shots of her own relatives. Most people couldn’t afford cameras in those days, she’d explained. So professional photographers would hang out in busy streets and snap photos of the passers-by, which they’d then try to sell to them. Most of them probably bought them, too; for some, they might have been some of the only photos they had of themselves.
In the photo in my hand, Elliot’s great-grandfather is striding through the square, wearing a US Army uniform (Or I assume that’s what it is), and with a huge smile on his face. And no wonder he’s smiling, because on one arm, there’s a young woman, her head tilted back as she looks up at him, as if she’s hanging on his every word.
The woman is in uniform too, although I don’t know enough about the era to know what kind. But she wears a smart skirt and matching jacket, with sensible looking shoes and a peaked hat. The photo is so old and faded that a lot of the detail has been lost, but she has a pretty, heart-shaped face, and dark, arched eyebrows, like a movie star.
“I’m guessing this isn’t the great-grandma from Boca Raton, then?” I say, passing the photo back to Elliot, and moving on to the next one, in which the same woman poses in front of a Christmas tree, wearinga thick wool coat with a swishy skirt, which makes me wonder why people stopped dressing so well.
“Nope. They didn’t meet until after the war. I don’t know who this woman is, actually. As far as I can gather, he never mentioned a girlfriend — if that’s what she was.”
“Oh, I’d say that’s definitely what she was,” I reply, my curiosity piqued by the young couple who look so happy in their photo together, but who were doomed to spend the rest of their lives apart. “I wonder who she was? And what happened to her after the war?”
I wonder what happened to her after he left her, is what I really want to say here. Because he must have done, given the little Elliot knows about the man in the photo. We know he went back to America. We know he married someone else. And now Elliot wants to write his story, but all I can think about ishers.
I flick quickly through the rest of the photos, finding two more of the movie star woman tucked in among shots of the village. She’s beautiful, whoever she is.
I wonder what her story is?
“Can I read this?” I ask, picking up Elliot’s manuscript and leafing through the pages.
“I thought you’d never ask,” he says with a grin. “Of course you can. I’d be honored. Maybe you can help me figure out where I’m going wrong with it. That missing piece of the puzzle.”
“Oh, I’m not sure about that,” I reply. “I just read books. Well, and sell them. I don’t know anything about writing them.”
“Well, that makes two of us, then,” he says lightly, taking the pages from me and throwing them onto the table by the bed. “Anyway, we can talk about the book later. Right now, I’ve got other plans for us…”
We spend the rest of the morning lying curled around each other in the lumpy little hotel bed, watching the snow fall lazily outside the window.
“This is so nice,” I say, as the light starts to fade, and we still haven’t left the room. “You’reso nice.”
“Okay,” Elliot replies, propping himself up on one elbow to look me in the eye. “That’s the second time you’ve called me ‘nice’ now. I’m going to have to beg you to stop.”
He leans forward and kisses me lightly on the lips, to show me he’s not being entirely serious.
“Why? What’s wrong with being nice?” I ask, after the kiss has gone on for much longer than he probably intended. “Don’t you want to be nice?”
“Nope,” he says firmly, shaking his head. “Nuh-uh. ‘Nice’ is one of the most insipid words in the English language. I’d rather be almost anything else. I want to be… brave. Stupid. Crazy. Magnificent. But not ‘nice’. No one ever remembers ‘nice’. And, anyway, the nice guy is never the one that gets the girl, is he?”
“I don’t know about that,” I reply, grinning. “You seem to be doing okay so far. But I get what you mean. For me it’s ‘sensible’. Or ‘hard worker’. People are always telling me I ‘try really hard’ or I’m ‘such a hard worker’. Which isfine, but… well, it’s not the same as saying I’mgoodat whatever it is I’m ‘trying hard’ at, is it? And no one ever remembers the person whotried hard, either — they just remember the one who succeeded. Or who failed spectacularly.No one remembers ordinary.”
“You’re anything but ‘ordinary’, Holly Hart,” Elliot says softly, tracing the contours of my lips softly with his finger. “I know I’ll remember you.”
And there it is: the subject we’ve yet to broach. The one we’ve been carefully avoiding ever since we met. The one where he goes back to America — soon, maybe? — and all of this becomes just another memory.
Until now, we’ve avoided talking about it at all. But now he’s put it out there; which means there’s no point continuing to pretend we’re at the start of something when we’re already at the end.
