“Look! There she is!”
The mystery woman is standing towards the back of the photo, on the very top step. Her smile isn’t quite as wide as it is in the photo with Elliot’s great-grandfather, but she’s still recognizable from her heart-shaped face and distinctive widow’s peak.
“Evie Snow,” Maisie says, as proudly as if she’s just conjured her out of thin air. “It says so on the back. Look.”
She flips the photo over and shows us the list of names, written in faded ink, by someone who’s presumably long gone by now.
“Evie Snow,” breathes Elliot, taking the photo carefully from Maisie. “The mystery woman has a name.”
And what a name it is, too.
“Surely that can’t have been her real name?” I comment. “She sounds like a character in a book rather than an actual person.”
Elliot’s eyes meet mine over the top of the photograph, both of us thinking the same thing.
“I’m afraid a name is all she has,” Maisie interrupts, clearly relishing her role as messenger. “I had a quick look on one of the library computers — I’m very clued up about the Internet, you know — and there were no Evie Snows in Bramblebury, either on the National Registration that happened in 1939, or the next census, which was in 1951. They didn’t bother during the war, you know; too busy trying to stay alive, I expect.”
“Right. So how would we go about finding her, then?” Elliot asks, undaunted.
“Oh, you can’t,” replies Maisie cheerfully. “Well, you could try the usual routes, I suppose: births, marriages, deaths; that kind of thing. But I’d be surprised if you manage to find anything. I know it’s a bit of an unusual name, but she wouldn’t have been the only Evie, or the only Snow in the country. And that’s assuming she never changed it by marriage.”
“What about the Ministry of Defense?” suggests Elliot. “They’ll have records of members, surely?”
Maisie nods.
“They do,” she agrees. “But they’ll only supply them to next of kin.Isshe next of kin, do you think?”
She looks at him eagerly, hoping for some fresh gossip.
“No,” Elliot says, sounding as disappointed as Maisie looks at this. “No, she isn’t. I don’t know who she was. And it doesn’t look like I’m going to find out, either.”
His shoulders sag in defeat. I really want to hug him, but I have to wait while Maisie flutters around, putting the photo of Evie Snow back into its envelope, and then launching into a long, pointless story about her sister Elsie’s next-door neighbor, who she suspects might be ‘up to something’.
Finally, though, she says goodbye, and heads off back down the hill, leaving Elliot and I to digest the fact that the search is over, and we’re still no further forward.
“Well, I guess that’s that,” he says, as the top of Maisie’s red bobble hat disappears behind the crest of the hill. “It looks like this book is going to have to be fiction, after all.”
“Is that such a bad thing?” I ask, puzzled by how seriously he’s taking this. “I know you wanted to figure out what really happened — I did, too. But it was always a long shot, Elliot. There was always a chance we’d have to make that part of the story up.”
“I know,” he says, taking my hand. “I just hate not knowing, is all. I hate loose ends. I hate that someone’s entire life can just … disappear. Like it didn’t matter.”
“That’s not necessarily true,” I point out. “Someone must know what happened to her; what her story was. And even if they don’t, she was still real. She still mattered. Things don’t only become real once someone’s written about them.”
“Don’t they? Do you really think that, Holly?”
Elliot’s words are soft, but his eyes, when I finally meet them, hold a challenge which makes me wonder which one of us I’m trying to convince here.
I’m the one who’s always felt like things haven’t really happened to me until I’ve written them down, after all. That’s why I’ve neverwritten anything about Mum dying; not even in my diary. I always felt like once it was down on paper, it would make it real; and, as long as it isn’t, I can continue to pretend on some level that it didn’t happen.
So I’m a fine one to lecture Elliot about writing and reality, when I don’t even believe my own words.
“What I think is that you can still write an amazing story about them both,” I reply, shrugging off the question. “And I guess the best thing about it is that this way you at least get to decide how it ends.”
“And what about us? How does our story end?”
The question is the one that’s been circling my mind endlessly, almost since we met, but it still comes as a shock to hear it spoken out loud.
“I’m not sure,” I admit, my palms suddenly clammy with nerves despite the chill of the afternoon. “I’ve been trying not to think about it. I just know it has to.”
