‘I don’t know.’
‘Was she older or younger?’ Lucy asked, glancing out towards the little cottage, watching the smoke plume from the chimney.
‘I don’t know,’ Clara said exasperatedly.
Lucy switched her attention from the cottage to the room andlooked properly around. The only items in frames were floral watercolours. ‘Where are all the family photographs? Her parents, sister and the like?’
‘How should I know? Are you going to help?’ Clara snapped.
Lucy stared at her sister’s back and then walked over to the wardrobe. ‘Maybe they grew apart. It’s easy to drift apart when people lead such busy lives.’
‘You certainly do,’ Clara teased. ‘I see your social media feed. How many parties can one girl go to each week? I’m exhausted just looking at it.’
Lucy opened her eyes wide in surprise. Clara never clicked ‘like’ on any of Lucy’s posts. Not one. But she’d admitted she’d seen them. Lucy would work that one out later. ‘When you live alone you need to get out and about,’ Lucy justified. ‘Dinner with friends or a microwave meal for one … I know which I prefer.’
Clara looked at her as she moved away from the wardrobe, a navy two-piece suit in her hands in which to bury the elderly woman they’d not really known. ‘If you say so. How can you afford it?’ Clara probed.
‘I earn OK money and I’ve only got myself to worry about.’
‘You must be up to your eyes in student debt, though?’
Lucy sighed, pulled her brown hair up into a ponytail. They’d been over this before and she couldn’t do it again. ‘Righto, what else do we need to get? Do we need a pair of shoes for the … thing?’
‘The funeral director just said an outfit,’ Clara replied with a tinge of horror in her voice. ‘I hadn’t thought about shoes.’
Lucy opened the wardrobe doors and got on hands and knees to look at the assortment of different-coloured shoeboxes piled on top of each other. ‘Oh,’ she exclaimed as she began lifting the lids to peek inside.
‘What?’ Clara asked, the outfit folded in her arms.
‘These aren’t all shoeboxes, or rather, they are shoeboxes butthey don’t all contain shoes. Some have got other things in them.’ Lucy lifted lids at random.
‘Such as?’ Clara asked with an uninterested tone.
‘Letters, newspaper clippings, photos.’ Lucy rifled. ‘I thought it was a bit odd there were no photos at all in the house. They’re all in here.’
‘Photos?’ Clara sounded interested now. ‘Why would they be hidden in a box?’
Lucy shrugged and held a little stash of photographs out for her sister who put the outfit down, dipped to her knees and sat beside her, flicking through the square, sepia images. They were mostly scenery from before the war, Lucy realised, the garden at Deux Tourelles in better days, the local beaches – the concrete fortifications yet to have been built when these were taken. She pulled out a sepia image of four young people laughing on a beach. Two teenage girls, wet hair falling about their shoulders and two young men, all of them in old-fashioned bathing suits and looking as if they were jostling each other good-naturedly for space in front of the lens. Lucy couldn’t help but smile back at them.
She turned the photograph over and read the caption on the back. ‘Persephone, Jack, Stefan and Dido. Summer 1930.’
‘Persephone? What a mouthful of a name,’ Clara said.
‘It’s Greek,’ Lucy replied, turning the photograph back over and looking at the foursome on the beach. ‘Persephone was queen of the underworld in ancient mythology.’
Clara looked at Lucy, amused. ‘How do you know that?’
‘Pub quiz. It came up once. I didn’t know the answer though. I’m mostly in charge of literature and celebrity gossip.’
Her sister laughed. It was a lovely sound, and Lucy knew right then that deep down she missed Clara. She would tell her. Later.
‘Now I think about it, Dido is from ancient mythology as well,’ Lucy said thoughtfully. She ran her finger over the faded ink on the back of the photo. History lessons at school in Guernsey had taught her that roughly a decade after this picture was taken theGermans invaded the Channel Islands and Hitler’s obsession with Guernsey and the surrounding archipelago, nestled in between England and France, had begun in earnest. But she knew, or rather she remembered, very little about the islands’ history before that time. She traced the name Persephone with her finger. ‘What a beautiful name. Do you think she’s the sister? She has to be the sister. Bit coincidental to have two girls with ancient Greek first names unless two sets of parents were being particularly pretentious,’ Lucy mused.
‘You should hear some of the ridiculous names of the kids that Molly’s at school with. I can’t spell half of them,’ Clara said.
‘She looks older than Dido,’ Lucy said, examining the teenage girls in their bathing costumes, wet hair around their faces.
‘She looks taller, which is not always the same thing,’ Clara reasoned, looking at Lucy who was two inches taller than Clara and always had been since they were sixteen. Clara looked at her watch. ‘Molly and John will probably be hopping up and down wondering where we are.’
