Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [89]
‘You could be right. But I’m not sure the meteorology of nostalgia can be trusted: those endless golden summers, snowball fights at Christmas – was it really like that?’
For a moment she was disconcerted: surely her memories of lost innocence must be true? Sun on the seashore, beach parties with toasted marshmallows, a swimmer waving from beyond the surf . . .
Charles considered the woman at the coffee dispenser. Dark blonde hair, cut unflatteringly short. Dress a practical brown, its shape unbecoming. Make-up confined to a dash of lipstick. This was a woman who gave no thought to her appearance.
He noted the downward droop of her mouth, the shadowed eyes. The wedding ring. Charles was not given to small talk, but this woman with her abstracted air, her neglected hands, her stillness, drew him. To hold her attention he asked her, conversationally, if her husband was with the American forces in Europe.
She stared at him, shocked by the unexpectedness of the question.
‘My husband has been dead for ten years.’
He groaned. ‘Oh God. I’m sorry.’
‘Why? How were you to know?’
About to move off, back to clearing cups and plates, she gave him a quick, forgiving smile. For a moment her drooping mouth curved upwards, other muscles lifted; her nose wrinkled sweetly. Fleetingly, her face was transformed.
Charles had the strongest sensation that if she took even one step away from him he would lose her for ever, and he could not allow that to happen. He must keep her talking, however creakily he engineered it.
‘Look. My name is Charles. Charles Bowman, I’m over here working with your people for a while.’
‘Uh-huh. Is that Bowman as in bows and arrows? Were your ancestors archers, fighting for Henry the Fifth at the battle of Agincourt?’
‘Actually,’ Charles said, ‘they were in the wool trade. In a particularly flat bit of south-east England.’
He saw her pause, watched the muscles in her face relax; she was almost smiling. He considered his options and dived. ‘The name was given to the man who untangled the wool. He used a bow – seriously, he did. It was the Italians who thought up the process but then we pinched the idea.’
‘When did all this go on?’
‘Oh, quite late . . . thirteenth century?’
And at that she laughed out loud. ‘Right. Really late.’
He added, encouragingly, ‘I could tell you all sorts of exciting stuff, about my good old ancestors vibrating the string of the bow in a pile of tangled wool to separate the fibres –’
‘You’re putting me on.’
‘I’m deadly serious. It got us the finest, softest thread you can imagine.’
She was stacking plates again; he was losing her. He began to gabble.
‘The old methods produced yarn that was so resilient it could be bent thirty thousand times without breaking or fraying.’ Desperation dried his mouth. Words, words, words; he was on a slippery slope to oblivion – what woman would want to talk to a one-track wool-twit? He felt like an old buffer addressing a Women’s Institute knitting circle.
‘We exported the stuff. Look what wool did for Florence, the most beautiful city in the world, the art, the treasures, but then the Black Death . . .’
He took a deep breath and risked a change of tack: on his last visit he had noticed her, off duty, absorbed in an old, fragile book. ‘Dante said a few things about the city.’ She glanced up. ‘Would you like to know more?’ he asked. ‘Over dinner?’ he added. ‘I promise not to say another word about wool.’ Cautiously, ‘How do you feel about poetry?’
When Nancy next wrote to Joey she mentioned she had met an Englishman, doing some kind of liaison work in the US.
‘He’s funny,’ she wrote: ‘funny ha-ha, not funny peculiar. It’s a while since I laughed.’ She needed cheering up, with Mary gone. All that time never moving out of her bedroom. Yet, since her mother’s death the house seemed empty; Louis was shrinking, growing ever more silent.
She asked about Joey’s health, and the food, on which subject she was sending him another parcel; she had baked him a cake . . . As always, the letter was firmly optimistic. Dark thoughts were excised, and in