Perfectly Ordinary People(99)

Christophe tried to get me to temper my excitement by pointing out that we didn’t know how old the tatty scrap of paper was; we didn’t know if Ethel still lived there, or even if she had ever lived there. It was perhaps, he said, just a forwarding address.

He started to add something else then, but I interrupted him. I knew exactly what he was going to say – it was entirely possible Ethel had met someone new in the five years since we’d last seen her – but I didn’t let him finish. I was as excited as I’d ever felt, and that excitement felt wonderful. I didn’t want to temper my hopes, I wanted to revel in them.

I hurried Christophe and Guillaume through their meals and then nagged them to walk faster once we were outside. But it was all quite pointless because when we found the place an hour later, there was nobody home anyway.

The address was a bit of a shock. I’d expected some kind of run-down boarding house like our own, but it was a splendid Georgian town house. There was a small green opposite, half of which had also been turned into allotments, and so we crossed the road and sat on a bench while we waited.

I remember asking Christophe if he thought we had the right place, and he said we definitely had, but he agreed Ethel almost certainly didn’t live there. ‘Unless she’s married some nice Jewish doctor,’ he said jokingly, and for a few seconds I was so angry with him for even suggesting such a thing that I couldn’t speak.

After an hour or so, Christophe wanted to leave. He’d walked Guillaume around the green at least ten times by then and he’d had enough. We could come back later, he said.

But I was physically unable to leave the spot, and he laughed and said he could understand why, so we waited, turning our heads right and left every time someone entered the street from either side. Christophe joked that we looked like we were watching a tennis match.

Eventually an elderly woman with a kind face stopped outside number twenty-three and climbed the steps, so I jumped to my feet and ran across the road to question her. She was visiting someone called Irene at the same address who wasn’t home yet either. So I invited her to join us on our bench.

She shook hands with Christophe and introduced herself as Joan. Then she ruffled Guillaume’s hair and asked me if we were Quakers too.

To my shame, I didn’t know what the word even meant, so I replied that no, we were French, and felt embarrassed when she laughed in a way that made me realise I’d probably said something silly.

‘But your friend,’ she said slowly, so that we could understand. ‘She’s a Quaker, yes?’

I looked at Christophe, who shrugged, and so she explained that it was a religion. ‘I just assumed,’ she said, ‘because she seems to be staying with John and Irene.’

I managed to express that I doubted Ethel was a Quaker, but after five years anything was possible, and so she asked, ‘Oh! She’s not one of Irene’s Jewish girls, is she?’

Irene arrived just then, cycling up the street on a pushbike, and so Joan introduced us all and explained to her that we were looking for Ethel, so Irene invited us all indoors to wait.

She was a middle-aged woman with short grey hair and one of those serene smiles that makes you feel instantly at ease, so we followed her into the house and perched on her sofa while she made tea.

I managed to tell her that we’d lost touch with Ethel during the war, and didn’t really understand her situation, and so she explained, as we supped our cups of tea, that Ethel was a lodger. She had a number of Jewish girls staying but Ethel was the most recent. She was a lovely girl, she said, and we agreed that indeed she was.

She wanted to know how we’d fared during the war in France, so I did my best to explain, but it was all terribly stilted. I was much too excited about Ethel’s imminent arrival – too busy listening for the door really – to concentrate on speaking English, and Christophe, as ever, was too embarrassed to help out.

Eventually footsteps approached and the front door opened, but Irene winked at me and shook her head and said, ‘Not yet.’ A young man peeped around the door, said ‘Hello’ in a very casual manner, and then ran upstairs.

It was unbearable, sitting in that lounge, waiting, and I started to realise that I’d been better off waiting outside. Not only would I have seen Ethel enter the street, and thus gained a few extra seconds with her, but I’d be able to lose myself in that precious moment without having to think about the fact that we were being watched by strangers.

I was trying to think how to say politely that we would prefer to return to our bench when I heard fresh footsteps approaching and the sound of keys jangling. This time Irene stopped speaking and smiled at me wide-eyed. ‘Now, that’s Ethel,’ she said. ‘She gets the keys mixed up so I can always tell when it’s her.’

My eyes started to water then – the tension of the moment was unbearable – and Irene looked at me quite intensely and I saw her understand that the moment was not without significance. ‘Go!’ she said, smiling. ‘I can see how eager you are. Go! Open the door for her before she changes her mind and goes somewhere else!’ And so I jumped up and ran to the hallway.

By the time I got there she was closing the door behind her and fumbling with the clasp of her handbag. She looked so different that for a moment I thought it was another lodger – that Irene had made a mistake. Her hair was the shortest I’d ever seen it and she was wearing a skirt and a tweed jacket. Because she was fiddling with her bag, her hair had fallen forwards, too, so I couldn’t see her features at all.