The Last Letter from Juliet

There was only one thing to be done.

Without a moment’s hesitation, I pulled on my flying jacket over my best trousers, blouse and cardigan and headed, as fast as my feet could carry me without actually running, down the road to Angels Cove.

I lost the final piece of my heart to Edward that day. And yet, the very next day found me standing on a small table in the garden room at Lanyon, with Katie fussing around me with pins in her mouth adjusting Lottie’s cream cashmere suit. Lottie and Ma Lanyon looked on. I tried my best to smile, but my mind was a whirlpool.

I have often wondered if human attraction works in the exact same way as magnetic attraction and if this is why it is so utterly impossible to repel someone you are deeply attracted to. I knew I shouldn’t see Edward again and yet the pull towards him was beyond my control. If the universal law of magnetism was involved, then it really wasn’t my fault.

It was weak excuse but all I had.

And here was another – just as the north pole of one magnet will attract toward the south pole of another, so will the same polarity force each other apart, and I wondered if, with the introduction of Edward, Charles and I no longer attracted but repelled each other. In the evenings at Lanyon I tried my utmost to be near to him, to hold onto him, to be in love with him, but I couldn’t. And the more I thought of Edward, the more Charles became pushed away. The physics of magnetism then, was my feeble excuse for my behaviour that day, my excuse for dashing to Angels Cove at the first possible moment, hoping to find Edward in the village hall.

But Edward was not in the hall. He was, I was told by a lady trimming the Christmas tree, most likely at his cottage, Angel View, a whitewashed cottage up a little track to right of the harbour. And it’s got the best view in the village – said another lady who was hanging off a ladder hanging paper chains in the hall.

I had not yet been to Edward’s home. Our meetings, although inwardly intimate – certainly intimate inside my thoughts and dreams, and I’m certain intimate inside of his – had been kept purely on a friendship footing, which meant keeping away from the privacy of his house. There had been no talk of love, no snatched kisses, no hand holding, just lots and lots of fun. Which was why, as I approached Edward’s cottage, I felt nervous. I stood there for a moment, just short of the cottage and stared out to sea, at the islands, my confused thoughts bouncing around my head. The tide was out and the Angels – the three granite mounts I had used as a navigational aid just a few days before, when life had been so much simpler – stood proudly in the bay. They were larger when the tide was out and it was odd, but as I stood there and looked out to sea, with my coat fastened tightly against the freshness of the Cornish breeze, I wondered how on earth they had been given such a name and thought that ‘angel’ was far too beautiful a word to have been adopted for these ragged-looking islands, which seem to hide in every nook and cranny, some dark and foreboding secrets.

My thoughts returned to the present and to Edward and also to a story that Edward needed to be told. And yet it was a story I couldn’t possibly tell him – a story I had promised never to tell. It was a story that promised to tie me to the house – to Charles and to Lottie – forever. And there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.

***

From the moment Lottie and I met, we were inseparable. We were for each other the sisters neither of us had ever had and despite my early misgivings, I loved my time in Paris and even felt the tug of my French ancestry calling me home. I spent every holiday with Lottie at Lanyon and became a welcome member of the family. Ma and Pa could not have been kinder and I became, without question, an accepted and loved member of the family. Those holidays at Lanyon were days of a privileged, gentrified youth – sailing on the river, a game of tennis, riding, croquet on the lawn – and although the loss of my parents could knock me sideways into a deep depressive abyss without a moment’s notice, bit by bit, although the weight didn’t lift completely, the grief became lighter as the months and years passed on.

My dream of flying as a career was not forgotten, but very definitely put on hold while I reluctantly did exactly what my mother had wanted me to do, transform into a lady. Ultimately – inevitably, perhaps – Lottie’s brother, Charles, became part of the package. I suppose it was expected from the get-go that Charles and I would marry, and so when Charles kissed me one balmy June afternoon in 1938, I kissed him back with the mechanical acceptance of a woman who had known for some time that this moment would come and accepted it.

This, I said to myself, was love.

Love was two people who got along and, after an appropriate amount of time, kissed, and after a further appropriate amount of time, married and perhaps had children. It was a steadier romance than Lottie and I had imagined during our nights reading novels at school, but I didn’t mind. My passion was reserved for flying and unlike Lottie, I had never actively looked for romance or expected anything other than that one day, I would perhaps marry the kind of man my mother had instructed me to marry – the non-predatory kind, the kind who would adore me to eternity.

Charles, very definitely, fit the bill.

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