Page 1 of The Light Between Worlds

Evelyn

September 1949

1

WE’RE BURYING OLD NICK IN THE BACK GARDEN. IT’S JUSTJamie and me, and it’s raining, and I know he’s worried because of the way he stands, head bowed, shoulders tense.

“You can cry, Ev,” he says, and takes my hand in his own. No one’s held my hand in such a long time, and I nearly do cry at that, because he’s always so kind to me. But if I’ve learned anything in life, it’s to choke back tears and smile.

Jamie won’t meet my eyes. Instead he glares at the freshly dug earth and kicks a clod of it with one foot. The soil hits up against the corrugated iron side of our Anderson shelter, a leftover from the war, and Jamie winces. I heard him and Philippa ask Mum and Dad about having it removed once, on an evening when they thought I was caught up in a book. My brother and sister are always having worried conferences behind my back, even though I’m sixteen and only two years younger than Phil. They fuss over me worse than our parents ever have, but in spite of their best efforts the shelter removal scheme never came to pass. Planted over with daisies now, it still crouches at the garden’s far end, reminding me of what once was.

I manage the smile I don’t quite feel, and I think that worries my brother more than anything else. It worries him more than the fact that the family dog is gone—one of the last creatures who remembered me as I was before the shelling, when I was a child, and untouched by war. It worries him more, even, than the knowledge that next week, he’s heading back to university. With Jamie at school and Philippa off in America, I’ll be truly alone. For years, the three of us were never far apart, him down the road studying at St. Joseph’s and Philippa across the hallway in our girls’ school dormitory. Now it’ll be just me, Evelyn Hapwell, a girl caught between two worlds and left, at last, to her own devices.

I know the secret fear my smile wakes in Jamie and Phil, a worry they will never acknowledge, not to each other, not even to themselves. It frightens them to see me smile through pain because it means I refuse to give up. And my brother and sister have resigned themselves to a fate I won’t accept. They’ve written the end of our shared history—been broken by the weight of a conclusion they see as inevitable. Cracks run through them; fault lines, breakages, places where they’ve shattered just a little.

And they worry because I will not, cannot, be anything but whole. They think one day I’ll break, too, and that I’ll go off like a bomb because I’ve refused to let my breaking happen bit by bit. Maybe so. But every morning I wake up and watch the sun rise and listen to the birds sing and know that I will not let today be that day. My story hasn’t ended yet.

Jamie’s words still hang on the air as his warm fingers grasp my own. He looks at me and I look at him.

“I’m not crying till I get home,” I say. The words are a prayer,a promise, and they burn my tongue with the heat of faith they require.

“Oh, Ev,” Jamie mutters, and stumps back up to the house with his shoulders bent.

What he doesn’t see, what he and Philippa never see, is that when my words burn, they leave ashes on my lips.

Hope doesn’t make parting less bitter.

It doesn’t lessen the sting of loss.

It is, in itself, a sort of pain, but one I would break without.

“Have you got everything you need for school, Ev?” Mum asks at breakfast. She and Dad and Jamie say nothing about Old Nick. All their words are careful, mouthed like razor blades that might cut me if they’re not spoken just so. They needn’t bother. I’ve never been as frail as they think.

“I’ve just got to pick up more socks,” I say around a bite of toast. “But I’m all packed, so we can stop for more on the way to the station.”

Mum sighs. “The rate at which you children go through clothes—it’s a mercy clothing rationing’s ended.”

“I’ll drive Ev to the station,” Jamie volunteers. I sip my tea suspiciously. He ought to be up to college already—he’s got a scholarship studying the law at Christ Church in Oxford. When I give him a hard stare, he won’t meet my eyes. He knows that I know he should be elsewhere. I don’t like this. I don’t like being handled as if I’m made of spun glass just because a dog who followed me in from the streets died three days before term. Just because Philippa’s flown off to America for school and the entiretyof the Atlantic now lies between us.

At least no one knows it’s my fault she’s gone. The sighs and sympathy and gentle treatment would be even worse if they did.

Mum and Dad exchange a look. They were pressed from the same mold, both ordinary and brown-haired with worry-lined faces, like two fretful bookends. They hardly need speak to understand each other. I wish I could decode the meaning of Dad’s raised eyebrow and the quirk of Mum’s mouth that serves as a conversation between them.

“That’s good, thank you, James,” Dad says to my brother before reaching across the table and pressing something into my hand. “In case you want anything on the train, love.”

It’s a crisp five-pound note and I swallow hard. Kindness always threatens to undo me, and my parents can’t afford this. It’s not much, but we’ve never been rich and they’ve put everything into working for a future for Philippa and Jamie and me. I’ve watched them make quiet sacrifices for years to scrape together the money for expensive schools, the sort of places they think will open doorways.

I wish I wanted to open the sort of doorway they’re thinking of. I wish I wanted to go somewhere other than home, to be someone other than who I was.

I take the note, because I can hardly sayI love you but I am as I am and I will never be who you want me to be, at least not over the breakfast table when my suitcase is sitting by the door and we’ll part ways in less than an hour.

Instead, I tuck the money into the pocket of my school skirt and smile. “Thanks, Dad. You’re a brick.”

The words come out light and normal, and a bit of the worry fades from my parents’ faces. Jamie frowns down at his eggs, but keeps his counsel.

When I’m meant to be looking my room over to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything, I steal back out to the garden. I only have a moment, otherwise I’ll be missed, but I plod through the rain and past poor Old Nick’s grave. Then I lower myself down into the bomb shelter’s musty half-light.

The splintered, moth-eaten cots that once crammed the shelter’s interior are gone. It’s just an empty metal shell that smells vaguely of earth and rust. I press my forehead to one aluminum wall and shut my eyes, trying to fill myself with radiant Woodlands light. Light from a far world. Light from a place of myth and wonder.