Free The Fall and Rise of Lucy Charlton by Elizabeth Gill Page A

a place?’
    ‘I don’t know anything about it. When Miss Lee’s will was made I was a small child – my father is dead now and I haveno information on the subject. What you do is up to you.’ He handed Joe a card. ‘When you come north I will give you the key.’
    Joe was dazed. After Mr Bainbridge had gone he thought how peculiar the whole thing was. His life was nothing like he had imagined it would be. All he had thought of was reaching home, seeing his father and holding Angela in his arms. He didn’t know how to go on looking for her any more. As for his staying here, the house would be sold and he would be homeless. He didn’t make a decision, only went back to his chair and fell asleep. It had become his one refuge.
    The weather turned bitterly cold and even after what he had been through in France, Joe felt it. He thought that he could only put up with so much for so long and his limits had been reached in every direction. He didn’t know what to do, whom to contact – he couldn’t think how he might find Angela now. Even this house had become an alien place and yet he could not make himself leave, he felt as though he were clinging to the wreckage of his life.
    One morning in January he had a letter from Mr Barrington to say that there were several interested parties for the London house and that he would employ someone to show them around. Joe took that as a hint that he could no longer stay.
    He felt like holding doors, hiding in the attic. He even went upstairs – it was darker and colder than he remembered, and daylight, such as it was at this time of the year, peeped in where the roof should have been repaired. It had been left as everything else: neglected.
    There were various discarded pieces of furniture, none of them worth anything, some of them broken, and a few of his toys, small painted soldiers in red and blue, and an old rocking horse whose mane had gone and whose eyes were wild. There were books, their pages mottled brown with damp. There was his old school trunk. He opened it; inside was a cricket bat he had once used and a rugby ball and, to his surprise, some papers at the bottom. They didn’t look as if they had been casually set aside but deliberately put there – folded thick pieces of paper.
    They were letters, he saw in the dim light, dozens of them. He couldn’t help but be curious so he took them with him back downstairs and into the chair. He untied the ribbons they were bound with and soon realized they were the letters he had written to his father, each one folded carefully and kept together with blue ribbons.
    His father had not written him one letter in five years, but he had kept every one that Joe had written him. It brought tears to Joe’s eyes. There were a great many of the letters. Under the ribboned ones he found another whole set, unbound. He opened the first one of these, dated right at the beginning of the war – it was a letter from his father to him.
    Why had it not been posted? What was it doing here? Was it a draft of something his father had intended him to receive? Then why had he not received the final thing? He opened a second, then a third and that was when he saw in huge dismay that his father had written to him over and over again during the war, but he had not sent any of these things. Was it because he thought Joe did not deserve them?Was it because he hated the idea of Joe being so far away that he couldn’t send them? Then why keep them?
    There were so many. Joe didn’t want to read them. He wanted to put them on a fire. His father was dead; what did any of it matter now? He gazed at the black grate, then he got up and went into the back of the house and beyond into the great big courtyard. Here were the stables and the carriages and other outhouses – the washhouse and the hen house and the buildings where the outside servants had lived.
    He found coal and wood and he shoved these into a bucket. He hauled them inside and set them down