Free Postcards from the Past by Marcia Willett

at college? Your mother will look after him, surely? She always has in the past.’
    ‘Andrew wasn’t there then,’ said Billa bitterly. ‘And nor was Tris.’
    Dom looked at her and she saw that he, too, felt a longing to hold out his arms to her and share her misery. She managed a crooked smile.
    ‘Well, I’ll just have to trust her,’ she said.
    Ed brought Bitser with him to the station to see her off to school and she stood at the train window for the last glimpse of Ed standing with Bitser in his arms. Ed held up Bitser’s paw and pretended to wave it. It was the last time she saw Bitser. The letter arrived nearly three weeks later.
    ‘I don’t know how to write this to you, darling Billa, but I think you would want to be told that we’ve had to put Bitser down. He bit Tris quite badly and the vet agreed that he was getting untrustworthy. I am so sorry…’
    *   *   *
    Now, Billa stares at the postcard: Bitser stares back at her, ears cocked, paw raised. She wonders how long it has taken Tris to find a card that would so surely pierce her heart with pain.
    ‘On my way. Tris.’
    ‘What is it?’ asks Ed, coming in behind her with Bear at his heels. ‘Are you OK?’
    She passes him the card and he studies it, frowning. Then he gives a little laugh, affectionate and sad.
    ‘It’s Bitser to the life,’ he says. ‘Gosh, that takes me back,’ and he turns the card to see who has sent it and the smile drops from his face in an instant. He stares at Billa, shocked and angry. ‘It’s like a declaration of war,’ he says at last.
    She nods. ‘They didn’t even bother to bring his body back to be buried with the other dogs,’ she says. ‘They left him with the vet. The last time I saw him was with you at the station.’
    She remembers Bitser, wriggling in her arms; she remembers pressing her cheek against his smooth head before passing him to Ed. And with this memory comes the painful reminder of those children that she couldn’t bring to birth, who wriggled, fish-like, swimming away in their amniotic liquid to disappear for ever.
    ‘I can begin babies,’ she had said to Dom, ‘but I can’t finish them.’ And this time he did hold out his arms to her and hugged her. Billa wept as she had never wept: for her father, for Bitser, and for her babies. Dom held her, his cheek against her hair, thinking of their father; the man he never knew.
    ‘What shall we do?’ Ed asks now. ‘First the bike and now Bitser. Don’t tell me these are friendly notes suggesting that we meet up to reminisce happily about the past.’
    Billa shakes her head. ‘But what can we do? We don’t know where he is or what he plans. As usual he has us over a barrel.’
    ‘They got everything they wanted.’ Ed drops the postcard on the desk. ‘And then they just packed up and left.’
    ‘Not everything.’ Billa glances around the study; at the paintings, the little cabinet of netsukes, the miniatures, the shelves of books. ‘How he hated you having this.’
    ‘But he couldn’t touch it,’ says Ed with satisfaction. ‘He was far too clever to go in for straight destruction but he tried everything else. It was as if the room defied him and won.’
    ‘Has it occurred to you,’ says Billa carefully, ‘that there might have been another will?’
    Ed frowns at her. ‘What?’
    ‘Supposing Mother left something to Andrew in a will that we never found because Andrew had it?’
    ‘What kind of thing?’
    ‘That’s the point. Supposing she was besotted enough at the beginning to leave him Mellinpons, thinking that he’d look after us.’
    ‘She’d never have done that.’ Ed is ashen-faced.
    Billa shrugs. ‘We have to think of everything. Why is Tris coming back? Has he discovered something that might be to his advantage? If Andrew persuaded her to make a will with his own solicitor we’d never have known anything about it. Perhaps Andrew has died recently. He’d be well into his nineties but it’s quite