In Falling Snow by Mary-Rose MacColl Read Free Book Online

the platform. Our bags and chattels were just as we’d left them, the straw mattresses piled against the back wall, our luggage supporting them on one side, my own portmanteau, everything I owned in the world, standing bravely against its first French snow. The station remained deserted. We worked together quickly in the cold to pack the truck. Violet left the headlamps burning so we could see what we were doing.
    When we’d finished loading the truck, we climbed back in and set off for Royaumont. “I’ve still seen no sign of this war they keep talking about,” I said. “And for all I know, Matron is writing to my father right now to say I’ve gone missing in Paris.”
    â€œI doubt they’ll even notice,” Violet said. “And if they do, Frances will speak to someone who knows someone and the orders will disappear. She has a way. I know what you mean about the war, though. Royaumont’s so strange. You don’t imagine the war could ever touch us there.”
    Violet told me she’d grown up in Cornwall, where her family had lived for generations. “We’re the Cornwall Herons,” she said, with a hint of mockery in her voice. “My father’s father, Duxton Digby Heron, had an extensive collection of stamps, inherited by my father, Digby Duxton—the names are not a joke, by the way. My father sold the stamps to pursue his own hobbies of gambling and drink. Gets me where I live, he used to say. It certainly did. He died of liver failure at forty-four, no mean feat.
    â€œMy mother, from a less wealthy and less unhappy Scottish family, tolerated my father until his untimely death, and inherited the estate. No love lost, that’s for sure, although the cousins are not happy about the estate falling to the Scots, and my mother does tend to rather rub their noses in it by inviting her family to stay. There’s no money left, of course, so the place is slowly falling apart.”
    â€œHow old were you when your father died?”
    â€œSixteen,” Violet said. “Away at school. I went home to make sure there was no mistake, that Digby wasn’t lurking in some corner of the house. He was always a bit of a lurker. My mother thought me ghoulish when I insisted on viewing the body.” Violet had lost a brother too, she said, to pneumonia, when she was eight.
    Violet told me her family’s story as if it was all a big joke, and it was funny, the way she put it, and I even found myself laughing, but later I couldn’t help thinking how unhappy she must have been growing up in a house like that. When I told her about my own family, it seemed much happier, despite the fact my mother had died when I was only six.
    â€œMy father remarried, a woman from a farm near us,” I told Violet. “Claire’s French. Thus my competence in the language,” I said in French.
    â€œAh, the wicked stepmother,” Violet said, in the same tone she’d told me about her own life, “with a French twist.”
    â€œI’m afraid not,” I said. “More like I was the wicked stepdaughter.”
    The year I turned nine, my mother’s sister Veronica visited us from Scotland. Until then, the three of us—me and Daddy and Tom—had muddled on together, but Veronica had put an idea into Daddy’s head I should be among women and girls. So he packed me off to All Hallows’ in Brisbane to board. I felt completely at sea among those girls with their girls’ games and perfect hems on their tunics. When I went home for the Easter holidays in that first year, I said I hated school and didn’t want to go back but Daddy made me. Two weeks later he came to town and brought Claire.
    We met in the parlour of the convent, a neat room with heavy drapes and the smell of wood polish. Claire was a small, slight woman with straight brown hair surrounding a heart-shaped face. Much later I learned she’d married into a