When peace arrives at last, with the tired fanfare of a long-awaited train, the entire village, the island itself – mostly woman-made these days, mostly empty of feeling – stands loose in the aftermath, upended by the end of the war. The long-winded echo of church bells after four years without them. Then, the single, singing silence. The jolt of celebration heralding the Armistice. After, the slow, creeping realisation that no amount of singing, sobbing in the street, will bring a dead man home. No amount of quiet prayer and toasting good fortune will bring a lost man – dead-eyed, vacant – back to the person he was. Peace becomes what they make of it in Backwater village. What they build in the new beginning. The turn of the tide – the first sign that it is over, truly over, after all this time – lies heaviest in the bodies of women. Young women who grew from school skirts into colourless widows’ clothes. They stand tear-swole at the market, the post office, baby-swole in line for the butcher, hands over their stomachs, guarding the last living proof of a lost husband. A lover in the fields behind McCaulay Farm. On the floor of the old schoolhouse. The babies arrive like rain. Common miracles. They come gulping, gushing out, keen and keening on parlour floors. It is a jolt seeing new mothers. Prams on doorsteps. Shawls over shoulders. Napkins on the line, fluttering in front gardens like little flags of surrender.
Mrs Ada Crook, stiff-fingered in the last white cottage on the main road, has never mothered a daughter before. Never taken to mothering someone who is not her own. She sent her eldest son, like a parcel, to France, and lost three more before she found hm dead in the attic, in the gleaming late-summer dust. The girl had floundered outside the house, seven months gone by then, and sobbing. Buckled on the back step while a neighbour removed the body. There was no time to weep herself, wrapped up in comforting the mother-to-be. In holding herself steady as the breath left her body, as the buttery August light thinned to a shimmer behind her eyes. Even now, she hasn’t cried. She has not wept for any of them. There is too much to be done, between the baby and the girl. Between the unfilled morning and the evening, made unfillable in its silence.
‘I’d like to call him Georgie. After his father.’
‘He’ll never know his father.’ Looking at Millie now, in the corner of her eye, Ada is tired. Dead-tired, down to her bones. Love is not a matter of choice anymore. It is a matter of practicality. Of tending to the baby more than to themselves. He lies yowling, hot and hungry on the rug between them. Millie moves to comfort him. She is clumsy in her nightdress. Milk-stained. Moon-eyed.
‘I know,’ she says, scooping the baby up, ‘Isn’t that the point?’
‘Why give him his father’s name, when he could have his own?’ Ada, half-listening, feels her shoulders tighten. ‘His head,’ she says despite herself, as Millie scoops the baby from the floor, ‘watch his head now, Millie,’ and hears her own mother in her voice from the days when Georgie was fresh out. Raw and unknown to her. She had to learn to love him. Learn to look for parts of herself, turning them to the light. Still, she managed. She made good of her motherhood. She made sure of it. ‘He hasn’t got the strength to hold it up for himself yet. I’m telling you, watch his head.’
‘I’ve got him.’
‘You don’t. He won’t latch on like that. Tilt him a little. Towards you.’
‘I am.’
‘You can’t be, he’s fussing. Here. Let me help.’
‘No, Ada. Let me learn.’
The silence is sharp-edged. Millie brings the baby to her chest, dangling in the crook of her arm. She settles, unsmiling, at the supper-table, in the chair nearest the stove, creaking back and forth with him on her knee. He settles. Suckles. The sun sets, burning up. There is no sense in explaining that she is sitting where Georgie sat. That in some senseless, yearning place, perhaps in the hollow under her ribs, Ada keeps track of these small reminders. These last signs of him in the house. She cannot climb the stairs without slipping into his bedroom, finding the sheets unchanged on the bed. The pencils lined up, sharpened to a point, on the desk under the window. The shelves groaning with books and maps, and in the cracks between the spines, some no larger than a finger’s-width, there are his private treasures: childhood marbles, glassy and gleaming. A sketchbook, crammed with pressed flowers and leaves. Between its pages, near the back, there is a crinkle-cornered photograph of Millie, in the days when summers stretched, yawning, into autumn.
Ada had first found it the year he’d turned sixteen. She’d watched him, at nineteen and in uniform, look himself over one last time before he slipped it into the back of his Bible. Ada had trailed Georgie and Millie to the station, saw them kiss and whisper on the platform-edge, and while he was alive, she had been pleased for them both. She had carried the gentle thought that somebody else was pining for her son. That Millie carried his face into her dreams, convinced that she was in love. It was harmless sharing him then, but sharing her grief is impossible. The girl in her kitchen feels like a betrayal. The baby, in his ceaseless need, anchors her to the same rooms, to the same senseless thought that she might have done something more. She cannot help but turn to Millie and wonder what they whispered about. What they said after they kissed on the platform, after they met in the fields. She cannot help but turn and return, each time more suspicious, to the baby scrunched and wailing on the hearthrug. Sucking his fingers in the pram. She cannot help leaning over, hopeful of some chest-splitting feeling, some sense that he belongs in the house. But she has never mothered a daughter before. Never been a grandmother. Never imagined that peace – slumped and spent at every door – would bring home a whole house of ghosts.
‘He’ll keep secrets from you, too. When he’s older.’ Serving supper, she searches Millie’s face for signs of the girl in the yellowed photograph. She goes as far as setting the fork in her hand, clumsy around the baby’s head. The soft mouth-sounds and the sunset. ‘That’s the way it goes between mother and child. The way it’s always been.’
‘If he keeps secrets, I won’t pry.’
‘You say that now, but–’
‘I mean it. I want to do this right. Then, perhaps, he’ll come to me. If he ever…if he needs to.’
A pause for the unspeakable thing. The house taking the shape of its ghost.
‘You were a secret in the beginning. He never once spoke about you.’
‘You know that’s not true. We’d been going together for years.’
‘He never brought you home, though. Never told me your name.’
‘But you knew, Ada. You made it plain even then that you didn’t approve.’
‘Not that it stopped you–’
‘Not that it mattered.’
‘I thought you’d be more…careful. That’s all.’
‘Careful?’ Millie’s voice is barbed. She shifts the baby from one side to the other. He mumbles, bumbles at her breast, all hands and mouth. Sucking. Sighing. ‘He was home three days last year before he went back to the front. Three days, and all the time I knew I might never see him again. What did we care for being careful when we knew that? Besides, I thought you’d be pleased.’
Ada blanches. ‘Pleased?’
‘To have a part of him.’ Millie chokes back tears. ‘To have a little bit of him…going on. Living inside someone else.’
Ada regards her. She hunts for the words to explain that the baby is a puzzle to her, impossible to solve. That he is impossible to place when his eyes are colourless yet. When he curls foetal on Millie’s chest, all gums and drool and tender flesh, and on the outside of such fresh motherhood, Ada pines more than ever for the baby she laid in the ground. The son she waved off in a smoke-fog and found with his palms to the ceiling in the attic as if – moments before – he had abandoned a prayer. Georgie belongs in every room, in reflections, in every memory. A baby himself in front of the fire. A boy returning from school, parading the grazes on his knees. A soldier setting out, tin helmet and kitbag. Then, a ghost himself returning, holed up in the bed with terrible dreams and screams that lurched, animal, from his throat. Ada regards the girl. She regards the baby. She shakes her head.
‘I’m sorry. I can’t,’ she says, steeling herself. ‘I can’t see my Georgie in him at all.’
© 2026 Reyah Martin