And here an extract to tempt you!
Synopsis
When a final goodbye in Cornwall is only the beginning…
Meredith Tremayne Russell has spent her life mapping the world, first in intelligence during WWII, and later as a professor. But at ninety-eight with time running out, she faces a journey she cannot chart, a return to her old Cornish home to sell it and to scatter her beloved husband’s ashes.
With her is her twenty-five-year-old granddaughter, Grace, a dyslexic who believes she is a failure in a family of academics. For Grace the trip is a welcome escape from her mother’s demands. But when she unlocks her great-grandmother’s abandoned art studio, she finds a legacy of a passionate artist and a French resistance fighter.
As Meredith relives the frozen December of her 1946 wedding, she understands her final mission isn’t to say goodbye to her old home, but to draw one last map—showing Grace how to navigate a life of her own making.
Extract
This is an extract from Chapter One. Merry is travelling home for the last time and with her is her twenty-five-year-old granddaughter Grace. I have loved writing about the relationship between them especially as I’m now a grandmother. Both my grandmothers had died before I was born so I never had the joy of this special relationship. The bond between Merry and Grace is important to them both and I loved the way that Merry reveals her past to Grace.
Glancing around at the imposing building, I asked, ‘Was this where you worked before you came to America?’
‘Yes,’ she said, heading straight through the arch to a gravel-filled open space which was flanked with buildings on three sides. It would have been good to stop and take it all in, but she carried on. Old people were supposed to walk slowly, but not my grandmother.
‘There.’ She pointed up to the corner of the building on the right. ‘That’s where my boss, Ian Fleming, worked.’
‘Wait, what?’ It couldn’t be.
‘Commander Fleming was my boss for part of the war.’
‘The James Bond author?’ The opening notes of the films filled my head.
She nodded.
‘You never said you knew Ian Fleming.’ I stared at her.
‘Well, I did, and rather well,’ she said with a hint of a blush on her cheeks.
‘You slept with him?’ Who was this woman? On the outside, she was the Gran I’d always known; fashionable, but not flashy in any way. Her navy-blue wool coat fitted her slim frame and the red silk scarf at her neck matched her bold lipstick. Maybe it was the lipstick that should have alerted me to something more than the clever professor.
‘Never, although he tried to at the start. He soon realised it wasn’t going to happen.’ She laughed.
I lifted my camera and snapped another photo of her. Her expression was wicked. How had I not known that my grandmother worked for Ian Fleming? The woman standing in front of me suddenly looked somehow different from the one I’d grown up with for the past twenty-five years.
‘That’s where I actually worked.’ She pointed to a block-like building with no windows. ‘The Citadel was the beating heart of Naval Intelligence. Later in the war, I then worked in a small office in Whitehall.’
‘Gran, what exactly did you do during the war?’ I should know this.
‘Made maps of course.’
I rolled my eyes. Stupid question. She was an emeritus professor of geography.
‘Including the ones used on D-Day.’
This I hadn’t heard. My grandmother had been important to the war effort, but no one in the family had ever said anything about it. ‘And Grandpa?’
‘Did not make maps, he wrote propaganda, and blew things up when they allowed him to do so.’
I shook my head. Grandpa, originally from Maine, had been a foreign correspondent, a Pulitzer-prize winning one. He’d written ten novels and countless short stories. But he’d never mentioned blowing things up. That I would have remembered.
‘Gran, maybe I wasn’t listening when you spoke of this before, or…’
‘No one mentioned that I didn’t sit and knit socks during the war.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘My mother, your great-grandmother, Elise, didn’t either.’
‘The artist?’ I asked.
‘Indeed. She was also a French resistance fighter.’
‘Wow.’ Mum and Dad had a few of my great-grandmother’s paintings. I’d always loved her work, and I’d done a talk about her in school, but my parents had never told me she’d been a resistance fighter too. Did they know?
Gran stared at me and I flushed. Caught out again not knowing things I should.
‘I think we need that drink.’ Gran took my arm and led me to the Mall, where she flagged down a taxi.
