Chapter 2 – Finding Mabel [Meaning]

Joyce had returned to the bureau with tea. She set it down beside the map case and tried to recall what she had taken from the first page.

The first page resisted her.

She read the opening line twice and found that it did not settle. The words were ordinary enough, but they failed to hold together. She reached the end without knowing what she had read, only that something had passed through her attention without stopping.

On the third attempt, she realised she had been reading for some time. Not the words themselves, but what lay between them. A sense of sequence. Of waiting. Of something unfinished.

When she looked up, the room did not immediately return. The light was still there, the furniture unchanged, but it felt distant, as though it belonged to an earlier part of the day.

She sat quite still, the page open in her hands, her expression blank. Anyone watching would have thought her distracted. She was not.

She was no longer fully present in the room. That realisation unsettled her. It was not right.

The sensation stirred an old memory. Being called a daydreamer as a child. Told to stop reading and get outside into the real world. She had done as she was told then, learned to attend to what was in front of her. Now the feeling had returned. Not escapism, but attention narrowing, the space between the lines thickening with implication.

Joyce Turner finished her tea and set the cup aside. She picked up the second sheet of paper and quietened her mind, allowing the old habit back in.

The room did not vanish. It simply ceased to matter.

There were no words before her now, only impressions. A sense of truth without language. Places rose unbidden. An abbey, cool stone and quiet. The sea, close enough to taste the salt on the air. The strange mingling scent of fruit and earth, apples over potatoes, grounding and familiar.

A woman’s perfume drifted through it all. Floral, worn rather than applied. A shop came to mind. Warmth. A cat asleep by the fire, curled tight in trust. Then a cottage, set deep among trees, not hidden but held. A place that knew how to wait.

With it came a pull she could not explain. Not curiosity, but return. As if she had once known the way and forgotten it. She could see the hills rising and falling toward the sea, the shape of the land impressed on her without a name for it.

She felt an ache to be there. Not as a visitor.

As someone coming home.

Joyce felt her arms lower. She laid the page back on the bureau and remained still for a while, not wanting to return to the living room, wanting instead to stay with what lingered. That imagined world, though the word no longer seemed to fit. Was it imagined?

She had lived there. She knew the street, the house, the shape of the life that had unfolded within it. It felt like memory, not invention. A husband. Children. A whole life, lived and ended.

It was her.

And yet it was not.

The realisation unsettled her deeply. Something inside her began to tremble. A tear slipped free as she closed her eyes, turning away from it, not in denial, but in self-preservation.

──✿──

Exhausted, she went to bed and slept through the afternoon. That was the advantage of living alone. No one to explain herself to. No one to mind.

The thought of the life lived, and the life not lived, wrestled within her.

Terry, her husband, had died in the war. At the time there had been too much happening to grieve for long. The bombing of London. The demands of the job. Everything had required her attention at once. She had done what was needed and kept going.

Yet today she cried more for his loss than she ever had then.

The feeling surprised her. Pain, yes. But also something else. Relief, threaded through it. Not relief at his death, but at finally being allowed to feel it.

As sleep took her again, one thought surfaced and would not settle.

If a life could be remembered after it had ended, what else might still be waiting to be found?