‘Oh, come in, come in,’ she said. What am I at? she thought in horror to herself, welcoming a soldier of the king as if he was the parish priest. ‘Is it Amelia you were wanting to see?’
‘Amelia Pim,’ Frederick confirmed, stepping into the hallway with his hat held over his heart in an awkward and endearing manner.
‘She’s above in her room, doing her home exercise,’ explained Mary Ann. ‘If you’d like to take a seat in the drawing room, I’ll get her for you now.’
Frederick smiled a polite smile and did another of his little bows that was more an inclination of the head and shoulders than a formal gesture, and Mary Ann couldn’t help admiring the way he stood so straight and bowed so neatly.
She slithered around him in the small hall and opened the drawing-room door. Amelia’s grandmother sat by a low fire, reading aloud. Edmund sat on a footstool beside her, listening.
‘There’s a person to see Amelia, Ma’am,’ gabbled Mary Ann to the old lady, and stood aside to let Frederick enter the room.
Then she turned and leapt up the stairs, two at a time. ‘Amelia! Amelia!’ she called urgently as soon as she reached the landing.
‘Amelia!’ she called again, and knocked at Amelia’s door. ‘It’s your young man,’ she said, when Amelia’s face looked sleepily out. She must have been snoozing, not doing her homework at all.
‘My young man?’ Frederick never came to the house like this, only to call for her on Sundays. He must be coming to tell her that he was going to the war. Well, she must prepare to say goodbye to him. Her heart did another of its little leaps.
‘Young Goodbody, the soldier, God-forgive-him,’ said Mary Ann excitedly.
‘Yes, yes. Where is he?’
‘In the drawing room, of course.’
‘Oh, Mary Ann, not the drawing room!’
‘But where else would I put him? Guests are always shown into the drawing room.’
‘Yes, but Grandmama!’
‘What?’
‘Grandmama’s in the drawing room.’
‘Well, of course she is. She usually is, from the time the fire’s lit in the afternoon.’
‘Yes, but don’t you see? You can’t put Frederick with Grandmama.’
‘Why? She won’t eat him.’
‘She might. You know what her views are about warfare. Oh, Mary Ann!’ Amelia sat down hard on her bed and waved her feet agitatedly to and fro, occasionally scraping the toe of her boot on the floor.
‘Oh lawny!’ said Mary Ann, ‘I didn’t think of that.’ And she sat down beside Amelia on the bed and looked glumly at Amelia’s swinging feet.
‘There’s worse,’ she said quietly after a moment.
‘What?’ Amelia jumped up in agitation.
‘He’s in uniform.’
‘Oh!’ said Amelia. ‘Grandmama will surely give him dreadful abuse!’ And she did a nervous little gallop to the window and back.
A soldier in this house, and in uniform! It was unthinkable!
‘But he looks gorgeous in it, I have to say,’ said Mary Ann slyly.
‘Oh!’ exclaimed Amelia again. ‘Oh dear! Oh, Mary Ann, has he got a gun?’
A gun in this house was even more unthinkable.
‘No, no. What are you thinking of? This is a social call. He wouldn’t bring his gun into somebody’s house, now, would he?’
‘No, I suppose he wouldn’t. Thank goodness for that much, at least.’
‘Well, come on, anyway,’ said Mary Ann.
‘What? Where?’ Amelia looked around desperately.
‘Downstairs. You’ll have to go down to him.’
‘Me? Why? Oh, Mary Ann, I don’t want to!’ Amelia wailed. ‘No, I do. I do want to see him, but oh!’ And she sat on the bed again and clawed at the counterpane.
‘Well, you’re going to have to see him. He asked for you.’
‘Did he?’ Amelia’s face broke into a beam.
‘Well, of course, you eejit, you. You don’t think he came to convert your granny to the cause of England’s war in Europe, now, did you?’
Mention of Grandmama wiped Amelia’s smile off before it really had time to establish itself.
‘Heavens! I suppose not. I’d better go. Is my hair all right?’
‘It’s lovely. Go on, now.’ Mary Ann gave her friend a gentle shove out of the bedroom door and followed her step by step down the stairs.
Frederick stood in the little bay window, looking out at the tiny garden, where daffodils and irises nodded knowingly to each other and did occasional little stately twirls when the breeze changed its mind and turned back the way it had come from. Grandmama was reading in a steady voice to Edmund: ‘For whatever you do unto the least of these my brethren, you do it unto me.’
Edmund usually paid attention when Grandmama did Spiritual Reading aloud in the afternoons. He liked being read to, and he didn’t much mind what the substance of the reading was. But this afternoon, although he sat still at Grandmama’s knee, he wasn’t paying the slightest attention. His eyes managed both to be focused on Frederick and to have a faraway look at the same time. He was small for eight, still delicate, and dreamy with it.
Amelia stood for a moment in the doorway, wondering what to say.
‘There’s a draught, child,’ said Grandmama, looking up from her Bible. ‘Come in and close the door.’ She spoke as if there were no-one but family in the room.
Amelia turned and shut the door. Mary Ann was still outside it, bobbing anxiously up and down. Amelia gave her an appealing look, but what could Mary Ann do?
Mary Ann stood for a few moments in the hall and looked at the closed door. She could hear voices, but they were so muffled, she couldn’t tell who was speaking. Well, she could hardly stand there and listen, like a common housemaid. She was a cook-general, and she had a position to keep up. She threw one last look at the keyhole, and sauntered off back to the kitchen.
As she swirled the last of the water out of the sink, Mary Ann wondered if she should make tea for the little party in the drawing room. It was nearly teatime anyway, and there was a nice bit of seed cake. It wasn’t that she wanted to know what was happening in there, of course, but Amelia probably could do with a bit of moral support.
She was just resolving not to make tea after all – for Frederick Goodbody was in disgrace in the Quaker community, and it might only complicate matters if she were to appear with a teatray, and in any case, Mary Ann herself didn’t condone the war, no more than the Quakers did, though for rather different reasons – when she heard Amelia coming running down the hall and the kitchen door burst open.
Amelia’s face was pink and her eyes were shining.
‘You needn’t bother with tea for Frederick, Mary Ann,’ she said. ‘He’s left.’
‘Aw,’ said Mary Ann hypocritically, ‘and he didn’t even get a cup of tea in his hand.’ And she tutted and clucked as if she were disappointed.
‘Oh, bother tea!’ exclaimed Amelia and strode to the window, where she fixed her eyes unseeingly on the coal-bunker in the little yard and fiddled with the tassel of the holland blind.
‘Yer granny didn’t eat him, anyway, did she?’ Mary Ann ventured after a bit, as she got on with making tea for the household.
‘Oh no,’ said Amelia, in a strained, high-pitched voice. ‘She simply ignored him completely.’
‘What!’
‘She never took the slightest bit of notice of him!’ Amelia giggled, somewhat hysterically. ‘He might have been a piece of furniture someone had inconveniently delivered.’
‘Ach, the poor lad!’ said Mary Ann, sorry for Frederick in spite of herself.
‘She just went on reading to Edmund, as if there was nobody in the room.’
‘But why would she do that?’
‘Well, I suppose she disapproves so much of what he is doing that she couldn’t say anything kind or friendly to him, so she must have thought it best not to say anything at all.’
‘Isn’t she the cute one!’ said Mary Ann admiringly
. ‘She didn’t want to send him off to the Front with a flea in his ear, I suppose.’
‘It’s just as well she didn’t. Oh, Mary Ann, I was so afraid there was going to be the most fearful row, and Frederick was going to leave thinking badly of me. After all, he might never come back.’
Amelia looked grave all of a sudden and gave the tassel of the blind such a distressed yank that the blind came down with a clunk. She yanked at it again impatiently, and the blind shot back up the window, whisking the tassel indignantly out of Amelia’s hand.
‘Don’t go upsetting yourself, now, pet,’ said Mary Ann, pouring the boiling water onto the tea-leaves. ‘Sure he’ll be back safe and sound, God willing.’
‘Oh, Mary Ann, isn’t he splendid!’ Amelia swung around to face her friend, swirling her skirts as if to shake her anxiety out of them and turning a glad face to the world.
‘Well, I have to say a uniform suits him,’ said Mary Ann cautiously. ‘Very handsome, I’m sure.’
‘Yes, but I mean, isn’t he brave! Going off to fight like that, leaving his comfortable home and defying his family and going to defend his country.’
Amelia desperately wanted reassurance, Mary Ann could see that. She wasn’t anything as sure about the value of this war as she pretended. But one thing Mary Ann couldn’t offer her was assurance on this point.
‘I didn’t notice anyone threatening this country,’ she said at last.
‘Well, the Empire, I mean, defending the Empire.’
‘Hmmm,’ said Mary Ann. ‘I can’t say I have anything against the Germans myself.’
‘Oh, the Germans aren’t the point,’ said Amelia impatiently. ‘It doesn’t really matter who it is he’s fighting. It’s just the whole idea of marching bravely and … oh, it’s quite, quite wonderful!’
Amelia really was pushing it now, Mary Ann thought, trying to convince herself.
‘Here,’ said Mary Ann acidly, arranging the teatray. ‘You march bravely up to your grandmother now with that. I’ve a dinner to get ready.’ And she turned firmly away from Amelia and made clattering noises with saucepans.
Dawn Farewell
Amelia’s alarm sounded in the dark. It rang for some time before the small, neat nose of its young mistress peeped out from under the covers and twitched in a puzzled way in the crisp air of the very early morning. The alarm clock rang on, tirelessly flip-tripping its tiny, frantic drumstick against the little cup-shaped cymbals, and executing a small, angry dance on Amelia’s bedside table. At last the rest of Amelia’s face, and then, gradually, her head, shoulders and arms emerged, tousled and yawning, from her body-warm cocoon of sleep, and a blind hand groped the table top for the noisy metal beast and eventually put a stop to its irritable serenade.
Amelia sighed with relief as silence filled the bedroom, and then she flopped back onto her pillows. Why? she thought. Why so early? She opened one sleepy eye and observed the dark. It’s still the middle of the night. It’s not even dawn yet.
Dawn. The word was oddly familiar. Dawn. Good heavens! Amelia leapt from her bed and scrambled into her clothes, standing awkwardly on the sides of her feet, to avoid too much contact with the chill linoleum until she got her stockings on. Dawn. She’d promised herself that she would be there at dawn.
She wouldn’t bother to put her hair up. Her night-time plait was still secure. That would save time anyway. She’d just brush a few wisps out of her face and put her hat on.
She crept onto the landing and mounted the narrow, ladder-like stairs to Mary Ann’s room under the roof. Papa had constructed the stairway himself, to make the attic accessible, and Amelia had always thought it so romantic to sleep in a room at the top of a ladder – almost as good as sleeping in a tree-house or on a high bunk. Frederick would have a bunk at sea. She hoped he’d get the top one. It was more fun.
‘Mary Ann! Mary Ann!’ Amelia whispered urgently at Mary Ann’s door, and creaked it open softly. She needn’t have worried. Mary Ann was already dressed and brushed. She was twirling her braids into a loop to pin at the back of her head as Amelia’s anxious face appeared around the door.
‘It’s all right. I’m nearly ready,’ said Mary Ann, flinging a shawl around her shoulders and looking for a pin to keep it in place.
‘We won’t have time for breakfast, will we?’ Amelia’s voice was worried, but whether at the prospect of the delay breakfast would cause or at the thought of that long walk to the docks on an empty stomach, Mary Ann couldn’t tell.
Luckily Mary Ann had thought ahead: ‘No. But I made us a few jam sandwiches last night. We’ll collect them from the kitchen on the way out.’
Moments later, the two girls were trotting along the Lower Kimmage Road towards the canal in the murky light of the gas street lamps, munching their jam sandwiches as they went. The streets were eerily still, as well as dark, the houses all shut in on themselves and secretive, like hulking beasts with grievances.
‘It’s like being small again, isn’t it?’ remarked Amelia.
‘I dunno. I never got up in the middle of the night when I was small,’ said the ever-practical Mary Ann, with misgiving in her voice.
‘No, I mean the jam sandwiches. Nursery food.’
‘For them that has nurseries,’ Mary Ann rejoined.
Amelia, sensing Mary Ann’s disapproval of the whole escapade, said no more till they reached Christ Church, when she observed: ‘Oh look, there’s a definite glow in the east. We’d better hurry.’
‘Glow in the east, yer granny,’ said Mary Ann. ‘It’s not a poem we’re in. Anyway, sailing at dawn doesn’t mean they’ll raise anchor as soon as there’s a bit of pink in the sky. It just means they’ll be off early. It’s the tide they’ll be depending on, not the sun.’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Amelia, amazed at Mary Ann’s knowledge. ‘But at that rate, they might be gone already.’ And she quickened her pace again, almost running down the incline of Lord Edward Street.
‘Hold yer horses,’ yelped Mary Ann, coming up behind, ‘if they’re gone, they’re gone, and running now isn’t going to make any difference.’
‘Stop being so blessed logical, Mary Ann!’ Amelia called over her shoulder. ‘Just get a move on.’
And with a mutter, Mary Ann did.
They were in plenty of time. The boat didn’t actually sail for a good hour after they arrived, damp and breathless, at the North Wall. There was fierce activity: men (boys, in fact, a lot of them), all in matching rather lumpy looking khaki tunics and puttees, milling about in a cordoned-off area, waving and smiling to individual faces in the throngs of wives and mothers and sweethearts on the cobbles, a hubbub of talk and laughter and not a few tears, cries from the seagulls wheeling overhead, occasional deep-chested booms from the boat’s belly – a foghorn perhaps, clearing its throat – and endless whistles and shouts and bellows and roars from sailors and landlubbers alike, metallic rumblings as barrels were rolled up a gangplank and creaking as crate after crate was hoisted aboard by a giant crane, and everywhere the hysterical whinnying and clattering of horses and carts and traps and cars and drays and vehicles of every description, jostling for position on the quayside, the horses doing desperate little gavottes to stay upright and keep their cargoes balanced in the mêlée.
Suddenly there came a steady rumbling followed by an ear-piercing scream and with a rhythmic roar a train pulled up, almost beside where Amelia and Mary Ann stood and stared at it all. It wasn’t a proper station with a platform and a ticket office, just a sort of dead-end, but the train didn’t look at all disconcerted by its arrival, and it promptly disgorged more hordes, some in khaki, some in civvies, to join the fray. When it had satisfied itself that it had rid itself of its incumbents, the train gave another high-pitched yelp, spewed out filthy clouds of smoke, and nonchalantly shrugged its couplings and lurched off again, this time going backwards.
The ship was most disappointing. Amelia had expected a galleon, billowing on the waves, dotted about with blue and scarlet figures an
d with a fo’c’sle and a crow’s nest and all the usual accoutrements visible and obvious, with perhaps an agile deck-hand or two swinging from the ropes or cheerily waving a bandanna. But it was an unprepossessing, though exceedingly large, boat, all grey and black, rather like a very overgrown trawler, and about as romantic. No doubt it did have a fo’c’sle and all the other things ships are supposed to have, but these features were indistinguishable from chimneys and cranes and gantries and such unengaging appendages.
Amelia scanned the crowds for a sight of Frederick, watching out for a gleam of auburn in the dawn light that would identify his dear head. But of course all the men wore stiff peaked caps on their severe haircuts, and abundant chestnut curls were nowhere in evidence. She buttoned her cape more closely to her throat and miserably tore another bit off a jam sandwich.
All at once something started to happen among the khaki-clad rabble. It was like watching iron filings obediently lining up under orders from a powerful magnet. With unwieldy grace, the military throng started to align itself into rows and columns, and in a moment or two, they were all square and at attention. A band struck up. It played something noisy and cheery with a good deal of drumming and a few tootly bits at the end of every bar. This was more like it – a bit of brass and glory at last. The ranks of soldiers moved in rhythm, up, down, up, down, marching on the spot, and then, at a strangulated cry from someone with a powerful throat, they all moved forward as with a single step and approached the gangplank. The music played gaily on, and the civilians began to wave handkerchiefs, scarves, shawls, hats, neckties or whatever pieces of unattached clothing they could muster – even small children, in one or two instances – in time to its rousing beat. A great cheer went up as the first men marched up the gangplank and on board, never once missing the beat. Slowly, the whole battalion snaked up that plank, left-right, left-right, to the beat of the drum and the roar of the crowd.
Still peering for a glimpse of Frederick, Amelia loosened the kerchief at her neck and waved it with the best of them. All the other men here had families to wish them well and wave them off, Amelia was sure. He only had her, and he didn’t even know she was there. And Mary Ann of course. Not that you could count Mary Ann as a well-wisher. She was there strictly as Amelia’s friend, and she made that quite clear. She stood tight-lipped and unmoved as the crowd waved and cheered and swayed to the music.
No Peace for Amelia Page 4
