Half of the Human Race

by Anthony Quinn

  Will, feeling the strain of the conversation, said, ‘I think we should let Sister Callaway get on with her work.’

  Connie, relieved to be granted an escape, offered her hand to both visitors, and told Will that she would return later to put a new dressing on his wound. She had exited the ward and was halfway down the corridor when she heard pattering footsteps behind her. She turned to find Ada, her eyes as innocent as a mooncalf ’s beneath her hat. She blinked quickly as she spoke.

  ‘Sister, I – I must seem such an awful booby … I meant to say how very grateful I was – I am – to you for – for saving William’s life.’

  Up close Connie realised for the first time how young she looked. She was perhaps twenty-two or -three, though her small features and the cornflower blue of her eyes were confoundingly girlish.

  ‘That’s kind of you,’ she replied. ‘I’m glad to know he’s so – cherished.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Ada said earnestly. ‘William’s the dearest thing to me. That he might so easily have –’ She bit her lip, unwilling to say the word. ‘… well, I can’t bear to imagine it.’

  ‘You’ve been engaged for some time, I think?’

  She gave a nervous little laugh. ‘Such ages! Two and a half years now. As long as this wretched war goes on I can’t see how we’ll be married.’

  ‘It won’t last forever. And to have that love for one another is a comfort, I’m sure.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose,’ said Ada, sounding not at all sure. ‘William seems so very changed since, well …’

  Connie felt a surge of pity. ‘We’ve all changed. Those who have been in France more than most. William, I should say, requires rest, long rest. Then you’ll see him more like his old self.’ She saw that her words had exercised a consoling effect on the girl, whose brow had begun to clear.

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ she replied, then looked at Connie in a frankly appraising way. ‘I do wish I had your confidence! William sometimes chides me for being so – what’s the word he always uses?’ She frowned for a moment, then shook her head, as if it were no matter. ‘Well, thank you again, Sister …’

  Beaming at Connie, she turned on her heel and walked, with a little skip in her gait, back along the corridor.

  * * *

  The influx of wounded from France had maintained a steady momentum, and Connie hadn’t a moment to herself for the rest of that day. The balmy July temperature encouraged the less grievously injured men to rest outside in the square, where lime blossom and wallflowers scented the evening air. As the shadows were lengthening over the enclosure she went out to look for him. A group of men were singing a marching song in sad, low voices.

  Where are our uniforms?

  Far, far away.

  When will our rifles come?

  P’r’aps, p’r’aps, some day.

  And you bet we shan’t be long

  Before we’re fit and strong;

  You’ll hear us say ‘Oui, oui, tray bong’

  When we’re far away.

  Will was parked in his usual corner, his head propped at an angle against his hand. At first she thought he was asleep, but at the sound of her footsteps he looked up, his expression lost to thought. A book lay open on his lap, and she directed her eyes at it.

  ‘Enjoying it?’ she asked lightly.

  ‘Hmm? Oh …’ He picked it up and turned the spine outwards. ‘Housman. A Shropshire Lad. One of my men lent it to me.’ He didn’t bother to add that the man was now dead.

  ‘That was one of my father’s favourites.’

  Will nodded, pensive again. ‘I never much cared for poetry. But there were a few lines I came across today …’ He riffled the pages until he found his place, and read to her: ‘“Now in Maytime to the wicket / Out I march with bat and pad. / See the son of grief at cricket / Trying to be glad.”’ He looked up at her, and before he had even asked the question, she said, ‘Tam.’

  It was a strange comfort to him that she instinctively understood. ‘I still think about him,’ he said, ‘even when I was over there, where you’re surrounded by death the whole time. I kept his bat in my my dugout – d’you remember it?’

  ‘Yes. I do.’

  ‘I was going to give it to Louis –’ he began, and then wished he hadn’t. The bat had been a lucky charm for him, he was convinced. He had promised it to Louis on the day the war would end, when what he ought to have done was put it in his hands straight away – passed the luck on. Too late now. No, he couldn’t explain that to her, it would sound madly superstitious. When she realised he wasn’t going to say more, Connie decided to broach the subject she had discussed with her mother. It would mean so much to the Beaumont family, she said, if Will were to talk to them about Louis. ‘I think – it would make their loss a little easier to bear, perhaps …’

  He paused before answering. ‘I should have done so anyway. Only – would you mind if I waited a while? I’m not sure I can quite face them yet …’

  ‘But of course,’ she said gently. ‘You must wait until you’re well enough. And there’s your own family to think of.’

  Will shifted in his chair, and sighed irritably. ‘I’m sorry about this morning – my mother, pretending never to have met you before. Though in her case that might not be such a bad thing. And Ada – what on earth was … what did she say to you?’

  ‘Only that she was grateful, and happy that you were alive.’ She paused, puzzled by his brooding look. ‘Why should that annoy you?’

  ‘It’s not that. I’m –’ He stopped, and tried a different tack. ‘She’s very young, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes. And very devoted to you.’

  Will nodded, and was silent for some moments. He wanted to confess what was wrong to Connie without appearing disloyal. She would understand. But how, when he could barely understand it himself? ‘I think Ada and I ought to have married when we were – when everything was as it was. We lost, I don’t know, the thread of it. I mean, I’ve hardly even seen her these last two years …’

  ‘You weren’t to know that war would get in the way.’

  He shook his head gloomily. ‘And still she has this dependence on me, like – like a child. I tell her not be so passive, and she just looks at me … I hate this constant feeling of responsibility for everything. Is it too much to hope for a woman with a mind of her own?’ The irony of this privately amused Connie, who could recall times not so long ago when such an asset would have discomfited him. But she only stood there, listening, and Will finally threw up his hands in a hopeless gesture of resignation. ‘What would you do?’

  Connie stared at him levelly. ‘Do – about what?’

  ‘About this! I am engaged to be married to a woman who barely knows me. She hasn’t even asked me about the front, about what happened …’

  ‘Perhaps she is afraid to hear it,’ she said quietly.

  ‘So … what should I do?’

  ‘Please don’t ask me that. All I know is that Miss Brink loves you and expects to marry you. Beyond that it’s not for me to say.’

  Will heard the reproof in her tone, and looked away. ‘You’re quite right, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to burden you with it.’ He fancied – he hoped – that slipping in the word ‘burden’ would incline her to sympathy for his fretting, but instead she changed the subject.

  ‘You remember Fred, my brother? He’s coming home tomorrow.’

  ‘He got a Blighty?’

  She nodded. ‘Shot through the arm. My mother’s been beside herself. It will do us good to see him again.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear he’s safe,’ said Will. ‘Does he know yet about Louis?’

  She shook her head. ‘I dread having to tell him. They were close as boys, when we went on holiday together.’

  Will felt suddenly ashamed of his recent plaintive tone. What right had he to feel sorry for himself, safe on land while others were pulling against such a tide of grief? To be apprehensive about one’s matrimonial prospects was a privilege of the living, w
hose membership he had so very nearly relinquished. That he had not was entirely due to the initiative of the person before him.

  Connie was checking her watch. ‘Time for my evening rounds,’ she said by way of parting. ‘Do you need anything before I go?’

  Will shook his head, but as she turned to go he called her back. ‘There is one thing. About yesterday. I – I still haven’t thanked you for what you did.’

  She looked at him. A smile, tender and sad at once, made little parentheses around her eyes. ‘You’ll never have to,’ she said.

  The toll of overwork and exposure to viral illnesses finally caught up with Connie, and no sooner had Fred settled in at Thornhill Crescent than she was laid low with a fever. For more than a week she sweated and shivered beneath the blankets, only dimly aware of her mother’s ministering and the doctor’s daily visits. Fred, having expected to be cosseted as an invalid, instead found himself understudying his mother in the role of brow-mopper and broth-maker. It was characteristic of him that he saw the comic side of it. One morning, when Connie was at last well enough to sit up in bed, a knock sounded on the door and Fred walked in, holding a cup of tea. He set it on Connie’s bedside table with a slight rattle, his balance compromised by his other arm being in a sling.

  ‘How’s the patient?’ he asked.

  ‘Much better, thank you.’

  Fred responded to her rueful smile. ‘This is rich,’ he laughed. ‘I come home with my arm bandaged up, expecting my sister to nurse me. And deuced if I’m not employed as her medical orderly instead! I tell you, I’ve been up and down those stairs like a dog at a fair.’

  Connie wheezed out a laugh and took Fred’s hand. ‘What a dear you are. I shall write to your CO requesting he make your transfer here permanent.’

  ‘I shouldn’t bother. Ma’s probably written that one already.’

  They were still teasing one another when Mrs Callaway entered, with a sheaf of post in her hand. Since Fred’s return her customary air of fretful preoccupation had been superseded by a mood of almost girlish delight. Her only son had escaped, somehow, from a foreign field that was becoming synonymous with a national tragedy. Connie shared her relief – there was nobody more precious to her in the world – but she was worried by her mother’s apparent blindness to the fact that Fred would, eventually, have to go back. Mrs Callaway had put her hand against Connie’s forehead.

  ‘Your temperature is down, at last. This came for you a few days ago – but you were in no fit state to read it.’ She placed a letter on the counterpane. Connie recognised the handwriting, though she had not seen it for some years. She opened it and read:

  Silverton House

  22 July ’16

  Dear Constance,

  Allow me to hope that by the time you read this you are recovered from illness. I was sorry indeed not to be able to bid you farewell when I was discharged from Endell Street. Having asked after you, I was informed by one of the VADs that you were confined to bed with a fever. I trust you have been well looked after; also that your brother is safely returned from the front. I am now back at home, shuffling about with a stick and feeling very like an old man, although that may be the consequence of living so much around my mother. Unfair, I know – she has been in most things considerate. Ada calls here every afternoon.

  I have not forgotten your request regarding the Beaumont family. Even were I not conscious of a personal obligation to Louis’s memory, I would make the visit – simply because you asked me to. Eleanor will be coming down from London for the weekend, so I am at least assured of congenial company. Like everyone else she has been apprised of your heroic handiwork in the anaesthetic room, and she would very much like to thank you in person. May I take leave to effect a meeting between the three of us when I am back in London?

  These last weeks have passed for me in a kind of waking nightmare, yet I am grateful for an immense double stroke of good fortune: that I survived when so many have not; and that my path, miraculously, should have crossed yours again. That the one became consequent on the other should perhaps be counted the most remarkable blessing of the lot. It shall not be forgotten.

  Believe me, sincerely and indebtedly yours,

  Wm

  ‘It’s from William Maitland. He’s convalescing back at home.’ She looked to her mother. ‘He’s going to pay the Beaumonts a visit –’

  ‘Oh, he already has,’ broke in Mrs Callaway. ‘Mima telephoned to say that he came down to East Molesey last week and spent the afternoon with her and the girls – told them all about Louis, and how brave he’d been.’

  ‘That’s very decent of him,’ said Fred, looking at Connie. ‘He must have done it as a favour to you.’

  ‘No, not just that,’ said Connie thoughtfully. ‘He was very fond of Louis – they were friends at Oxford, remember …’

  Privately, however, she could not help feeling that Will’s swiftness to condole with Mima and her daughters was a gesture of respect to her. He could justifiably have claimed his injury as a reason not to travel; or else found some other excuse to put off what was an especially painful duty, knowing how beloved a son and brother Louis had been. It perhaps marked a change in him, she thought. He had not always been so readily sympathetic to those in need.

  Mrs Callaway was descanting on Will’s character: ‘… such delightful manners, too. Do you remember the day he stayed here for lunch?’ Connie could practically hear the cogs and wheels clicking away inside her mother’s head; so her next question did not surprise her. ‘… is he married now, Constance?’

  ‘No. But he’s been engaged since the war began.’

  ‘Oh …’ she sighed. ‘He did seem so very – eligible.’

  Connie exchanged a glance with Fred, who, protector of her feelings, saw his cue to interrupt. Opening the blind on the bedroom window, he remarked on the loveliness of the morning, and picked up the book on Connie’s bedside table. It was a library copy of The Mill on the Floss.

  ‘You could sit out in the garden and read,’ he suggested.

  Connie pulled a face. ‘I don’t feel quite up to reading at the moment,’ she admitted.

  ‘Very well, then, I’ll read to you. Why not – I seem to be doing everything else around here!’

  Will, wandering alone one afternoon, had stopped on the promontory just within the shadow of the castle ruins. To his right he could see over the Priory, its rich turf dug up and divided into allotments, to support the war effort. Men pushed wheelbarrows around the grid of the new encampment. His cricketing career seemed to belong to another age, though it was only two years since he had last walked out to the middle, bat in hand. From this vantage it was hard to imagine how the ground might ever return to its original guise. He surveyed the glimmering surface of the Channel, dotted here and there with patrol boats. A breeze was blowing north, and he became gradually aware of a distant crackling pulse. At first he couldn’t place it, and cocked his ear trying to ascertain which direction it was coming from. It was monotonous, the insistent pounding of it, like an early warning of thunder. And then, of a sudden, he knew it for what it was – the noise of the guns carrying from France. It seemed queer that it should have taken him nearly a minute to recognise a sound that had once lain on his skin, hummed in his teeth, for days on end. He thought he had left it behind for a while, the crump of those guns, but they would not be blotted out, not from twenty-five, thirty miles away. He stood there for a few minutes, mesmerised by its thin crepitant echo, until he forced himself to turn and walk away.

  His constitutional took him into town, where war privations had rendered the streets dowdy and lugubrious. Shop windows looked embarrassed by their paltry displays, and certain small hotels wore a look of drab defeat, as if the very buildings they inhabited were about to pack up and move elsewhere. Gildersleeves was still open for business, but even this august old stager looked weary around the edges, its stonework carious and its paint flaky. There simply weren’t the men around to keep the place in good re
pair. On a side street he happened to pass a little shop that specialised in sporting goods, one he used to visit when he was a boy. This too had closed down, and through its murky windows he could make out faded posters advertising this or that bit of paraphernalia – Wisden squash rackets and golf clubs, Gradidge’s ‘Imperial Crown’ cricket balls, Stedman wicket-keeping gauntlets. There was no sign of the ‘Tamburlain Repeater’, however. On his death the company which sponsored him had quickly withdrawn its patent; nobody would want a cricket bat with the name of a suicide on its splice.

  He looked at his watch, aware that he was delaying a call of duty. Last week he had received a letter from Beatrice Tamburlain, informing him that she was about to sell the family home and move away. In the course of clearing out the place she had hesitated over personal effects of Tam’s, removed from his flat in Prospect Place, and asked Will if he would care to take anything as a memento; otherwise it would all go ‘to a charitable institution’. He had suffered a dreadful stab of sorrow on reading that. The idea of his old friend’s possessions being anonymously dispersed seemed very hard to bear. With no great enthusiasm he caught the ’bus out of town and alighted at the quiet tree-lined road where the Tamburlain house stood, a place he had not visited since that January day he had come bearing the unhappy news. It was a house that depressed him, a tall redbrick of late-Victorian stamp with fussy gables and cloudy windows. It radiated an atmosphere of morose insularity. On hearing the bell ring within, he removed his cap and instinctively smoothed a hand over his oiled hair.

  Beatrice Tamburlain was one of the few people whose appearance seemed unchanged by the war, probably because she had looked grey and careworn from the first time he had met her. Inviting him inside with her demure, apologetic smile, she immediately became grave on seeing his walking stick.

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ he said. ‘I use it only because I occasionally become short of breath.’ He gave a brief and heavily edited account of the injury he had sustained, to which she listened with doleful clucks and sighs. They talked in the drawing room with its long view out to sea. Packing crates lay about on the floor in readiness for the removal men, and shrouding white sheets had turned the furniture into stage ghosts. Will enquired as to her plans.