I could feel my face flushing red.
“I only let you stay here because I expect you not to speak,” Father said. “You don’t understand these matters. That’s all there is to it.”
He sent me to my room. Tom forced a smile as I went, but I could hear their row go on as I went upstairs.
I shut myself away, and stared out to sea. I suppose I should have been hurt by Edgar, and Father, but I’m used to their ways. That’s just how Father is, with everyone in the house. Not just me. Mother, too. I wonder sometimes what she was like when they got married, but I can’t picture her. I only know her as she is now, at Father’s beck and call. But I know he loves us, really. I know he does. And Edgar, well, it’s simply that it’s not that long since we were children, and we had fun sometimes. It’s just sad it’s not like that anymore. We’ve all crossed a line; it has to happen sooner or later. Even Tom and me. I know I’ll never be as close to him as when we were children, however much I try.
I could half see my reflection on the glass, and half the world outside. Across the waves, not so very far, I could imagine France. Everyone I knew was excited about the war, everyone in town, and we heard later there had been mass celebrations in London, in Trafalgar Square.
I looked across the water to France, and felt like the only person in the world who thought the war was a bad thing. That only bad things would come of it.
98
As I came down to breakfast this morning I heard my parents talking. I was late. Mother had let me sleep in after the business with the accident.
Something made me wait awhile on the darkness of the stairs. I gripped the mahogany banister tightly, feeling its familiar smooth, dark surface under my touch. I remember sitting there as a child, watching Cook and the previous maid going about their business. I’m far too tall to sit on the stairs anymore, though somehow I’d still like to.
Then I heard Mother say something about the tram.
“Nonsense!” Father said, loud enough for me to hear clearly.
Quickly I moved down to the bottom of the stairs. My hand hovered by the dining room door handle. I knew if I went in they would stop talking.
“But Henry,” she said, “what if we had got on? We might have been desperately injured. Even killed.”
I didn’t hear Father’s reply.
“Well, you explain it, then,” Mother said.
“I don’t need to because it’s ridiculous.”
Suddenly I heard Father walking to the door. It sprang open.
“Alexandra!” he snapped. “Always watching, always prying!”
He plucked his coat and hat from the stand and went off to work.
“Father, wait!”
He had left his armband behind.
As soon as the war started he had been sworn in as a special constable of the Brighton Borough Police. He goes patrolling the streets two or three nights a week. What for, I don’t know, but he has to wear an armband to show his status.
He looked at me and took the armband.
“See if your mother needs help,” he said as he left.
“With what?” I asked. The door was already shut.
What with being a special constable and his work at the hospital, he is hardly at home these days. The New Grammar School was only open for a year before the war turned it into the Dyke Road hospital, which Father now runs. It’s not the only school that’s become a hospital.
In the evening, while Father was still patrolling, I tried to talk to Mother while she sat doing needlework.
“Mother,” I said, “are you all right now?”
She stopped and looked at me.
“What do you mean, Sasha?” she asked, smiling.
“After the accident,” I said. “I thought—”
Her smile disappeared. “We weren’t hurt, were we? Whatever do you mean?”
“I know, but it was such a shock!”
She looked away.
“Yes,” she said, “we had a lucky escape. If you hadn’t . . .”
She paused.
“What?”
She didn’t answer, so I tried again.
“What? If I hadn’t told you I didn’t want to get on the tram? Is that what you mean?”
“I’m busy, Alexandra. Don’t pester me.”
The moment was lost. I wasn’t Sasha anymore, I was Alexandra. But I wouldn’t let it drop.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” I said. “That’s what’s bothering you. How did I know we shouldn’t get on the tram?”
“That’s enough!” she said. “You didn’t know we shouldn’t get on. I decided not to. We had a lucky escape. That’s all.”
“But I knew!” I insisted. “I knew.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she shouted, with sudden anger. “Now go to bed before your father gets home.”
I was so amazed that she’d shouted at me that momentarily I stood motionless; then I ran upstairs.
My room, like the sitting room, has a clear view of the sea, even from the bed. It’s the most wonderful thing I have, my view. I can see across the little gardens that belong to the whole street, then away over town to the sea itself. When we moved into Clifton Terrace I begged to have the room in the attic so I could see the sea, and though Edgar and Tom protested, I got my wish. I think it was the only time I ever made a fuss as a child.
I sat on my bed, and wondered. I wondered about the war, and what it was doing to people. But can I really blame the war for the arguments between Father and Edgar, and Tom? Or for Mother’s shouting at me? Or are those things there anyway, but just not seen until now?
Night waves washed along the summer shore, like a gentle thunder in some show of pretending. I gazed across the sea to the real night horizon, and felt the storms over the water. I knew the thunder rolling across the fields of France was no pretense.
97
It was a bright and bone-chilling day today, a sign that winter is not so far away.
I went out for the first time since the accident. A piercing wind sailed in off the sea and up Ship Street as I went down to the seafront. It cut right through me even though Mother had made me put on my warmest overcoat.
It was on another sunny day, though a warm August one, that Edgar went away to join the army. He decided to put his training to become a lawyer on hold, and didn’t go back to Oxford that autumn. Instead, Father made some ’phone calls, and just as he said, Edgar got a commission. He had been on OTC camp; he had been to a good school. The army was eager to have him. He spent a couple of months at the regimental depot, learning to drill and be drilled, and whatever else officers need to know.
For a while he wrote to us, complaining that the war would be done before he had even started, but he need not have worried. The news from France was bad. There was a miserable article in the Sunday Times about heavy British losses, and the general invincibility of the German army. Even though the war had really only just begun, it had become a dreadful stalemate, and wounded were arriving in Folkestone and Harwich every day.
They had said it would all be over by Christmas, but Christmas came and went, and the war stayed. In the new year Edgar got the posting he had been waiting for, and went to France. Since then most of another year has come and gone, and still there is nothing but the war.
96
On many occasions I’ve asked Father if I might help in the hospital, but he says nursing is no occupation for a girl from a respectable family. If the truth be told, he thinks I shouldn’t have any occupation at all, but just wait for someone of the right sort to marry me. The right sort means rich, and from a good family. But I want to do something. I think I really do want to be a nurse. It goes way back to when I was tiny; I always wanted to be useful, but when you’re a little girl no one takes you seriously. You’re not allowed to help people.
People like Clare.
I was only trying to help, but somehow that day put a wall between me and my family, a wall of guilt and fear.
I’ve grown up no
w, and I still want to nurse. Edgar is mean to me about it. Ever since I was little he teased me, saying I would be scared, and that I would faint as soon as I saw blood. Then Tom would tell him to shut up and they’d start to fight instead, until I would cry and that stopped them both.
But I think things may have changed, because I heard Mother and Father talking this evening after they’d gone to bed. I can often hear them from my room. I don’t think they realize how thin the ceiling and floor is between their bedroom and mine.
I stopped brushing my hair and bent down to the floor, pressing my ear against the boards.
“She’s quite a young woman now,” I heard Mother say. “She’s pretty, but she’s even more intelligent. And she’s seventeen. You know she wants to do something.”
“It’s still not the sort of thing she should be engaged in,” Father replied. “You don’t know what they’re like, Dorothy. They’re a rough bunch of girls.”
He meant the nurses in his hospital.
“Perhaps,” Mother said, “but they do the job that needs doing. And the war is changing things.”
“Don’t preach to me about my own profession,” Father said, curtly. “If Alexandra becomes a nurse, you know the sort of people she’ll have to deal with.”
“She could join the Women’s Emergency Corps. That’s only for decent women. The uniform alone costs two pounds.”
Father snorted.
“If by ‘decent women’ you mean suffragettes . . .”
“Well, she’ll have to do something. Sending her to Miss Garrett’s for private tuition is all very well for now, but what then? You know what she’s like. All that sitting, watching. She should have something to occupy her.”
“Are you talking about Alexandra now? Or do you mean to bring up your own complaints again?”
“No, Henry, no,” Mother said, quickly. “You know I’m content. Really. But Alexandra . . .”
“Maybe,” Father said. “We’ll see.”
“And she’s always wanted to be a nurse.”
“And you know why!” Father said, suddenly raising his voice. “You know when it started!”
Mother hushed him and their voices fell quiet, so that I couldn’t hear any more.
So there was hope after all! I couldn’t sleep for a long time, but when I did I dreamt of playing with Clare in that summer garden, where she was alive once again.
95
Last Easter, about six months ago, Edgar came home on leave. We sat around the dining table at Sunday lunch, just as we always had, but something was not the same.
Although he’d been away for just a few months, Mother stared at him as if she’d never seen him before. He looked very smart in his captain’s uniform, it was true.
“Well, my boy,” Father said, beaming. “Tell us about the army.”
Tom pulled a face, which only I saw.
“Actually, it’s been a pretty dull show,” Edgar said. He couldn’t hide his disappointment. “We’ve been in reserve mostly. And the other officers . . . I get a hard time because I’m a special reserve captain.”
“Never mind,” Mother said, smiling. “You’re doing your best.”
Father nodded. “Your chance will come.”
“Yes, you’re right,” Edgar said. “And you’ll get your chance too, Tom, after all. You’ll be eighteen in July.”
We all looked at Tom.
“Well, Thomas?” Father said. “Edgar’s right.”
“I want to be a doctor,” he said, slowly.
That afternoon, we went out for a stroll along the seafront, past the West Pier, and along to Brunswick Lawns. What a fine, proud family we must have looked. Mother and Father arm in arm. Father was well known, and respected, and men nodded to him as he walked, with his children behind, me in the middle, Tom on the right and Edgar on the left, in his uniform.
The lawns were very busy, though before the war they would have been packed on a fine afternoon, and the ladies’ clothes much more flamboyant. We passed a family we knew, with their invalid son in a chair. Father had treated the boy for many years, though without much success. His father smiled as we passed.
“What a fine daughter you have, now, Mrs. Fox!” he said, and Mother smiled, but I thought about their son. I looked away.
The sun shone and gulls cried overhead when suddenly, I saw a flash of color at our side. I looked round to see a young woman in a dark blue dress approaching us. She had two friends with her, girls a little older than me, also in expensive dresses. Before we even knew what was happening, the girl was talking to Tom.
She was very pretty, and at first Tom smiled as she pressed something into his hand.
Tom looked down at what she’d given him and his face fell. It was a white feather.
The girl muttered something and hurried off to rejoin her friends.
“But I’m not even eighteen yet,” Tom protested as she went.
We went home straightaway, and no one said a word.
94
When we got in there was an awful row.
Edgar didn’t even have to say anything. The look on his face was enough to tell Tom what he was thinking.
“The disgrace!” Father snorted. The white feather meant the girls thought Tom was a coward, shirking his duty in the war.
“But I’m not even eighteen,” Tom said, again and again. “Why didn’t any of you tell them that?”
“But it’s true!” Edgar said. “You don’t want to go to war. It doesn’t matter what age you are or aren’t. There’s a name for people like you!”
“Edgar!” Mother cried. “Stop it.”
Without realizing it, I held her hand.
“It’ll only get worse,” Father said, “the older you get. When people know. You have to do your bit.”
“Is that all you can ever say?” Tom shouted at Father. I shuddered. None of us has ever raised our voice to him, but strangely, Father let it pass.
“That’s all that counts,” he said.
“What?” asked Tom. “Going to war? Killing?”
“Not killing,” Edgar said. “Doing your bit. That’s all. Fighting for what’s right.”
“You haven’t even done any fighting,” Tom spat at Edgar.
That really upset him. He stormed over to Tom, and for a moment they looked like they did when they were young boys, Tom trying to stand up to Edgar, even though he is five years younger, and so much weaker.
“That’s not my fault,” Edgar shouted. “And when I get the chance, I’ll fight. I’m no coward!”
“Is that what you think I am?” Tom said angrily.
Maybe Edgar hadn’t meant that. I don’t think he did, but now the word was spoken, it seemed impossible he could take it back.
“Yes. Coward.”
Tom stood rigid, his face drained, his teeth clenched. He took a deep breath.
“All I want to do,” he said finally, “is to go to medical school. I’d rather save men here than kill them over there.”
He stepped past Edgar, and, avoiding Father’s eyes, made his way upstairs as calmly as he could.
93
When we were children, we fought about little things, and sometimes Tom and Edgar would fight because Edgar had been mean to me. It seemed deadly at the time, but we all grew up, and the years between Edgar and Tom and me began to tell. The two of them bickered instead of punched, and while Tom and I were still close as we got older, Edgar grew distant, and paid me no attention.
The argument over the white feather reminded me of all that. Except now we were fighting about something truly deadly.
That was six months ago, the Easter of 1915. Edgar went back to the war, and got his wish. He wrote to us that his battalion was being called up from reserve and would soon see real action. Mother is very worried, but tries not to show it. Father is proud.
Tom has gone, though not to the war but to Manchester to study medicine.
I miss him. My brother who is almost a twin to me, although there is a year
between us.
But something good has happened. I don’t know why, but Father has finally agreed to let me spend some time on the wards at the Dyke Road hospital, to see if I want to go into nursing properly.
At last! This is my chance to show everyone that I can be useful, that I can help people.
Tomorrow, I will see what the future has in store for me.
92
“Sister Cave will take you round,” Father said. “Stick next to her. Don’t say anything unless she asks you a question, do everything she tells you to. And don’t get in anyone’s way.”
He walked away down the dimly lit corridor. Sister’s about my mother’s age, I suppose, and quite friendly, but I felt nervous. If anything were to go wrong Father would never let me come back.
We pushed through the half-glass doors and were in the ward.
“Wait here while I get the trolley,” Sister said.
Ahead of me I could see the beds, but it was nothing like a normal hospital ward. The building had been built as the new boys’ school only two years ago, but as soon as the war had started it had been commandeered as a military hospital. In this makeshift arrangement, the beds are crushed in tight together.
It was all very quiet. I don’t know what I’d been expecting but I was surprised that there wasn’t more noise. I took a couple of steps forward, and noticed another room opposite the one Sister had gone into.
The door was open. Something made me take another step and I saw a man in pajamas sitting on a wooden chair. He was young, but had thinning hair.
He gazed intently ahead, but when I came closer, I saw nothing but a blank white wall.
I jumped as I heard a clatter behind me, and turned to see Sister wheeling the trolley toward me.
The Foreshadowing Page 2
