by Ajay Close
He grabs her by the shoulders, his hands on her skin. Her breasts swing free of the gaping nightgown.
Now. Do it. Kick the blanket aside. Lie down with her. For once in your life, let passion be your master.
Maybe it happens, and they spend the rest of their days pretending it did not. Maybe this is the key to everything. To the tragedy of his life, and mine. Or maybe what gives it such power is the fact that it doesn’t happen. The lifelong regret.
‘You said, “The tiger is coming”.’
She laughs, disappointed. ‘We used to say it as children.’
‘You and Muriel?’
‘All six of us. The house in Dum Dum had a tiger-skin rug. When we were naughty Father used to tell us it would eat us.’
‘You lived in India?’
‘For a few years.’
The fearful, tantalised look on his face. Blazing sun, babbling tongues, strange gods. When he finally leaves Scotland, he will go north, to Norway, a land even colder and more costive than his own. But that is years away. Tonight, in this prison hospital, anything is possible.
‘The government would send you to Canada.’
‘To Canada?’ It’s the first she has heard of it. ‘As breeding stock, you mean? I hear they’re short of wives, but surely not so desperate as to risk me giving birth to a tribe of pyromaniacs.’
Why is he not smiling?
‘It could be arranged,’ he says, ‘if I gave them assurances.’
‘What assurances?’
A suspense in the air between them. Her nipples stiffen.
‘That I would conduct you there.’
That evening she eats a slice of toast with her cup of tea.
To Canada.
She has a life outside the gaol. Home, friends, family, a job. Her reputation. The campaign. All these are hers still, however remote they feel right now. He must know she would never give them up. And yet she can picture it. The snowbound village by the frozen lake. Her days in the schoolroom, his in the surgery. The rosy-cheeked children exhaling clouds of vapour. Evenings by the fire in their log cabin. The stitched furs covering their feather bed.
Or is it just the journey he has in mind? I would conduct you. Ten lost days neither here nor there. Sun-sparkle. Salt spray. Laughing gulls riding the air. The rocking ship on the rolling waves. Cut off from the world like a prison, but free.
HILDA
No white bread, no butter, no butcher’s meat, no front or back garden without its jungle of spuds, and no Billy.
If Hilda found Newton Abbot a drag before the war, it’s a thousand times more moribund now. Caleb the gardener’s son is boxed. And Tommy Hithe, and Peter Baxter, and Charlie Cavendish, and so many of those boys she danced with and fended off in cabs (with varying amounts of pep) the summer she came out. Ancient history now. She still sees three or four of her fellow debs, but they drink watery tea, not fizz, and the talk limps along to the pother of needles because they’re all knitting toe bags for the troops.
Argemone ffarington Bellairs is at the Front, pulling shrapnel out of wounded soldiers. Out there, everyone calls her Bill. It’s dangerous of course but by God we’re alive. Hilda would have given her right arm (or at least a little finger) to go with her, but the Ancestors wouldn’t wear it. About the one thing they’ve agreed on since the war started. Hilda told them ‘Billy will look after me’, and Pa snorted and mumbled something she couldn’t hear, but it didn’t take a genius to twig the gist when Mama shot him that cyanide look. So then Hilda and Mama went down to the shore to gather seaweed to dress the vegetable beds, and had a little chinwag about how worried Pa was with Gordon in Flanders, but with a son there’s no choice. Hilda could make bandages with the old biddies of the Townswomen’s Guild, or stand on the station platform handing out gaspers to the sailors on their way to Dartmouth, or even nurse the wounded Tommies in Paignton if she really had a vocation. Was it fair to put Pa through all those sleepless nights just so she could have an adventure? And if anyone needed nursing, it was her own sister.
So that was that.
Perhaps it’s just as well. Hilda’s not sure tending the sick is her cup of cocoa. This last year has been an absolute penance. Dodo off her chow, getting feebler by the day. Pop your head round the door and there she is, her cheeks that ghoulish bluey-white, mushroom shadows around her closed eyes. A goner, Hilda’s sure of it. She’ll lean right over the cot, put her ear to those papery lips. Nothing. And when she touches her: cold as croak. This grisly feeling in Hilda’s chest, as if her ribs are made of chalk. And suddenly she’s blubbing like a babe and pleading with a God she hasn’t prayed to since Sunday school. But even as she’s offering up her spiffy future as a femme fatale and famous painter, she’s in such a bate. What the hell is Dodo playing at? All those years she blazed like the sun in Hilda’s sky: hotter, wittier, more dazzling. And then the clouds closed in. At first Hilda was tickled pink – who wouldn’t be? – to find the chaps all staring at her. To find hers was the laughter Billy looked for when making a joke. But what’s the point, if Dodo’s not green with envy? A bit of honest competition, is that too much to ask? The fabulous Atkins sisters, the toast of fashionable London, the subject of endless debate: which one would you marry? But it’s not like that at all.
Appendicitis. Poor Donella. She nearly died, you know. One day Hilda wakes up to find her elder sister resurrected as a saint. And how is she supposed to compete with that?
For thirteen months Mama hardly leaves her bedside. She’s worn to a rag. Pa’s clothes are hanging off him. All those suits he had made in Burlington Arcade look like hand-me-downs from a happier man. Hilda’s practically an embarrassment, with her peachy cheeks and silky hair. No one throws parties any more. There’s no reason to get all dappered up and drink too much and flirt your eyes at the best-looking buck in the room. The best-looking bucks are all at the Front getting themselves boxed. That’s social success these days. Hilda can’t say any of this out loud. Even thinking it, she feels like a monster. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true. And even more monstrous, and every bit as true, is the thought that Dodo has hit the jackpot. Everyone admires a plucky invalid, especially during a war. The peakier she looks, the less she smiles, the more they adore her. It drives Hilda mad.
So when a plan is hatched to send Dodo up to Scotland to convalesce with Aunt Nellie and Uncle George, and to give Mama a break from the sickbed, Hilda’s not sorry to see her go. She could have gone too, but what’s the point of swapping the old biddies of Newton Abbot for the auld wifies of Perth? For the first month or so it seems she has made the right choice. Dodo’s letters are gratifyingly yawnsome. She spends her days trailing Aunt Nellie from the Girls’ Sewing Guild to the Red Cross Hospital where she stains her mitts making war dressings out of sphagnum moss. But in July there’s a twinkle of gold amid the epistolary dross. When Hilda gets back from the tennis court, Mama is at the bottom of the garden picking greengages, humming to herself.
Only Dodo could travel to a one-horse town in Scotland and bump into the last eligible bachelor in the kingdom.
FIFTEEN
I didn’t mind the boredom. The thing about nearly dying at the age of twenty-five is you emerge no longer young. You have knowledge you don’t want but can’t unlearn. All those war casualties didn’t shock me. I counted myself lucky not to be among them, but I wasn’t alive like Hilda or Gordon or Bill. I felt older than Aunt Nellie, with her sketchbook, her sewing-guild musical review and her sweet, girlish love affair with Uncle George. That was shocking to me. Kissing the top of his head when she found him at his desk. The poems he left in her workbasket. The feverish notes of a Mozart sonata leading me to discover them side by side at the piano, pink-cheeked, nimble-fingered, breathless with laughter.
I had been visiting Perth since I was three years old. Hilda and Gordon and I had crawled around on Auntie’s rugs, played house under her piano, shod her cat in walnut shells, tickled each other with the ostrich feathers she had worn to bob her
curtsey to Queen Victoria. Of the town itself I knew almost nothing. The River Tay. The big cathedral where Uncle George had married my parents. The flat stretch of common where the men played golf and the women hung their washing. On previous visits this had seemed enough. But now I was twenty-six. I had come out at court, attended the balls, danced with more amusing young men than I could remember, eaten kedgeree breakfasts with their mothers, clinked glasses with my own kind on the French and Italian rivieras and, receiving no offers of marriage, had almost died. It was time to make the best of things.
I borrowed Auntie’s bicycle and explored the Tay, drinking air sweet with the first hay crop. I watched the chuntering ducklings learning to fly, the swan patient on her nest. I saw an old man upto his thighs in cold river, casting and waiting and casting and waiting but never, so long as I stood on the bank, hoisting the silver salmon, and I thought: he has hope, but it doesn’t mar his pleasure in this moment.
Some days I accompanied Auntie to her good works. I met Lady Georgina Home-Drummond and Lady Cheyne and Miss Murray MacGregor of MacGregor and we talked about the young men they knew, my old dancing partners, now married or dead, or both. I tried to look too dignified to allude to a dead fiancé of my own. Better to be pitied for that than as an old maid. It may not be fashionable to talk like this now, but I didn’t make the rules. Women had all sorts of freedoms in that war. We took over the jobs the men had done, raised our hemlines, shed our underskirts, smoked, drank, but we all knew this time would come to an end. You had to be married. Only then could a man and a woman get on with living their separate lives.
I think now that the summer of 1916 was the happiest of my youth. The sun shone. The birds sang. The dust motes swam in the light streaming through the morning room window while the old cat purred on my lap. I had my aunt’s extensive circle of acquaintance and the run of my uncle’s library. They didn’t care whether I was married or not. The only bone of contention between us was my poor appetite.
And then Aunt Nellie came home all fired up about some act of rudeness at the war dressings.
As if Doctor Ferguson Watson did not have enough to do treating Scottish convicts and criminal lunatics, Perth Gaol now doubles as a camp for German prisoners of war. And with so many of his peers away at the Front, there’s a shortage of doctors in the town. He spends a couple of mornings a week treating the aches and pains of Doctor Stirling’s patients, and another afternoon at the Red Cross hospital checking for gangrenous wounds. One Tuesday, he casts his supervisory eye over the volunteers making surgical dressings.
He has not paid much attention to the stories about cowards being presented with white feathers. When the woman plants herself in front of him, he thinks she is going to ask him to look at the cyst on her neck. She is holding something, offering it to him. Ah. Now he understands. Conscription applies to men between the ages of eighteen and forty-one. He is doubly exempt, being forty-two (though looking ten years younger) and employed in a reserved occupation. Not that he wears his King and Country badge. He is not going to explain himself to anyone, least of all this sour-faced besom. ‘Excuse me,’ he says, not particularly civilly. The woman thrusts her feather in his face. ‘Excuse me,’ he says again, more distinctly. She remarks that better men than him are dying in Normandy.
He raises his voice, ‘For the third time, madam, will you let me pass?’
She throws the feather at him and stalks out of the room.
A grey-haired matron jumps to her feet. Wearily, he turns his gaze on her. These confounded do-gooders think they run the country. She says he must not think such rudeness typical of their town. If he will do her the honour of coming to tea on Saturday she will introduce him to as pleasant a selection of people as he could hope to meet. He laughs. He has been living in Perth twenty-seven months. This is his first invitation.
Aunt Nellie has held a couple of tea parties at Balhousie Bank since my arrival. I’ve cut cake for the diocesan ladies and passed the sugar to wounded soldiers and, frankly, my expectations of amusement that afternoon are not high. But I change into my periwinkle silk and get Aggie to dress my hair. Then I stand at the upstairs window, watching for the first guests so she’ll know when to put the kettle on.
It’s one of those blazing June days, the sun reflecting platinum off the pitched slate roofs, the silk dress sticking under my arms. How cool it looks down there in the garden, a faint breeze stirring the leaves. He slips through the gate. The boyish swing of his stride. His face flecked with shadow as he passes under the silver birch. ‘Dashing’ I will write, describing him to Mama, but the word I use to myself is ‘beautiful’.
Lady Cheyne and her thick-waisted daughter follow him up the path. The maid admits them all together. Already he regrets coming. Half an hour, then he’ll plead an ailing patient. There’s a long moment of silence after the introductions, before the cleric with the receding hairline takes charge of the conversation. Music, the servant shortage, the Somme.
Someone asks about the prison. Lady Cheyne’s nostrils flare, but she’s as curious as the rest of them. Does he have to do with murderers? Child-killers? Poisoners? Do they really deserve his cure? How can he bear to touch them? What’s the point in treating a man who’s going to hang? All these good God-fearing folk, so sadistically avid. He feels like telling them to go to hell. Across the room, his hostess catches his eye, her brows lifting. Up and down, so quick, no one else sees. It occurs to him that she has invited these people expressly to meet him: the first act of unambiguous kindness he has received in this town. So he tells them about prisoners flogged with the cat o’ nine tails in Peterhead Gaol, the knotted ropes wrapping twice around their stomachs, the roars heard as much as a mile away, the permanent scars and the lifelong deterrent. He’s never known a prisoner risk a flogging twice. In fact, there was one man so terrified . . .
He stalls mid-sentence.
I have been downstairs, fetching more hot water. As I enter the parlour, Aunt Nellie inclines her head to draw me towards her. He stops talking. I can feel him staring at me, my hair, my brow, the way the light strikes my face. I leave my aunt and cross to the window. He is sweating. The guests smile politely, waiting for him to continue. He excuses himself.
‘Arabella.’
He takes my hand. I turn to look him full in the face.
‘I beg your pardon.’ We say it together.
He drops my hand, gives me the most desolate smile. ‘I thought . . .’
‘I was somebody else—?’
He can’t take his eyes off me.
‘—Are we so very alike?’
‘In profile.’ Still he stares.
Behind his eyes, his brain starts working. Any moment now he’ll return to Lady Cheyne.
‘I’m sorry I startled you.’ Touched me, he means.
I think about her, this woman I do and do not resemble, this fascinating person who knew how to make him fall in love with her. My colour heightens becomingly. I can feel it happening. As if I’m turning into somebody else. My eyes glitter, my lips soften. I smile.
‘I’m Donella,’ I say, ‘Nellie’s niece, up from England. Though I was born in America.’
He is the last guest to leave. Reaching the garden gate, he looks up. The big house looms against the evening sky, the windows too dark to see in. What is he thinking? Does he know I’m watching him? He suspects, just as I suspect he is letting himself be seen, but we could be wrong. It’s the possibility of error that makes it so delicious. He has never taken a girl out to the theatre or a concert or even for a walk, unless you count his cousin Jeannie when they were students at Glasgow and living in her father’s house, but he knows he will court this woman he has just met. Does he fight the return of these feelings he thought dead? Does it occur to him to spare me? How completely I match his desires. Young, intelligent, spirited, yielding, with that dark-haired, white-skinned loveliness that tears at his breast. The odds against our meeting dumbfound him. A gentlewoman, presented at court, my home five
hundred miles away. His first invitation in two years. He has no time for superstition but, all the same, it feels like fate.
So much like fate that he sees no need to engineer another meeting. When a week has passed with no word, I accompany Aunt Nellie to the war dressings. He doesn’t show. I sit there, rolling sphagnum moss in my best frock. So much has happened since I met him. When I leave the house the recruits being drilled on the North Inch follow me with their eyes, no matter how the sergeant major yells at them. Twice a week I help out at the patriotic barrow in the railway station, distributing tea and buns to the troops. They whistle. The bolder boys shout give us a kiss! It’s not just that I’m using Vaseline on my eyelashes, a little rouge on my cheeks. I’m alive again.
The following Friday there is a charity night at the theatre in aid of the Red Cross. During the interval Aunt Nellie and I sell refreshments in the little bar off the grand circle. Tea and coffee threepence a cup. Quite a scrum in here. No matter how quickly we fill the cups, the queue never seems to shrink. A man’s hand holds out a pound note. I take my time looking up, enjoying the secret thread that stretches between us. Admiration in his blue eyes, along with something keener-edged. ‘I’m not sure I can change that,’ I say, demure and provocative. He says he doesn’t need change, as it’s for a good cause. How badly he wants to impress me. A whole pound! He could have me for sixpence. But the last thing he wants is a bargain.
Look at us, laughing at nothing together as the bell rings to call us back to our seats. Are we so different from other couples? Don’t they all have this double vision: the man in love with a slightly different woman, and the woman so eager to please?
