by Annie Murray
The rain was still pelting down. Jess looked at the clock. Normally Polly would be on her way out by now. It was her night for going to Mrs Black’s.
‘Not going out tonight, Poll?’ Jess asked, wiping the bread round her dish.
‘No—’ Polly had Grace on her lap and was dipping little bits of bread in her broth, feeding them to Grace on a teaspoon while trying to feed herself and keep her daughter’s inquisitive hands from tipping the bowl over. ‘One soaking’s enough. Hark at it out there! I’ll leave it for this week.’
She still clung to her messages from Ernie as one of the few things that kept her going. Jess once asked her whether it might be a good idea to stop, try and put his death behind her for good.
‘I can’t, Jess,’ she said. ‘Not yet. It’s too much for me on my own. I need him to help me – I know that sounds like nonsense to you, but it’s true. It’d be different if we could bring his body home – have a proper burial and a funeral and that. But being out there – I know ’e’s gone really, in my heart. But it ain’t finished. There’s too many of ’em all just to go like that, for good.’
Jess half understood Polly’s need, although she’d never gone back to the Blacks’ spiritualist sessions with her. The experience of going once had been unsettling enough. Most of it was a trick, she was sure: so obvious to anyone who didn’t desperately want to believe it wasn’t.
‘It gives them comfort,’ she told Olive. ‘You can feel it. Everyone’s so sad, and it makes ’em feel better. I think it’s harmless enough.’ But what about what happened when she’d asked to hear from Alice? What if that had been real? It had certainly seemed convincing at the time. She hadn’t mentioned the incident to Olive.
Sometimes, usually in the dark of the night, she found herself wondering about Alice, fancying a plea, a cry coming from her, something unfinished that it was her responsibility to act upon.
That’s just daft, she’d say to herself when daylight came. Getting the heeby-jeebies in the night! But she knew instinctively that she wanted to know more, as if her grandmother’s fate was a key to something in herself. She found nowadays that she could ask Olive more about the family. A dam had been breached and she would try to remember details about Alice, about Louisa. Jess was hungry for the information, was beginning to understand more fully her aunt’s contradictory feelings towards her sister: the great protective love for a younger sister, mixed with enormous bitterness and resentment that Louisa had been absent through so much of the grief and trouble they’d endured, that in marrying first, she had escaped it again. Jess was watching her aunt, thinking about these things, when Polly looked up, her chin close to the top of Grace’s tufty head.
‘I thought I might pop in next door again – a bit later on like. When the younger ones’ve gone up.’
Olive paused, spoon halfway to her lips. She looked concerned. ‘Why don’t yer leave it for a bit, Poll? Yer said ’e daint take too kindly to yer going last time.’ She was worried about Polly’s preoccupation with John Bullivant.
‘I hear ’im – the way ’e keeps moaning and carrying on. It’s terrible, Mom. Heartbreaking. No one should ’ave to suffer the way ’e is. ’E was a big strapping bloke before. And she’s at ’er wits’ end. I know ’e’ll most probably tell me to get out. But how’s ’e ever going to have any sort of life again if all ’e does is sit there?’
Polly leaned in close to the Bullivants’ front door, trying to shelter from the rain. Mrs Bullivant opened it cautiously, unused to visitors at this time of night, and hurried her quickly into the hall out of the wet. She held a lamp in one hand and they stood in its arc of light.
‘Anything the matter?’ She sounded tense, had guessed why Polly had come. Polly’s hands had gone clammy. He’s only a man, she told herself. An injured man, that’s all. What was there to be so nervous about? But she was frightened: at the same time she felt compelled to be here.
‘I just thought I’d pop in and say hello to John again. Wondered if ’e’d like a bit of company? I know it’s late, only I’m at work again now.’
‘Well, I don’t know . . .’ Marion Bullivant kept her voice low. ‘’E’s not been too good today.’ She worried at her lower lip with her teeth. Polly’s heart went out to her.
‘I’m ever so sorry.’
‘Oh, you’ve got yer own troubles, Polly. I know that. Look, come in, but I don’t know what sort of welcome you’ll get.’
Through the back, Mr Bullivant, a dark, stocky man, was asleep in a chair beside the same sort of puny fire that burned in their grate next door. The room was cold, although it had a cosy atmosphere, plates and cups tidy on shelves and the range and little ornaments on the mantelpiece. Close to Mr Bullivant sat Lottie, who was twelve, fiddling with a tangled skein of wool. She looked up at Polly and smiled, but also glanced anxiously across at her brother.
‘Awright, Lottie?’ Polly greeted her. ‘’Ello, John.’
There was no reply from John Bullivant, seated in his wheelchair which was pushed up close to the table. The way he was sitting you couldn’t see his injury. He just looked like a man reading the paper, elbows on the table, hands making a frame round his face. For a second Polly imagined him getting up, walking across the room, like before.
She pulled up a chair to sit down by him. As she did so she saw him wince as if she had hurt him, or he was afraid she would.
‘For Christ’s sake watch it!’ He bellowed so loudly that Polly jumped. Mr Bullivant stirred, opening his eyes. John’s face was contorted with rage and pain.
‘I’m sorry,’ Polly stood gripping the back of the chair. ‘What did I do? Did I hurt yer?’
She knew she hadn’t touched him. It was as if pain surrounded him like a magnetic field.
‘What do you want?’ he said, more quietly, but with such contempt that Polly cringed.
‘John—’ his father warned.
‘I just came to see yer. Thought you might like a bit of company.’
‘Come to have another look at the cripple, ’ave yer?’ he propelled himself back from the table. ‘There yer go then – ’ave a good look.’
‘I didn’t come to . . .’
‘LOOK, I said!’ Again, a loud bawl, which sent his mom and dad into protests that he should stop it and calm down, Polly was trying to be kind.
Polly clung to the back of the chair and did as she was ordered. John sat with his shoulders thrown back in an awkward, helpless posture. Polly thought, you don’t see how much the legs do, even sitting down, until they’re gone. She looked down, past his strong, barrel chest to the thick stumps, sawn off mid-way between knee and groin. There was nothing repulsive in the sight, barely even shocking. He was covered, dressed. It was unnatural to see, but the full horror of it came when she slowly moved her gaze upwards, over his thin, taut face. He had grown back his moustache, but when their eyes met, she felt herself go cold at the expression in his.
‘Now get out.’
‘Oh don’t, John!’ His mother stood over him, her hands squirming round each other. ‘Polly’s just come out of friendliness – to see if yer’d like a chat.’
‘A chat! What in hell’s name does she think I’ve got to chat about? Go on – out. Bugger off out of ’ere!’
‘Awright—’ Polly shifted towards the door. Her knees had gone weak. ‘I’m going . . .’
‘I’m sorry,’ Mrs Bullivant said in the hall. ‘I did warn yer. I just don’t know what to do with ’im for the best, that I don’t . . .’
‘It’s awright.’ Polly was shaken by the intensity of John Bullivant’s self-loathing. ‘I s’pose I shouldn’t’ve come.’
‘No – I’m sure it’s what ’e needs. It’s just – well, it’s taking a bit longer than we thought . . .’ She trailed off, her voice desolate.
‘Any news of the others?’ Polly asked.
The woman nodded. ‘They’re awright, for the moment. Look—’
Polly stopped with her hand on the door handle.
‘
’E won’t see anyone – pals of his, nothing. Course, most of ’em ain’t home anyhow. But the couple that are’ve given up . . . I hardly dare ask this, but . . .’
‘I’ll come again,’ Polly promised. ‘In a while.’ She squeezed Marion Bullivant’s hand. ‘’Ave the best Christmas yer can manage, love.’
Thirty-Four
Ned was let out of the convalescent home at the end of February 1918. His leg was healing reasonably well, and the doctor said he should soon be able to progress from walking with a crutch to a stick. Eventually, perhaps barring a very slight limp, he should be back to normal. He didn’t say ‘fit for duty’ but Ned knew that was what he meant.
‘You’ll be able to come and stop with us, son,’ his mother said. She was looking forward to having him there, he could tell. His brother Fred was in France, and she had at least one of her sons where he belonged – at home. She was longing to look after him, fuss round him.
He felt like a stranger in his parents’ house, although every inch of it was disconcertingly familiar. He spent the first few days resting, waiting to feel normal, to find himself again. More mobile now, he soon became restless. He couldn’t concentrate on anything, and found himself wandering without purpose from room to room, looking at things. There was the table at the back where he had eaten breakfast and tea every day of his childhood. His bedroom – also at the back – overlooked a short strip of garden where his mother grew marigolds and pansies in neat beds, though now she had taken some of them up for vegetables. He saw the same old wooden bedstead, the faded hazelnut brown eiderdown, the little table where he had done his homework with scratches and ink marks and in the top right-hand corner, a hardened patch of glue. His father’s chair with the round patch worn thin and oily where his head rested. Things from which he now felt cut off: a past when he had been innocent of both love and war.
‘How d’yer feel today?’ his mother asked every morning, carrying him up a cup of tea on a little tray. Even the cups and saucers were unnervingly familiar.
‘Not too bad,’ he’d say. ‘Better.’
In truth he felt nothing, or rather could not find the place in himself where feeling should be. But he couldn’t say this. It was too strange and difficult to make sense of this state he was in.
In the hospital there had been the other men, the ones who knew the Front, had seen the same sights, the commonplace horror, the things impossible to describe – or perhaps possible if anyone ever asked, which they did not. They avoided the subject as if it was personal and embarrassing. It was too far from them. Back here he was supposed to put it behind him, to forget: he protecting them and they him. Here at home, he reverted to the state of a child, sitting for hours at a time in the back room, watching thin winter sunlight etch the bright, distorted shape of the window on the carpet. His mother brought him food on invalid trays. She would come and sit opposite him with her own dinner balanced on her knee, and he learned, watching her hold her knife and fork, that her knuckles had begun to swell and she told him they ached. She looked much older than when he’d left, her hair steely grey, the white catching the sun from the window. She talked about the neighbours, snippets of amusing or reassuring – never bad – news. In the evening his father came home. Sometimes they went down to the pub together where Ned went through the motions of talking to people, being modest when they called him a hero because of his medal, being cheerful and grateful to be alive. He was grateful – of course he was. He was also thankful for their affection but he could barely breathe at home. He knew he had to get away.
The pressure they put on him was gentle at first. It started in the hospital, after the delirious days of fever had passed and he was cooler, weak, but able to talk.
‘We thought, in a day or two, Mary could come in and see you,’ his mother said.
Ned looked into her face. At that moment he didn’t care who came. ‘What good will that do?’
‘Well – she wants to see you. I don’t think they’ll let Ruth in here, but all in good time. It’ll give you two a chance to have a talk together, won’t it?’
‘But Mom—’
‘She wants to see yer.’ In a sterner voice she added, ‘She’s your wife, Ned. Of course she’s going to visit yer.’
He had started to cry.
‘There, there.’ His mother kept patting his arm. ‘Oh dear, never mind, love, never mind. Least said soonest mended.’ She interpreted his tears as those of remorse. They had decided to act as if Ned’s behaviour before he went away had been a few weeks of madness, an aberration so offensive to their respectable social standards that they could ignore it and treat him as if it had never happened. They wanted their son back from years before: a good lad, biddable, settled.
Jess’s visit now seemed like a kind of dream. Her lips on his cheek, her face . . . One small crack which had opened in him, letting emotion crowd through. But now that too was distant from him. He couldn’t seem to rouse any emotion towards any of them.
Mary came dressed sweetly in a sea-blue skirt gathered at the waist, a white blouse with an Eton collar tucked over her navy coat. She was still painfully thin and obviously very tired. Ned saw how much she was coming to look like her mother.
‘Hello, Ned.’ She tried, uncertainly, to smile as she sat beside him. He realized as he answered, that she was fighting tears, but she won against them, looking down for a moment, controlling herself.
‘How are yer – the leg and that?’
‘Oh – coming along, you know. I weren’t myself for a while I think.’ He tried to move the leg and clenched his teeth at the pain which shot through his thigh. ‘But they say it’ll be awright.’
There was a long silence, before he remembered to say,
‘And how’re you?’
‘We’re getting on awright,’ she spoke carefully. Everyone seemed in a conspiracy to spare him any feeling, to pretend everything in life was smooth and quietly contented.
‘You wouldn’t know Ruth now,’ she said. ‘She’s ever so pretty. Got your eyes. I’d’ve liked to bring ’er in but they don’t want children in ’ere. She’ll be four before long.’
Ned nodded. ‘Yes. I know.’ He licked his dry lips.
‘Would yer like to see ’er?’ There was a tremor in her voice.
‘Yes, awright,’ he agreed, dismissively. ‘Mary?’ He looked into her face.
Mary kept her expression calm. ‘What is it?’
‘I’m sorry.’ He knew he should be sorry, that he was sorry. He had the memory of sorrow and knew it was for her. ‘What I did . . . you and Ruth. It was terrible . . .’
Tears welled in her eyes again. ‘Yes it was.’ She pulled out a handkerchief. ‘It bloody was, Ned.’ She sat waiting for him to say more.
‘I don’t know—’ he hesitated. ‘I don’t know what else to say to yer.’
She shook her head, wiping her eyes. ‘One minute you was there – Ruth’s dad, my ’usband. And the next you’d just gone – with her . . .’
She was really crying now, unable to control it. ‘I wanted you to die,’ she said bitterly, through her tears. ‘For what you’d done to us. I thought if I couldn’t have you then neither would she. How could you’ve done it?’ She clasped her handkerchief over her mouth for a second. ‘Oh – I said I wouldn’t . . .’
‘It’s awright – I deserve it,’ he said dully. He watched her, trying to enter into the situation. It must be because I love Jess, he thought. I can’t pity Mary as much as I should.
In a short time she stood up. ‘I’ll come again. Let you know ’ow Ruth’s getting on. I’ll bring a picture of ’er.’
As she left he turned his head away, exhausted, and closed his eyes. As soon as he did so the ward vanished and he was back there, as ever among the dead, standing completely alone, it seemed, heat hammering down on him. The only sound he was aware of was the roar of thousands of flies moving over the scorched waste of No Man’s Land.
Mary walked out to catch a tram on the Dudley Road, back
to her mother’s house where she had lived with Ruth for the past three years. As Ned’s wife she had received her share of his army pay, but it had made no sense to rent two houses next door to each other and she could barely afford it anyway.
When Ned left she had felt disbelief for a long time, then anger and jealousy. If she thought back now to that time, to what she had suffered, she could still get herself worked up into an almost hysterical state of bitter fury. But after three years of bringing up Ruth on her own, yet being also back in the position of child in her mother’s house, her emotions now included a shrewdness towards the practicalities of life.
I don’t want to spend the rest of my days like this, she thought. I’ve got the worst of all worlds. I want a house of my own and a husband. She knew that Ned’s mom and dad had always been on her side when he left, and when he came home, injured, it was they who told her of it and suggested she should be beside him in his weak state to tell him how his little daughter missed him.
‘Take it slowly,’ Mrs Green said. ‘’E’s been ever so poorly since ’e’s been in hospital. But if you’re prepared to make a fresh start with him, now’s yer chance. Be gentle with ’im and I reckon you’ll soon win him back.’
I was gentle enough, she thought. Gentle as I could be, when I think of some of the things I might’ve said to him! And I’ll be back, so he’ll have to get used to me. Seeing him lying there helpless, she knew she could still feel for him, despite the hurt he had inflicted on her. He’s still mine – my husband, the only one I’m likely to get now. I want him back and I’m going to see I get him!
