by Rosie Alison
She crept away as silently as she could.
* * *
Elizabeth Ashton was drunk. She was walking up and down naked in her bedroom, swearing, sobbing, showing Thomas the menstrual blood smeared down her legs.
“I’m bleeding again,” she cried. “I’m bleeding.”
She swore at Thomas, gagging on a string of ugly expletives. It was a strangled voice, hysterical, before she doubled over with weeping, her breasts pressing against bare legs.
Another month and still no pregnancy. Thomas sat by silently on their bed, longing to soothe and pacify her, but knowing he could not reach her yet. Sometimes, when Elizabeth menstruated, her raving grief could not be contained. Drink unleashed this frenzy in her. She drained the room of any space for his emotions; he just had to wait for her to collapse onto the bed in a drunken sleep as he knew she eventually would.
Both of them were exhausted by her misery. There were times when Thomas longed to be left alone, but he felt responsible for his wife’s unhappiness. They were both damaged people now, both locked into their drama together. Some self-destructive urge made Elizabeth stay with him. She would neither leave him, nor would she adopt a child.
At last she sank onto the bed and her sobs ebbed into sleep. He covered her and switched off the bedside light. The door remained open till morning, when the kitchen maid spotted it on her way to the dining room. She shut it before the children came down to breakfast.
* * *
In the morning Anna saw Mrs Ashton stride through the Marble Hall, trim and elegant as ever, her face a mask of distant composure. Anna stole aglance at her breasts, so discreetly tidied away now behind the silky blouse. Then she felt ashamed and anxious.
Did all adults cry out in such pain behind their bedroom doors?
It was only once more that Anna wet her bed, and she allowed herself to be rebuked by the matron rather than go on her dark journey to the laundry room.
But whenever she saw Mrs Ashton now, she felt a strange bond with her. Because Anna knew she was unhappy, even if she did not know why. Mrs Ashton’s sadness was her secret now, too.
She found herself puzzling over an unfamiliar pang inside. Mr Ashton’s words came back to her, from his lesson. “Things are not always quite as they seem.” She thought of his smiling face, and his wheelchair, never mentioned. She thought of Mrs Ashton and her secret sorrow. She found herself troubled by a new twinge inside – an ache she could not quite fathom.
It was as if her heart had been suddenly tuned into a strange new wireless station for other people’s sorrows. And their vibrations would not quite let her go, even if they had nothing to do with her.
11
Soon after the evacuees’ arrival, Thomas began to dream that he could dance again. Whether the children had awakened something in him, he couldn’t say, but suddenly his dreams transported him into wide, bright rooms of flowing waltzes and swift, intricate foxtrots on sprung floors. Dreams in which he could feel himself dancing, yet watched himself too, both dancer and audience. So vivid were his sensations that he would awake with a pleasant ache in his legs, surprised to discover that he had only been dreaming.
The dreams took him by surprise, but did not sadden him: they were rejuvenating. As if the past was still inside him, within reach. Sometimes he whirled around a ballroom with Elizabeth, or he gazed into the eyes of other, earlier lovers, from the days when he was a young diplomat stepping out in Berlin.
There was one tender night in Berlin which Thomas would not forget. A ball at the French embassy, when he held Elizabeth’s waist and led her deftly round the dance floor, as if nobody else was there. When their marriage was only weeks old.
Her eyes were fixed on his, and she began to laugh, exulting in their moment together. “I am dancing with my wife,” he thought. “This is us – you and me, together.”
“Happy?” he asked her. “So happy,” she said, “so very happy.”
He could not contain his own joy as he spun her round the floor, the music flowing through them and the tenor crooning his love song.
Oh sweet and lovely lady be good,
Oh lady be good to me…
Even now, ten years on, he could still remember her eyes reaching into his own. Later events could never quite cancel out what once had been. There was still that time, whatever came afterwards.
As he sat at his study desk preparing for the day’s lessons, his thoughts wandered back further, to the summer of 1914 – and the day when his mother had taken him out from school to watch a polo match in London. He could remember standing with his sister Claudia amidst the Hurlingham Club’s ornamental gardens, waiting to see their brother William, whose cavalry regiment had just returned from India. It was a day of great excitement for them all; they had not seen William in over two years.
He appeared with a familiar wave, taller, darker-haired, more dashing than Thomas ever remembered. He had grown a lustrous moustache, and his powerful legs filled his riding boots.
“Our team is being drilled for a summer of tournament wins,” he explained casually.
That was a great afternoon for the Twelfth Lancers. They played with grace and speed and intuition. For a moment, when William fell and their mother Miriam rose with a cry, it looked as though the afternoon might be blighted. But William was unhurt, and his team played on to win the Subaltern’s Cup with ease.
Afterwards, a sea of coloured hats fooded the lawns as the spectators congregated for tea and sandwiches. Claudia danced about, euphoric to see her eldest brother, and entranced by the braid and brass buttons of the cavalry uniforms. Here was the full pageantry of the Empire, with its glinting array of young men. Claudia pulled Thomas along to watch the military band down by the lake. As the crowds died away, the bandsmen paraded with a final slow march, their spurs glimmering in the late-afternoon sunshine. Thomas noted the strange slow double-step performed with solemn grace even by the stoutest bandsmen.
Everyone knew that war was in the air, and the proud valedictory note of the brass band caught at the hearts of many mothers. Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination was everywhere discussed.
“If war happens, it will be over by Christmas,” was the line which Thomas heard passed around Hurlingham that day.
Be thou my guardian and my guide,
And hear me when I call;
Let not my slippery footsteps slide,
And hold me lest I fall…
Even after war was declared, school went on as usual for Thomas. Beneath the soaring fan vaulting of Eton College Chapel, he continued to sing rousing Anglican hymns. Glancing upwards, the chapel’s carved medieval stone made any present troubles seem somehow insignificant.
We blossom and fourish as leaves on a tree –
And wither, and perish, but naught changeth thee…
Daily they prayed for those who had died at the front. Roll calls of boys’ names were read out, boys who had so recently walked down the school streets. But Thomas was still hedged in by his lessons, competing for the History Prize, and running for his house team. Never thinking much about the war, even when his brother’s cavalry regiment crossed the channel to France. Until his housemaster called him into his study after lunch one day.
“It was a dawn raid. He was leading his men with the courage you would expect. I’m afraid they were unable to retrieve his body.”
William, his indomitable brother, whose thick legs had strained the top lace of his riding boots.
Thomas was excused from afternoon school, and sent off to running practice. He ran and ran, and the breath of life streamed through his lungs, and the ground pushed up against his feet as he pounded along the track. But he could not stop himself imagining the alien landscape, and the random moment of his brother’s death in the trick light of dawn. He had vaguely assumed until then that any British deaths were those of incompetent soldiers, without his brother’s verve or timing. Now, with William caught out, he glimpsed the roulette of survival on the front.
A few weeks later William’s memorial service was held at Ashton Park, despite the absent corpse. Only his bulletscarred helmet had been retrieved. Miriam Ashton was distraught and held onto Claudia, stroking her hair. It was no comfort to her that William had been heroic, because the soaring death toll had already devalued the worth of any one sacrifice. Nor could she lose the imagined moment of her son’s pain in death: the phantom shrapnel kept tearing through her own guts.
Thomas’s father was silent, but inside he wept at the memory of his son, whom he saw as a better version of himself. He was privately mortified that he could not have died in his place. But he was also pricked with guilty sorrow by the three young labourers from the village who had also died that month, yet would not be treated to the ceremony of William’s memorials. He ensured that flowers were sent to their mothers.
William’s leather trunk was returned by his regiment, all his chattels neatly packed by his batman, his shaving kit, his ivory hairbrushes, his silver flask and cigarette cases, his letters. It gave an oddly ordered impression of war, Thomas thought. His mother would not allow the trunk to be unpacked: it was locked up and stowed away, upstairs, somewhere safe.
Her anguish was only deepened when her next son, Edward, finished his schooling and arrived home for a visit in his uniform. In 1915, he trained for a month at Aldershot before his regiment was sent to the front.
When fifteen-year-old Thomas returned home to Ashton Park in the holidays, he found an altered place. All the young men from the estate had left to join the local yeoman rifles. For the first time, he and his sister saw the great shell of their house empty of parties. The fires were unlit, and the deserted corridors echoed to their footsteps. Memories of William’s commanding presence crowded in on them, in every unused room.
Their mother had removed herself to London, to help run a soldiers’ canteen at Waterloo. Their father struggled to keep his estates going in the absence of so many labourers, then succumbed to his wife’s wish to turn Ashton Park into a hospital. At least the house was full again, thought Thomas. For the next few holidays, he carried supplies up and down the mahogany stairs to nurses in starched uniforms. He and his sister watched with appalled fascination as limbless young men were wheeled around in bath chairs on the front lawn. Claudia longed for Edward to come home on leave; Thomas dreaded his mutilation.
School was little better for Thomas, because every day brought fresh news of casualties from their teams, their school plays, their choirs.
Edward wrote home from Flanders, letters which at first – but only at first – commended the bravery and spirit of his company.
Dear Thomas,
I imagine with pleasure your daily routine at school. Enjoy it for me and do not hurry to join us. Here, death is so familiar that it weakens our will to live. What does it matter if the sun shines? Why should I shave?
Our bravery is bovine. We expect to die, and prepare for it daily. But just when you think you are resigned and emptied of fear, and free to fight, then a chance thought makes all the old hopes flood back in again and, with them, all the fear fuelled by hope.
Yesterday my fellow patrolling officer was picked out by a shell. It blew off his head. It could have been me.
But I have William for company, in his way. I feel his presence with me here, cheering me on, bringing me luck.
Stay away as long as you can—
Your loving brother,
Edward
The letter felt oddly rhetorical to Thomas. The writing was neat, the paper unsmirched. Was it really so bad? Thomas forgot the fights he had known through his childhood with Edward, and felt sucked into the abysmal world of the trenches. He could sense the stinking mud which was so often described, the infernal soup of earth through which the soldiers waded, while he, Thomas, ate buttered muffins over a stoked fire at Eton.
Edward survived as the men in his company fell. Through the long nights, he often recalled the sunlit lawns of his Yorkshire childhood. For too long now, he had left behind all that comfort and delight – first for the chilly dormitories of boarding school, and now, barracked with his men in trenches, with the stink of gangrene rising amongst them. The natural flickers of fellow feeling, of seeing how the limbs of working men were as good as his own, had made him doubt his inheritance. He would go back to his home a changed man – a better man, he told himself.
But in 1917 he slipped into the infamous Flanders quagmire of Passchendaele. Running along slippery duckboards on a wet night, he was blown into a flooded dugout by ashell which shattered his right side.
“at last a blighty,” he thought, “I’ll be home at Ashton for Christmas.” But he had not reckoned on his weakness, nor the depth of the mud, nor the distance to the duckboard. He hung onto a wooden rafter in the darkness and called for help, but the sky was loud with the clamour of shells. He tried to move forwards, but there was no firm ground beneath his feet. He thought of Bunyan’s Christian, in his Slough of Despond, and prayed for help. But there was no true faith in his prayers, only panic. The mire was too thick to swim through. With his good arm he clung to the wooden beam, but the mud was heavy, pulling on his boots, drawing him down.
The sky was fitfully lit with the blazing flares of war. His shattered shoulder was throbbing with pain, and his too rapid breathing only sunk him further. The meteoric splendours of the battle sky echoed the involuntary flashes of light inside his own dimming mind.
Images flickered through him, of his pale-faced sister, of the yellow wallpaper in his room at Ashton, of bare white legs on the rugby pitch at Eton. The aroma of his mother’s scent seeped through his breathing, and he felt the touch of her white embroidered handkerchief. He wished he had spent more time with women. If he could just keep afloat till dawn, somebody would surely find him and fish him out. Christmas at Ashton Park, breakfast with new-laid eggs and toast.
After an hour, as freezing weariness and pain loosened his grip, he slipped downwards to darkness. He tasted the mud for a moment, thick, suffocating, before it flooded his lungs and he drowned.
Nobody in his company knew where he was, but they were sure he had not deserted. He was missing, presumed dead. Too many had vanished into muddy oblivion, and would surface only later, as picked bones, when the summer skies dried up the unnatural quagmire.
Ashton Park now lacked a second body to bury at home, and Miriam’s heart was broken. She clutched at consolations in the air around her, and began to speak to her dead sons through mediums.
My dear Thomas,
How close we are to the spirit world, if we only learn how to listen and open our eyes! Last evening, with the help of Mrs Ostleton, I had a sighting of Edward. He was smiling. He looked as he did before going off to the war. He told us that William and he are together now, and happy, too. We need not despair. We are all together, now and for ever. Take courage, dear Thomas. I will tell you all about the vision properly when I see you soon. We must help your poor father, and Claudia, through this terrible time.
Your loving Mama
Thomas was at first shocked by his mother’s retreat into the spirit world of her Anglo-Irish youth. But he, too, sometimes felt the presence of his brothers’ spirits, in his head, and in the promptings of his conscience.
His mother was desperate not to let her beloved last son go to the front. But like all his friends, Thomas went to war as soon as he had completed his schooling.
“It is not a question of choice, Mama,” he told her.
He found himself at Aldershot, where long lines of faceless barracks were interspersed with barren parade grounds. A monotonous landscape, manufactured and unreal. Thomas was drilled in the art of marching and the skills of open combat, which by all accounts were worthless
on the front.
My dear Claudia,
I think of you at Ashton, with all the convalescents. I can imagine how much you must cheer them up.
Strange to think that Edward trained here, at Aldershot. The barracks are worn and shabby – did he ever say which building he was in?
Memories are to be cherished. I think of William and Edward daily, and the thought of them bolsters me. Other times, I am still shaken by their loss.
Take care of Mama. I know how she will suffer if I go too, and so I will do all I can to return to you.
Your loving brother,
Thomas
Thomas was an eighteen-year-old marching on a parade ground when the Armistice was declared, releasing him back to civilian life. With a mixture of relief and regret, he left behind his dreary barracks and returned to the Ashtons’ London home, Sussex Place, a wedding cake of a house in REgent’s Park, all pillars and porticoes.
His father and mother were waiting for him there, to rejoice in their living son, who carried now the weight of his brothers’ unused lives. Claudia joined them for a champagne toast in the drawing room, but privately felt that any celebration was inappropriate.
After two glasses, Miriam Ashton became lachrymose and reached out to her only son.
“You’re lucky, Thomas,” she said.
“I know that,” replied Thomas, a little abashed.
“No, I mean something else, I believe you have luck with you—”
“Please don’t say that,” chipped in Robert, unusual though it was for him to contradict his wife.
“You can be sure that Thomas and I will take good care of ourselves for both of you,” said Claudia, eager to pacify.
Miriam smiled and laughed, but Thomas was subtly shaken by his mother’s longing for his good fortune – what if lightning struck, or he fell from a horse, how could he fulfil all the hopes she had for her remaining children?
It was not long afterwards that an epidemic of Spanish influenza swept haphazardly through Europe. At Ashton Park, the cook’s daughter was the first to fall ill. Rachel Barry shivered and sweated, and her mother stayed with her through the night, giving her water, sponging her face and body. Rachel recovered, but the fever spread rapidly through the rows of recuperating soldiers in their hospital beds. Within days, three men and a young nurse had died.
