White Feathers

by Susan Lanigan

  Only one other girl, Mina Williams, had shown an interest in attending the concert. Large and shy, Mina would sit at the back of the class, her eyes hidden behind opaque spectacles. Her state of permanent bewilderment pleased Miss Dunn and irritated Mr Shandlin in equal measure – the former mistaking it for piety, the latter considering it mental laziness. Eva had witnessed him needle her, sometimes to the point of tears, and wished herself a more compassionate person who might condemn his impatience rather than sympathise with it. She wished for Mina’s own sake that the girl could be less self-conscious, but such things are often deeply bred. Eva knew that much from experience.

  Saturday started blowy and cold, the kind of weather that had hair in one’s face very quickly if pins weren’t fastened down with a vengeance and a tight-fitting hat wedged over them. Eva thankfully did have such a hat, as well as a rather fetching pair of red leather gloves which she had stolen from Grace’s room last Christmas. Paired with a long gabardine frock coat, the ensemble was quite passable, though well worn.

  She and Mina made desultory conversation as a silent Miss Hedges drove them to Eastbourne. Since Mina mostly responded in monosyllables, Eva eventually grew bored and took the Rupert Brooke poems Mr Shandlin had given her from her coat pocket, opening the book at a random page and immediately wishing she hadn’t, particularly as Miss Hedges was driving rather fast over a rough stretch of road:

  Do I forget you? Retchings twist and tie me,

  Old meat, good meals, brown gobbets, up I throw.

  Do I remember? Acrid return and slimy,

  The sobs and slobber of a last year’s woe.

  And still the sick ship rolls. ’Tis hard, I tell ye,

  To choose ’twixt love and nausea, heart and belly.

  Who on earth writes poems about vomiting? Eva thought to herself, putting the book aside once more.

  On arrival at Eastbourne, Miss Hedges parked the car, and they crossed the little square to the church. As they approached the heavy wooden double doors, one of which was wedged open, the sound of a choir spilled out. Miss Hedges swept Eva and Mina in ahead of her with a frown.

  The choir’s conductor was, unusually, a lady, who made wide, sweeping gestures that might or might not have corresponded to the time signature but kept her singers in time reasonably well. The church was about three-quarters full. Occupying the first two rows of pews were several dozen boys in blue blazers, aged, as far as Eva could tell, between twelve and fourteen. And with them, head nodding to the rhythm of the choir’s singing, sat Mr Shandlin.

  Eva started; she had forgotten about his other job. For some reason she could not elaborate to herself, she was reluctant for him to see her with the book of poems; she thrust it in her coat pocket. She tried not to shiver in the draught that blew up the aisle of the church and winkled its way under her blouse.

  Mr Shandlin was having some trouble disciplining his charges, Eva noticed, more than once having to get up out of his seat to admonish boys who either looked like they were playing a game or who were whispering over the performance. Then he would sag back into his seat, exaggerating his usual posture until his head was almost hanging off the back, but always with one limb twitching or dancing to a pattern, whether a foot or a hand.

  The third time he rose to correct his boys, he turned around and noticed them. Eva wanted to hide, even though they were there with Miss Hedges, and perfectly legitimately too. Mr Shandlin nodded at them briefly; he was too preoccupied to pay Eva, Miss Hedges or the hapless Mina Williams much attention. Eva gripped the book in her coat pocket.

  After an hour, the conductor called an interval. Her voice was surprisingly quiet, out of kilter with the drama of her gesticulations. Miss Hedges announced her intention to stay put during the break. The conversation from the boys in the front grew louder.

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ Eva said to her two companions, ‘I would like to get some air.’

  They didn’t mind but did not move either, so Eva got up and slid past them, out to the small vestibule. The wind made its way in there through the door, stronger than the draught inside, making her shiver. She was about to go outside all the same, liking the strong wind even when it was cold, when a familiar figure slipped through the entrance and joined her, coat tails flapping.

  ‘Hallo, Miss Downey!’ Mr Shandlin said cheerfully. ‘Didn’t know you were a church haunter, or did Miss Hedges get you to come along for company? Miss Williams is a young lady of irreproachable character, I don’t doubt, but I would not choose her for her skill in rhetoric. Or any other conversational skill, now I come to think of it, but perhaps that’s excessively uncharitable of me.’

  ‘It is rather, sir. I chose to come. I like choirs.’

  ‘Really? I didn’t know, but it shouldn’t surprise me. I like them too, which only makes it more painful that I have to attend their concerts with that lot.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be attending to them now, sir?’

  Mr Shandlin raised his eyebrows. ‘I am boring you already, Miss Downey. I must be improving with age.’

  ‘No, no, sir, not at all.’ Eva coloured. ‘I was just wondering how … manageable they are.’

  ‘Oh, they’re beasts,’ Mr Shandlin remarked off-handedly. ‘They are not fit to be left for five minutes. But if I worried about that I would worry about how these boys will eventually be running the British Empire – and that would keep me awake at night in cold sweats. Are you all right, Miss Downey? Is there something wrong with your coat?’

  Eva had just remembered that the book was in her pocket and that if she didn’t do something quickly, he would spot it there and perhaps wonder why she was in the habit of carrying it around on her person. ‘No! No, I’m all right, thank you.’ She was abrupt, but not abrupt enough, for it was clear from his glance that he had indeed spotted the volume. His face broke out into another of those unexpected smiles.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘the Brooke.’

  ‘I—’ Eva blushed with embarrassment.

  ‘Tell me, which poem do you prefer?’

  ‘Not the one where he’s getting sick on the boat, that’s for sure.’

  Mr Shandlin thought for a moment, then his brow cleared. ‘Oh, that one. Well, I disagree with you. Do you really think poetry is just hearts and flowers? Have you not read the Iliad?’

  ‘Well, I—’ Eva broke off. Inside the church, the choir were starting again. A chord sounded on the organ, presumably to give the choir their notes.

  ‘Better go back in,’ Mr Shandlin said, turning.

  Eva shook her head. ‘Wait … listen …’

  She recognised the piece immediately. Palestrina’s Sicut Cervus, in four parts. Voice after voice overlapped, a series of waves, impersonal and clear as an announcement in a public square, an announcement that would carry through the streets, divine and distant. The music overwhelmed the singers, grasping them with something more than the sum of their parts. Eva was caught in this new ecstatic carousel and became quite lost because she saw beyond it to something she had tried to see for the past seven years: her mother Angela’s face, lifted away from her, the sun shining on the beads she threaded through her fingers. Just for a moment.

  Ita desiderat anima mea ad te Deus. She was crying, she knew it, but she did not care. The voices rose and fell, rose and fell. She remembered where she was, and that Mr Shandlin was watching her. Out of the blurred corner of her eye she could see his raven shadow in the doorway, unmoving. It was very unusual for him to be so still. She pulled out her handkerchief and rubbed at her cheeks. When she looked in his direction again, she saw that he was indeed regarding her – in a fixed, odd way.

  Then he said, in a not altogether even tone, ‘Have I caused you distress?’

  ‘No, Mr Shandlin,’ Eva said, folding her handkerchief and putting it away. ‘It is nothing to do with you. I forgot myself. Forgive me, please.’

  ‘You’ve done nothing for me to forgive,’ he said, ‘but I wonder what is troubling you.’

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nbsp; ‘I was thinking of my mother. She loved music. I have this recurring dream about her, and it’s always in a church.’ Now she had started, Eva could not stop. ‘She died when I was five years old. Whenever I have the dream, she turns to me, and where I should see her face, all I can see is a blank. The more I try and remember, the further the memories flee. Even my dreams won’t let me have her.’ She stopped abruptly. Why did she do things like that, tell things when she should be discreet? It was unwomanly and showed a lack of restraint.

  ‘I am very sorry.’ He was gentle. Then, ‘I know what it’s like.’

  Eva looked at him questioningly.

  ‘Twelve years ago, I lost my brother.’

  ‘My sincerest condolences, sir.’ To her own ears, the words sounded flat and insincere, but he did not seem to mind.

  ‘Thank you. It was during the South African war. He was killed in a guerrilla ambush near Tweefontein. They attacked when he was in one of the blockhouses and … well, he was unlucky that day. Or so it said in the letter they sent my mother. He died on Christmas Day.’

  Eva tried to imagine what it would be like to read such news in a letter, or in a telegram. How someone’s face would change as they read the words. What a terrible thing to happen to a family! Her arm began to ache again.

  ‘When you said, “My dreams won’t let me have her”,’ he continued, ‘I knew straightaway what you meant. My dreams do let me see him – sometimes even speak to him. But I can never have his company again. Part of you just stops and never goes on. It’s still raw, that’s the devil of it.’ He spoke these words levelly but directed his gaze entirely upwards, to the roof.

  Eva was dumbstruck, her heart full of sudden, sweet pain. He understood all too well, and it hurt. Something broke loose in her like a raging river. Her next question tumbled out of her mouth before she could stop herself. ‘What is your name?’

  He was startled out of his reverie. ‘My … pardon me? You mean my first name?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Christopher. Why?’

  ‘N-no reason.’ She wished the floor would fling up its tiles, form a quick hole and swallow her up. What had she been thinking, asking him his name like that? He would think her quite cheeky.

  ‘Do you plan to use it on me, Miss Downey?’

  Oh, God, he was smirking. Time to pull up the drawbridge. But even as the thought crossed her mind, he noticed the change in her and suddenly pointed at her arm. ‘You’re doing it again.’

  ‘Doing … what?’

  ‘That thing you do. You grasp your arm with your hand and shrink away, as if someone were about to attack you. No, don’t deny it, I’ve seen you do it. In class! Several times! It disconcerts me. Do I frighten you?’ he said, with a smile.

  ‘I’m not frightened.’ Eva let her arm fall to her side.

  ‘Then … what is it?’

  Oh, God, Eva thought, please don’t. ‘I was injured.’ The words came out before she could stop herself.

  ‘How?’ His eyes bored in on her, black as obsidian in the half-light. Eva could not answer him, could not think of a casual-sounding excuse. Say something of no consequence, that was all she had to do, and she couldn’t manage it.

  ‘How,’ he repeated, ‘were you injured?’

  There was no more looking at the roof now, or past the back of her head. No, now he was full-on staring at her, his lips parted as if he were about to say something but could not quite form the words. Her skin felt prickly, and her heart began to knock about unsteadily in her chest.

  The night when Catherine found out about the article in The New Feminist. The night when she found out about everything.

  Catherine, waiting by the door. On the sight of Eva, transforming into a moving column of flapping skirts and pink-cheeked rage, chasing her around the house, screaming. Doors closed, family fleeing to the library, parlour, bedrooms, anywhere. But no escape on the landing, half-filled by an absurd pine console which stood flush against the wall, topped with a vase of pale pink carnations. There, Catherine belted her with a wooden spoon, then, when Eva wrenched it out of her hands, with her bare fists. In the face, the belly, the breasts. Then, with a low growl, grabbing Eva’s wrist and leaning forward as the spoon fell with a rattle, smashing her forearm against the edge of the console again and again – until it cracked. It hurt, it hurt, it hurt so much, oh God …

  ‘How dare ye! Skippin’ on the Census and runnin’ round with them suffragettes!’

  And Grace, looking on with that worried expression, as the vase lay on the floor, carnations scattered everywhere. ‘Mama – I think you did break her arm.’

  How could she describe that to anyone? ‘Please, sir,’ Eva said, trembling, ‘it was at home – please don’t ask me any more.’

  He flinched, as if she had struck him – and when she saw him do it, a wave of shame convulsed her. She had striven never to even hint about what had happened that day. It felt dirty and dishonourable. All she could see on his face now was horror. He would run away from that smearing place, surely, back to his own world, free and open, where there was nothing noxious in the air. Who wouldn’t?

  But all he said was, ‘I see.’ Then, a moment later, he spoke again, so quietly that in her shame and with the wind blowing a low, mournful note through the porch and antechamber, she almost didn’t hear him. ‘I always thought there was a sadness about you, in your eyes, the corners of your mouth – even when you laughed, there was always an untouchable sadness behind it. Now I know why.’

  The endless counterpoint of the choir swelled up and filled the silence. The base note of the Palestrina piece and the veering off-note of the moaning wind together formed a discord. Eva felt naked in the presence of that wind, exposed by Mr Shandlin’s words – exposed, tattered, cheap. She longed to be as innocent as those singers, free of other people’s horror or, worse, pity.

  The choir finished, and another noise rose up over it. Mr Shandlin’s pupils had at last noted his absence. He, for his part, appeared to be waking from a trance. Once more alert to his surroundings, he glanced anxiously in their direction. But still he did not go in.

  Finally Eva said, to try and break the atmosphere, ‘May I have my book back?’

  He held it out, and she took it, not without a bit of resistance from him. ‘I will take care of it, sir.’

  ‘I know you will, Eva.’ Her name, again, like that. He sounded sad.

  ‘We should go in now,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, taking her lead, ‘I believe the monsters might have flown a biplane through the entire choir. It would be entirely form for them. I should make sure they crash-land with some dignity. Ladies first.’ Once again he was full of his earlier bonhomie, but now it was a little too hearty and forced. He seemed to be putting distance between them.

  Eva slipped back in the door and rushed to her seat, where Miss Hedges greeted her with a frown and Mina Williams with a flat stare. A respectable interval later, Mr Shandlin loped down the aisle and settled in beside his restive class just in time for the start of ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’, where the choir once again reasserted their provincialism with flat accents and flat notes in a deadening unison, the boys buzzed with chat and tomfoolery, Mr Shandlin waved his hands around his head as if his pupils were a plague of locusts tormenting him, Eva sat with Miss Hedges and Mina Williams, and the strange magic of the Palestrina altogether disappeared.

  8

  24 March 1914

  Dearest Eva,

  I have some news: I can collect you for your half-holiday next weekend. It will be so good to see you again! Taking the train is out of the question for me at present, for fear of infection, but Mother’s cousin Fred is over from Ireland, and he has agreed to motor down to Sussex so that I can see your school, and we can go back to London together. He won’t be free till midday, so if you can wait till three, you can travel with us!

  I have given this letter directly to Fred and have not sent it by the usual means, if you understand me.
I am concerned about Mother. She keeps muttering about ‘paying Mr Cronin a visit and straightening things out’. I fear she has not given up the idea that you and he might be married. Fred has no idea of this letter’s contents, and he is an honourable man; he will not read it. But I won’t write any more about that because I know it upsets you. I am sure that once you are ‘finished’ you will have your pick of many gentlemen.

  Do you know there are suffragettes out on Trafalgar Square again? I read it in the paper and straightaway thought of you. These women are a new group, calling themselves the East London Federation of the Suffragettes. They allow men to join, and Mrs Pankhurst doesn’t like that at all! Anyway, a whole lot of them got arrested last Sunday. They started hitting policemen over the head with ropes knotted together like lifebelts. Which doesn’t sound too bad, but they had lead mixed into the rope. I imagine those poor policemen got quite a headache.

  I also have some news about Grace: she has a serious beau. His name is Alec Featherstone, but Grace prefers that we call him ‘Captain’, because he is a serving officer in the 11th Hussars. His unit were inspected by the King the other day, and, to impress Grace, he rode to our house in full parade, and oh! he looked magnificent in his red coat with its immaculate white sleeves, the bronze helmet and plumes and the braided ropes that fell around his neck. (Hopefully with no lead mixed in!) It is very special indeed to be a cavalry man, they are such a cut above the ordinary infantry, Grace says. Nelly was rightly annoyed though as there was nowhere to put the horse and he just stood out in the street, so the visit did not last so very long.

  Please do answer soon. I am so looking forward to seeing you!

  Much love,

  Meldi

  Eva and Sybil were watching a hockey match, Sybil gazing at one player in particular, a tall girl on the opposing team named Patricia Arnason, who wielded the stick with deceptive lightness as she weaved and sidled past her long-skirted markers.