White Feathers

by Susan Lanigan

  ‘It’s especially hard for Eva. They went through so much …’ Sybil’s face began to crumple. Matron Dowse pursed her lips; she had dealt with quite enough emotion that morning. ‘Will you be all right, taking care of your friend?’

  It was a tactful but clear dismissal. Sybil turned to Eva, still slumped in her chair. ‘Evie,’ shaking her gently, ‘Evie, I need to take you back to the hotel.’

  Eva did not prevent her, but Sybil had a job lifting her to her feet. God, she weighs a ton. Then Eva said something, but it came out all garbled. ‘Yes, what are you trying to say?’ Sybil said.

  ‘They sent him back.’ Her words were still indistinct. Sybil saw her swallow, her lips trembling, then her eyes lighting up as if someone had ignited a white flame: ‘They sent him back because he didn’t salute an officer. He wasn’t well. And they still sent him back. They murdered him.’

  ‘Eva—’

  ‘I will never forgive them,’ she said softly, then, in a roar, in a low, hoarse scream that blasted beyond the hut’s wooden walls, making Sybil clutch her chest and nearly fall over in fright, forcing nurses promenading along the water’s edge to stop in their tracks: ‘I will never forgive them!’

  ‘All right,’ Sybil murmured when her heart had stopped hammering, ‘we’d better get out of here. C’mon.’ She dragged Eva out into the sun. Why was it so bright? The sun had no business shining like that in November, right in their faces. Eva just closed her eyes. People stared. ‘Go away, will you!’ Sybil cried, not caring if they were Greek or British. ‘Mind your own business.’

  The walk back to the hotel felt like the longest of Sybil’s life. Eva was so inert that it was like hauling a sack of potatoes. At first Sybil murmured gentle words of encouragement in her ear, but she stopped when she realised how pat and foolish she must sound. By God, she thought, now she really has lost everything.

  On the road, all was busy. Men had disembarked at Piraeus and were finding rooms, men in khaki with chevron patterns on the upper sleeves of their jackets. Canadians. So much life and brash noise, and Eva vulnerable. Sybil feared for a moment that they would injure her by their very existence, though common sense told her that Eva was beyond being hurt. Then she spotted a solitary female figure, poised and quiet.

  Roma and Sybil locked eyes. Sybil returned her look with a slight but firm shake of her head. As she toiled along Poseidon Avenue with Eva, she looked behind: Roma was several yards back. Even though they were moving slowly, she did not catch up but followed them at the same distance.

  Sybil brought Eva to their room and knocked her out with a heavy sedative. Carefully she pulled the sheets up to her shoulders, dropped a quick kiss on her forehead and left. She badly needed to find Roma, to feel her strong, slight body close to her own … and there she was, standing in the corridor, her room key in her hand.

  When they reached Roma’s room, Sybil slammed the door behind them. The sound echoed all through the building, and someone shouted from a downstairs room. Before Roma could protest, Sybil pulled her down onto the narrow bed, divesting her of her skirt and pulling off her own with jerky, violent movements. Then she tore at Roma’s blouse, pushing away all the layers until she laid her hand on the small breast with the disproportionately large nipple she had admired with slow tenderness before but now pressed hard with her thumb. Then, without preamble, she mounted Roma and started to finger her, pushing her underwear out of the way. She was in charge, and not inclined to be gentle.

  ‘Sybil.’ Quiet but firm. ‘What are you doing?’ Roma was looking right up at her, into her eyes, with the slightest hint of reproof. That hint was enough to stop Sybil in her tracks. How could she? She stayed there a moment, swaying over Roma. Then, feeling a burst of shame opening inside her like a flower, she began to withdraw her fingers, only for Roma to tighten around them, the briefest flick of a powerful muscle. ‘Stay where you are.’

  ‘But …’

  Roma pushed her hips forward, arching up to allow Sybil to get deeper still. Her eyes closed, and her lips parted as she sighed with satisfaction. Then she lowered herself back down and opened her eyes once more. The edge of her underwear was light and loose, barely brushing against the back of Sybil’s hand.

  She said, ‘What’s going on, darling? No—’ as Sybil made to pull out again, ‘I told you. Stay.’

  Sybil found her earlier boldness disintegrating. She breathed shallowly. ‘We had some bad news today, Eva and I. About Christopher Shandlin. I don’t know if I told you about him, he’s …’

  ‘Sybil.’ Again that hint of reproach. ‘Of course I know who he is.’

  ‘Well, he isn’t any more. He’s bloody dead!’ Sybil inhaled back a strangled sob. ‘Poor cranky old bastard, he never harmed anyone, and now he’s blown to bits by a shell, and Eva’s life is ruined. What’s it all for, Romy? I don’t know any more.’

  Roma reached her hands up to Sybil’s shoulders and slowly pulled her down. Their kiss was long, soft. She tasted clean. Sybil felt her tears dampen Roma’s cheek, and the intimacy was nearly too much; she began to cry. Her fingers were still inside Roma, moist and warm.

  ‘I am so very sorry, Syb. For her and you. He taught you too, didn’t he?’ They lay like that for a while, Roma stroking Sybil’s back as she wept, until the stroking became something more rhythmical, her desire waking up again, and Sybil responded, first with a delicate touch of her thumb against Roma, then by raising herself with her free hand. Sliding out her fingers and pulling off her own underthings, Sybil made Roma understand, hoarsely, that it was her turn to use her hand – Oh, please hurry! – then let herself feel it coming, in a descending column through her. It wasn’t the thing itself, but the closeness of it approaching, and then she did come, and she thrashed like a fish on a boat, nearly hitting the ceiling, rising like a ship on the horizon and forgetting Roma far down below, forgetting not to make a sound, forgetting war, forgetting herself. The sun lit her up as her head fell back, her arched neck bathed in light, the tears still glinting on her cheeks, giving her hair an intense, aureate glow.

  Sybil collapsed beside Roma, who gazed at her with bewildered affection. Spent, Sybil drew her knees up and curled herself as if she were waiting to be born all over again.

  It was a while before Roma spoke. ‘How is Eva?’

  ‘She’s asleep. I was there when they told her. My God, it was as if her soul flew out of her body. Right there and then, I saw it.’

  ‘How awful,’ Roma said, with a shudder.

  ‘And now I’ve come to you, and I’ve left her alone, because I’m too much of a coward to bear it.’

  Roma’s eyes were wide and light blue and looked innocent, even after everything she and Sybil had seen and done together. ‘Then you should go back, my love. I’ll be here tomorrow. I’ll always be here. I promise.’

  Sybil pressed her entire front against Roma’s. The smell of the two women after love was strong and salt-sweet. Her voice was subdued. ‘No, you won’t, darling. You know that. Everything ends. Just promise me tomorrow.’

  ‘I promise,’ Roma repeated. Her lips tickled Sybil’s ear, her warmth was close. They came together one more time before Sybil slipped out and returned for the long watch over Eva.

  No, not that. ‘If I let one crack perpetuate, the whole glass will shatter into a thousand pieces.’ But it is too late, the glass is shattered. Bits fall, raining out of the sky, cutting the face of anyone who looks up. The sky is glass, raining more glass; the glass falls into Eva’s heart; she is the Snow Queen. If she could weep, her tears would be glass too. Her cheeks would bleed from it.

  In the Russian hospital in Athens, where she is expected to continue her duties looking after refugees and the wounded of the Britannic, Eva does not sleep. On her first day on the Isle of Wight, she had lied to Christopher: You were fine. And he had responded, the familiar irritation in his voice (which she will never hear again): I was terrible.

  You are fine, fine, fine. You do your bit. No room to be insane in th
e midst of all this insanity. Far below your feet the wheels of the war machine thrum like those giant propellers on the Britannic, waiting for you to trip, fall and be crushed. You cannot get off this moving machinery. You have nowhere to go.

  And still her limbs are strong, her heart steady. A warm September afternoon in 1914, with Christopher, in Southwark Park, her head against his chest, hearing his heartbeat, reassuring, firm. Now his heart has been blasted into pieces, along with the rest of him, while hers could go on another fifty years. Why is it so resilient? Why will it not stop? Why will her mind not stop? She is so short of sleep, her hand shakes and her eyelids twitch, and yet she continues – continues. Then, finally, one evening, as monks nearby chant the Greek doxology, the emptiness of the Kyrie’s perfect fifths, the relentless drone of the bass – then, like a felled tree, she falls.

  Now people intervene. She is brought to a bed in the corner of the ward where she was working. A young girl with a veil who speaks little English sedates her. But her dreams, which flit through her mind like motifs and musical phrases, will not let up. Matron Dowse at her desk, chin on hands, saying, ‘Do you know a Lance Corporal Shandlin?’ until the propellers move through her face. Suddenly, her cheeks, eyes, mouth are sliced and chopped and flying in all directions, spotting the walls and desk with blood and lumps of flesh. And still that face, now a blood-drenched skeleton with sodden flesh still attached in parts, clack-clacking its jaw: ‘He was hit directly by that shell. It was instantaneous.’ Then she is a child again, in St Peter and Paul’s in Cork, her mother and Imelda by her side, the Palestrina floating from the nave, ribboned and looped, like a Gavioli fairground organ. Light spills in from the window. At last Angela is fully remembered: her smiling face, its jowls and dimples, expands until it fills Eva’s vision. What she has longed for.

  But, ‘No,’ Eva says, a jagged piece of glass in her throat. ‘You’re too late.’ And Angela’s face melts into the dark, replaced by Catherine’s. Her smile is a thin smack of complacency. Her mouth opens, a black underwater cave to trap fish. ‘’Twas always going to be me in the end, you know. I told you I’d break you, now I have. That’ll learn you.’ Catherine’s laughter is horrible. Horresco referens. Eva screams. No sound comes out. She wakes suddenly to find herself banging her head repeatedly against the wall, the pain bouncing along her skull, then voices calling out, firm hands grabbing her upper arms, securing her. Everything goes black.

  When she woke again, the room was bright. And empty, apart from herself. The walls were painted warm brown, like fresh mud. Someone had removed her dress, and she was wearing a pair of pyjamas that felt like straw on her skin. Her buttocks felt slimy on the mattress; with a nascent horror, she realised that she was menstruating. Why would the whole apparatus not shut down?

  ‘Eva.’ Sybil was on her left, out of her vision.

  Eva wearily moved her head. ‘Sybil.’ Her voice felt like the wind in the joists of an abandoned building. ‘What’s the matter with me?’

  ‘You’re in shock, darling. You need to eat. Keep your strength up. Please, Evie.’

  ‘Keep my strength? Whatever for?’ Eva said, collapsing back into the pillows.

  ‘Because we need to take you back. Matron Dowse has made arrangements. You’re going tomorrow on the Aquitania. To England.’

  Sybil’s face looked wrong, as if Eva were regarding it through the wide end of a telescope. It made Eva’s head hurt, looking at her. ‘I don’t think I can work—’

  Sybil took her hand. Her fingers felt absurdly warm. ‘Evie. Nobody will make you do anything you don’t want to. I’d come over with you but I’m not due leave. You can stay at the flat as long as you like: Clive won’t bother you. I’ll be back in London just before Christmas.’ She dropped her voice. ‘We want to help, you know. I’m worried about you. So is Roma.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Eva said, not knowing how else to respond. There was an odd pattern on the ceiling, she noticed, as if a glass of red wine had spilled upwards and left a splodge.

  ‘Darling, don’t be silly, nobody’s looking for an apology. It’s a rotten shame, what happened to Christopher. It really is.’

  ‘Yes,’ Eva said, but she could not keep focus. It was as if a piano were collapsing in her head. ‘Why am I bleeding?’ she said.

  ‘What?’ said Sybil, then, understanding. ‘Oh. Because that’s what a woman does. Unfortunately.’ She made a face. ‘I can get someone to help clean it up for you.’

  Life mash, Lucia had said, when Eva told her Christopher had gone to war. Eva had asked her what it meant, and Lucia explained it was a patois expression, meaning everything was messed up and broken. Meaning life was cruel.

  ‘Life mash,’ Eva whispered, closing her eyes, feeling ever more blood leach out of her.

  On the Aquitania, the fog in Eva’s mind began to clear just as the weather worsened. The Atlantic waves were malign grey-silver, the ship’s passengers’ faces a similar hue. On deck, the December wind howled. Inside, the cabins stank of puke and ordure.

  The ship was packed with the wounded from the eastern front. Many were nervous about German attack. Eva wasn’t. No German had hurt her, no German had browbeaten her into giving the man she loved a white feather, and no German had sent him back to the front.

  A chaplain took a shine to her. Eva tried to tell him that he should administer to his patients instead, but he would not be put off. He had a round, moon-shaped head and a habit of chewing when there was nothing in his mouth. ‘Better to remember how he lived than died, my dear,’ he intoned, his hand sliding onto Eva’s knee, his mouth making an odd noise as he compulsively masticated, ‘and that he’s gone to a better place.’

  She tried, and failed, to explain that for her it was not a passing irrelevance that the body she had loved had been violently torn to pieces, or that Christopher had had to experience this dismembering, eviscerating, tearing even for a moment. ‘I’m alive, I’m real,’ he had said. But now the arms that had held her when she told him about Imelda’s death were gone; the teeth that had caused the cut on her lip, a cut which had since treacherously healed, were gone; there was nothing left of the face that had fallen when she put a white feather in his lapel, or of the sudden, wide smile when she did something that surprised him, or of the hands that had pulled the Rupert Brooke out of hers and thrown it into the Solent. All those memories gathered in his brain, all those thoughts about her, good and bad, were now blown everywhere, grey matter fallen in a wet shower on dry earth. Not even an eye.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she interrupted Moon-Face. ‘You’re wasting your time. I don’t believe in Heaven, and I don’t believe in God. There is no immortal soul, it’s all tommyrot. There is no “better place”. We are nothing but temporary structures: viscera, bones and skin stretched across them. And some of us are blown apart, while some of us remain intact until we rot.’

  The chaplain stammered, offended. ‘Now, my dear lady, if your fiancé were here—’

  Eva bounded to her feet, knocking his hand off her knee. ‘If Christopher were here,’ she said, ‘he would not abide you. He would throw you overboard and feed you to the fish. Go away, and take your bible with you. I want nothing more to do with any of you people, ever again.’

  35

  Grace Fellowes stood outside the row of grand houses, looking up at the unblinking windows. The wind blew at the pram, and Dolly, warmly wrapped up inside, grew fretful, as seemed to be her wont, no matter what Grace did for her.

  Her maid had no idea that they had gone out. Nor did she know that Grace was not coming back. She had just left her husband. She did not leave a note. There was nothing she could say against Herbert. He had never said a cruel word, nor laid a finger on her. He refrained from medical talk at the dinner table. He had done his bit, suffering a convenient wound at a convenient time. And he had not, as far as she knew, committed adultery, so she could not sue for divorce.

  Instead, she chose to leave. She had a ticket for the mailboat, the RMS Leinster, bo
oked for nine sharp the following morning. There was only one loose end she needed to tie up: Eva.

  The bitch hadn’t answered a single one of her letters, fancied herself too good for her now, Grace supposed – then she felt ashamed to have supposed it. After a lifetime of apologising for her mother’s ignorance, Grace was appalled that she carried around the same resentments, in spite of her efforts to scrub her mother out of herself. Certainly, if she were in Eva’s position, she would have chucked all the letters in a bonfire.

  On the matter of Eva’s unwise relationship, however, her conscience was clear. Never would she forget the sneer that ill-mannered fellow had fixed on her when they first met. Intellectual poser, making a mock of her beliefs, flaunting his refusal to fight as if he deserved a medal. It was nothing but inborn mental weakness. He was damaged goods, she could tell, from that odd look in his eye; rarely in her life had she disliked anyone as much. But Eva …

  It might have never have come to light if Mother had left her and Herbert alone. But with Imelda in the grave and Roy preoccupied with Irish affairs, Catherine would phone the Fellowes household day and night, haranguing Grace with endless requests and impositions. Ignoring the telephone was not practical; as a doctor, Herbert needed to make and receive calls.

  Grace stopped rocking the pram for a moment and put down her case to tighten the belt of her high-collared wool velour coat. In one of the windows, she could see activity, a chambermaid stripping the sheets from a bed. She knew which doorbell to ring. She knew exactly where Eva was. But indecision kept her still.

  She had been as officious as you like when seeking her sister’s whereabouts. Demanding answers from the matron in France in the name of ‘family’, then a convoluted line of enquiry via Salonika and eventually a quick trip on the train down to the Destouches residence in Kent. An under-butler with a snotty tone had sent her packing, but not before she had obtained the final address she needed. Now she could tell Eva the full story. Eva needed to know.