by Maggie Joel
A crow cawed loudly right overhead, once, twice, and the rector, an ancient man in a long black coat and leaning heavily on a gnarled oak stick, stumbled on an open gravesite and would have slipped had Bill not put out a hand to steady the fellow.
Travers was grey this morning, his normally arrow-straight frame bent forward against the bitter chill and no doubt against other chills that had little to do with the weather. His hat was askew, as was his collar, and at one point he put his hands up to adjust it and his fingers shook. He walked with his eyes cast downwards and Lucas wondered if it was shame that made him walk thus, unable to meet the eyes of the other mourners, of the people who knew that his last act towards his son had been to disown him.
And yet his brother-in-law was guilty merely of trying to save the life of his only son. He alone, amongst a sickening clamour of patriotism, had sounded a cautious note, had tried to prevent what now seemed to have been inevitable.
They had reached the memorial, a small square of marble atop a plinth, and the words:
In memory of a beloved son
Roger Brightside, aged 19
whose body lies in a distant land
and who died in the service of Queen and Empire.
Lucas at once looked away. How exactly was the Queen or the Empire served by his death? No one had yet said. Perhaps it would be explained by the rector who had now come to a halt and was resting for a moment against his stick, wheezing painfully, his breath hanging in the frozen air. Lucas watched the man and did not hold out any great hope that he would be able to explain anything much to the waiting mourners. The rector was speaking, though the wind whipped his words away and they had to turn their heads to hear him.
‘Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.’
Well, Roger had been cut down, though whether or not it was like a flower, Lucas could not say. He suspected not.
‘We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the Name of the Lord.’
Lucas shut his ears to the words.
The man had finished speaking and he had not explained Roger’s death and perhaps it was not his place to do so. Perhaps only God could do that.
The mourners made their way back along the little path through the cemetery. There were a handful of military men in attendance and Travers disengaged his arm and made his way unsteadily over to them. When Travers rejoined them, his face was stricken, though he said nothing. Once they were back inside the carriage and Bill had pulled up the windows and was slapping his gloved hands together to warm them, Travers spoke.
‘They have every confidence of a swift victory,’ he said, clearing his throat, and for a moment Lucas could not make sense of his words. ‘Colley is in an unassailable position, it appears.’
The war.
Lucas nodded slowly. If this gave Travers some comfort, well so be it. There was precious little comfort to be had in the details of his son’s death. Bill glanced at him, and seemed at a loss for how to reply.
‘I am certain they will be proven right,’ Lucas replied. And perhaps when they were the reason for this war would become clear.
‘My Godfather, the bishop, sent us his condolences,’ Aunt Meredith, seated opposite her sister-in-law, announced, and beside her Rhoda seemed to stir restlessly.
The ladies were not attending Roger’s memorial so they waited together in the drawing room of the Brightsides’ house in Great Portland Street.
‘How kind,’ murmured Mrs Jarmyn, summoning a vague smile and Dinah thought, looking at her mother, these were the things one clung too, the small but important details, the rituals undertaken to fill an otherwise unfillable void. ‘He is well, the bishop?’ her mother added.
‘Oh yes. Quite well. Though I understand he suffered a head cold earlier in the winter.’
‘Oh dear. And at his age …’
‘Yes, indeed,’ agreed Aunt Meredith readily—but here she stalled. The question of the bishop’s health and age and the nature of his condolences appeared to have been stretched as far as it could.
Dinah felt her mother’s gaze upon her but she sat perfectly still and silent on the Brightsides’ sofa, her hands folded in her lap, her face composed, every inch the dutiful daughter at her cousin’s funeral. Opposite them Aunt Meredith shifted and her mourning gown rustled and rearranged itself into new folds.
‘You went to Dearly Departed in Regent Street?’ said her mother indicating Meredith’s gown, though she knew very well that this was the establishment the Brightsides had patronised as Dinah had related the details of her and Rhoda’s outing to her, including the meeting with the Van Der Kuyts.
Aunt Meredith nodded. ‘Such a relief, crape,’ she observed, leaning forward and speaking in a conspiratorial tone so that the maid might not overhear her. ‘One is so restricted in bombazine.’
‘I do so agree. We wore crape. And after a week we took to wearing it only when we went out. No one knew. And besides, we had the curtains drawn.’
‘The servants would have known,’ Aunt Meredith replied, with a significant glance over her shoulder.
And Rhoda, who had been sitting stiffly beside her mother, leapt to her feet with a sob and ran crying from the room.
A terrible silence followed as the three remaining women sat and waited. Rhoda’s absence, her sob, seemed to echo and fill the room. But no one moved.
‘I think I hear the carriage returning,’ said Dinah, getting abruptly to her feet and going to the window. She tweaked the heavy drawing room curtain aside to look out at the street beyond. A dozen or more carriages were passing: hansoms and crowded omnibuses heading south towards Oxford Street or north towards Marylebone and the park: broughams, phaetons, a landau, even a barouche open to the weather driven by two young men buttoned up against the chill. But of the funeral procession there was no sign.
Of course they would not be returning yet, they had left barely more than an hour before; they would hardly have ended the service yet. But she had needed to stand up. Could no longer bear to remain seated in that horrid silence, with Rhoda gone upstairs.
It is their bereavement, not mine, she told herself. It is for Rhoda to run upstairs and Aunt Meredith to sit in state and receive condolences and Uncle Travers to lean on Father’s arm.
We are not even immediate family and after the funeral we will remove our mourning clothes and no one would even know we have suffered a loss. Dinah waited by the window and the traffic did not cease.
‘Is it them?’ inquired her mother.
‘No, Mama. It is not them. I was mistaken.’
She left the window, finding no reason to remain there, and returned to her mother’s side on the sofa.
On the sideboard was a framed photograph of Roger. He was in uniform, standing very straight and proud, beside an opulent fern, its fronds brushing against the arm that held his officer’s hat, so that he must be posing either in the very heart of an African jungle or in a photographic studio. Dinah assumed the latter. A black cloth lay beside the photograph as though it had covered the frame but someone had recently removed it. Who had covered it, Dinah wondered, and who had uncovered it? She turned her face away from the photograph.
‘We are hopeful of further information,’ said Aunt Meredith and Dinah realised her aunt was also regarding the photograph. ‘Of Roger,’ she clarified.
Of his death, she meant.
He wanted to marry me, Dinah said—but not out loud, inside her head where the words thundered and reverberated—but I turned him down. Dinah studied her hands in her lap. She had said yes but then she had turned him down. She looked up at her aunt who was casting about her, searching for something that would not be found.
‘This Lieutenant Graves was very kind to write to us,’ her aunt continued. ‘To take the time to write. In s
uch difficult circumstances. Of course, we know nothing about him, about his people, nor he us. But he was very kind, nevertheless. Even so, the details were sketchy. Naturally, he would not have the time to write at length but we are hopeful, once things are settled, that he will write to us again. Or perhaps pay us a visit upon his return. It would be such a comfort for Travers. For Rhoda. To hear. From someone who was there. From a fellow officer. Such a comfort.’
Dinah looked down again at her hands in her lap, hoping her mother could summon up a suitable reply. Instead, the door to the drawing room opened and Rhoda returned, her face pale but composed. She looked at no one but silently came and sat beside her mother.
‘I had thought I had heard the carriage,’ she said. It was perfectly clear to them all that she had not left the room because she thought she had heard the carriage.
‘Yes, Dinah thought so too,’ said Mrs Jarmyn. ‘Though in the end it turned out not to be them.’
A silence fell that the clanging of pans in the kitchen below and the clatter of the constant traffic outside seemed to magnify.
There would be no medal, that much was clear, and no trip to the Palace. From the sideboard the Roger who regarded them from the photograph, so splendid in his dress uniform, was unaware he would die without ever facing the enemy.
‘Did I mention my Godfather, the bishop, sent us his condolences?’ said Aunt Meredith, and Dinah closed her eyes.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
London and the North
RIGHT UP UNTIL THE LAST possible moment Thomas Brinklow did not know whether or not he was going to board the train. The guard had blown his whistle and waved his flag and doors had slammed up and down the length of the train. The engine had let off a great whoosh of steam and the couplings had gone taut, shuddering as they began to take the strain of the carriages. Thomas chose that moment to grab the nearest door and fling it open and himself into the third-class carriage as the shouts of the furious guard rang in his ears. The train was already moving out of Dawley Station, heading south, as he righted himself and pulled the resisting door shut behind him.
The 11.55 a.m. local train to Birmingham was dead on time.
The irony of embarking on his journey by boarding a train of the North West Midlands Railway was not lost on him. Trains continued to run between the various northwestern Midlands towns and passengers continued to purchase tickets at the ticket offices and board the trains with their wives and children, and goods and livestock for the market, just as though they had every expectation of reaching their destination intact. Five weeks had passed since the accident yet people, for the most part, had forgotten. Or they found it prudent to forget, especially if they needed to take a train journey.
The inquiry into the railway continued but Mr Brinklow’s attendance was no longer required. Instead he was taking the train to London.
A whistle blew and a sudden gush of steam from the engine deluged the fast-disappearing platform so that all he could see was the slate roof of the ticket office and the smoke billowing from the stationmaster’s chimney. The train began to gather speed and instantly Thomas felt a pressure in his chest so that it was difficult to breathe. He reached up and pulled blindly at the window latch and a blast of steam, smuts and frozen air hit him. The woman opposite him reached over and slammed the window shut with a glare.
His palms were sweating. He stared down at them and thought: what kind of man am I that I cannot get on a train without fear?
He wiped his hands on his trousers, looking up at the faces of his fellow passengers. The woman opposite him returned his gaze unwaveringly. Beside her a man, a farmer by the look of his clothing, cradled a little girl on his lap. The little girl slept though the carriage rocked violently from side to side, and her father stared emptily over her head at nothing. Next to him was a family of four or five children and a mother in their midst, clutching a basket covered with a cloth. The children were silent, some standing, some sitting on their mother, some crouched at her feet wherever they could find a space.
The train continued on its way, leaving the town in its wake, flying through farmland and woodland, climbing and dropping, rattling over points and plunging into tunnels. Soon the farmer nodded off and his arm slid from the child’s shoulders so that she was balanced precariously on his knee as he slept. The train rattled over more points and she swayed to left and right.
Thomas rubbed at his chest to relieve the constriction he felt. If the train braked sharply the girl would surely be tipped to the floor. He thrust out both hands to catch her and the little girl opened her eyes and viewed him with a look of terror, shying away, and he let his hands drop to his lap and turned to look out of the window.
His wife had stopped speaking to him. He hadn’t realised it at first, as he had had little enough to say to her. But after a while, some days, he realised she no longer spoke to him. Or looked at him. As if he no longer existed. The silence was more than he could bear and he could not fill this silence himself—the Brinklows were not known for their skill at conversing. They left fancy talking to the union man and the local member of Parliament and the reverend in his Sunday sermon.
The train ran alongside fallow and overgrown fields, abandoned farm buildings, a rusting threshing machine left behind after some long-distant harvest.
The Brinklows were not talkers: they were farm labourers, nothing more and nothing less, going back generations—back to King John’s time, Grandpa Brinklow had claimed, though how he could know this when the Brinklows’ only mark in history was an occasional cross in a parish register was a mystery. Two dozen generations on the land. It had ended abruptly with Daniel Brinklow, Thomas’s father, moving to the town for a job in a mill, marrying a factory girl and living in one room in the shadow of the mill, raising a family who grew up knowing no other life. Perhaps Daniel Brinklow would have fared better remaining on the land, though the work was itinerant and seasonal and famine was never far away. But Progress was a lure not easy to resist, particularly for a young man. Daniel Brinklow had not resisted and had paid the highest price: horribly mangled in a mill accident before he had reached his thirty-fifth year, leaving a widow and seven children. The family, without a breadwinner, had entered a workhouse where they were separated, the mother from her children, brothers from their sisters. Twelve-year-old Thomas was sent to work at the ironworks in Dawley where he had worked fifteen years, boy and man. He had not seen his mother since the day he had entered the workhouse and did not know the whereabouts of any of his four sisters or two brothers. He still thought of them, occasionally.
He had attended—all the local children attended—a Sunday school in a small unfurnished room above the Trades Hall run by a short-sighted spinster with a permanently red nose who had spoken of Jonah and Noah and Moses as though they were personally known to her. Thomas had not found God in that small unfurnished room but he had found Jenny Bythwaite.
She was a year older than he and he had never seen her without four or five younger brothers and sisters crowding about her knees and tugging her skirts and pulling at her hands. She sat always in the same chair in the second row at the Sunday school, and the four or five brothers and sisters arranged themselves in a noisy circle about her feet. When she quietened them they fell silent. When she read—and read she could, better than anyone, as good, nearly, as the short-sighted spinster—they listened in rapt awe. The whole class listened in rapt awe; certainly Thomas did. One Sunday he had arrived early and pleaded of the short-sighted spinster which Bible story they would be reading that day. Locating the particular passage, he had placed a single buttercup between the pages then left the Bible on Jenny’s chair. When she came to open the Bible he could hardly bear to look at her face and watch as she laid her eyes on the gently pressed flower that lay between its pages. But he did look and when she opened the book the rich and heavenly yellow of the flower had bathed her angel’s face in a rich and heavenly yellow light and he had thought in that moment he was watching the W
ord of God come to life.
They had wed four years later and there was Progress, right there, for Thomas had signed the marriage register with his own name—the first Brinklow ever to do so. Alice had come along a few months after. There had been no other children but Jenny’s lying in had been so arduous—three days, with her and the unborn baby in mortal danger the whole time—he had been glad. He had wondered if something had broken inside her that meant she could have no more children but they had never minded it for they had Alice and she was everything and more.
The train rattled over another set of points and a branch line veered off to the east.
And now Jenny would not speak to him because he had taken their only child to the fair on his day off and she had been killed. Perhaps she believed it to be God’s punishment. He himself did not think it was God’s punishment. He thought it was the railway company that had caused his child’s death. God had had nothing to do with it. God had nothing to do with anything, it now appeared.
He had received a letter of condolence from the railway company. The letter had been sent a week after the funeral with a third-class stamp. It was postmarked London and the notepaper was headed with the emblem of the railway company and an address in the City. The letter was addressed to Mr Thomas Brinklow, Esq.
Nothing good could ever come from a letter such as this and he had torn the letter in half and thrown it away.
He had lost his job at the foundry because he had taken time off work for the accident and the inquest and then for the funeral and finally the inquiry. He had retrieved the letter of condolence and opened it: the railway, he read, expressed their grief and regret; they were desirous to make every effort possible to contact the relatives of the deceased and injured so that everything might be done for them as lay within their power.
Paying for the cost of the funeral was within their power and yet they had not done so.
And now he was on a train heading south and the letter from the railway company and the bill from the undertaker were in his pocket, burning a hole in his flesh. He did not have four pounds but it was more than that—he wanted someone to explain why they had failed to pay it, even if it meant travelling all the way to London.
