The script varied, as if the ink were from another bottle, or because of an indifferent nib and a nervous style of writing: ‘I spoke to him. We were shopping and I saw him on Oxford Street. He saw me, and stayed in one place, and I deliberately avoided Miss Silver. I took his hand and we walked up a court. His name is Percy Phillips, and to me it doesn’t matter that he is not one of us. God is not blind when He looks on people, and must see that we are all the same.
‘“Why me?” he said.
‘“Because I have chosen you,” I told him.
‘He said he had loved me since he first saw me but couldn’t understand why I should love him. I said that I did, and that he was mine, and wasn’t that enough? Far more than any elegant sufficiency, he said with a smile. We were together for half an hour. Poor people were begging while we were talking, but they were shadows, because I was happy. “I will pass here next week,” I said, “and we can meet.” He nodded, and told me that he worked in his father’s office in the City, from which the family property was managed, and that with so much work he might not be able to come. I said he must, and he agreed that he would. “You must also see me on Saturday evening,” I said, “whether we speak or not.” He said that, providing the family didn’t go to their house on the Kent coast, which they did on occasional weekends, he would do so. I maintained that it would be a better plan if, when we next saw each other, we walked away together. I would never go back to my home. My life there had finished, so why not let our shared existence begin? I could not remain where it was abhorrent to me, nor stay away from where it would be heaven to be.’
A different handwriting, on smaller paper, seemed to be part of a letter. ‘… wrong, because my son tells me he wants to marry your daughter. I realize, as I am sure you also do, that because she is a Jewess, and as we are Christians, this is quite out of the question.
‘There is nothing further to be said about it. I would not want to be an obstacle to anyone’s happiness under normal circumstances, but nothing in this case promises the possibility of any progress towards bringing them together. It would be understandable to me that you do not want your daughter to become a Christian, and therefore you must see that it is quite unthinkable to me that my son should enter your Faith, even if that were possible.
‘This situation must be explained to them, and I shall certainly do my part in the matter, so that it shall not be allowed to get out of our control. You must see, my dear sir, that there is a danger of this, though I emphasize however, and I am sure you will agree, that the status of our families is such that were it not for the matter of Religion there would be no obstacle against the young people being joined in Holy Matrimony. How it began is beyond …’
‘She did not,’ Clara commented in her journal, ‘fail to notice the gist of James Phillips’ letter. All she had to do was become a Christian. There was no other way. Any self-respecting Jew – and all Jews are self-respecting, perhaps because they are more than usually God-fearing, so I understand – would be dismayed at her action. There was a lot of talk at that time of converting the Hebrews to Christianity, and many societies were formed to make the attempt. I’ve often wondered why, but I suppose there must have been some feeling among the more sincerely religious English that the only real Christians could be Jews, and that if numbers of Jews became Christians then the Christian religion might begin to appear more Christian than it seemed to be at the time. So the Phillipses would have been happy enough to make things easy for Rachel to become one of them. Their son Percy was an only child, and loving him as they did, and fearing for him as I understand one does for an only son, they did all they could to make him happy.
‘But father was never happy. No one could have made him so, though mother gave him more happiness than most. The very fact that he must use all his faculties, and fight every inch of the way to get to know her, kept him spiritually awake right up to the time of her death. With someone of his own sort, whoever that might have been, but whom he might more easily have understood both by heredity and upbringing, he would have quickly become dull and slothful. By continually making the effort to understand her – and at the end he was close enough – he stayed alive. Married to anyone else, his first attempt at suicide would have been his last. I’m convinced of it.
‘Rachel was only a lukewarm Christian, and so was he, come to that, though they believed in the same God. No form of worship would have been able to cure his melancholia. He would sit for days in his study as if fixed to the huge mahogany desk, moving only to light a cigarette, or to turn the page of a book or newspaper whose print his eyes couldn’t fix on sufficiently to read a single word.
‘At five or six years of age I remember trying to look through the keyhole, or pushing the door further and further open, and waiting for him to waken because mother had said that he wasn’t like other people because he could sleep while sitting at his desk. I stood there with Emma one day, who was a year younger, but after a few minutes she began to shake at the sight of our unmoving father, and wept in terror. “He’s dead, Clara! Look! He’s dead! Why doesn’t he go to heaven?”’
He moved neither head nor hands, though Clara knew he must have heard, as she pulled Emma away. He was awake, but paralysed. When he wasn’t, he went to his office, sometimes every day for weeks. He would walk in the garden and cut roses. There were occasions when nobody knew where he had gone. He would come home dirty and tired, carrying a picture, or flowers, or presents for the children. Then they would see neither their mother nor their father for days, going quietly to bed at night after spending their evenings in the kitchen with the cook. Clara told Emma that she would never marry. Emma said she wouldn’t, either. ‘Nor shall I,’ John said. ‘I’m going to be an engineer, and engineers go to foreign places, so they can’t be married.’
‘But they get eaten by crocodiles,’ Emma reminded him.
‘Not me,’ John said. ‘I shall have a gun, never fear!’
Sometimes their father would go to hospital for a few weeks, and Rachel told them that because he went to sleep at his desk they had to take him away in order to wake him up. People went to hospital either to die or get better, and he went there to get better. An account book gave his income for 1895 as eight thousand pounds, and Clara had kept bills and receipts to prove that he had always gone to the best places.
A photograph showed him at Broadstairs after coming out of the convalescent home. On his own at the time, he had arranged for a local photographer to take the picture in the open air. His hands rested on a silver-headed stick, and he was looking towards the water. Forty years old, he was wearing a derby hat and an overcoat, and rimless spectacles. His thin lips curved down with settled apprehension, and his eyes seemed to be looking at the vision of an eternally receding mountain range whose heights he knew he would not be able to scale. Nor would his thoughts catch up with those fragments of his mind that always eluded him. His faculties at times were clear and active, but there was part of himself that he could never find, and the effort to do so occasionally became too much. Clara thought it was this vacancy in his powers of perception that Rachel had sensed at their first chance passing in the street. Something was missing that yet belonged to him, and she thought that by searching, and firmly tying down whatever it was, she could thereby give it back to him whole, an action that would produce a lifelong stability of soul between them.
Perhaps in more lucid moments he had seen that something similar needed to be done for her. However it was, they sought each other’s soul all their lives, and didn’t give up even at the darkest hours. Because they did not entirely find in each other that which they knew to exist, though at times they were closer to it than anyone incapable of making the effort, they never stopped being in love. ‘Your mother,’ Percy said to Clara after he had become a widower, ‘was from a devoted race,’ implying that she had given everything to him, as he at his best moments had tried to give all that was good in himself to her.
A photograph taken in the
garden showed Rachel as a grave-looking women with a high forehead and an abundance of hair. Clara was fifteen, her sister Emma fourteen, and their brother John sixteen. Emma had at this time the same tormented eyes as her father, and a distortion of the mouth which was due as much to having moved as because she was horrified at being fixed for ever at this time with people to whom, she said afterwards to Clara, she did not feel she belonged. But her eyes stayed still and were perfectly caught, vainly trying to grasp a vision that would not come to her. In physique she was slight like her father, but grew taller in the next few years. Her look suggested that she had already experienced much suffering, and would spend the rest of her life trying to forget the ordeal. ‘She had seen none at all,’ Clara commented, ‘though what she appeared to feel might have been a preview of what had yet to happen.’
The cardboard boxes devoted to John were marked NOT TO BE OPENED – EVER! But traces of broken sealing wax showed that they had been examined more than once by Clara. There were school reports, textbooks, letters sent home, a picture postcard from Cromer (‘seashells good, weather bad’) as well as a cloth cycling map marking a tour through Belgium, on which each night-stop was shown in such heavy pencil that the name of the place was almost obliterated.
Letters from the trip were tied up with a Baedeker guidebook that was falling to pieces. After Ostend, on the way out, John stayed the night at Dixmude: ‘A level run of nearly thirty kilometres along a poor road of paving stones which can’t be much good for my old bone-shaker. We passed many dairy farms – Lord, how many! It rained some of the way, but my cape kept most of it off. Arthur had a puncture near a village called Keyem, and I think all the children of Belgium watched him mend it. They thought it a great lark when we knocked on a door and asked for a bowl of water to find the hole.
‘We got a room at the Hotel de Dixmude (unpretending, but good enough for us), had a wash, then went into the church, and inspected the fine rood-loft my tutor told us about, as well as an Adoration of the Magi by Jordaens. Tomorrow, we go on to Ypres, then east to Menin, Courtrai and Audenarde and, Oh dear, I don’t know how many places yet, but I don’t doubt, and neither do you, dear mother and father (and Clara and Emma, as well as that horrid little dog), that there will be a letter from each benighted spot.
‘I’m sore from the saddle, though am told such an affliction will pass with time and wear, but in all other ways it is wonderful being awheel in flat-as-a-pancake Flanders. I understand that the Ardennes area is hilly! I shall have to stop being silly! All we hope is that the weather stays dry.
‘Arthur sits on his bed playing the flute, and if he doesn’t pipe-down soon I shall throw my pillow at him, and they have very big ones in Belgium. So that you don’t know of our fight, dear parents, I will close this fond epistle from the almost benighted bicycle-pilgrims!’
Every letter saved, every hotel bill, steamer and railway ticket from John’s holidays, as well as engineering notebooks, drawings and profiles, plans and layouts, and estimates for schemes and bridges. All packed away and hoarded, and for what? Paper well-written on, in a small neat hand as if even a margin would be so much square-inchage of waste. A clever, fun-loving, patriotic uncle dead fifty years before his time, and never known.
Another box was set aside for the war that had to come. John was a soldier at university, and later with the Territorial Force. Photographs showed him at summer camp, and it was easy to pick out the young man with dark curly hair and a handsome hawkish face in his middle twenties. A bushy moustache in later photographs made his face somewhat longer and fiercer. Other snapshots showed him laughing when caught trying to pull down a tent tope, or when a friend was preparing to take the jump at leapfrog. Happy days while they were playing, and Clara noted that it was such a pity that reality caught up with them.
During one of his leaves he stood with a sister on either side, premature regret shaping their set mouths, while John was smiling as if, under the circumstances, nothing less would do. In another photograph, next to a horned gramophone, he sat with a small white dog on his knee. There were scores of letters, neatly tied together, as well as badges and buttons in a cloth bag closed by a drawstring. A dozen damp-stained diaries and notebooks were filled with the same fine hand, except that much of the script was in pencil, and had come back from France:
‘I am sitting on a stool in a deep dugout with thirty feet of solid chalk and sandy clay above my head. I feel very safe. I am living with three of my fellow-officers in a place eight feet by twelve. It has been fine all day, and our guns have not ceased pounding. The day for our big attack has been a long time coming, but the whole army is as confident as can be, and will go over the parapet keen as mustard to get into contact with the enemy. Our men know they are his master in all but barbarous acts.
‘It is now Monday, and has been a great day. I was interrupted all night long with messages, and so got little sleep. I was up at five-fifteen, and at Brigade HQ at 5.27. At Zero Hour – 5.30 – for our operation, every gun we had opened fire and continued hard as could be until we gained our final objective. It began to rain as soon as the battle started, but stopped about 8.30. Later in the day it snowed, but cleared again. While our casualties have not been light they have not been nearly as heavy as at the Somme. Our men behaved wonderfully well, and I am quite proud of my sappers and officers. They carried things along marvellously, and obtained good results.
‘Thursday: Shells were passing over our heads when I was out with my orderly. A wind blew towards us from where the shells were landing and exploding. Suddenly we were both half smothered. We hurried forward to get out of the cloud, but soon were complaining of sore throats and chests from the gas. We should have rested, but went on over the battlefield. The padres were first and foremost. I thought one of them was an Artillery Officer, as he was helping to guide a gun over a soft bit of ground. Large parties were out collecting the dead, and when they got a certain number together, service would be read. The padres are responsible for the proper burial, and for the collection of all papers belonging to the dead. Just as it was growing dark I passed the burial party again still at their work, and I wondered how much longer they would stay. The ground we won looks so hopeless. So many wasted lives. Corpses all around. One of the enemy’s support trenches was strewn with dead men from end to end. The fire from our artillery was so effective, and with such a preponderance of it, that a man behind our barrage could not easily escape death or such awful wounds as I have ever seen. I picked up the latest pattern rifle and some rounds from one of these dead Germans, and hope I shall be able to bring it home on my next leave. There are so many stories that I want to tell, but none of my real thoughts about what happens here can be put into words. I sometimes feel they never will be. Artillery is louder than all speech. When it is close and continuous even the shape of people’s lips is distorted, and they stay calm, though the eyes tell another tale. When the barrage is still I have so much work to do, or I am too numb to think …
‘The thing I abhor more than all else in this war, after the actual loss of life, is that the dead are allowed to lie out in the open, uncovered and uncared for in so many cases. We see in and about our trenches hordes of ponderous rats. I am not sure what species, but they are certainly carnivorous. There is nothing the men out here loathe more than seeing their lumbering bodies dragging along, knowing they have fattened off their dead comrades, and may well fatten off them if ever the time comes. Numerous rat holes are seen over every grave, and our greatest delight is the destruction of these rodents who, by and large, are the only victors of these battles. And children think that Ratty in The Wind in the Willows is a lovable character! What a time he would have had out here! But we shall beat the Hun. We shall go on to the end, and certainly defeat him at his own game of soldiering.’
There was a pile of plain buff-coloured Army Books 152, their pages of squared paper, in which were written factual day-to-day diaries telling what time he got up and went to bed, and what the weat
her was like. Tom had space in his room to set the notebooks on a shelf for further reading.
When everything had been dragged clear from the cluttered boxroom he discovered a shallow cupboard built into the wall. A zinc lock held the latch in place, but he gripped hard and twisted it from the wood. Inside were measuring tapes, photographic enlargement equipment, a tripod, an engineering level, a miner’s compass, a clinometer and some longish thing wrapped in a tarpaulin sheet which he carried to the living-room. The knot had been hammered into a compact ball, but he pressed and squeezed till the individual strands worked free.
‘I don’t know whether I learned in the orphanage that you never cut string,’ Tom said, ‘or in the Navy, but it’s another old habit that dies hard.’
Maybe it’s part of his nature, Pam thought, to waste nothing, and to let no job daunt him. ‘Makes no difference,’ she said, ‘as long as you get it undone.’
She took a basket from the kitchen and went out, leaving him bemused with his clues and time-schemes, stooping among heaps of ephemera from which he tried to make sense.
Going up a narrow street from the sea, rain drove against her mackintosh. For half the way, till wind blew it clear, a stench of mothballs enveloped her, because the coat came from the hall cupboard and had not been worn for months. Water filled the gutters, and a car splashed her almost to the waist. She stepped across the street to the shops. He needed feeding. Such delving and sifting ate at him from the inside, and made his face thin.
She walked on, a zig-zag course towards the station. The wider road exposed her, icy rain flurrying when she turned towards the seafront. She would never find the flat. She would knock at a door, and someone whom she hadn’t seen before would answer. She would wander around town for the rest of her life wearing Clara’s mackintosh and with a bag of shopping on her arm.
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