by Rosie Thomas
Jake wrote of the work he was doing, but only as numbers, how many casualties arriving, how many hours on duty, how few hours sleep. The rest of the letter was taken up with his thoughts on John Donne, whose poems he had been reading, and with reminiscences of home. He recalled the day of the picnic beside the river.
Grace gave the letter back to Eleanor. ‘Jake will be a good doctor,’ she said to fill the silence, but the random remark struck a chord of optimism. It looked ahead to a better time, beyond the necessity of survival. Eleanor’s face softened.
‘I believe so,’ she said.
The maid came to clear away their soup plates.
After dinner, it was usual for Grace to sit with Clio and Julius while they read or worked, but tonight she left the table and went quickly up through the odd layers of the house to the room she shared with Clio. She half sat and half leant against her high bed, and opened the envelope.
The letter was longer. There were three sheets of the flimsy paper, each one closely covered with Jake’s black handwriting. Grace bent her head, and began to read.
The words burned off the page. There were no careful sentences here, nothing like the letter he had addressed to Nathaniel and Eleanor. Jake had simply written what he felt, disjointed snatches of it, letting the raw suffering lie where it spilt. It was these images that had informed his earlier letters, the awkward and troubling missives that she had not wanted to look at again, but Jake had kept them veiled, somehow, saving her eyes. Now he had passed some last point of endurance, and Grace saw clearly what Jake was seeing.
Oh, Grace, the horror of it. Grace, do you hear me? I hold on to your name, like a clean white river pebble in my fingers.
They come in all day and all night, stretchers, cargoes of what were once men, pulp and jelly of flesh, turned black, bones like splinters.
Crying and screaming and praying, or lying mute like children.
I am afraid of each day, each death.
We are close to the lines here, I can hear the guns.
We run like ants, doctors and orderlies and bearers, like ants over the blood heaps, but we can do so little. Death keeps coming, the tide of it. Some of the men I work with indemnify themselves with a kind of terrible laughter, but I can’t laugh, Grace. All I can see and hear and smell is the suffering. Each separate pain, loss, life gone or broken.
The deaths are all different. We have to leave them, most of them, to the chaplains or themselves. There was a boy like Hugo, younger, who screamed and cursed. His anger poured out of him as fast as blood. As hot. And another man, an old Cockney, wept for his mother. Like a baby cries, like Alice.
I have tried to read. I know there is beauty and order somewhere, but I can’t recall it. I look at the words on the page, and I see death. I try to see your face, Clio’s face, my mother’s.
I am afraid of death, I am afraid of life like this, I am afraid for us all. I think of Hugo, under the guns. I think of all our deaths, yours and mine and the others; the same deaths, over and over, each of them different.
I have tried to assemble the disciplines of logic, and marshal the proofs of what human suffering has won for humanity, but I can find no logic here. There is only madness. I am afraid that I am mad.
Grace, you should not have to hear this. Forgive me.
I think of you, and of home. Julius and Clio. Of you, especially.
All this will end, it must end. But when it is done, whatever the outcome, nothing can be the same as it once was. I am sad for what we have lost, for what we are losing every day.
Grace lifted her head, but she didn’t see the room with its two white beds and her own gilt-backed hairbrushes laid out beside Clio’s on the dressing table. She could only see Jake, and after a moment she looked down again at the last page.
The black handwriting had deteriorated so much that she could only just decipher the words. Jake was writing about Donne again, but not in the detached, analytical way he had done in Eleanor’s letter. As far as Grace could understand, he had taken some of the poems as speaking directly to him. They had taken on a significance for him that she could only guess at.
There is one, ‘A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day’, do you know it? It is about loss and grief. There is one couplet: ‘He ruined me, and I am re-begot Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.’
It runs in my head, all the time, while I am doing my antlike scurrying. We are all re-begot as nothingness by this war. The evil of it, the waste.
I have to go now. We live in a canvas shelter, and I sit on my camp bed to write this on my lap by candlelight. Perhaps you can’t even read the words. Perhaps I should not send them to you, but I need to reach out. It is another weakness. I am afraid of my own cowardice, too.
You are so clean and white, Grace, like nothing here.
When will it all end?
For some reason Jake had signed not his name but his initials. It made Grace think again of the schoolroom at Stretton, of their old secure and undervalued world.
She said aloud, ‘You are not a coward.’
The window opposite her had been left wide open after the warmth of the day, but the night air was icy now. It rolled in like a hill mist and Grace shivered as it touched her bare shoulders.
She did not move, or fold the letter into its creases again. She knew that she would never forget the way Jake spoke to her out of it.
It was the letter’s fusion of two voices that touched her most profoundly. There was the old Jake, who had whispered their secrets to her in the hot summer before the war began, and from whom she had in the end retreated. Out of fear of the unknown, out of childish impatience. And there was the Jake she did not know, who had witnessed the field hospital. The images of it came to her now, in Jake’s disconnected words, pulp and jelly of flesh, bones like splinters …
And just as Jake had become two Jakes, boy and man, so the world had split into two worlds, old and new. Not only for herself, Grace understood that, but for all of them.
Images of the old world were all around her. There was this room with its mundane evidences of their girlhood, and in the framed snapshots on Clio’s tallboy there were memories of Christmases, holiday games at Stretton, beach cricket in Norfolk or Normandy.
The new world was obliterating everything that had once been familiar. Jake and Hugo in France were part of the fearsome new world, and the officers who came to mend themselves in this house, and so were the newspapers with their black headlines and their casualty lists, and even the women who served behind shop counters where there had once been men were part of it too.
For a long time, for almost two years Grace realized, she had thought of the war as a momentous event that touched them all, but as an episode that would eventually be over, leaving the world to continue as before.
It was on that day in October 1916, the day of Jake’s letter, that she understood there could be no going on as before.
If Hugo came home again, he would not be the same boy who had marched off in his fresh uniform. Jake would not be the boy who had kissed her in the angle of the hawthorn hedge. For all of them, whatever they had done, there would always be the speculation: If there had been no war. If part of a generation had not been lost.
Grace read the last, scrawled page of the letter once more.
I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.
But then she put the pages aside. The blackness of the lines stirred an opposing determination in her. Grace found herself making a bargain with a Providence she had never troubled to address before.
Let them come home, she bartered, and we will make something new out of ‘things which are not’. We don’t cease to exist, those of us who are left. We’ll make another world.
She could not have said what world, or how, but she felt the power of her own determination as a partial salve.
Behind her, the bedroom door creaked open and Clio slipped into the room.
‘Grace? It�
��s so cold in here.’ She went to the window, closed it, and drew the curtains over the square of darkness. She did not ask, but Grace picked up the pages of the letter and gave them to her.
‘Read it,’ she said in a low voice.
Afterwards Clio sat down beside Grace on the edge of the high bed. She was ashamed that amidst all her love for Jake, and fear for him, there was a shiver of jealousy that he should have written in such a way to Grace, not to herself, or Julius. And yet she understood that in the terrible hospital Jake needed to reach out to his ideal of whiteness and cleanliness, his smooth river pebble. That was not a family entity, and so Jake turned to what was closest to home, to Grace. So she told herself.
The two girls let their heads rest together, the smooth roll of hair and the thick plait the same colour and texture, side by side. They were still sitting in the same position when Julius found them. He took his place next to Grace, making the same arrangement as on the garden bench.
He still felt happy, remembering that he had kissed her.
The letter did not surprise Julius, neither the horror of it nor Jake’s image of Grace. His vivid imagination had led him closer to the reality of what Jake was suffering, and he loved Grace to the point where he would have been more surprised to find that his brother did not.
It did not occur to Julius to feel jealous.
‘I wish he would come home,’ Clio said savagely.
‘He will, and Hugo,’ Grace promised. ‘Everything will start again. We’ll make it.’
When Eleanor came up, the letter was hidden in the folds of Clio’s dress. All three of them knew that it was for the magic circle alone. They felt that for even Eleanor to see it would be a betrayal.
That night, although she had not had the nightmare for years, Grace dreamt of her own death by drowning.
Five
The turret room was growing familiar. As he lay in bed the soldier had learnt the contour of it, the regular square of one side and then the hemispherical opposite bulge where the tower was grafted on to the red brick absurdity of the house.
He had looked up at the turret, blinking his sore eyes at the white winter sky, when they wheeled him into the house from the ambulance. Since he had been brought home from Cambrai he had seen nothing but the rigid lines of the hospital ward, and this apparition of a house with its crenellations and gables had made him momentarily afraid of hallucinations again. He had gripped the wooden arms of the wheelchair and found them solid, and had looked again to see that the house was solid too, an architect’s fantasy castle planted in the North Oxford street. There were bare-branched cherry trees in the front garden, and a child’s discarded wooden engine beside the path.
As they lifted him up the steps a woman had come out to greet him. She was statuesque, dressed in a plain grey afternoon dress, with her coils of dark hair put up in the pre-war fashion.
‘I am Eleanor Hirsh,’ she said, smiling at him. When she held out her hand it was as if they were being introduced in a London drawing room. After the months in the trenches and the indignities of hospital, the simple gesture was like a benediction. When he took her hand he saw that there were no rings except for a thin wedding band and a small diamond, and that the fingers looked as if they were accustomed to harder work than writing invitation cards.
‘And you are Captain Dennis.’
Peter Dennis forgot, momentarily, that he was in a wheelchair with his head bandaged and all his senses dislocated. He made a little bow from the waist that was almost courtly.
‘Welcome to my house,’ Eleanor said.
The nurses and the driver who had come with him from the hospital half pushed and half carried his chair up into the house. There was another nurse here, and Peter Dennis had a confused impression of a dark-brown hallway, many more stairs and passages, children’s faces solemnly watching him, all blurred by renewed pain as he was lifted out of the wheelchair and carried up to the turret room.
He heard that his attendants called the dark-haired woman Madam or Mrs Hirsh, but that the children’s voices rising up through the house cried ‘Mama …’
The room they put him into was blessedly quiet, and filled with the reflections of light from the pointed windows in the turret. The new nurse helped him into the high iron-framed bed and he lay back against the down pillows and closed his eyes.
Eleanor took Tabby and Alice down to the kitchen with her. ‘You mustn’t make too much noise,’ she told them. ‘Captain Dennis has been very ill, and now he will need to rest quietly.’
‘May we go and see him?’ Tabby asked. ‘I could show him my sewing.’
‘Perhaps, in a day or so.’
‘Did a German shoot him, as well?’ Alice demanded. It was her standard question.
‘Captain Dennis was very brave. He was fighting to defend what he believes in, and he was wounded. But the German soldier who fired at him was probably just as brave, and defending his own in the same way.’
It was a variation on Eleanor’s standard reply. With her own pacifist sons, her husband’s German blood and the male Strettons’ fierce jingoism to reconcile, she felt it was the best she could do.
‘Like Hugo?’
‘Yes, of course, like Hugo,’ Eleanor answered. That was safer ground. She did not object, for once, to Cook handing out iced biscuits to the little girls. They took their prizes and ran out into the garden before Eleanor could change her mind.
Eleanor instructed Cook that the driver and the nurses who had accompanied the ambulance would probably require tea before returning to the hospital. Then she saw that Mrs Doyle had already put the kettle on the hot plate of the big black range. The kettle sighed and a wisp of steam issued from the curved spout. Eleanor nodded her satisfaction, and the two women smiled at each other. Their relationship was unconventional, but Eleanor did not run a conventional household.
Mrs Doyle had been widowed in the first year of the war and had left her husband’s Oxfordshire village shortly afterwards to return to service. Before her marriage she had been employed as a parlourmaid in a great house, and had no experience in the kitchen. But Eleanor had lost a series of cooks who could not adapt to Madam’s haphazard housekeeping, and she was glad to offer the post to the capable-looking Mrs Doyle. Her instincts were correct. Mrs Doyle proved herself to be a naturally talented cook, producing the sweet cakes and pastries that Nathaniel loved as well as economical ragouts and vegetable pies, and managing to direct the shopping and weekly menus for the family whilst giving the impression that Eleanor was really in charge. Everyone ate much better food, and a new state of calm overtook the household.
The secret of their relationship was not a secret between the two women. They felt a comfortable and open respect for one another, and as the war continued they also became friends. Mrs Doyle’s dependability freed Eleanor to concentrate on her convalescent nursing work, and as the time passed the Woodstock Road house became less a rest home than a hospital extension.
By the beginning of 1918 the flow of casualties was so relentless that there were never enough hospital beds available. Eleanor and Nathaniel had begun to accept into the house men who were still seriously ill, simply because their taking a man who could be nursed at home meant that a bed was freed for another who could not.
One trained and one volunteer nurse now came to the Woodstock Road every eight hours, in shifts around the clock, but it was still Eleanor who took responsibility for the recovery of her patients. They did recover, almost all of them had done, some with a rapidity that surprised the doctors.
‘You should have been a professional nurse,’ Nathaniel proudly told his wife. ‘You have a great gift for it.’
‘Can you imagine my dear mama countenancing anything so dreary and dangerous? Permitting her daughters to do any work at all, however genteel?’ Eleanor sounded cheerful, but she was touched by a wistful sense of opportunity missed, of an unexperienced life running parallel to her own that she could only imagine, never know for sure. She consoled
herself with the fact that she was doing what she could, now that it was needed, although it seemed so little.
Nathaniel had laughed and refolded his newspaper. ‘I can not imagine,’ he had said.
Eleanor and Mrs Doyle now had enough experience of both nurses and ambulance drivers to know that they needed tea, and slabs of cake as well. Mrs Doyle set out the plain white kitchen cups and cut a cherry cake into symmetrical pieces, and Eleanor welcomed Captain Dennis’s escorts into the kitchen.
‘Is he comfortably settled?’
‘The journey’s taken it out of him, all right,’ one of the nurses said. ‘But I reckon he’ll do well enough when he’s rested himself.’ There was no ‘madam’. She spoke with a brusquely businesslike air, one professional to another. Eleanor noticed it and felt a mild satisfaction. Only Mrs Doyle frowned and held up the big brown teapot as if to threaten the woman with it.
‘Won’t you sit down, if you have time?’ Eleanor invited.
They settled themselves around the scrubbed table, and Eleanor sat down with them. She took a cup of tea from Mrs Doyle and paid her a joking compliment about the even distribution of the cherries in the sponge. Only the driver stared and looked uncomfortable, but he was the only one who had never been to the Woodstock Road before.
The nurses talked about patients and their prospects. Eleanor stayed just long enough to drink her tea, and then she said a smiling goodbye and went off upstairs to see if her newest patient was comfortable.
‘She’s the lady of the house, is she?’ the driver sniffed. ‘Funny sort of a set-up you’ve got here, the mistress sitting drinking tea with our sort, isn’t it?’
‘More of a lady than you’re ever likely to encounter,’ the cook snapped. ‘And a finer household, too.’
The man appeared not to have heard her. He rubbed his whiskers with the palm of his hand. ‘It’s the war, isn’t it? Changing everything, all the old ways.’ He shook his head lugubriously, ready to insist that no change he had ever experienced had ever been for the better.
