by Anna Hope
The little girl turns and pads into the violet darkness at the end of the hall, from where there come hushed voices. Then she comes back. “She says you’ve to wait in here.” She pushes open the door of a room to her right, and Evelyn follows her into a little parlor. There’s an armchair in the corner: a lumpy-looking two-seater along the wall. It looks as though there hasn’t been a fire in the grate for years. They stand for a moment, she and the little girl, facing each other in the half light.
“Well.” Evelyn’s breath clouds before her face. “I don’t suppose you have a candle, do you?”
“I’ll have to get a match.”
“Wait. I’ve got some here, look.” She takes a box from her pocket.
The little girl brings the stub of a candle over from the mantelpiece, holding it out in front of her. Evelyn bends to light it. “That’s better,” she says, when the wavering light has taken hold. “Now I can see your lovely ribbon.” She smiles. “It’s a very pretty color.”
The girl doesn’t take her eyes from Evelyn’s face.
“What’s your name?”
“Dora.”
She has a low, cracked voice, the way some children do.
“Pleased to meet you, Dora. I’m Evelyn.” She holds out her hand.
Dora looks at the hand, then back up to her face. There’s the bang of a door and low murmuring in the kitchen. Evelyn recognizes the voice of Rowan Hind.
“That’s my dad,” says Dora.
Evelyn straightens up.
“Why have you come to see him?” She presses her lips together; they are white with concern.
“Don’t worry, I promise, it’s not about anything bad.”
The little girl gazes at her, seeming to consider the possible truth of this. Then, “I’ll go and see if he’ll come,” she says, passing the candle to Evelyn to hold.
Evelyn walks over to the mantelpiece and puts the candle down. She sits on the edge of an armchair. Stands again. Crosses the room to the window, half of which is covered with a piece of sagging yellowed lace. No lamps light the street outside; it is almost completely dark. She longs to light a cigarette.
Behind her the door opens and Rowan Hind is standing in the doorway. “Mr. Hind.” She steps forward, her hand outstretched. “My name’s Evelyn Montfort. I work in the pensions office in Camden Town. You came to see me on Monday.” Her words collide with one another in her haste to get them out.
His head is moving slightly from side to side, the same involuntary movement she remembers from the other day. It was pitiful then, amid the late afternoon tedium of the office, but now, when she cannot properly see his face, it makes her afraid. “I remember,” he says. “I’m not daft. I remember you.”
She clasps her hands together and presses her thumb into the opposite palm. “That’s good, then. I didn’t want—”
“Munitions.”
“That’s right.”
“No finger.” He points to her hand.
“Yes.”
“What are you doing in my house?”
There’s so much hostility in his voice that she steps backward again, catching her heel awkwardly on the grate, and for a brief, awful moment, she feels as though she will fall, but then catches the mantle, steadying herself just in time.
“Careful,” he says.
“I’m sorry,” she says, straightening herself. “I came because you were looking for someone. For a Captain Montfort. Is that right?”
He says nothing.
“Was it an Edward Montfort? Captain Edward Montfort?”
Something about her words changes the temperature in the room.
“He’s my brother,” she says. “I can help you, if you tell me why you want to find him.”
He turns and closes the door behind him. “Why?” he says.
“Why what?”
His face is pinched, suspicious. “Why would you come all the way out here?”
“Because, I thought this was what you wanted. And—I was sorry that I lied.”
He stares at her.
“I didn’t have to come.”
The minute it is out she realizes how untrue it is. And how petulant it sounds. She had to come. She couldn’t not.
He pulls a bent cigarette from his inner pocket, straightens it out, and puts his head in his right hand, his first two fingers rubbing at the space between his eyes.
“Have you been working today?” Evelyn asks quietly.
“Yes.”
“Did you have any luck?”
He shakes his head and goes to sit on the sofa. “Nothing. Too bloody cold.”
“You’d have thought they’d have let you in, if it’s cold.”
“Well, doesn’t work like that, does it?” He lights the cigarette, pulling a stray piece of tobacco away from his lip.
“Do you mind if I smoke, too?”
He shrugs. “Do what you like.”
She lights one of her own. “What did he do?” she says.
“Who?”
“My brother.”
His head is still down, but he is listening, she can tell; she can see the tension in his body; it’s almost palpable reaching toward her. He lets out a small, involuntary sound, and then begins to shiver. At first she thinks it is the cold, but then, when it carries on, she sees that it is the same shivering she remembers from the office that had preceded his fit. There’s a small knock at the door. She jumps, but it is only Rowan’s daughter again, carrying a tray set with a teapot and two cups, a sugar bowl, and a milk jug. The girl carries it carefully, an expression of grave concentration on her face, setting it down on the small table before the empty grate.
On the sofa, away from the candle, Evelyn can see Rowan wrestling with himself, can see the shaking threatening to take him over: the fight within him, his foot rapping out a jangled rhythm on the floor. She feels a corresponding panic rise in her own body. Her eyes flicker to the little girl. She should protect her somehow, from what is about to happen—cover her eyes. But the girl is already turning toward her father. “Dad?” She leaves the tray and goes to him. “Daddy?” He is shaking badly now, but she clambers into his lap and wraps both her arms around his neck. She sits like that, with her arms tight around him, until her father is still.
As she stares at the two of them, twined together, Evelyn is filled with a hot, stinging envy; she wants to be in that chair with that little girl’s warmth in her lap, those thin arms wrapped around her neck. She sits back in her chair with her cold arms and her empty lap and thinks of Robin, his hand on Rowan’s back, stroking him, calming him, and of her sharpness with him afterward. Reginald Yates, that awful man, was right: She really is a bitch. She really is a sadistic bitch.
When Rowan is finally still, his daughter reaches a hand up to his cheek and holds it there for a moment, before slipping off his lap. She pours tea and milk into the cups and hands one of them to Evelyn.
It is difficult, somehow, to look at the child.
When the girl has gone, she places her cup and saucer on the floor. “I’m very sorry to have troubled you, Mr. Hind. I’ll leave you now.” She stands and pulls on her gloves. It was a mistake to come. She has disturbed these people, and she is glad to go.
“Stay,” says Rowan, and his voice is different, calmer now. “Drink your tea. It’s rude to leave when you’ve been given a cup of tea.” He looks at her then, square in the face, and his gaze is steady and bold.
She does as he says, taking a seat back in the chair.
“Your brother,” he says.
“Yes?”
“What’s he ever done to you?”
“He …”
He made me feel small. Like a small, stupid spinster. He’s able to be happy. He’s able to forget the war.
“He lied to me,” she says.
Rowan nods,
seems satisfied with that. “All right,” he says. “I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you what you want to know.” He lights a cigarette and points it at her. “But I want you to remember you asked for it.”
She is silent.
“Say it,” he says.
“Say what?”
“Say you asked for it. I want to hear you say it.”
“I asked for it,” says Evelyn.
“All right,” he says, and then he begins to speak.
“I had a pal. We met in a rest camp, behind the lines. They called it rest, but it wasn’t really; they had you doing all sorts of jobs. The only rest you got was when it went dark and you could get into your bed. They’d brought a load of other men to the company, but I didn’t really notice. I was keeping myself to myself.
One day me and this other lad were put together, loading coils of wire and taking them further up the line and dropping them off. We had to chat a bit, and I could hear straight away he was from near me. Turned out he was from Hackney. Few miles north of here.”
“By then all the regiments were split up. It wasn’t like before, with pals from all the same places serving together. Too many had gone by then for that. By that time you’d get a Yorkshireman with a London man with a man from Wales. They’d shift them around after an action, all the ones that were left and able to fight. It wasn’t often you’d meet anyone from near where you were.”
“What was his name?” Evelyn shifts forward in her chair.
“Michael,” he says. “Michael Hart. He was from a company that had lost nearly all their men. They’d been in something pretty bad, and only forty or so of them were left.”
“Out of how many?”
“Few hundred.” He shrugs. “So they put them into ours. They would never talk about it. What happened. But we’d heard about it all right. They’d all been drowned in the mud.”
“Drowned?”
He nods slowly, looking up at her. “You wouldn’t believe it unless you’d seen it.”
There’s a silence as she tries to take this in. She cannot. Her mind balks at it. “What was he like?” she says. “Michael?”
He sits back and scratches his neck, considering this. “I’ll tell you something,” he says. “When we finished work, in that camp, most would sit around and smoke and play cards a bit. But he’d never play. He said he didn’t want to know how much luck he had left.”
“Why? What did he mean?”
“You’d play some gambling game or other. Bet pennies. But if you did well you’d get jumpy. You didn’t want to think you’d had your luck. I expect, since he’d got through that last bit alive, he thought he might have had his luck. So he thought it was best not to play. Said he didn’t want to know.”
“I see.” And she does; it makes a kind of sense.
The end of Rowan’s cigarette glows red. “He didn’t talk much to anyone. None of them from the new lot did. But we were behind the lines for a good few weeks or so. Every night they had you on working parties going up to the front line.”
“What did that mean?”
“All manner of everything: You’d have to carry up ammunition, sandbags, trench mortars, barbed wire. That was the worst. You’d carry it on a stick, two of you, and you’d more than likely cut yourself to ribbons before you got where you were going. You’d walk two or three miles like that, trying not to fall into the mud. But whatever we had to sign up for—me and Michael—we’d do it together.
“He got a cake once. His mum sent it him. A big fruitcake.” He looks up at her, half smiles, gestures for size with his hands. “He shared it about. It was tasty. I remember wondering how she’d got it so tasty. She must have saved up her sugar for weeks. He used to get letters from her, too, regular. I never got any letters from my ma.”
“Why not?”
He looks scornful. “Couldn’t write her name, could she?”
“Oh,” she says. Of course.
“After a few weeks, they started giving us more food. Double rations. That’s when we knew we were going to have to move up the lines again. Everyone always got twitchy when you got more food. You wanted it, but you didn’t want it, if you know what I mean. No one knew where you’d be going, but you’d be taking bets on where it would be. The only thing anyone wanted by then was a cushy one, a nice quiet bit of line.
“Captain Montfort came out in the morning. Said we were moving out at dawn tomorrow. He looked jumpy. I had a feeling straight away. I just knew it was going to be bad.”
The sound of her brother’s name in this man’s mouth makes her flinch. Captain Montfort. She leans forward. “Was he good?” she says.
He looks up at her, seems surprised.
“A—good captain, I mean?”
He shrugs. “He was. He was all right. Till the end.”
“The end?”
“Yes.”
He says no more on this, and she can tell he won’t be pushed. She is filled with a strange feeling, half-defensive, half-guilty; she finds she wants Ed to have been good at his job.
“I turned to Michael,” says Rowan, “to say something, but he’d gone white as anything.
We were staying in billets in a farmhouse, and when the sun went down you weren’t allowed a fire. You weren’t allowed to do anything but get into your bed. We were lying in our bunks in the dark but I was wide awake. Then there’s a sound over where Michael was—
“ ‘You awake?’ I says.
“ ‘Yes,’ he says.
“ ‘I’ve got a bit of a bad feeling.’
“ ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Me, too.’
“ ‘Will you promise me something?’ I say.
“ ‘What’s that?’
“ ‘Will you tell my wife if anything happens to me?’
“ ‘Course,’ he says.
“ ‘Tell her what happened. Proper. I don’t want her getting the bollocks they write home. I want her to know the truth.’ ”
“And what did he say to that?” Evelyn says, lighting another cigarette.
“He said he’d do it. He promised. Then he says, ‘Can you do the same for me? I haven’t got a wife, but you could go and find my mum.’
“ ‘What’s your mum’s name?’
“ ‘Ada,’ he says.
“I made a joke. I said I’d thank her for the cake. He laughed. I wrote down her address.”
He leans forward, putting his hands to his head and speaking to the ground.
“I made sure that I learned it, in case I lost the paper. So I could still come and find her. For years after he died I had that bloody address in my head.”
“You didn’t go to see her, then?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
He shakes his head. “Couldn’t tell her, could I? I was a coward.”
“Couldn’t tell her what?” she says.
He doesn’t answer. Then he speaks again. “One day, a couple of weeks ago, I was working the streets, selling my brushes and soaps and crap, and when I looked up I realized that I was on his street. The street he’d written down for me. And I was standing right outside his door. And as I’m standing there, the door opens and his mum comes out and she walks straight past me.”
“She didn’t see you?”
He shakes his head. “She had her own thoughts about her. She walked straight past me down the hill. But before she turned I got a look at her face. And she looks just like him, same dark hair, except smaller, and sort of tidy-looking, and I thought, That’s the woman sent him the cake I ate. That’s the woman sent him all those letters. And then I start to shiver, right there in the street, and I’m looking right and left and I’m thinking, Someone knows I didn’t keep my promise. Someone wants me to tell her now. Three years passed and I’m standing here.” He looks up at Evelyn, his face fierce, as if daring her to contradict him. “I
knew it was him that had brought me there. To his house.”
She swallows. “And what did you do then?”
“I went back. Last Sunday it was. I took my bag along with me and made out I was selling something. It was a Sunday, but she didn’t say anything, his ma. She let me in anyway.
“First thing, I get in there and already I know I’m not going to see this through. And I’m standing there in the kitchen and staring at her and I’m thinking, You look sad. And I know why. I know why you’re so bleeding sad.” He pauses a moment, and then meets her eyes. “Have you ever seen a ghost?”
“No,” Evelyn lies.
His foot is tapping, tapping on the floor.
She takes a swift drag of her cigarette. Then, “Once,” she says.
“Tell me.” He leans in. “What did you see?”
“I can’t.” She shakes her head. “I’m sorry.”
“Tell me. I’m telling you.” His voice is raised now. “You tell me.”
She releases her breath. She has never told anyone this. Not a single soul. “Once …” she says, slowly, “when I woke, in the night, I saw a little girl. She was standing in the corner of my room. She looked lonely. I wanted to go to her. I wanted to comfort her, so I got up, out of my bed, and as I went toward her, I knew—” She stumbles. “I knew that she was mine. My daughter. And that she needed me to hold her. And I wanted to, so, so much. But when I got close enough to reach her, she turned away from me. She walked into the wall.” She is shaking. Don’t cry. Don’t bloody cry.
“Were you scared?”
She returns his gaze. “Yes,” she says. “I was.”
He seems satisfied enough with that. “I saw one, too,” he says. “That day. Michael. He was standing there, in his mum’s kitchen, just beside her, clear as you are now.”
Her heart is at her temple, at her throat.
“Pointing his finger straight at me, and his mouth’s going, but I can’t hear. It’s like in the pictures, when there’s no words underneath to tell you what they’re saying but you know they’ve got a murderous rage on them anyway. And all I can think is I’ve got to get out of there. I try to leave. But she’s guessed by then, his mum. She’s trying to keep me in the house.”
