It is a lot of information to give to a stranger. The young woman seems close to tears.
“You must be worried,” Maeve says. They are perhaps the same age, but the young woman seems childlike, vulnerable. “I think I can help you out. I’m sure I remember seeing your road on my way down here.” Maeve has lost her feeling for the spire anyway. She can always start again. She snaps her sketchbook shut and tucks her pencil behind her ear.
Harriet smiles at the gesture. “You look like a carpenter.” She likes the easy gestures of this woman, the way she wears her hair bobbed short.
“Well, good,” says Maeve. “I like being mistaken for someone useful.”
They start off down Broadgate. The street is busy with shoppers. Maeve has no idea where Berkeley Road is, but she always tries to act with more confidence when she feels uncertain. She has successfully manoeuvred through her life thus far by doing this, so she strides out, forcing Harriet to break into a trot to keep up.
They pass a row of Tudor shops, each one supporting a top storey of black timbers and white plaster. There is a line of people outside the butcher’s, and several delivery carts pulled by horses moving slowly down the street.
“Oh, look at that,” says Maeve as a motor bus clatters by. “A double-decker. I haven’t been on one yet, have you?”
The motor bus has only this year been introduced onto the medieval streets of Coventry. It is such a recent addition to city life in Britain that it is still a shock to see one.
“Shall we?” says Harriet, and the two young women look at each other and grin, grab their skirts and break into a run, chasing the bus down Broadgate until it stops. They clamber on, laughing and digging into their purses for their fares. “Berkeley Road,” says Harriet.
They sit up top, in the open, under the bright sky. The bus lurches into gear and they shriek with delight, clutch on to the seat-back in front of them.
It seems to Harriet as though they are flying through the streets of Coventry. She throws her head back and watches the clouds, the blue blur of the morning. She can still feel the press of Owen’s body against hers, the taste of their last kiss. She doesn’t even know the name of the woman sitting beside her, but it doesn’t matter. Owen will be home by Christmas. She is young and in love. Harriet, reckless with feeling, whoops from the top of the bus, the way the soldiers had sung out as the train pulled away from the station. It feels, for this moment, that it is she who is leaving Coventry, not Owen.
Maeve can’t believe how high up they are, level with the top storeys of the buildings lining the road. She can catch glimpses of the furniture in the rooms above the shops. In one room she sees a painting of a horse on the wall. In another room she watches a woman hurry across to the window to stare out at the bus clattering past. It is as though Maeve has become a giant in a children’s story, thundering along the ground, as tall as the tallest tree.
Harriet and Maeve tumble off the bus, giddy from their adventure. Maeve leads them around a corner, down a street, around another corner.
“There,” she says triumphantly, and sure enough, when Harriet looks up she sees the sign for Berkeley Road.
“Would you come and have a cup of tea with me?”
“I’d love to,” says Maeve, “but I have to meet my friend Charlotte for my daily briefing.”
“Your what?”
“It’s a long story.” Maeve looks at Harriet and realizes that she hasn’t done anything for ages that was as much fun as the ride in the double-decker bus, that these days in Coventry have been lonely ones for her. “Oh, bugger Charlotte,” she says. “She’ll just have to wait.”
It feels strange to Harriet to walk into the flat and know that Owen won’t be there, that she can’t expect him back at the end of the working day. Suddenly the rooms seem full of him, and she pauses uncertainly before entering the kitchen.
“Do you think the war really will be over by Christmas?” she says.
“Why not?” Maeve likes the simplicity of the flat. There’s no clutter. The only photograph above the fireplace is a wedding picture. She follows the straight line of the mantel to the straight line of the window ledge to the straight line of the worktop. “No one wants a war.”
Harriet fetches the tea things. When she goes to the cupboard to get the cups, she sees Owen’s teacup from this morning still sitting on the worktop. Perhaps she shouldn’t have supported his decision to join up? She could have stopped him from going. He would have listened to her if she’d told him not to enlist. But all the young men were enlisting.
Maeve comes into the kitchen. “Your hat,” she says. She reaches up and straightens it, her hands resting for a moment on Harriet’s shoulders.
The touch calms Harriet. She closes her eyes, opens them again. The feeling of uncertainty has passed. She removes her hat, puts the dirty teacup from this morning into the sink, and places clean cups, a teapot, and a few slices of cake on the tray.
They drink their tea by the front window, side by side on the settee, as if they were still riding up high on the bus.
“What were you doing when I interrupted you this morning?” asks Harriet.
“I was drawing.”
“What?”
“St. Michael’s spire.”
“Will you show me?”
Maeve hesitates. She has never shown anyone her drawings. She’s not sure that she wants to. It’s her private world. And the work isn’t finished.
“Please,” says Harriet, and she seems so genuinely interested that Maeve reaches into her bag and brings out the little sketchbook.
“It’s no good,” she says as she opens the book. “The perspective is completely off.”
Harriet looks at the detail on the church spire, detail she has never noticed herself. Each piece of stone has been drawn by Maeve as either shadow or light. Her talent fills Harriet with wonder and admiration. The church looks more alive in the drawing than in reality.
“It’s beautiful,” she says. “It’s even more beautiful than the real church.”
“I should be off,” says Maeve, but she is flattered by Harriet’s response. She tears the sketch from her book, passes it over to Harriet. “Keep it,” she says. “I’d like you to have it.”
Harriet holds the drawing in both hands, looks at it carefully. “Thank you,” she says. “Will you come and see me again?”
“Yes.”
“Tomorrow perhaps?”
“Or the day after. No later than that.”
“You’ll remember how to get here?”
“I got us here this time, didn’t I?”
When Maeve reaches the road, she turns and waves. Harriet waves back from the upstairs front window. It is not until Maeve is at the corner of the street that she realizes they never exchanged names.
Charlotte has already eaten her lunch by the time Maeve gets to the café on Broadgate.
“I waited,” she states. “And then I didn’t.”
Maeve has always admired the cavalier attitude of Charlotte Benson, but today it merely seems selfish.
“I’m not hungry anyway,” she says. “I had tea and cake with a friend.”
“What friend?”
“A new friend.”
Charlotte raises an eyebrow. “A new friend?” she says. “Obviously I haven’t been spending enough time with you. Tomorrow we’ll take a walk in the countryside. Freddie has a chap he wants you to meet. And this weekend there’s a dance. We can all go together.”
“But I’m to go home on Sunday,” says Maeve.
“So?” Charlotte waves for the waiter with a white-gloved hand. “You did come to Coventry to see me, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And so you shall see a great deal of me between now and Sunday.”
Maeve watches Charlotte’s hand turning in the air. She wishes she’d asked the young woman her name so she could send a letter tomorrow and explain why she wouldn’t be able to see her. She is surprised at how much she regrets this, and
thinks of the thrill of the double-decker bus ride, and the even greater thrill of showing the woman her drawing. Maeve had felt at such ease with the young woman on Berkeley Road. It seemed that they understood the world in the same way, and that they would be good friends if given the chance.
MARCH 5, 1919
Harriet lays out her clothes on the bed. She is not sure how cold it will be. She is not sure if she should bring both a winter coat and her heavy cardigan that buttons up to the neck.
The taxi has been called for the morning. There is nothing left to do but sleep and rise and make her way to the station. Harriet stands by the front window, looking down into the garden. The moon has turned the path into a small silver river, slipping through the gate. She follows it with her gaze and suddenly remembers the young woman she met on the morning Owen left for France. How the woman had stood by the gate and waved up to Harriet. How she had given her the sketch of the cathedral. How she had promised to come and see her the next day, and had then disappeared.
Harriet turns abruptly from the window. She doesn’t want to think of that woman, not now. She’s just one more person who hasn’t kept her promise; just one more person who hasn’t returned to Harriet.
The bus judders over the uneven ground. Harriet is thrown about in her seat, has to hold on to the seat in front of her in order to keep her balance, to keep herself upright. It is raining. The water falls in veils over the streaked glass, obscuring the fields of mud, the burned, skeletal trees that they pass on their way into Ypres.
The bus is full, and mostly women—wives, mothers, sisters of the soldiers who fought in the trenches here at the start of the war. No one speaks. Even last night, in the guest-house in Poperinghe where Harriet and some of the other women were staying, no one had much to say. Grief, unlike love, seems to be a solitary experience.
They pass the ruins of a spinning mill, then a wooded area where the tops of the trees are all blown off and what remains are charred and splintered stumps, bare of leaves or bark.
Harriet still has the telegram she received two months after Owen left for Europe. When she was handed it solemnly by the messenger, on a crisp November day, at the door of the flat on Berkeley Road, she knew that it said one of three things. Her husband was wounded, missing, or dead. When she opened it, with shaking hands, right there on the front door stoop, it said two of three things. Private Owen Marsh was missing, believed killed. Such a simple statement, with just one word between missing and killed to offer her the smallest flicker of hope. Missing in a place called Ypres.
How Harriet clung to that small pause between what she wanted, and what was probably true. For those first months after she received the telegram, she believed that Owen would walk into the flat at any moment. When that didn’t happen, she believed that he was probably wounded somewhere, perhaps badly, and that they hadn’t been able to identify him yet. She had heard stories of soldiers lying in military hospitals, suffering from wounds that left them unconscious and unable to identify themselves.
She waited for word, but none came. She went to the local war office every day to make inquiries. Then Harriet prayed to a God she had never really believed in, night after night down on her knees on the bare bedroom floor, her head resting on her clasped hands, the words rasping in her throat.
But nothing brought him back to her, and at the end of the war, when the death tally was done, Owen Marsh was simply one of nearly eight thousand soldiers who had perished on October 30, 1914, during the first battle of Ypres, simply one of ninety thousand British soldiers with, as the military reports put it, no known grave. A generation of young men gone.
The bus lurches to a stop and the doors swing open. There’s a hesitation before people move from their seats. The rain is still pelting down and it is very cold. No one is dressed adequately. There’s a hesitation, and then an old woman stands up slowly and they all rise.
Harriet steps off the bus and hunches her shoulders against the rain. She has forgotten her umbrella. It feels petty to mind getting wet, but she does mind. She walks purposefully down the road and into the ruined city.
The Belgian city on the border of France had once been prosperous and had boasted many fine houses, many grand buildings and churches. It had a magnificent cathedral. The Cloth Hall was an enormous market for the buying and selling of every kind of fabric—wool, lace, linen, cotton. It had been built around a rectangular courtyard, and it was so vast that on the ground floor alone there were forty-eight doors to the outside. The river once ran through the town and allowed the boats carrying merchandise to sail right up to the warehouses to unload.
Now the main street of the city is entirely flattened. There isn’t a building in Ypres that hasn’t been affected by the shelling, that isn’t either missing, or wounded, or destroyed.
Only because Harriet has seen pictures of Cloth Hall does she recognize what’s left of it. It has been shelled to almost nothing. Parts of two walls remain, ragged towers of brick. The once impressive bell tower is a crumbling wreck, and what once were the two interior floors are now a mound of rubble filling the cavity between the walls, rubble as high as a small hill.
The cathedral is an endless plain of broken stone and dust, with several small portions of wall jutting up from the debris like tombstones.
Harriet walks through the city streets. The rain plasters her hair to her scalp and starts to run down the back of her neck. The other people who have been on the bus are reading their guidebooks, for there is a sombre guidebook that has been published for the thousands of people who travel here to see the ruins.
Harriet pulls her coat tighter around her. The mud is making it hard to walk, and she has no clear idea of where to go. She had been anticipating this moment for so long, this moment when she would be able to go to the place where Owen had last been; but now that she is here, she doesn’t know what to do.
The dead men are nowhere to be found, and so it seems that they are, in fact, everywhere. There is no guidebook for that.
No one knows that Harriet has made this journey. She is estranged from her own family and has been for years, and Owen’s parents, despite making a strained effort to be polite to her when she was married to Owen, have retreated into their own grief. They would think it ghoulish that she had travelled here to find the ghost of her husband. They dislike a display of feeling, prefer emotion to be securely locked away, like the good bone china they keep in the mahogany bureau in the parlour.
Yesterday the bus tour travelled to nearby Hooge, a village that had been completely obliterated. All that was left was the wooden signpost with the word Hooge. There was a small British cemetery there, containing about two thousand graves, on the western ridge above the vanished town; no grass, no trees, just tight rows of simple wooden crosses planted in the dirt. The names of the dead soldiers and their rank were painted on the crosses in white.
How Harriet envied the women who knelt in prayer in that small cemetery, weeping at the graves of their husbands. How she envied their laying of flowers on the graves, the way they ran their hands over the contours of the crosses. One woman laid her forehead against the top of her husband’s marker, the way Harriet remembers Owen laying his forehead against hers. Harriet had to turn away at that.
Now, she huddles in a corner where two ruined stone walls meet. “Owen,” she says out loud, just to hear his name here. “Owen.”
She is past tears. She is past believing in his safe return. She is past love. She says his name into the falling rain, rubs the back of her knuckles against the stones until they bleed, and then she feels stupid and stops.
They are to stay the night in Ypres, in one of the small hotels that have sprung up to support the tourists who pour into the city. This afternoon they are to visit some of the remaining trenches and the wooded area where the soldiers would wait to be reunited with their regiment if they had become separated from it.
Harriet could never have imagined this much destruction. It seems unreal. She thi
nks of all those days and nights when she foolishly believed that Owen was still alive. Being here now, she knows absolutely that he is dead.
He is everywhere. He is nowhere. The blood on her knuckles is the brightest thing in this landscape. His name tastes like smoke in her mouth.
Owen had time to write Harriet only one letter before he was missing, believed killed. Before that letter she had received a regulation postcard. The postcard had lines already written on it that the soldier was supposed to cross out if they didn’t apply to him. The lines that Owen had crossed out sent a chill through Harriet when she received the card.
I have been admitted into hospital.
I am sick and am going on well.
I am wounded and hope to be discharged soon.
I have received no letter from you for a long time.
What he left as his message was the simple and entirely banal I am quite well. Letter follows at first opportunity.
The letter, when it came, a mere week before the telegram arrived, was surprisingly vivid. Harriet had never known Owen to be much of a talker, let alone much of a writer, and she felt both comforted and alarmed by his letter. She was grateful that he hadn’t tried to spare her his experience by engaging in reminiscences of their life together, or inquiries into how she was getting on at home. He still wanted to offer himself to her, even if just with words—and for this she was glad. But the man who wrote this letter to her was also not a man she felt she knew, and it alarmed her to think how much there still was to learn about her husband.
Harriet has brought Owen’s letter with her to Ypres. But she has read it so many times that, even standing in the mud-filled trench, she can bring it back word for word.
Dearest Harriet,
Well, I’m writing from the trenches within hearing distance of the Germans; they are in fact only 25 yards away. It is daylight and a beautiful day and I’ve just had a good sleep in a sort of covered hole. There is nothing but sandbags all around, and a crater nearby full of dead matter. Yes, the stink is awful and the Germans have a nasty habit of stirring the bowl and keeping it good and fresh. However, in spite of all this, I feel unaccountably happy.
Coventry: A Novel Page 2
