by Clare Clark
‘You, Oskar Grunewald,’ she said, yanking up her drawers, ‘are a lily-livered chicken-hearted whey-faced spineless bloody milksop.’ She snatched up the book and hurled it at him as hard as she could. It knocked the breath from his stomach. In a daze he heard her boots on the parquet, the slam of the door. The library tilted and spun around him but, even as the thoughts fell over themselves inside his brain, he knew one thing for certain: nothing in the world was quite the way he had imagined it.
3
1915
That December was bitterly cold. At Ellinghurst the lake froze thick enough to skate on and the ice on the window panes made curved patterns like the backs of seashells. On the second Sunday of the month, as the grey afternoon sank into dusk, it snowed. Jessica stood in the window of the old day nursery, the lamps unlit behind her, and watched the white flakes as they swirled like feathers in the gathering gloom. Beyond the black humps of the trees the full moon was a smear of silver beneath the thick shroud of the sky. Shivering, she pulled her cardigan more tightly around her shoulders.
Theo was dead. A boy had brought the telegram, riding up the drive on a red bicycle. The bicycle had a silver bell. Jessica had seen it through the window, propped against the stone ledge, the silver bell and the dark cloth tape, beginning to fray, wrapped around the handlebars. As soon as Mrs Johns saw the boy she backed away from the door, calling in a shrill voice for Jessica’s mother. Jessica heard Eleanor say something to Phyllis on the gallery landing and then the click of her heels on the stairs, the barely suppressed irritation in her voice.
‘Really, Johns, what could possibly be so—’ But when she saw the boy the words died in her mouth and her legs buckled and she had to catch the eagle at the bottom of the banisters to stop herself from falling. She did not look up when Sir Aubrey came out of his study, Mrs Johns clutching her apron behind him. Nor did she go to the boy who waited on the doorstep in his too-big uniform, the envelope in his outstretched hand. She clutched at the post like a mast at sea, her face chalky white, her head swaying backwards and forwards.
It was less than three months since the news had come of Uncle Henry, killed at the Battle of Gallipoli.
‘No,’ she said, her eyes wild. ‘No, no, no’, over and over again in a bleak howl like the wind in the chimney while Sir Aubrey took a coin from his pocket and gave it to the boy. When the boy handed him the envelope he stared at it as though he had never seen a telegram before.
Jessica clenched her fists, pressing her nails into her palms, and willed him not to open it. For as long as he did not open it whatever was in it had not happened. Not yet. Her father ran the side of his thumb over the typed address. Then, turning it over, he slid a finger under the flap and drew out the slip of paper. Someone gave a strangled cry. Perhaps it was her.
Then, like a jump in the newsreel, Phyllis was standing beside her.
‘Father?’ Phyllis said, holding out her hand, but Sir Aubrey only shook his head and went on staring at the telegram. His breathing was unsteady and he swayed a little. Phyllis took a step towards him. He blinked and looked up, leaning away from her, shaking his head, his free hand smoothing his tie.
‘No reply,’ he said to the boy and the boy nodded and straightened his cap and opened his mouth as if he meant to say something. Nothing came out. Instead, he turned around and swung his leg over his red bicycle. When the front door closed the silence was terrible. Jessica stood frozen, mesmerised by the ticking of the grandfather clock, the hiss and sigh of the fire, Eleanor’s low keening punctuated by the scrape of her breath.
‘Father?’ Phyllis said again, uncertainly. Sir Aubrey cleared his throat. Carefully, he folded the telegram and tucked it inside his jacket.
‘Take your mother upstairs please,’ he said in a voice that was not his. ‘She needs to lie down.’
Phyllis shook her head. ‘What does it—’
‘Killed in action. Fourth of December. I assume we shall know more in due course.’ He paused, taking his handkerchief from his pocket. Last Saturday, Jessica thought dumbly as Phyllis put her hands over her face. Theo has been dead since last Saturday. She watched her father unfold his handkerchief and blow his nose. Then he folded it again, one square on top of the other.
‘There is no nobler cause than to lay down one’s life for one’s country,’ he said, his voice cracking on the consonants. Eleanor’s cries had grown higher and shorter, jabbing the air like tight little stitches. ‘We should be proud. Mrs Johns, would you? I . . . there are things I must take care of.’ He slid his handkerchief back into his pocket. Then, once again smoothing his tie, he went into his study and closed the door.
After that things continued to happen one after the other in what everyone pretended was the ordinary order. People came and went away again. A white-faced Phyllis poured them tea. Three days later the morning post brought a letter from France. Jessica was in the Great Hall when it arrived. She stared at Theo’s familiar spiky handwriting on the envelope and something inside her burst. Theo was alive. There had been a mistake. It had not been Theo who had been blown to pieces by that shell, not Theo at all but someone else. Did he even know that they had thought . . . ? The envelope was addressed to her mother but she tore it open anyway.
The letter was short, covering less than a single page. Theo had always been a poor correspondent. He wrote that they were not to worry about him, that although his battalion had moved forward they considered themselves pretty safe, as they had only the odd stray bullet whistling over and none of the heavy shelling that had dogged their last position. He wrote that all he really wanted was for it to stop raining because the rain turned everything to soupy, sticky mud. But, although the whole world was mud and all the men in it, his boys were in good spirits, buoyed by the rumours that the German trenches were worse. So at least we’re winning something, he wrote, even if I would give everything I own for a dry pair of socks. Below the scrawl of his name he had noted the date.
Jessica sank down onto the stone flags, her arms around her knees, the sobs coming in dry heaves that twisted her ribs. December 2nd 1915. It did not seem possible that the shock could be just as new a second time.
Later, sometime in the lost hours, she rose and went barefooted to the bathroom. There were lights on downstairs and the landing was striped with shadows. The house no longer slept. Time had lost its substance, the old boundaries between day and night broken open. Outside Theo’s bedroom door she hesitated. The door was pushed to and a narrow knife of light lit the wooden floor beneath it. Hardly breathing, she nudged the door open.
Her mother stood with her back to Jessica at the chest of drawers. The top drawer was pulled open, its contents spilled out all over the floor. In her hands, Eleanor held a pair of woollen shooting socks, dark green with jaunty yellow diamonds knitted into the turnovers. Slowly, her head balanced as carefully as an egg on her neck, she turned round. She did not say anything. Jessica was not even sure that she saw her. Her face was stretched so tight it looked like a skull with two dark holes where the eyes should have been. Behind her, on top of the chest of drawers, every one of the silver-framed photographs had been turned to the wall.
It had always been the tradition at Ellinghurst to hang the Christmas decorations on Christmas Eve. Boughs of spruce and ivy were cut from the woods and twisted with pine cones and scarlet ribbons and slices of dried orange and sticks of cinnamon, and laid along the sideboards and around the posts of the banisters. The children gathered sprigs of holly to put behind the paintings. There were wreaths on the doors and creamy candles in silver candelabra on the mantelpieces and, in the hall, reaching up so high that you could almost touch it from the gallery, a huge Christmas tree hung with glass baubles and silver stars and lit with hundreds of tiny electrical lights.
The Christmas of 1915 there were no decorations and no friends of Eleanor’s with their dancing and their cocktails and their long cigarettes. When Mr Fisher’s boy brought the tree up to the house, Mrs Johns sent him away.
The tree jounced as he clattered back down the drive, its hacked-off trunk jutting from the cart like a broken bone. The stars and the baubles and the heavy ropes of silver tinsel that Uncle Henry had brought back from Germany before the War stayed in their boxes in the attic. Eleanor locked the piano. There was no music, no singing. Death filled the house like dirty water, muffling sound.
It was as though time had stopped. The hands of the clocks moved slowly round but the days did not change. For as long as Jessica could remember Father Christmas had come to Ellinghurst at midnight on Christmas Eve, not down the chimney the way he did in books but through the front door because, as Eleanor always said, what kind of lunatic came down a chimney when the fire was lit? Jessica was seven when she saw Father Christmas kissing Eleanor’s hand and realised that it was not Father Christmas at all, but M. du Marietta who was Viennese and ate four green apples every morning for breakfast. The next day, after church and before it was time to open the presents, she had sneaked into his room and filled his shoes with a paste of flour and water. Eleanor had been furious. She had had Nanny send Jessica to bed without any supper, even though it was Christmas Day, and said she could stay there until she was sorry, but Jessica was not sorry, not a bit, not just because M. du Marietta deserved it but because of Theo who told her she was a marvel and spun her round and round in the air by her arms. It was one of Jessica’s favourite things to balance on her stomach on the gallery balustrade, she liked the dizzy vertigo it gave her, but Theo spinning her was the closest she had ever come to really flying.
The Father Christmases continued to come to Ellinghurst long after they were all too old to pretend. One Christmas it was a financier Eleanor had met in Berlin, another an Italian sculptor. Once it was Mr Connolly with the white motor car. Last year it had been Theo, home from the Front on a week’s leave. His hand shook as he gave out the presents. Afterwards he sat by the fire, a glass of whisky in his fist, and Eleanor rested her head against his shoulder, strands of her hair clinging to his scarlet coat.
‘Promise me, my darling,’ she murmured. ‘Promise me you’ll always be Father Christmas.’
Theo hadn’t promised. He only raised his glass with a slurred ‘Ho, ho, ho!’ and drained it in a single gulp. He drank a lot of whisky that Christmas. It made him quarrelsome. He tried to argue with Phyllis but she was like their father and would not argue back, so he argued with Jessica instead. She told him he was hateful and that she wished he had not come back. Two full days before his leave was up, he left Ellinghurst and went to London. He did not say why or where he was going. Nanny told Jessica it was not her fault, that there was no fighting the bright lights with a boy Theo’s age, but Eleanor was inconsolable. She wept and raged and accused Sir Aubrey of driving him away. It was not fair but he did not say so. He did not say anything at all. He just folded up his face and went into his study and shut the door.
He said it was because of the book he was writing about the history of Ellinghurst, but Jessica knew it was because he was weak. He never stood up to Eleanor, even when she laughed at him with other people’s husbands. That was why she did not love him. You could love someone who argued with you, even in the heat of hating them you could love them so hard it hurt to swallow, but how could you love someone without any backbone?
The Christmas Theo died there was no Father Christmas. On Christmas Eve Eleanor did not come down for dinner. The next morning they went to church. Sir Aubrey insisted. They were not the only family in the village, he said, to have lost a son. It was the first time since the telegram that Eleanor had left the house. She leaned on Phyllis as she stepped out of the car, her black dress rustling, her face obscured by a thick veil of black crape. In the graveyard she stopped suddenly, one hand on a lichened headstone. Phyllis murmured something to her and tugged at her arm but she doubled over as though she was being sick, her body wracked with sobs. The extravagance of her grief was like a pillow pressing down on Jessica’s face.
By the time they went in the organ was playing for the first hymn. The church looked as it had done every Christmas since Jessica could remember, the nativity scene with its painted plaster figures in the upended wooden crate that served as a stable, the winter jasmine in tall vases behind the altar, the Advent wreath with its red candles burned down and the white one in the middle, its flame guttering a little in the draught from the door. Jessica breathed in, inhaling the familiar church smell. As they made their way up the aisle, several members of the congregation rose, murmuring their condolences, but Eleanor did not acknowledge them. She clasped her hands together as Phyllis guided her into the family pew, her hunched silhouette impervious to solace.
The parson was fat with several chins and an abundance of curly grey hair. Jessica had never seen him before. She frowned at Phyllis, wondering what had happened to whispering Mr Lidgate and his weak chest.
‘Gone to be a chaplain at the Front,’ Phyllis muttered.
Jessica had never cared a straw for Mr Lidgate but abruptly his absence was a hole gouged inside her. Once, after one particularly inaudible Collect, Mr Lidgate had stuttered, ‘Lord, hear our prayer,’ and Theo, matching exactly the parson’s hoarse whisper, had murmured in her ear, ‘Not a bleeding hope, dearie.’ Jessica closed her eyes, her arms tight around her ribs, squeezing herself in. She knew how it worked, from the time she had broken her collarbone. The more you moved, the harder it was to bear it.
The new parson delivered his Christmas sermon, his elbow on the pulpit as if it were the bar in a public house. He said that just because the country was at war it did not mean that God had abandoned them. He told the story of the avenging angel of Mons who had appeared to embattled British troops at the very moment that they had believed themselves vanquished, and led them to victory. Only months ago, he said, a bright white cross had appeared in the sky over Flanders, dazzling the soldiers of both sides who laid down their weapons and prayed. This was, he said, a Christian war. It was Jesus, God’s only beloved son, whose birth they were gathered together to celebrate, who had shown them the way, by laying down his life for mankind. Now it was the turn of his people on Earth to make the same sacrifice.
‘Sacrifice is traditionally the theme of Easter, not Christmas,’ he said, ‘but this war has turned our world upside down and us with it. Let us steady ourselves with the certainty that those who have fallen have done so for the salvation of mankind. Let us not grieve. Let us rejoice in their valour and their heroism. Let us give thanks for their willing sacrifice. And on this day of hope let us consider the words of H. A. Vachell: “to die saving others from death or, worse—disgrace—to die scaling heights; to die and carry with you into fuller ampler life beyond, untainted hopes and aspirations, unembittered memories, all the freshness and gladness of May—is not that cause for joy rather than sorrow?”’
Eleanor stood up. Throwing off her husband’s restraining hand, she pushed out of the pew. Everyone stared, their heads turning to follow her as she swept up the aisle. For the first time Jessica noticed that they were almost all women. The only men in the church were old or little boys. The porch door banged. There was a silence, then coughs and shushing. The fat parson asked the congregation to rise. As the organ wheezed out the first notes of ‘Oh Come All Ye Faithful’ Jessica looked at Phyllis.
‘Leave her,’ Sir Aubrey said.
Jessica hesitated. Phyllis shook her head. Then, closing her hymn book, she followed her mother out of the church.
When the freeze was at its hardest, and the midday sun hardly more than a pallid smear on the lowering sky, Sir Aubrey told Phyllis and Jessica that Mrs Carey was coming to stay. Mrs Carey was Mrs Grunewald, only since the War she had gone back to the name she had had before she was married. She had changed Oskar’s name too. Now he spelled Oscar with a ‘c’ and his surname was Greenwood, like the dentist in America who made a set of teeth for George Washington out of hippopotamus bone. The story of Greenwood the dentist had been one of Theo’s favourites.
‘What do
you mean, they’re coming here?’ Jessica protested. ‘They’re German.’
‘They’re not German in the least. Mrs Carey comes from Sussex.’
‘Oskar’s father was a Hun.’
‘Joachim Grunewald was a composer. An artist. He would have detested this war as much as anyone.’
‘So what? He’d still have fought for the other side. Against us.’
Sir Aubrey was silent. He bent his head over his plate, cutting his meat into smaller and smaller squares. The scrape of knife against china set Jessica’s teeth on edge. On the other side of the table Phyllis turned a page of her book, her chin propped on her cupped hand. Her dogged deafness enraged Jessica. Did nobody but her read the newspapers? Had they not seen the stories of German soldiers in Belgium, the mutilation and the torture and the bayoneting of babies? Her father looked at the meat on his plate. Then, piercing a piece with his fork, he lifted it to his mouth. The square was small enough to swallow in one go but he chewed it and chewed it, his eyes fixed on the tablecloth. The chewing made Jessica want to break something.
‘I won’t let them come here,’ she said furiously. ‘How could you even think of it? The enemy in our house, under our roof?’
Sir Aubrey pressed his lips together and swallowed. ‘For the last time, Jessica, Oscar Greenwood is not German. His father was naturalised before he was born. The boy is as English as you are.’
‘Except that his father was a Hun. She wears a ring with an inscription in German on the inside. Remember, Phyllis? Mrs Grunewald’s ring? She took it off once and showed it to us.’
