Change wouldn’t come overnight, and possibly not in her lifetime—yet she had already cast a vote for a member of Parliament, something her undergraduate self would never have believed possible, and each year women were being accorded more freedom and greater rights. One day it might even be possible for men and women alike to be judged by their character and actions rather than the accent with which they spoke, or the God to whom they prayed, or the color of their skin. One day.
The ideas were crowding upon her; she had to get home, had to set her thoughts down on paper. She would send the column to John in the morning, and ask him to run it instead of the piece she had submitted earlier in the week.
My last few columns have turned on instances of the government’s failure to act, or its failure to act in a manner that I believe to be in the best interests of the British people as a whole. While I find no shortage of material in that regard, this week I have decided to set aside the theme of what is being done for us, or to us, and instead I wish to focus on a different matter entirely: what I can do, and what you can do, to make this country fit not only for our returning heroes, but also for every man, woman, and child who calls these islands home.
Although I do not presume to think the Christmas story is one that resonates with every reader, I do feel, in this season of Advent, that it is worth using as an example of how the very great may at once be perfectly humble as well. Who among us has not, at one instance or another, thought poorly of another human being simply because of the way he or she talks, or dresses, or because of where he or she lives, worships, or works? Who among us has not sat in judgment upon another, though we know full well that God tells us not to judge, else we be judged instead?
You may decide, if you have not already, that my words mark me as a socialist, or some other species of radical bent on the leveling of British society. I assure you I am not; my radical views, such as they are, lie in my conviction that no one of us is born superior to his others. Only by a man’s actions should he be judged, I believe, and not by his origins, profession, religion, politics, or race.
I ask you to go forth this winter and spread warmth among your fellows. Offer a kind word, extend a helping hand, or offer a shilling or two to those in need. No matter how you act, treat the recipient of your kindness as your fellow. For we are all of us equal in the sight of God, and so should we be in the laws of man, and the conventions of our land.
—the Liverpool Herald, 9 December 1919
Chapter 26
Where is Meg?” Miss Margaret asked as they were sitting down to supper. “Friday is her favorite. She loves fish cakes. Norma, go and tell her that we’re waiting for her.”
When Norma didn’t return after five minutes, Charlotte got to her feet and went after her. Fish cakes might be Meg’s favorite, but they didn’t taste especially nice when they were stone cold.
Norma was in the hall outside Meg’s room, her ear pressed against the door.
“What on earth are you doing?” Charlotte asked.
“I knocked, but she told me to go away. I think I can hear her crying.”
“Let me talk to her. Meg, it’s Charlotte. Is anything the matter?”
“I’m f-fine. Please leave me be.”
“It doesn’t sound as if you’re fine at all. May I come in? Please?” She went to open the door, but it had been locked.
“Tried that already,” Norma said.
“You don’t have to come out. Just unlock the door and let me in. I don’t think you should be alone, not if you’re upset. You don’t have to say a thing. Only let me sit with you.”
A key turned in the door.
“Norma, you go back downstairs. Meg and I will be down in a bit. Perhaps Janie could keep our supper warm?”
Charlotte hadn’t been inside Meg’s room before. It reflected its occupant perfectly, or at least the cipher she knew: neat as a pin, and almost entirely bare of personal touches. The only exception was a single photograph, of a man in uniform, on the bedside table.
After unlocking the door, Meg had retreated to sit on her bed. She had evidently been crying for a long while, for her eyes were swollen and she was shivering, though the room was warm enough. Charlotte took off her cardigan and set it around her friend’s shoulders, then sat next to her on the bed.
Meg seemed unable to stanch her tears, so Charlotte let her cry, rubbing her back from time to time, until the worst seemed over and only hiccuping, shuddering sighs broke the silence of the room.
“Do you wish to tell me what has upset you?” she asked in her softest, most gentle voice. “You don’t have to, of course, and I won’t judge you for it. But if you wish to tell me I will—”
“It’s Bill.”
“What about him?”
“My husband. He’s dead.”
“I know, my dear. He died at Passchendaele, didn’t he?”
But Meg was frantically shaking her head, the tears pouring from her eyes once more, and her next words were so garbled that Charlotte couldn’t make out their meaning at all.
“I don’t understand . . . are you saying he’s not dead? That they made a mistake?” Stranger things had happened, after all. Edward had been missing for almost a year before Robbie had tracked him down in that Belgian hospital.
“No, no . . . he is dead.”
“I’m sorry, Meg. I don’t quite follow.”
Meg took a great steadying breath. “He didn’t die at Passchendaele. He’s . . . he’s been here all this time. At the Mill Road Hospital, up Everton way. That’s where I go every Sunday. I mean, where I went.”
“He was at the hospital there?” Charlotte’s nurse’s mind paged through the possibilities. Paralysis, neurasthenia, multiple loss of limbs . . .
“He was burned. It was at Passchendaele—that much was true. The Germans had some sort of horrible weapon that sprayed fire. Bill and his whole platoon were burned. They all died, all except for him. I don’t know how it is they kept him alive, his burns were that bad.”
“Oh, my dear. I am so, so sorry.”
“I was living in Basildon when it happened—that’s where we’re from—and when he was brought back to London I came up on the train as often as I could. Then they moved him up here, so I moved, too. I couldn’t stand the thought of him being all alone.”
“How badly burned was he?” Charlotte asked quietly.
“All over, more or less. Most of his face. His arms and hands were very bad. He lost all but two of his fingers. He couldn’t move much because of the scarring. They did some operations, to make his skin less tight, they said, but it never helped. Nothing ever helped with the pain.”
“Did he have any other family?”
“His parents came to visit him once, when he was still in London, but as soon as she saw him his mum started screaming, so they hustled her away. That’s the last I ever heard of them. I wrote but they never wrote back.”
“So all this time it was just you?”
Meg nodded. “Just me. On Sundays I’d go and spend the day at his bedside. In the beginning he could sit in a wheelchair, so I’d take him into the courtyard and we’d sit in the sun. The other patients stared at him, though. After a while he said he didn’t want to go outside anymore, so we stayed on the ward. I’d read to him, tell him about my week. When the shop was closed in the summer, when Mr. Timmins was rebuilding, I went more often, of course.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know for sure. When Matron called me at work, this afternoon, she only said that he’d taken a turn for the worse last night, and died in the wee hours. But I think it was the infection that got him.”
“The infection? To his burns?”
“No, it was a bedsore. The past while, since the summer, I’d say, he’d been staying in bed. He barely said a word to me for months, just lay there with his eyes closed. Slept most of the time. The nurses said he was depressed.”
“I’m not surprised. It must have been very hard for him.”
<
br /> “After staying in bed for a month or two he started to get bedsores. One of them got infected the other week. The first week of December, it was. I think . . . I think that must have been it,” she said, and began to cry again.
Charlotte held her hand, and gave her a fresh handkerchief, and waited once more for the tears to subside.
“I know I should have told everyone, but I just couldn’t bear to talk about it, to talk about him, so when I came here I told the misses I was a widow. It was wrong of me, I know it was, but once the lie was out of my mouth I didn’t know how to take it back.”
“All water under the bridge. You didn’t do it to deceive anyone, only to protect yourself.”
“What will I do, Charlotte? Now that’s he’s gone, what will I do?”
“I think that’s a question best saved for another day. First things first,” she said firmly. “I think we should go downstairs and tell the others—no, don’t fret. I’m sure they will react exactly as I have done. Then you and I are going to eat our supper. It will be much easier to think, and plan, once we’ve eaten.”
They sat on the bed until Meg felt a little steadier, and then they went downstairs and sat at the big kitchen table. There, surrounded by her friends, Meg told everyone about Bill and what had happened to him. Though the others were surprised, they assured Meg that they weren’t at all angry and quite understood her reasons for the deception, and one by one they embraced her and offered their condolences.
“It’s not as if we don’t all have our secrets,” Norma observed a little later as they drank their tea and nibbled at a plate of shortbread that Janie had set out.
Rosie snorted in disbelief. “You? You’re an open book if ever I’ve seen one.”
“I’m not,” she insisted. “I have my secrets.”
“Name one,” Rosie demanded.
Charlotte braced herself for another unpleasant surprise. What was Rosie thinking? Hadn’t the evening taken a dramatic enough turn already?
Norma hesitated, her face reddening, and then she spoke. “Norma isn’t my real name.”
“It isn’t?”
“No. It’s Nell.”
“That’s it? That’s your deep, dark secret?” Rosie asked, laughing, and then they were all laughing, even Meg, even Norma.
“I always hated ‘Nell,’ so when I left home I changed it.”
“It does suit you,” Charlotte said, and reached over to pat her hand, relieved beyond measure. “It sounds very . . . well, very American.”
Then she turned to Meg, who was dabbing discreetly at her eyes. “What can we do to help? Have you thought about his funeral at all?”
“Matron offered to have it on Sunday, so I don’t have to take a day off work. There’s a chapel at the hospital, and then they’ll drive me up to the cemetery.” She paused, twisting her handkerchief in her hands. “Would you come with me? It won’t be a long service, I don’t think.”
“Of course I will.” Charlotte looked around the table and took the temperature of the room. “We’ll all come.”
“It will be our very great honor,” said Miss Mary. “We shall all of us be there.”
THE MISSES MACLEOD had insisted on hiring a pair of taxis to convey the household up to the hospital, so Sunday morning saw them setting off in some style for the hospital. It had once been a workhouse, according to Rosie, and its architecture was correspondingly severe. A central building of turreted red brick was surrounded, or rather hemmed in, by huge, nearly windowless blocks that had likely once been dormitories. It was every bit as cheerless and lowering as its architects had intended it to be.
They followed Meg inside and up to the first floor, which took a while as nearly everyone they passed had a word or two of comfort for her, orderlies and nurses and even a few patients. Although Meg seemed perfectly at ease, and the hospital was clean and tidy and none of the patients appeared to be neglected in any way, Charlotte found it unutterably depressing.
It was too quiet. Even her hospital in London, though it had been filled with men whose mental state might charitably be classified as despairing on a good day, had felt cheerier than this place. Where were the normal sounds of patients talking to their nurses and one another? Where were the visitors?
“Is it always this quiet?” she asked Meg, and though she pitched her voice to a whisper it still echoed down the corridor.
Meg nodded. “Most of the men on this ward are bedridden. And there aren’t many visitors, besides. Most Sundays it was only me.”
Only Meg had persevered. The families of the other patients, one could only assume, had given up. It might be the case that some lived so far away that frequent visits weren’t practicable. More likely, though, they had left their loved ones here, in this cold and clean and soulless place, abandoned like so much detritus after a parade.
Matron was waiting for them, and it was a relief to see how warmly she greeted Meg, and how candidly she answered Rosie’s questions about Bill’s final illness. It had, after all, been an infected bedsore that had killed him. At first he had seemed to be rallying, but then, overnight, he had taken a turn for the worse and had died just before dawn on Friday.
“I thought you’d like to know that Sister Yeovil was with him,” Matron told Meg. “She’ll be coming with us to the service.”
“I’m glad,” Meg said softly. “She was one of his favorites.”
“Shall we walk down to the chapel now?” Matron suggested. “Reverend Walsh will be waiting for us, and there will be a guard of honor from St. John’s Barracks.”
Bill’s coffin was at the front of the chapel, neatly covered by a Union flag. Seeing it, Meg began to cry. The service was short, with only their party, Matron and two nurses, and Reverend Walsh in attendance. As it finished, the chapel doors opened and the guard of honor entered. They shouldered the coffin with practiced ease; likely they had performed this ritual many times before.
Accompanied only by the minister and the honor guard, for the nurses were required to remain at the hospital, they continued on to the cemetery. It seemed to go on for miles in every direction, though soldiers’ burials took place in one section that had been set aside at the beginning of the war. There were many fresh graves and many white headstones as yet untouched by moss or lichen.
The soldiers unloaded Bill’s casket from the horse-drawn hearse and gently placed it on the ground next to the prepared grave. Two of them removed the Union flag, folded it into a tight rectangle, and then one of the men approached Meg, knelt before her, and placed it in her hands.
The minister said his prayers of committal, Bill’s coffin was lowered into the grave, and a bugler, who until then had stood quietly by the hearse, stepped forward and played the plaintive, elegiac notes of “The Last Post.” All the women, even Charlotte, began to weep.
Remember this moment, she told herself. When you think you must surely die from the pain of losing the man you love, remember what it was like to stand here beneath an empty sky, next to your friend, and weep with her for a husband who took two years to die.
This was what war did to men, she thought, her heart seized anew by the agony of it all. This was heartbreak, this was loss, and she, who had arrogantly thought herself one of the wounded—she was nothing more than an insignificant bystander.
“Come, now,” she said, wiping away her tears, and she took Meg’s hand and led her back to the waiting cars.
Chapter 27
London, England
March 1918
Nurse Brown?”
“Yes, Sister Barrett?”
“When were we expecting the new lot of patients?”
Charlotte had been closest to the telephone when the call had come in that morning. “Anytime now, Sister. Two ambulances direct from the station, though they didn’t say how many men.”
“Typical. How on earth do they expect us to be properly prepared? They might be sending two men or a dozen.”
“Yes, Sister.”
“Very w
ell. Finish off Captain McGrath’s dressing change, and then you can make up beds for the new men. Start in Wards H and J. Such a shame that we can’t give them private rooms anymore.”
“Yes, Sister.”
Sister Barrett was a pleasant enough woman and not given to an overemphasis on rules and regulations. All the same, Charlotte knew better than to offer up a lazy “yes” or “no” in response. Sister had earned her title and expected underlings to use it.
The burn on Captain McGrath’s forearm, inflicted by a piece of white-hot shell casing, had healed quite nicely, and only required twice-daily dressing changes. He never flinched, never complained, but then he had been rendered mute by the aftermath of his injury, when he had been buried alive in his dugout for nearly a day, along with the bodies of his commanding officer and two signalers. He was able to answer simple questions with a nod or shake of his head, but speech eluded him, even after several sessions of hypnosis.
When she had finished, she settled the captain in the patients’ sitting room on the first floor. Leaving him by the window, which had a pretty view of Kensington Palace Gardens, she began to circle around the room, checking that everyone was calm and comfortable, fetching tea and adjusting blankets on laps and generally ensuring none of the patients felt neglected.
Lieutenant Stephens, alone at a table in the corner, his book forgotten, was humming to himself. It sounded like “There’s a Long, Long Trail,” a welcome change from “I Don’t Want to Join the Army,” which had been his sole musical selection for the two days preceding. She approached him quietly, and, crouching at his side, began to sing the words to the song.
“There’s a long, long trail a-winding
Into the land of my dreams,
Where the nightingales are singing
And a white moon beams.
There’s a long, long night of waiting
Until my dreams all come true,
Till the day when I’ll be going
Down that long, long trail with you.”
He rewarded her with a little smile, the first she’d seen since his arrival a fortnight before, so she continued to sing.
After the War Is Over: A Novel Page 24
