To Die but Once

by Jacqueline Winspear

  “Someone missed the train?” asked the stationmaster, touching the brim of his peaked cap.

  “Yes—my friend’s son. He’s sixteen now, and I think he’s old enough to look after himself, but I still worry.”

  “Coming in from Charing Cross, changing at Tonbridge was he?”

  Maisie nodded. “He’ll probably be on the next one.”

  He pulled a pocket watch from his waistcoat, extended the chain to better see the dial. Maisie knew the stationmaster would have been aware of the correct time to the second but seemed to enjoy wielding his watch with a certain flourish. “The platforms are a bit packed on that line up from the coast toward—there are men coming back from France, you see, and the seats are taken until the next train comes through. Some of them are in a bit of a state—they’ve got the WVS out there handing tea in through the windows as the trains pull in so the lads can get something down them. I heard they’d handed out a few hundred sarnies in just a couple of hours this morning.”

  “Knowing Tim he probably rolled up his sleeves and got stuck in to help,” said Maisie. “He can’t wait until he’s in uniform.”

  “There’s many a lad who couldn’t wait the last time around—and then they couldn’t wait to get home again. Anyway, better get on. Like I said, he’ll most likely be on the one o’clock—due in at twenty-past.” He laughed. “But I reckon you know the timetable as well as I do!”

  Maisie smiled. “Yes, I’m sure you’re right—I’ll be back in an hour.” She left the station and drove the five minutes back to Chelstone Manor.

  “The stationmaster said the ‘up’ trains coming from the coast are holding up other services,” she said, explaining Tim’s absence to her stepmother. “The navy has been bringing home a good number of our soldiers, apparently—I’d heard that nonessential personnel were being sent back from France. And the trains were very unpredictable yesterday,” said Maisie. “Tim might well have missed the connection to Chelstone.”

  Tim was not on the train at twenty past one, twenty past two, or twenty past three. In fact he did not arrive at Chelstone until long after Maisie had promised herself that she would place a telephone call to his mother. At half past six, on the train that should have arrived ten minutes earlier, Maisie felt a wave of relief wash over her as the tall, lanky lad clambered down from the third-class carriage, and seemed to lope toward her. Priscilla was right when she had observed some months earlier, “He’s at that ungainly age.”

  “Tim, where have you been?” asked Maisie, trying to keep the mixture of relief and irritation out of her voice.

  Priscilla’s son leaned down to kiss her on both cheeks. “I tried to telephone, Tante Maisie, but it was rather chaotic at Tonbridge.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “Does my mother know I’m late? She’s watching me like a hawk these days—and I’ll never hear the last of it.”

  “Had you not been on this train, I would have telephoned her—and she would have harangued me for leaving it so late to do so. I would have deserved her ire, because I put it off time and again. But the stationmaster told me about the trains coming in from the coast causing timetable delays. And it took me a long time to get home last night for the same reason. Now then, let’s get you back to the house—your bed’s made up in the conservatory. You’re the only person I know who can sleep with the sunshine beaming in first thing in the morning.”

  “I love the conservatory—makes me feel as if I’m on a boat, hearing the wind outside and then the sunrise waking me up.”

  It was later, over a late supper, that Priscilla’s son described the scene at Tonbridge station. “It looked as if everyone in the town was out there to help. There were women making sandwiches, brewing tea—and the men were helping to wash up the cups as the soldiers handed them back out of the train windows. I don’t know how they’d heard about it, and mustered all that help—I asked a guard and he said that as some of the earlier trains stopped at the station, soldiers were leaning out and asking for water, so word went round and people started coming in with whatever they had to contribute. I’m telling you, Tante Maisie, the men looked terrible—many of them were covered in mud, and a lot were bandaged up. I left my kit bag with a guard and just got stuck in to help—handing out food and water, bringing back cups. I asked one soldier—he was only about my age . . . well, a bit older, about eighteen, nineteen, more Tom’s age—and he said he was lucky to get on a ship. He told me there are thousands of them, thousands of men trying to get to the coast and waiting to get off. The navy’s in there, sending over ships, but the Germans are bombing them, coming in with their Stukas. The soldiers I spoke to think they’ll all perish there.” He was silent for a moment, and stared out of the window into the peppery darkness of late May. “Some of them were moaning that our RAF were flying right over, and then someone else pointed out that they were going deeper into France to try to slow down the German advance to give more of our men the chance to escape. Then another came back at him and said the RAF were going after the Messerschmitts over the Channel, trying to push them back. It’s a devil of a fight—and there are our soldiers, completely stranded. It’s terrible. They said they had no idea how the navy would be able to get them back to England—they’ll be left there, like sitting ducks.”

  Maisie stood up, came to her godson’s side and put her arm around his shoulders. “War is terrible, Tim—and you are so young to have to learn just how terrible it is.”

  “You know, Tante Maisie—we haven’t heard from Tom for over a week. Mother is much too calm, but she’s also snappy.”

  “I know—but she knows how she is too, which is why she was keen for you to come down to Chelstone. She understands only too well what worry can do to her, so allow her some latitude. And you can cheer up Anna—she’s come down with measles, though she’s on the mend.”

  “I remember measles—it was horrible. Poor Anna.”

  “Now then, Tim—time for us all to go to bed. And your mother says you have work to do for your final school exams.”

  “Pointless work—pointless when you know what’s going on over there.”

  “It seems like that at the moment. But humor your mother—and your father. They have enough to worry about.”

  Tim pushed back his chair and began to help Maisie clear the plates. As they moved to the kitchen, he spoke again.

  “Tante Maisie. You know you said I was too young to learn how terrible war is? Well, I’m sixteen—how old were you, when you went to France?”

  Maisie sighed. “I was seventeen, Tim. Your mother was a bit older than me, but no more prepared for what we encountered.”

  The boy nodded, though Maisie thought she saw his eyes redden, and he looked down, as if to avoid her gaze. “Tom will probably telephone tomorrow. Friday is usually his day, and he missed it.” He turned, picked up his kit bag from the kitchen floor where he had dropped it as they’d entered, and made his way toward the conservatory. He did not look back, but called over his shoulder, “Good night, Tante Maisie.”

  “Good night, Tim.”

  Maisie stood for a moment, and then went to the library. She still thought of it as “Maurice’s library” even now she was at peace with the legacy she had inherited upon the death of her beloved mentor. It was to this room she would come when the ache of loss was most keen, and she yearned for the comfort of his wisdom. Now, with the house full, it was her makeshift bedroom. She poured herself a glass of sherry, and as she was about to take a seat alongside the fireplace—cold, and covered with a needlepoint screen for the summer—she stopped, and returned to the trolley that held the same two decanters as it had in Maurice’s day. She poured a measure of aged single-malt whiskey into a glass and set it on a small table alongside his leather wing chair. She clinked her glass against the glass she’d left for a man now passed, and seated herself on the chair opposite. She took a sip of the sherry and leaned back.

  “Oh, how I miss you at times, Maurice. How I miss you.”

  And she
waited for the counsel she would not hear, but would feel in her heart.

  Chapter 9

  Maisie and Lady Rowan left Chelstone Manor early for the drive to London. As Lady Rowan would doubtless have been more comfortable had her chauffeur taken her to Westminster Abbey, Maisie concluded that, in accepting her offer, her mother-in-law probably wanted to discuss something, without interruption and away from her home.

  “Now we’re under way, I think I can relax,” said Lady Rowan. “And I must say, I do like your new motor car.”

  “Thank you very much,” said Maisie. “It’s bigger than the MG, so easier to take the family out for the day, though of course when I bought it I hadn’t considered the fact that we would be dealing with petrol coupons. I have to be very careful because I have an assignment that’s taking me down to Hampshire now—it’s a bit of a journey, and I cannot depend upon buses and trains when I get there.”

  “And it’s not as if you can put your toe down and push this motor car a bit is it? I suppose it uses more petrol if you get too enthusiastic.”

  Maisie looked across at Lady Rowan for a second, then brought her attention back to the road. “I know you, Rowan—you would be tearing around the countryside if you had this motor.”

  Rowan laughed. “I always liked a little speed, you know—the wind in my hair and the feeling that I could just drive off in search of something thrilling, if only for a short time. The hip put paid to that though—the wonderful hazards of riding horses diminished the years of excitement behind the wheel. And as you know, my son inherited the devil-may-care aspect of my character—which I . . .” She faltered. “It’s something I very much regret. I wish he had been more like his father; more measured, more a thinking man than a doing man.”

  Maisie continued to look ahead but chose her words carefully for she understood her mother-in-law was, perhaps, making a confession of sorts.

  “The James I knew—and loved deeply—had within him the best of both you and Lord Julian. He was also his own man, and he followed his heart.”

  “He followed it too high that day, didn’t he, Maisie?”

  “Time has passed, Rowan—time has passed for us all. It’s taken me a good long while to reach this point, but I don’t think it serves any of us to look back. Tormenting ourselves with ‘What if?’ and trying to change past events—if only in the imagination—can drive a person mad.”

  Lady Rowan looked out of the window. “I love the way the mist comes off the fields in the morning, just as the day is warming up. It makes me feel as if the next twenty-four hours could hold the promise of something extraordinary. Something new.”

  Maisie nodded, aware that the older woman had turned toward her and was now watching her as she drove on toward River Hill.

  “It was the me in him that caused him to make that bad decision, Maisie. It was the me in him that caused you to lose your child.”

  Maisie looked in her rearview mirror to check the road behind, slipped down the gears, braked and pulled over into a lay-by. She switched off the engine, turned to her mother-in-law and reached for her hand.

  “What do you want to say, Rowan? We’ve never really made the time to talk, just the two of us, and we’ve always skirted around what happened in Canada, touching upon it here and there before escaping to our respective corners. We’ve let fear of what might be said prevent us from saying what has to be said, so we can be at peace, both of us. And I know only too well how time can cast a sort of skin over an event—a membrane that gets thicker until a point where broaching the subject is all but impossible, even when you think you can face the grief and terror once more. I did the same thing—years ago, with Simon. Remember?” Maisie looked down at Lady Rowan’s hand, clasped in her own—at the deep brown liver spots, and the arthritic thumb and forefinger. It was a hand that revealed a life lived to the full. “I loved James for who he was, and he loved me for who I was. His death caused me to lose myself for a while—for years, really—you know that. But I am back. I am whole. And you do not need to make your confession to me, but I will hear it all the same. Your son loved his life, Rowan. He loved the man he became, and the man he was on the day he died.”

  “But he was a . . . a bloody fool.” The older woman pressed her lips together, and looked away. “That was bad language, but I am so very angry with my own son and I’ve kept it bottled up because it’s so . . . so hard to say that about someone I loved so much but am so very . . . so very . . . disappointed in. I can’t stand myself for the thoughts that go through my head sometimes, and when you were away for all that time, all I could think of was, ‘James did that—she lost him and her child and it’s all his fault.’ And if it was his fault, then it was my fault too, because I’m his mother. I couldn’t talk to Julian about it, because the man is crushed anyway—there have been times when it has taken every fiber of our strength together to go from one day to the next, though it’s become easier. But if I had the chance to do so, I would take my son and box his ears.”

  Maisie shook her head. “Oh, Rowan. James drew joy from the mystery of what each day might hold—he had come back from the dreadful years immediately after the war, and those years tormented him. That’s all we should remember—that he loved his life, that he died as a man who was loved, a man filled with the promise of fatherhood and of being involved in something so important to our country. It’s something we should hold in our hearts, Rowan.”

  Lady Rowan shook her head. “I wish I could be so forgiving.”

  Maisie sighed. “What might Maurice say to you, if he were here?”

  Lady Rowan shifted her seat, though she allowed Maisie to continue stroking her hand. “I wish I knew,” she said, then changed her tone. “Though I will add that he wasn’t always right, you know.”

  “And there you have one thing he might have said.” Maisie smiled. “He would have reminded you that we don’t always make the very best decisions. That is who we are—not perfect. Yet with our imperfections we are perfect human beings; that is who we are meant to be. James died doing something he loved, and we all adored him for his passion. He chose to be an aviator, and he chose to test a new fighter aircraft for the government—it was a fateful day and it changed all our lives. Yet it serves no one to go back and forth trying to apportion blame. Forgive yourself, Rowan. Forgive yourself and set yourself free of this blame, of regret.”

  “But you lost—”

  Maisie shook her head and released Lady Rowan’s hand, patting it as she did so.

  “I am here today.” She reached for the ignition and started the engine again. “In Spain I was reminded of all the losses people endure. Tragedy is so personal, but it doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened before, to someone, somewhere—it’s what helps us to understand and bring solace to others, knowing something of what they feel. And look at the family I have now—you, Lord Julian, my father and Brenda, and Priscilla, Douglas and the boys.”

  “And Anna,” said Lady Rowan.

  Maisie felt the piercing blue eyes upon her, and another unspoken question hanging in the air. She slipped the motor car into gear. “Yes, and Anna.”

  The long snaking line of people waiting to enter Westminster Abbey almost took Maisie’s breath away. Unable to park near the abbey, she pulled in as close as she could to the gates to allow Rowan to step out of the Alvis. She then drove off to look for a suitable place to leave the motor car, which she found just off Great Smith Street. She ran back to the abbey to rejoin Lady Rowan, who informed her that because she “knew people” there were already places kept for them, so they wouldn’t have to stand. But as she was about to follow her mother-in-law into the abbey, she had second thoughts.

  “Rowan—I’m going to join the queue. I want to stand with the crowd. You should sit down as soon as you can—keep a seat for me, and I’ll find you.”

  Lady Rowan looked at the growing line of people—there must have been thousands of men, women and children—and nodded. “The king said it should be a National
Day of Prayer, that we should come together, as a people, to pray to be delivered from the approaching tyranny.” She cast her gaze back to Maisie. “Yes, join the throng, Maisie—if my hip were not nipping at me, I would too. But it’s one of those days when I must give thanks for the privilege of good connections and a reserved seat. I’ll see you inside.”

  As she was moving to the end of the line, Maisie heard a voice call out.

  “Oi, Miss! Oi, Miss—it’s us over here. Come on.” She looked into the line of people, and saw Billy, Doreen and Margaret Rose, all waving to her.

  “You don’t mind if the lady joins us, do you, mate?” Billy turned to a man and his wife standing behind them.

  “All right by me.” The man stepped back. “Come on, slip in here, love.”

  “Thank you, sir—I am much obliged to you.” She turned to Billy and Doreen. “It’s lovely to see you here—all three of you.” She put a hand on Doreen’s arm to emphasize her greeting, and smiled down at their daughter. “Hello Margaret Rose—oh my goodness, you’ve grown. You’ll be as tall as Bobby soon.”

  The child looked down at her feet, and ran her fingers through the halo of blond curls that fell across her forehead, a mannerism that made her appear even more like her father. And when she raised her head, her cornflower blue eyes staring at Maisie, she said, “Mum and Dad told me we had to come, because even if you didn’t believe in God, you had to give him a chance when things get very difficult. And everybody has to pull together.”

  “Quite right,” said the man who had allowed Maisie to slide into the queue, as Margaret Rose hid her face in her mother’s skirts.

  “From the mouths of babes,” said a woman in front of them.

  There was little time for a long conversation with Billy, but there was an opportunity for a brief chat. “Is Bobby at home?” asked Maisie.