She fell into bed on Christmas Eve blessing Faxby’s Licensing Committee for its insistence on respecting the sanctity of Christmas Day and then got out again since no civic authority had been able to control the alcoholic intake of Euan Ash whose voice very soon awoke her, raised in no Christmas carol of love and peace and good cheer, no ‘Sleep Holy Babe’nor ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen’ but a song she had heard many a time above the sound of wet slogging feet on muddy roads:
‘If you want the old battalion
We know where they are.
They’re hanging on the old barbed wire.’
She closed her eyes, hoping she might ignore it. But his voice went on and on, high and eloquent with the whisky which would have stupefied any other man. Or at least, any man who had not used it day in day out in the trenches to blur his sensibilities and reinforce his desire to stay alive. Claire understood that. But others – the older and rather more substantial residents of Mannheim Crescent, for example – did not and, hearing him pass vigorously from song to verse, she turned over on her back and groaned.
‘”Good-morning, good-morning!” the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of’em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
“He’s a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.’
She heard a window open on the floor above, a man’s gruff voice and then more than one growling something that was not applause in the street outside, a rumble of dissent as Euan, having finished one poetic rendering, launched into another; a deep-throated muttering through which his clipped public school accent, trained to be heard above the din of rebellious natives or across the floor of the House of Commons, suddenly broke free.
‘Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.’
She had heard the poem before. She knew the poet was dead, killed by machine-gun fire in the last month of the war at the ripe age of twenty-five. She knew that if she heard any more she would not sleep again that night but would sit, her eyes aching and burning, avoiding that line of shuffling, yellowing men. She put on her coat and shoes and ran outside.
‘Gas! Gas! Quick boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling.
And floundering like a man in fire or lime …’
He was standing on the garden wall, precariously balanced, looking, brittle, insubstantial, a wraith through which the cold Christmas wind could easily blow when one compared him to the thick-set, middle-aged men – the grocer from the corner, the coal merchant, a short-sighted but burly book-keeper – confronting him.
‘Euan,’ she called out. A moment longer and other burly middle-aged men – the local constables – would be called to take him away. And in any case, she couldn’t bear it.
He smiled at her sweetly.
‘Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.’
‘Euan!’
‘In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.’
In her dreams too.
‘Euan, come down.’
‘There are children in bed up there,’ growled the coal merchant, ‘And women. It’s not decent.’
‘It’s Christmas Eve,’ said the grocer, as if he had found a talisman.
‘He wants locking up,’ said the book-keeper, ‘and in a strait-jacket too if you ask me.’
‘Why,’ enquired a female voice from a high window, ‘doesn’t somebody send for the police?’
‘If,’ quoted Euan, still in good voice and by some miracle keeping
his balance,
‘If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face.’
She got him down the only way she could, by standing behind him and tipping him over so that they fell together in the garden on a heap of rotting leaves which broke their fall but did nothing to dampen Euan’s poetic ardour.
‘Fat civilians wishing they
Could go and fight the Hun.
Can’t you see them thanking God
That they’re over forty-one?’
But he was on his own ground now, behind his own garden gate and since no one really wanted the trouble of the law and the inconvenience it entailed on Christmas Eve, the woman up above shut her window with a sharp crack, the trio of honest tradesmen contented themselves by growling ‘Bloody lunatic’.
Sitting up on the compost Euan smiled at them angelically. ‘Oh absolutely – Lieutenant Euan St John Bardsley Ash, Military Cross, at your service.’
She got him inside the house, her flat not his, since he had no heating and she did not expect to leave him straightaway.
‘Do you really have a Military Cross, Euan?’
‘Yes. Or I did. I put it down somewhere and never picked it up again. God – I feel awful.’
‘Yes-I know.’
He had been drinking heavily for days, cooking eggs and beans and dubious sausages and leaving them uneaten on greasy plates for her to throw away, and now, through his thin shirt, the hollow wall of his chest, she could hear the rasping labour of his lungs, recognizing the scarred legacy of gas which would return every winter of his life.
She brought blankets, pillows, pushed her two armchairs together and deftly made him a bed into which he allowed himself to be placed, wrapped up, ‘settled down’, and then, with an alcoholic flash of urgency, jumped to his feet.
‘I’m just on my way to Edinburgh –’
‘No – Lieutenant Euan St John Bardsley Ash – you are not! Get into bed.’
‘Ma’am!’ He sketched a military salute, overbalanced and fell back giggling and shivering into the careful nest she had made him.
‘I’m cold.’
‘Yes. Are you going to be sick?’
‘No – no – old soldiers never do that. They never die either, they just –’
He became graphic, bitter, obscene and she ignored him, cocooning him in blankets, raising him on the pillows just in case, checking his temperature, listening only to the effort his breath had to make – would have to make every winter now, every damp spring, every humid summer – as it forced a passage through the clogged debris the gas had left behind.
Somewhere, not too long ago, a trench had filled up with gas not necessarily discharged by enemy hands but British gas – quite possibly – blown back on a neutral wind, to clog British chests, blind British eyes, cause the fumbling for gas-masks which did not always work, the choking and the green drowning of the poem he had thrown so defiantly a few moments ago at those men, all of them safely over forty-one, who wished to see the war dead and buried – like the youth of those who had fought it – and forgotten. She knew he would not tell her where the attack had occurred. She did not wish to know. She waited, listening to more snatches of verse, an occasional ribald marching song, until he fell suddenly asleep in the middle of a word, as she had seen men die.
‘Good night, Euan.’
There was no answer. She put his cold hands under the covers, noted that the shivering was less violent, his temperature not alarming, that he was drunk which did not particularly require her attention rather than diseased which might, and went to bed herself just four hours before it would be time to get up again.
It was not Benedict as it turned out but Parker, the chauffeur, who came to fetch her to High Meadows, rather fortunately perhaps, since she was cooking an omelette for Euan
when he arrived and made no bones about asking him to wait, giving him a mug of coffee and leaving him to draw whatever conclusions he liked as to what this thin young man with a bricklayer’s flamboyant check shirt, a public school accent, and a hacking cough might be doing in her flat.
‘You’d better stay tonight as well, Euan. It’s warmer. I won’t be back until tomorrow.’
And no doubt Parker, she thought, would also feel free to put his own interpretation on that.
She had managed to avoid the blue chintz room on Christmas Eve, pleading pressure of work, but Faxby’s Licensing Committee, by offering her a day of rest to follow and Kit Hardie by extending it to Boxing Day, had made it impossible for her to upset Miriam’s plans. She was to spend Christmas Day with ‘the family’, on Christmas Day night she was to be tucked up, warm and snug and safe, in the blue chintz bed, to be served a leisurely breakfast on Boxing Day, an ample lunch, and to be released to the world outside Miriam’s charmed circle as late as possible on Boxing Day Afternoon, not a moment before ‘that nasty old job’reared its ugly head to claim her.
‘There is simply no one to drive you into Faxby any sooner,’ Miriam had told her gently, not caring in the least how little time these arrangements allowed Claire to spend with her mother. ‘Parker is not on duty after twelve o’clock on Christmas Day, you see – and I don’t like to ask Benedict.’
The blue chintz room, therefore, awaited her, bearing on its door a pretty china plaque with her name in blue letters surrounded by blue flowers, a fire beaming a cheerful welcome from a blue-tiled fireplace, a little maid in starched cap and apron beaming just as cheerfully as she arranged Claire’s dressing table, tucked her nightdress under the pillow, hung her clothes in the wardrobe, calling her ‘Miss’instead of ‘Madam’, as befitted a young lady of the house, permanent, dependent, rather than a visitor.
The day was cold, clear, lightly frosted, perfect Christmas weather, the house a giant Christmas grotto of tinsel and holly in bright, sturdy branches; pale, strategic mistletoe; a Christmas tree from a Dickensian fantasy, laden with parcels, red candles, tinkling gold and silver bells, crowned by a fairy in a white crinoline, golden-haired, blue-eyed, a foot tall, made specially and secretly, long ago, on the instructions of Aaron Swanfield, from a portrait of Miriam.
She had worn a white crinoline herself that year for her Christmas dance and had posed charmingly – so everyone had said – beneath the Christmas tree to receive her guests, Aaron so proud of his ‘portrait fairy’that he had refused to offer a cigar to any man who did not immediately notice its resemblance to his wife.
She had been twenty-eight that Christmas Day, ten years married and still able to wear silver-spangled white satin and a white rose in her hair, still ‘pretty Mini’, the sole object of her husband’s romantic adoration. She was fifty-three now in well-corseted powder blue as Claire caught her first glimpse of her, coming back from church, her cheeks pink with the weather, her carefully assembled flock behind her, Polly in a grey velvet cloak and hood trimmed with white fur looking pointedly angelic; Nola, the eternal huntress, draped in her double fox pelts; Eunice in the black fur coat which always looked too big for her, surrounded by her four sons, two large, two small, Justin in a sulk because his escapade with the school chambermaid had not, after all, won him a permanent aura of wickedness, Simon in a sulk because he had not yet had an escapade at all, the two little boys simply bored; Toby and Benedict walking behind immaculate and neutral as men often seem on these traditional occasions. And Claire, hurrying into the hall to greet them, was aware, quite suddenly, of the two strangers, two neat, dark, slender young gentlemen – she could not call them boys – keeping themselves courteously but decidedly apart, Nola’s children – Benedict’s children – home from school for the holidays and finding it, as she had always done herself – an uneasy and unfamiliar place.
‘Claire,’ Miriam was at her most endearing, ‘you will just have to forgive me. I told you to be here in good time – yes, I know I did. I was even a little sharp about it – and now here we are, late from church, held up, dear, quite against my will, by all the young men who just had to come and whisper some nonsense or other to Polly – and one or two good souls who were kind enough, to offer the season’s greetings to me. Give me a kiss, dear. There now everybody – off coats and hats.’
Coats and hats were removed.
‘Sherry,’ she said, beaming benignly, ‘by the drawing room fire, as we always do.’
Glasses were brought and raised, the toast was drunk. ‘Merry Christmas.’
‘Many of them.’
‘What a lovely morning.’
‘What an excellent sermon.’
‘The same as last year,’ said Nola.
‘Not so fast,’ said Eunice as Justin defiantly emptied his glass.
‘Why not?’ murmured Nola – now that he’s a man.’
‘And don’t put your glass down on that polished table, Simon,’ snapped Eunice, who was in fact so mortified by her son’s public loss of virginity that she could not have discussed it rationally had she tried; certainly not with Nola.
‘Can I have another?’ enquired Justin of his grandmother.
‘No, dear.’ She was affectionate but very firm. ‘One sherry before lunch on Christmas morning – that is our tradition. Grandpapa used to pour it himself – and serve it from this very tray. One sherry each.’
‘And a very sweet sherry at that.’ Nola’s grimace made no secret of her preference for dry.
‘I like sweet sherry,’ Eunice, who – missed her father and needed her mother, spoke hotly. ‘It’s a lady’s drink, after all – so Father said.’
Nola looked amused.
‘Can’t we have champagne instead?’ breezed Polly.
‘It is time now,’ said Miriam, still smiling, ‘to run along and tidy ourselves up for lunch.’
Claire had not expected to change but the maid, who evidently knew better, had laid out the cherry red jumper suit she had planned to wear the following day but which she put on now with red silk stockings and black shoes with patent buckles, brushed her hair into its gleaming Chinese fringe, wound a length of black and red beads around her neck and ran downstairs again, feeling late, to find herself alone, for five painful moments, with those strange, silent young men – her lover’s sons.
‘Are you home for the holidays?’
Of course they were. Any fool must see that. But, with scrupulous politeness, they supplied her with the exact date and time of their arrival, the duration of their visit – as ‘visit’it was, no one being under the impression that they lived here – the train they would be most likely to take on their departure.
What else could she say to them? She could have asked Eunice’s boys about their Christmas presents, but realized at once that with Conrad and Christian Swanfield she dare not raise a subject so trivial. She could have talked cars, motor cycles, dogs to Justin and Simon, books, the cinema, and they would have answered ungrammatically perhaps or thoughtlessly – but at least with some enthusiasm.
‘Do you like your school?’ she asked feebly.
‘Yes,’ said Conrad, ‘It is a very good school.’
‘Yes – very much,’ said Christian.
She understood that they were bored with her, and, hearing a step in the hall turned towards the door, her hope of a reprieve fading before the renewed awkwardness of Benedict.
‘You’re down early, boys,’ he said.
‘Yes, sir.’
She saw that he did not know what to say to them either, and that they were bored with him too.
Lunch was enormous, lengthy, the traditional roast turkey with a special chestnut stuffing – ‘special’because Aaron Swanfield had chosen to call it so – plum pudding flamed in brandy, eaten with plain, honest custard because Aaron had disliked rum sauce, the same meal that was being eaten in every middle-class house in Faxby that day, except that at High Meadows it was grander, there was more of it, and Miriam could neve
r quite stop herself from pretending that she and Aaron had invented it. And afterwards, abandoning port and brandy which could be consumed at leisure all afternoon, the family – in memory, Miriam insisted, of her father – gathered around the tree for the distribution of presents, Eunice restraining her brood with difficulty, Conrad and Christian standing with the grave composure of twin bishops, while Miriam gave the signal for the scramble to begin.
Claire had brought her own gifts that morning and placed them under the tree without much interest, simply a family duty meticulously done with nothing personal or significant about it since Miriam had calmly handed her a list, early in November, not merely of appropriate gifts for every member of the family but of colours, sizes, flavours and in which department of Taylor & Timms they might be bought.
‘I always do a list for everyone, dear. It saves disappointment.’
And so she was able to say ‘Thank you, Benedict,’ knowing that the expensive but markedly unoriginal scent spray he gave her had been chosen by Miriam too.
Within moments the hall was littered with Christmas paper, tinsel ribbons, Eunice’s four boys and Polly down on the floor squealing like happy, excitable little pigs scrabbling for trinkets which Polly, at least, could have twice over, any day of the week, from Roger Timms: their cousins, Conrad and Christian, gravely comparing the Latin Grammar, the leather-bound Shakespeare, the books on antique coins and industrial architecture their grandmother had thought suitable – and apparently rightly so – for them.
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