by Jane Bailey
Goodbye, my lovely little sister. I wish I had known you more. There is not one day that has gone by since that terrible parting that I haven’t thought of you. I love you so very much. And that is a single truth.
Please don’t think I do this because of anything you have done or not done. It is because of what she did, and my own weakness. I’m sorry from the bottom of my heart.
Your loving brother,
Philip x
61
I began to cling to people, Gracie in particular. I had this ridiculous notion that she would go off with Howard and want nothing more to do with me. And yet it was the one thing I most wanted for her in all the world. Poor Gracie didn’t know when she was interfering and when she was needed. She didn’t know what to do with me any more than I knew what to do with myself. I wanted to know what she was doing all the time, and became terrified she would leave me.
And the children … I clung to them for solace at night-time. One night I would sleep with Jill, the next with Andrew. I would close myself around their dear, perfect bodies, breathe in the sweetness of their baby soft hair, and cry silently with love for them. Their little sighs and murmurings would wake me – alert as a cat – when they had bad dreams. Then I would stroke their dimpled hands and their marshmallow arms, and wonder what sort of mother could give away these precious gifts.
Once Andrew asked me to sing him ‘Bright Moon’.
‘I don’t know that one.’
‘Yes, you do. Mr Man sang it to me. Bright moon on Charlie Chaplin … and baggy trousers. You hum it sometimes.’
‘Oh, that one.’ So I sang it.
‘For the moon shines bright on Charlie Chaplin,
His boots are cracking,
For the want of blacking,
And his little baggy trousers they want mending
Before we send him
To the Dardanelles.’
Sidney had wrapped himself around me like this, had felt my dimples and my night murmurings. We would have learnt each other’s movements, rolled over together like clockwork. Sidney had had a warm sleep companion, and then suddenly, without warning, a cold empty bed.
I couldn’t name my misery. I would sit and weep for whole mornings without knowing why. I would turn the wireless off for some peace and quiet, and then feel injured because the newscaster had stopped speaking to me in mid-sentence. I thought I overheard Howard say, ‘Don’t tell Joy’ again on the phone, or ‘Don’t tell her yet.’ I felt negligent, feeble, and I had the ominous sense that there was no good left in the world, and that no one was safe. The sound of a bird squawking could make me jump and break out in a sweat. I was terrorized at the thought of Andrew or Jill cutting themselves with a knife, spilling hot tea over themselves, being spat at by the fire, not seeing a barbed wire fence in time, catching their fingers in a door, playing with matches, stroking a mad dog or choking on apple skin. And yet I couldn’t bring myself to sing to either of them with any cheer in my voice, or tell them a story that was not a glum monotone. I could hold them very close – so tight that Jill’s arms hurt and she wanted to wriggle free – but I couldn’t give them the tenderness owed to two small children whose accidental death was just around the corner.
I was convinced my disquiet would end when James came home, but James would not be back until the winter if he was lucky. As the months went by, however, I grew more and more introverted. I found myself staring out of windows for half-hours at a time, or unable to get up in the mornings and face the day.
In November 1945 the air smelt of winter: cold lungfuls bereft of pollen but with a hint of woodsmoke. The trees grew thin and ragged, fluttering their last remaining leaves like tiny items of washing on a line. Mist turned the hills into looming clouds. The blackberries shrivelled on the hedgerows, dry and rotten, and everything seemed attached to something else by strands of cobweb. I took the children into the village for a walk. The walk was for my benefit: Jill and Andrew sat at each end of the pram, even though Andrew was strictly far too big for it.
I was making my way to the corner by the memorial cross – because that was where the fish van stopped on Fridays – when something very queer happened. Suddenly I became aware of two huge sheep blocking the pavement up ahead. They were making their way towards us, slowly at first, but then at quite a sinister trot.
They came right up to the pram, and one of them leapt up on her hind legs and put her trotters on the side. Jill screamed. Andrew giggled. I tried to shoo them away. There was no one around at that moment, and I found my pulse racing in silly terror. They were only sheep, and with a couple of big shoves they trundled back down the street and stood looking hurt and bewildered by the green.
I remembered then that Miss Wallock had died last year, and these were probably two of her old lambs: they’d seen the pram and thought she’d come back for them. They stood longingly by as I purchased four tails of cod, occasionally putting one hoof tentatively forward as if to make another run at the pram, then thinking the better of it as I caught their eye.
I felt oddly moved by those two old sheep, lost without their dear Miss Wallock, but with no real place in the sheep world after so much Wallock-love.
I felt increasingly isolated and introverted. I couldn’t seek advice from the one person who might have helped me, because I felt the burden of Gracie’s sacrifice for me. If I asked one more thing of her it would plunge me into a deeper self-loathing. One evening, when Howard was painting a cluster of orange rowanberries in the drawing room and I was watering the plants, I asked him quite suddenly, ‘Am I mad?’
He looked up briefly, and then stroked his fine paintbrush over a square of watercolour in a metal tin. I supposed it was too much to ask of him to talk about emotions. One whiff of feeling and the Englishman retreated swiftly into his impenetrable shell. But I was wrong. Howard was just biding his time. It seemed my madness or lack of it was not as clear cut as I had hoped.
‘Well,’ he said, not looking up, ‘I suppose guilt and regret have their uses in the short term …’ He put his brush into a jar of water, and we both watched as the orange colour streamed into it like a rescue flare. I waited, not at all sure he would continue. ‘But long term, they’re absolutely useless. They’ll destroy you if you let them.’
He squeezed the water out of the brush and refined the tip. I waited, but there was nothing more.
‘So … am I mad, do you think?’
I watched as he painted another whole rowanberry, painstakingly dipping and stroking and blotting. I’d given up waiting for a reply when he said:
‘When you’re in the trenches, you have to stay alert. If you let yourself sink back, the rats’ll get you.’
I closed my eyes in exasperation. This was so typical of Howard: one hint of emotion and he retreated into trench warfare. I sprinkled the remaining water on a rubber plant and went towards the door.
‘Stay alert,’ he said to my back.
I turned around to face him. ‘Alert to what?’
He looked up from his work and in a rare moment of eye-to-eye contact he said, ‘Loveliness. Lovely things …’ He looked awkwardly at his rowanberries. ‘Moments of joy.’
And that was it. His head was down over his work, and I was left, mouth ajar in the doorway.
62
Late that November I had a letter that made me cry. I cried so much that Andrew ran over to me and started stroking my hair.
‘What is it, Mummy? What’s the matter?’
‘Daddy’s coming home!’
I squeezed him very tight, but he backed off and looked at me earnestly. ‘Never mind, Mummy,’ he said. ‘Don’t cry. If we don’t like him, we can always send him back.’
But Daddy didn’t come home. Not straight away, at least. It would take six weeks for his voyage from India, and then there would be some disembarkation leave before being posted to Aston Down to await release from the RAF. Those six weeks passed slowly. I went to his wardrobe and took out his old clothes, opened his o
ld stamp books, smelt inside his shoes. But nothing smelt of him, and I couldn’t conjure him up.
I made myself a new dress and new outfits for the children. I went to the hairdresser’s in town and bought myself lipstick and a pair of shoes with little heels. I sat in front of the mirror at my dressing table and held my hair in different shapes, inspecting my skin, my smile, my eyebrows, wondering if he would find me different to the woman he had fallen in love with. I didn’t like my nose. I inspected it in profile in the three-way mirror. There it was, that image I so rarely looked at because it confused me so much: Joy into infinity.
At first I couldn’t think how he would fit in. We had our routines now, our patterns. The children had become children without him: he wasn’t a part of anything they did or thought. I had my things to do each day. There just wasn’t a place for him. Before I’d had vague imaginings of him taking me to town in the cart, of me ironing his shirts while he smoked a pipe, or chatting to him as I knitted by the fire in the evenings. But it was Howard who took me to town in the cart, I liked to listen to the children play whilst I ironed, and I chatted with Gracie or Mrs Bubb by the fire in the evenings.
‘It’s always hard at first,’ said Mrs Bubb, helpfully. ‘My friend Pam’s daughter took one look at her husband when he came back and told him to clear off. Told him he wasn’t the man she married he was so changed.’
‘Did they work it out?’
‘Hang! No! She’s seeing the postman now. Then there was Mrs Alma – you know Mrs Alma with the ears? – her husband came back to find she’d put a smile on the face of every man this side of Gloucester. So he walked out. Then there’s Mrs Davies – you know, with the blue door – and she had her husband come back with bits missing, so that can’t be easy. Well, I suppose it depends which bits. I wouldn’t mind the odd leg off, but there’s bits I would mind, I don’t mind saying.’
In the second week of January I was in the garden on the far side of the house pruning some fruit bushes. Andrew and Jill were helping me make a big heap of twigs for a bonfire, and kept getting distracted by interesting-looking cuttings that turned into swords or walking sticks or cigarettes with real smoke as we sent coils of dragon breath into the jagged cold of the air. Suddenly something leapt from behind a bush and scampered up the greengage tree. It was Tigger, son of Digger, sleek and beautiful, trying to enjoy our company, trying to show me something, perhaps.
‘Look!’ yelped Jill, as if she had never seen our cat before. ‘He’s right up high.’
‘He’s amazing,’ I said.
‘No,’ Jill frowned. ‘He’s a cat.’
I smiled, noticing how simply the little furrow between her brows disappeared when she settled on an idea.
‘You don’t get mazings round here.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘Where do they live, then?’
‘In the jungle.’ Then she bubbled over with laughter as Tigger made a branch wobble up and down. Her head went back and out it came: long, uncontrollable chuckling, and her eyes disappeared in the wideness of her smile. I held on to the loveliness of it, and the moment opened like a parachute, billowing and floating and holding me gently in the air.
Suddenly I heard Andrew’s voice near the front of the house speaking in unexpectedly stern tones.
‘No, I’m afraid you can’t,’ he said.
Looking up, I could see him standing, arms akimbo, and addressing someone out of view around the corner of the house. Then I heard a male voice, and then Andrew planted his feet firmly apart and said: ‘She doesn’t speak to strangers and neither do I!’
I ran around to the front of the house, expecting to see James. But the person standing there was indeed a stranger. His face was gaunt with sunken, hooded eyes and his skin was so brown that the whites of his eyes seemed luminous. I stood, startled, a few yards away from him, and put my arms automatically around Andrew’s shoulders.
‘It’s all right, Mummy. I’ve told him to clear off.’
I couldn’t take my eyes off him. At this last comment his gleaming, sunken eyes welled up and he looked at Andrew in disbelief. He looked back at me and smiled: a tentative, apologetic smile that didn’t seem to know where it was going. Seeing my recognition, it grew and covered his whole face, the teeth glowing brightly against the tanned skin.
I ran towards him and embraced him. But even in that moment of elation I felt the strange bones in the lean body, and he seemed so frail and unfamiliar I didn’t know how hard to hold him against me, and I wondered if we would ever truly fit together again.
63
The feast laid out in the dining room seemed ridiculous: Victory Jelly with flags in it. A monstrosity.
The Mustoes were there with George and their youngest Emily (Robert, Mo and Tilly weren’t demobbed until later in 1946), Mr Rollins and his family and Mrs Bubb. I could only think that I didn’t know my lines. I felt nervous, unhinged, and a little stupid. It was easy enough to step back from things with all the noise and laughter and congratulations. It wasn’t until they had all gone home, when the children were put to bed, that James and I had to confront who we had become.
I found him standing outside the orangery, looking up at the stars. The realization that he would not slot into place either, that he too was adrift, gave me an unexpected jolt. I stood next to him and he held my hand. We said nothing for a long time.
‘This must all seem very trivial to you‚’ I said at last.
There was a long silence, and when he turned his face to mine I could see his eyes glistening. ‘This is what we were fighting for. This is what it was all for: you, the children. I’ve missed so much of it – their childhood, I mean. I didn’t want to miss it.’
‘I’m sorry.’ I squeezed his hand, not expecting his tears. ‘There were times I wished I was fighting,’ I said hopelessly. ‘It’s been such a long, long war just waiting.’
He put his arm around me and rested his head on mine. I could hear him sniff and swallow. ‘I’ve done things … I’ve done things I’m not proud of in this war.’ His voice faltered at the end, and I didn’t know how to react to this new version of James.
‘You’re home now. It’s over now.’
‘Who knows how many other women and children, waiting for the war to end … innocent people just caught up … just in the wrong place …? We … I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to forget what we did.’
I burst into tears.
‘I’ve upset you – I’m sorry! I’m so sorry, darling.’
He took me in his arms and we buried our heads in each other’s necks, but I felt treacherous. I wasn’t crying for those other women and children, I was crying for myself, crying because my saviour was just another human being racked with guilt, surprised not to find what he thought he’d find, and all at sea.
As the days went by we tried to draw closer together, remembering what we had been before so much stuff got in between us. I brought him breakfasts on trays, posies of flowers, drawings by the children. He made me sketches of birds, took me and the children on walks, and I would pass through kissing gates bordered with holly berries and through bright fields of sheep with buzzards flying overhead under windswept clouds and see nothing. The children would laugh about something he said or did and I wouldn’t notice. Sometimes I watched him from our bedroom window walk to the end of the garden, and would see him stretch out like a cartwheel, whispering to the moon or listening to the trees. I was struck with the awful possibility that he didn’t feel the same about me either.
At night we couldn’t touch because Andrew would come and sleep between us. Neither of us took him back to his room, because we knew there was something else in the way, something huge and growing: an incubus that wouldn’t go away.
On the fifth morning of his leave I was awoken by the wireless on loud downstairs. There was no one else in the bed, so I put on my dressing gown and went down to the kitchen. The wireless was not on. No one was about, but the music was very loud and clear. I followed it to the
orangery and there, with his back to me, was James playing his cello. The sunlight made the tips of his ears glow, and I watched the dear point where his hair reached his tanned neck. His right shoulder moved slightly under an old cotton shirt, and I could see the fingers of his left hand making confident, magical movements on the strings.
Jill and Andrew were sitting on the floor beside him, dipping bits of toast into boiled eggs.
‘Have you had enough?’ he asked Jill, stopping his playing when she reached up with eggy hands.
‘I’ve had a little nuff,’ she said, her head on one side, ‘but not a very big one.’
James threw his head back and laughed. I caught the moment just there, and it opened like a falcon’s wings, spreading his laughter through the air, wider and wider until it soared.
He saw me and smiled.
‘Our daughter needs a bigger nuff!’ And I saw him again, for an instant, the same man who’d gone away.
‘One more nuff coming up, then.’ I went back into the kitchen and Andrew followed me.
‘Daddy’s going to get me a go in a Spitfire. Only I need to sleep in my own bed because fighter pilots aren’t allowed to sleep with their mummies. Do you mind? I’ll still look after you.’
‘That’s fine. How exciting! A ride in a Spitfire!’
‘I know. I’m going to … Mummy … why are you smelling inside Daddy’s slippers?’
64
Despite the confusion of his presence, when James went back to Aston Down I missed him.
The following weekend I walked the grounds wondering if he would make it back for a visit. When I reached the beech tree at the far end of the paddock I stopped suddenly, startled by a stream of smoke rising from the chimney of the empty cottage. At first I thought it was on fire: it had been derelict for years. But it was definitely coming from the little chimney stack and, now that I studied it, the roof seemed in unusually good shape for a wreck.
