The Last Summer

by Judith Kinghorn

  When my mother walked into my room, clutching an envelope, I knew as soon as I saw her face that it was more bad news.

  “No, not Henry . . .” I said, sitting up in my bed, putting down my book.

  “No, darling, not Henry,” she said, taking hold of my hand. “I’m afraid it’s Charlie . . .”

  The telegram was from Henry: Charlie had been badly injured.

  My mother telephoned the Boyds immediately. Charlie had been injured in an ambush on a night patrol. Nine of his men had been killed. He’d already been returned home and admitted to one of the London general hospitals.

  The next day Mama and I went to visit him. He lay in a small bed curtained off from the rest of the ward—his torso and arms bandaged like an Egyptian mummy, his legs under some sort of cage, covered by a sheet—in an open-eyed state of coma, seemingly deaf and dumb. I looked on in silence, stood at the end of the bed and watched my mother as she spoke to him. But he couldn’t see her, couldn’t hear her. I glanced about the ward—at the other injured servicemen, but none of it was real, none of it touched me. That small green glass bottle had continued to be my comforter, nullifying my senses, and, like Charlie, I was locked in a dream. Only I could hear and move and speak, and sometimes even smile.

  We visited Charlie almost daily for two months before he was transferred to Craiglockhart, a military hospital near Edinburgh, specializing in the treatment and care of shell-shocked servicemen. A friend of Mama’s, a doctor, had told us that the rate of war neurosis was much higher among officers than among regular soldiers, simply because their positions required them to repress their emotions and set an example. These men were often ashamed of their fear, he said, and, in his opinion, it was no coincidence that the most severe cases occurred in officers who’d also made a name for themselves as heroes, performing daredevil acts to prove to their men that they were not afraid. It made sense. And at that moment I could imagine Charlie, my ever-cheerful ebullient fiancé, at the front. At Craiglockhart, we were told, Charlie would be able to have the new electric shock treatment, he would learn how to walk and speak properly again.

  I watched him slowly begin to recover from his physical injuries, but he was not as he should have been. He walked badly, dragging one leg, and putting together even the simplest of sentences seemed to be a struggle. At first he’d been unable to control both the pronunciation of words and the loudness of his voice, often shouting out in such a way that I’d jump. And he looked different too: wide eyed and haunted, and so very tired. He told me that he was afraid to sleep, afraid of the nightmares that delivered him straight back to the trenches. But sometimes these nightmares came to him in the middle of a sentence; and then he’d shriek, cry out a name, or begin whimpering like a wounded dog. He suffered appalling headaches, heart palpitations, dizziness, and sweats; and once, in front of Mama and me, he had what appeared to be some sort of fit—his whole body jerking violently upon the bed, shaking its tiny frame. He’d burst into tears a few times when we were there, and I knew, I knew then that Charlie believed he, too, should have been killed; that he wished for death, not life.

  Perhaps it was seeing Charlie in that state, or perhaps it was watching the nurses who attended him, but I finally decided that I needed to do something, something useful. I’d heard that the hospitals were still desperate for volunteers, albeit for menial work, and so, the same day Charlie was transferred, I walked to the Russian Hospital for Officers on South Audley Street, and asked if they could use me.

  The sister who interviewed me—a solid, fearsome woman with tiny blue eyes and a Scottish accent—told me that I’d need to be there by seven each morning, “bright eyed and bushy tailed. You’ll be working down in the basement kitchens,” she said. “It’s by no means glamorous, so I suggest you come attired a little differently.”

  I looked down at what I was wearing. “Yes, of course.”

  “From time to time you may be needed to help out on a ward . . . cleaning, stripping beds, that sort of thing. Is that acceptable to you, Miss Granville?”

  “Yes, yes,” I replied eagerly.

  “Good. But I should warn you, many of the men we have here are traumatized . . . incontinent of mind and body. It’s not pleasant—not nice for any of us, or for them—but it has to be done, and we’re all run ragged . . .” She paused, smiled at me. “Unfortunately we don’t have time for the manners and courtesies you’re no doubt accustomed to, Miss Granville. You’ll have to get used to that. You’ll have to think on your toes and look sharp. But I’m sure if you can do that and keep your head, you’ll be fine.”

  “I am a pantry maid!” I declared to my mother when I returned home.

  “But are you quite sure? Are you certain you’re able to cope?”

  “Yes of course. And I have to do something, Mama.”

  It was mindless work, and no one really spoke to me. When they did I was simply addressed as “Granville.” But I was happy to be doing something, happy to be useful at last. And I had no time to think, no time to dwell on Tom Cuthbert, my baby, or Charlie. I worked in a small, windowless pantry in the hospital’s basement, next to the kitchen. In a long white apron, thick hairnet and white cap, it was my job to set the breakfast trays each morning, stack the trays on a trolley and wheel it through to the kitchen. There, I helped the kitchen maids—working from a list—to add food to the trays. Some were bestowed with nothing more than a plastic cup of yellowish milky liquid and a straw, a blue note placed next to it, with a name and a number; crockery and cutlery removed—for me to return to the pantry. Others, soft food—porridge, stoned prunes or scrambled eggs—served in a bowl, never on a plate, with a spoon and never a fork, and a pink note. And a few received something more substantial, with the full complement of cutlery, and no note. Then I took the trolley up to the wards with one of the kitchen maids, leaving her there to help the nurses hand them out, while I returned to the kitchen. By the time I’d finished clearing the kitchen, the trays had arrived back and I had to wash, dry and stack everything away for the next day. Sometimes I was asked to stay on for an hour, to do extra cleaning or mop out the kitchens, but I never saw inside the wards, never really saw the men, though I heard them, once or twice. The blue notes.

  It was around this time, shortly after Charlie had been sent to Edinburgh, that Jimmy Cooper called on me. He was home on leave and took me to dinner at the Savoy. We drank champagne, ate caviar, foie gras, and lobster, and later, that same evening, we went to a party at the Millingtons. I was apprehensive. I hadn’t seen Rose in a while, and I wondered if Tom would be there, home on leave, and if they were still seeing each other. He wasn’t there and I was pleased. I don’t think I could have borne it if he’d been there, been with her.

  “Darling!” Rose said, kissing the air to both sides of my head. “I simply love the new you!”

  Much to my mother’s horror, I’d had my hair cut in the new “short” style. I’d had Antoine cut it. It was, he told me, all the rage in Paris. Times, fashions, and everything else seemed to be changing, and I noted that Rose, like me, was wearing a new, rather daring, shorter gown.

  Rose had always been a city girl: her vista happily confined to the angles of streets and pavements and rooftops. On her occasional visits to Deyning, I remembered, she’d always preferred to stay on the terrace or flagstoned pathways rather than walk on the grass or among the trees. She had a morbid fear of mud and didn’t like the weather, any weather it seemed to me: summers made her sneeze and she found winters in the countryside too, too depressing. But in London, among the shops and cafés and theaters, she thrived. And though we were the same age she’d always seemed to me to be years older: more sophisticated, more knowing. Mama had once called her a flibbertigibbet sort, and perhaps she was.

  “We never seem to cross paths these days . . . but I’m so, so pleased that dear Jimmy’s brought you along. Oh darling, we simply must have a good old catch-up. And . . . I’ve a little treat for us upstairs,” she added in a whisper.<
br />
  Among my ever-diminishing group of friends in London there was a new craze: injecting morphia. The drug not only worked on physical pain, its effects produced a pause long enough to obliterate reality, suspending thought and reason. It removed those light-absorbing particles and made things shine once more; made us shine once more. And life just seemed too short not to burn brightly.

  At that time it wasn’t fashionable, certainly not among those I knew, to drink. To appear in any way inebriated—by alcohol, at least—was considered quite vulgar and rather louche. And, under pressure from the temperance movement, and then the newspapers, the government had severely restricted the sale and consumption of alcohol anyhow. Shortly after the war began, hotels, restaurants, bars and public houses had had what was known as the “Beauty Sleep Order” imposed on them, and sometime later, this lights-out rule had been brought forward, from ten thirty to nine thirty. I’d heard of a few places, certain dubious Soho nightclubs and bars, which somehow managed to stay open into the small hours, but most of the people I knew entertained at home. It was easier. And, I suppose, it allowed us to do whatever we wished in private.

  My mother, like so many others, caught in the grip of a xenophobic obsession about spies and foreigners in the city, had once asked me if I’d come across drugs at any of the parties I went to. She’d read in the newspaper that itinerant immigrants and foreign soldiers were targeting young English women—to sell into prostitution and white slavery. She mentioned opium and cocaine, and I was shocked. Shocked that she knew these words. Of course I’d lied to her, told her I knew nothing; said I hadn’t seen anything.

  But the craze for these things had been around for a few years by then, and the war, the never-ending news about it and about death, served only to accelerate the need for escape. All of us had friends working in one or other of the London hospitals, and with so many doctors, nurses and VADs about, the drugs were easy enough to obtain. Even our local Mayfair chemist, the place my mother liked to patronize, advertised their gelatine sheets impregnated with morphine and cocaine as useful presents for friends at the front. And a few very fashionable London girls I knew carried the most exquisite, beautifully enamelled silver bonbonnières of morphia grains or cocaine in their handbags.

  Later that evening, as we sat side by side on her bed, Rose took my arm. “Now don’t worry, darling. It doesn’t really hurt,” she said, examining my flesh, tapping at it. And it didn’t. I felt nothing. For what’s a pinprick? She disappeared to the bathroom, to sterilize the needle, she said, and when she returned I watched her inject herself. She pulled out the needle with a sigh, turned to me and smiled. And we sat there for a while, sharing a cigarette, chatting about who was seeing whom, and who’d died. Then, with a queer sort of drifting feeling, as though I wasn’t completely there, I heard myself ask her about Tom: was she still seeing him, writing to him? And I heard my voice, slightly slurred and slow.

  “Good grief, Clarissa, I was never seeing him as such. It was just a thing, you know? He’s hardly one of us, is he?”

  “But I thought . . . Henry said you were . . .”

  “Well, strictly between you and me, I was with him . . .” She got up, walked over to the window. “He is rather handsome . . . and quite compelling, but can you imagine what my parents would say? No, no, it was a momentary thing.”

  “And . . .” I heard myself say, egging her on for the detail of their thing, “. . . tell me more.” And then I lay back against her pillows, a blissful mellowness creeping into my senses.

  For a moment I thought she wasn’t going to divulge anything further; then she came and sat down on the bed next to me.

  “Come along, Rose,” I said, half closing my eyes, ready to test the pain. “Tell me . . .”

  “It was here,” she said, looking above me, above my head, remembering. “He made love to me here. Oh, I know how preposterous it sounds, darling . . . but it was a moment of complete abandon.”

  And in my blissful haze, through the morphia, I felt a twinge in the pit of my stomach.

  “Yes,” I said, “a moment of complete abandon . . . how wonderful.”

  “I suppose if his circumstances were different I might fall in love with him,” she said, still staring at a patch of wall above my head. “And truly, it was sublime. But I know—I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I’m a little tart to go with such a person, but he’s altogether different from other men. There’s something unusual . . . rather extraordinary about him . . . It’s hard to explain, but I think you know what I mean, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I can imagine.”

  “He’s so passionate . . .”

  “Really?”

  “So desperate . . .”

  “Yes . . .”

  “And quite obviously experienced with women,” she said, looking at me with a wicked grin.

  “Oh?”

  She sighed. “To be honest, I’d be more than happy to have him as a lover for the rest of my life.” She moved closer. “The things he knows, Clarissa . . . seriously, darling, it would make your hair curl. I said to him, ‘I don’t know where you’ve learnt about women, but surely it can’t have been in the trenches.’”

  “And what did he say?”

  “I can’t quite recall now. I think he said it was Paris. You know they all go there, don’t you?”

  “No, I didn’t know. You mean they go there to pick up women?”

  She laughed. “Oh, Clarissa, really. They don’t need to pick them up, they pay for it, darling. And you know what they say about French prostitutes . . .”

  “No,” I said, beginning to feel dizzy. “What do they say?”

  “Well, that they invented everything. Every debauchery known to man . . . or woman, ha! And they’re everywhere at the front, brothels all over the place. Apparently there are more cases of syphilis and gonorrhea there than anything else. Isn’t that just so horrendously . . .”—she glanced about the room, searching for the word—“sad,” she said at last.

  Suddenly I felt sick. “Must be the morphia,” she said, and showed me to the bathroom.

  I looked at myself in the mirror. He’d made love to her. He’d said her name and made love to her. I closed my eyes. He made love to her as I had his baby. I saw myself back in my room at St. Anne’s in Plymouth; saw them together on her bed. And then I vomited.

  “Are you all right in there, darling?” Rose asked through the door.

  “Yes . . . yes, I’m fine,” I said, staring back at the girl in the mirror. “You go down. I’ll see you there.”

  “Are you sure? I can wait, dear.”

  “No, Rose. You go back down. I’m fine . . . I’ll be along in a jiffy.”

  I heard the bedroom door close, and stood staring at my reflection. My eyes appeared unusually large and dark; my complexion a luminous ivory. I picked up the tablet of rouge on the marble washstand in front of me and applied it to my cheeks. A touch of color: a mask; theater; a beautiful, sad creature from a Greek tragedy. I lifted a tortoiseshell hairbrush, pushed it through my shorn hair, away from my face.

  “You’re not Clarissa,” I whispered. “Clarissa doesn’t look like that.”

  I walked slowly down the staircase, moving my hand along the polished wood of the handrail, and then on, through a small sea of vaguely familiar faces.

  “Clarissa!”

  “Are you quite all right, dear? You look a little pale . . .”

  “Clarissa?”

  I smiled, kept moving, looking ahead of me all the time, and then on into the Millingtons’ ballroom, into the crowd. I closed my eyes, lifted my arms, swaying in time with the music: this is good; this is fine . . . I am good, I am fine.

  I opened my eyes; saw Jimmy standing in front of me.

  “Clarissa?” He sounded strange, quite far away.

  “I think I need to go home now, Jimmy,” I said.

  Later, in my room, I lay on my bed, staring at rosebuds, drifting. I smiled. I was home now. I was sa
fe. He was gone. All I needed to do was bury him. I had to extinguish every sensation I associated with him. But how? How do you kill everything you’ve ever felt to be good without killing some of yourself?

  I rose from my bed, walked across to my desk, opened the drawer and pulled out my journal and pen . . .

  You may survive this war, but from today you are dead to me.

  I climbed back into my bed and pulled the covers up. I wanted to be lost; I wanted to be found: found by him. I wanted him to feel my pain and beg for my forgiveness. I wanted to give myself to someone, anyone, and for him to know. For him to feel each touch, each and every kiss, like small shards of glass pressed into his flesh.

  I would do it. I would.

  I would make him feel the pain.

  I stared at pink rosebuds between slow blinks, and I hated them. I’d never again be the girl on the gate, longing, and waiting for friends. I’d never again be the girl he’d made love to in the park. I’d never walk across a meadow and hear a lark or a cuckoo with that same sense of wonder. I’d never watch the sun set and feel at one with the universe or gaze up at the moon and stars and feel that same sense of awe. And I’d never again look at a baby and smile.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Oddly enough, it was around this time I began to see more of Rose. I couldn’t and didn’t blame her for what had taken place between her and Tom. After all, she had no idea, knew nothing at all of my seemingly doomed relationship with Tom Cuthbert, or the child I’d given birth to months earlier. But then neither did he. And in reminding myself of that, in reminding myself of that pertinent fact, and knowing that he had been with Rose after he’d learned of my engagement to Charlie, offered me a degree of comfort.