by Hilary McKay
The summer passed in dust, thunderstorms, food queues, short tempers, work, and trying not to think. Fear lurked in the undergrowth of the days, waiting for the moments when clamor died down. Then, while Peter kept watch in the nighttime corridors, or Vanessa paused between dances to ease her aching feet, or Clarry hung, pen poised over a blank sheet of letter paper, then the fear would come.
Where was Rupert? Clarry wished she had someone to talk to about him. Peter was no good; it only stirred up the old guilt that Rupert was enduring a life he had escaped. Vanessa was elusive whenever his name was mentioned.
Violet was the best. Violet asked, “Did he like the ink?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Have you got a picture of him?”
“Yes.” Clarry reached automatically into her bag for the one she carried everywhere, cut small enough to fit in a little card frame.
“Coo, lovely,” said Violet. “Why’s he not in uniform?”
“It was before. In Cornwall.”
“Was it cloudy in Cornwall?”
“No, it’s steam from a train.”
“Who’s he looking at?”
“Me.”
“Well!” said Violet. “Don’t tell me you don’t write him . . . oh, never mind! I liked that Red Cross thing you took me to. I’ve done two pairs of socks already and stuffed them full of messages! And I heard there’s girls needed on the trams and I’ve applied. I know I shouldn’t say it but I quite like this war. There’s more to do. Do you think it’s really so bad over there as some people say?”
“Yes, I think it probably is,” said Clarry. She had found the newspapers in the library now, and had no illusions left.
“Still, you have to carry on,” said Violet cheerfully.
It was true. They kept on doing ordinary things. They coped with the endless shortages in the shops, treasure hunting in the backs of cupboards for things they had never known mattered before, a forgotten packet of tea, or sugar or rice. A triumphant box of lavender soap, just in time for Miss Vane’s birthday.
“I hope she didn’t give it to us,” said Peter.
“She’ll be glad to get it back if she did,” said Clarry practically.
They were both busy that summer. The Grace children no longer needed extra coaching, but their mother had asked Clarry to stay on for the school holidays. Peter was at the hospital day and night, hobbling down the corridors pushing trolleys and wheelchairs, or shadowing the doctors and nurses. Sometimes, scrubbed up, he hovered at the back of an operating room. In between shifts he found a quiet corner and made his way through as much as he could of the reading list sent out from Oxford. He often woke with a jump over a pile of notes, or a textbook.
Clarry was thinking of Oxford too. She arranged a day off with Mrs. Grace, put on her gray-striped dress and her raspberry beret, and traveled there with Miss Fairfax.
Thirty-Three
“NOTHING IS THE SAME,” MISS Fairfax warned Clarry. “There are soldiers billeted everywhere. My college is a hospital; I can’t take you in. They put us up in a little corner of one of the men’s places. I’m going to show you as much as I can, and introduce you to a great friend.”
And so she did, introducing Clarry to the Principal of the College, saying, “Miss Penrose, meet Miss Penrose!”
The Miss Penroses looked at each other and laughed in surprise at their shared surname, and then Clarry was rushed around libraries and common rooms, in and out of a punt, and back to college for tea with students who had stayed behind to work through the summer. Nobody there thought it was odd to like Latin, her raspberry pink beret was much admired, and there was a lot of hopeful talk about after the war. Clarry noticed how, unlike at home, they talked about it as if it really would end, had to end, could do nothing else but end.
Then colleges would fill up again, and there would be good academic work to be done, by women as well as men. Especially by women, now it had been seen what they could do. Everyone spoke as if Clarry would quite naturally be coming to join them. “Bring your bike!” they advised. “And your lovely pink hat!”
“So,” said Miss Fairfax on the train home, “two years, Clarry, and then it could be your turn. You’d better get down to some real work now! Can that brother of yours start you on Greek, or had it better be me?”
“Greek?”
“Oh yes! They’ll examine you in Greek and Latin and math the moment you set a nose through the door! Always supposing you’re invited to that door in the first place! Still, we’ve made a start. Everything your brother did easily through school, you will have to do the difficult way. Which will toughen you up wonderfully, so let us not lament. No more Grace children next term, I’m afraid.”
“Mrs. Grace doesn’t need me anyway,” said Clarry, a little ruefully. “The twins are all caught up with work, and they can take care of Robbie after school too, I expect.”
“Excellent,” said Miss Fairfax. “Then you’d better make that dress last and hang on to your hat! Now, then, Greek, recite after me: alpha, beta, gamma, delta . . .”
For a little while they both of them had forgotten about the war.
Thirty-Four
HOWEVER, THE WAR WAS STILL there, that monstrous smile. Rupert, back in Flanders, had a fleeting few minutes of awful clear-eyed sanity, during which he wrote a letter to Clarry, the first one for months.
Were they real, those summers? There used to be skylarks. There used to be green waves. There used to be buns with raspberry jam. There used to be grass and quietness. Is anything left how it was before? So many things are gone. Are you still the Clarry who sent butterflies? Or have you vanished too?
He knew now that he should have taken more notice of grass and quietness. Thick, wild grass, springy with life. The clean smell of it. And quietness. So quiet that you could hear a wasp, shredding wood for its paper nest; so quiet that birdsong could wake you from a dream, a pony’s hooves sounded loud, and a steam train pulling into a sunlit station was a glorious clattering, hissing roar.
“Clarry,” he said out loud, and for one moment the grass felt close enough to touch.
Peter was at home when Rupert’s message arrived, which was a miracle, because he was usually in Oxford. He saw Clarry’s face light up at the sight of Rupert’s handwriting, and then he saw the lightness fade, as she read.
“I’ve always written to him every week,” she said. “I don’t know if he gets my letters, though. He doesn’t write like he did. He hasn’t replied for ages. I thought he’d forgotten us.”
“Not forgotten,” said Peter, his mind going back to his early weeks at boarding school when it had seemed to him that the only way of surviving was to numb the memory of any other life. “He perhaps just didn’t let himself remember.”
“He sounds so far away.”
Peter hugged her, less awkwardly than in the past. “He’s still alive, anyway,” he said, and did not add, as he once would have done, “or was.”
“What shall I say? Help me, Peter.”
Peter looked down at the letter again. “Tell him that those summers were real,” he said at last. “Tell him how we think of him every day. Tell him you haven’t vanished. Make him believe it. He wants to believe it.”
Peter paused, and looked at Clarry’s anxious face. She wrote every week, she had told him, but perhaps words were not enough. A photograph? he wondered. Would she look the same Clarry in a photograph?
“Send him a butterfly,” he said.
“A butterfly? To France? A butterfly when things are so terrible?”
“You never sent a swallowtail.”
“I was saving it for in case.”
“Now is in case,” said Peter.
The butterflies that Clarry had once sent to Peter at school were three-dimensional models, as close as she had been able to come to a real butterfly. Their bodies were made of carved matchsticks wound round with embroidery silk, their antennae and legs were varnished black cotton, their painted wings were colored on top
and beneath. They had never been quick to make, even when Clarry had had all the materials to hand and plenty of time to do it. Peter was back at Oxford before she reached the painting-of-the-wings stage on Rupert’s swallowtail.
“Dolls’-house games,” said her father, disgusted at this apparent return to childhood, but for once Clarry did not try to explain.
Thirty-Five
SIMON THE BONY ONE REACHED France by way of a ship from Southampton in the fall of 1917.
I’m here, he wrote to Rupert the day he arrived, crouched on a crate of tinned beef that looked like it had been abandoned by the roadside for years. I can see now why no one says much about it at home. I keep thinking I see you. It would be nice to bump into you soon.
Had he said too much? Nothing was private in the army except the space inside your head. If you died they got your letters out of your pockets and read them. And these last few days he’d started talking in his sleep again, it seemed. “Who’s Rupert?” they’d asked, but he got out of that, quick as a flash. “My dog,” he’d replied, “golden Lab.” He’d turned the talk to dogs very successfully. Dog stories had come pouring out from a dozen listeners. You were allowed to love your dog.
“You were shouting for your dog again last night,” his neighbor remarked a few days later.
“Sorry,” he said, completely casual. “I dream about him a lot. I dream he’s lost.”
“I dream I’m lost,” said his neighbor, and Simon nodded and said, “Yes, I do that too.”
Back to the letter. How not to sound desperate.
France seems a bit busy, he wrote.
It was a bit busy, miles back from the lines the ground throbbed with the pounding of the guns at the front. It was terrible seeing the horses, knee-deep, toiling, their carts slipping sideways. They were moving back the wounded as fast as they could.
Never for one moment did the Bony One wonder why he’d come. Nor was it worse than he’d thought it would be. He’d guessed it would be very nearly unendurable, and it very nearly was. His feet were agony. They didn’t seem to make boots his size. Already he’d seen things that he knew he’d never ever tell. A cartload of dead men. Loose limbed, turned blackish. He hadn’t known that happened.
“They’re all Australian,” someone said, as if that explained anything.
He’d never thought of grave digging, but then, he’d never thought of rum. It was very helpful stuff, he decided. He was nearer to Rupert than he’d been for years.
It rained and rained.
Three days after landing they sent him to the front. He had a pack weighing nearly sixty pounds on his back, and a rifle that he’d fired only half a dozen times. Round his neck was Rupert’s spare key to the cricket pavilion, along with his dog tags, so they’d know who he was when he died. The dog tags were made of asbestos, so they wouldn’t burn if he burned. There was a red one to be taken off his body and a green one to be left on. Whenever he reached the point when he believed he could not stand the misery for an hour longer, he thought of Rupert, who had stuck it for more than two years.
Peter was now at Oxford studying biomedical sciences, the consequence of jumping off a moving train, an adaptable brain, and accidentally running into the regius professor of medicine while getting a photograph copied. He was so busy he hardly had time to look up from his work, but when the news came that Simon was going to France, he spared a moment to drop his head on his arms and remember his friend. A long letter came from Clarry, he could picture her writing it, in her room at the top of the narrow cold house.
He shouldn’t have gone. He needn’t have. What use would Simon be with a gun? He used to walk round ants, he was so kind. It isn’t fair. Mrs. Morgan says if anything happens to him, it’s for the best. She says life isn’t easy for boys like him. I’m never speaking to her again.
Thirty-Six
IN CORNWALL, CLARRY’S GRANDFATHER’S CHEST had almost got the better of him at last. He had pneumonia; he was drifting in and out, awake and asleep, slowly drowning.
“Had enough,” he said. “Still, could wish for one more summer. Skylark time, I used to think. Hear them singing over the moor. Know I’d soon be off to the station.”
“Always late!” said his wife.
“Hardly ever! There they’d be . . . our own skylarks. Little Clarry and the boys.”
“Grown-up now,” said Clarry’s grandmother. “How we used to complain about them coming, and now we wish them back.”
“Never complained about them!”
“Oh, you did! The upheaval! The house full. The dramas! Clarry nearly drowning! Peter’s leg.”
“They were no trouble.”
“You didn’t say that when Rupert ran away to Ireland!”
“Well.”
“Or when Clarry kidnapped Lucy!”
“She was right,” he said, sighing. “Don’t know what I was thinking of. Silly.”
“Silly,” she agreed, and bent and kissed his forehead.
“Had this chest a long time.”
“You have.”
“Got over it before. Many times.”
“Many,” she agreed.
“My love to our skylarks. All three.”
“Of course.”
Thirty-Seven
SIMON THE BONY ONE’S LETTER to Rupert arrived when he was a few miles behind the front line on the last evening of a three-day break. He hardly read letters from home anymore, but this one wasn’t from England. It was from just a few miles away, battered from being carried round in a pocket, slightly damp and thumbmarked with mud.
Rupert stared at it incredulously, recognizing the handwriting of the all-too-familiar Simon Bonnington, Bonners, the Bony One, that borderline pest from the past.
The past. School. That lost world. Peter, Simon. Mad Irish, whom he had carefully forgotten. Once, long ago, in a different life, he had saved the Bony One by means of his mad Irish friend. Don’t start going back, don’t start going, Rupert begged his weeping memory. Don’t start, don’t start, let’s find a drink, let’s find a bottle. Anything.
But still, it started.
Long before, when the redheaded Irish boy Michael had been dispatched to school in England in order to lose his Irish accent and toughen up for the army, he had had to suffer a certain amount of agony, as all the new boys did. Each of them had their weak point, and his was his Irish accent, his Irishness in general, and his way of comparing his present dismal circumstances to his previous carefree life, and so they tormented him with Irish ballads.
They sang them behind him as he stood in front of the notice boards, reading every word over and over, as if, in his misery, he cared. They roared them in unison when he entered the common room. They howled them even as he flew at them, at first with blubbering nose and badly aimed kicks, later with head butts, and in time with hard, freckled, lightning-fast Irish fists. They were more wary when he moved on to fists. They began to say, “He’s a lot stronger than he looks.”
Even so, he was an irresistible target.
“ ‘In Dublin’s fair city . . . ,’ ” began the smirking inventor of this glorious game, incautiously, at the top of a staircase, and a minute later there he was, swiped down, heaved up, and dangling from the mad Irish one’s grip, held only by one wrist, on the wrong side of the banister.
The crowd around immediately switched allegiance and began a chant of “Drop! Drop! Drop!” The hanging boy didn’t help either.
“Let go! Let go!” he foolishly wailed, but luckily the Irish boy did not let go, although his face was now dead white, with orange freckles. It was Rupert who raced to grab the hanging boy’s arms, and held on tight.
Even so, it was a job to get him back to safety.
“What do you say?” demanded Rupert, when the inventor was back on his quivering legs at last. “Thank you thank you sorry sorry thank you sorry thanks I’m sorry I’m sorry,” he gibbered, and reeled away.
Then Rupert and the Irish boy looked at each other, and they were frien
ds. They grew into the two most popular boys in the school. The Irish boy’s accent remained unchanged and so did his reckless temper. They were legendary sportsmen and practical jokers. Rupert climbed the chapel roof one Saint Patrick’s Day and dressed the weathercock in shamrock green.
There were no more Irish ballads.
Not for years, not until Simon the Bony One arrived on the scene.
Simon’s wistful grin and perilous tendency to walk into walls when Rupert was about got worse and worse. One day it happened to attract the passing attention of Rupert’s Irish friend, who remarked, “Watch out, Rosy! I spy a blushing swain!”
All in a moment Rupert understood what would happen next. What the Irish boy saw today, the rest of the school would see tomorrow. The destruction of the Bony One would be as inevitable as time, if he didn’t think fast.
Rupert did think fast. “It’s your lovely little maid from school,” his Irish friend continued, and Rupert caught him in a swift and wicked headlock and crooned as he gripped him, “Don’t be jealous, you mad Irish! He’s nothing compared to you.”
After this he took to singing Irish ballads now and then. “ ‘When Irish eyes are smiling,’ ” he caroled to his raging friend, and, “ ‘A little bit of heaven fell from out the sky one day.’ ”
It took the attention from the Bony One completely.
“ ‘Oh, do you love, oh, say you love . . . you love the shamrock green!’ ” he loudly serenaded his friend under his study window, with the first form in stitches, rolling round in the quad. And Michael leaped fifteen feet from the window and half killed him.
In these ways, he, Rupert, had saved Simon the Bony One from the ridicule of the rabble. And now apparently the silly kid was here in Flanders. How had that happened? Why had that happened?
Rupert didn’t want to think about that so he spent the evening drinking red wine that tasted as if something extra added, like hair oil. It was raining, as it had rained all August, September, and October, the world was half liquid, the front line trenches were knee-deep in mud; if it weren’t for the submerged duckboards you’d just keep going down. You moved with the same speed that you ran in a nightmare. It was very bloody hot and then very bloody cold; the temperature regulation was a complete foreign mess. His head had the strangest floating feel, as if it might detach from his neck and sail away. In two hours time his unit would be marching back up to the front again. The next morning they would go over the top.
