by Hilary McKay
“Promise. But he might hear anyway.”
“Not yet. Perhaps not for ages. It’s hell over there right now. You must make Peter promise too. He will; he’ll understand.”
“All right.”
“Good! Here’s Emma! Emma, this is my great friend Clarry and darling Miss Vane! They’ve lost lovely, lovely Rupert!”
“Good Lord, look at our teacups!” said Emma. “Not your lovely, lovely Rupert, Vanessa?”
“I borrowed him! He wasn’t mine! I was just trying to cheer him up!”
Never, thought Vanessa remorsefully, must Clarry know the lengths to which she had gone, trying to cheer Rupert up. Or Peter. Peter must never know. It hadn’t worked anyway.
“I know he wasn’t really yours; he had lots of girlfriends, he told me,” said Emma cheerfully. “From Ireland, London, all over the place! Anyway, what do you mean, ‘lost’?”
“Stop talking rubbish and listen, Emma! Clarry is Rupert’s cousin. She and her brother are his next of kin. They’ve just had a telegram.”
“Oh, I’m sorry!” said Emma, looking absolutely stricken. “Oh, it happened to us, last year, my brother. . . .”
“Not the same, not the same!” said Vanessa impatiently. “Emma, will you look after Clarry and Miss Vane for me? I can’t be late. I already owe Matron for this morning, seeing Dad off from the station. Clarry, where are you staying?”
“Anywhere. Somewhere cheap.”
“I’ve an aunt who does rooms,” said Emma. “If it helps.”
Forty-Two
THAT WAS HOW THE GREAT search for Rupert began. Practical things kept them busy. Clarry remembered how Peter had the picture of their mother reprinted, and she got out her photograph of Rupert. They had it turned into postcards, a hundred, for thirty shillings.
“Please give me one for old time’s sake,” begged Emma when she saw them.
By the end of the first week, Clarry had the addresses of sixty base hospitals in France and Belgium, and she and Miss Vane had written to every one of them. Also the Southampton hospitals had been checked, and a long chain of nurses, VADs, patients, ex-patients, and friends had been contacted by way of telegram and postcard, and asked to send back news. As well as all this, Violet, stalwart tram conductress and dedicated packer of gloves and socks, had been contacted and had reported back on the state of the cats. (Stuffed, but your dad’s in a shocking mood, Clarry! Let me know when you have to come home and face the music, and I’ll come along with you to see fair play!)
Miss Vane’s energy seemed endless. In between everything else that had to be done, the little staff room at Vanessa’s hospital had been polished to gleaming point, all the cupboards turned out, and the paintwork washed.
“Please stay forever!” many people begged her, and Miss Vane had to earnestly explain about her cats.
Peter wrote, Yes, I’ll go round the local hospitals, but I can’t pretend that I don’t think it’s hopeless. How is Vanessa? Are you managing for money? What about your school, have you told them? I’m enclosing fourteen pounds, afraid I had to borrow most of it. (“I love your brother!” said Vanessa when she read this.) I don’t see how anyone could lose his ID tags, whatever happened to him.
Vanessa said that to an up-and-well-enough-for-light-duties patient and got a sideways look.
“What?” she asked.
“Well, you’d know if you’d ever been out there.”
“Would I?”
“I don’t want to upset you, but not everyone gets found.”
“I know.”
“Supposing, I’m not saying it happened, but supposing I was out after a charge or a lot of shellfire or something, and I came across . . . across some poor chap and I thought I should take his tag, let someone know.”
“Yes.”
“And it was raining, deep in mud, and I had maybe a minute to get back out of it. Probably dark coming on, or dark altogether, you wouldn’t be out there if it wasn’t. His tags are on a cord. You’ve got to get it out from under his jacket or whatever, pull it over his head, or cut it with something. Take one off, leave one behind, that’s what you’re supposed to do. And you’re thinking all the time you need to get back, you need to get back!”
“Yes,” said Vanessa compassionately, seeing the fright in his eyes. “Come on, sit down, you’re out of it now. Thank you so much for telling me.”
“I don’t mind. It’s in my head anyway. But you can see how things go wrong?”
“So easily now.”
“Good! There’s other ways too, things get mixed. You see chaps write a letter, give it to their friend. ‘Send that home if I don’t come back!’ Then the wrong one cops it, and he’s got a letter in his pocket that gets sent back to England. ‘Good-bye, pat the dog for me, you were the best, sorry about all the swearing.’ Only it’s not his letter, it’s his mate’s, and his mate’s not dead after all. Now I’ve upset you!”
“I am never upset,” said Vanessa. “Never. How’s the arm?”
“I can still feel it.”
“Everyone says that.”
“Always wanted to drive a car. Never be able to now.”
“You absolutely will!” said Vanessa.
“Like to know how.”
“Next time I get a weekend off I’ll bring my dad’s car back here and we’ll take off in it for a ride. You driving.”
“Oh yes?”
“Dare you!”
“You wouldn’t!”
“Wait and see if I wouldn’t,” said Vanessa, back in her normal state, and prepared, as usual, to do anything, absolutely anything, to cheer someone up.
Later she related these examples of confused identity to Clarry, with some of the details omitted.
“You see!” said Clarry triumphantly. “We’re going to London tomorrow. Miss Vane’s got a map, and a list of possible hospitals, all marked on in different colored inks.”
“She’s wonderful; she’s loving this.”
“So many people have been wonderful. You and Emma and Violet. Violet’s going to brave my father and see if any letters have arrived.”
“You’ll hear more,” Emma had told them. “When we lost Tristam, so many people wrote. His officer and a nurse who’d treated him for a day or two. His friends. A chaplain.”
“Oh, Emma, how kind!” Clarry had exclaimed.
“It helped,” Emma had said. “It helped us face it.”
In the darkest parts of the night, when the blackout blotted the windows and Miss Vane was snoring gently on the other side of the room, Clarry faced it. Rupert dead. And she couldn’t believe it. She thought (as Emma’s mother had thought when she lost Tristam, as people had thought since the beginning of time), If he were dead, I’d know.
Forty-Three
TO LIE OUT STRAIGHT, WITH clean sheets and a solid roof, thought the young gunner in the French hospital. To know that for you it was over at last, and for nothing more than the cost of an eye and a broken shoulder. Worth it. Cheap at the price. The pretty nurses. He’d sent a message home. His family could stop worrying now.
But the chap in the next bed wouldn’t shut up.
Droning.
Or singing. Very quietly, not moving his lips, a hardly changing note, the same phrase over and over.
Like a mosquito.
“ ‘Three little maids who, all unwary . . .’ ”
“Could you say a word?” he asked a passing nurse.
“What? I’ll be back in a minute.”
She was back in ten, saying, “I’m sorry, we’re terribly rushed. Is it your head? Are you in pain?”
“No. Yes. It’s him in the next bed. Is he all right?”
She hurried as if it mattered then, bent over to look, checked a pulse, and asked, “Why did you worry?”
“He was sort of singing,” he said, not liking to say, He was driving me nuts. “He’s stopped now.”
“Mr. Rose,” he heard her say, very clearly. “Can you hear me, Mr. Rose? Squeeze my hand.”
“Why do you call him that?” he asked, but she frowned at him and shook her head and carried on holding Mr. Rose by his wrist, looking at her watch, and counting. As a matter of fact, she didn’t know why he was called Mr. Rose. She’d arrived only two days before and she hadn’t had time to speak to anyone properly. She didn’t know that when he’d first arrived, before they’d done anything about his fractured skull, someone had asked, “Can you tell me your name?” and quite a while later he’d croaked, “Rosy.”
The patient who’d called her over was pretty stable, she knew, but this one worried her. And puzzled her. And suddenly she realized why.
There was a postcard in the entrance hall with a label above it asking, Do you know this man?
And she’d unpinned it that morning to read the back, a family plea for someone lost. How desperate had they been to write like that? she’d wondered, halfway through. And why choose here, out of all the hospitals in France and Belgium? And then she’d read the end and found a line that explained that they hadn’t just chosen this one; they’d written to them all. Poor souls. And his name had been a Cornish name, just as her own name was. Penrose.
Rose.
Mr. Rose.
It was a five-minute walk back to the entrance hall, and there were only three staff on the ward and sixty beds, all full, but all the same she went, almost running.
The picture showed a tall, curly headed boy, smiling at someone, eyes squinting against the sun. The patient in the bed in front of her had a head wrapped up into a great white bundle, two black eyes swollen shut, and lips all cracked with fever from blood poisoning. He was immobilized from a broken pelvis too, and scattered with bits of shrapnel, but that was the least of his worries.
“Rupert Penrose,” said the nurse, taking his hand again. “Rupert. There’s a message for you here from Clarry.”
Then she knew her guess had been right, because he smiled, and it was the smile that she’d seen in the picture.
Forty-Four
THE TELEGRAM CAME TO EMMA’S aunt’s, because that was the address on the postcard. Two travel passes followed, arranged by the Red Cross for relatives of patients who were critically ill. They were for in three days’ time.
“Three days be damned!” roared Vanessa’s father, as Vanessa had known he would when she telegrammed the news. He thought very highly of Clarry, not least because she had named him Odysseus and turned his exile into hope. “Three days be damned!” repeated Odysseus, and drove down in full naval uniform, commandeered a friend with a boat, and took them across himself; Clarry and Miss Vane, because Clarry, being under sixteen, needed a guardian. “You’ll be the guardian?” he asked Miss Vane.
“I certainly will,” she replied.
That was how, when Rupert opened his eyes at last, there was Clarry’s face, drifting in and out of focus, but growing clearer all the time, through waves and waves of consciousness, as once, long ago, when he had fished her half-drowned from the sea.
“Hello, Rupert,” said Clarry.
Forty-Five
CLARRY’S FATHER LOOKED AT HER for a long time and said finally, “Well.”
Two months had passed and Clarry was back, facing the music, as Violet had put it, only it wasn’t music, it was silence.
The whole house was eerily silent. The air was so still that when she moved it felt like she was disturbing something, like a puddle when it was stirred with a stick.
There was still a half-painted butterfly.
“We found Rupert,” said Clarry, a bit unnecessarily because she could see perfectly well that on the mantelpiece was a neat stack of the letters she had posted home, the envelopes carefully slit.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to you,” said her father.
“Have you been all right without me? I’m so sorry if you were worried.”
“Worried?”
“I knew Rupert couldn’t be dead,” said Clarry. “If he’d been dead, we’d have known, wouldn’t we?”
“In what way?”
“We’d . . . we’d have ached. I think. We’d have known somehow.”
“Your grandfather’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“More than a week ago. Did you know somehow? Did you ache? I thought not. I’m just back from Cornwall. The funeral was yesterday.”
Clarry stared at him, absolutely stunned.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you like this. Your grandmother is very much distressed. Since you’ve finished with school, I think you should go there. You might be some comfort, I don’t know.”
That was the worst moment, as bleak as when the telegram came.
But it passed, and Clarry was grown-up now.
She put her hand on her father’s arm, and led him to a chair. She would have liked to hug him, but she knew that he would flinch away. Nevertheless she held his hand gently and said, “Poor Grandmother, poor Grandfather, poor, poor you, what an awful time you’ve had. Does Peter know?”
“Why should he? I have given up expecting anything from my children.”
“I’ll make tea, with sugar in, we had some sugar, I know. Something hot. And light the fire and warm the house up. Stay there. Please don’t go.”
He let her fetch a blanket, light the fire, and make tea. She lit the fire in the kitchen too. The kitchen cupboards had clearly been recently restocked by Mrs. Morgan. She found potatoes and a tin of ham and another of peas and made a sort of meal.
“It’s much too cold in the dining room,” she said, “but it’s warming up in the kitchen now and I’ve pulled the table close to the range. Did Grandmother get my letter from France when I told her we’d found Rupert?”
“I presume so.”
“Did . . . did Grandfather know?”
“I have no idea.”
“Miss Vane was wonderful. She helped so much in France. She looked after the other families in the hostel who had come to see their sons, and she went shopping in the town for people, she speaks French much better than me, and she wrote letters home for patients. She’s brought back another cat! A kitten, all the way from France in a basket!”
“And your cousin is well? It was all a fuss about nothing?”
“He has a fractured skull and a broken pelvis. He had blood poisoning. He was caught by shellfire, they think. They found him in a bomb crater; they didn’t know how long he’d been there. Probably three or four days, at least. He hadn’t any identification and he can’t remember any of it. He said he was worrying about someone, and the next thing he knew he was in hospital.”
Clarry looked up and saw her father wasn’t listening, so she stopped.
Forty-Six
RUPERT WAS MOVED TO ENGLAND a week after Clarry left France. By either luck or charm or a mixture of both, he managed to get himself into one of the hospitals in Clarry’s own town.
“Thank goodness we’re not getting him,” said Vanessa when she and Clarry met at the cottage.
“I thought you’d be disappointed,” said Clarry. “You could have cheered him up!”
“No, thank you,” Vanessa replied. “I tried cheering him up that time he came on leave. It didn’t work out very well. I don’t think Rupert and I could cope with sponge baths and bedpans and just-let-me-look-under-that-dressing. Besides, I’m seriously thinking of giving it up.”
“The bedpans and dressings?”
“No, no, the cheering! The last one I cheered up, that lovely dark boy who lost his arm (I taught him to drive, he was wonderful, he even managed the gears by the end), how was I to know he was engaged?”
“How did you find out?”
“She ambushed me. Very cross. I hate being shouted at.”
“Poor you.”
“I know. I felt like saying, He kissed me first! But I didn’t want to show that I cared.”
“Did you?”
“No more than usual. Never mind. The good news is that Simon is being moved back from the front for a
bit. Oh, when will this blasted war be over, and what will I do when it is?”
“America will speed up the end, that’s what everyone was saying in France.”
“Perhaps, but I don’t think the fast bit will be much fun. Talk about something else. What was it like facing the music?”
“Not very nice. A bit better now, though. Grandmother has come to stay so she can be close to Rupert.”
“And Lucy!”
“Oh, what a good idea, Vanessa! She could see Lucy! How could I get her here? Perhaps Mr. King?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Clarry! You know my dad adores you! He’ll come and fetch you both in the car, since he has unkindly reclaimed it again. Leave it to me, I’ll sort it. Are you going? Give Rupert my love, and Peter. And everyone at school. You are still going to school? Are you happy, Clarry?”
“Yes,” said Clarry, and she was. It was the spring of 1918 and she was unexpectedly content. Rupert and Simon were temporarily safe. Someone who was not Rupert was in love with Vanessa. Peter was happy in Oxford, transformed by finding something worth doing at last. Small cheerful things happened. Violet, who had recently been writing very highly scented letters indeed, had come to borrow the pink hat.
“For a photograph,” she said. “He’s had one in my tram conductor’s uniform, and he’s had one by the shop, and now I want something fancy by the lilacs in the park. If it’s all right that I borrow it?”
“Of course! It’s lovely! Didn’t I say you could?” asked Clarry, running to fetch it. “But Violet, who is he?”
“It’s Eddie from those first socks I sent that were all your idea! I’ve had eleven letters now and two postcards with the same picture and he’s looking out for a shell case to make into a vase. The brass ones polish up lovely, he says. I’ve told them all at Red Cross about him. I’m surprised Miss Vane hasn’t told you!”
Clarry was not surprised because recently Miss Vane had developed a new interest of her own. When she had come back from France to find her cats stuffed to cushion size, the earth box scrubbed white, and her back door repainted a beautiful emerald green, she had naturally invited Mr. King to dinner. He in turn had produced a perfectly respectable little dogcart, polished Jester so he looked like a newly varnished black and white rocking horse, and taken her jaunting into the spring countryside. She had returned looking ten years younger and carrying a bunch of cowslips.
