by Lizzie Page
* * *
Olive was in the back of the ward during the interval, again scrutinising me. She was helping distribute water.
‘Enjoying the show?’
‘It’s interesting.’ She looked up at me with doe eyes. ‘There’s a letter for you, back in our hut.’
‘Oh?’
‘I think it’s from Edmund’s mother. I recognise the handwriting.’
‘Thank you, Olive.’
Edmund’s mother? What did she want with me? She’d never written to me before. I suddenly felt nervous.
‘Aren’t you going to get it?’
I thought, Here is someone who knows how to take the shine off a lovely evening.
‘Not right now.’
She raised her eyebrows at me.
‘We’ve got twenty minutes before the second half.’
‘I know, Olive.’
* * *
One of the actors came on to introduce the second half. He was wearing a bow-tie and I stared straight ahead at him as though my life depended on it. The curtains swung back, and I let out a wild laugh, I don’t know why. I could not tell you what he said about the inhabitants of Elephant and Castle in London. I couldn’t tell you what observation about the West End made the crowd roar. I couldn’t tell you why a man came on wearing only a sheet. I could only tell you about the heat creeping over me, and how hard it was to breathe in there.
I just feel responsible for him, that’s all.
When the actors were bowing for the finish, Daisy came over and I’m sure she noticed that Sam and I were holding hands. Under her gaze, I felt suddenly tearful, as though everything was breaking apart in front of my eyes. I detached my fingers from his and stood up. I’d never not opened a letter from England immediately before.
I hoped maybe Olive was confused and the letter was from Aunt Cecily or even Uncle Toby instead.
‘I had better…’
‘Of course,’ he said politely, his eyes on mine.
‘You don’t mind?’
‘It’s fine.’ I minded though. I wished we had gone out for a cigarette during the interval.
‘Goodnight, Vivi. It’s been wonderful.’
I fled the ward, feeling his concerned eyes on me.
Dear Vivienne – or do you prefer to be called Vi?
* * *
I didn’t get to tell you last month, but thank you, so much, for coming to England and for your subsequent cards. It didn’t go unnoticed or unappreciated. You are a credit to your family.
Christopher is forever in our hearts.
Belated congratulations on your engagement to Edmund. We are very proud to welcome you to our family. I don’t think I ever made a secret of it, but I have always wanted a daughter. And now, please – you, Olive and your dear father – you are part of us now.
Let us plan the wedding for as soon as possible. Please don’t wait on our account. These are terrible dark times, but it does us good to have some brilliance to look forward to.
One small thing, Edmund begged me not to tell you – he doesn’t want you to leave your post so soon after Christopher – but he is in a hospital in Sussex. Please don’t panic, he is making an excellent recovery and we don’t expect him to be here for much longer than a few weeks.
I will ensure that he writes.
* * *
Yours lovingly,
Mrs Lowe – Evangeline
29
1940 – Now
Pearl and Eleanor are waiting for me. It’s time to go back to the village hall. I have come back upstairs under the pretext of tidying my hair. I have put on fresh lipstick. I am nearly running out of it, and goodness knows what I’ll do after it goes – but this seems an occasion that warrants it. I feel like Sam is watching me. I rub in some rouge even though I am red enough. I am still sweating hot and cold. Trying to put a face on it. I had thought Pearl might be emotional today, but I didn’t expect that I would be.
Eleanor pulls on her coat. Her heels are too high for our uneven and now puddled roads. Her tights already have a tiny ladder over her calf. It draws the eye somehow. I still have four pairs left. If I were a better person, I think, I would offer her a pair.
This is Sam’s baby sister.
I could ask Eleanor not to tell him. I could tell her not to tell him. I could say we had a promise…
What will I do if she tells him she’s met me? What will he do?
We walk back to the village hall. Clippety-clop, her heels go. It’s like walking with a horse. A truck passes, then a car slows down to ask directions. I try to help but my mind is not really on it.
I am desperate to ask more questions, but Eleanor talks about the London bombings and how they sleep crammed in the Underground, like sardines, and that feeling when you emerge from underground to see what has been destroyed and what hasn’t.
‘It’s so quiet here. It must feel like the war is just a… a distant dream. You must be able to forget it’s even happening.’
‘I served for three years in the Great War,’ I say quickly. ‘I don’t forget easily.’
‘Of course,’ she replies gracefully. ‘I know you did. I didn’t mean anything. I know you saved my brother’s life.’
Pearl gazes seriously from me to her mother. She says, ‘Mummy didn’t get to meet the dogs.’
Lightly, I say, ‘Next time,’ and she nods.
Pearl and her mother aren’t too emotional in the hall. I think they already said their goodbyes back at home. Pearl is subdued with the baby and Max. She kisses the crowns of their heads.
We wave and wave, and Eleanor and my eyes lock, and I hope mine say, I’ll take good care of her, which is part of what I’m thinking, but I’m also thinking, Sam. What is she going to tell Sam?
30
1916 – Then
The last time I saw Sam Isaac was a grey-skied September morning, 1916. Men were piled in the back of our ambulance like rolls of carpet. Some of them were singing: Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag. I was driving, and Olive sat next to me, with her concerned expression: ‘Don’t you want me to drive?’ Her ankle still wasn’t strong enough though, so it irritated me that she kept asking.
When we arrived at the port, I helped dismount those who needed help, and bade them farewell. Sam carried one man by piggyback to the gangplank even though it must have hurt his shoulder. Then, gruffly, he said he was heading over to the tea van. He didn’t directly invite me but I followed him anyway, and when we were there, he bought himself and me a black coffee.
I had spent the last two days going over and over what to do. I had written him a brief note saying I regretted ‘giving him the wrong impression’ and asked Olive to deliver it. She visited him often and was growing increasingly annoyed with me.
‘It’s because he’s a Jew, isn’t it?’ she said one time.
‘No,’ I said, hurt that she would think that of me. Maybe that was part of it, but it wasn’t the main reason.
Olive looked unconvinced, but then she had never liked Edmund and sometimes, I think, she liked to imagine the worst of me. Maybe it made her feel better about herself?
But Edmund was in hospital now! This was enough to stop any girl in her tracks. My fiancé was poorly. But with what and why? I had read and reread the letter from his mother, but however many times I went over it, I could never find a clue as to what had happened – or how bad it was. The way his confinement had been perched on the letter’s end, almost as an afterthought, surely suggested it couldn’t be too serious. But then, if it wasn’t serious, why had he been sent back to England? I didn’t know a great deal about army protocol, but I knew they did not let their officers go off sick easily.
I had written to Edmund’s mother immediately, but she had not yet replied. I wrote to Aunt Cecily but she knew nothing and was shocked to learn that he was in England at all.
* * *
Every month or so in Lamarck, I might transport a soldier with a wound in an unlikely place. Invariably not life-threate
ning, these were known as ‘Blighty wounds’ –injuries self-inflicted to gain passage back home. It was perhaps mean of me, but Edmund’s mother’s phrasing seemed so opaque that my imagination was left to fill in the gaps. I pictured Edmund stuck in some trench on the Western Front, anticipating the dreadful going ‘Over the Top’. Well, who could blame anyone for a little slip of a rifle?
If it were a Blighty wound, I knew that I wouldn’t be expected to stand by him – no one could be expected to tie themselves to a coward. But what if it wasn’t that: what if it were simply a case of appendicitis, a broken femur, a spell of the measles? You couldn’t walk away from a promise for those.
Sam and I moved over to a bench where we could watch the ship – the ship he’d return on – be loaded up with its cargo of men with their rich variety of injuries. Men leaning on each other, men with stumps where their legs once were, men with bandages over their eyes, men being stretchered in.
It was such a commonplace view, but at the same time, you couldn’t see it and think it was anything other than deeply shocking, absurd and wrong.
Sam must have been thinking along the same lines, because he said: ‘Look at Europe, tearing its young people apart. How we have let ourselves down. And for what?’
I nodded, thinking of the excitement in the streets in 1914. ‘I could never have dreamed war would be this ugly and people would hate each other so. What have we become?’
‘Vi,’ he said quietly, and I knew, painfully, he was going to try again. ‘We could be different. We could… make it work. I know we can.’
I shook my head, drained my cup.
‘Please change your mind, Vivi,’ he said softly. ‘Give me a chance: love, marriage, children… together, there’s no reason we couldn’t make each other happy.’ Then, his voice trembling, he said, ‘I don’t believe you feel about your fiancé the way you feel about me.’
Yet still, I couldn’t speak. Every part of me was crying out for him but I knew it couldn’t be. I had decided my future many years back and I just couldn’t shift myself from that path. Edmund and I were finally moving towards our goals: his being in hospital was not a mystery or another bridge to cross, it was simply a timely reminder of where my heart should be. I was the good sister, the kind cousin and the loyal person. I would take care of him.
‘Don’t write then,’ Sam said flatly. ‘Unless you change your mind.’
‘I won’t,’ I replied.
‘I won’t get in touch either.’
‘That’s for the best.’
But then, I’m not sure how it happened, I was in Sam’s arms, safe in his arms, and his lips were on mine and mine on his and I pulled his coat to be even closer to him. I had never been kissed like that before. Kissed so that the rest of the world ceased to exist. For a moment, I didn’t know where I was. I just clung to him, his mouth joined to mine, and I felt an incredible whoosh of incredulity that I was capable of being so… so primal or animalistic. I had never seen myself as a passionate person before.
‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine,’ I whispered back. I wanted him to swallow me up, and he did, he kissed me again and again.
And then he let me go. He was walking away, hauling his bag, out towards the wooden gangway to be swallowed up by the ship. I couldn’t let him go like that.
I cried out, ‘Sam!’ and he looked back, shaking his head at me.
‘I won’t write,’ I repeated.
‘Nor will I,’ he replied. And then the ship blew its whistle and he hurried away.
* * *
The sea was as grey as the sky. It was choppier than it had been for some time, and I felt sorry for the ship’s passengers because it mightn’t be a peaceful crossing. Already I regretted my promise to Sam and wished he might write; just the once would do, to let me know that he had arrived back on English soil safely. I drove slowly back to the hospital, straining to listen to the chirrup of the birds over the rattle of the engine and the clatter of the wheels. Olive knew better than to try to engage me in conversation.
I couldn’t leave Edmund Lowe. Not now. You couldn’t leave a sick soldier during a war, could you? What kind of monster would that make me?
* * *
Four days after Sam had gone, Olive called me into our hut. She was grinning widely, happier than I had seen her for some time.
‘What do you think?’
She turned the picture she had been working on to face me.
She had done it. She had created the God-light: there was something about this piece that meant I couldn’t look away. It was compelling. Even the hands were perfectly executed. I looked radiant, somehow, Madonna-like. There was patriotism, but there was realism too.
‘Olive,’ I whispered. ‘What have you done?’
She laughed. ‘I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever made.’
* * *
I had always encouraged Olive to do art. Always. As a little girl, she used to draw on rough grey paper Father brought home from work, and then when she’d gone through those, she’d sketch on my textbooks. She defaced portraits of kings and queens with moustaches, beards and glasses; not only that, she would cover over the writing with pictures of her own – but I didn’t mind.
I remember when her favourite subject matter was elephants, especially their ears like the number three; rabbits with cotton-fluff tails; fat toddlers with bottles. For a short while, when we were very small, I had the steadier and the less smudgy hand but soon her elephants outranked mine and I still didn’t mind. I adored my little sister. I made up drawing competitions for her and let her sweep the board of prizes. First, second, third and a billion runners-up! I invented new categories she could enter: Best Adult, Best Toddler, Best Elephant Ears, Best Dogs. I taught her to treat her tools, her colouring pencils, then paints (and eventually, my books!) with respect. When she got upset about her failure to do realistic hands, I told her: ‘If you really can’t do hands, even after you do plenty of practice, then maybe it’s a sign to avoid them,’ which I took to be a great philosophy, not just of art but of life.
Even here in France, I had taken on some of her tasks – washing her clothes, care of the ambulance – just so she could have time to draw.
‘I need thinking space,’ she often complained. Sometimes, she said she was creating even when she wasn’t. ‘It’s part of the process, Vi. It may look like I’m doing nothing, but actually, I’m fermenting ideas.’
She couldn’t say I didn’t support her.
* * *
‘Why would you do this, Olive?’ I exclaimed, once I was over the shock. ‘You can’t show this to anyone.’
‘What do you mean?’ She gazed at me disbelievingly. ‘What on earth is wrong with it?’
‘You can’t. It’s… you know what’s wrong with it. I can’t… look like that.’
‘You did look like that,’ she said, shaking her head at me. ‘You still do when I mention his name.’
‘No, I can’t look like that, with… with a man who is not Edmund.’ I shouldn’t have to spell it out to her. What was wrong with her that she couldn’t get what I was trying to say? ‘I’m an engaged woman, Olive!’
Olive sighed. ‘You’re engaged, not enslaved.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It means that I don’t see the problem.’
Olive could never, ever, see the problem.
My voice was shaky. ‘I have to put my future husband and his family first, not you or your art. You’re going to have to get rid of it.’ This was the one time I had asked her to do something different. The one time.
If Edmund saw it, what would he see? If Edmund’s parents saw it, what would they say?
You realise he’s a Jew?
I always knew the Mudie-Cookes were no good.
‘I worked extremely hard on this,’ Olive muttered.
We glared at each other. Finally, she sighed. ‘I’ll make it look less like you, if it’s that important to you!’ When I sai
d nothing, she added, ‘And I will make sure no one sees it. All right?’
I backed down too. ‘Thank you, O. Yes, that will probably do.’
31
1940 – Now
There is, of course, no word from Sam. I am a fool to think there would be. As though Eleanor would forget the bombs and devastation all around her, put her singing job at the Dog and Duck on hold, get babysitters for her small children and rush to tell him the news. ‘You’ll never guess what! Remember that woman you met in the First War, the one who turned you down for her fiancé in hospital?’ As if Sam would stop his job as a tailor, or whatever it was he was doing now. As if he would dash to Leicester to declare he has thought of me every single day…
What would be the point of him getting in touch anyway? I’m Mrs Edmund Lowe now. Not Vivienne Mudie-Cooke.
I sit with the WVS group in Mrs Burton’s living room. Listening to their chatter, I feel a million miles away. We are all experts on foreign policy now. We have learned who is doing what and where, we know the names of shouty leaders, dictators in far-flung places, we know the names and colours of air forces and towns in Turkey and Malta.
Mrs Burton is concerned. Not about the assembly line of wool and the assembly line of toys, which are running with a streamlined efficiency Mrs Webster could only have dreamed about, nor about our tea van, which is out today with Mrs Dean and Mrs Beedle at the wheel, but about me.
