The Reckoning

by Chonghaile, Clár Ní;

  When I gave you up, I was like a spiderling: I needed to move to survive. And so I climbed high, stood on my toes and released silky silvery threads into the wind, so that I could be borne away. I knew you could not come with me into the clouds. You would weigh me down. So I let you go. Let me say it straight. There was relief as well as anguish when I gave you up. It is terrible but all truths are.

  As I said earlier, Diane, perception is everything. Did I sin against motherhood if I alone know the relief I felt at breaking free? From that day until now, I have curated my story with care, removing the details that tarnish my image. I have shaped what people think they know of my life. This is the one advantage of being the sole survivor. But now, I need your wide, no-nonsense eyes on me. I have fibbed and fabricated for too long. I need to tell the truth, for once. You are the only one I can imagine doing this for. So you shall have my final story, Diane, and it will be as true as I can make it. Do with it what you will.

  Let us begin. We have a lot to cover. I will, of course, take some liberties but not with the facts. I will honour them and the people they concern but I cannot help myself from embroidering a little. There is a certain truth in such fripperies too.

  CHAPTER 3

  We will start with my mother for that is where all great stories – whether tragedy or farce, from Goodnight Mister Tom to Pride and Prejudice – start. What can I say that will not diminish Charlotte Baker in the telling? Born in 1896, she was in some ways a typically fin-de-siècle child. She grew up in a country finding its feet in a new century even as the ground shifted underneath and trembled with the dull rumble of an approaching war. It must have been a frighteningly heady time for people pinging between the elastics of tradition and modernity. Queen Victoria had been a beacon of stability but her time was nearly up and Britain was tentatively stepping into a new era that would redefine what it meant to be human.

  Charlotte was not a revolutionary – she would never rock the boat – but I believe she always knew which boat she wanted to be in. She was outwardly respectful and modest, as women had to be then, but she generally got her way. It was an admirably lady-like form of insurrection.

  As a young woman she loved those penny novels that were so popular at the time, especially romances. She kept the books under her mattress to avoid having to endure a lecture from her mother on the dangers of ‘trashy’ stories designed to tempt women away from their God-given duties.

  She was delicately pretty rather than beautiful – the fine blonde hair we all share above a broad forehead and brown, feline eyes. She was profoundly loving. This may sound banal but as you and I know, this quality should never be taken as a given. She sang beautifully, her clear voice soaring like a lark’s from the garden or skipping along before her as she walked down the street. This kind of singing doesn’t seem to happen much any more. As I remember it, people used to sing all the time. Snatches of melody shimmied over fences along Hatfield Road or played hide-and-seek between the market stalls in St Albans town on Saturdays. Charlotte also loved Busy Lizzies. Just like spontaneous, public singing, they are not so popular these days. I suppose there is something unfashionably modest about the flowers. A little too pastel for our Technicolor world. Charlotte herself would undoubtedly be deemed too pastel today.

  Charlotte had phenomenal restraint when necessary and it was always necessary after my father returned from the Great War. When I was a young child, she drank consistently and methodically, marshalling all her self-discipline to control the visible results of her alcoholism, although we would not have called it that then. Those who lived through the Great War had little use for judgmental labels because it was almost impossible to determine what a normal baseline for behaviour should be after such a trauma. Charlotte’s addiction was nothing out-of-the-ordinary and she bore it with such gentility.

  What else? I never called her ‘mother’. She was always Charlotte to me, and Lottie to her husband and friends. I can’t remember who decided I should forgo tradition and call her by her first name. I like to think it was her wish. She had a great respect for the individual and a concomitant horror for nebulous masses. Maybe that extended to nomenclature too. This is pure speculation, as I never asked her. By the time I was old enough, my reference to her, as Charlotte, no longer seemed eccentric. It was just the way things were. We always assume we have all the time in the world to quiz our parents about the people they really are but we forget that time does not stand still. We turn a deaf ear to the ticking of the clocks. That’s the danger with clocks. They become part of the furniture and we forget what they are doing. I am keenly aware of the irony of saying this to you but it is no less true for that.

  When war broke out in 1914, Charlotte was using her typing skills to help out at the Herts Advertiser, where her father was a sub-editor. It was not really a full-time job, just enough to keep her in clothes and shoes.

  What else can I say about her? I’m finding it fiendishly difficult to paint an accurate picture of her despite this being my job, so to speak. The details I am giving you seem so random; they do not add up to the whole person. Adjectives appear too flimsy. They hang loose and baggy on the real woman I knew. It’s as though they have been stretched too much by my use of them over the ages. But I will fall back on my craft. I must show not tell and so I will become Charlotte’s ghostwriter and gift you this family fable, Diane. Her low, mesmerising voice will soothe me as I write. To this day, I find it hard to believe that her voice is no longer part of the world. The constancy of my grief over Charlotte’s death has been one of the few things to surprise me as I have aged.

  Let me recreate the moment she met my father, Henry Rose. Or rather I will let her recreate it. Charlotte loved to recount this tale and she would do it often, sometimes sitting by the fire sipping brandy after supper, holding court before her guests. It was, I suppose, her party trick but it bored me in the way parents’ tales bore all children. Now, I understand why she retold it so often. It was the defining moment of her life and she delighted in reliving it because she genuinely believed she was lifting the veil on the mysterious workings of Fate. Maybe she was; who knows and does it really matter if she was right? Remember what I said about perception, Diane? She believed this story encapsulated destiny and so it must.

  ***

  Charlotte Baker felt a blush spread across her cheeks. She lowered her eyes because that was what a girl should do, but curiosity got the better of her and she dared to peek again at the soldiers marching up the main street, their fresh, sharp steps propelling untested broad shoulders. They all faced up the hill except for the naughty blighter who had winked at her seconds before. As she raised her eyes, she saw that he was still looking back. He winked again. She tossed her head and deliberately looked away but not before she had seen the start of his slow smile. Maybe it was true then what her mother had muttered when Father said thousands of young army lads were to be stationed in St Albans before shipping out to France.

  “That’s the last thing this town needs,” her mother said, frowning at the teapot in her hand as though there might be a rogue soldier hidden among the tea leaves. “There’s not enough trouble already without throwing a bunch of fresh young lads with their foul language and drinking into the mix.”

  Father grunted but said nothing, pursing his lips under a brow that had been permanently furrowed since war was declared on August 4th. Charlotte made no comment but secretly she was delighted, first with the news and then with her mother’s characterisation of the men who would soon be flooding the streets. St Albans could do with a bit of a shake-up and the soldiers might be just the ticket. The cheeky so-and-so who had just winked at her seemed to prove her mother delightfully right.

  She stared at his back until he turned the corner onto the main street but he didn’t turn around again. She had only glimpsed his face but the word now echoing in her head was ‘sultry’. They were always using ‘sultry’ in the novels she kept hidden under her mattress. If she was honest with hers
elf, she had only the vaguest idea of what ‘sultry’ actually meant – she assumed it was something to do with exotic sultans – but whatever the exact meaning, that soldier with the laughing eyes and the pencil-thin moustache probably embodied it. In any case, she wouldn’t be wearing the word out for any of the boys from St Albans, she thought.

  When the procession had passed, she joined the rest of the gossiping people as they straggled up the hill, stepping carefully between piles of steaming horse dung. That’s all we need in this heat, Charlotte thought. More bloody horse poo. The stench made her throat itch. She opened her bag, reaching for her handkerchief, but then remembered she’d given it to her father before she left the office. He’d appeared in the corridor, sweat pouring down his forehead, and said he’d left his own handkerchief at home. She gave him hers, meeting his wink with her own as he told her not to inform her mother of his lapse. That was Father all over. So lost in his work that he wouldn’t remember to mop his brow even in this hellish heat.

  Since war was declared last week, he’d become even worse. He even left the house without his hat the other day, sending Mother rushing into the street after him, the hat held aloft like a battle flag. Mother had been mortified by her own unseemly haste in the street but not as mortified as she would have been if she’d had to think of her husband being in public all day with no hat on his head.

  Charlotte was thankful now for her own straw hat. How in heaven’s name had the soldiers managed to march all the way from London to St Albans in this heat? She was wearing her lightest summer dress but she could feel the sweat running down her back, pooling where the lavender ribbon she’d sewn on herself pulled the soft cotton tight above her waist. She glanced up but the sky above the clock tower was as blue and empty as it had been every day for the past two weeks. Surely, it would rain soon. The weather in St Albans certainly didn’t give a fig for what the papers called ‘the clouds of war gathering over Europe’. The last few weeks had unfurled like the longest, most wonderful summer ever. A summer to end all summers. As Charlotte reached the top of the street and turned the corner, she saw the soldiers had already passed through and she felt an unreasonable pang.

  The next day, Charlotte was walking down Hatfield Road, heading to the newspaper’s offices, when Sally Betts shouted to her from the other side of the road.

  “Lottie, Lottie. Wait for me,” Sally yelled, dashing across the road and nearly colliding with the milk truck. She giggled madly as the milkman shouted after her, tossed her head at him and linked her arm through Charlotte’s.

  “I’ve some big news. Bigger even than the war, if that ever really starts. Lord knows, it seems to be all talk for now.”

  Charlotte smiled at her best friend, even though her own feelings about what was coming were darker, shaped by her father’s subdued comments and anxious eyes.

  “Go on, then. I can see you are genuinely on the point of expiring. What’s this big news then, Sally?”

  “Well, it’s only that one of the soldiers, the ones that arrived yesterday, has been billeted at our house. Imagine, we have a male lodger. Mother wasn’t one bit happy but what can she do? There’s no arguing with the army. When the captain brought the young man to the door, he told Father it was his patriotic duty to support our brave fighting men. Those are the very words he used. Of course, Father was furious, you know how tight he is, but he could do nothing and now we have a man living in the house!”

  Sally ended on a note so high and triumphant, Charlotte had to shush her, pointing to the hard-faced women squinting at them from the steps of the squat red-brick homes lining the road. If there was one thing her mother hated, it was making a show in front of what she insisted on calling ‘the common people’. Charlotte once made the mistake of repeating what her father had told her after he’d had a few too many glasses of port one evening.

  “Weren’t you one of the common people too, Mother, before you married Father? Didn’t Grandad work in the Kershaw hat factory and didn’t you live in one of those small houses when you were a girl?”

  Her mother had turned on her, her clenched fist rising as if to box Charlotte’s ears.

  “Never speak of my family in that way again,” she hissed before turning on her heel and walking out of the kitchen, her arm still raised as though it didn’t know where to go now that its purpose had been thwarted. Charlotte had learned two things that day: class warfare is most acute between those closest together on the ladder; and her mother had quite the temper as well as impressive control. She never mentioned her mother’s past again.

  “You’ll have to come over later,” Sally gushed. “I’ll be home around five. Come and have a gander at our own brave fighting man.”

  She rushed across the road again, a whirlwind of waving hands and trailing ribbons.

  “This might be the one,” she shouted back. “This could be Fate at last, Lottie!”

  Sally was everything Charlotte wanted to be. Her thick brown hair could be twisted into the most elaborate styles, she was loud and confident and men’s eyes followed her down the street like dogs after the butcher’s delivery boy. But Sally was such an incurable romantic that Charlotte couldn’t imagine any man ever meeting her lofty standards for love. Unless, perhaps, a brave fighting man from out of town.

  When Charlotte arrived at Sally’s elegant, ivy-draped house in Marshalswick just after five, she was ushered into the garden by a harried-looking Mrs Betts.

  “Sally is upstairs, dear. She’ll be down in a minute but I thought you could wait in the garden. This heat is beginning to turn my head. What with the weather and the war, food riots and banks not opening, I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.”

  Charlotte had known Mrs Betts since she and Sally were placed next to each other on their first day in primary school. Even in the coolest, most temperate weather, with no war on the horizon, she was a bundle of nerves. Charlotte thought Sally was Mrs Betts through a prism: what was ceaseless anxiety in the mother had refracted into effervescent enthusiasm in the daughter.

  Mrs Betts disappeared back into the house, plucking at her sleeves and muttering to herself. Charlotte sat on a wicker chair under the willow tree, watching goldfinches pecking at the seeds on the bird table under the branches of the cherry blossom. Even the birds seemed uncharacteristically sluggish in the unrelenting heat.

  “He’s out. Oh, Charlotte, he’s out!

  Sally’s words galloped before her as she sped across the lawn, carrying a tray with two glasses of lemonade.

  “What a shame. He’ll have to come back for his supper but I don’t know when.”

  Sally dropped heavily into the sagging wicker chair beside Charlotte and put the tray on the low, wooden table between them.

  “Mother insists you drink this. She’s convinced we’re all going to die of heat stroke. As if that’s our biggest worry right now.”

  Sally paused to catch her breath and sip her drink.

  “You know, we get food for our brave fighting man: meat, bread, potatoes. They deliver it in a wheelbarrow every day. Not a bad deal, I say. A dreamy soldier and better meals too. Food for the soul and the stomach.”

  She giggled.

  “So exactly how handsome is he?” Charlotte said.

  “I thought you’d never ask,” Sally said, leaning closer. “He’s tall, taller than Father by a good foot. He has dark hair, an ever so tidy moustache and a rather too-pretty face. But it does sit well on him, I must say. His name is Henry Rose and he’s in the second London Division. At least, I think that’s what he said. It was hard to concentrate when he was telling us. I was drowning in his eyes, Lottie. Such beautiful, dark eyes. And he has a lovely voice. All London but warm. It’s like having treacle poured into your ears only not so messy.”

  She blushed and Charlotte burst out laughing. Sally never did anything by halves. She always fell head-over-heels in love and when the object of her affection inevitably proved unworthy, she was invariably beside herself.

 
“Oh, and he’s an orphan. His mother died when he was three from some kind of illness, I think, and his father didn’t last much longer. His aunt took him in and so he grew up with her in Ealing. He was just starting an apprenticeship at an accounting house when all this started.”

  Sally paused, wrinkling her forehead.

  “I think that’s it. It’s all I can remember in any case.”

  “It’s a real pity but I can’t stay to meet him,” Charlotte said, putting her glass of lemonade down and standing up. “I told Father I’d play chess with him before supper. But you certainly paint a pretty picture.”

  “Speaking of pretty pictures, I don’t think I’ve seen one as stunning as this for some time.”

  The voice came from behind Charlotte and she spun around too quickly, snagging her low heel on the grass. And so it came to pass that Private Henry Rose darted forward to place a steadying hand under her arm. And, of course, he was the very same soldier who had so cheekily winked at her the day before.

  Those are the exact words Charlotte used, Diane. Every time she told that story, she would conclude with “And, of course, he was the very same soldier…” Her personalised version of ‘happily ever after’.

  I can see her now, coming to the end of her tale and leaning back in her chair like a self-satisfied preacher, her long fingers wrapped around her glass. Her melodious voice and unshakeable conviction always enraptured her audience, even if they’d heard the story before. My father never joined her in retelling her favourite fairy tale. He just sat, smiling in that quizzical way he had, as if he wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or embarrassed by the whole thing. As if, in fact, he wasn’t really sure the story concerned him. But every now and then you might catch him inclining his head ever so slightly. Without those slow, silent nods, I would have struggled to believe a word of Charlotte’s story. It was too beautiful even for my beautiful, broken parents.