I’m afraid I cannot give you the end of Sally’s story. Just before the war – it must have been 1938 – she left England for Australia, sailing from Liverpool on a damp June day. Charlotte and I said we would see her off and, to our surprise, Henry insisted on joining us. We sat silently in an otherwise empty compartment on the train. We had little to say, beyond commenting on the wind-swept countryside sprinting past the window as though trying to outrun its own destiny. Sally had left a few days before to pick up her ticket and sort out her trunk.
We met her on the docks and she appeared to be in an almost indecent haste to get going, to start the new life she had been talking about for months. Who could blame her? We all knew war was coming and for Sally, that was the last straw. She would not endure it again, she said. Standing in her best red coat and a tight red hat, she seemed unsettled by Henry’s presence. Her conversation with Charlotte was stilted, unnatural. I remember thinking it was a shame and then blushing at my disloyalty to the broken man standing stiffly on the edge of our sorrowful bubble.
Charlotte cried as she hugged her friend but Sally remained dry-eyed. She held Charlotte’s hand for a long time though. When she embraced me, she whispered: “Take care of your mother, Lina. She is strong but only because she has to be.”
I nodded but could not speak. I had grown up with Sally and at the time, going to Australia was a kind of death. I knew I would never see her again. It’s hard for you to imagine, I know, but there were still geographical impossibilities then, Diane.
Sally nodded to Henry and he nodded back. She turned and started up the gangway, a middle-aged woman with slumped shoulders and a bowed head. She cut an isolated, lonely figure among the helter-skelter of young emigrants, all shiny shoes, sharply cocked hats and new world enthusiasm. I wondered if she would seem as out-of-place when her new black boots touched land in Sydney.
Suddenly, my father darted into the crowd, heading for the gangplank. Charlotte gasped, her hand coming to her mouth, her eyes darting to me and beyond, looking for help should she need it. You never knew with these men who’d come back from over there when you might need assistance.
“Where is he going?” I heard her whisper. “Where is he going now?”
At nearly 18, I was a head taller than Charlotte and by standing on my tiptoes, I could just glimpse my father’s head as he pushed through the crowd. He caught up with Sally, grabbed her arm and she whirled around, her eyes wide. Henry leant in and whispered in her ear. He had her hands clasped in his and I remember being shocked by this familiarity. I turned quickly to see if my mother was watching but Charlotte was darting her eyes left and right, scanning the crowd for answers. I turned back to the gangplank, just in time to see Sally shake her arm free of Henry, shout something that was lost in the hullaballoo of new lives starting, and then storm up the ramp. She was swallowed by the people milling around on the deck. We stood there until the gangplank was raised, the ship’s horn bellowed its melancholy goodbye and the tugs began to haul the great beast out into the channel.
Henry returned to Charlotte’s side. She opened her mouth, as though to ask him something, but stopped when she read the bleak anguish on his face. She turned back to the ship.
“I thought she would wave,” she said quietly. “I imagined we’d see her again.”
Henry, eyes red in a red face, said nothing but he took Charlotte’s hand in his and they stood for a few minutes more, watching people they did not know sail off to a place they would never see. We never saw Sally again.
CHAPTER 7
I turned 18 three weeks after Sally left. You remember the fizzing potential of 18, Diane? Of course, your own 18th birthday is less distant than mine and your children’s birthdays must seem like yesterday. I think they are both in their 20s now? You see, I have kept an eye on your family, from afar. Information is, after all, what I have long traded in.
From my vantage point, a human life seems a mere blip – an echoless clap in an infinite space. But then I think of how much changed between my 18th and yours and I wonder at the brazen speed of the world’s transformation. Our linear measurement of time is inadequate. It falls short because it cannot convey depth and arguably that is more important than duration. The Great War only lasted four years but that cannot be the truth. How to measure the endless stretch of a day in a flooded, rat-infested trench? The eternity of that last minute ticking down for an exhausted, lice-ridden, black-fingered soldier waiting to go over the top into the void? The hours it took for the screaming to stop in no man’s land? Time should be graded in some way, like coffee perhaps. One measurement for the day-to-day tick-and-tock, and another for time that devastates and defines. For me, 1938 was a year that defined.
I won a place to study literature at Somerville College in Oxford and one drizzly day in early September, my parents drove my leather trunk and me the 40-odd miles from St Albans to the women’s college. It was a good hour-and-a-half trundle through the kind of honeysuckle-stippled, velveteen landscape that poets celebrated and men who fought with my father died to preserve, or so they said.
Charlotte and Henry were mostly silent. There was little to say. We had worn our excitement out in the weeks since I had been accepted and there was no question of talking about current affairs. What could not be helped, must surely be ignored. I felt jittery, as though my blood was fizzing through my veins. We drove past fat-haunched cows and vacant-faced sheep, grazing peaceably as though their time would never end even as our car and my life raced forward. I had declared age 12 that I would go to university and it had been a given in our household since then even though neither Charlotte nor Henry had gone. We chose Somerville because it was relatively close and Charlotte’s father had also gone to Oxford. A tenuous enough reason for a decision that would change my life.
Who was the almost-woman, all big eyes and fidgety fingers, sitting in the back of the car that Saturday morning? If you had asked Charlotte, she would have said: “Lina is headstrong, smart and a little too forward for her own good. She is the girl I might have been if I had been born in this century.” She might also have mentioned my oft-noted tendency to blame others when I myself fell short of expectations. She was fond of gently pointing out this unseemly trait.
If you had asked Henry, he would have said: “Lina is delightful, always smiling. She brings light into my day.”
Both descriptions were true and both were incomplete. I did always smile when my father was around. Charlotte had schooled me in this perpetual cheerfulness since childhood. I felt it was my duty, the only thing I could do that might in some way make up for what he had suffered. Henry and I could never have a truly honest relationship. He was too damaged for that. We could never lift our masks but maybe that is the case to some degree with all parents and their children, with all people, in fact. Who among us has the courage to reveal all, except to themselves, in the slightest of whispers, in the darkest of dead hours?
With Charlotte, I was more relaxed. She was the one I railed against when things didn’t go my way, when homework was too hard, dresses too frumpy, hair too unruly, teachers too mean, life too unfair. But there were things I could not show her. I admired her control so much that I felt unable to honestly reveal all my own weaknesses. Especially not when I was cleaving both away from and towards her, as all teenagers must. But what would I know, you say. I never was a mother to a teenager. Perhaps, but one doesn’t need to be a painter to appreciate art.
We were winding our way through Worminghall when Henry spoke.
“I knew a lad from here. His name was Dick but damned if I can remember his surname. Funnily enough no one called him anything except Dick though we usually called lads by their last names. Maybe it was because he looked so young. Lovely looking boy, dark curly hair, big brown eyes like a puppy and he’d one of those wide smiles that’d set everybody off. He bought it on the Somme, first day in fact.”
I could sense a new tension in Charlotte’s back but she said not a word. I wondered
what was coming. Henry so rarely spoke of the war.
“He was a little ahead of me when he took a bullet to his right leg and fell, but very softly, like he was kneeling down. I saw him and I was about to run over because I thought I could pull him back to the trench – we’d only gone about 40 steps. But then I saw him jerk again and there was red all over his chest and a bullet whizzed past my cheek so I dodged the other way. And then it was already too late to go back. That’s how it was. One second, and one second, and one second, and something terrible happening in each one, and nothing to do about any of it.”
Charlotte and I didn’t say anything. I tried to catch her eye in the rear view mirror but she was looking out at the fields and her face was as closed as a tomb.
“Yes, that’s what it was like then. Just like that,” Henry said and then he fell silent again.
Later, when we were alone in my new quarters, I asked Charlotte why he had suddenly decided to speak of the war. She shook her head slowly and said, “I don’t know why, Lina. Maybe because you were going away or maybe it’s this new war coming. It’s preying on his mind a lot. But I couldn’t say for sure. Only Henry really knows.”
When we arrived at the college, Henry carried my trunk up the stairs of the student hall and into a cramped room with chaste twin beds in matching pale blue covers. He kissed me once on the top of my head, wished me luck and said he would wait in the car. He left the room, his slow steps echoing dully in the hall. He never was one for wordy displays of emotion. At least not when I knew him.
Charlotte sat on the bed, pulling me down beside her.
“Now listen, Lina. Your father and I will miss you terribly but this is your new life and I don’t want you to be moping around, thinking of us. Make the most of every opportunity. This is the start of something wonderful for you. No matter what happens. This is where your dreams can begin to take flight. Let them. Don’t allow what is happening out there to distract you because there will be an after. There is always an after.”
I hugged her, mainly so I could discreetly rub the tears from my eyes. I wish I could say I was worried about the possibility of war but I wasn’t. Sitting there in that tiny room, so clean, so bare and so foreign, I was terrified of not fitting in, of not making friends, of failing. But I couldn’t let the side down by crying over such piffling concerns. Not in front of Charlotte, not after what she had been through.
I dried my tears and forced myself to smile.
“I just wish Evelyn was here. If she was, I would be so much happier,” I said. I nearly said braver but that would just have drawn attention to my cowardice. I was ever the great dissembler.
Remember I mentioned Evelyn earlier, Diane? She was my best friend and she died last year. Evelyn, who never gave a fig for danger or risk, was finally defeated by her own body, losing herself to the ovarian cancer that ate away at her from the inside. Nothing else could have bested her, that’s for sure.
In 1938, she had decided to enrol in a secretarial college near St Albans to be closer to home. Her mother’s health was failing and although Evelyn would have scoffed at the idea, she was too loyal a daughter to walk out on a sick parent.
Evelyn arrived at my school aged nine after her father took a job in the town. That first day in the playground, we slotted into each other like pieces of a puzzle. By the end of the hour, we were walking arm-in-arm and laughing at nothing, secure enough already in our world-of-two to disregard the other children. Soulmates seems such a trite word, the kind of thing one might see in a lonely hearts column. But Evelyn and I were soulmates. Perhaps that is why this past year has unsettled me so. With Evelyn gone, how can I be complete? How can the world be complete? I feel, sometimes, as though Evelyn took gravity with her when she passed. I hope you have a friend like Evelyn, Diane, but I wish I could spare you the grief of their passing. Love demands such a high price.
I always envied Evelyn her relationship with her father, particularly as we got older. On summer evenings, Evelyn and Mr Watts would sit together playing cards in the garden, he with his pipe and she with a look of perfect contentment. I envied her that ease. I desperately wanted a father who was whole and I hated myself for it.
Mr Watts was a little older than Henry and he’d been disqualified from fighting because of his poor eyesight and bronchial chest.
“Blind as a bat and with puny lungs to boot,” Evelyn said with a rueful laugh. “But he did his bit. He was living down in Devon then, a place called Dawlish Warren, and his job as part of the Home Guard was to patrol the coast in case of invasion. Mind you, I’m not sure what they were thinking letting him do that with his dodgy eyes. He spent most of his time trying to shoot rabbits on the golf course. Never hit a thing, obviously.”
She laughed and then glanced nervously at me as if in silent apology. We were sitting in the branches of the beech tree at the bottom of her garden and I had just told her Henry’s story. We were probably about 12, that age of awakening when the world comes into focus and one’s eyes begin to turn outwards.
There were many things I felt jealous about when I was with Evelyn, an only child with straightforward parents, living in a sprawling, creeper-covered house on one of St Albans’ poshest streets. She was wealthy, pretty and there were no gloomy shadows that I could see hanging over her perfect life. Of course, that was not true. If it really had been, I doubt she would have remained my friend through all these years. I am petty enough to dislike perfection in others and anyone truly uncomplicated could never have condoned all my many sins, big and small. I never concealed anything I did from Evelyn and although at times she stopped speaking to me for months on end, she never gave up on me entirely. And I never gave up on her.
Without Evelyn’s sardonic voice in my ear, I was lonely and overwhelmed in Oxford. To combat the dizziness of displacement, I steeped myself in Somerville’s history, hoping to ground my ephemeral new life in something solid and immutable. I had always been obsessed with the Great War, reading everything I could about it, and when I discovered that the college had been converted into a military hospital during that time, my passion was reawakened. I walked around the buildings, imagining injured soldiers in all the places now reclaimed by us girls. I stood on the terrace of the library, wondering what the men who lay there, convalescing, had thought as they looked out at the luscious green lawns. It must have seemed so surreal after what they’d experienced. Did they wake in the middle of the night, sweat-covered and gasping, terrified they were back at the front, fearing that this retreat was the real fantasy? I was quite the daydreamer then, Diane. I suppose I still am, although now I deliberately spin fantasies to turn a buck, as the saying goes. Back then, my daydreaming was less mercenary.
I met Robert Stirling on September 30, 1938. I am not naturally given to remembering romantic anniversaries, despite my otherwise muscular memory, but in this case I remember the date because of something else entirely. It was the day Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich waving that little piece of paper that we thought could hold the line, if you’ll forgive the pun.
I was in a teahouse near Balliol, a bright, airy room where I used to go regularly because I liked the bustle of that quarter and because the middle-aged waitress had something of Charlotte around her delicate lips. I was sitting in the window, with a copy of Edward Thomas’ Collected Poems open in front of me. I had taken to carrying that book in my bag, believing naively that its physical presence brought me closer to my father – like a literary bridge stretching back to St Albans. At that moment though, I was not reading. I was staring out the window, idly observing the Darwinesque struggle between cyclists and cars over the cobbled junction in front of me. It was, as I remember, a grey day, remarkable only for the fact that the heavy rain that had plagued my first term had briefly abated. But the cobbles were still damp, vastly increasing my amusement as I watched cyclists skid into the kerb or each other.
The wireless was on in the background, tinting the air with a soft jazzy melody. The bell o
ver the door jingled and I looked up.
He was wearing a tweed suit without a tie and the first word that leapt to my mind was ‘entitled’. It was in his long thin nose and ice-blue eyes, in the angularity of his face under brown hair that was fashionably parted in the centre, rising like little waves to the sides. He marched straight to a table in the back, sat down, asked for a black coffee and pulled a folded newspaper from his pocket, shaking it out with the air of a man who does not mind ruffling the atmosphere around him. I studied his reflection in the window, naughtily thrilled that I could observe him secretly. Economics, Balliol, second year, I thought. Plays rugby well, middling at tennis and supports the Tories, of course. Came up from a sprawling family estate in Wiltshire although his father had to sell off a few cottages and fields to make ends meet after the war. Father an army man, but most likely an officer and spared the trenches.
I played this guessing game a lot in those early weeks at Oxford as I sought to find my feet. I invented backgrounds for interesting, by which I usually meant beautiful, people. I was pretty enough myself back then to be exhilarated by true beauty. These were the people who caught my critical eye. I was superficial, yes, but I will not apologise for this weakness. It is the mildest of crimes. You could, I suppose, call these guessing games my earliest efforts at fiction. I was creating characters and yes, some of them did pop up in my books years later, nuanced by the passage of time.
You would not be wrong, Diane, if you detected some class prickliness in those first impressions of Robert Stirling. I never doubted my right to be at Somerville – I had worked hard and deserved my scholarship – but I did often feel inferior and I abhorred this weakness in myself, seeing it as a betrayal of my own background. I told myself crossly that the fact that I felt out of place was as much my fault as the fault of the place itself. The wealthier students did not care one jot whether I was studying at Oxford or not. They literally did not see me. I wanted to be that oblivious to others’ opinions, to others’ existences. The Great War had blasted chunks out of the walls dividing classes but they were never destroyed. Our uniquely English sensitivity about class continues to mark us out from the rest of the world. And for all the recent talk about creating a classless society, I doubt we could survive as a race without the ability to pigeonhole people definitively within seconds of meeting them on the basis on their accent, table manners or tea etiquette. To preserve such things did brave men die.
The Reckoning Page 7
