I turned to say something to Michael, who was breathing rather heavily, but suddenly he grabbed me by the arms and kissed me. Not very expertly, it has to be said. Our teeth clashed. My mouth fell open in surprise. Perhaps he mistook this for feminine yielding – at any rate, he stuck a surprisingly long tongue down my throat. I got both hands between our chests and pushed him away. I don’t know why I wasn’t flattered – as I say, my heyday’s over and we old maids must take what we can get – but I wasn’t. As quickly as possible, I started off to walk back. The sun on my back seemed to push me along. I was sweating, thoroughly out of sorts; it was easier to blame the weather than think seriously about bloody Michael.
His friend Philip Bannister was waiting on the lawn when we got back. Michael kept darting little defiant glances at him, very daring, very naughty-boy, and suddenly I knew why I wasn’t flattered. I nodded to Philip, and went straight upstairs to my room. I hope without a flounce, but I can’t be sure of that.
Later. What a silly trivial little incident – and yet it’s opened a door into a room I never thought to visit again. I keep thinking about that walk to the old mill with Toby and the night that followed. I resent having it dragged out into the daylight like this – by nonsense. Toby and I put it behind us so successfully, we built a different, in many ways deeper, relationship, on that patch of burnt earth. And now I feel I’m being dragged back to the beginning again. Well, I won’t go. Michael bloody Stoddart doesn’t have the power to do that.
After dinner, there was rum punch. I drank a bit too much of it and ended up with a bursting head and a short fuse. At some point – I can’t really remember – the talk turned to who was likely to be commissioned as a war artist. And of course Kit Neville’s name came up – and then Paul’s.
‘You know both of them, don’t you?’ VB said.
Glances across the table. Immediately I felt my relationship with Paul – possibly even with Kit, not that there ever was one – had been a topic of discussion, and I hated the idea. So I just said yes, I’d overlapped with both of them at the Slade, Kit Neville in my first and second year, Paul in my third.
Then Michael said he didn’t know what he thought about war artists. Wasn’t it just propaganda? And then Philip said, ‘At least it’ll get them out of the war.’
Now that is a perfectly innocuous remark, if you’re not on your fourth glass of rum punch.
I said I was sure that was the last thing on either of their minds. And I pointed out that Paul was back home wounded so getting out of it wasn’t an issue for him, and then I said, ‘They did both volunteer.’
What a thing to say in a room full of conchies. A hole opened up in the conversation and we all stared into it, until several people at once rushed in to fill the silence.
After dinner, we walked in the garden, the moths fluttering round a lamp, the women in their pale dresses looking like ghosts. VB came up and sort of semi-apologized for Philip’s behaviour at dinner. ‘I don’t think he realized how close you are to Paul Tarrant.’ I just muttered something and changed the subject. I couldn’t be doing with it all, and besides my headache was getting worse by the minute. I could hear a steady thump, thump, thump and I really didn’t know if it was inside my head, but then I thought, No, it’s thunder. I said, ‘Thank goodness’ – something like that anyway – and everybody looked amused. And then Philip said, ‘No, it’s the guns.’
I don’t know what’s the matter with me. You can hear the guns in south London sometimes – teaspoons rattling in saucers, that sort of thing – so they’re bound to be audible here. But, surely, not as loud as that? It must mean something’s going on – a ‘show’ they call it, bloody stupid word – and I’d really rather not know. It only deepens the fear that’s there beneath the surface anyway.
When everybody else went inside, I stayed in the garden saying I had a headache and thought the fresh air would do me good. I had the feeling that my relationship with Paul was being gossiped about, fingered, passed round, pawed at, the way the Bloomsbury crowd always do, and that made me think about it: the fact I haven’t been to see him, didn’t write. I don’t know how much is left – if anything. Probably not very much. I threw it away – and I did throw it away, we didn’t ‘drift apart’, as people say. I ought to have written more regularly when he was in France, and I didn’t. I ought to have been to see him in hospital, and I haven’t.
And when I ask myself what went wrong the only answer I can come up with is the war. In those first weeks it seemed to throw us together – and then there was that mad weekend in Ypres, in the room with the big shiny brass bed and the view over the rooftops – which aren’t there any more. Apparently, you can look from one end of the city to the other and there’s hardly a wall left standing that’s above knee height. But Paul and I became lovers there in that doomed city, the first bombardment started while I was there, and somehow the war has always followed us. It made us and then it unmade us.
Because late in 1915, Paul enlisted – and not for medical work this time – no, he volunteered to fight. And I know he says he volunteered because everybody knew conscription was coming anyway and he didn’t want to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to the front – but still he did it, and from that moment on things began to unravel between us. It became harder and harder to know what to write.
So that’s the truth, I think, or as close as I can get to it. The war brought us together; the war tore us apart.
At least he’s back home now, and that’s one less to worry about. I’m so frightened for Toby. Of course I’m worried about Kit Neville too, he’s in the same unit, facing the same dangers, but fear has an awful way of revealing the truth. Toby’s the one I couldn’t bear to lose. Nobody else, not even Paul – certainly not Kit, though I’d be terribly upset, of course, if anything happened to him.
I sat on a bench for a full hour and listened to the night sounds. The soft explosive hooting of an owl seemed to be compounded of blood and fear. And I thought, nothing’s safe any more.
5 August 1917
I knew I wouldn’t sleep and I didn’t. The room was too hot so I had to leave the window open, and the thud-thud of the guns went on all night. I tried to cry; I’ve never found it easy and it seems almost impossible now. I manage a couple of sobs, and then give up in disgust. And, of course, I tell myself there’s nothing to cry about. Yet. Only, as the night hours pass, that belief starts to wear thin.
This is difficult to write. Just before dawn I got dressed, walked down through the sleeping house, across the garden and into the fields beyond. I was trudging uphill, feeling spikes of stubble jab my ankles, and then, just as I reached the top, the sun rose – huge, molten-red – and at that moment I knew – not thought, not feared, knew – that Toby wasn’t coming back. Not that he was dead, I didn’t think he was dead, it was quite precise: he wasn’t coming home.
Ten
Days went by before she stood at her bedroom window and watched the telegraph boy – ‘boy’ you called him, though he was a middle-aged, even elderly, man – all the boys were in France – dismount from his bicycle and push it up the hill.
At one point his head disappeared behind the hawthorn hedge – the lane dipped sharply there – and she convinced herself, standing motionless at the window, that he would never reappear. She had willed him away; even when, slowly, his peaked cap reappeared and then his head and shoulders and he stopped to mount his bicycle, even then, she knew it was in her power to prevent the telegram being delivered. There were other farmhouses, other families, further down the lane. The Smeddles had three sons; they could afford to lose one of them. She’d have swept all three Smeddle boys off the face of the earth without a second thought if by so doing she could have prevented Dodds coming through the gate and crunching up the gravel drive. Listening to the doorbell chime, she almost shouted out: Don’t answer it, he’ll give up, he’ll go away. If he went away it wouldn’t have happened. Only by now she was halfway down the stairs. She looked over
the banisters at Mrs Robinson, drying her hands on her white apron as she hurried to answer the door. Then Elinor’s mother came out of the breakfast room, her face blank, but fearing the worst because these days no telegram was innocent. She, too, disappeared into the porch and, a minute later, Elinor heard a thin, despairing cry. That doesn’t sound like Mother. Elinor’s hands gripped the banisters. Doesn’t sound like her at all.
Mother became a white slug lying on the sofa in the living room. Rachel, with her two boys and their nurse, moved into the house and was in constant attendance, though after the first week she began to get resentful. She had a husband working in the War Office, resigned to staying at his club all week, but expecting home comforts at the weekend and deserving them too. She had a house to run, two small children, who were so much easier to manage at home with their own toys and beds and a garden to run around in, this garden wasn’t even fenced in, and the pond, for God’s sake, ten feet deep at the centre if it was an inch … And what did Elinor do? Go off and see her friends in London, and not just there and back in a day, either. No, she stayed away two or three nights at a time. It was perfectly plain what should happen. Elinor should stay at home and look after Mother, freeing her, Rachel, to see to her husband and children who were, after all, her primary responsibility. Elinor could go on painting – if she really felt she had to – but it was absolutely clear where her first duty lay, and it was jolly well high time she started doing it too.
Elinor refused.
‘You are so selfish,’ Rachel said. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody as selfish as you.’
‘Yes, I am selfish. I need to be.’
Their father said very little, but Elinor knew he agreed with Rachel. Everybody – the aunts, the uncles, the second cousins twice removed, Mrs Robinson, the village, the farmer, the farmer’s wife, for all she knew, the farmer’s dog – agreed with Rachel, but it was only her father’s opinion that hurt.
It made no difference. She went back to London on the next train and forced herself to paint. She had very little contact with other people. She seemed to be surrounded by a great white silence, long echoing corridors, doors opening into empty rooms. On the rare occasions when she had to meet people, she barely coped. A solitary visit to the Café Royal lasted a mere twenty minutes, before she began to feel anxious to get away.
Round about this time, she went to see Paul Tarrant in the Third London General Hospital because really there was no alternative: she had to go. As she walked down the centre of a long ward she kept her eyes fixed on the bed at the end, afraid of the injuries she might see if she looked to either side. She wasn’t good with hospitals at the best of times and some of the war wounds were so dreadful she couldn’t bear to look at them. Paul was sitting up in bed chatting to a middle-aged couple. His eyes widened with surprise when he saw her; her letters had become so infrequent he may well not have expected her to come.
The man beside the bed stood up and Paul introduced him as his father. He had Paul’s way of ducking his head when he shook hands, but not Paul’s looks. The woman was Paul’s stepmother. To Elinor’s dismay, they showed every sign of leaving her alone with Paul though they’d travelled three hundred miles for this visit. She could see they were slightly in awe of the nice middle-class young lady their son was walking out with. She supposed some such term as ‘walking out’ would be the one they’d choose.
‘No, please,’ she said. ‘Don’t leave on my account. I can only stay a few minutes anyway.’
And it was a few minutes. Afterwards she thought she might have done better not to have gone at all, since she and Paul had not managed to have any real conversation. The surgeon was pleased with him; he might get quite a bit more movement in the knee, probably not the full amount, but enough to get around. No, crutches, then? No, no crutches. He thought perhaps a nice stick with a swan on the handle. Out of hospital, probably by the end of the week, then a convalescent home in Dorset for a month after that. Looking forward to that, never seen Dorset. Had she ever been? And so it went on, until she was able to take her leave. After a second’s hesitation, she bent to kiss him, and felt his father and stepmother exchange a glance. Then she was off down the ward as if all the fiends in hell were after her. She might have deceived his parents about the warmth of her regard, but she was under no illusion that she’d deceived Paul.
Not long after the telegram arrived, Elinor was standing on the terrace when once again a postman turned into the drive. This time he was carrying a big brown-paper parcel entwined with thick, hairy string. It was addressed to her parents. Already fearful of what it might contain, she took it into the conservatory where Rachel sat by their mother, who lay stretched out on the sofa. She’d hardly moved since the news of Toby’s death. Her skin seemed to have slackened, as if she’d shrunk away inside it. Until recently, she’d still been considered a beautiful woman, though nobody would think so now. Again, the image of a moist white slug came into Elinor’s mind. It filled her with guilt, but then, almost at once, her impatience returned. She couldn’t bear the weeping and wailing that punctuated her mother’s long silences. Elinor was determined not to grieve, and particularly not to grieve like that. Her own first reaction to the news had been a blaze of euphoria; immediately her fingers itched to grab a brush and paint. Grief was for the dead, and Toby would never be dead while she was alive and able to hold a brush.
But now here the three of them were. They looked at the parcel, trying to decipher the postmark, and then at each other.
‘Well,’ Rachel said.
Suddenly sick of the suspense, Elinor began trying to unfasten the knots, but her fingers felt swollen and stiff.
‘Ring for Mrs Robinson,’ Mother said. ‘She’ll have some scissors.’
Mrs Robinson’s eyes widened when she saw the parcel. She looked, rather shamefacedly, excited, as indeed she had when the telegram arrived. She’d been genuinely fond of Toby, but still, his death was drama in a humdrum life. She’d talk about him in the village post office; no doubt the family’s bereavement had enhanced her status there.
‘It’ll be his things,’ she said. ‘They send them back. They did with Mrs Jenkins’s lad.’
The scissors were duly fetched and the string cut, but even before the first layers of brown paper had been stripped away something entirely unexpected entered the room: the smell of the front line. Filthy water, chlorine gas, decomposition – and because it was a smell, and not a sight, Elinor was defenceless against it. She walked, stiff-legged, to the window where she looked out over the lawn and trees, not seeing anything, every nerve and muscle in her body fighting to repudiate that smell.
When she turned back into the room they’d got the parcel unwrapped. Tunic, belt, a periscope, breeches, peaked cap, puttees, boots – all reeking of the same yellow-brown stench. Elinor’s mother touched the tunic, timidly, stroking the sleeve nearest to her. At first, she seemed entirely calm, but then her mouth twisted, a crease appeared between her eyebrows and she began to cry. Not like an adult; no, this was the dreadful, square-mouthed wail of an abandoned baby.
Rachel gathered the things together and thrust the bundle into Elinor’s hands. ‘Take it away.’
‘Where shall I put it?’
‘How do I know? Just get rid of it, for God’s sake.’
Elinor backed out of the room – bumping into Mrs Robinson, who’d heard the cry and was rushing in to help – and took the parcel upstairs to her own room, then along to Toby’s room, but then she remembered that her mother often came up here and sat in the window, for hours on end sometimes, looking down the road into the village, to the train station where she’d seen him for the last time. He wouldn’t let anybody go to London with him.
Nowhere seemed to be the right place. In the end, she wrapped everything up again as best she could and took the parcel up into the attic where she pushed it deep into a recess under the eaves. Right at the back, out of sight. Then she piled old blankets and a rug in front of it, anythin
g to fend off the smell. Closing the door at the top of the stairs, she felt as if she’d disposed of a corpse. Out of sight, out of mind, she told herself.
Only it never was, quite. That smell broke the last numbness of shock. The following day Elinor’s mother left for Rachel’s house; Elinor was left alone, and glad to be alone. The parcel containing Toby’s clothes remained in her mind, but separated from her waking consciousness, like a nightmare whose every detail is forgotten, though the fear survives, poisoning the day.
Now that she could work at home, there was no need to go back to London. She spent all the hours of daylight painting in the barn across the yard, creeping back into the house at dusk, often forgetting to eat at all. At night, she slept in Toby’s room.
Painting numbed the pain; nothing else did. In the evenings, when she was too exhausted to work, she sat in front of the fire, trying to read. Usually, she had to abandon the attempt because nothing stayed in her head. She could read the same paragraph half a dozen times and still not be able to remember what it said. Above her head the floorboards creaked as if somebody were pacing up and down in the corridor outside his room. She paid no attention to this. It was a trivial manifestation of her state of mind; no more.