The front line was one long hell hole. The flare of lights and the flashes of tracers would from time to time reveal its stark outlines. The skeletal shape of a tree; a coil of barbed wire with an effigy hung upon it like a rag doll. The humped figures of men lying about - as if playing some boyish game. It seemed as if they would all get up and dance when the music started. Yet these boys who had become men overnight would never dance again. Gazing upon them, Nathan knew they were dead.
Even as the thought passed through his mind a shell exploded and the body flew into the air with balletic grace to fall to earth with a sickening crunch. The noise filled his own body as if it had a life of its own: a screaming, roaring, explosive crescendo of sound. Nathan aimed his gun and fired in furious retaliation into the blanketing darkness. Seeing nothing, he pressed himself into the mud, wanting it to swallow him and make him invisible even as he gave his all to survive.
That’s all he had to do, really, stay alive, so he could see Lily again. Was that too much to ask?
He and Bertie had joined the same regiment together, a common thing for blokes, or pals as they called them, to do. They’d been sent to the front almost right away, rapidly discovering that war was not the lark Bertie had so enthusiastically imagined it would be. It could not be played out as if by gentlemen in a football match, or lads in some good punch up, and be over by Christmas. It was an endless, indescribable, unmitigated horror.
Nathan had stayed with the foot slogging. Bertie had taken the first opportunity to join the Flying Corps.
‘Still mad about your matchstick aeroplanes?’ Nathan teased, and Bertie had simply laughed, madcap as ever.
‘More fun, soaring high in the sky. Nothing to beat it.’
‘Well, good luck.’
‘And to you.’
Nathan hadn’t seen him since.
He remembered clearly that first leave. Merely to watch Lily move about the room had been solace to his soul. The swaying of her hips, the sheen of her chestnut hair, the way her gaze had fixed on his so entreatingly. And the way her teeth had chattered against her cup as if, like him, she was hard put not to beg him to make love to her there and then. His body ached still with the pain of his need.
If Selene hadn’t been so wrapped up in her own affairs, she’d have noticed for sure.
He’d wondered since what had ever possessed him to get involved with the woman. A twisted sort of ambition, perhaps? The idea that since he could never have Lily, he might as well have money and position instead. Was that it? Yet it was much more challenging and exciting to make his own fortune, which he was well able to do. So why? And why had she accepted him? Because Selene rather enjoyed the idea of marrying the local bad boy turned good?
It was some time now since he’d been on leave, and he was tired. Everyone was tired. The fighting had gone on too long. Even the Boche were losing heart, while the British guns pounded ever harder against enemy lines. Yet if we’re winning, Nathan wondered, how come the casualty lists lengthen daily?
He wondered again how Bertie was. Did he too lie in some field, a bloody bundle of rags amongst the splinters of his precious aircraft?
Again an explosion rent the air. Another man screamed and Nathan flinched.
In the next bright flare he saw a sight that must have come directly from hell. In a sea of mud pitted with shell holes and strewn with bodies, the carcase of a horse, its rider still attached, lay before him. Beyond that rats scurried, dipping in and out of a pool which daylight would no doubt show to be red with blood. Pockets of creeping yellow mist hung everywhere, hampering the efforts of those few who, like himself, were still left alive and searching for their comrades. The stench was unbearable yet Nathan did not gag on it.
The regular shots and explosions from behind the German lines made little impression upon him now. Nathan was beyond fear. You still had to believe in hope and life and the future to feel afraid. He had long since given up on those. Real fear, the cold stomach-churning stuff of sick nightmares, came afterwards, when the battle was done. It was always so.
‘Dear God, Rose, you scared me half to death! What in God’s name are you doing lurking about here?’ Lily could have kicked herself for being caught sneaking out of Nathan’s house on the comer of Drake Road. She’d called to see if his housekeeper had heard any word from him. She hadn’t.
‘Waiting for you.’
‘For me?’
‘It’s been a long time, Lily.’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ve been busy of course.’ But the smile said she knew of a different reason for their failing friendship. ‘Can you spare a minute now, d’you reckon?’
‘Of course.’
Reluctantly Lily followed her one-time friend down Drake Road and along Fossburn Street. As Rose pushed open her own front door and ushered Lily inside the small house, the familiar over-sweet cheap perfume hit her, bringing with it the memory of copious tears and, strangely, a picture of Dick’s handsome face.
Mingled with the scent of violets was an all-pervading smell of stale cooking, dust, and an acrid scent she’d much rather not name. Lily screwed up her nose in distaste, and wished instantly she’d managed to be more composed as Rose gave a grunt of amusement at her expression.
‘Quite the lady now, eh? I’ll keep you no more’n a minute. Five at most.’
‘So long as I’m not late for…’
‘Dinner?’ Rose peeled off her coat, the very same one that Hannah had made for her all those years before, looking even more frayed and faded now. She began to riddle the ashes in the half-dead fire with a rusty poker. ‘Oh, aye, we wouldn’t want you to miss your grand dinner, now would we?’ Rose put down the poker and Lily watched in silence as she added a few screws of paper and chips of wood to the cinders, then carefully set three pieces of coal upon them.
‘I’ll not ask you to sit down. Bit mucky round here. Wouldn’t want you to mark that nice blue coat. New is it?’
Lily sat. ‘Rose, don’t be like this. I’ve done nothing to deserve it.’
‘Oh, you haven’t, have you?’
‘No. If this is about you and Bertie, there’s really no need. When I found out - well, I made no attempt to stop him coming. Not once. Not when I realised it was you and not - not your mam.’ She tried a tiny laugh, to recapture the way they’d once both declared they’d no wish to end up like their mothers. But it failed to lighten the grim atmosphere. For she would have been lying to say Bertie’s defection hadn’t upset her. ‘Bertie and I…’
‘I don’t want to know. It’s naught to do wi’ me how you and Bertie go on.’
Lily saw Rose bite on her lower lip before turning her head away to reach for a taper from the mantel-shelf and hunt through papers and accumulated rubbish for a box of matches. Lily wished desperately that she had not come.
‘What is it you want? I must get back to Thomas, and we’ve...’
‘Naught to say to each other? No, happen not. You stopped calling long since, didn’t you? Too grand now for the likes of us. When’s the last time you set foot in your own mam’s house, let alone mine? Wouldn’t know whether they were alive or dead, would you? Nor even care, I shouldn’t wonder.’
Stung by these remarks, Lily felt sick. ‘That’s not true. Life isn’t all that easy for me either, if you want to know.’ She felt a sudden jolt of fear. ‘Are Mam and Dad in trouble? Is that what this is all about? Tell me.’
‘They’re getting older and sadder, like the rest of this Godforsaken world.’ Rose regarded Lily with eyes that might have been laughing were it not for the cynical twist of her mouth. ‘It’s a poor do, though, that you have to ask me how your own parents are. I reckon you should know, don’t you?’
Rose applied a flame to the paper and wood, then stepped back, brushed off her hands and held them out to the growing warmth while Lily searched her mind for the right words to explain her situation. But what made sense sitting in Barwick House no longer seemed appropriate. She feared for her child, of course. But was that the only reason?
‘It’ll soon get going, the ash is still warm,’ Rose said. ‘Then I’ll put t’kettle on.’
‘I really haven’t time. Thomas will want his tea.’
‘I heard about the bairn.’ Rose halted in the process of filling the kettle long enough to nod at Lily, the faintest gleam of kindness now warming her dark eyes. ‘I’m glad for you.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Bertie was - must’ve been delighted.’
‘Yes.’
‘Aye.’ Softly. ‘He missed little Amy.’
A small silence as Lily struggled with a rush of emotion that rose swiftly to block her throat and prick the backs of her eyes. She stood up rather abruptly. ‘If there’s nothing else? Thank you for your concern over my family. I’d best be going.’ She half turned, anxious to quit the claustrophobic room with its memories of men tramping up and down the wooden stairs. Bertie apparently one of them.
‘Oh, I forgot. You mustn’t miss your dinner.’
Something in her tone got to Lily. She whirled about to face her one-time friend. ‘Don’t criticise me for being neglectful. You didn’t adopt this holier-than-thou attitude when you pinched my husband, did you? Or Dick, for that matter. Why don’t you find a man of your own for once?’ Then she strode down the small passage to snatch open the front door.
‘How is he?’
There was a plaintive note in Rose’s voice, revealing at last the purpose behind her waylaying of Lily. But she didn’t stop to answer. It was only much later that she wondered how it was Rose knew where to find her.
A favourite part of Lily’s day was when she walked little Thomas out each afternoon. She would point out a cheeky robin, a busy moorhen, or pluck a buttercup to hold under the baby’s chin to see if he liked butter.
The lake was quiet now. The big Public Steamers had stopped running, partly because of lack of fuel, and partly because most of the men who worked on them had joined up. Lily thought this rather sad, and it certainly created problems for the folk who lived about the lake, war or no war.
On one such expedition she ventured round a grassy peninsula and, lifting weeping willow branches to allow her to pass, encountered Edward working on his beloved
Faith
up
a quiet backwater.
‘So this is where you get to. There’ll be no pipes left if you rub much harder,’ she teased.
‘Lily.’ Edward turned to her with pleasure. He’d grown fond of this daughter-in-law of his. Rough diamond though she may be, Lily had spunk. She was the only person he’d ever known to stand up to his wife.
For Lily’s part, she’d warmed to him since his efforts over The Cobbles.
He let her kiss his cheek, beaming at her as she did so.
Thomas took the opportunity to grasp a bunch of Edward’s hair with the tenacity known only to a robust two year old.
‘What a scamp. Come to Grandpa then. May I take him?’
‘Of course.’
For the next ten minutes Edward was fully absorbed in playing with his grandson while Lily smiled and enjoyed the sun. But when the toddler began to grow restless, Edward asked if he could take him into the boat.
‘I won’t drop him into the water or anything. I’ll take great care of him.’
‘I know you will. You can show me your precious boat too while you’re at it.’ With a plump little hand held in each of theirs, Edward and Lily climbed aboard the
Faith.
As he talked, Edward found his polishing cloth and went back to his polishing. ‘Here you are, laddie, help your grandpa.’ The child immediately tried to copy the old man, making them all laugh. ‘Real chip off the old block, eh? He’ll make a good boatman one day.’
Lily agreed that he probably would, not wishing to consider exactly which block he was a chip from. Then she was rolling up her own sleeves, picking up a rag and dipping it into the metal polish. Edward watched her in amusement.
‘You wouldn’t catch our Selene or Margot cleaning a boat. Cleaning anything, in fact.
Lily cast him a sly grin, hazel eyes sparkling. ‘I’m not Selene or Margot, am I? Bertie loves this steam-yacht. He was always happiest when he was out in her.’
‘Bertie likes wearing fancy clothes and driving up and down the lake, but ask him to do aught involving work and he’ll be conspicuous by his absence. You’ll never see him roll his sleeves up.’
‘Oh, I’m sure he would,’ Lily protested.
D’you know what it is exactly that you’re cleaning, Lily?’
She laughed. ‘No.’
Edward proceeded to describe the mysteries of the many pipes and tubes and pistons, Lily understanding about one word in five. But by the end of the morning, the
Faith
had benefited from their efforts and Lily found she’d thoroughly enjoyed herself. Baby Thomas was black from snub nose to chubby knees, but it would do him no harm, she decided. His grandfather had enjoyed the experience most of all.
It came to be a regular weekend activity for them all, and Edward in particular made the most of it. For Lily it was a welcome relief from being in a household of women and she found she enjoyed learning more about her father-in-law’s hobby and the two became easy in each other’s company.
‘You’ve fitted in well with us, Lily, I’ll grant you that. I know it was difficult at first, but you’ve made a lot of effort and I, for one, appreciate that. But don’t neglect your own. Family is important, lass. If you neglect something, it tends to die. Never forget that.’