The stairs smell of rotting wood and Bea, chest pulled in as though that’s the only way she’ll fit between the banisters and the wall, tests each step before she puts her weight on it. She didn’t expect the house to be this grey, even the wood has a greyness to it. Bea runs her finger along the handrail as she climbs. There’s no
dust, at least it’s clean; the colour is just from the years of penumbra that have saturated the building and its contents.
The floorboards in Michael’s room are grey, too, rough and unpolished. Bea wonders whether she will be more or less likely to pick up splinters in stockings or bare feet. Did one, in any case, remove one’s stockings in these situations? There has to be some sort of convention, everything else seems to be governed by one set of rules or another, even if the principal rule seems to be that they should be broken. Though perhaps not this far. It’s not just that Bea is in a man’s bedroom, but what sort of man’s bedroom she is in.
The walls are not much better, a browning yellow. In the far corner is a clothes horse with two pairs of socks hanging from it. Does he do his own laundry? Who else would he have to do it for him? Would she, once they had done this, be expected to do it for him herself?
Mr Campbell is upstairs with her now. His steadiness has gone and he is mumbling about the years he’s been here, that the landlady is a good sort, her son’s in Flanders. He’s looking everywhere but straight ahead of him at Bea and the bed beyond. It occurs to her that maybe he is a virgin, too, and what a farce that would be, if he knew no better than her. She suddenly wants the whole matter to be over and done with as soon as possible.
Deciding to take some sort of initiative, she takes two steps backwards and sits on the edge of the bed. The springs sink, and the mattress with it. The sharp hospital iron of the bedstead digs into her calves.
Mr Campbell walks to the far side of the bed and sits on it, she imagines, facing the window. The mattress rocks from side to side as he does whatever he is doing. He has stopped talking. After an hour-long minute of movement and silence, Bea turns to look behind her. Mr Campbell has removed his shirt and is sitting in his vest, chin to the window and the tendons on his neck taut. Against the plaster of his skin his vest is grey. Laundry again. Bea puts her purse on the floor and unbuttons her coat. She stands up to slip it
off, and once she is holding it in her hand she realises that she is unsure of where to put it. On her side of the bed there is only the clothes horse, and she doesn’t quite have the guts to start striding about half naked. She moves the damp socks to one side and drapes the coat over it. Stepping backwards, she returns to the edge of the bed and starts to unbutton the top of her shirt and stops. Surely she can do better than this. She slides her hands behind her and, even with fingers half clotted, manages to unhook her skirt, letting it fall to the floor. Almost before her waistband has reached the splintering floorboards, she is in the narrow bed, stockings still on.
She is now tucked up to her collarbone between a pair of sheets thinned to the slipperiness of an ice-rink and under a faded pink blanket. She leans her head back, searching for a pillow. There is only one, roughly in the centre, and Bea is firmly holding her position to one side. It seems churlish to take the pillow and impossible to lie half on and half off it, so she shuffles her shoulders further to the side, leaving the rest of her where it has landed, putting her in an awkward diagonal.
Mr Campbell is clearing his throat.
Ready now? he asks, his voice reed-thin.
Afterwards, Bea doesn’t know whether to be relieved or shocked that he had a preservative. Had he been planning the event? And was it for her, or, or … A far from romantic thought comes into her mind and she checks herself; is there always this much hypocrisy around making love? If that’s what this was. They are lying in silence but Bea is still short of breath, she feels as though her insides have leapt out of her and back in again. She had no idea that ‘this’ would be so energetic. From the way she had heard it whispered of, it was a distanced affair.
Distanced is not what she feels. She wants to reach out and touch Mr Campbell’s face but is unsure whether it would be too forward, even now. She smiles to herself. But what struck her more than
anything was the extraordinary vulnerability that men are reduced to, it hadn’t occurred to her that Mr Campbell could ever be so at her mercy, and she suddenly feels a burst of gratitude towards him. Thank you, she wants to say, thank you for doing this for me. Instead she turns towards him having now decided to stroke his forehead, and finds his big, dark eyes drinking her in. He reaches for her hand and kisses the heel of her palm.
‘Beatrice? May I call you Beatrice now?’
‘God. Yes.’ She hesitates. She’s never called him by his Christian name before, and it is slow to form in her mouth. ‘Michael.’
He reaches for her hand closest to him, the bad hand.
‘Will you marry me?’
Her hand freezes on his forehead. She pulls her fingers back.
‘Beatrice, will you marry me?’
‘Michael.’ It still feels strange to say his first name. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Understand what?’ Anger is flashing back into him, and Bea feels her pulse quicken. But what does he mean? Move into this room and wash his clothes? She pushes away from him and sits up. He watches her, puzzled.
‘What’s wrong? Are you all right?’
Bea doesn’t reply. She stands up and starts to dress quickly. She’s fumbling, but she can just pull her coat on over her clothes.
It’s Michael’s turn to sit up, and his voice is irritable now. ‘Where are you going?’ He says, as if telling her to come back.
‘Mr Ca— I’m sorry, Michael—’
‘Sorry?’ He’s out of bed now, stark naked, without even the manners or care to cover himself. ‘Why, what was this to you? Some charity fuck?’
As Beatrice runs down the stairs and pushes past the small woman standing at the bottom, she bursts into tears.
She’s still a wreck when she falls in through the front door of Number Thirty-Five. Clemmie is in the hallway, looking shrunken.
She casts a glance at Bea, up and down. I see you’ve heard, she says. Heard what, Bea replies, and Clem can’t meet her eyes. And with this look, or not-look, Bea knows. She shuts her eyes, holds her breath. She wants to block the words out.
Clem holds her elbow as they go up the stairs. A stone statue that is Mother is sitting on the far sofa in the red drawing room, her neck livid and her face white. A piece of paper is in her hand. Her eyes are as red as the wallpaper.
‘Poor Edward,’ she says.
Bea opens her mouth to speak but no words come out. Not that Mother will hear anything. Bea stares at Mother, Clemmie, the paper, the brown envelope, and she turns to the door.
‘Beatrice, where are you going?’ asks Clemmie.
‘Out on the motorcycle,’ she says. ‘It was still in the garage when I last looked.’
And Clemmie is chasing her, whispering don’t do that as though she wants to shout it out. You’ll kill yourself. But Clemmie can’t shout that out.
‘Your arm, Bea,’ she pants. ‘How will you hold—’
‘Fuck my arm.’
Aftermath
1918
24
THE HOUSE IS BEING SHROUDED. WHEN BEA WALKS PAST
the yellow drawing room on her way back from breakfast she finds Mrs Wainwright directing Sarah and Susan in the laying of sheets over furniture, as if for its own burial. Bea stops at the doorway: she’s had a thousand, no, thousands of conversations in this room, and, among them, goodbyes. Her chest tightens. Edward, she thinks, it’s the last place I saw Edward. There’s a shadow in the corner of her eye, in front of the chimney piece, and for an instant she thinks she sees him there but as soon as she is facing the fireplace, he vanishes.
The fireplace is cold and bare. Every fluff of ash has been brushed out and only the blackened brick behind it admits that there was ever warmth there; even the furniture has been deadened. Bea surveys the room. The sofas are like corpses on stretchers, their ruined bodies hidden from sight. The last sheet has been thrown over the last chair. Susan and Sarah have slipped away – to turn the next room into a tomb, thinks Bea – but Mrs Wainwright is hovering, a question on her lips. No, Bea wants to say, we’re all still here, it is only Mother who is being buried today. But Bea can’t get these words out past the lump in her throat. She has no spare emotion to give this morning; instead what emerges is, ‘We’re coming back for lunch.’
Mrs Wainwright nods as though Bea has a desire to play out for as long as possible something that is clearly over. Bea almost says that she hasn’t any intention of leaving this house in the near future. Which is, in a way, true, for intending is not the same as possibly having to. How odd, she thinks, that I have spent so long wanting to escape all that this house stands for, and now that I might have to go, all I want to do is stay.
The rest of the country, Europe, the rest of the world, seems to be celebrating peace as though there were no war before it. Yet for Bea the past week has been a wake for every single face that will not return. If you are not going to see them again now, then you really never will.
Nor will you see Mother, though the question was raised by Clemmie, extremely briefly, as to whether the coffin should be open at any stage in the ceremony. ‘I know it’s a little strange, and you probably can’t, what with it being the flu and all that,’ she said when they met with the funeral director. ‘But she would so hate to be shut out of things. She must be furious at going the day the war ended.’ Bea can’t imagine what Mother would have done with peace. She had surged through the war on such a wave of the gallons of milk she produced from Beauhurst that it is almost impossible to imagine her ever having slowed down again.
Even from her mortuary slab, she is still being controversial. While Bea’s and Clemmie’s friends are engulfed in a wave of almost spontaneous weddings, Mother is having a funeral. Yes, Mother, marriage seems to be what they want, the men, when they’re back. A wife, home, hearth, a certainty of some kind; so they’re rushing up the aisle as though at any minute the whole bloody thing will start again. What you should have done now, Mother, was to tie the knot. You could have welcomed some war-weary general home, installed him amidst the healthy sea vapours of Beauhurst and given him glassfuls of fat milk from your cows. But you didn’t do that. You went and died, on purpose, it almost seems. When
you were told to rest, you were up and about far too soon after your fever broke, and so it came back, pushing you away in its place. It was really very inconsiderate of you, Mother, to die. Of course, now that you’ve gone – or are almost gone, because you are still here, making your way over from the cold stone mortuary to the church in a polished oak box. Now that you’ve gone, we are realising how much you held us all together, even if it was by irritating us with those hypocrisies you called practicalities.
The practicality now is that we are all unravelling. Two daughters, acres of crumbling brick in the countryside, few funds and precious little means of gaining any more. Unless one of us were to marry well. Us? That’s only me, thinks Bea. And, Beatrice, who is there to marry? She can’t think of any rich man she’d want to see at breakfast every day. In fact she can’t think of any man she’d like to see at breakfast every day. Then she checks herself, for that’s not quite true. All too often the moment she ran from Mr Campbell’s room comes back to her mind. Though she still hasn’t managed to picture the life she and Mr Campbell would have lived together.
In any case, it’s too late. Every letter you sent him afterwards was returned, and you’ve no idea whether you will ever see him again or whether he is still kicking, or in pieces. Is that why you are thinking about him so much, because the fact that you are extremely unlikely ever to see him again makes him a safe dream to have? And safe because even if she did, it could never, however much she might puzzle to find a way, lead to anything.
Safest of all, however, because she’d blown it. More fool you, Beatrice.
The red drawing room, the only one on the first floor not dust-sheeted over, is still cold when Clemmie, Bea and Edie come back for lunch. Edie is staying with them for ‘moral support’, though who is supporting whom is a trifle unclear. There is no fire and Bea walks towards the bell but Clemmie interrupts her. ‘Darling, I can’t.
Not after this morning. It’ll be a funeral pyre. That’s what they must have thought. Have a drink. Or a cig. Some fire in that. Throw me the box, darling.’
‘Nonsense, the servants are just annoyed that the drinks were at Claridge’s.’
‘It was, may I say,’ ventures Edie, ‘a little inhospitable.’
‘Oh, God, Edes,’ Clemmie drops into an armchair and flings her head back, blowing smoke at the ceiling, ‘I don’t think I could have stood having it here. People would never have left. I mean, they haven’t left there, yet, have they? It was turning into some sort of political rally. We all needed somewhere to escape to.’
Escape, thinks Bea, from Mother. Perhaps that’s what we’ve all been trying to do, perhaps that’s what all daughters do. But mothers reach far, even from beyond the grave.
Clemmie continues. ‘At least we are able to bury Mother.’
‘Oh, Clem, don’t.’
‘And the half of Tom I haven’t buried yet.’
‘He’ll come back to himself, Clemmie. He just needs a rest.’ Given her recent form, Edie sounds almost worryingly calm.
‘A life-long rest. How’s Tony, Edie?’
Edie shrugs her shoulders. ‘I guess he’s back,’ she says.
‘Hasn’t he come to see Archie?’ Clemmie is now leaning forward in her seat.
‘He’s not too interested in Archie.’
‘How peculiar,’ says Clemmie and, her mind clearly on children, excuses herself to go and check on the nursery. ‘I’m rather hoping,’ she says as she leaves the room, ‘that they understood enough of it to be shedding at least one tear between them.’