Authors: Anna Hope
“Thanks.” There’s the scratch of a match against the box, the small fizz of the flame in the room.
She goes over to the fire, gives it a quick stoke, then walks quickly behind him, toward the drawer that contains her purse. She turns to see if he is watching, but he has his back to her, smoking in quick, jabbing drags. She slides the drawer open as soundlessly as possible, is lifting the purse out and searching inside when there’s a sudden noise, a sort of strangled cry. She turns to see him staring at the air in front of him, curled forward, his whole body straining toward something she cannot see.
“Michael?” he says. Then his head jerks once, twice, as though caught in a fierce current, and is still.
Ada drops the purse back into the drawer. “What did you say?” She moves over to face him.
“Nothing,” the boy flinches, shaking his head. “I never—I never said nothing.”
“You did.” She speaks slowly, though her heart is pounding. “I heard you.”
“I never.” He stands up. Stabs out his cigarette. Takes a couple of crablike steps away from her.
“You said ‘Michael.’”
Then the boy begins to twitch, and the twitching spreads, until he is having a fit, almost, in awful spasms, and it is awful, and she should help him, but he is terrifying, and she cannot, and so she stands, stranded, until the fit has passed and he is still. It is a moment before she can speak.
“Why did you say ‘Michael’?” She tries to make her voice light, easy. She wants to keep him here.
“I never,” the boy says, snatching up his packages. “I never did. I just knocked on your door. I’m just selling stuff, aren’t I?” And he holds his hopeless little packages out to her, before stuffing them back into his bag.
“You said ‘Michael.’ You knew him.”
“No, I never.” His head swings violently from side to side. “I don’t know any Michael. No.”
“Stop it,” she says. “
Stop that.
You knew him. You knew my son.”
But the swinging movement only gets faster and faster, until he takes a couple of steps toward her, grabs one of her hands in his and puts it on his head. “I’m sorry,” he says, pressing her hand hard against his skull. “I’m sorry, missus.” Then he stumbles from the room.
For a moment she is still, feeling the burning, buzzing touch of him against her. Then she runs, down the hall, out of the house, calling after him to stop.
But there is no one on the quiet Sunday street. The boy has disappeared.
As though he were never there at all.
Just outside the small town of Saint-Pol-sur-Ternoise, near Agincourt, on the road that leads to the coast, from her room in the barracks of the British Army, a young nurse watches a field ambulance arrive.
It is very odd; it is the fourth such ambulance she has seen today.
The nurse blows her nose. She has a cold and is out of sorts. She has been reading a letter from home, trying to stay as close as possible to the tiny little stove. The letter is from her fiancé. It is a perfectly pleasant letter, full of perfectly pleasant things. He is a perfectly pleasant man.
And yet.
She had her demob papers last week. One of the last left over here. She hadn’t been in a rush to go. Soon she will have to face him. This small, uninspiring man who was wounded in 1918 and whom she tended, and felt sorry for, and agreed to marry when all of this was done.
Since then the nurse had fallen in love. A French captain. She met him at a social. He calls her “Chérie.” It sounds a lot like the fruit.
She knew the French captain was married. He never lied about that. But he did promise he would leave his wife. Then, last week, when she was out shopping on her day off in Saint-Pol, the ugly, bruised little local town, she saw them: the whole family. Two dark-haired little children, the Frenchman, and his pretty young wife. All of them laughing, holding hands, jabbering away in a language she couldn’t understand. She hid in a doorway, mortified, till they were gone.
The nurse puts down her letter and goes over to the window, pulling her cardigan closer against the cold. A coffin is being unloaded from the ambulance by four men. All the other ambulances today have held coffins, too. She watches as the men lift the plain box and carry it into the small chapel that went up last week. That, too, was strange, since no one said why they were building the little Nissen hut, or nailing a cross above the door. They’ve managed perfectly well without a chapel until now.
She wonders who is inside the box.
It is odd to see a coffin nowadays. Not like before, when they loaded and unloaded them like so many loaves of bread. The nurse reminds herself to ask around—find out what might have happened that four bodies have been brought here today.
When the ambulance has gone she goes back over to the stove and picks up the letter. Then puts it down again. She will write to him later. For now, she cannot think of what she might say.
In her old bedroom at the very top of the house, Evelyn sits on the edge of the bed and smokes. She stares balefully at the rack of dresses in the open wardrobe in front of her, tipping the ash into her palm. Then she pulls open the window sash and throws the butt out.
In the distance she can see the blue-gray waters of the lake. It’s not really a lake; she grew up calling it a lake, but really, from up here, it’s an overgrown pond. She can just about make out the red roof of the two-room summerhouse that stands on the reedy little island in the middle. There’s a fireplace in one of the rooms. She could sneak downstairs to the kitchen now and steal some wood, take the little rowing boat over there, light herself a fire, and spend the day hidden and reading. It wouldn’t be the first time she’s ducked out of a family gathering in the same way.
Rather that than enduring her mother’s birthday lunch; rather that than her cousin Lottie and her tiny bites of food, her tiny nibbles of conversation from her tiny, tidy mouth.
It’ll be ten times worse without her brother, too.
There’s a knock at the door. She pulls herself back from the window as a uniformed young woman enters the room. Evelyn doesn’t recognize her. She must be new. Her mother has always gone through maids like other people go through handkerchiefs.
“Yes?”
“I was sent to ask if you want any help.”
“Help?”
The girl blushes. “With changing, miss.”
“Oh, right. No. Thank you.” She waves a hand. “Please tell my mother I’m more than capable of choosing a dress.”
The girl, looking relieved, disappears, and from somewhere deep in the house a gong sounds, insistent and low. Evelyn goes to the wardrobe and runs her palm along the rack of dresses, which bob and jingle on their hangers, pretty, pliant as puppets. She plucks out the most muted dress she can find, a green silk day dress she hasn’t worn for years, and pulls it over her head. It smells of must and mothballs. The color is all wrong, draining her already pale skin.
Bright chatter from the morning room spikes the hall as she makes her way down the wide main staircase of the house. She listens but cannot hear her brother’s voice, and so she heads across the hall to the dining room instead. They’ll all be in here soon enough.
Two young men, little more than boys, are putting the finishing touches to the place settings. They must be new, too, as she doesn’t recognize either of them. They nod at her, then bow and turn and slide away.
She walks to the window, looking out to where the lawn slopes down to the lake. She can just see the little boat, tethered up against the deck, and conjures the damp wood and varnish smell of it, the friction of the oars against the heels of her palms.
“
Here
she is.”
Evelyn turns to see her aunt Mary, Lottie’s mother, plump and bejeweled, leading the march. She submits to being kissed, and then scrutinized at arm’s length.
“You look tired. Are you still
working
?”
“Mmm.” Evelyn nods.
Her aunt’s face wrinkles. “And are you still in that
horrible
little flat?”
Despite herself, Evelyn smiles. “Yes, Aunt Mary,” she concedes, detaching herself gently from her grip. “I’m afraid I am.”
Then here they come, the rest of them, Uncle Alec, Cousin Lottie, Anthony—
Lord
Anthony—Lottie’s husband. All of them pink and smug and smiling. No sign of her brother. For a brief moment she wonders if something is really wrong, but then they are upon her, and she steels herself, arranging her face to meet them, making the right noises as she progresses down the line, the sudden, reluctant welcoming committee to her mother’s birthday lunch. Her father nods at her, chin set, eyes locked, as ever, somewhere to the left of her head. But next to him, her mother’s gaze strafes her, head to toe. And in it is the inevitable, the illimitable disappointment.
Better,
says her expression,
but still not good enough.
The family members take their places around the table, and the two young men reappear with the soup trolley, moving quietly around the room. Anthony takes the seat across from Evelyn. The space to his right is free.
“So,” says Lottie, to Evelyn’s left.
“So,” says Evelyn, turning to her cousin, who is resplendent in yellow lace.
“How’s London?” Lottie tilts her head to one side, as if London were a wayward old acquaintance she used to run around with but with whom she has lost touch. When she married, two years ago, Lottie moved from a short-lived flat share in Chelsea into Anthony’s ugly, crenellated Victorian pile. She is a Lady now.
Lady Charlotte. Lady Lottie.
Evelyn can only guess at the fury that engendered in her own mother’s breast.
“London seems well,” says Evelyn, taking a sip of wine. “Bearing up. Shall I pass on your regards?”
Lottie gives an indulgent smile. “And are you still living with Doreen?”
They were all at the same school: Lottie, Evelyn, and Doreen—Evelyn and Doreen three years ahead, fused in friendship by their mutual loathing of everything the school stood for. When Evelyn inherited a small sum from her grandmother at the age of twenty-one, she bought a flat in Primrose Hill and invited Doreen to live in it, too. Her family couldn’t have been more scandalized if she’d announced that the two of them were planning to keep a brothel.
“Still living with Doreen,” says Evelyn.
“And is she still”—Lottie pauses delicately—“
unattached,
too?”
Evelyn meets her cousin’s watery gaze. “Yes,” she lies. “She is.”
There’s a flurry in the corridor. Her brother’s voice.
Finally
. She looks up to see him handing his coat to one of the young men.
“Edward!”
“Sorry, Ma. Got caught up. Missed the train. You’re looking divine.”
As Ed embraces their mother, her skin registers pink delight. He’s not looking his best—his jacket is creased, and his hair looks as though he wet it in the kitchen on the way through—yet, somehow, he carries it off. As the ripples from his arrival spread across the smiling room, Evelyn is struck, not for the first time, by her brother’s easy grace, his seemingly limitless ability to dispense charm. If it were she, late for a family gathering in this way, she’d have been cut out of the will.
She is the last to be reached. When he leans in to kiss her he smells of alcohol—not fresh, but saturated, as though he’s been drinking for a long time.
“I thought we were supposed to be coming down together?” she hisses into his ear.
“Sorry, Eves.”
“Where’ve you been, anyway? You look like hell.”
“Out.” He shrugs.
She rolls her eyes as he takes his place diagonally across from hers. Her mother knows better than to seat her two children together. The young men resume wheeling the soup trolley and start to serve.
“And what about you?” Evelyn says, turning to Lottie. “Country life treating you well?”
Lottie picks up her spoon. “I
am
rather well, actually. I mean, in a manner of speaking. I’ve been a little sick, too.”
“Excuse me a minute.” Evelyn tries to catch her brother’s eye, but he is already in conversation with Anthony, so she leans forward and steals a cigarette from his case on the table in front of him. She turns back reluctantly to Lottie. “What was that you said?”
“I’m going to have a child.” Lottie’s wispy little voice rises at the end of the line, as if she is unsure herself about this state of affairs.
Evelyn lights up.
“I’m going to have a child,” says Lottie again, a little louder.
“I heard.” Evelyn blows out a lungful of blue smoke. “Goodness me.”
To her right, at the top of the table, she can feel without looking that her mother’s eyes are upon her. She turns properly to Lottie, giving her mother the back of her head. “That’s wonderful,” she says, too loudly. “Congratulations. What do you think you’ll have?”
“Excuse me?” Lottie looks confused.
“What do you think you’ll have? Cannon fodder? Or the other kind? What shall we call it? Drawing room fodder?
Tedium
fodder?”
Lottie puts down her spoon. “I’m not sure I quite know what you mean.”
“Boy,” says Evelyn slowly, “or girl?”
On the other side of the table, as though alerted by some chivalrous instinct, Anthony and Ed look up. Anthony clears his throat and leans forward. “So. How are you, Evelyn old thing?”
He looks even plumper, thinks Evelyn, while Lottie looks thinner than ever. Perhaps they’ve got things confused and it’s Anthony that’s eating for two. For a brief, horrible moment an awful mental picture assails her: Lottie and Anthony, deep in the act. He smiles encouragingly. “Coming along with us on Thursday, then?”
“Thursday?”
“The burial. Westminster Abbey. Got a friend with a place on Whitehall,” says Anthony. “Good view of the Cenotaph. We’ll be having some drinks. You’re most welcome.”
The burial. Few drinks.
He makes it sound like a trip to the West End.
“I’m not sure,” she says. “I’m not really one for funerals.”
Anthony looks at her, seeming to weigh the relative truth of this.
“Still fighting the good fight?” he says eventually. “What is it again? The labor exchange?”
“Pensions, actually,” says Evelyn.