When Nights Were Cold (28 page)

‘Here is a Struton in Bristol. Your great-grandmother on your father's side was a Struton and they were somewhere down there. I wonder if we're related. He was shelled, poor man.'

‘Frank Black has enlisted,' Catherine told us one day. ‘Mrs Black told Mrs Hunt and she said so at the greengrocer's, but I don't know any more than that. He can make a man of himself, if he wants to.'

‘I doubt it's true,' I said. ‘I don't think Frank is a militarist.'

‘That's hardly the point,' Catherine sneered. ‘Even a coward like him wants to be a hero now.'

Mother affected not to hear this. ‘We must just keep the home fires burning. That's all we can do.'

We knitted socks and helmets for soldiers. The three of us would sit around the fire, working quickly, barely watching our needles or glancing at our handiwork but taking some comfort from the rhythm of the click-clicking. One evening I found that I was absently unravelling the stockings Catherine had just finished. When Catherine realized this, she and I laughed ourselves silly. We giggled and snorted till our sides hurt and Mother smiled uncomfortably as though she could not quite find the joke. Then we began again and settled quietly into the hypnotic work. I tried not to think any more of Frank.

The Ladies' Alpine Club gave up its axes to be melted down into knitting needles and its ropes to be made into bandages. They moved out of their club rooms at the hotel. All the climbers were down from the slopes and mountaineering was over for now. Frank did not write to me and I tried to be glad. I scanned the casualty lists and sometimes forced myself to walk past his parents' house to look for signs of them, some signal that perhaps he was home on leave. I never saw his parents or even a servant about the place. I heard nothing from Parr and did not expect anything. I guessed that she had returned to London, but she might just as easily be tramping across some glaciated peak in Peru.

I remember the hurried note I received from Locke in 1916. She had left the theatre to train as a VAD, but never told me which hospital. She said that Geoffrey and Horace had both enlisted and gone to France. I don't remember writing anything to Locke at this time though I thought of her every day. I'm sure I intended to reply, but I was waiting to learn her new address. I imagined her small, elegant frame weaving between hospital beds, mopping floors, tending to stinking wounds and whispering comfort to frightened men.

Mother and I ran the house together with the help of Sarah and a new cook. Every Thursday Mother went to Father's study with a notebook and a large money box and counted money in and out.

‘It is pleasant,' she said to me one Thursday evening, ‘to have the house bustling. It has never really bustled before, even when the two of you were children. Or perhaps it did and I've forgotten.'

Miss Porter had put away her illustrations and begun working as a tram conductor. I thought this a wonderful job and so did Mother. Miss Porter arrived home each evening with tired feet and shining eyes. I suggested to Mother that I might look for something similar but she pointed out that I had my work, looking after her and the house.

‘You're doing plenty,' she said, ‘though you could find more time to improve your knitting. Your attempts at hosiery are not going to win the war for us.'

We grew used to our routine and I cannot say that I was unhappy. I wrote to Locke once or twice at her parents' address but, if she replied, her letters never reached me. I guessed that her parents had moved. In her note she had told me that she would volunteer to work in Belgium. I meant to try harder to contact her parents and find out whether or not she had gone, but I never did it.

Zeppelin attacks destroyed homes, opened them up like twisted dolls' houses, left family belongings shivering and exposed to the neighbourhood. When we passed such houses in London and imagined our own home as a broken carapace, Catherine and I prepared ourselves for losing it. We moved from room to room, memorizing each space, the shapes thrown across the floor by the light, the number of paces from the door to the window, what the fireplace looked like from the door and the window from the fireplace. We reminded ourselves which floorboards creaked when we stepped on them and which snagged our stockings.

‘Grace, do you think we should put Father's portrait in the cellar, lest anything should happen to it?'

‘But he didn't like it. We shouldn't try too hard to save it.'

‘But if he didn't like it, should we ever have left it on the wall in the first place? Should we not have hidden it?'

‘I don't know. But then would we be putting it in the cellar to save or to hide it?'

‘I suppose we could leave it there. There's not much space in the cellar.'

‘Mother thinks that he is keeping us safe.'

We left the portrait in its place.

All our neighbours had lost a son or friend and sometimes it was too painful for them to tell anyone so they put notes through the door. My first big loss did not come until 1917. I received a letter from Mrs Locke telling me that Leonora had caught an infection and died in hospital in London. I fell to the floor with my arms crossed over my ribs, as though a heavy trunk had been dropped onto my chest. It took minutes to remember how to breathe and, even then, I could do little for days. I could not eat nor move about. I could whisper but I could not speak. I went alone to the funeral. Only Hester Morgan and Edith Foot were there from our college days. There was no mention of any play that Locke had been writing, or of our Alpine disaster. She had, apparently, devoted herself to her voluntary work and intended to qualify as a nurse and make it her career after the war. Morgan told me that when Locke first helped to save a man's life she felt redeemed in some way, released from her guilt. The memory that came to me most was of our first meeting, in the corridor on our first day at university, when she called out my name and smiled. I was sick every night for a week but I was unable to cry.

The next one came soon after. Frank died in a hospital in France of trench fever. Catherine heard it from his parents, who never knew about Frank and me. An explosion resounded in my ears when Catherine told me and did not die down, like a fire that roared and roared. We didn't find out exactly where or when he'd died. I could have read the newspaper but I did not want to know.

‘But he came home a few months ago on leave,' Catherine said. ‘He was at his parents' house so they were glad at least that they had seen him. That's what they told me. They seemed utterly destroyed so I can't believe it gave them as much comfort as all that. I suppose it might in time. I had no idea he was here a few months ago, just round the corner from us.'

‘Catherine, shut up.'

Catherine played the piano deep into the evening and through most of the night. All I had from Frank was the Pitman's shorthand book. It had somehow survived my week on the mountains in Wales and was in my room, unread. I wanted to burn it – what an inappropriate token of our passion – but could not.

In the midst of this, or somewhere behind it, Shackleton and his men were missing. By the end of that year they had not returned and there was no word of the
Endurance.
I looked out for news in the papers, but it didn't matter to me as it would have mattered a year earlier. It was as though the explorers had fallen out of life, come too late to do their job, and history had simply pushed them down and buried them before they had quite finished. It didn't seem likely that they could come back now. Where would they fit?

Oh, what have you seen, Father, with eyes that search and always find us? Did you know that I would never leave, that I will probably die here in this room? Do the years fall out in order for you or do you see and hear it all at once? Perhaps Catherine is playing for you now and I am in the cosy corner seat and then Mrs Horton comes in with cocoa. Perhaps, for you, it is in layers, or all present in one moment, say the moment you died getting out of this chair and you are getting out of it to die, even now. Can it be true that Frank and I made love right here, under your shiny oil-paint eyes, with my mother upstairs and my sister nearby? And yet I do remember it. I giggle, cover my mouth so that my visitor does not hear.

Chapter Twenty-Five

I received an invitation to a talk at the home of a Mrs Gertrude Belcher by the renowned lady mountaineer, Cicely Parr ‘Peru Calling: One Woman's Journey into the Andes'. – The Ladies' Alpine Club no longer had official premises but, it seemed, members had unofficial at-home gatherings with speakers. The invitation must have come from Parr as I did not know any other members. I took the card into the garden, read it several times. I was curious to know about Parr's adventures, but I wondered if I dared go.

Mrs Belcher's drawing room was vast, with seats for twenty or thirty people. I positioned myself to one side, near the door. Parr noticed me, just as she took her place to speak, and she gave a cautious nod and smile. She spoke very well, with a lightness and warmth I would not have expected. She even laughed several times, without any obvious effort. She made an amusing comment about the state of her bloomers after losing her footing and sliding down a wet, muddy hill. She showed us the mark on her hand where she had lanced and cut out an infection with her knife. She told us how the Peruvian expedition had almost ended in disaster as most of the climbers' equipment shot away down a smooth slope of ice. I watched, astonished, as Parr enjoyed the attention, the admiring smiles.

‘It might as well have been a precipice, such were our chances of getting anything back. And it was partly my fault.'

She had changed indeed.

‘But I managed to save the hypsometer from a fall and so we were able to measure the height, even if we then had to hurry down as we had little to eat and little to protect us from the wind. The Indian porters were camped on the foothills and helped us set up camp. Fortunately they had looked after our gear well and stolen nothing – I had been warned to expect otherwise, you know – and we were all delighted with ourselves.'

As she was leaving, I caught up with her. It was beginning to rain outside and was turning dark. We put on our coats and hats, set off together along the pavement.

‘Farringdon, I trust you're not going to run at me with an axe, or perhaps you've come to suggest that I forged the details of my own expedition. No doubt you were there with me and helped me to the summit while I wasn't paying attention.'

‘No. You're a brave climber and a good speaker. I wanted to ask if we could forget all the other business, if you would forgive me for upsetting you.'

‘Thank you. Yes, thank you.' She nodded, solemn and understanding. ‘You seem more yourself than before, I must say. I wasn't sure whether or not to invite you but, then, I thought that if you were still mad, you wouldn't have come anyway, would you?'

‘But I wasn't mad.' I tried to make my voice light, as though the question of my madness were a silly joke.

‘Remember how unstable you were the last time I saw you? I really thought you'd cracked up and lost yourself for ever.'

‘But I hadn't.'

‘You and Locke always wanted to blame me, as if I had made Hooper fall on purpose. Hardly surprising that you went mad. Did you have treatment?'

‘Parr, stop it. I did not go mad and I never shared Locke's opinions.'

‘You came at me with my axe, remember? Struck the house with it. I was terrified.'

‘I tapped it against your badly built wall, that's all. You know it.'

We reached the stop where Parr would catch her tram. I waited with her and we talked about Locke, about the war and when it might be over. The tram rattled in, spattered dirty rain on our skirts. A few soldiers jumped off and hurried away through the gloom. One bumped into Parr and apologized. She pushed past him and hopped on board.

‘It's dark so early these days, isn't it? Goodbye then.'

She moved further into the tram and did not look back.

I wondered why she had bothered to invite me to her talk. Locke would say it was because Parr wanted to boast about her success and see me envy her. If this was true, she had succeeded in some respects. I watched the tram drive off and felt the usual muddle of fear and awe, and had the strong sense that, despite everything, I would not want to be her.

I used to go to the stations and watch people arrive and leave all day. Waterloo, Victoria, Paddington. I'd find a seat and listen to the trains and the voices. I liked to see couples who might have been Frank and me. I'd follow them sometimes towards the platforms and try to catch their conversations. I'd walk home late in the evening, exhausted, and I'd think about what I would say to Locke about it all. Sometimes I saw people I recognized but I never spoke to them. I made vague plans for after the war, but mostly I felt that if it were ever to end, I would just rest. I would want to sleep. We would all want to sleep, I thought. Until then, I would continue in a state that was somehow both frantic and numb. Even at the stations, I did not wander aimlessly. I would make lists of the kinds of people I had seen, the soldiers, Girl Guides, schoolchildren, men with flat caps and women with fur stoles. I listed and categorized the outfits they wore. I counted the tickets as the clippies punched them. I thought that I would, one day, find the courage to ask for a job like this myself. Knitting and housekeeping did not keep me busy all the time, but I had lost my nerve.

I would go home and help the cook with dinner. I would watch Catherine knitting, unable to concentrate on work of my own. The lodgers moved around the house, sometimes closing a door or scuttling over floorboards. I took Father's maps from their box and I imagined journeys through France, Belgium, Turkey, Germany. I sat by the globe and let it spin and spin. I measured distances with the nail of my middle finger (half an inch) and spent the evenings adding up measurements and comparing them, for no reason at all except to keep my head full.