by Tanith Lee
Worse, I bored all my family, particularly my mother and sister since, during my early years, they had to spend more time with me than either my father, or my brother Eric.
Once I heard a woman friend of my mother’s acquaintance speak quietly to her when I had just left the room. Hearing my name, maybe instinctively, I hesitated outside the door to listen. It taught me never to eavesdrop, for someone such as myself will rarely hear anything good. “Poor Laurel,” said the woman friend. “To come of such a handsome family and to inherit so little from it in either looks or spirit. It must be a great burden, my dear. Still, there is Constance, she’ll do well. Where Eric, of course, is a splendid young man.”
What my mother said I have no idea, but she will have agreed no doubt, in words, or with one of her heartfelt sighs.
There then, in that silly and pointless manner, I became and was, and grew up to be eighteen years old.
The terrible War had begun, in fact, four years previously, in 1914. Somebody was shot. I could never quite grasp who, or where, because nobody explained it to me. But suddenly there came to be a ferment. Patriotic outcry commenced, and very soon after the urge for all young men to enlist, to give themselves over to Duty. Our enemy was Germany, which circumstance, or so I gather, occurred again in the late 1930’s. I hope I have that correctly; I’m afraid I always make mistakes, yet I trust this may be more pardonable following my ousting to a non-physical existence. (I’m not sure non-physical is a proper expression. I’ve picked up, as they say, rather as one might pick up bits of money, or fruit, from a confusing street, more recent expressions and phrases, by which I mean talk of the later eras that succeeded my very short span. A lot of these came from that thing called a Tea V. No doubt, it’s really just my stupidity.)
Eric gave himself up to Duty. Not immediately, but in a while. My mother became used to sitting weeping. She was maddened by the fear that he would die, or be mutilated by shot or shell. This latter option may have seemed worse to her.
As for Constance, she altered into some sort of nurse. I think this was about 1915. She looked quite beautiful in the horrid uniform, naturally. And when at home for her spells of ‘leave’, she would talk on and on of the dying soldiers whose hands she had held, whispering to them that there was nothing to be afraid of, and how they blessed her for it.
In 1916, despite the Storm and Stress of the War Situation, I had been ‘brought out’. I wore a white dress, and had almost fainted again, from fright, before we drove to the event. It was a vast hunt ball, rather muted by the fact that so many of the young were now elsewhere, the males fighting, killing and dying, the females nursing and, too, now and then dying, when the zeppelins had passed over England, like a flock of angry angels Or else, inevitably, overseas in dangerously located hospitals .
Unarguably, I should know so much more about the course and dramatic highlights, a term I think more often, post my era, applied to colouring the hair, of the Great War. But as I’ve said, I was ignorant, silly, slow, and nobody explained much to me. The brief written images I snatched from the journals left me only more befuddled, and nauseous. (If they had had Tea V then, my stars, it scarcely bears thinking of.) The rationing, even, scarcely touched my family. There were always ‘ways and means’.
Eric won some medal. I can’t remember what it was for. Conspicuous gallantry, I’m sure. And Constance became engaged to a quite beautiful senior officer, a brigadier or something similar, that she had nursed back to full health from the removal of a chip of bomb-burst lodged in his side. He came of a wealthy and glamorous family, whose heraldic name eludes me, as does his Christian name. I think secretly I called him ‘Cuckoo’, so debatably his surname might have been Cook-something-or-other.
I feel I must stop this silly chattering. I must – what did they say in the 1920’s – no, the 2010’s? – cut to the chaise.
It was 1918. The War was coming in to land, in a belly- flop, to be quite coarse, and so many stranded in its wake, all broken, poor souls, or lost, and one saw these women, mothers, widows, sisters, weeping in the winter mornings, standing out beyond the house, where the village was back then, with the telegrams in their hands. “Dead,” they said, the telegrams. “We regret.”
They shivered, the women, and sometimes the men did too, the fathers, sons and brothers or, dare I say this now, the unspoken lovers of those other lost men, ploughed deep into the wine-red blood and midnight mud of France, or wherever it was they were mown down. Or else buried in graves, which were all alike, and like the stone-petrified wooden footprints of the Devil passing over Europe, a Devil that did not exalt but wept and shivered, as the mortal others did, left behind on that frozen timeless shore of grief.
He was called Ashton. Being a soldier, he had some sort of rank, but I can’t remember what. There were a lot of soldiers at the dance in the town. I’ll call him Captain. I’ve done that since, always since. Captain Ashton.
The dance was to mark Christmas, and recent Victory, and was held at the Eddington Hall, a lofty stone building with a ballroom of sorts. The big room had been garlanded with paper leaves, and lit with candles in addition to the electricity. I wore a pale dress, and I remember it had a yellow sash, and little yellow flowers worked on the bodice. By then there was a dislike of coupling red to white. I had heard someone remark such a combination was now supposed to be avoided, as it might indicate bandages and fresh blood. Probably they were being ‘dramatic’, as Eric would have termed it. (Nevertheless, the red-white partnership seemed seldom to be seen, certainly in our part of the country, after the upheavals of 1916).
I remember too I felt less nervous before we left for this dance. Perhaps that was due to my having learned that a tiny secret nip of sherry, from the evening decanter in the dining-annexe, seemed to calm my nerves. (The maids sometimes stole quick nips of sherry too, or the port. No one seemed to notice it. As for me, I had reached the revelation after having a teaspoon of brandy, administered to me by an irritated Constance, when I had wrenched my ankle the previous winter).
Also that evening of the dance I noticed, as if for the first, my arms, mostly bare in the evening frock, also slim and firm, and quite shapely, and luminously pale, if warmer in tone than my dress. Then I noted my eyes were large and clear, and of a shiny grey, the lashes quite long and dark. And my hair, washed carefully the day before, and pinned up with little silvery combs, shone in a wonderful, metallic way. Possibly I was not, then, as unprepossessing as I’d always thought, or been assured, by implication, or family remarks, I was. I had a tiny waist, eighteen inches for my eighteen years. (And for the year; come to that). I never asked myself thereafter if the measurement would increase, by one inch, for every subsequent birthday. Nor would I have the time or space to find out.
When I entered the hall of the dance, everything was as usual. Clusters of young men, cold or timid, and, by this date, some flushed and a touch heightened by alcohol, (it seemed I wasn’t the only coward at a social gathering. Of course, the men were brave as lions elsewhere, on the Plains of War). Others were obviously bored, however, scanning the available female meat, just as tired or over-heated lions would be, and thinking: but these gazelles aren’t quite up to scratch, old boy. For there we were, the straggly gaggle of gazelles, we girls, some also nervous, and some not. Constance began dancing almost as soon as she entered. Her Cuckoo brigadier was absent, in a mud-hole somewhere, waiting valiantly to lead his men into ferocious battle. But Constance had the ‘Correct’ attitude. She was Brave, and lived every day as it came to her. One must not show worry, must not brood or mutiny. One must set the proper example. And why shouldn’t she dance, after all, in her turquoise dress with gilded beadwork? She did her duty. She nursed dying warriors back to health, Saint Constance. I shouldn’t say that.
I believe I was starting to lose the spoonful of courage I’d gained after about ten minutes. I would, wouldn’t I, have been useless in a battle. Others had been selected from the gazelle herd, borne off in strong lio
nesque, uniformed, masculine arms, and were dancing now like my sister, yielding and swirling like lilies on a lake.
And I, as ever, sat on my chair, and looked about me brightly, as if loving simply to be there, while my heart drained of its wisp of valour. Until, all at once, he stood before me.
He said his name, and I thought he said that he knew my aunt, one of my aunts, as if he must reassure me he was acceptable. I forget which aunt he was claiming to know. I personally knew none of them well. But he held out his hand, politely, coolly asking me if he might dance with me. So I stood up and said, in my silly small voice, “Of course, Captain.” After which he led me out on to the floor, just as a waltz began.
How can I describe him? I don’t know. All the words I choose – tall, beautiful, unlike any other – seem entirely mindless, as no doubt, since I selected them, then and still, they are. His hair was a flaxen almost white, and his eyes that deep blue one sometimes sees in old paintings of a foreign sea, in Italy, say, or up against the shores of Egypt. He had retained a settled tawny brownness of other places, acquired in hot summer and upheld by the burning winds of winter cold.
I’m not, or I was not, a bad dancer, not really. Light on my feet, somebody had said, and I followed obediently the male lead. Acquiescent cowardice then has its virtues, it seems. Even so, this wasn’t what I felt when I danced with this stranger called Captain Ashton. I felt so much more than ever, in my tiny little world of days amounting to eighteen years, I had felt before.
When the music stopped, he led me out of the hall into a side room, where there were chilled drinks – I can’t recall what I drank, some sort of lemonade punch, I think, not alcoholic, but very cold. He drank a whisky, just one.
Then we danced again. I can’t recall what this dance was. More brisk, I think, than the waltz. We had spoken a few words, both when on the dance floor, and at the draped and pink-paper-flowered tables. The conversation, or rather, the things he said to me, flowed and sank away, what they call, and perhaps did even then, small talk. Yet his intense sea-blue eyes met mine, stared deep within me. Did he do this with all his partners? I don’t know how much the war had damaged him, or even if it had sent him mad with that sort of dissimilar but entirely related energy, which I have seen since, in extraordinary acted scenes on the house Tea V, moving photographs, flickers from a later time, when everyone seemed to become more honest, or only more unbearably assaulted by the effort of telling decorous lies.
All told, I conclude we had four dances together, Captain Ashton and I. I learned, or I thought I did, he had a sister, also a nurse as was Constance, and that he had loved France in the two years preceding 1914 when he, then a very young man, had travelled there. What now happened there appalled him, but he kept his statements on this fact to the barest bones; perhaps only one – a single bone of sorrow.
Suddenly it was nearly half past ten o’clock. Another man, this one older, and not in uniform, came up and murmured something to the Captain. The captain nodded, and the man went away.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” the Captain said to me. “It’s been a great pleasure to meet you. Do take care of yourself. We’ll get through this somehow. As the poet says, The morning always comes. Goodbye.” His voice wasn’t cold, nor relieved to be called away; nor was it sorry. He smiled and nodded to me. I said, or I hope I did, the proper polite words. There was something in his eyes, or did I imagine it? – nothing to do with regret at leaving me, only a vague, clear shadow, as if, and I’m unsure how to say this, I had stood for a while between him and something darker and less ordinary. It wasn’t that he would miss me, only what I had represented. Or only my interruption of other, more awkward, matters, which help anyone else might have provided him.
I thought, with a stumble of my pulse, that maybe he had been called directly off to return into the Theatre of War. But he did not leave quite then. He went across the room to another group of people, these known to my parents, and quite important in the town. He stood a while with them, sometimes laughing, or gravely listening. He next chose two more girls to dance with. Four dances each, or so I seem to have counted. Just the same as with me. He vanished from the hall some thirty-six minutes after.
My mother had gone in to take supper with her own friends, so I had sat down again, on another chair, and watched the other dancers go past, including, of course, for a time, Captain Ashton. It occurred to me somebody had suggested he dance with me and take me for a lemonade, to even the score for me a little.
After he had completely disappeared, I began to feel cold quite soon, and then very heavy. Shivering, I put on my wrap. Nobody else had or did ask me to dance. At twenty minutes past midnight Constance, who had an early shift at the hospital next day, came over and suggested we should leave. The Findlays would bring Mother home, and besides I was looking washed-out. I think that was how she put it, unless again that is another expression I’ve somehow accumulated since; washed-out, like an old and fraying shirt or petticoat, all my colours and my usefulness soaked and rubbed and wrung away.
During the night at first I couldn’t sleep. Then, when I did, I woke over and over, sometimes with great jumps of fear that had no proper source. Once I woke and I was boiling hot and soaked in perspiration.
Then, as I lay and cooled and calmed, my brain seemed to clear in quite a crystalline manner, and deep within my mind I knew that I would soon hear from Captain Ashton, and we would meet again, and be sworn lovers; we would marry in due course. The War next would have ended, nor would there ever be another, and he and I would love each other through a vibrant youth and holy maturity into a serene and gentle old age.
Never, truly I believe, did I ever before feel so uplifted and so sure, nor so perfectly, radiantly happy, in all my miniature life.
I’ve never forgotten this, of course not. And perhaps not surprisingly. These were the last definite physical thoughts and feelings I ever had.
That terrible epidemic, that plague, that thing called the Spanish Influenza, was already threading and surging through our world. And so it had come, unseen and unnoticed, into mine. That alarming and radiant night I was already dead, even if I breathed still, and so never knew.
There’s no point in recounting the stages of the fever and horror and decline, nor all those symptoms, and other awfulness, not even the sound of my mother screaming in lament, which I heard as if far, far off on the edge of a mountain, and through thick white fog, when they apparently told her I could not be saved. I can’t understand what made her so distressed to lose me. She had never found me in the first place. To her I was nothing. Perhaps it was the thought of the waste of time and money to be entailed in my funeral. I won’t retract this statement.
Other Things
We had lived here in the old house all my life, and presumably I didn’t know enough about anywhere else to go back to. I’d never been to France, or Italy. I’d never even been to London, let alone Heaven. As for Hell, well, in a soft and insipid way, it was here at home, wasn’t it? I’m sorry, no doubt I never grasped how historic this house is, and how lucky I was to live here, and now I’m afraid I still don’t grasp it, or appreciate it, as I should, or really care, and anyway I don’t live here now, do I? I’m dead here.
It was like wandering back in from a mist, or the fog I spoke of, and I found myself standing in my blue tailored suit, on the stair, and I looked down and there was this pretty, dark-haired young girl below in the hall, and everything smelled and looked and was quite changed. And then it all melted away and I was sitting instead in the library, which had been my father’s ‘Province’, (as my mother termed it), where he lounged, and read books, and smoked cigars and drank brandy, and ‘jawed’ with male friends, and Eric, after dinner, far from the twittering of the women of the house.
Later, I met Elizabeth, the girl from the hall – which is curious because, when I saw her from the staircase that first time, she wasn’t yet a ghost, nor fully grown up, and besides I seem to have gone farther back in
time and place after seeing her, back to a much earlier period, perhaps only a few years after I actually died in 1918. Which is when I met Coral, and after that eventually all of them who were already here. But now, saying this, I’m not quite sure when I did meet each of them the first. Also, and I can’t deny or explain this, I do feel in addition that I spent some time elsewhere. By which I mean I was somewhere that wasn’t the house, though I have no notion where, but I wasn’t unhappy there. It stays for me a mystery.
A memory – which I cannot remember. Haven’t I said I am silly? What can we expect of me but an inadequate – what do they say? – take on events?