The Twilight Hour

by Nicci Gerrard

  He made no move towards her. She understood that she could walk past him, into the house, close the door behind her, and he wouldn’t pursue her. He didn’t smile or speak, just waited to see what she would decide. And as she stared into his eyes, she felt that she was looking into a desolate landscape of the hidden self and she knew that as long as she lived she would remember the moment when he let her see everything he was.

  She took the last two steps that separated them and put up one hand, touching his cheek with the tips of her fingers very lightly. Still he didn’t move, though a small writhing crossed his face.

  ‘I never knew,’ she said at last softly. Never knew how deep it could go; how much love could hurt. Looking at his face, she felt scoured by the feeling. ‘Come with me.’

  ‘Wait.’ It was the first word he’d spoken. ‘You won’t leave again?’

  ‘I won’t leave again.’

  ‘Not if—’

  ‘Not if anything.’

  She took his hand and led him across the road and through the door. Gladys came into the hall at the sound of the door closing, but Eleanor didn’t let go of Michael’s hand as she took him up the stairs. She couldn’t remember why they had ever bothered to hide themselves before, like a dirty secret from the light, like a squalid fling that would run its course and need never be mentioned to the snickering world.

  He had chilblains, new callouses on his hands, new lines on his face. She hated to see him so. She took him in her arms and held him against her breast; whispered words into his ear that made him groan. He had a few days’ leave before being sent abroad; he had managed to borrow a small cottage in Norfolk for three days, on the chance she would come with him. She told him she would come with him, anywhere. In those few days, love seemed so grievously powerful and the self so fragile and porous that even speaking was hard. They used low, soft tones with each other and chose their words with care.

  They travelled by the slow train to the coast, stopping at empty stations, not saying very much, staring out of the window and then back at each other. He was still in his uniform, which was a bit too large for him. The house was square, plain, very small and barely furnished, half a mile from the sea. It stood alone in marshy, windswept fens, with the great sky above them and the wrinkling sea in the distance. They felt that they were quite alone, and for that brief period the war stood far off, just a distant rumbling, a faint shadow. The days were cold and bright, and the wind that swept in from the North Sea took their breath away. They walked for miles along the vast, deserted beaches, the wet sand shining and the sea-birds stepping delicately through the shallows or borne aloft on the currents of air, calling; and they hunkered down behind the dunes and felt for each other through layers of clothing, Eleanor’s hair blowing into his face and sand on their lips. They found shells on the beach and Eleanor took some home with her and kept them with her father’s cuff-links. In the evenings he would build a fire and she sat beside him and watched as he stood at the stove, making their dinner from the supplies they had brought from Eleanor’s rooms. She played songs on the battered piano in the living room, some of whose notes were missing. Decades later, hearing them, they would bring back those days by the sea but she never played them again herself. They made love and tasted the salt on each other’s skin. They drank whisky and tasted it in each other’s mouths. They woke in the night and reached out for each other.

  On the last day he dressed once more in his uniform. Naked, she watched him from the bed as he buckled his belt, buttoned his jacket, tied up his laces, until he looked camouflaged, diminished. He turned, feeling her gaze, and came towards her. And she unbuttoned the jacket and pulled it off; knelt and unlaced his heavy boots. She took off his trousers and laid him down on her bed, pale and slender, with his shorn head and his unsmiling face. She leant over him and kissed him. She lowered herself on to him. It could never be enough.

  ‘Don’t go,’ she said afterwards.

  ‘You know that I have to go.’

  ‘Don’t die.’ She hated the words even as she was saying them: they were the words Merry would have spoken.

  ‘I’ve no intention of dying. I’ll be back before you can miss me.’

  ‘I miss you already.’

  ‘How can you miss me when you have me?’

  ‘How can I have you when you’re going?’

  ‘Because you always have me,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter where I am, how far from you; you have me. I’m leaving my heart in your care.’

  ‘I’ll take good care.’

  ‘Do that. It won’t be long, Nell. Will it?’ he added, and she saw he was scared.

  ‘No. No, of course it won’t.’

  ‘And then we’ll have the rest of our lives.’

  ‘But it was long and we didn’t have the rest of our lives. We just had those few snatched, secret months.’

  Peter got up and closed the curtains.

  ‘And then what—?’

  ‘Enough of me,’ said Eleanor. ‘Enough of the past. Time to talk about the party.’

  ‘Party?’

  ‘My birthday party. Most people get presents for their birthday – I will give presents. Lots of presents. Everything I’ve got. Wine and jewels and pictures and furniture and books. A great free-for-all. What will you have?’

  ‘Me!’

  ‘Yes. Take your pick.’

  ‘I couldn’t – I don’t want anything.’

  ‘Surely. If it makes it easier for you, you can choose after they’ve all gone. There’ll be plenty left.’

  ‘I plan to go before they arrive.’

  ‘Which would be a pity. But in that case, you’d better choose now.’

  ‘Perhaps just a couple of photographs,’ he said. Then he could take the photographs he had already put beside his bed.

  ‘That doesn’t seem quite adequate, after all you’ve done.’

  ‘I’ve liked being here. This has been my halfway house. My safe place.’

  ‘I’m glad.’ She briefly laid a cool, dry hand over his.

  ‘And now it’s nearly time for me to go.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Eleanor. She was smiling at him and he smiled back, although he knew that she couldn’t see.

  24

  In May, Michael was killed in the Siege of Calais. Eleanor didn’t hear of it directly: she had only one scrap of a letter that he had posted before embarking, and then nothing. Michael’s mother was officially informed and she told family and friends, although gradually. Merry heard of it from the aunt and uncle with whom Michael had been staying when she had met him; they knew of their nephew’s past involvement with Merry but not that he had left her. They thought she was still his girl and came to the house especially to tell her, even though they themselves were stumbling in their grief. They held her hand and treated her like the dead man’s acknowledged sweetheart and it gave her solace. She did not tell them she had heard nothing from Michael for very many months, and she wept in their embrace. She was very pretty and delicate. Her eyes were red-rimmed. She told her friends of the death, and then after a day or two of sobbing she wrote a letter to Eleanor. She put a great deal of care into the letter and wrote it several times before it satisfied her. She was laying down a version of events that she felt confident Eleanor wouldn’t contradict. Although she could never admit it to herself, she was glad that Michael had died; now he could belong to her again. Eleanor would never have him. In the end, Eleanor had lost and she had won.

  Dearest Eleanor, I have some tragic news and I wanted to give it myself, before you heard from Daddy or Sally, though they’ve been very kind to me. Everyone has been kind. You’ve always tried to protect me but you can’t protect me from this. My darling Michael has been killed. You understood how much we meant to each other; I know how you stood up for us with Daddy and Sally. I will remember him and love him until the day I die. It is a dreadful waste of his life and our happiness. I have written to his mother and I think I will go and visit her soon. We will be able
to talk about Michael and perhaps that will give both of us some much-needed comfort.

  I wish you were here, Eleanor. I am trying to be strong but it is very hard when I feel so weak and unhappy. But at least I know that he died fighting bravely for his country and what it is to have been truly loved.

  Your ever-loving sister, Merry

  At first, Eleanor didn’t take in the contents of the letter that she crumpled in her hand. Her hand was trembling but her brain was still and empty. There was a sour feeling in her throat, as if she had been sick. She opened up the letter and stared at it, trying to make sense of the words. My darling Michael has been killed. That meant her Michael had been killed, her darling and her love, who had found her out and made her real. Has been killed. Was dead. Is dead. Was, is and ever more shall be dead. But still, her brain didn’t process the fact; she simply went on staring at the writing, girlishly round and neat, the way Merry had always written since elementary school. Eleanor could see her sister as she was then: the end of a plait in her mouth and a puckering frown on her pretty face. Triumphant.

  It is a dreadful waste of his life. As if he’d been crumpled up and thrown away. She imagined Michael limping towards battle. No, she couldn’t imagine it. She refused to imagine that she would never see him again. I know what it is to have been truly loved. Merry’s easy, lying, self-deceiving words – words she would repeat until even she believed them – but did she, Eleanor, know what it was to have been truly loved? No; for they had only just begun. He had told her, that last anguished time that even now made her body lurch with a kind of remembered, hopeless desire, that a lifetime would be too short.

  He died fighting bravely. What did Merry know, what did any of them know, about how Michael would have died? This trite phrase, died fighting bravely, was just a sticking plaster over a gaping hole where the heart used to be. Perhaps he had died bravely, thinking of King and country, thinking of England’s hills and fields, or perhaps he had died slowly, horribly, lying in the mud like an animal in pain, and alone, no one to hold him and look into those eyes of his and say his name.

  They would not grow old together. She would grow old alone.

  She put her hand against her heart to feel it beating. She felt the weight of her breast, soft and full against the heel of her hand, and then she laid a palm flat against her belly. She closed her eyes and let the knowledge enter her.

  She was sick, but even after there was nothing left she still retched, stinging bile splattering against the toilet bowl. Then she washed her face with cold water and cleaned her teeth and put on fresh clothes. She felt dizzy, clammy, cold, dark. So cold and dark although it was bright summer.

  Dearest Merry, she wrote, and then stopped. Her pen slipped in her hand. There were birds singing outside in the dusk, perched on the plane tree. She took another piece of paper and began again. Dear Merry, I am so very sorry for your loss.

  They were words she could have written to a stranger. This was to be the lie that Merry would build her life on: that Michael had died loving her; that she was the best beloved. This was how she could survive, her frail but steely self kept intact. And how would she, Eleanor, survive? What was her story to be? These are terrible times, she wrote, and I hate to think of what you must be going through. She knew it was her task to say something about the comfort to be drawn from having known love, but she couldn’t. I am glad that you are being cared for and of course I will come and see you very soon. All my thoughts are with you, Eleanor.

  It was insufficient but it was all the generosity that she could manage for now. She took the letter to the postbox and then she walked all the way to the churchyard and the quince tree. She sat in its dappled light and remembered him.

  She was sick again in the night, but the nausea wouldn’t leave her. There was a nasty taste in her mouth and it was as if she was poisoned. Her breasts felt uncomfortable and her skin prickled. Perhaps she was ill – but of course she knew that she wasn’t ill. She had known for days, weeks even, as she leant over her wireless listening to the news, or sat in the little hall up the road planning evacuations and mobile canteens, chatting with the other women who all had husbands or brothers or sons abroad, or ate her buttered roll in the little café and heard everyone talking of the war. How long had it been? She counted back to their last time together in the small house near the sea, the tender frenzy. They hadn’t taken care. Now she didn’t know what to do or who to tell. There was no one in the world she could tell and there was no one who could tell her what to do.

  Once, she had been engaged to Dr Gilbert Lee: anticipating a church wedding with white satin and bridesmaids, family heirlooms, a house with windows through which the light fell over polished floors, a disapproving mother-in-law, theatre-going and concerts and days flowing past like a broad steady river. Now she was on her own in a city in danger, and Michael was dead and she was in trouble.

  At last, she told her friend Emma, who lived a rackety kind of life with her artists and penniless poets. Emma regarded her with excited horror, a hand over her mouth.

  ‘Oh my gosh. You poor thing,’ she said. ‘Gin. Castor oil. Hot baths.’

  ‘Or I could try falling down the stairs,’ suggested Eleanor drily.

  ‘There are things you can take. Someone said putting elm bark up you. I don’t know. I’ve never … but I can ask people.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Who—? Was it the man who you—?’

  ‘That’s not relevant,’ said Eleanor, cutting her short. ‘Someone I’m not going to see again.’

  Suddenly, the roads seemed to be full of pregnant women, of women pushing babies in perambulators. They had wedding rings on their fingers. They had husbands. She hid in her room with the curtains drawn, repelled by the glare of the sun. Its heat seemed hostile. Everything seemed dirty, infested, rotten. Her skin felt smeared, however much she washed. Food made her stomach heave. Even the thought of the rich yellow of an egg yolk or the blisters of blood on meat flooded her mouth with bile. She could smell what Terence was cooking in his room. Sardines. Corned beef. Sour milk. Fried eggs. Beer. She could smell the garlic on Gladys’s breath. She heaved the contents of her stomach into the toilet when she woke and still couldn’t get rid of the nausea that coated her insides.

  She lay on her bed in her slip and felt the squashy softness of her breasts against the pillow. It was just a collection of cells, no bigger than a fingernail or a broad bean or something. Yet though her face had become thin and pale, purple shadows blooming under her eyes, and her collarbone seemed sharp as a blade, her spare body was swelling and ripening, as if one day it must split like a purple fig, a melon spilling its seeds. She was like a piece of food herself, slightly rotten. She thought she could smell her own disintegration.

  Across the street one day, near Oxford Street, she caught sight of Gil. He was walking with a woman. She only glimpsed them for a few seconds, but she could see that the woman was small and full of vivacity and she was laughing, her head tipped back. She had her arm through Gil’s and was laughing into his face. She couldn’t see his expression but she imagined it to be solemn and happy, the way it used to be with her. She turned quickly away and stood with her back to them, her face pressed to some shop window, pretending to be gazing in at the wares. But she couldn’t see anything beyond her own reflection. She stood like that until they were gone and she was safe from being seen.

  Gladys knocked at her door, put her small face round it.

  ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Yes.’ Eleanor struggled to a sitting position and pushed her hair back from her hot face.

  Gladys sat down on the edge of Eleanor’s bed, folded her hands in her lap.

  ‘You’re not well,’ she said.

  ‘No. I think it’s a sickness bug.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Eleanor could feel Gladys’s bright, restless eyes travelling over her body. ‘How are you going to get better?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Yo
ur young man—’

  It was a relief to talk about it. ‘He died.’ For the first time, Eleanor’s eyes filled with hot tears; she could feel grief unlodge in her stomach. She looked away and swallowed hard. ‘He died in France.’

  ‘Oh my dear.’ For some reason, she didn’t mind Gladys’s sympathy. ‘So you’re in a tidy bit of trouble now, aren’t you?’

  ‘I fear I am.’

  ‘Have you thought of what you will do?’

  ‘Do?’

  ‘About your troubles.’

  It seemed odd to Eleanor that neither of them said the words out loud: pregnancy, baby, illegitimacy, disgrace … They just said ‘troubles’, delicately skirting around the thing itself.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, biting her lip, looking towards the window.

  ‘There are chemists, you know.’

  ‘Chemists? But it’s not allowed. What would I ask for?’

  ‘The ones that can help often have signs.’

  ‘Signs?’

  ‘“Cures for all blockages”, “Treatments for all ladies’ ailments”. That kind of thing. Once you start looking, you will see them.’

  ‘And then I just ask for – what do I ask for?’

  ‘Say you haven’t been getting your monthlies and you need help.’

  ‘And they’ll just give me something over the counter, as easy as that?’

  ‘I don’t know if it’s easy. It can be nasty and then, whether it will actually work …’ And she gave a little shrug.

  Eleanor wanted to ask her if she’d ever been in the same situation, but she didn’t know how.