by Sadie Jones
He saw that his father hadn’t left. He and Alice were waiting by the wall of the church and murmuring to each other and not looking at their friends as they passed them. After a while Gilbert came over and they spoke a few words. There was nothing conclusive; there was no reunion and no statement of loyalty. Gilbert asked him if he was all right and wanted to know if he’d be coming home, and Lewis said he wouldn’t, but he might spend the night, and that he had his enlistment notice through – and then they went. He was left with not a person in sight. He glanced over at his mother’s grave before leaving, but she’d never really been there, and it didn’t mean anything.
He walked down the middle of the road, towards the edge of the village and his father’s house, and the Carmichaels’. It wouldn’t have mattered, except for Kit. He’d thought that if he could shine a light into the dark places of her life, they would disappear, but he had thought wrong. No-one wanted to look.
‘Lewis?’
Lewis turned and saw Dr Straechen. The doctor was standing on the pavement and Lewis thought how he must look, in the middle of the street, blood down his shirt and not even able to walk straight.
‘Why don’t you come with me to the surgery?’
‘I’m all right.’
‘I think you should.’
They walked down the main street to his house, which had the surgery in the front of it, and Lewis could smell lunch cooking and hear Mrs Straechen moving around in the kitchen behind the white-painted door at the back of the hall.
They went into the consulting room. Dr Straechen closed the door.
‘Why don’t you sit down? I’ll clean you up – that cut over your eye looks rather nasty.’
Lewis sat in a metal chair by the curtain that you could pull across to divide the room. He watched the doctor go about collecting cotton wool and other things. He was grey-haired and his suit was a dark pinstripe and worn to softness. He put the things on the small table nearby and pulled up another chair and sat close to Lewis, looking at him.
Lewis felt very tired. The doctor didn’t speak, but watched him, steadily, and Lewis looked around the room. There were framed photographs on the desk of Dr Straechen’s sons and of his wife. There were flowers that needed changing and a hat-stand with the doctor’s hat and coat hanging on it.
‘I delivered you.’
‘What?’ He looked back at the doctor.
‘I delivered you. I’ll always remember your mother, the way she was about it. She wasn’t very frightened, like lots of new mothers; she was extremely brave, and she kept saying she couldn’t wait to meet you. Your father was downstairs, waiting, and he was terribly nervous, of course. It was a good straightforward labour and nothing remarkable, just the sort I like, and your mother, Lewis, your mother was a natural. Now, let’s have a look at you.’
He looked, and he wiped the blood away while he looked, and asked which bits hurt.
‘I imagine you’ve a concussion. You may have fractured your cheekbone. I can stitch the eye up for you. Do you remember that day?’
‘What day?’
‘The day – after the church – when I came to see you at the police station.’
Lewis nodded.
‘It was distressing to see you like that … I’ve got two boys. They’re older than you, of course. Both married now. My elder son’s in Egypt, with the British ambassador there. Younger one’s in the City. When they were younger it didn’t always look as if things might turn out so well. Each of them had a difficult time in one way or another. But things did work out in the end, do you see?’
‘Yes. Thank you.’
‘I’ve always thought you were a good boy.’
Lewis sort of laughed.
‘Aren’t you a good boy? I mean, I’ve always liked you.’
Lewis looked down because he was going to cry and he felt stupid about it.
‘You know you should go to hospital with this.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It does matter. Lewis, here—’ He put his hand on Lewis’s head and rubbed his hair and held the back of his neck, looking at him and making Lewis look back. ‘It does matter,’ he said.
He had Lewis lie down on the metal bed that was there, like a hospital bed, with a cotton blanket, and he put four stitches in his eyebrow. He gave him some painkillers and Lewis fell asleep almost straight after, and the doctor went away and had his lunch.
The long dining table at the Carmichaels’ house had been extended to its full length. Silver and china and linen had been laid at sixteen places during the morning, and flowers had been cut from the garden and put in small vases along it. The flowers were August yellow and pollen dropped onto the varnished table.
When the family returned from church there was a nothing, a silence, a regrouping. Claire and Dicky went into the drawing room where there were more yellow flowers, and Tamsin stood in the hall. Kit went upstairs, but stopped in the corridor on the way to her room and sat in a high-backed chair she had never sat in before. She looked up at a painting of a child with a dog. The corridor to her room was to her right and the stairs to her left and she was nowhere, just waiting.
In the hall, Tamsin took off her gloves, slowly. The telephone rang. She picked up the receiver.
‘Guildford 237?’
It was Mary Napper cancelling lunch. Joanna was home unexpectedly. They were sorry. Immediately she put the telephone down, Dora Cargill called to say they were both unwell and wouldn’t be able to come to lunch. The Turnbulls’ butler called, and then David Johnson and then the Pritchards. Everybody was terribly sorry.
The family sat at one end of the table and the lunch was brought in. It took the housekeeper and the maid to carry the side of beef, which had been for sixteen, into the room. They put it in front of Dicky. Dicky picked up the carving knife.
The maid stayed to finish clearing the extra places at the table and, as she finished, looked up and caught Dicky’s eye. She hadn’t meant for him to see her looking at him, but, when he did, she didn’t look away – not until he did.
The housekeeper came back in with vegetables.
‘Just leave them,’ said Claire, ‘we’ll manage’, and she put them near her on the table and they went out and closed the door. The air in the dining room was still and warm.
‘Do you know,’ said Tamsin, ‘I heard on the wireless, it hasn’t rained since the sixteenth of June.’
‘It has been terribly dry, but I had no idea it had been that long,’ said Claire.
‘The garden looks absolutely flat.’
‘We’ve done our best with it.’
‘There’s not enough humidity for a thunderstorm.’
‘No, it’s been very dry, hasn’t it?’
This went on for a while between Claire and Tamsin, with Dicky coming in occasionally and all three exchanging smiles, smiles that weren’t to do with the conversation.
‘It’s still hot enough to swim,’ said Kit. ‘May I go after lunch?’
‘They say the reservoirs are drying up,’ said Dicky, not looking up from his plate. His hands felt very painful, but he was cutting the food up all the same.
‘Well, I hope they’re not going to start that water-rationing nonsense,’ said Claire.
‘Mummy? May I swim?’
‘Do you remember in ’38, when none of us were allowed baths?’
Tamsin laughed. Kit began to feel desperate. Maybe they couldn’t hear her.
‘I said, could I swim after lunch?’
Dicky and Claire and Tamsin all stopped and turned to Kit and looked at her. Then they carried on.
‘Robins spoke to the boy who comes on Tuesdays for the vegetables and he said …’
Kit stood up and they didn’t acknowledge that she had stood up. She looked around at them. She thought she might laugh; she wanted to laugh at them for being like the girls at school, for being so stupidly mean to her, but somehow she couldn’t. She pushed back her chair and left the room.
She w
ent up the stairs and felt a hot feeling in her chest, and the feeling grew and she knew it was all the tears she had been not crying and not feeling, and she felt desperate and that she mustn’t cry them and mustn’t think about her family hating her, or what her father might do if he found her alone, or of Lewis and what he’d done and how hurt he’d been and not having any hope … She wouldn’t think about it and she would be strong, and she would endure it and hide herself and be brave. Brave, but not fine. She got to her room and went inside and closed the door.
She went to the floor by her bed and started to tidy the records that were lying there. She knelt, picking them up, and tried not to think about the world being hard and broken or that she was alone and broken too, and with nobody to help her. There was nobody, and she felt weak and faithless. Her tears were hot and hurt her eyes, and she was angry and clumsy, trying not to feel them and losing her battle.
The door opened. Kit scrambled up from the floor. It was her mother. Claire stood in the doorway, with one hand still on the doorknob, not committing to being there. She looked around the room and her look made the room invaded and shameful.
‘You’ll be going to Sainte-Félicité early,’ she said. ‘And you can remain there for two years. I telephoned them before lunch. You will take the train on Wednesday. We won’t expect you home for the holidays. At the end of your stay there you’ll be almost eighteen. Do you understand?’
Kit looked at her mother and she didn’t fail herself.
‘Perfectly,’ she said, ‘but when I’m gone, don’t you think it will be your turn again, Mother?’
Claire stared at her. Neither one said anything else. Kit clenched her fists and waited for Claire to go and close the door behind her, and then she sat down on the bed.
She was leaving in two days. Not some time in the future, not weeks; two days and not coming back.
She sat on the bed as the feeling came over her and she surrendered. She pressed her face into her pillow and her tears wet the eiderdown that covered it and made dark marks, and she cried and muffled the sound in the pillow. She gave herself up to it and it hurt. It hurt, but the hurt had relief in it because she was getting out. Because of Lewis, she was at last getting out.
Lewis spent his last evening at home outside the house, waiting, while Alice and Gilbert performed their evening in the lit-up drawing room. He stayed outside, where he felt more at home.
He told himself that the next day would come and that he would be away and he’d look back at this and it would be just something that happened to him, like Jeanie, or school – just some thing that happened and not everything, the way it felt now.
It wouldn’t always be so very bad. It wouldn’t always be like a death. His face was still hurting, but he reckoned it was just mending like all the other things that faded away. It hadn’t been the absolution he had needed. He didn’t think anything could be.
He pictured Kit, all her life, from her childhood – all the bits he’d seen – and she was lovely and light and strong, and he wished he could hold that in his mind all the time. He didn’t want to forget her. He had forgotten his mother; at least he hadn’t been able to keep her image in his mind.
He walked over to the woods behind the Carmichael house to collect his case when it was dark, but he didn’t look at the house. At home, he packed and made sure he was ready to go. He looked around the small white bedroom at all the familiar things: the books on the shelves and the chest of drawers and the crack in the ceiling. It was not a living place.
He sat on the bed and let his head go down into his hands. His mind wasn’t raging any more, it wasn’t rushing and fighting to hurt itself, but he was sad, and he missed Kit, and he had failed, and just then his loneliness hurt him very much. He was surprised by how much it hurt; he had thought he was already broken.
The night was long. He didn’t sleep, but waited until the very early morning and then went downstairs to leave.
As he opened the front door, sudden light filled the hall. Gilbert came down the stairs towards the dining room. It was as if they had met by chance in his office or club; he paused and shook Lewis’s hand without looking at him particularly.
‘Good luck,’ he said, and then he picked up the paper from the hall table and went into the dining room.
Lewis left the house and walked towards the road. He heard the door behind him.
‘Lewis!’
Alice came running, barefoot in her nightdress, across the gravel towards him. Her hair was loose. She stopped in front of him and glanced over her shoulder, like a schoolgirl out of bounds, and breathless with not knowing how to say what she needed to. They looked at each other, and her face, with all its need and hope, went straight to him, as it always had. He felt something like love.
‘If you write,’ she said, ‘write to the flat. We’ll be leaving this house.’
‘I won’t write.’
‘No. Goodbye.’
She kissed his cheek, carefully, reaching up, and he put his free arm around her and held her for a moment.
‘All right?’ he said, worrying. She nodded yes. He thought she meant it. She went back into the house and he didn’t wait, or watch her, but carried on, away and out onto the road.
* * *
Kit put on a light blue dress that she had been waiting to grow into and found it fitted. She washed her face and did her teeth in the bathroom and ran her damp hands over her hair and her neck for coolness, and then she went downstairs and had her breakfast in the kitchen. She called her kitten in, and fed her, and annoyed her by lifting her up with her paws dangling to kiss her. She put on her shoes by the kitchen door and went outside. She walked slowly over to the Aldridge house through the woods, and when she got there she cut down through the garden to the front door and knocked. It was Mary who answered the door, and not Alice, and when Alice came neither of them could look at the other. Kit looked at the ground and asked for Lewis and only looked up when Alice said he’d left.
‘Gone?’ she said, ‘he’s gone?’
Lewis watched the other people getting onto the train. It wasn’t the main commuter train to London, but a local one and there weren’t many people. When the train had pulled out he was alone on the platform and he watched the signals changing and saw the stationmaster, after staring at him for a while, go back into the station. It was quiet. There was birdsong and the faint murmur on the line of his distant train. He went to the edge of the platform and trod out his cigarette and kicked it onto the stones by the track. He could hear the engine of the train now, the rhythm of it and the shunting and the metal sound as it came through the valley. Then he saw the steam, a long whitish-grey trail against the clean blue sky, and then he heard a girl’s voice and stared down the platform and saw her, the blue of her dress, coming out of the station where the stationmaster had gone. She called something and he couldn’t hear what it was. He couldn’t believe it was her, but it was her, and she was running towards him. He started towards her too and he could see her clearly now and she was still running, and she was wearing the blue dress that made her look like an imagining of Kit, and not real, until he heard her shout and saw her frown and knew it was her.
‘What?’ he said and she shouted again, but her voice was a girl’s voice and he couldn’t hear her. ‘What?’
‘You are good!’ They both stopped – just for a second – ‘I had to tell you—’
They reached each other then and he got his arms around her and she was holding on to him.
‘You said you were no good, but you are.’
He held on to her and kissed her face and couldn’t believe she was there, but she was, and smelled so clean and beautiful …
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘No, no, it’s all right—’
‘I’ll be better for you, I promise.’
‘No, I love you. I said —’
‘Oh, you’re beautiful.’
He kissed her and held on to her and they kiss
ed for ages, a real kiss with longing to it and heat.
‘Come with me.’
‘I can’t.’
‘I can’t leave you here.’
‘No, it’s all right, I’m going away, they’re sending me to Switzerland early. I’ll be gone and they don’t want me back.’
‘I’ll come there, I’ll come and get you.’
They were having to talk over the engine noise now, because the train was pulling in and it was vast and noisy and the whistle blew.
‘Wait! Look here—’ Lewis started through his pockets, looking for a pencil, and the train towered over them and he didn’t have a pencil and he pulled out the enlistment notice, pushing it into her hands.
‘I’ll be here, I don’t know where they’ll send me after—’
‘Don’t worry.’
‘I’m not, don’t be sad.’
‘I’m not sad,’ she said, crying.
The train had stopped, the guard blew the whistle again. It was too hard, to have to get onto the train and to be leaving her. They held on to each other and then he got in with his case and shut the door and bent down from the window to kiss her some more, and they didn’t let go. Everything about her was right, the feel of her, her strength and her softness, and that she was a baby, but so grown-up. It was incredible to him that she knew him and, even knowing him, would hold on to him and kiss him like that, and he felt her hand on his cheek – the one that was all right – and her arm around his neck, and he kissed her some more and there was nothing in the world but that. They forgot about leaving each other, but the train had started, and she started to walk along with it, and it was funny for a moment, but then not. She started to run. He let go of her. They weren’t touching any more. She stopped and looked into him and he looked back, loving the sight of her.