by Hilary McKay
‘I certainly will,’ she replied.
That was how, when Rupert opened his eyes at last, there was Clarry’s face, drifting in and out of focus, but growing clearer all the time, through waves and waves of consciousness, as once, long ago, when he had fished her half drowned from the sea.
‘Hello, Rupert,’ said Clarry.
FORTY-FOUR
Facing the Music
Clarry’s father looked at her for a long time and said finally, ‘Well.’
Two months had passed and Clarry was back, facing the music, as Violet had put it, only it wasn’t music, it was silence.
The whole house was eerily silent. The air was so still that when she moved it felt as if she were disturbing something, like a puddle when it was stirred with a stick.
There was still a half-painted butterfly.
‘We found Rupert,’ said Clarry, a bit unnecessarily because she could see perfectly well that on the mantelpiece was a neat stack of the letters she had posted home, the envelopes carefully slit.
‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to you,’ said her father.
‘Have you been all right without me? I’m so sorry if you were worried.’
‘Worried?’
‘I knew Rupert couldn’t be dead,’ said Clarry. ‘If he’d been dead, we’d have known, wouldn’t we?’
‘In what way?’
‘We’d . . . we’d have ached. I think. We’d have known somehow.’
‘Your grandfather’s gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘More than a week ago. Did you know somehow? Did you ache? I thought not. I’m just back from Cornwall. The funeral was yesterday.’
Clarry stared at him, absolutely stunned.
‘I’m sorry to have to tell you like this. Your grandmother is very much distressed. Since you’ve finished with school, I think you should go there. You might be some comfort. I don’t know.’
That was the worst moment, as bleak as when the telegram came.
But it passed, and Clarry was grown-up now.
She put her hand on her father’s arm, and led him to a chair. She would have liked to hug him, but she knew that he would flinch away. Nevertheless she held his hand gently and said, ‘Poor Grandmother, poor Grandfather, poor, poor you, what an awful time you’ve had. Does Peter know?’
‘Why should he? I have given up expecting anything from my children.’
‘I’ll make tea, with sugar in – we had some sugar, I know. Something hot. And light the fire and warm the house up. Stay there. Please don’t go.’
He let her fetch a blanket, light the fire and make tea. She lit the fire in the kitchen too. The kitchen cupboards had clearly been recently restocked by Mrs Morgan. She found potatoes and a tin of ham and another of peas and made a sort of meal.
‘It’s much too cold in the dining room,’ she said, ‘but it’s warming up in the kitchen now and I’ve pulled the table close to the range. Did Grandmother get my letter from France when I told her we’d found Rupert?’
‘I presume so.’
‘Did . . . did Grandfather know?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Miss Vane was wonderful. She helped so much in France. She looked after the other families in the hostel who had come to see their sons, and she went shopping in the town for people – she speaks French much better than me – and she wrote letters home for patients. She’s brought back another cat! A kitten, all the way from France in a basket!’
‘And your cousin is well? It was all a fuss about nothing?’
‘He has a fractured skull and a broken pelvis. He had blood poisoning. He was caught by shellfire, they think. They found him in a bomb crater; they didn’t know how long he’d been there. Probably three or four days, at least. He hadn’t any identification and he can’t remember any of it. He said he was worrying about someone, and the next thing he knew he was in hospital.’
Clarry looked up and saw her father wasn’t listening, so she stopped.
Spring 1918
FORTY-FIVE
Miss Vane and Mr King
Rupert was moved to England a week after Clarry left France. By either luck or charm or a mixture of both, he managed to get himself into one of the hospitals in Clarry’s own town.
‘Thank goodness we’re not getting him,’ said Vanessa when she and Clarry met at the cottage.
‘I thought you’d be disappointed,’ said Clarry. ‘You could have cheered him up!’
‘No, thank you,’ Vanessa replied. ‘I tried cheering him up that time he came on leave. It didn’t work out very well. I don’t think Rupert and I could cope with sponge baths and bedpans and just-let-me-look-under-that-dressing. Besides, I’m seriously thinking of giving it up.’
‘The bedpans and dressings?’
‘No, no, the cheering! The last one I cheered up, that lovely dark boy who lost his arm (I taught him to drive, he was wonderful; he even managed the gears by the end), how was I to know he was engaged?’
‘How did you find out?’
‘She ambushed me. Very cross. I hate being shouted at.’
‘Poor you.’
‘I know. I felt like saying, He kissed me first! But I didn’t want to show that I cared.’
‘Did you?’
‘No more than usual. Never mind. The good news is that Simon is being moved back from the front for a bit. Oh, when will this blasted war be over, and what will I do when it is?’
‘America will speed up the end, that’s what everyone was saying in France.’
‘Perhaps, but I don’t think the fast bit will be much fun. Talk about something else. What was it like facing the music?’
‘Not very nice. A bit better now, though. Grandmother has come to stay so she can be close to Rupert.’
‘And Lucy!’
‘Oh, what a good idea, Vanessa! She could see Lucy! How could I get her there? Perhaps Mr King?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Clarry! You know my dad adores you! He’ll come and fetch you both in the car, since he has unkindly reclaimed it again. Leave it to me, I’ll sort it out. Are you going? Give Rupert my love, and Peter. And everyone at school. You are still going to school? Are you happy, Clarry?’
‘Yes,’ said Clarry, and she was. It was the spring of 1918 and she was unexpectedly content. Rupert and Simon were temporarily safe. Someone who was not Rupert was in love with Vanessa. Peter was happy in Oxford, transformed by finding something worth doing at last. Small, cheerful things happened. Violet, who had recently been writing very highly scented letters indeed, had come to borrow the pink hat.
‘For a photograph,’ she said. ‘He’s had one in my tram conductor’s uniform, and he’s had one by the shop, and now I want something fancy by the lilacs in the park. Is it all right that I borrow it?’
‘Of course! It’s lovely! Didn’t I say you could?’ asked Clarry, running to fetch it. ‘But, Violet, who is he?’
‘It’s Eddie from those first socks I sent that were all your idea! I’ve had eleven letters now and two postcards with the same picture and he’s looking out for a shell case to make into a vase. The brass ones polish up lovely, he says. I’ve told them all at the Red Cross about him. I’m surprised Miss Vane hasn’t told you!’
Clarry was not surprised, because recently Miss Vane had developed a new interest of her own. When she had come back from France to find her cats stuffed to cushion size, the earth box scrubbed white, and her back door repainted a beautiful emerald green, she had naturally invited Mr King to dinner. He in turn had produced a perfectly respectable little dogcart, polished Jester so he looked like a newly varnished black-and-white rocking horse and taken her jaunting into the spring countryside. She had returned looking ten years younger and carrying a bunch of cowslips.
‘Good Lord, Miss Vane!’ exclaimed Clarry’s father indignantly, as soon as Mr King drove away. ‘The rag-and-bone man!’
‘He is actually a very knowledgeable art and antiques dealer,’ said Miss Vane proud
ly, ‘who prefers to source his own stock.’
‘He sourced my piano,’ said Clarry’s father, who never, ever forgot or forgave.
‘It was entirely wasted and being ruined by damp,’ replied Miss Vane with spirit.
‘You’ve changed your tune!’
‘Yes, I have, Mr Penrose,’ agreed Miss Vane. ‘I am happy to say I have!’
Clarry’s father was very much put out. In the past he had never bothered to treat Miss Vane much more considerately than he had Clarry, but at the same time, the option that it might prove useful to marry her and that she would be grateful if he did had always been at the back of his mind. Now he was suddenly alarmed and he stood dithering in the street, half inclined to ask her now and secure her before she did anything rash, half inclined to rudeness.
Rudeness won.
‘You want to make sure he doesn’t source you, Miss Vane!’ he snapped, and to his dismay she laughed happily, said, ‘Oh, thank you, Mr Penrose!’ smelt her cowslips, and tossed her head.
‘That silly woman Vane is scheming to marry the rag-and-bone man!’ he told his family at dinner that night.
‘Oh, good,’ exclaimed Clarry. ‘Violet and I can be bridesmaids!’
‘I told you years ago that you should snap her up,’ Clarry’s grandmother said calmly. ‘As usual you ignored me and, as always, I was correct. Instead you let this house get into a dreadful state, and left it to me to put right!’
‘It was perfectly satisfactory,’ said Clarry’s father grumpily.
‘It was a disgrace,’ said Clarry’s grandmother. She had always been a woman who liked her own way and as soon as she had arrived, she had set about getting it. She couldn’t bear cold rooms, and she detested damp beds, and she didn’t like to see the wallpaper peeling off the walls in the corners. She also liked three hot meals a day, flowers in the windows, clean rugs and polished floors.
‘You can’t find people to scrub for love nor money these days,’ Mrs Morgan told her, but Grandmother had found them. Within a week of her arrival she had the rooms turned out, all the chimneys swept, the paintwork washed and the paper glued back up.
‘I have ordered coal and wood and kindling and opened an account at the general stores,’ she told Clarry’s father, who was so torn between temper and sulking that he didn’t know what to say. ‘Also Mrs Morgan’s neighbour’s niece is coming in for two hours every morning to help with the fires and two hours every evening to help with the supper, and in between I will cope.’
‘Er . . .’ he said, sneezing at the smell of polish and glancing ungratefully at the daffodils glowing in the window. ‘As long as I’m not expected to pay for all this, I suppose I will have to agree.’
‘Of course you’re expected to pay for it! What on earth is the matter with you?’ demanded his mother, and so he said he had to go out and then fell over Miss Fairfax on the doorstep.
‘I’ve come to see what’s going on with Clarry,’ said Miss Fairfax.
‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ said Clarry’s father, and almost ran away.
Miss Fairfax did not waste time on idle gossip. It had not gone unnoticed at school that their Dark Horse had vanished, and she was determined to find out more.
‘Quite a number of people went out of their way to help your granddaughter,’ she told Clarry’s grandmother severely, ‘and naturally they have been disappointed to find that they were wasting their time.’
‘I did write to school!’ said Clarry, who had come into the room at the sound of her voice. ‘I’m very sorry, Miss Fairfax. I had to find out what had happened to my cousin, you see.’
Miss Fairfax did not seem to see. Nor was she much moved when she heard the tale of the loss of Rupert, his rediscovery in France and how at last he had been brought back home.
‘Quite enterprising,’ she said. ‘How fortunate he has been. And now he is recovering?’
‘He’s making wonderful progress,’ Clarry’s grandmother told her. ‘Luckily he is quite near to us, so I have been able to see him often, and every day Clarry visits on her bicycle.’
‘Every day?’ asked Miss Fairfax, turning to look at Clarry. ‘Is that really necessary? Is it not, now he is so well, rather a fuss?’
At this terrible word Clarry blushed red with shame and could no longer look at Miss Fairfax.
Peter was even more direct, and he did it in front of Rupert, now promoted to crutches and encouraged to try them outside.
‘You’ve got too comfortable with Grandmother fussing over you,’ he said to Clarry. ‘And Rupert here, held captive, so you can have fun playing nurses.’
‘Shut up, Pete!’ snapped Rupert, who had reached the getting-well stage of feeling like a tiger constantly prodded with a stick.
‘No, I won’t,’ said Peter. ‘Clarry was doing all right, except her Greek was rubbish and she could have worked on that. Now you’ve appeared she’s let it all go. You’re not going to stay here forever, and neither will Grandmother. So what will she do? Run around skivvying after our father while she waits for someone to marry her?’
‘No, I WON’T!’ snapped Clarry, with flaming cheeks, but that night she got out her school uniform and gazed at it. The mushroom hat looked less becoming than ever, but she found herself opening the books.
Rupert was improving every day. One final operation had removed the last of the shrapnel from his leg, and he hardly had a headache any more. The bandages could come off any day. His temper had improved since they started him on exercises. He could walk with just a stick.
‘I shall take him down to Cornwall for some proper sea air,’ his grandmother announced, but when Rupert heard this proposal he grinned.
‘I’m not going to live with my granny!’ he said.
‘What, then?’ asked Clarry. ‘You’d hate it with Father and me.’
‘Well,’ said Rupert, ‘there are other places. I promised old Irish I’d go and see his family.’
‘He died, didn’t he?’
Rupert’s face closed up, the way it did when the war was mentioned. He could not bear it. All the time he’d been ill he had never said a word about what had happened. However, between things the hospital in France had told her, and letters that had arrived when it was heard Rupert had been found, Clarry and her grandmother knew most of it. He was wild the night before, someone had written, light-headed, singing Irish ballads, talking nonsense, burning with fever. He should have been sent back, but we were going over into an early morning attack. We drank a bit, wrote letters home, everyone was jittery. We marched to the front, and tried to get some sleep in the couple of hours before dawn.
That morning had come the first blue sky they had seen for weeks, the rain had vanished, and so had Rupert. We know now, wrote the friend, that he must have pushed aside the chap on sentry duty. He probably caught him dozing. Of course, nothing was reported.
‘Of course not,’ said Clarry. The penalty for sleeping on sentry duty was death by firing squad. Even her grandmother knew that.
We went over the top ourselves minutes later, the letter had continued. And after that everything was hell.
And so Rupert’s escape had gone unrecorded. As had his fevered race across the battlefields, shedding everything that might have identified him, pushing through the wires and winding paths and bogs, ending not in a leap to green and blue sparkling water, but in a roar of shellfire and a blast that lifted him into a crater where he stayed for three days, unconscious in the good times, singing in the bad, until someone crawled out and found him and managed to drag him back into the chaos of the trenches where there was no one left who knew his name.
He’d been so great for so long, he’d stuck out so much, he didn’t deserve it to end like that, his friend had written.
No one deserves any of it, Clarry had written back.
Now Rupert was watching her face, and she knew, with ice-cold fear, that he was about to tell her something awful.
‘Darling Clarry . . .’
‘Don�
�t call me darling!’
‘Haven’t I always called you darling?’
‘Just say it, Rupert.’
‘After Ireland, as soon as they’ll let me . . .’
‘No!’
‘Yes, I’ve got to. I’m going back.’
‘Who have you told?’ whispered Clarry at last.
‘No one,’ said Rupert. ‘I’m just telling you.’
Summer 1918
FORTY-SIX
Rupert Goes Back
Rupert went to Ireland; they didn’t see him again. He passed his medical in August; he wrote and told them that. Simon, Clarry’s gentle giraffe, sent a message to say, ‘Tell him not to come.’
But they couldn’t.
Vanessa raged, ‘How could he do that to Clarry?’
‘He could at least have told us himself,’ said his grandmother bitterly. She was more distressed than Clarry had ever seen her before.
‘The coward,’ said Clarry’s father.
Clarry said nothing. She had said it all to Rupert the day that he told her, and it had made no difference, except that they had parted angrily, hurt and hurting, instead of parting friends. Peter said nothing because he sort of understood, although he couldn’t have listed the reasons as clearly as Rupert had.
Rupert’s reasons, spoken aloud to no one, were these:
One: Clarry. He could still hear Peter’s bitter comments: ‘Clarry was doing all right . . . Now you’ve appeared she’s let it all go.’ And Peter was telling the truth. Clarry had a chance to escape. He couldn’t risk her losing it. Two: That silly kid, Simon Bonnington, who never should have been there, who wouldn’t have been, if it weren’t for him. But if Clarry had already had her place at Oxford, if Simon had been safe at home, Rupert knew that he would still go back. He couldn’t see that he had any choice. His third reason, the one that drove him hardest, was this: it wasn’t finished.
Rupert knew that he couldn’t rest until it was finished. He had to go. He’d left friends there.