‘Pride and Prejudice. You can’t go wrong with that. You can borrow my copy, you’ll find it on the landing. First shelf down, a red paper cover. It’s all alphabetical.’
‘What?’
‘A,’ she said. ‘For Austen.’
From the window at the top of the stairs, if she stretched her neck a little, Beatrice could just about see the front of Madge’s cottage door. Dr Burke was still inside. He’d been in there for almost an hour with his black Gladstone bag, and small gold-rimmed glasses that sat on the end of his long Roman nose like a fussy kind of ornament. As soon as he’d gone, his overcoat flapping, Beatrice pulled on her own coat, washed her hands again (the pigs were sticking), and headed over there, making sure that no one had seen her. Madge eventually opened the door, running a tea towel through her fingers, still in her best Sunday clothes, the only clothes she’d let a doctor see her in.
‘My last hope,’ she said, her shoulders bent, defeated.
‘What did he say?’ Beatrice asked.
‘Physically fit.’
‘But what about the other thing?’
‘Frank was more or less himself,’ she said. ‘He was trembling a bit. He kept saying, “Is it time?” over and over again, but it was as if the doctor couldn’t hear him.’
‘So he has to go back?’
Madge nodded. ‘And what chance has he?’ she said. ‘Of taking good care of himself, never mind fighting a war?’
‘The others will see he’s all right.’
‘The others will have their own selves to think about.’
‘I’ll make some tea,’ said Beatrice. ‘That’s what we’ll do; we’ll all have a nice cup of tea.’
They sat at the table looking out of the kitchen window. Frank couldn’t keep his eyes off Beatrice. He looked happy.
‘Is it time yet?’ he asked.
Outside, a couple of blue tits were swooping around in circles. ‘I never would have thought it,’ said Madge, almost managing a smile. ‘You, the foreign American, making us all a nice pot of tea.’
‘I can’t get hold of decent coffee anywhere,’ shrugged Beatrice. ‘Everything tastes like chicory.’
‘But there’s nothing like tea,’ said Frank suddenly, and they looked up at him and laughed.
Beatrice started running. He was on her doorstep. It had to be him. Out of breath, she slowed at the path, the disappointment taking over as quickly as the excitement had a moment ago. It was Jeffrey. Beatrice glared at him.
‘Three days’ leave,’ he said. He waved a box at her. ‘I’ve brought foreign cigarettes.’
She led him inside, but as the day was clear, and the sun was out at last, they sat in the garden on the two faded deckchairs she’d found folded in the potting shed.
‘So, what news?’ asked Beatrice. Now that her disappointment that he wasn’t Jonathan had passed, she felt happy to see a friendly face, someone who’d been over there.
Jeffrey shrugged. ‘We’re desperate for men,’ he told her. ‘We’re losing so many every day.’
‘And of course,’ said Beatrice, taking a drag of her cigarette, ‘that’s just the kind of news I need to help me get to sleep at night.’
‘Oh, he’ll be all right,’ said Jeffrey dismissively.
‘Is it awful?’
‘Hell. Don’t ask.’
‘Will it soon be over?’
Jeffrey opened out his hands and gave a mournful shrug as they sat in their little blue smoke clouds.
‘I read the Daily Mail,’ said Beatrice. ‘They always sound so hopeful.’
‘Of course we’re hopeful,’ said Jeffrey. ‘We’re always hopeful. Sometimes, that’s all we can be, though I’m working with men who surprise me every day, men who make me feel hopeful, and humble, shaming and spurring me on into some kind of bravery. Whatever that is.’
‘Let’s not talk about it,’ she shuddered. ‘Tell yourself you’re on vacation from all that. You’ll be back there soon enough.’
‘True. Anyone else home?’
Beatrice looked towards the lawn that needed cutting, then at the trees, their branches like fine bony hands gnawing at the sky. ‘Frank,’ she said. ‘He hurt his back.’
‘I’ll go and see him.’
‘No visitors allowed,’ said Beatrice. ‘We’ve all had very strict orders.’
‘Best not to incur the wrath of Madge Temple,’ he said. ‘I’ll obey orders, like I usually do these days.’
Later, when the sun had vanished, they took themselves inside.
‘It’s strange doing nothing,’ said Jeffrey, tapping his fingernails on his chair arm. ‘It’s almost unnerving, not to be looking at the time, or over my shoulder, or sitting in the mud.’
‘It goes very slowly here.’
‘I can hear every tick,’ he said, nodding at her clock. ‘Time passing.’
‘Take me out,’ she said suddenly. ‘Take me out to a public house for a glass of gin or something. I’m sure Jonathan wouldn’t mind. We shouldn’t be sitting here, looking at the clock. What an awful waste.’
‘All right, farm girl,’ he grinned. ‘You’re on.’
Madge watched them go. She was standing in her bedroom window. Beatrice had changed into a blue dress. She was clapping her hands, like a small excited child.
‘Sir!’ Frank shouted from the bed she’d tucked him into. ‘Is it time?’
Madge turned towards him and tried her best to smile.
‘Not yet, love,’ she said. ‘You’ve days and days ahead of you. You’ve plenty of time. We all have.’
The pub was busy, but they found a small round table close to the fireplace, Beatrice giving a mock grimace towards the case of stuffed pike and the dusty fox head with its lolling pink tongue and missing glass eye.
‘I can’t get away from it,’ she said, taking a sip from her small glass of ale, which Jeffrey assured her was the only thing in the place worth drinking.
There were other women, glued to men in uniform, laughing, and nuzzling the blue and khaki shoulders, sipping beer of their own with glazed-looking eyes.
‘I expect people will think we’re a couple,’ said Beatrice.
‘I expect they will,’ said Jeffrey with a shrug.
‘I wish you were with him, over there. I’d feel so much better.’
‘You would?’
‘Definitely. Just look at you,’ she said, smiling at his face. ‘You are reassuringly unchanged.’
‘Thinner surely?’
‘Maybe.’
‘The food is measly,’ he told her. ‘By the time the rations reach my station, they’ve either been dropped into the mud, or half have gone missing. Wet and starving, that’s what I am.’
‘You’re all dry now,’ she said, looking into the fire, the thin logs and branches rough at the edges and fraying bright orange, like the filaments in a light bulb. ‘And full?’
‘Fullish. I don’t think I’ll ever be really full again.’
‘Look, soldier, they have pork pies just sitting on the bar,’ she said, ‘and the pastry is thicker than my arm.’
‘Sold,’ he said. ‘I’ll take two of them.’
She rolled her eyes at him. The beer was making her cheeks tingle. On another table a soldier had a broken arm and a web of black lines scratched across his cheeks and he looked at Beatrice with hard hollow eyes, before turning back to his beer and a fresh game of cards.
‘The world will never be the same again,’ she said. ‘That’s what the papers say.’
‘And you know the Daily Mail is always right,’ said Jeffrey.
‘Really?’
He smiled. ‘It will be better, yes, it will be so much better.’
‘Good, but let’s talk about the past for a minute.’
He put down his glass, and wiped his foamy lips with his fingertips. ‘What past? Yours? Mine?’
‘Jonathan’s.’
‘Oh? You want to know about his deep dark secret past? It was the same as any other young man’s, I suppose.�
�
‘I mean his life. I’ve been trying to find out about his parents. His family. What were they like? Do you remember them?’
‘His mother, not at all, though of course I remember his father very well. He was a dapper-looking gentleman, but he was quiet, and something of a loner. He was great friends with Lionel. You should ask him.’
‘He never remarried,’ said Beatrice. ‘He never got over losing his wife?’
Jeffrey looked hard into his nearly empty glass. ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ he said. ‘There were rumours of lady friends, but no one ever saw them.’
‘Perhaps that’s all they were,’ said Beatrice. ‘Rumours.’
‘Twenty years is a long time to be alone,’ said Jeffrey.
An old man appeared with a tray around his neck. ‘Whelks?’ he said. ‘Cockles and mussels?’
‘I’ll have mussels. And you?’ said Jeffrey, rummaging in his pocket for some change. ‘I can recommend Ed Pearson’s seafood; he’s been selling it here for years.’
‘And never a dull moment,’ the man said. ‘I have shrimps, if the lady would prefer something a little more refined?’
‘Oh, that’s OK, I’ll take the cockles,’ she smiled. ‘You see, I’m not at all refined.’
The man chuckled, handing her a carton and a small wooden fork.
‘Now,’ said Beatrice, pulling her stool a little closer, ‘what about my husband? I’m getting curious. Has he got a murky past?’
‘Not at all,’ said Jeffrey, lighting another cigarette. ‘Though of course, they were all in love with him.’
‘Who’s all?’
‘Madge, and Mary, Lizzie and Ada. They worshipped him. From afar,’ he added.
‘Only from afar?’
‘They knew,’ he said, taking another swig of beer, ‘that he wouldn’t be interested in that kind of girl.’
‘What kind of girl?’
‘You know exactly what kind of girl I mean,’ said Jeffrey. ‘Do you want me to spell it out? Lower class. Uneducated.’
‘Uneducated? Mary’s read more books than I’ll ever manage in a lifetime.’
‘And you sold picture postcards,’ he said. ‘Aye, there’s the rub, that’s what they can’t come to terms with. Jonathan went and married a shop girl after all.’
It was a dry clear night as they picked they way over the cobbles.
‘The stars,’ said Jeffrey, suddenly stopping, tipping back his head. ‘The stars are very comforting in France. Seeing them blinking by the moon, those very same constellations.’
‘What’s it like? France?’
He said nothing as they began their walk again. Beatrice could taste the sour bitter beer on her breath.
‘Like hell,’ he said. ‘That’s all I want to say. Like hell.’
‘But the other parts of France,’ she said. ‘The France that isn’t fighting. Away from the battlefields? Is it beautiful?’
‘It’s all fighting,’ he said. ‘It’s all mud and hell.’
She didn’t say anything; she pushed her hands deep inside her pockets, as their boots made a creaking sound.
Then, ‘There was a place,’ he said quietly. ‘A small place. I can’t tell you what it was called. We were marching, the sun was shining, and then the snow, it was coming down in curtains. Some of the locals were standing in their doorways, watching these uncouth British soldiers marching through their shattered lives. A few of the old men were spitting, I can tell you that. Apparently, a month earlier one of the girls in the village had been attacked by a Canadian infantryman and we could feel the hate and tension hanging heavy in the air. We felt sad and somewhat guilty. The cottages were crumbling, the farmers’ carts were broken, their horses old and lame. Some of the women were crying. It was a desolate place, until suddenly we turned, and we were at the top of a sloping valley, and beyond there were fields and fields, a small grey church, a farmhouse. It was a beautiful sight. Really. I wanted to sit right there and paint it in the snow. That night we slept in a barn. A woman with a thick blue ribbon in her hair brought us steaming bowls of broth and jugs of red wine. It wasn’t much, but it felt like the best thing we’d tasted in our lives.’
They stopped outside Fox Cottage, the wisteria hanging ghostlike from the thick sloping walls.
‘Come inside,’ he said. ‘I’m feeling quite morose.’
‘It’s late.’
‘What does time matter?’ he shrugged. ‘But I’ll walk you home if that’s what you want?’
She shook her head, and followed him over the step.
The room was wide, the ceiling low, and the thick distempered walls were covered in paintings and prints. Butterflies. Trees. Insects. There were advertisements for ink, beef tea and dentifrice, Orchid Dusting Powder, liver salts and lamp wicks.
‘Those pictures might be selling things,’ said Jeffrey, leaning on his messy desk underneath the window, ‘but I consider them works of art all the same.’
‘You’re very talented.’
‘Thank you.’
She sat on the sofa, with its scattering of worn cushions, the arms stained with ink.
‘I kept wondering,’ she said, ‘if you might be in an office somewhere, or in a studio, designing war posters, you know, “Send Something For Our Troops”, “Save Food”, that kind of thing?’
He laughed. ‘However lily-livered I might look, I’m far too fit and well for that game,’ he said. ‘Those studios are full of lame artists, or consumptives, coughing into their palettes.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. You saw what I was like before I left. You had every reason to wonder.’
‘I don’t know how soldiers cope. You must all get very frightened.’ She paused. ‘What do you know about this illness they’re calling battle stress?’ she asked.
‘Not a lot,’ he said. ‘Though most of them are faking it.’
He went to his drinks cabinet and poured them both a glass of cognac from an almost empty, dusty bottle.
‘I’m always wondering what Jonathan might be doing. Now for instance.’ She looked up at the clock. ‘It’s eleven o’clock. It’s midnight in France.’
‘Perhaps he’s sleeping? He’s a sergeant. He’ll be much more comfortable than most.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh, yes. Our sergeant, a snappy man called Barlow, has an almost complete china tea set on a dented silver tray, he has pictures on the walls – not very good ones, mind you – he always has a bottle of something, and an almost real bed made from beer crates and wadding.’
‘That’s one thing I haven’t imagined,’ she said, rubbing her own aching eyes. ‘Jonathan simply sleeping.’
‘Of course, at first, you wonder how you’ll manage it, then by the time it’s your turn to rest, you can drop off in seconds, you could sleep standing up like a horse if you had to.’
‘I can’t imagine it.’
‘No. You wouldn’t want to.’
But then, looking at the quivering metal hands on the clock, the small sooty fire and Jeffrey’s cap with its badge shining on the desk, she could think of nothing else, and she was sure she could hear the shouting and screaming, the gunfire rattling over their small frozen heads in the trenches.
‘Let’s talk about something else entirely,’ she said suddenly. ‘Something frivolous.’
‘Frivolous is a word I haven’t heard in a long time,’ said Jeffrey.
‘Then frivolous it shall be.’
‘Hmm.’ He squeezed the last few drops of cognac into their glasses. ‘Let me think …’
‘When were you at your most frivolous?’ she asked, smiling.
‘When I was a student,’ he said. ‘We’d sit on the studio roof drinking cheap wine and smoking these stinking Turkish cigarettes that a boy called Julian would filch from God knows where. They were murder on the throat. We’d leave the windows open downstairs and play gramophone records, lie on our backs and talk nonsense all night. Sometimes we’d dance, right there on the rooftop �
� it was flat, by the way – and we’d babble on about everything, though it would usually wind up with how our fathers despaired of us ever getting real employment. One boy had been completely disinherited because his parents were so ashamed of him. Funny thing is, they’d spent a small fortune on art, they’d hung paintings on their walls, and admired them, visited the Louvre and so on. Where on earth did they think the bloody things came from? Did these paintings just appear?’
She laughed.
‘Artists are wonderful creatures and very much admired,’ he said. ‘As long as they’re not in the family.’
‘Were there girls in your class?’
‘One or two, and they were lovely.’
‘Did you fall in love?’
‘Every five minutes.’
‘Was there anyone – you know, serious?’
He took a sip of his cognac and put the glass by his feet. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There’s always one that breaks your heart.’
‘Tell me?’
‘No.’
He took his empty glass to his desk and started moving papers around, sliding them under the giant conch shell he was using as a paperweight. He put some loose charcoal pencils into a pot.
‘It’s very late,’ said Beatrice. ‘I should be going.’
‘All right.’ He turned towards her and shrugged. ‘Frivolity,’ he said, with something of a smile. ‘See where it gets you?’
*
After a day bagging carrots and turnips, Beatrice sat with a glass of warm milk reading Pride and Prejudice. Jeffrey had waved good-humouredly while she was shovelling muck in the farmyard, enjoying the sight of her in muddy overalls. He was on his way to see a cousin whose husband had been killed. ‘I didn’t really know the chap,’ he’d told her. ‘But sympathy and respect costs very little.’
The milk made her think about Normal. Glasses left souring on the table. Joanna adding a drop of honey when she’d had her hand stitched. She looked at the scar. It was almost invisible now.
The book had a torn paper jacket and yellow-edged pages. The spine was a shade or two lighter, where it had faded in the sun. It smelled musty. After the first thirty pages, her eyes began to ache. The print was too small and she longed for her magazines. The pictures of showgirls, the chat about horoscopes, or the baby-faced actor who’d left his new wife to set up home with an acrobat. So she gave up, putting the book across the cushions as a small piece of sunlight fell across the jacket. Words appeared. Holding it at an angle she tried to make them out. Scrawled dents across the illustration of a girl in a pale Regency dress said, Please come home it’s killing me.
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