by Rosie Alison
Looking back, Thomas believed this moment had struck on a rainy March day, when the teachers had gathered in the library. He could remember every beat of that afternoon. There was a confusion of chairs as they all assembled for the staff meeting. Thomas was placed next to his wife, and there, seated at a nearby table, was Ruth – casually placed in his line of vision. She did not say much, but sat very still and straight.
He watched her and wondered, with guilt, if she could read his mind. She never looked his way, nor did he expect her to, though he felt a strange pull between them – or was he just imagining that?
Obliquely, he gazed at the quiet grace of her face; an aura of light seemed to gather at the curve of her cheek, and he found himself transfixed.
Time stalled as the voices talked on; he did not want to leave that room, he wanted the meeting to go on for ever with its soft drone, just so that he could remain there watching her.
How had he ever lived without such feelings, he wondered. Her hair, tucked behind her ears, had come loose on one side. And when she moved her hand, his heart rose – the thought of a caress from those fingers.
That was the day he had recognized Ruth for what she was: the first woman he had ever wanted to love. How could he not have known this at once? It had taken him weeks, months, to understand that her face, her soul, her actions, were everything that he had ever craved in a woman.
Yet that had been just the beginning. First there had been the joy of recognition, the secret elation of love, but dejection soon followed, as he faced the folly of his feelings.
He thought of other people, everyday people on streets, who met and courted, and knew that they loved each other, and married and procreated. Perhaps that was how it had seemed with him and Elizabeth, yet all the while it had been a pretence. And now – he felt for Ruth all the things a man should feel, but he was unable to say so. How could he blight the life of this young woman, when he had nothing to offer her? And yet he could not stop himself thinking of her, and hoping for her, and longing to hold her in his arms.
Elizabeth stirred on their bed, and Thomas watched her with dispassionate eyes. He was sorry for her, and felt culpable too. But it was distant pity, long since sieved away from his own griefs. He saw her fine dark features, but these left him cold now, because she was outside him, had no place in his heart.
He might feel guilty about Elizabeth, but she could never uproot his feelings for Ruth now, however foolish they were.
31
At break time, Anna would race to the Marble hall to wait for the post. Hillary Trevor, the eldest girl, collected the letters from Mr Stewart, and all the evacuees thronged round her as she called out their names.
Maltby... Rothery... Price... Rimmer... Hill... Todd...
Small arms popped up through the crowd, letters were passed back to answering hands, and children slipped away to window seats or garden benches to read their letters from home.
My dear Anna,
We have had cloudy days this week, which has been a boon
because it is trickier for the German planes.
Not so many air raids lately and London has come back to life again,
everyone smiling on the streets, helping each other.
For the rest of her life, Anna never quite lost that childish daily hope of getting something in the post. Letters always reminded her of those wartime messages from her mother, those treasured bulletins which reassured her that another life was still waiting for her at home. There was that surge of excitement in the roll call, which might suddenly throw up her own name, Sands! Then a cream letter with her mother’s handwriting would dance across raised arms to her, and she would carefully prise it open and savour her mother’s words.
Near my office is Regent’s Park, and I often stroll there at lunch. I feed the wintry ducks and think of all the times we have done that together. I hope school is going well, and that you are eating enough. I miss you my darling, and I long for us all to be together soon, as I’m sure we will be. Keep safe, my Anna, and say a prayer for your father. He wrote to me from Egypt, where he had three days’ leave in Alexandria and said he had bought a gift for you.
Write to me soon my dearest, and all my love, Mummy.
Anna could glimpse her mother’s face in the shape of her writing, and love spilled through her as she read her words. She tucked the stiff envelope into her pocket and it pressed against her leg all day, reminding her that she had been written to, that she belonged to somebody.
Some of the evacuees never got letters, but they still could not resist hovering on the outside edge of the letter crowd with forlorn eyes. Yet even for those who were remembered, there was still a dull ache of homesickness which never really eased, running like a buried river through their daily lives.
December, in particular, was a time when many of the children grew sad, and in the years to come, Anna would never forget her wartime Christmases so far from home. But she would remember, too, how generous the Ashtons were, always making sure that every evacuee had a gift under the tree. And how on Christmas Day itself they all shared a hearty lunch, with the rare treat of roast chicken and crispy potatoes, with plenty more vegetables from the grounds.
Yet none of those consolations could ever quite staunch the Christmas-night tears in the dormitories. The remembrance of home, of mothers, of fathers. The emotional wasteland of their lives without them. It would take years for many of them to dare to love again.
* * *
The New year of 1941 brought a spell of bad weather to Yorkshire, and Ashton Park was cut off for several days by drifts of snow. Thomas found himself more removed than ever from his old diplomatic colleagues, with little or no sense of what was going on in London.
“We are packing up our house here,” Norton reported in his last letter, “and preparing for my new posting in Switzerland. We leave in a few weeks.”
It was difficult to gauge any sense of the war’s progress from a wireless in snowbound Yorkshire, Thomas reflected, as he wheeled himself to his study window. But perhaps that was a blessing.
The children had all rushed outside to build snowmen and roll great snowballs down the grass banks. They were unstoppable, despite the cold. Thomas watched them from his window, though his thoughts were elsewhere. Ruth had gone home to visit her parents for Christmas, but since her return she had behaved like a stranger to him. Their relationship, always tenuous, had reverted to stilted formality, as if any flicker of feeling had been erased.
“Did you find your parents well?” he asked at lunch, on her first day back.
“Yes, thank you – very well.”
“And what do they make of your work here?”
“They’re relieved, I think, to see me out of London.”
“It was our good luck that you ended up here—”
“If you’ll excuse me, I must finish some marking.”
“No coffee?”
“Not today, no thank you.”
Thomas found himself unable to reach her. Lessons began again and school life rolled on, yet every day he grew more agitated by their distance. He longed to speak to her more freely, but the bad weather had long since ended their poetry classes, and there was little excuse for extended conversation.
“There’s a new copy of Horizon in the library, if you would like to see it?”
“Thank you, but I already have so many unread books stacked beside my bed.”
“There’s an article about Hopkins which I thought might interest you—”
“I’ll remember to look out for it. Thank you.”
Had he lost her? Twice she shied away from the empty seat beside him at lunch, crushing him with a suspicion that she might be avoiding him. He began to feel his disability acutely; his legs felt wasted, his arms weak. He struggled to keep his back straight, and took to crossing his knees in staff meetings, to show that he still had feelings, nerves, life in his legs.
Self-doubt infected his every thought. How could she ever care
for a man such as him? How could he have ever imagined that she might?
He watched her as she walked out of rooms, or passed by windows. The lightness of her walk. I can’t take my eyes off you, he told her silently in the dining room, when her face was turned the other way.
He thought of her all day, every moment, and began to fear that he was losing his mind. She was in the crack of the floorboards, and the window pane, and the lines of every book he read. He was heart-sick, soul-sick, mind-sick. His eyes saw nothing but inward images of Ruth walking, turning, smiling. The first euphoria of love had passed. Now he was consumed by longings which he feared he could never declare.
And yet when he half-awoke in the morning he still dreamt that he was holding her and his heart soared with quiet bliss.
He was in despair but it was not true despair, he told himself; that came only with no hope, no meaning, nothing. He could still think about Ruth even if he could not be close to her. He tried to appreciate her from a distance, without any need to have her for himself. How can you feel the loss of someone you have never possessed? He wrote this in the margins of a book, trying to reason with himself, to temper his longing.
Sometimes he would indulge in safe fantasies of making love to Ruth, holding her tenderly, stroking her inner thigh, kissing her eyes, his tongue in her furrow – knowing all the while that it was only a dream. But he grew anxious, too, that he was toppling into delusion, a lunatic shadowland more vivid than the facts of his daily life without her.
Day and night he saw her face, and he shook whenever she came near, and he watched to see if she gave any flicker of response, any pity for his distress. But she always seemed distant. Was it shyness? Was it indifference? Could it even be secret love, as he sometimes hoped? He endlessly replayed their conversations in his head, sifting through everything she had ever said, straining to find any innuendo in even the most innocent of remarks.
He wanted above all to look into her eyes, and find an answering longing there. He wanted to reach out and touch her with infinite care. Perhaps it would be possible—
Until the thought came crashing back to him, as it always did, that a young woman like her could never be attracted to a married man of forty in a wheelchair. How could she ever want him? He felt pricked with jealousy by the unknown men in her life. In his darker hours, he imagined her writing loving letters to some imaginary army officer.
But for all that, his hope still refused to die away. He told himself that he must be patient. He had to wait for the spring, and longer days, when he could revive the poetry class, and she might push him there again. With the passage of time, the intimacy they had built up before could be rekindled. Sooner or later, he would know what she felt.
32
There was a night in the spring of 1941 when the bombing in London was so loud and insistent that Roberta could barely sleep. By daybreak she had given up any hope of dozing off again, so she decided to leave her cellar and walk to work early.
She made her way through Olympia and Kensington, unnaturally silent at that hour. Several buildings were turned inside out, their rooms exposed to the curious gaze of the outside world. She saw an iron bath stranded three floors up, held aloft by chaotically twisted pipes. There were staircases leading nowhere, and shreds of rose-print wallpaper flapping in the breeze. Charred joists littered the pavements, and crushed glass was scattered underfoot.
Walking briskly, she reached the empty Bayswater streets leading towards Oxford Circus, where a few burnt-out houses looked like half-finished stage sets – skeletal frames still intimately adorned with photographs and china mementoes of family life. In the trick light of dawn, it was as though she could sense the spirits of the dead flowing round her, or sitting on the broken chairs of abandoned houses – all those people whose lives had been so suddenly cut off, now silently thronging the streets as if nothing had changed. Roberta shuddered and pulled her coat tighter, quickening her pace.
She passed a derelict house where a child’s cot was poised precariously on the fourth floor. For a moment she thought she could hear the phantom cries of a child, high-pitched, helpless, unanswered; her heart turned over as she thought of Anna, and her gap-toothed smile.
She arrived at last at the doors of the BBC. The gallows camaraderie of her colleagues was immediately infectious: every morning was a celebration for surviving another night. Roberta spent that day cataloguing old discs, the sentimental melodies of a dozen different dance bands. She came upon an old Al Bowlly number, ‘The Very Thought of You’, intimately crooned in his sweet lyric tenor. She kept the disc aside, and made a point of adding it to the playlist.
I see your face in every flower,
Your eyes in stars above,
It’s just the thought of you,
The very thought of you, my love...
In Egypt, later that night, Lewis lay on his back in the sand and gazed up at a cloudless night sky humming with stars. A wireless was playing from somewhere in the camp, and he thought of his wife as he listened to the song, wondering when he would see her again.
33
Spring had at last reached Ashton Park. Thomas opened his study window, feeling heady with the new season. There were lambs in the field, and children running around on fresh grass. How could he have lived through so many springs without ever recognizing its simple rapture?
Light rain fell on new leaves; he could hear the soft patter as he worked at his desk. For so many years he had been wasting in his own private desert – but here was rain, sweet rain, washing into his roots and rousing his hope.
A new air filled his lungs as he looked out of the window and rejoiced in ordinary sights: the greenness of grass, the glow of buttercups, the light of the sky – it was a shining world again because of Ruth.
And yet, all this joy still hung on the hope that he might one day look into her face and find answering eyes. That thought took his breath away – the first consummation of eyes.
But what if he declared himself only to find her laughing at him, or looking puzzled, or piteous, or just detached?
The usual loop of hope and fear played through him as he sat in his study with a pile of unmarked homework. Elizabeth came in to fetch some writing paper, and noticed his reverie.
“A penny for your thoughts,” she said. Thomas glanced up at the beautiful cold face he knew so well, and felt a twinge of guilt.
“I was just wondering how the Nortons are faring at their new embassy—”
He wheeled himself away from her gaze and started fiddling around at the bookcase. Stay away from me, Elizabeth, he thought.
And then he felt ashamed; he did not want to be unkind, or even think unkindly, about anyone.
After all, he had only two lessons to teach before he would have the joy of seeing Ruth at lunch. A friendship of sorts was developing between them again. And with the change of season, they would soon begin their poetry classes once more.
* * *
The longer, lighter spring days were a relief to Anna too. Instead of knocking about the house with the others, she could go out on her own, wandering down to the river, or off to the aspen grove. Without anyone even noticing she was alone.
One Saturday, Katy Todd asked her on a trip with her gang.
“We’re going down to Saw Mill Bridge,” she said, “to catch frogs.”
“Sorry,” said Anna, “I can’t come.”
“Why not?” asked Katy, curling her lip. Anna had no answer, she just didn’t want to go.
“Because I’m meeting people at the lightning tree,” she came up with.
“Who?”
“It’s secret,” mumbled Anna, but her face gave her away. Katy moved on in disgust.
Ashamed at her lame fib, Anna felt suddenly defeated. She watched the gang of girls heading off towards the river, and realized with a pang that it was too late to join them now. But I didn’t want to be with them anyway. What do I care? she told herself defiantly as she swung through the woods, a birch s
witch in her hands thrashing through the undergrowth. It was a familiar walk which took her to an overgrown clearing in the woods, where the old tennis court and pavilion lay disused and neglected. The mouldering court was infested with tall weeds which seemed to thrive in the cracked red-clay surface.
Anna walked into the palm-house pavilion. The door was slightly warped, and the frame shivered when she pulled it open. There was a stone floor, and a smell of musty old geraniums. The place was deserted. Just an iron watering can, paint-spattered, and an abandoned stepladder. There was an old wrought-iron bench too, whose decorative pattern was fretted with rust and cobwebs.
She wandered over to the other side of the pavilion, and glanced through the misted windows. The air of neglect was completed by an overgrown lawn beyond, with a small fountain at its centre – a cherub on tiptoe – which was empty save for a residue of rotting leaves. To one side stood a stark monkey puzzle tree, angular and charmless in its gaze over this abandoned place.
Anna retreated to the bench inside the palm house, swinging her legs slightly. She imagined the plash of the fountain behind her, and out in front she watched a phantom game of tennis – Mr Ashton as a young man dashing across the court, and stretching to return a ball.
But she could not imagine Mrs Ashton there. Women who always wore high heels didn’t come to the tennis court, surely? Anna no longer liked her. Mrs Ashton was beautiful, but frightening – she could be sharp. And she was not always nice to her husband: Anna remembered suddenly the strange night when she had overheard her shouting at him in their bedroom.
She sat there for a while in the silence, and a gloom began to settle on her. It slowed her breathing, as if something was dragging on her heart. Until the shrill call of a blackbird jolted her to her feet, rousing her to walk away from the empty pavilion.