by Maggie Joel
For a moment he faltered. It was not what he wanted. This was the last time she would see him before he sailed for the war. Did one want composure at such times?
She had written to him in June, a day after her sister’s death, telling him that it had been a terrible mistake. She could not marry him. That he should tell no one what had happened.
It was grief, he had known that and he had understood though it had wounded him almost beyond endurance to wait. But six months had passed and still she would not see him.
Instead she had said, ‘It will be summer though, won’t it, in the Transvaal?’ And she was right. Half the world was in winter yet there, south of the equator, it would be summer. The thought filled him with wonder.
Perhaps he had not made it clear to them, the nearness of his departure? That this must, surely, be the last time he would set foot in their house before he sailed, before he went off to fight in a war?
He turned and took a step back towards Cadogan Mews. He would tell them, make it quite clear. Make it clear to Dinah.
But as he looked, the lamps on the ground floor of number 19 were gradually extinguished and a moment later the upstairs lamps went out too.
So instead he turned away and continued on his journey, westwards towards Great Portland Street.
Cousin Roger had gone and the boys had stood at their bedroom window and waved him off.
‘Do you remember, Lucas,’ said Aurora, waiting in the drawing room doorway as he came back upstairs, ‘Roger falling out of the monkey puzzle tree in the garden? I can see him now, sitting on the lawn rubbing his knee, crying, and Dinah, perched on some upper branch, pouring scorn on him from above. And now he is a lieutenant in the 58th and about to depart for war. How quickly they grew up.’
‘Indeed,’ said her husband, with a frown, passing her and going into the drawing room.
‘Thank God Bill is at Oxford. What can Travers have been thinking, allowing his only son to become an officer in the infantry? I always assumed Roger was to have followed him into the clergy.’
‘Apparently that was not Roger’s plan,’ Lucas remarked. ‘Sons, it seems, no longer regard their fathers’ wishes when choosing their careers.’ He returned to his chair but instead of reseating himself he merely collected his spectacles and his newspaper and made to leave the room.
‘My uncle was a little agitated by Roger’s presence,’ Aurora observed, forestalling his departure. Dinah had been agitated too, she added privately, but this was a conversation for another time.
‘As well he might,’ Lucas replied, pausing and studying the front page of the newspaper.
‘My uncle came to visit us at my father’s house when I was a very small child,’ she remembered. ‘I recall him being a rather frightening and blustery man with loud boots and a louder voice. He never called me by my name, just called me “little girl”. And the next time I saw him it must have been the spring of ’55, years after Father’s death, and the war in its second year.’
The man who had been returned to them had been an imbecile, barely coherent, a shambling, shuffling, frequently distressed casualty of a war that was still raging and with no one to look after him. So Mrs Randle, somewhat against her will, had provided him with a home. And there he had remained until Mrs Randle’s own death four years later, at which time Uncle Austin had been uprooted for the final time and brought here, to Cadogan Mews. The major was into his mid-seventies now, having outlived his brother by thirty years and his sister-in-law by twenty and, aside from the occasional attempt to hurl himself from a top-storey window, looked likely to outlive them all.
And now another war seemed set to rage in another distant corner of the world and more young men were set to die horribly and far from home, yet always there was this stream of boys ready—nay, eager—to sign up for it, oblivious, it seemed, to their likely fate. Jack, she had noticed, had been in thrall to his older cousin. If Jack were to become a soldier—
Something swelled up in her chest making it difficult for her to catch her breath.
If Jack became a soldier, this current war would be long over but there would be another, there was always another. Lucas wanted Jack to go to Oxford but he would not; the days when sons, especially younger sons, did what their fathers wanted were gone. Jack would go into the army and perhaps he would die. What then? Ten years might have passed. She might have ten years until that point, until the next death.
She stood in the doorway but Lucas would not look at her, and her anxiety about her nephew and her son was, for the time being, forgotten. Lucas would not look at her! Even when he spoke to her, his eyes were always elsewhere. It was not anger, it was something else, something worse. He had come to her bedside in the first few days following Sofia’s accident; even in her delirious state she had been aware of his presence. But one morning he had not been there. He had ceased to sit with her, he no longer entered her room. Death had turned him cold. It had turned them all cold and yet Lucas had turned from her even before Sofia had died and all her attempts since then to reach him had failed.
‘Unless there is anything further you wish to say, I shall retire,’ Lucas said.
There was nothing further she wished to say. He departed, giving her a brief nod. A draught blew in through the gap in the curtains and Aurora hastily closed them. A second draught crept in beneath the door. The very air was icy.
‘Say you will marry me!’
But I am not yet eighteen and you are to go off to join your regiment and we are first cousins, our parents cannot wish this—all the things, in short, that Dinah might have replied, she did not. They certainly occurred to her for Dinah was of a practical nature, but what she said was:
‘Oh! Yes! I will marry you!’
For in that moment the world had shifted and instead of the faceless, nameless stranger of her imaginings she now saw a future where the person at her side was Roger, whom she adored more than anyone else. That one could feel such happiness was a revelation! The fears and dread of a girl on the edge of womanhood vanished, replaced by a bright and warming certainty. She would marry her cousin Roger.
Yes I will marry you. This is what she had said and when one says these words one expects them to endure. One does not anticipate that they will be revoked; or at least, if they are to be revoked, then not in almost the same breath in which they are uttered. But now that one extraordinary thing had happened, a second happened almost at once. For Sofia had spied them.
Whether nine-year-old Sofia had been standing at an upstairs window looking out when she spied the two cousins in the garden below, or whether she had wandered of her own volition into the garden in order to enjoy the late May sunshine was a moot point. She came at them out of the dappled sunlight, a malevolent sprite materialising from the underworld, or this is how it seemed to Dinah.
Sofia’s reaction to her elder sister and her cousin caught in this most compromising of positions was decided and unequivocal. A look of dazed horror passed over her face, followed at once by one of almost unimagined triumph. For now she had the power to make or break! Hers alone was the decision to give or to destroy and when you are nine years old and forever the youngest in a large family and a girl to boot, your position was negligible at best.
Often you went completely unnoticed.
So Sofia darted away, giving a little skip of pure glee, and aware only vaguely of her sister’s hot pursuit. The race was a one-sided affair, the nine-year-old Sofia too filled with her heady new power to think through her escape and running straight to the French doors of the morning room, which were locked, as they always were until at least the first day of June. Consequently Dinah caught her up and grabbed her by the arm.
Perhaps, if Dinah had done the thing more delicately, had she reasoned and negotiated, had she cajoled, had she offered an inducement, the outcome might have been different. But something extraordinary had just happened to Dinah and now it had been ruined before it was even properly formed, and so in her fury and disma
y she grabbed her sister’s arm roughly.
‘I won’t let you spoil it!’ she cried.
But Sofia would not be bullied. ‘I’m going to tell! You cannot stop me! I shall tell Father!’
Dinah slapped her once, hard, across the face.
The garden, which had been alive with birdsong, fell silent. The children playing noisily in a neighbouring house ceased their game. The carriages in Cadogan Square became still. The city stopped.
The first to move was Sofia. Her nine-year-old frame rocked and her face seemed to freeze into a mask then tears sprang to her eyes. The elation of a few heady moments evaporated in an instant. She shook herself free and ran from her sister into the house and up the stairs and pushed open the first door she came to which was the door to the drawing room where, inside, a fire was burning.
CHAPTER SEVEN
London and the North
THE FIRST OF THE THREE funerals was held in Dawley on the second Monday in December, a week and a day after the train crash. On that day the sky hung heavily over the Earth leaving only the narrowest of spaces for man and his structures and rituals. The tiny Norman church clung to a hillside a mile from the town, its churchyard crammed already to bursting with the dead of eons. The walls of the churchyard had crumbled and, in places, had fallen quite away.
At eleven o’clock a small procession climbed up the hill towards the church, bent into the wind and holding onto their hats. Some wore black armbands. Others had black streamers tied around the crowns of their hats. The man from the railway company, Sinclair, wore a black frock-coat and a top hat and carried a cane. The path through the churchyard was overgrown and choked with brambles so that a way could only be found by following the muddied footsteps of the man ahead. An enormous black crow cawed from the uppermost branch of the wizened and ancient oak tree that had stood sentry over the churchyard since the Middle Ages. A second crow, older and battle-scarred, watched from the apex of the moss-covered lychgate, and its single black eye was the only object that glistened on this blackest of black days.
For it was the funeral of the little girl.
Sinclair followed closely in the footsteps of the clergyman who led the procession of mourners up the hill. He had had a difficult journey—the line was still closed and would be for some days yet. He had been obliged, once again, to hire a carriage at Wolverhampton and make his way across country by means of the roads and laneways. The carriage had become stuck three times in the mud and it had seemed likely he would not make the funeral at all. However here he was and let it not be said that the North West Midlands Railway Company did not care about its employees or its fare-paying passengers, even the poorest of them.
The procession had reached its destination: a four-foot by three-foot hole cut out of the frozen ground by the gnarled hands of a watching gravedigger, the man’s frame so bent and ravaged he seemed as old as the churchyard and could as well have been digging his own grave. The vicar—a man not long past his youth but with a marked stoop like a pit worker and a face disfigured by smallpox—began his business and beside him Sinclair pulled out his watch. He had a habit, newly formed, of polishing its surface with his handkerchief. He did this now, with slow, methodical movements, feeling the smooth polished surface of the object through the newly laundered linen of the handkerchief. It was a gentleman’s pocket watch made for him by John Bennett of London. It had cost six pounds and seven shillings. The watch had an ivory open-face dial with roman numerals and the exterior was hand-engraved. The fob chain was gold and the key brass. Sinclair had ordered the manufacture of the timepiece himself. He polished the watch a final time and placed it carefully in his pocket. The clergyman, he noted with satisfaction, was making good time. At this rate he would spend the night at Wolverhampton and be back in London by the following afternoon.
‘I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.’
There were many men at the little girl’s funeral. One of these, naturally enough, was the girl’s father, Thomas Brinklow, a man born and raised within the shadow of the great iron foundry that dominated the town. A man who had begun work young and married young and did not expect to die an old man. A man whose only child lay in the coffin in the four-foot by three-foot hole in ground. As for the others who stood in solemn and respectful silence at the grave’s edge, some were neighbours of the grieving man, some brothers and cousins of his wife’s, but who the other men were, Thomas did not know—curious townsfolk, perhaps, who had heard about the railway accident and wanted to see for themselves, and men from the inquiry. One, a gentleman in a tall black hat and long black frock-coat, had shaken his hand before the service. All of them had given their names but he hadn’t taken any of them in.
‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.’
After the train crash Thomas had been taken to an infirmary where a surgeon had bandaged a gash on his temple. He wore the bandage still as his head throbbed more or less constantly and made him sway dizzyingly if he moved too fast or tried to think. It brought bile to the back of his throat, though it may not have been the lump on his temple that caused this.
His child, whose name was Alice, had died in his arms. One moment they had been riding along in the third-class carriage, fighting for room in the confined space, feeling the jolt as the wheels went over some points, the next she had been a broken thing in his arms, her blood seeping out onto his clothing. He did not remember anything after that, had come to in a bed in the infirmary surrounded by the injured. He was not badly hurt, they had assured him, yet he had been unable to speak or move in his bed. He had lain in the infirmary not speaking, not moving, awaiting his wife’s arrival. But she had not come and he was glad and dismayed.
For his wife had refused to accompany himself and Alice to the fair. Not on the Sabbath, she had said, and he had not realised before that moment how stubborn she could be, his wife. And how stubborn he could be. Sunday was his only day off—what other day could he take his little girl to the fair? Why would God deny them this one pleasure, he reasoned, when their lives were otherwise a never-ending grind, grind and more grind, morning till night, day after day, year after year? Was this what God intended for His children? It was not what he, Thomas Brinklow, intended for his child. They would go to the fair. Besides, he had promised Alice and she would be disappointed. His wife, tight-lipped, had chosen to remain at home.
And now Alice was dead and his wife blamed him for her death.
‘We brought nothing into the world, and we take nothing out,’ recited the vicar in a deadened and dreadful tone that denied hope or joy or justice, at least in this world. He scooped up a handful of loose earth and cast it over the coffin, stepping back to indicate the mourners do likewise, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket and absentmindedly wiping the dirt from his fingers.
Thomas cast his own handful looking away so as not to see where the dirt landed on his daughter’s coffin. He had no handkerchief and the dirt remained on his hands.
The burial was completed and the procession made its way back down the hill. When he saw the gentleman in the tall hat and the frock-coat climbing into a waiting carriage, Thomas understood that this was the man from the railway company. The door slammed shut and the carriage moved off, becoming bogged in the mud and the ice and, if he had wanted to, Thomas could have easily caught it up and spoken to the man but his heart was black and he could not move. Which was as well, for the man from the funeral company now arrived to present Thomas with the bill for the cost of the burial, which was four pounds. Thomas had assumed the railway company would pay. Four pounds was more than he earned in a year.
The carriage had freed itself and driven off and the funeral party had moved off down the hill but the gravedigger had remained. He now dug up the little girl’s grave and retrieved the cheap pieces of timber that had made up her coffin. He rolled the girl’s body back into the grave an
d scattered a thin layer of soil over her but he left the hole open for the next burial, which was due at midday.
The churchyard was crammed to bursting but still the people kept on dying.
The following morning, a Tuesday, Dinah found her mother winding wool in the morning room. She wordlessly came and joined her on the sofa, taking the skein of wool off her hands and submitting to her mother’s winding. They sat in silence for a while.
‘I have resigned from my committee, Mama,’ said Dinah.
This was not intended to shock, indeed she hardly expected her mother to mind much at all, yet when Aurora had reached the end of the ball they had been winding and attempted to tie it off but the strand would not be tied, in a sudden and inexplicable rage her mother hurled it across the room, springing to her feet and upsetting the workbox so that pin-cushions, knitting needles, threads and scissors and bits of embroidery scattered in all directions.
‘Oh!’ she exclaimed in fury or dismay and strode over to the window, thrusting her palms out behind her as though to push the chaotic scene, and her own outburst, from her.
A little shocked, Dinah quickly dropped to her knees to retrieve the fallen items, scooping up the escaped balls of wool and attempting to instil some order in the confused tangle. It could not, she reasoned, be the announcement of her resignation from the committee that had caused such a reaction. She placed the things in the workbox and tried to think what to say.
‘But tell me, why have you resigned from your committee, Dinah?’
It was her mother who spoke from her position at the window and her voice was perfectly normal as she gazed out over the mews, her back to the room, but her right hand began to rub her left forearm, the place where she had been burnt in the fire.
‘Because I no longer care about the poor,’ Dinah replied, trying not to watch her mother rubbing that same spot over and over. ‘And it seems hypocritical to sit on a committee whose aim is to help the poor when one no longer cares about the poor. So I resigned.’