by Maggie Joel
He didn’t stop until he had reached the bedroom on the upper floor that he shared with Gus. Once here he pushed shut the door and wedged a chair against it and sat down heavily on the floor.
He would not cry, he would not! He was going to be a soldier and soldiers did not cry. He was going to be a soldier just as soon as he was old enough and he would go away to an academy and wear a uniform and learn how to be an officer and how to drill and how to fire a rifle. He was going to go off to wars in far-off places and perhaps shoot at other soldiers and at natives in Africa and in India and in other places and he would win a medal for his courage and be mentioned in dispatches and he wouldn’t have to live here in this house for one more day! He was going to be a soldier like Cousin Roger.
But Cousin Roger had been killed on his very first day.
Jack kicked out with his shoe, kicked the chair that was wedged against the door, until it became dislodged and fell with a thud to the floor and he stood up and continued to kick it until the wood splintered and the cross-bar connecting the legs sprung out.
Everyone died! Why did everyone die?
He could hear voices downstairs, his father ordering something to be done. Would Father be angry with him for running out like that? For upsetting the soup? Gus would say he was a cry-baby.
No, he realised, Gus would not say that—it was he who would have said it to Gus had their roles been reversed. There was bisque on his shoes and now on the carpet. Had he hurt Hermione? She ought not to have been in his way, it was stupid of her to be standing there, right in his way like that and carrying something hot. She would learn! It was a lesson for her. She would not make such a mistake again.
He pulled off his shoe and there was bisque on his hand.
They had not let him see Sofia, neither he nor Gus had seen her. They had kept her shut away in a room, hidden behind a screen, and all he had seen was Father, Dinah, Mrs Logan, the doctor, going silently in and out carrying bandages and bowls of water and tubs of balms and ointments. He had watched them enter with tight smiles on their faces and leave with their faces grey and closed. And beyond the door he had heard muffled sounds, like an animal whimpering. He had run up to his room with his hands over his ears. Then they had been sent to stay with their aunt and uncle in Great Portland Street.
After ten days she had died and even then he had not been allowed to see her. It had been a closed coffin. Now, whenever he closed his eyes he imagined a blackened, disfigured face.
It had been seven months but the face would not disappear.
He wiped his hand on his shirt front and it was stained a pinky-orange. In a rage he tore at his shirt and picked up the shoe and hurled it at the door.
Cook was not impressed. First Mrs Logan had come downstairs to announce that Mr Brightside was killed and now that daft girl had gone and got herself scalded again.
‘Ain’t there enough ways to get yourself killed right ’ere in London, without a body taking itself all the way off to the Cape to do it?’ Cook demanded of Mrs Logan.
‘No doubt there are,’ agreed Mrs Logan wearily as she bathed the sobbing girl’s legs with cold water. ‘Please keep still, Hermione, I cannot help you if you wriggle about so.’
‘And that were me best salmon and basil bisque,’ said Cook, throwing down her rolling pin in disgust. ‘Took me all morning to make it. Now it’s all over the floor without a livin’ soul so much as tasting one morsel. I call it a downright shame, that’s what it is,’ and she cast a malevolent look at Hermione.
‘It wasn’t Hermione’s fault,’ said Mrs Logan.
‘Oh, it’s never anyone’s fault!’ grumbled Cook. ‘’Cept when it’s my fault, then folk are fallin’ over themselves to find someone to blame, leastways that’s what I’ve always found.’
‘Master Jack came out of the room in a great hurry,’ Mrs Logan continued, ignoring this interruption, ‘and he knocked straight into her.’ She reached for the jar of balm that she had not got around to putting away since the last time the girl had been scalded. ‘And to be fair I think the poor boy was upset—’
‘Upset! I’ll give you upset—’
‘—on account of Mr Brightside’s death.’
‘Hmmph!’ said Cook and stuck her hands one on each hip in readiness to launch herself into her favourite topic. ‘If you ask me, Mrs Logan, there’s a deal too much wailin’ and gnashin’ of teeth goes on in this house when folk die. I mean to say, it ain’t as though we ain’t all goin’ to die at some time or other, is it? Me and you, Mrs Logan, have both seen it firsthand and we wasn’t forever wringin’ our hands and runnin’ out of rooms knockin’ into people—leastways I wasn’t and I have a pretty fair guess you wasn’t neither. And another thing—’
But Mrs Logan stood up, with an abruptness that caused the prostrate Hermione to stifle a cry, and faced Cook.
‘I would prefer it, Mrs Varley, if you would refrain from speculating on my past life or making comment on my present circumstances. I believe they are no concern of yours, nor of any other living soul.’
Cook fairly bristled with indignation.
‘Well! I’m sure I meant no offence by it and furthermore—’
‘Good. Then let us attend to this poor girl.’
The poor girl, who had been weeping quietly during this exchange, now turned her tear-streaked face towards Mrs Logan. ‘Shall I be able to walk again?’ she asked tremulously and Cook rolled her eyes and Mrs Logan patted the girl’s arm.
‘Don’t be silly, Hermione, of course you shall walk again—why, it’s only a scald.’
‘And you needn’t think you’re going to get out of any of your work, missy, neither!’ added Cook with a scowl. ‘I remember when I was in my very first position, just a slip of a girl I was, and I dropped one of them big old cauldrons on me foot coming down the scullery stairs. Broke a bone, it did, and the bruisin’ were somefing awful. But never a word did I say to no one! Kept on workin’, night and day, up and down them very stairs. Never a word of complaint. I’d have lost my position if I had. This foot has never been the same since that day,’ and she hobbled across the kitchen as proof of this.
‘I am sure you are an example to us all, Mrs Varley,’ said Mrs Logan.
Cook had an idea Mrs Logan was not as impressed by this tale of heroic fortitude as she might have been and she returned to her rocking chair near the range.
‘Well, I can’t be standin’ around here gossipin’,’ she announced. ‘The dinner’s ruined and I’m sure I don’t know what’s to be done about it at this late hour.’
‘Is there no bisque left? It was all spilt?’
Cook sniffed. ‘How should I know? Send the girl to find out.’
‘She’s hardly in a fit state. Mrs Varley, I would advise you go up and retrieve the tureen and ensure no one slips on the spillage.’
‘I ain’t goin’ up them stairs for no one, thank you very much, certainly not when some damn fool of a girl gets herself burnt—’
‘Then I shall go and you shall need to tend to Hermione. I believe you will make a very fine nurse—’
‘I ain’t no one’s nurse! Not to some damn fool girl what’s got herself burnt.’
There was a silent stand-off as Mrs Logan returned her look wordlessly and Cook decided on the lesser of two evils and took herself off and up the stairs.
Upstairs the signs of the recent calamity were still very much in evidence. The tureen lay on its side at the foot of the stairs where it had landed. Lumps of salmon and potato and leek lay like small islands in a vast ocean of soup and it broke Cook’s heart to look on her work thus destroyed. But see! At the bottom of the tureen, though it lay on its side, was a few spoonfuls of unspoilt bisque and the ladle, miraculously, still inside. Cook observed the door to the dining room, which was firmly shut, and she observed the hallway and the stairs, which were similarly silent and deserted and, with a swiftness surprising in one so advanced in age and so wide of girth and who had displayed her lameness for all to see
not two minutes earlier, she darted forward and scooped up the tureen, righting it and, grasping the ladle, she began to shovel the largest lumps into it.
What they don’t know won’t harm them, she thought as she scooped up a ladleful of the thick gravy. In a remarkably short time the tureen was half full and the vast ocean reduced to a smallish lake—though now it had a tell-tale criss-cross of large, flat footprints through it. Cook used the ladle to smooth out the footprints and, satisfied with her work, set off with the tureen back downstairs.
‘Managed to save some of it,’ she announced, returning triumphantly to the kitchen. ‘Call it a miracle if you like, but the girl managed to drop the thing so as it landed right way up and most of the stuff still inside.’
The first aid having been administered, Mrs Logan was putting the ointments away and Hermione was attempting gingerly to stand up, holding her ruined skirts in one hand, leaning heavily on the kitchen table with the other. They both observed Cook in some surprise as she made this announcement.
‘But—’ began Hermione. She was silenced by a look from Mrs Logan.
‘Whilst I do not call it a miracle, Mrs Varley, it is certainly most providential,’ Mrs Logan remarked. ‘Now, Hermione, go and change your apron then return to your duties. I shall go upstairs and report this piece of good news to the family. No doubt they are quite famished by now,’ and she left.
Cook plumped herself down on the rocking chair to catch her breath and reached for her pipe, which had long gone out. She felt hot and out of breath but pleased with the rescue she had effected with the bisque.
‘What a day!’ she declared. ‘And all because the young chap gets hisself killed! What did he die of, anyways? Was it a gunshot or a native spear or some jungle disease? They all die of disease in my experience. Come on, what was it?’
But Hermione, who had by now made it as far as the kitchen doorway, could not say and Cook was left to speculate on all the many and varied ways by which a young man could meet his death in Africa.
The dinner was over and Lucas had gone out. He had not said where.
Aurora had resolved to see her children. On this night, of all nights, they needed the love, the strength only a mother could provide. Dinah’s room was silent and no light showed and that was as well for she had feared Dinah would feel it the most, but instead it had been Jack. She passed on by her daughter’s room. A faint light flickered from beneath the door to the boys’ room and now Mrs Logan emerged cradling a stub of candle which she shielded from the draught, and there was something of Florence Nightingale about her, a calm serenity that ought to have been soothing, reassuring.
Aurora felt a thin red veil cover her eyes. And so it had come to this. This slow, encroaching takeover of her duties that had begun three years ago so slow, so encroaching that it had gone all but unnoticed. It had seemed, at worst, a benign but unavoidable consequence of bringing a housekeeper into her home. Now it seemed planned. It seemed malignant. ‘Why do we need a housekeeper?’ she had demanded of Lucas three years ago. ‘These are the duties I perform as your wife. Other people we know do not have a housekeeper.’ It was an unnecessary expense, she had argued. And what, exactly, was she to do, his own wife, if this housekeeper oversaw the kitchen, the tradesmen, the bills, the weekly accounts, the other servants? What duties were left to her? But he had been adamant, and his wife would still oversee the accounts, if that was her wish. She would still oversee all duties performed in the house and Mrs Logan would organise the day-to-day running of tasks. Mrs Logan would consult her, naturally, on every point, at every turn. And at first Mrs Logan had consulted her—or had made a pretence of consulting her—but almost at once a new daily and a weekly routine was set in place and both maids retrained and redeployed. The tradesmen went directly to Mrs Logan and soon all that was left was the daily menus and the weekly accounts. And since May, even those had devolved to Mrs Logan. There was nothing left. Aurora no longer knew what they were to eat at lunch or dinner. She did not know the name of the boy who delivered the meat from the butcher’s. She had not opened the various accounts ledgers since the summer.
‘Mrs Logan,’ and she spoke loudly and clearly into the gloom so that the housekeeper spun around, her candle flickering wildly. ‘Would you mind telling me what you are doing?’
Mrs Logan steadied herself, regaining her composure, and her face, which for the briefest of moments had registered alarm, now resumed its more usual neutral countenance.
‘Checking on Master Jack, Mrs Jarmyn. He is a little shaken still. Though he is calmer now, I believe.’
‘Do you? And no doubt you are an expert in childhood upsets?’
Mrs Logan lowered her eyes but lifted her chin.
‘I have been a child, if that is what you meant, Mrs Jarmyn.’
‘No, Mrs Logan, that is not what I meant. I was alluding to the condition more commonly known as “motherhood”.’
There was the slightest of pauses. ‘It is quite true that I have not been a mother, no. If that is all, Mrs Jarmyn?’
‘Yes that is all. I shall see my son.’
But she waited until Mrs Logan had made her way along the corridor and up the back stairs and the light from her candle was gone.
The boys’ room was almost in darkness. A guttering candle set off a faint glow as the drops of wax fell away and the wick burnt itself out. She could hear the gentle snores of her children sleeping. Crossing to the window she eased the curtain open a few inches so that the moonlight fell in a long strip across the two beds and across the two sleeping forms. It was a clear night. It felt like it might snow again.
She sat on the chair between the two beds and looked first at Gus and then at Jack. They were so different. All her children were so very, very different and how could that be when they had the same parents, had grown up in the same house? She had no brothers and sisters so she could not imagine what they might have been like; a version of herself and yet not herself. But her own children: Bill, who was so like his father, so sure of himself, so full of his own self-importance. And Dinah, a sweet girl. So good, so fair. But something had changed in her since the accident. She had become at once harder and less sure of herself. And there was something else, some restlessness about her that was unsettling—
‘Mama?’
‘Gus. I thought you were asleep.’
‘I think I was. I was dreaming.’
‘What about?’
‘I can’t remember. It’s gone … Mama, I believe Jack was very upset by Father’s news.’
‘I know, dear. We all were.’
Gus struggled to sit up, wide awake now and irritated by the sheet that enclosed him. ‘Yes, but Jack especially was very upset.’
‘I understand that. He does not need to fear Father being angry with him for leaving the table and knocking the maid over. Father is not angry.’
She did not know this to be true but it felt important to reassure the boys.
But Gus shook his head. ‘It’s not that. He wishes so much to be a soldier.’
‘And now he believes that, after this, Father will never let him be one?’
Gus appeared to consider this. From the other bed Jack’s steady breathing reassured them he was fast asleep.
‘Yes, I suppose that must be it … But Mama, what if one should wish for something all one’s life—to go to Oxford, for instance—and then, on the very day one gets there, one is killed?’
Aurora felt a chill settle across her shoulders. She made herself smile.
‘Oh my dear. Nothing will happen to you at Oxford. Why, the worst that will happen is that you might find yourself tipped in the pond!’
Gus shook his head, dismissing this.
‘But what if Jack becomes a soldier?’ he said, and she smiled at him and patted his hand in the moonlight.
But what if Jack did become a soldier?
Aurora undressed hurriedly and got ready for bed. There was little that Lucas could do to prevent it if the boy’s heart
was set on it. Surely though, the events of this evening would give Jack pause for thought?
Perhaps—and perhaps not. Years would pass. He would forget his cousin’s death. He would remember the scarlet tunics and the flashing swords and the bright rows of medals in his books. There was little one could do to guard against the future. It was all one could do to guard against the past.
Aurora got into bed, experiencing a moment of anxiety that in all the distress the maid had forgotten to warm the bed for her. No, the girl had done her job and her feet pressed themselves gratefully into the warmth of the mattress, craving its fleeting heat.
Another death. Pointless, untimely, utterly tragic. She could not judge if she was horrified by it or untouched.
The hour was late. The clock in the hallway was striking midnight and a moment later she heard Lucas’s footsteps in the street below, now coming up the front steps and the front door opening. He had gone out directly after dinner. Did he ever visit their child’s grave? she wondered. She had never asked him, and she wondered how she would answer if he asked her the same question for she had never visited the grave, not once. She was too frightened to. She was not certain that, if she did, she would return in one piece. Lucas had not been to their daughter’s grave tonight, of that she was certain. To a mistress then?
Aurora got quickly out of bed, pulling a shawl about her thin shoulders against the oppressive cold, and went to the doorway and stood for a moment listening. Her heart was beating very fast and a memory—all but lost—now appeared to her of herself twenty years past, a girl of eighteen, standing at the window of her room in her mother’s house on the evening she and Lucas had met, waiting for a glimpse of him in the street below. The staggering impropriety of it had made her giddy and daring. She had opened her window and allowed him to see her standing there. It had driven him mad, that glimpse of her in the moonlight, and he had paced like a crazed man up and down between the streetlamps, lost in shadow one moment, thrust into dazzling gaslight the next, then in an instant he had run at the balustrade and pulled himself up and in no time at all was clinging to the ironwork on the outside of her balcony, still in evening dress, a carnation in his buttonhole. Had she made him climb thus to her balcony? It seemed to her eighteen-year-old mind that she had made it so and that he had no choice but to acquiesce. She had kissed him and afterwards had wondered if other girls of her acquaintance behaved as she had done. If they did, they never said so.