The Passing Bells

by Phillip Rock

  “They . . . the chief of staff, that is, doesn’t like to upset important visitors.”

  “I can understand the point. It would have upset Mother and the duchess dreadfully to have seen a man with his face blown off . . . especially before lunch.”

  Ivy’s mouth went dry. “That takes getting used to,” she said with difficulty.

  “Does one ever get used to it? Is it possible to cope with a sight like that?”

  The intensity of Alexandra’s stare was disquieting. Ivy shifted slightly on the seat and rubbed the back of her hand across her lips.

  “It takes . . . time.”

  A young doctor wearing a white jacket over an obviously new uniform stepped into the lounge.

  “I say, are you on duty, Sister Thaxton?”

  “No, sir. Not till nine.”

  “Have you seen Sister Jones?”

  “Which Jones, sir?”

  “Number sixteen Jones.”

  “She was assigned to Abdominals this afternoon by Captain Mason.”

  “Mason? Do I know him?”

  “Regular, sir . . . Indian Army . . . purple nose.”

  “Ah, yes,” he said, as though that took care of his immediate problem. “Thank you, Thaxton.”

  “They’re becoming younger every day,” Ivy said after the doctor walked off. “Barely qualified for surgery, but they do a very good job despite their lack of experience.” She had been grateful for the slight interruption.

  “One gains experience very quickly these days, I would imagine.”

  “There’s no lack of patients here.”

  “Nor in France,” Alexandra said quietly.

  A dozen probationers carrying notebooks followed their nursing instructor down the corridor and into the lounge. The probationers were all young and gaunt with fatigue. They stared at Alexandra as though she were a creature from an alien world. The nursing instructor was a tall, jolly woman of forty who took everything in stride.

  “Hello, Thaxton! Entertaining visitors, are we? Well, not in here, my girl. We were right in the middle of wet dressings and got kicked out of room fifty-six by the jaw and plastic lads.”

  The two women walked into the corridor.

  “Is there anywhere private where we could talk?”

  “No,” Ivy said stiffly. “This is a very crowded place.”

  “You resent my coming here, don’t you?”

  Well, Ivy thought, an honest question deserves an honest answer.

  “Yes. I don’t wish to hurt your feelings, but I don’t have the time for small talk. And, after all, we really don’t have that much to talk about, do we?”

  “The reason I came, Ivy, was simply to ask you a few questions. You see, I want to join the QA’s.”

  Ivy’s stare was rude, frankly incredulous. “You?”

  Alexandra flinched. “Why not me?”

  “I don’t know exactly. . . . I just can’t see you going through the training. It’s a lot of hard, dirty, exhausting work. The maids at Abingdon Pryory were never worked as hard. There’s a Red Cross VAD unit here for ladies of good birth . . . mornings or afternoons . . . writing letters . . . reading to the men . . . rolling bandages. . . . Why don’t you join that?”

  “Oh, dear,” Alexandra said, drawing in her breath sharply, “what an awful little snob you turned out to be.”

  And she was gone, half-running down the corridor. Ivy stared after her in bewilderment. Her hidden anger and resentment turned to cheek-burning shame.

  “Wait!”

  She ran swiftly, dodging nurses and orderlies. She caught up with Alexandra near the end of the corridor, grabbed her by one arm, and propelled her toward a narrow green door, which she opened and closed after them with the quickness of a conjurer. They were in a blanket-storage room, lit by a low-wattage bulb dangling from the ceiling. Ivy slid a bolt into place and leaned back against the door.

  “I’m not a snob,” she said in between deep breaths.

  Alexandra stood stiffly, her face taut and pale. “Yes, you are. It would be like my saying that all you’re suited for is making beds and carrying tea trays!”

  “I was only speaking my mind. I just can’t imagine you as a QA probationer, that’s all. If it’s a question of wanting to do your bit—”

  “I joined the Red Cross at the beginning of the year. A convalescent home for officers in Wimbledon . . . writing letters . . . fluffing pillows. . . . All the things that ladies of ‘good birth’ do as volunteers.”

  “There can be more to it than that.”

  “I know. I went to France after my brother was wounded and mastered the art of emptying bedpans!”

  They studied each other like two strangers. But there was a bond of sorts. The Rt. Hon. Alexandra Greville had always been kind.

  “I’m sorry,” Ivy said. “I’m sure you didn’t wait hours just to tell me that you wanted to join up.” She waved a hand at their cramped surroundings. “You asked for a quiet place to talk.”

  “Thank you, Ivy. Something happened to me in France . . . a kind of breakdown . . . more emotional than physical . . . and although I want very badly to become a military nurse, I have this fear, you see, this feeling of inner panic that . . . under similar circumstances . . . I might break down again. It’s not a fear I can express to the director of recruitments.”

  It was so quiet in the closet that Ivy could hear the thumping of her heart.

  “Tell me about it.”

  She kept her eyes on Alexandra’s face, seeing pain and honesty and truth mirrored there. She could visualize the Alexandra she had known, romantic and vain, play-acting the role of a nurse in her elegant and expensive uniforms from the House of Ferris. “Alexandra Nightingale,” “Saint Alexandra”—the girl mocked herself without indulging in self-pity. Ivy knew the inevitable outcome of her folly as Alexandra told of her trip in the ambulance from Saint-Omer to the casualty clearing station at Kemmel. Reaching out, she took Alexandra by the hand and pressed firmly.

  “You don’t have to tell me what happened there. I can guess.”

  “They needed help so badly,” she whispered. “Hundreds of men, Ivy . . . men without arms . . . legs . . . faces. I could do so little for them . . . and what little I began to do . . .” She paused, running her tongue over her dry lips. “I failed them so completely. . . .”

  “You didn’t fail anyone,” Ivy said sternly. “You can’t fail at something that you weren’t equipped to do in the first place. Don’t be a twit!” She turned to the door and opened it. “For God’s sake, let’s get out of here before we suffocate.”

  They walked slowly down the corridor toward the main entrance. Nurses, orderlies, and doctors passed them, some nodding in recognition to Ivy, all eyeing Alexandra with varying degrees of curiosity.

  “I look out of place,” Alexandra said.

  “Do you feel out of place? That’s what’s important, you know.”

  “I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”

  “I meant . . . will you be comfortable in the QA’s? Is it what you really want to do? Or are you just trying to prove something to yourself?”

  “I want to be useful,” she said flatly.

  “Fine. We can use all the help we can get. And as for your fears . . .” She stopped and faced Alexandra. “We all have a certain amount of fear every time we walk into a ward. Do you see those two girls standing by the dispensary window? One of them is the daughter of a parson in Ludlow . . . the other taught school in Wales. A cut finger or a broken ankle were the worst injuries they’d seen before coming here. Now they work ten hours or more a day with men who are coughing up their lungs bit by bit. They don’t have some special kind of bravery that you lack. What they have is the assurance that twelve months of training has given them. The only courage you need is the courage to begin that training and the courage to stick it out.”

  The bells of University College chapel pealed the first stroke of nine.

  “I must go,” Ivy said. “Perhaps w
e can talk again tomorrow.”

  Alexandra bent quickly forward and kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll be joining up tomorrow. Good night . . . Sister Thaxton.”

  “Well, I never,” Ivy murmured, holding one hand to her cheek. She stood in the corridor and watched Alexandra cross the vast entrance hall, crowded now with departing visitors. The frescoes on the hall’s walls depicted famous healers, and, stretched above the door, a twenty-foot sign lettered by the ambulatory patients said, PEACE ON EARTH, GOOD WILL TOWARD MEN.

  God rest ye merry, gentlemen:

  Let nothing you dismay.

  Remember Christ, our Savior,

  Was born on Christmas Day.

  “The carolers are not quite what they used to be,” Lady Margaret Wood-Lacy whispered. “Jim Penny, Will Adams . . . oh, all the best baritones are in the army.”

  They sounded harmonic enough to Fenton. He invited them in for hot whiskies or punch, but they gracefully declined and moved off down the lane toward the Shaw house, where Mr. and Mrs. Shaw and their five children waited expectantly.

  It came upon a midnight clear,

  That glorious song of old. . . .

  Fenton closed the front door and followed his mother down the hall and into the parlor. An aroma of roasting goose filled the house.

  “I’d better see how Jinny is coming along,” Lady Margaret said. “She gets forgetful sometimes.”

  Jinny was eighty years old and the only servant Sir Harold and Lady Margaret had ever had, or needed, having lived most of their married life in cottages at the various job sites—Balmoral, Sandringham, Abingdon Pryory. But the small exquisitely constructed house in Suffolk—an architect’s house, after all—had always been waiting for them, with Jinny puttering about in the kitchen.

  Fenton poured a whiskey and stood by the bay window. The last glow of the pale winter sun glinted off the cold wind-stirred waters of the River Deben. Home for Christmas, but his thoughts were far from carol singers, holly, and roast goose. It was the second Christmas of the war and far different from the first one. He had celebrated that Christmas in France, quartered in a château near Béthune. All conversation in the mess had been of peace, perhaps not on earth, but surely in France. They had all believed that the war would be over within a month. Astonishing reports had come to them of British and German troops meeting in no-man’s-land to exchange gifts and to sing carols.

  “It means the end, you know,” Captain Jarvis had remarked sagely. “Our lads have lost the fighting spirit and the Enemy is as exhausted as we are. It’s up to their politicians to work out something with our striped-pants brigade. There’ll be a general cease-fire within a week. You mark my words.”

  He had buried Captain Jarvis three months later at Neuve-Chapelle with one hundred sixty of his men.

  One year.

  Not just men had died. War destroyed more than human life. It nibbled away at the spirit, corroded the senses, mocked all the old values. It was what the French liaison officer at Laventie, in the wisdom of a Cognac haze, had called le cafard. It was empty stables and unpruned trees at Abingdon. It was a thousand men in sodden khaki, who could have been better employed, stumbling across a railway track with rifles in their hands. It was Lydia Greville naked by a fire.

  He looked in on Roger’s old room before going to bed. It was exactly as Roger would have expected it to be, had he suddenly come bursting into the house. The bed made. A notebook and pencil on the nightstand. His books, well dusted, on the shelves.

  “It’s not a shrine,” his mother said quietly, seeing him standing there in the hall. “And I have no illusions about him being a prisoner of the Turks. It’s just that I hated to put away all the things that he had loved. He wouldn’t have wanted his Wordsworth and Shelley sealed in a box.”

  There would be unfinished poems in the notebook, Fenton knew. Lines for an unfinished life.

  Le cafard.

  His mother was on a dozen committees of one kind or another in Woodbridge, and certainly did not lack for friends. She enjoyed being with her son, but did not need him for comfort.

  “You seem restless, Fenton,” she remarked on the Thursday before New Year’s Eve. “Thinking about your new job?”

  “And other things.”

  He took the train that afternoon, a slow train crowded with sailors from Harwich going to London on leave. It was dark when the train pulled into King’s Cross. He shared a taxi with five naval officers who insisted on buying him a drink at the Army-Navy Club. Conversation in the bar ranged from the merits of oil-fired ships vis-à-vis coal to the bedroom antics of French women. He had one drink, excused himself, and left.

  It was a familiar route that he walked—along the Mall, past Buckingham Palace, and into Lower Belgrave Street. He strode past his old flat without glancing at it and continued on to Sloane Street and across Pavillion Road into Cadogan Square. Number 24.

  If the butler was surprised at the lateness of the call, he did not show it by so much as a blink of the eye.

  “Miss Winifred, sir? I do believe she has retired for the night.”

  “Who the devil’s at the door, Peterson?” A testy voice sounded from down the corridor, and then Lord Sutton emerged from the gloom in maroon smoking jacket and carpet slippers.

  “Fenton, by gad! What the devil you doin’ here at this hour?”

  “I was . . . in the neighborhood,” he said lamely. “Sorry if I woke up the household.”

  “Nonsense.” The marquess dismissed the butler with a gesture. “It’s good to have company. Close the door before you freeze us out.”

  “I didn’t realize it was so late.”

  “It isn’t. We retire early . . . except for me. Just goin’ to have a nightcap or two.”

  A slender shaft of light fell on the dark stairwell from the upper floors, the light widening with the full opening of a door. Fenton looked up at the figure standing by the second-floor balustrade.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “We still have a telephone,” Winifred said.

  “I’m sorry. . . . I intended to call . . . but . . . one thing and another came up . . . and then I went to Suffolk for Christmas—”

  “There’s nothing to explain, Fenton.”

  “I think that there is.”

  Lord Sutton scowled at Fenton and then glared up at his daughter.

  “Either come down or go back to bed, Winnie. As for me, I’m goin’ to the library and closin’ the door.”

  “Well?” Fenton asked after the marquess had done just that.

  She came down the stairs clad in a long, quilted-satin dressing gown, her hair loose about her shoulders. She did not descend to the foyer, but sat on the third step from the bottom.

  “What an odd man you are, Fenton.”

  “Impulsive . . . also a bit reflective.” He leaned against the banister post below her, hands shoved into the pockets of his trench coat. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking the past few days. You said that we’re different people now. I know I’m not the same, but I can’t say that about you. You’re older and wiser, but essentially the same. I don’t think anything will ever change you radically, Winnie.”

  “Everyone changes.”

  “I suppose they do. It’s a matter of degree, isn’t it? Some people tarnish more quickly than others. You will always have a polish . . . a certain luster.”

  She folded her arms about her knees. “You came to propose, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’ll make Father very happy.”

  “It’s not your father I care about pleasing.”

  “It’ll make me happy, too. I love you, Fenton. I fell in love with you when I was sixteen and Andrew brought you down to Lulworth for my birthday party. Or was it your scarlet jacket I fell in love with then? Difficult to say. I don’t love you for your jacket now. In fact, I love you in spite of it. I hate this war. If you marry me, you’ll be in the odd position of having a pacifist for a wife.”

  “General D
avenport’s wife is a suffragette. She chained herself to a letter box once. It didn’t ruin his career.”

  “I pray for the day when your career is unnecessary.”

  “So do I.”

  She looked at him in silence for a moment and then hugged her knees tighter to her body.

  “One thing has been left unsaid. Father will be happy . . . I’ll be happy. What of yourself? Do you love me?”

  “If wanting to be with you is loving you . . . if feeling at peace is loving . . . then, yes . . . I love you.”

  She nodded somberly. “How blunt and honest you are. Shall we go in and tell Father?”

  “I would like that, yes.”

  “Shall we be married in London? Or would you prefer Suffolk?”

  He rubbed the side of his jaw. “The fact is, I have only five days’ leave left. I thought we could . . . well, go up to Scotland tomorrow and get married in Gretna . . . stand in line with the other couples. That is, if you don’t mind.”

  “Oh, Lord.” She laughed. “Gretna Green! What will Mother say?”

  “She won’t have a chance to say anything.” Lord Sutton stepped into the foyer, a bottle of champagne under each arm. “Knew how the wind was blowin’ when you knocked on the door, Fenton. Put the bottles in your kit bag. Mumm’s nineteen ten. The Royal Mail leaves Euston Station at midnight. You have plenty of time to make it if you can hurry your packin’, Winnie.”

  She stood up slowly. “We can miss the train, Fenton, if you have any doubts at all . . . any second thoughts.”

  “Why would he have doubts?” her father blustered. “I’ll ring ’round for the car.”

  “I mean it,” she said.

  He reached up and touched her hand, his eyes steady on her face. “No second thoughts, Winnie.”

  She turned quickly and hurried up the stairs.

  The marquess gazed after her, then handed the bottles of champagne to Fenton.

  “I’d crack one of these with you, but there ain’t time for it. I’m glad to see her leave this house, Fenton, and I think you know why. She’s a good girl. Clever. Strong in body and mind. And she’s a Sutton . . . she’ll bear sons.”

  The wind came in a flood off the Irish Sea to churn the waters of Luce Bay and rattle the windows of the inn. Putting one hand on the glass, Fenton could feel the chill power of it. The wind had chased the mist, and the hills of Cumberland were like banks of green cloud across the Solway Firth. He drew his robe tighter around him and then lit a cigarette, the draft through the windows spiraling the smoke behind him.