It was true. My mother knew her own mind, had her own arguments always, wherever they led.
“It’s not a question of conventionality or otherwise, Hal. Married men only rarely leave their wives, so I do not foresee a happy future for your sister—that’s what I mean. I would have thought she had more sense.” She shook her head and sipped more gin.
After a short silence, she went on: “Seriously though, Hal, does your wound make things a problem with girls?”
“Mother!” I began, but my father got in first.
“My dear, Hal’s twenty-five, a grown man who’s been in a war and seen life. Don’t treat him like a—”
“I’ll treat him how I like, Arthur, I’m his mother. Because he’s grown up, and fought on that stupid, evil Front, does not mean that I—or you, for that matter—will stop caring for him, or looking out for him.”
She glanced at her watch. “I think I’ll have a walk round the garden before dinner. I’ll leave you two to talk men talk. Einstein!”
Einstein was the family Labrador, so called because, though adorable, he was monumentally stupid.
They disappeared through the door to the hall, and we heard them in the garden.
After another short pause, when both my father and I drank our drinks, I said softly, “I’m shocked, Dad. She looks really bad.”
He nodded his head. “The worst of it is, she won’t stop smoking. Your mother is so sensible in every other area of her life—as you well know. But the smoking clearly makes her cough worse. She has coughing fits that last for minutes on end, and if you think her skin is purple now, you should see it then. I don’t know what to do.”
“What do the doctors say? Did that man in Harley Street help?”
He shook his head. “They’ve washed their hands of her. If she goes on smoking, her coughing will only get worse, her lungs less efficient until…” He gloomily drank some brandy.
“Is there anything I can do in London?”
“I don’t think so. We could have yet another opinion, I suppose, but…” He looked up at me. “You know, sometimes I think she’s doing it on purpose—”
“No!”
“I mean it. I ask myself sometimes if she’s … if she’s trying to kill herself, if deep down she’s depressed and wants to end it all.”
“Depressed? Mother? She’s always seemed perfectly sane to me— brutally so at times.”
“Hmm. That’s what I mean. She’s been profoundly affected by this war—I mean, we all have, but your mother’s angry about the whole show; the stupidity has really got to her.” He lifted himself out of his chair, fetched the whisky and brandy decanters, and refilled our glasses. “You know she’s always been fiercely moral—and, well, I rather think she feels this war is just about the most immoral thing that could happen. All those young men being sent to their deaths— and young women too. It’s eating away at her insides.”
“But that wouldn’t make her clinically depressed, would it?”
My father shrugged.
After a pause, I said, “Perhaps I can help after all. There are one or two new psychiatric techniques about at the moment. Shall I try to find someone?”
“It’s an idea,” he said. “But whoever you found would have to be prepared to come down here. There’s no way she will travel to London. How is your own situation?”
“Still the same. I’m still happy, content. You don’t need to worry.”
“I don’t worry, but nor do I approve. What you are doing is not right, Hal, it really isn’t. We can’t tell your mother.”
I let the subject drop. I could hear my mother and Einstein in the hall. Izzy had mentioned something about psychiatry, when we had dinner in Stratford, and Sam, too, was reading this Freud man. I decided to explore the possibility of a specialist when I returned to London. It would make me feel useful. I had never dreamed my mother might be depressed.
Dear Ma and Pa,
When I had to stop writing last time, I was telling you about Alan. You, Ma, probably fell over at the point when I said he was married!! Try not to worry. (Though I know that you will!!) He’s a lovely man and I didn’t just meet Alan and fall head over heels for him. We worked together for weeks, for months, before anything happened! The feeling between us grew slowly and, now that we’ve talked about it, we know it was perfectly mutual.
Blame it on the war, if you like. Our war—near the Front, dealing in so much blood every day—is not as dangerous as is the war of the soldiers who are stuck in the trenches, but believe me, what we do is quite wearing enough. In these circumstances—and I haven’t mentioned the physical conditions: the mud, the lack of privacy, the lice, the smells it seems hardly right that we experience, the lack of fresh water (forget washing; what water there is goes to the injured), the sameness of the food, the intimate company of rats—in these circumstances it is only natural that our unit should grow closer together. We have special skills that set us apart, and me being a woman sets us apart too.
Partly this is because in a few cases—in a very few cases—we can do something, save lives, give people hope. It keeps them going, but it keeps us going too. It makes us—and this may sound strange—more optimistic than many others. It is a relief being optimistic. To be here at the Front, as an ordinary soldier, even as an officer—like Hal was—must be the most soul-crushing experience anyone can have. Ma, Pa, I don’t think any of us properly understood Hal’s feelings when he found out that he couldn’t have children. Now that I know what he’d been through, and then to have that news on top of everything, it must have been—I don’t know what to say, but horrible.
Alan is a doctor—I think I mentioned that last time. Alan MacGregor is his full name. From Edinburgh, from a family of doctors. He’s been married for six years, to a woman from the Highlands he met in Edinburgh, when he was at medical school there. I know what you are thinking and the answer is: yes, a baby son and daughter
I hear you groaning and you’re right, at least partly right. The existence of children doesn’t make the whole business any easier. Part of me wishes this hadn’t happened, but you will know, Ma, Pa, that these feelings just creep up on you. You relax with someone, talk to them, in our case you sneak away from the Front for a few hours, and you don’t think anything is happening. Then you pretend nothing is happening. Then, before you know it, you want something to happen. Then it happens. Then, before you can feel guilty, you feel so good, so alive, so joyful, that you are glad it has happened and you are trapped.
I’m not going to put down my feelings for Alan on paper, and I’m not going to go into any more detail. I know you won’t be happy for me; I know you think it’s all a mess and that it will end badly. All I will say is that being with Alan certainly makes this war a bit more bearable, and allows me to think about life afterward. After what I have seen here, even that is a luxury.
Please write, but if you do, please try not to lecture me. We’re on a knife edge here.
All my love, Izzy (and to Einstein!)
When I told Sam about Izzy’s latest letter to my parents, she pulled a face and shook her head. We were walking by the river, slowly, letting Will try his legs rather than have it easy in the pushchair.
“I envy your sister, being so near the Front, doing something practical. And I can see that emotions there can run very high. She couldn’t help what happened to her—”
“My mother wouldn’t agree.”
“Maybe your mother… I don’t know… maybe your mother hasn’t been faced with a situation where … where she couldn’t help herself.”
I knew what she was thinking, of course. “But Izzy’s situation isn’t like yours, Sam. When you fell for Wilhelm, you didn’t know the war was going to break out, but Izzy knew right from the start that this … Alan, was married. There’s a world of difference. I know she’s been working in a hothouse, been closer to danger than she ever dreamed possible, but… she could have kept her distance.”
Sam didn’t say anything
for a moment. Some barges were going downstream and she lifted Will so that he could see over the Embankment wall. He pointed and said something in his incomprehensible protolanguage. She set him back down on the pavement again and we resumed our slow progress.
“Lottie’s been in touch with Faye, and Faye’s going out with a married man.”
This was news to me. I knew that the sisters talked—Sam and Lottie, that is—but in general Sam kept me abreast of everything. Or so I’d thought. I would have assumed that had Lottie and Faye reestablished contact, Sam would have told me straight off. Maybe she was.
“Faye has had a lot more experience with men than Izzy has,” I pointed out.
“True, and maybe Faye will handle her situation better than Izzy will handle hers. But ask yourself this: if someone knows in advance that someone they like, someone they feel strongly about, someone they could become attached to, is already married, and yet they go ahead anyway, doesn’t that… doesn’t that say something about the strength of their feeling, the force of their attachment? Is it something that, even in Izzy’s case, can be avoided? Would it have made a difference to you if I had been married when you met me? In a sense I was married—engaged, anyway—and it didn’t seem to … it didn’t put you off.”
“Sam, you can’t compare me with Izzy or Faye. Come on! Had Wilhelm been right there, in Stratford, nothing would have—”
“I know. I know. I’m just saying … before you condemn Izzy, remember how we all can get bowled over in different ways, blown this way and that by circumstances. I agree that, probably, in her case, and seeing it from my point of view, falling for a married man was not the wisest thing she has ever done. But you—we—don’t know that. Treat your sister like an adult, with her own mind and sense of survival.”
I let the subject drop. I could see that what Sam said made a kind of sense, but I wasn’t fully convinced. And I could see that all our conversations of the emotional kind always came back to one thing: her encounter with Wilhelm.
Dear Hal,
I don’t believe it! I heard from Ma and Pa and they said you had actually been down to visit. I’ll ask how London is in a minute but first, do please write and give me your verdict on Ma. Pa wrote me a secret letter the other day—one she doesn’t know he’s written—to say how worried he is. Apparently her cough is “out of control”,’ as he put it. Is there anything you can do, with your fancy connections? When you were ill, didn’t you meet any useful doctors or professors, or deans of medicine?
If you’ve been home, then you’ll know about Alan. Ma and Pa will have filled you in with what I’ve told them. I expect they’re distressed—yes? Devastated, more like. They think I’m a silly girl who’s lost her head with some older man, etc.
It doesn’t feel like that. I’m not going to say what it does feel like, because I’m not sure I’m up to it, in pen and ink anyway. I’m trying to put it down in my notebook, because it’s all so new, and so wonderful, for me, and we’ll see how it goes. If I’m satisfied enough, I’ll maybe show you someday.
I wish you were here, Hal. It was such a frantic time when I was in London, all us girls dashed about everywhere, doing everything, as I think I lectured you that night we had dinner But although I thought my flatmates were friends, I don’t think of them that way so much now. You’re different. Your wound… don’t take this wrong, Hal… your wound makes you somehow more—well, approachable. As an older brother you were always a bit like a god to me when we were younger. Now you’re mortal. I like that.
Meeting Alan has changed everything for me. He’s a scientist. Yes, I know, he’s a doctor so he must be a scientist, but that’s not what I mean. I mean that he looks out on life as a scientist, in a very rational way. He says this war is going to last at least another two years because of the numbers of men committed but that it’s now not so much about winning as not losing. Fighting to avoid defeat, he says, is always the most vicious kind—we only have to look at animals defending their territory or their offspring.
Falling in love with Alan was never my intention—I ask you to believe that, Hal. But it has rescued me in more ways than one. The war was getting to me—I wasn’t sleeping well, I found it hard to get out of bed, I wasn’t finding the work as rewarding as I should have (“rewarding” isn’t the right word, not in wartime circumstances, but you know what I mean). But that’s all gone. I tell you, my life has changed.
Write to me, Hal. Tell me the truth about Ma, and tell me you are not distressed—not too distressed—by the news about Alan.
I haven’t asked about you and London but that doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about you.
Izzy
Later that year a zeppelin bomb dropped near the school where Sam taught. The school itself wasn’t hit but the roads around it were cratered and the school was closed for a week, until the rubble could be cleared and the buildings that had been damaged made safe. I had accumulated a bit of leave by then and so I suggested to Sam that we use the opportunity to take Will out of London for a short break. The problems that many of the children in her school were facing were getting to her and she leapt at the idea.
“But where will we go?”
“I know where I’d like to go … I’d like to see where you grew up, in Bristol.”
She was taken with the suggestion. “Can I bring Lottie?”
“If she wants to come, why not?”
But Lottie didn’t want to come. She didn’t say why; she just said she preferred to remain in London.
So the three of us took the train—the first train ride that Will remembered, and which he loved, though he was made a bit sick with the rocking of the carriages and the smell of smoke. We stayed at the Clifton, one of the best hotels in town.
“I never thought I’d ever get to see inside this place,” Sam said as we settled into bed for our first night away. “It was far too swish for us when we were growing up.”
The only part of Bristol I knew, of course, was the Baltic Wharf, but I wasn’t about to tell Sam that. I did wonder if Crimson was still there.
Bristol proper was smaller than I expected, and hillier. Walking was quite arduous, especially when I had to push Will, which was normally the case after about half an hour under his own steam, when he conked out.
The next day we found the building where Sam’s parents had rented their flat, we found the school the girls had attended, the church they went to on Sundays, and we found the tailor’s shop where their mother had worked as a needlewoman. Nothing seemed to have changed.
Sam stood outside the school, slowly shaking her head. “Look how small it is. I remember it as a huge place—a cavernous hall, big heavy doors, a vast playground. As, of course, it seemed to a tot like me.”
She recognized some of her erstwhile neighbors and school friends, but no one seemed to recognize her—she’d been gone from their lives for too long, and of course had grown up. It was only because they hadn’t moved that she recognized them. And she didn’t introduce herself.
She showed me a river nearby where the sisters used to go bathing in summer, an orphanage where the boys would chase them, and the warehouse where imported sherry was stored, with a back entrance the girls could sneak through to sample the “angel’s share,” the faint smell of fortified wine that escaped through the corks.
“As young girls we could get a little tipsy on the angel’s share,” she said with a guilty smile.
She was pleased we had come, I think. “I wondered, in the train on the way down, if all I would remember was our father.” She looked serious for a moment. “But no. It has brought back my sisters in an earlier time, when we were all together. Before … before we grew up.”
On the way back into the center of Bristol, where the hotel was located, we stopped off at a cemetery.
“I want to show you something,” said Sam softly.
She found the grave she was looking for without any trouble— her memory was good.
“Look at that,” she sa
id.
From the names on the gravestone, which we could read only with difficulty, because it was so overgrown, there were about half a dozen people buried in this one plot, some of them named Ross, but not all.
“My father’s parents and grandparents are here, and my mother’s parents, and one of her aunts.” She looked up at me. “We used to come here a lot, with my mother. She wasn’t maudlin, or anything like that. She would come here, tidy the grave, clean it up, put fresh flowers in the vase, all the while singing to herself and talking to her mother and father as though they were still with us. No one thought it odd— everyone did it, and us girls would sit and have a picnic on the grass. It was what everybody did in those days; at weekends the cemetery was quite crowded, and there were picnics all over the place, children playing, making a noise, laughing.” She smiled. “It sounds odd, but when I was growing up this cemetery was quite lively. Visiting the cemetery was part of our life, we did it every week, and in a way it was healthy. It showed us girls that death was a natural part of life, that life went on afterward, that grief eventually passes. We learned not to be afraid of death.”
She made no attempt to tidy the grave but turned away, back toward the entrance and the road that led into the center of town. “Where will we be buried, Hal? And who with? That sounds crazy— right? What does it matter who you are buried with—you’re not going to know it, are you? But I think a family grave is right, I think a family grave is a natural ending. With this war … with all those men, boys, being buried abroad, in some foreign field, with strangers, it’s not right.”
“Not strangers, Sam. Or not necessarily.” Will had been poking around other graves and I lifted him back into his pushchair. “I agree it’s not the same as being buried in a family grave, but many of the men killed on the battlefield will be buried with colleagues, comrades, others they knew, laughed with, smoked with … many will have come from the same town. And it’s not dishonorable, is it, to be buried on the battlefield where you have given your life?”
“But will we remember them, one by one? I don’t see how we can. An anonymous death… doesn’t that frighten you just a little bit? That if you’d been killed that day, and not just wounded, and you had been buried where your parents or Izzy could never find you, because your grave was unmarked… isn’t that, don’t you feel… doesn’t it make you go cold just thinking about it?”
Gifts of War Page 23