Gifts of War

by Mackenzie Ford

  “Some of what I said was true,” she wrote. “Like the fact that, yes, I always did have a soft spot for you and, had we met under different circumstances, what fun we might have had. But I had no right to say what I said about Sam. Of course, I do know her better than you—at least, I have known her far longer. But she never discussed you and your life together with me, and I never asked, please believe that, Hal. I said what I said out of spite and I am sorry and ashamed and, for the second time, ask you to forgive me. I hope I will see you at the wedding.”

  I sat, sipping my coffee and rereading Lottie’s letter. The business with Faye’s wedding posed no problems. Sam would either agree to go or she wouldn’t. The rest of the letter, however, was far from straightforward and posed as many problems as it attempted to solve. First off, did I believe Lottie? Had she undergone a genuine change of heart, and was what she was saying now a truer version of events than what she had told me—in a heated exchange—outside Penrith Mansions? If so, why had she changed her tune, and why now? I had no idea. I did know that part of her letter was demonstrably untrue. Sam had discussed our life together with her sisters, because I had overheard them the night Will couldn’t sleep, after the party for Reg. Second, what was I going to say to Sam? If I said that I had received a letter from Lottie at the office, she would think that very odd and she would want to see it, and I didn’t want that. But if I didn’t show her the letter, how had I come by the information that Faye was to be married and that we were invited? I couldn’t duck that.

  Lottie had landed me in it.

  As the week went on, I couldn’t decide what to do. On Thursday, Sam said, “Will’s playing in a school football game on Saturday. He wants you to take him and to stay and watch. I have things to do. Do you mind?”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  But the very next day, when I came home in the evening, after she had poured me a whisky, Sam took me to one side, away from Will. “Saturday’s game is off.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “Oh, Hal. I went to see the headmistress, Miss Allardyce herself. It’s the first time Will’s been selected and they type out the team sheets for these games and post them on the school notice board. Knowing that, I said to the headmistress that Will’s name wasn’t Ross but Montgomery. She asked me how that could be—and I told her. That we aren’t married, I mean.”

  Sam looked at me. “She was shocked. Shocked and very upset. Spitting fire. She said I had cheated and she’s asked me to take Will out of the school.” Sam was close to tears. “I feel so wretched—it’s all my fault, and Will is going to be devastated.” She looked distraught.

  I thought for a bit. “The game is the easy part. I’ll take him to a proper game—you know, at Woolwich Arsenal or Tottenham. He’ll be thrilled and that will take his mind off what was going to happen.”

  “Oh, Hal, you will?”

  “As I said, that’s the easy part. How are you going to explain changing schools—and what are you going to tell the next one?”

  She came across and sat on my lap. “Ellen Smith, at school, will help me find somewhere else.” She handed me the whisky. “She knows about us. I’ll tell the new school we’re married, of course. I can’t put Will through this again—or you.”

  While I was still mulling over what to do about Faye’s invitation, I was let off the hook. On the Monday morning of the following week, in the post at Penrith Mansions, there arrived a printed invitation to Faye’s wedding, plus a note from her begging forgiveness and asking if Sam would allow Will to be a page boy. Faye added that Ruth would be making her wedding dress, those of the two bridesmaids, and Will’s outfit.

  I was delighted by this turn of events. “It’s an olive branch,” I said over breakfast that morning, “the perfect way for you all to get back together again.”

  Sam felt differently. “No,” she growled. “Not under any circumstances. Not after the way Faye behaved toward you, and the way Ruth behaved toward you.”

  “Sam!” I said. “Don’t be silly. You can’t do this. They are your sisters, your family, your blood.”

  “Blood!” she almost screamed. “Don’t talk to me about blood. My father was flesh and blood, and look how he behaved. Sir Mortimer Stannard wasn’t flesh and blood and he was always much more decent to my sisters and me than our father ever was. You’ve been better for Will than any of my sisters ever have.” She finished her tea and put the cup and saucer in the sink. “So don’t tell me blood counts for anything! Hal, how many times do I have to tell you: you are my family now, you are Will’s father, it’s you I am with. My sisters know they’ve done wrong, done wrong by Will, by you, and by me, and they are trying to … trying to slide out of it.”

  “Meet them halfway, Sam. They have made the first move—”

  “And the last move, so far as I am concerned. Will is not being anybody’s page boy, not for now. Faye’s marriage won’t last, anyway. You know what she’s like.”

  I let a pause elapse. “If you really think I’m Will’s father now, I say we should meet Faye halfway.”

  Sam looked at me. Her features were set. “No.”

  At the end of October my mother died. It was scarely a surprise but it would come hard on Izzy, I thought, upsetting—devastating—her wedding plans. Ma died on a Thursday. This was fortunate in one way: it meant that my father’s telegram announcing the news reached us on Friday and we were able to get the vicar’s daughter to look after Will for the entire weekend.

  It was a gray morning as we boarded the train at Paddington down to Edgewater. Both of us were in a mood to match the weather but, in a funny way, Sam took the death of my mother harder than I did. I knew my mother as an unsentimental person, someone who held her emotions inside, and I was much the same. Sam, on the other hand, had thoroughly enjoyed her first visit to Edgewater, she looked upon my parents as a new family, and the prospect of a second visit in very different circumstances did not sit well with her.

  The train was fairly empty and we had a carriage to ourselves. We talked about all sorts of things and Sam raised the business of my meeting with Colonel Moore and the brigadier.

  “I dropped you in it, didn’t I?” she said. “I gave away too much in my fight with Ruth. After all you’ve done for me and my family, this is how I repay you. I’m so sorry.”

  The train was passing some reservoirs. We could see men training to be divers.

  “I’ve thought about that myself, from time to time. How did the subject crop up in the first place?”

  “Oh, I said that Lottie had helped catch a spy and that Ruth and Greville had no business shopping her man. That Lottie had been as useful to the war effort as Ruth has, and that letting you take the blame in Lottie’s eyes was despicable. One thing led to another and Greville was listening in. What a pig he is.”

  She leaned forward and touched my hand. “I’m sorry.”

  I lifted her hand and kissed it. “No harm done. I was just rapped across the knuckles and told not to do it again. Anyway, the war’s nearly over. Not much chance now.”

  “Yes,” she said after a moment. “The war is nearly over. And when it is over, Hal, would you mind—would you mind very much—if I tried my hand at something other than teaching?”

  I stared at her. I couldn’t think what to say for a moment or two. First Izzy wanted out of nursing, and now Sam wanted a change too.

  “Do you have something in mind?”

  She nodded. She went to speak but the train rattled over some points and she held off till we were back on smoother rails.

  “Haven’t you noticed how interested I’ve become in psychology?”

  I thought. “My birthday present, that Swiss chap and the unconscious.”

  “Jung. Yes. But before that the lecture by the psychiatrist from Edinburgh, and before that I suppose I first got interested in the different ways the war has affected families, especially the children.”

  “And where does all that lead?”

&
nbsp; “Well, first I’d like to do a course on psychology—”

  “You want to be a psychiatrist?”

  “Nnno … that would mean six years of medical training, more. But there’s a one-year course on psychology that I can do at London University. That will tell me whether I’m cut out for it, and it will also show me what sort of jobs are—or might be—available.”

  “What sort of job do you want?”

  We rattled over a bridge and the noise of the train deepened for a moment.

  “Trying to help people, I think, in a more personal, more technical way than teaching. Helping children who have been disturbed by the war, lost fathers, been totally orphaned in some cases.”

  I told her about Izzy’s change of heart over nursing. “She finds it too much, too overwhelming. You might find the same.”

  “Oh no, Hal. Your sister’s been in a war, blood and death and horror for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for more than three years. What I want to do—well, what I think I want to do—is nothing like that. And there’s going to be a need for it after the war.”

  Another train went past, going in the opposite direction. The smell of smoke was briefly intense.

  “Well, I don’t have any objection if that’s what you really want to do. I just hope all the grief you’ll encounter doesn’t get you down.”

  “I’ve got you to keep me on an even keel,” she said softly, reaching out for my hand and kissing it.

  We dozed for a bit then, even though it was morning, lulled by the swaying of the carriage. Later, as we were pulling out of High Wycombe station—the railway tracks lined with beech trees—she asked, “Are you nervous? How will your father have taken it?”

  “Stoically, I am sure, in the Montgomery family tradition.” I shook my head. “No, I take that back. Mother, Father, and I are stoics. Izzy isn’t—she’s the opposite. It shines out in her letters. Her bubbliness makes up for the rest of us.”

  As the train headed west, the weather deteriorated. We went through a cloudburst near Lechlade but by the time we reached Chalford, where we got off, it had stopped. I had wired Dad which train we would be on and he’d sent the car, driven by old Dr. Barnaby’s son, Trevor, who did odd jobs while he waited to go to Cambridge after the war.

  The boy had the understanding to make himself scarce when we reached the house, though at first we couldn’t find my father. We shouted and shouted until Sam suddenly cried out, “There he is, in the garden, on your mother’s favorite bench.”

  “Father!” I called out softly as we stepped into the garden. Now that we had arrived, I was a bit nervous. He didn’t move but sat hunched on the bench.

  As I approached I could see that he was weeping. I was alarmed. Such a display of feeling was surprising, to say the least, and most unlike my father. I immediately sat next to him and put my arm around him. That was most unlike me.

  But he didn’t flinch. Instead, his frame continued to shake softly as he sobbed and tears ran down his cheeks. I was disconcerted.

  I noticed Sam scrabbling in the gravel under the bench and then she was holding a piece of paper. I paid no attention.

  I took out a handkerchief and handed it to my father. He accepted it but just held it in his fist, in a ball.

  Sam held the piece of paper out to me. “Hal.”

  I glared at her and shook my head. “Not now,” I whispered. “Dry your tears, Father. Let’s go in. It will rain again soon. You’ll catch a chill.”

  “Hal, read this. Now!” Sam still had the paper before my eyes. I glared at her again but then noticed that the piece of paper was a telegram. I snatched at it with one hand and scanned the lines:

  + REGRET • TO • INFORM • YOU • SENIOR • STAFF • NURSE • ISOBEL • ELIZABETH • MONTGOMERY • DIED • TODAY • OF • SHRAPNEL • WOUNDS • RECEIVED • IN • ACTION • EARLIER • THIS • WEEK + STOP + LETTER • FOLLOWS + STOP + ALAN • MACGREGOR + SURGEON • COMMANDING + STOP +

  I have never cried before or since. Yes, as a child when I fell out of a tree, or crashed my bicycle. But not for long and never, never as an adult, except then. My father and I sat together on Mother’s favorite bench, weeping. My lovely sister, a bundle of bossiness, my lieutenant in so many adventures, the one person who could talk to me in total candor, who could be embarrassingly honest and get away with it, was no more. Was dead. I would never see her again. I would receive no more letters from her. Those outraged exclamation marks and breathless underlinings were gone forever. Her lovely languid brown eyes, her button of a nose were now just a memory. No more dinners with her. I would never again taste the envious glances of men who thought I was her lover. I now had no chance of meeting her flatmates. No wedding, no nieces and nephews. No chance to mix her her beloved G&Ts. She would never meet Sam or Will or Whisky. They would never meet her.

  How I hated the Germans.

  Sam, I think, went into the house, ostensibly to make some tea or to pour some whisky, but in reality to leave us alone.

  I had been prepared for the death of my mother. I had hoped she would live for Izzy’s wedding, but neither she nor my father nor I had any illusions about where emphysema would lead, and in taking Sam down to Edgewater on our previous visit, I had known, as my mother had known, that we were acknowledging the beginning of the end. It had been a suitable gesture and had, I think, made it easier for my mother as she faced oblivion.

  But this … Izzy’s death, Izzy’s too premature, tragic, and violent death … I wasn’t prepared and had no mechanism to cope. Since the depression I had endured after my injury at the Front, I had done well, I thought; I had handled what had been thrown at me, both professionally and personally, and had come out pretty much on top.

  But not this time.

  I was wrecked.

  How I hated the Germans.

  I don’t really remember what happened during the rest of that day. I think that Sam had Trevor fetch old Dr. Barnaby, and he may have given both my father and me a sedative. Or we may just have drunk endless bottles of whisky. I don’t remember.

  I, we, got through that day, and the Sunday afterward. Like most doctors, as I think I said, Liam had been equipped with a telephone, and I was able to call the office on Monday morning from his surgery and speak to Malahyde. The brigadier was understanding, more than understanding. He gave me the week off and used his authority to ensure that Izzy’s remains were sent on to us immediately.

  Alan MacGregor was as good as his word. A letter was hand-delivered on Tuesday. MacGregor told us that Izzy had been gassed— mustard gas, the gas developed by Fritz Haber at his institute in Berlin. Little had I known, when I’d first made the connection, that it would have such devastating personal consequences for me. I later learned that, in the course of the war, mustard gas killed some 135,000 Allied soldiers. But it didn’t kill Isobel. It burned her and blinded her, as it has burned and blinded so many, and in her distress she blundered around and took shrapnel in her head from an exploding shell. She was invalided home but died on the way, at Ashford in Kent.

  At least the circumstances of Izzy’s death meant that she wasn’t buried in France, or Flanders. Thanks to the brigadier, her remains reached us on Wednesday.

  Sam had gone back to London on Sunday. She had to look after Will. But she returned for the funeral.

  When my father and I could bring ourselves to face up to the dreadful truth, sometime on Sunday, we decided that a joint cremation would be seemly. And so, on Friday, we held a funeral in two parts. First, there was a ceremony at our local church at Edgewater, the church where the previous vicar had five daughters, when I was a boy, one of whom caused such a scandal. The church where Izzy had hoped to be married.

  Sam had managed to leave Will with the wife of the vicar in Old Church Street, who, when it came to it, helped us out in our hour of need. My mother’s two sisters came, as did a few friends. Alan MacGregor did not come. No doubt he was back at the Front. He, poor man, had lost both of the women in hi
s life. The church ceremony was well attended by all the locals, all the traditional hymns were sung, and I paid for a chorister to come from Gloucester Cathedral to sing Handel’s “Let Me Weep.” My father didn’t object—he was too grief-stricken—and he agreed it matched our mood perfectly.

  But there was no wake. A small group of us then went on to Stroud, where there was a crematorium. After that, my father, Sam, and I went back home, where we left him alone to do as he wished with my mother’s ashes.

  I knew what I wanted to do with Izzy’s remains, and my father agreed. I took Sam with me. We turned left out of the house, right just past the church, and walked down a rutted lane until we reached a barn, beyond which a field rose to a small copse of trees.

  “Remember the bull?” I said. “This is where he was kept.” The field now looked as though it was sown to potatoes, more useful for the war effort. I took Sam forward, to the iron fence that marked one edge of the field. It was now all overgrown but we found the kissing gate that had featured in the great game of “Bullrush,” and let ourselves through. I walked round in a circle, spreading Izzy’s ashes on the ground. “This would have appealed to her,” I said. “Outlasting the bull.”

  We just stood for a while, without speaking, looking at the field, feeling the breeze, listening to the birds, brushing off the insects that landed on us. Izzy’s ashes had already all but disappeared. It might not be a family grave but she was home.

  Though I was sad that day, sadder, I think, than I had ever been, I was also angry, still choked with loathing for the Germans. Handel had made that lovely music but it had been a long time ago, and what had the current crop of Germans done—produce ever more deadly forms of gas, zeppelin sky bombs, and torpedoes. Faye was right— how could Sam have fallen in love with a German? How could she, after all these years, after all that had happened, after her own family, and now mine, had been devastated, how could she still hold fast to Wilhelm? She didn’t mention him much now but he was there, he was there, in our minds, filling our thoughts, like a mine buried but not too deeply, ready to explode and destroy all around it with one false step. My mother’s death, Izzy’s death, the funeral, seeing my own father weep for the first time … none of that made me depressed the way I had been all those months and years before; instead I was fired up, burning with loathing, bristling with contempt, gorged on a hot rage—and part of me, I could admit it now, was angry with Sam. I never thought I’d feel that. I was angry, livid, that she still felt… whatever she felt for Wilhelm. Whatever she felt, it was too much, it was wrong, he was the enemy, he bore some responsibility, some blame, for what we had been through. I had to tell her that, and at the same time she should know what I had done, how I had deceived her … but also how I had delivered her from the limbo, the no-man’s-land, the wilderness she would have inhabited for the rest of her life, had I not come along. The play had gone on for long enough. It was time she was told. I would sit her down at home, this very afternoon, in Izzy’s room, a room Izzy would never return to, and let Sam know what I had done, how I had tried to steal her love, so she could decide where to go next. I didn’t care anymore.