‘Don’t, whatever you do, go back to your old home, Liddy! That woman will be there, she’ll get you in some way, damn her. Besides, London’s not safe at the moment, with all the troops.’
‘I think I have to. It’s been such a long time since I heard anything from them now, thirteen years.’ She put her hands down.
He nodded and she knew he understood. ‘Let me finish The Lilac Hours,’ he begged. ‘I’ll take you to London, we’ll do it in style, my love. I’ll drive you up to Highgate myself.’ A curious expression crossed his face. ‘We don’t need his money. We have money. Too much money.’
She gazed at him with tenderness. ‘Oh, Ned. Of course I don’t care if he’s left money. I’m sure there was none left. I want – I simply want to know, he’s my father, after all. And Mary might—’ She swallowed, for she missed her sister so much still, fourteen years after her child’s death, that it was a physical pain in her chest. Oftentimes Liddy would wake up talking to her, knowing she had been there, by her side – a new coat she’d bought, a most interesting book, that funny saying of Hannah’s . . . Mary sat beside her, in her dreams, her small heart-shaped face alight with laughter, the two of them, heads bent over a drawing, or a flower . . .
And then would come the memory of Mary’s head, bent now and hanging with shame, of Zipporah’s broken cries when she finally came into Liddy’s room two weeks afterwards, eyes red, lids raw from crying – ‘I saw him coming out of her room, that time, all those times, I never breathed a word.’ Of Eliza’s eyes now, fixed in horror on her mother as she tried to breathe, and Liddy’s heart would harden again. Then, the years did not bring any diminishment of pain.
‘Of course, my Liddy,’ he said. ‘I will take you, when I can. Now, may I begin again?’
Several minutes later, in the doorway of the studio, a voice said quietly, ‘Mama?’
‘Hello darling,’ said Liddy. Ned was bent over the canvas, an inch away from his nose, scraping furiously at it with a knife, muttering to himelf, and Liddy knew they could invite a marching band in and he would not pay any attention.
‘I won’t disturb your pose,’ John said, coming towards her, cool, golden-blond, fresh as a daisy. He took off his boater and, with a gentle rolling twirl, laid it on the stone shelf next to her. She regarded him fondly as he sniffed the paintbrush solemnly. ‘This is standing in for the lilac, is it?’
‘Yes, this is my lovely fragrant bloom.’
‘You are good, and patient, Mama. I’m sure that’s why he never painted us again.’ He turned to her, his eyes smiling. ‘Do you remember Eliza threw those wings into the stream afterwards?’
‘I’ve never been so townfumftable in all my days,’ Liddy said, quickly squeezing her son’s fingers back and smiling into his sweet, open face. Behind them, Ned cursed under his breath.
‘Townfumftable?’ John said.
‘Yes, that’s what she told me it was! As townfumftable as being in town.’
John gave a small laugh. ‘Oh, that’s her, to the life! Yes, I can’t see her like Jessica or Charlotte Coote, doing a season in London, can you? She’d have hated it. She was a true country girl.’
She loved many things about her sweet-natured, kind son, but perhaps most of all was his easy manner, and the way he spoke to her freely of Eliza. No one else mentioned her daughter. Death swallowed the loved one up: memorials, portraits and gravestones took the place of the dead. But John remembered his big sister, often better than Liddy, who sometimes found she could not recall a certain feature of hers; cruel time was stripping away her memories of her golden-haired, loose-limbed, laughing girl. So John knew she had loved The Arabian Nights stories, especially Aladdin and the naughty genie, that her favourite flower was the iris, that she had adored cats, while he, of course, had longed for a puppy, implored, beseeched his parents for one, until Eliza died, when a puppy was never, ever mentioned again.
Ned did not speak his daughter’s name after she died. When Liddy thought about it, the fact of it catching her unawares, it made her angry. Sometimes she felt she might strike him, to see how he reacted. His daughter whom he had borne down the garden on his shoulders to pick apples, whom he had sketched over and over again, capturing her smooth unlined feet and fat toes, and each perfect curl, who had held his heart in her tiny plump hand. But then, so many things made her angry now that it was simpler to say nothing. We go on.
She tried not to think about Eliza too often, but it was very hard pushing the grief and the questions down, down. They kept coming back up into her mind. What she would be doing, now. Would she have enjoyed tennis, like John? Would she have been a reader? A good dancer? As bright at her lessons as she seemed? She would be a young woman now; Liddy could picture exactly how she would have turned out. Beautiful, spirited, fierce.
She shook her head now and smiled into her son’s eyes. The letter from Dalbeattie was on the stone shelf behind Ned, but she would not show it to him. ‘So, my darling boy,’ she said. ‘What news?’
John had tucked something in his hand but now he unfurled it. ‘I thought I’d better tell you myself, since you won’t like it.’
She was still smiling, and she looked down at his open hand, at a piece of paper.
‘Fight alongside your friends,’ he said.
Scrape, scrape, scrape . . . the knife scratched, and Ned grunted, behind the easel. She could see the palette occasionally, the finger hooked around it, as though it were part of him.
‘What?’ Liddy did not really hear him properly. ‘What’s this? Another game? Shall we play after tea?’
‘Jack Barnaby, Tom Peck, Coote and a few others – we are going to the recruiting office tomorrow.’
Liddy looked properly at him. She saw now his skin was slick with sweat, his face pale. She blinked.
‘What do you mean?’
He cleared his throat. ‘We’re signing up, Mama. Your King and Country need You.’
‘No,’ Liddy heard herself say quietly. ‘No.’
‘Mama!’ John laughed, as though it were funny. ‘We must all do our part. The Godstow Pals – we’re all going off together. We’ll be—’
‘You will not!’ she shouted. ‘Ned! Ned, listen to this. Ned!’
His voice was faint behind the easel. ‘One moment, Liddy, then I am entirely yours.’
Liddy dropped the paintbrush to the floor and stood up. ‘John, my darling, they won’t make you go. You can’t go.’
John gave a ghastly smile. ‘Jack and I had a bet, and—’
Ned looked up, suddenly alert. ‘What’s this? You and that farmer’s boy?’ He nodded at his son. ‘What devilry now, what are you planning?’ He jabbed the easel at him. ‘What’s it now, Liddy?’
‘He’s going to the recruiting office tomorrow,’ said Liddy, hearing her own voice say the words, and it was ghastly. ‘John is joining up.’ She covered her face with her hands for a moment and when she looked up again Ned was staring, frozen, at his son.
‘If we go together, we’ll all be in the same battalion,’ John said. ‘It’s a great show, Mama, they have a brass band over at Godstow and the village is cheering each man as he goes into the office . . . The Pals’ Brigade they call it. It was Jack’s idea . . . He loves a scrap. I know I’m not a fighting man—’ He cleared his throat, said hoarsely, ‘But everyone’s going, Mama. I can’t be the only one at home.’
‘Yes, you can,’ said Liddy. ‘Ramsay MacDonald—’
‘Ramsay MacDonald is a traitor and a liar!’ said Ned, almost shouting. ‘My love! At this moment, of national crisis, when our country is beset by forces who would threaten everything we hold dear about the Empire! I beg of you not to speak the man’s name.’
Liddy’s eyes were blazing, but she kept her voice light: ‘Oh, Ned. Where is the boy who disdained organised religion, and used to say the Empire was too powerful? Our son, dearest, our son is saying he is leaving us, that he wishes to join up.’
‘You think we should abandon France to the Germans?�
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‘I do not. I merely think . . .’ She shook her head. ‘I have a distaste for war, this war especially, which is apparently shared by very few. John, my love, I say again that I wish that you would not go.’
‘No. He’s quite right. He must go.’ Ned put down the palette, went over and put the boater back on his son’s head. He straightened his collar. ‘My boy. . . so.’ His face formed into a small half-smile. ‘I’d say it’s the thing to do. Quite right.’ He patted John’s smooth cheek. ‘Put hairs on your chin, John. Make you into a man.’
They had fought often about John. There was the time he had been sent away to school against Liddy’s will and had written such heartbreaking letters home, and eventually they had found out about the schoolmaster who did such terrible things to him, beating him with a branch John had had to select himself and making him walk through the school grounds holding a sign: ‘COWARD’.
It was Nurse Bryant all over again, Liddy had screamed, when Ned had uneasily said he supposed that was what happened at good public schools. But she had won that argument, though it had cost her dear and it had forever altered Ned’s relationship with his son. He could not understand how his own boy who, but for his golden colouring, looked so very like him, could be so utterly at odds with his father. John let every bluebottle and daddy-long-legs out of the casement windows and refused to eat meat after he turned sixteen. He grew tall like a tree, his muscles huge and supple, and worked the land at harvest-time, helping the Burnabys bring in the corn, tossing bales of hay high into the sky with the flick of a pitchfork. He went to a local boys’ day school over in the nearby market town of Walbrook, not the great public school future his father had wanted for his only son. He would walk home every day come winter or summer, though it was an hour or more. He said he liked the hedgerows, and the people one met. He wanted to be a teacher – an art teacher! He was a fine artist, and drew sketches of everyone he met in the notebook he kept in his knapsack. The loss of his sister had turned him from a little brother into an only child. The house was never quite the same again. Happiness was gone. But John was kind, calm, conviction shining through everything he did – Liddy often thought of him as a tree: strong, solid, unbreakable. She wished Ned could see how very like him his son was.
John did not reply to his father, at first. He turned to his mother and said with his gentle, slightly lopsided smile, ‘It’ll be a great show. And, Mama, you wouldn’t think much of me if I didn’t.’
‘Oh, John. It is not you speaking now, my love,’ she said, very softly, watching him intently. Nausea kneaded her stomach.
‘God Save the King!’ said Ned smartly, jumping to attention. After a momentary pause John saluted smartly, echoing his father, in a clear, steady voice.
Liddy, weakly, mimicked them as they stood to attention in the sweltering room, and knew it was over at that point. What could she say now? How could she stop him?
‘I must draw you, my boy,’ Ned said, picking up his palette and knife again. He stared curiously at his son, as though seeing him for the first time. ‘When you’re in uniform. Do you get the uniform, before you go?’
‘I believe so.’
Ned had turned towards the easel, gazing at the unfinished painting through narrowed eyes, a vein ticking in his cheek.
‘There,’ he muttered, jabbing softly at the canvas with a soft hogshead brush. ‘Yes – yes, of course. That’s why. That’s why. There. It must be there.’ He waved the palette at his son, and for a second the old light was there in his eyes. ‘You must hurry. Or perhaps my father’s old military jacket would do. It was his father’s, he was in the Crimea. I must draw you. That’s why it’s been impossible to finish, I understand it now. Reflections of England, you see? There.’ He nodded at his son.
‘I’ll find a jacket, Father,’ John said, as though that was the thing, not his leaving for war.
‘God save the King,’ Liddy said softly and then, crumpling the letter from Dalbeattie in her hand and letting it fall to the floor, she dashed from the studio. She met Zipporah on the path back up to the house. The older woman clasped her hands, and fixed her pale-blue eyes on Liddy. All she said was:
‘He’s getting ready to go, isn’t he? I knew he would. Our John.’
There was pride in her voice. Liddy pushed her aside, and went to her room, where she vomited into the china bowl on her washstand, heaving over and over. The smell of the decaying lilac, too rich, an edge of rotten mulch behind the rich scent, would forever remind her of that awful day.
She knew then.
Chapter Thirty-One
1916
It all started with a rug.
There was a horse chestnut tree beside Mary’s room, overlooking the river. Every year the cycle of its frothy blossom, its budding leaves, the slow fading of its greenery to yellow and then dazzling orange and red, and the conkers which bounced down almost comically on to the passers-by below, pleased Mary. It stood in the lawned gardens stretching from her building across to the Dove public house and the dark, dank passageway that led towards Hammersmith. The glossy brown conkers were scooped up with great joy by teams of jostling boys, and from her window seat above the path Mary could look down at them and wonder how many would be called up to fight – how soon they would come for them. Some looked to be fifteen or sixteen – only boys, the pleasure they took in those conker fights, the ferocity of the swing and the – to her – sickening sound, like crunching bone, of the conker when it was cracked open. And then they would disappear, laughing and calling rudely to one another through the passageway. Games, games. It was all games.
The noise those boys made reminded her of the way the crows used to call in the yew trees behind Nightingale House, blithely oblivious to anyone or anything. She would lie there in the early mornings, listening to their billowing, grumbling caw-ing.
Once, long ago in that house, Dalbeattie had got up, gone to her window and thrown a stone from his pocket into the yew trees. The protesting noises they made were unbelieveably loud.
‘Now,’ he’d said, returning to the bed and climbing into it, pushing her unprotesting white legs apart, his long face wolfish, voice husky with passion. ‘No more disturbances, my angel—’
Sometimes the memory of it came to her, the tingling, swirling warmth of ecstasy, and she would feel liquid, magnetic, as though being dragged to the floor, red, red blood staining her cheeks. His large long hands on her waist, on her thighs, how he handled her – as though she were material, something to be touched and worked and caressed into sympathetic agreement with him. How afraid she always was when he came to her room, how every time she would tell herself – I am not the girls who came to Pertwee, or the ones he visited. I am different. And then it would begin – a touch, a sigh, a word from either one and she could not stop herself, did not know how to – and it was, of course, extraordinary.
Yet the pleasure of it was inextricably tangled with the sight of Eliza’s coffin, the beginnings of her suffocation, her little feet in laced boots stumbling back from the farm. Falling to the floor, legs tangled in her muddied white lace petticoat and smock, the first indication something was wrong – ‘I don’t feel well, Auntie Em. My throat . . .’
In the fifteen years since her niece’s death Mary had lived in the shadows. She had found rooms in London, selling her mother’s cameo brooch at first and then taking in sewing. She knew she was sliding slowly, incrementally towards poverty and the workhouse, but she had long decided that she would find her grave in the Thames outside her window rather than enter the workhouse or whatever version of it might exist when the war was over. She had it planned out to the last notion – arsenic procured from the chemist under the pretence of getting rid of rats, a skirt and jacket weighted down with stones sewn carefully into the lining – no one sewed more carefully than she – one jump late at night from the Hammersmith Bridge. A smooth, relatively pain-free death, or so she hoped. It was more than she deserved.
War had changed very li
ttle in Mary’s life, only that she was slightly busier, because people were mending more, and buying less new clothing, despite the exhortations in the papers that one should support the Empire by shopping. She took in alterations and made curtains and cushions and did embroidery – she could turn her hand to anything. She deserved nothing, and thus it was not a bad life, she told herself; she often thought she should suffer more than she did. She had one room, and the light from the river helped her with her sewing. She had a small rocking chair, a bed, a little mahogany trunk, and a chest of drawers, all (save the mahogany trunk which she had taken to Aunt Charlotte’s all those years ago) purchased from a shop nearby in Hammersmith under the new railway arches. Mrs MacReady, her landlady, made her breakfast and supper and brought it up, though frequently it was nothing more than hot water with a single potato and a piece of gristle floating in it.
She had everything arranged just so. But –
There was a space on the varnished wooden floor for a rug, and this is where the trouble started.
Mary told herself she deserved nothing more, but she wanted a rug. Every day she sat by the window and sewed until the light began to fail, and often she met with her fellow suffragists, in Hammersmith, at the WSPU meetings and rallies. And if there was no gathering or call to action, every evening alone she rocked back and forth in her chair and stared at the empty square on the floor where a rug should be. It was all she wanted, a rug like the one she’d had in St Michael’s House. It was dark red and ochre orange, studded with interlinked roses, and it had been in her room from birth, save for the night she had tried, in her innocence, to give it to Liddy, before Miss Bryant had returned it. Every night Mary had fallen asleep, looking at it. It was the first thing her bare feet touched every morning. Her mother had owned it as a child, and it was the last link Mary now had with that old life, her mother, the happy family they might have been had she lived, if a woman hadn’t taken a walk with her sick nursemaid one afternoon. If Bryant hadn’t seen the situations vacant column in The Times one particular morning. If Liddy hadn’t got up out of bed and dared to leave the house. And she thought about that rug.
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