Iris was raving. Grace had got up and was checking the fridge—old milk she’d bought last week, the eggs she’d bought the week before, untouched, jam, butter, also bought by Grace, also untouched. She turned to look at Iris, who was looking out towards the backyard, talking more to herself than to Grace. Grace felt a sudden pull of sadness. She knew Iris was between worlds now, not quite with them anymore. The Byron weekend somehow symbolised the loss that would come. “Come for the weekend,” Grace said. “The kids love you so much.”
Iris looked at her as if in a dream. “What? What did you say?”
“Byron. Come to the beach. I promise you can sleep all day. The sea air will do you good.”
Iris looked at Grace as if she was having difficulty placing her. “I did love him, you know. I really did.”
“Tom?” Grace said.
“Al,” Iris said. “I loved Al.”
Iris
It was a Sunday morning and I went out to the verandah to tell him it was time to get ready for lunch. Grace was still at the medical school but she’d be home by one. Al looked peaceful enough, sitting there on the chair, book on the table beside him, the bookmark returned, page 347 of a biography of Abraham Lincoln I’d bought for him. He loved the American presidents. Truman was his favourite, although lately he’d said he was becoming a Lincoln man. I like to think he marked his page and put the book down on the table so as to have a little snooze before lunch as he often did on a Sunday. It was a roast we always had, with baked vegetables. I’d called him perhaps half an hour earlier to help me get the meat out of the oven. I’d hurt my shoulder the week before and had been shy of lifting, and when he didn’t answer and I’d called again and he still didn’t answer I thought nothing of it other than that he must be asleep, and I pulled the roast out and was quite pleased really because it didn’t hurt my shoulder, so I knew I was on the mend. After I turned up the oven to finish browning the potatoes I thought I should wake him. You don’t want Grace thinking you’re getting old enough to sleep on a Sunday morning. I heard the chapel bell up at All Hallows’, I recall, and I wondered why. A wedding, probably, some past pupil so dedicated to the school she wanted her marriage there.
Al was so obviously dead. His eyes were closed, which lent support to my notion that he’d died in his sleep. His right arm was resting across his chest, his left hung limp by his side. His skin was grey. His lips were dark, blue-purple. His jaw was slack. I wiped my hands on my apron and closed his mouth, which made him look much more normal. His skin was faintly warm to the touch. And then I heard a hound baying in the distance, as if it knew, and that almost undid me.
Later Grace asked, delicately, whether I’d tried to revive him. I hadn’t, intentionally. Al had come out to the verandah at around ten. He’d not heard my calls at eleven and it was nearly twelve when I found him. If by some miracle I’d managed to force his poor heart to pump again, what would I have left but the idiot he would never want to be? I thought as clearly as this in those first few moments, however much I regretted not trying to drag him back to life in the days and weeks and months that followed.
I sat down on the floor beside his chair. “The veggies are nearly done,” I said. I’d parboiled and scored the potatoes so they’d have the crisp skins Al liked. “And I’ve done onions, love,” which I knew he’d enjoy even if later he’d suffer with gas. I took his hand, cooling now. I held it in both of mine as if to warm it. I said, “I hope your soul hasn’t flown yet. For I want you to know that I love you. It took me a long time to know it myself, so I hope you know it too.”
I sat by Al while sunlight came through the blinds and stretched itself across the coverlet like an old cat. “Oh Al,” I said, “how will I go on without you to guide us straight? Do you remember the time you and Tom went swimming in the dam at Risdon in shorts? It was the first time I saw you naked or near enough to naked. You were so complete in yourself, I confess I wanted to touch you, I wanted to put my hand to your breastbone. You felt it sooner, that heat between us. You were young, in love with medicine, in love with life, in love with me, as you’ve said. You never gave in to despair like I did.
“And you were right. I didn’t love you, not then. I liked the square set of your shoulders, the compact power in your chest and middle. I’d have wanted you if I’d known the feeling enough to name it, but I didn’t love you.
“And if I hadn’t gone to Royaumont, hadn’t learned about a world where women sat rather than served at table, I’d never have had cause to complain, never have known what I missed. You bore the brunt of the anger of a million women whose lives were something like mine. And it was never fair.”
Just then I imagined Al stirred as if to protest, so I paused with my thoughts, but it was just a trick of the light or my eyes.
“I know when I came home I was unkind. And I don’t know why you stayed by me. But I’m fortunate you did. Because, Al, and this has been a roundabout way of speaking the truth, I came to love you and I love you still and if Tom had lived in the flesh instead of in the dark sadness of my heart, I’d have loved you better.” I was crying as I spoke. I knew this was weakness twice over—to burden Al with my confession in order to relieve my own conscience, and to tell him in death to avoid his response.
“Let me tell you when I knew I loved you,” I said. “It was that day at Pyramid Rock. Do you remember?” It was nothing in particular that happened, no great life change. A day for a picnic, Rose at two—a beautiful child—Al with a rare midweek day off, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his strong fair forearms. Rose had been up in the night with dreams. I was tired but not so tired as I’d been, it seemed, for years. I’d woken in the morning in bed with Rose and I’d had a peculiar feeling, something like that after a journey back from somewhere far away when the familiar of home seems bright and new. The smell of eucalyptus struck me as I was hanging the sheets in the morning. I heard a butcher-bird high in the dead gum at the front gate. I remember the sun that day as it rose pink and gold on scuddy clouds. It struck me as so beautiful and yet I’d seen sunrises just like it perhaps a hundred times since Royaumont. It was as if I was seeing the world again for the first time.
Al sensed the change. After the long walk up the rock, Rose on his shoulders when she tired, we ate our lunch—cold chicken and potato salad—and lay down together under a tree. We all slept, I woke first, and when I looked across at Al and Rose, their faces so free in repose, I swear I felt I was the luckiest woman alive. Al woke too and something in the expression on my face melted something in him and while Rose slept we held one another and kissed and renewed the bond that made us man and wife. And then in the afternoon, we wandered home at Rose’s deliciously slow pace.
It didn’t end right there. There were nights still when I woke in a sweat of anguish or fear. There were days when all I could manage to do was go through the motions of being Iris Hogan. But that day was the point at which the life I lived, the life with Al and Rose, became the life I wanted, and the life I had been living, in my fug of guilt and resentment and pain, became the life I wanted to leave behind me.
“That’s when I knew I loved you,” I told him now.
When Grace walked in and saw Al, she panicked, or perhaps it was me on the floor beside him that frightened her. We’d been there a good while and we were quite settled. She grabbed Al’s wrist and said, “Oh my God, he’s dead. Quickly.”
“Why?” I said.
She looked at me as she had when she was three, summing me up. “Shock,” she said and ran inside to call an ambulance. I didn’t say not to, although I prayed they wouldn’t try to revive him even as I wished they would. For the beginning of realisation was with me. Death as the end of someone, and I didn’t want to let him go. Looking back now, Al, I’m glad I gave you that one gift. I let you go.
I was left to myself, more or less, while Grace and the ambulance men talked in whispers about me. They thought me mad, I’m sure, b
ut I just wanted to sit a while more with you Al, before you went over. I just wanted to be able to smell your dear coconut oil head for a little longer before you went away forever.
I believe that loss brings memories of loss, and in the months after Al died I grieved for both of them, him and Rose, as if they’d both just died, even though Rose had died over twenty years before. I suppose I never had time for grief when Rose died, for there was Grace to be cared for and I didn’t have much energy left for anything else. And so it was Rose as much as Al I wept for in the months that followed his death.
Violet and I had been in Paris with Miss Ivens the day before. Violet was having some work done on her car and Miss Ivens and I had to see the Croix-Rouge. We’d seen Dugald in the afternoon—he’d come to the meeting and he and I had to pretend we hardly knew each other—and then he and I met again that night after Miss Ivens retired. I felt awful to deceive Miss Ivens about our relationship and guilty about my feelings for Dugald. They seemed duplicitous, selfish. Miss Ivens and I caught the train back to Royaumont and I know I was distracted. I couldn’t concentrate on the figures we were working through, trying to increase the hospital’s capacity ahead of opening Villers-Cotterêts.
Violet had stayed on in Paris for an extra night, as they needed parts to fix her car. I hadn’t had a chance to tell her what had happened with Dugald, how difficult it had felt to be in the same room as him and pretend I hardly knew him.
Violet wasn’t expected back before morning. I woke in the dark, from a dream I couldn’t remember, unable to shake a feeling of foreboding. In the dream, there was a funeral in Asnières but I didn’t know whose funeral it was. Daddy was there and Claire too and the twins but not Tom. As I woke fully, the feeling of foreboding centred itself on Tom. I felt in my bones that something terrible had happened to him.
I was wide awake now, my heart thumping, my belly filled with fear. I looked over and saw in the faint light from the window that Violet had come in after all and was in her bed. I got up, lit the lamp, and shook her awake.
“I’m worried.”
“What about?” she said, blinking in the light.
“I had a dream. I can’t talk about it. Please will you take me to Chantilly, to Tom?”
“Oh Iris, I only got back three hours ago. Can’t it wait?” She turned over to go back to sleep.
“No, Violet. I think something’s happened.”
She sat up and rubbed her eyes. “To Tom,” she said flatly.
“Yes.”
“He’s a postie, remember?” She smiled hopefully, blonde curls all over her face. “Iris, he’s all right. How about I tell you I saw him yesterday and he was fine?”
“Did you?”
She looked at me and didn’t answer straightaway. “No, of course not. But really, he’s all right.”
I shook my head, close to tears.
“Very well, Iris, let’s go and get the postie out of bed.” She got up, pulled on her long pants and boots, grabbed her coat, splashed water from the bowl on her face, and followed me out into the pre-dawn morning.
On the way to Chantilly she talked cheerfully, as if I hadn’t just dragged her out of her first long sleep in two weeks. In the dim light I could make out the huge craters in the earth where shells had exploded. Violet saw me watching. “He’s going to be all right,” she said finally. I said nothing.
We arrived just as the sun was coming across the muddy field, and went straight to the barracks. I found a soldier I’d seen with Tom on one of my visits. “Where’s Tom Crane?” I said.
“He’s in bed, I think,” the soldier said. “He came in late but I’m pretty sure he’s not working today.” He must have read something in my face. “I’ll get him.”
What seemed like an eternity later, Tom came into the canteen, half asleep, hair a curly mess, a dark red stubble covering his cheeks and chin.
“Well, Tom, you’ve had your sister worried again,” Violet said. “You’ve got me out of bed, and here you are, sleeping like a baby.”
“What is it, Iris?” Tom said. I couldn’t speak. I just looked at him.
Violet got up and poured Tom a cup of tea from the pot on the stove. “Drink this, sunshine. It’ll wake you up.”
Tom took a sip and spat. “It’s got no sugar.” He rubbed his face.
“Oh pet,” Violet said. “Grown-ups don’t have sugar in their tea.”
“Tell that to our captain. This is his second war. He’s been injured three times and he has more sugar in his tea than I do. Sunshine.” But he smiled as he said it.
I got up and put milk and sugar in Tom’s tea, trying to shake off whatever was left of my feeling of foreboding. Tom held the mug in both hands and looked at Violet. His sweater hung loosely off his shoulders and wasn’t long enough in the waist. “You’ve not a skerrick of extra weight on you, Tom,” I said finally, as if our dawn visit had no purpose other than to tell him to eat more. “It’s no wonder you’re feeling the cold. Do you remember when you were little and wouldn’t wear your coat?”
“No.”
“You’d be shivering and shaking, saying you weren’t cold. Finally I just stopped nagging and after a while you put it on. I wonder if that’s how to get you to go home too.”
“Iris, I’m not going home. Is that what this is about?”
“It’s not,” I said. “Of course it’s not. I just had a bad dream.”
He looked at Violet. “My lieutenant says I’m a good shot, by the way,” he said. “And a good runner. They need riflemen and messengers up at the front. He’s going to see what he can do about getting me transferred.”
“When?” I said, worried suddenly. Was this what the dream was about?
“Dunno,” Tom said. “Soon I hope. We had a shooting competition among the blokes. I won hands down.” He took his arm from around my shoulders. “The old man isn’t right about everything, Iris. This matters, what they’re doing. I want to help.”
“You are helping, Tom.”
What could I do? If I tried to push, Tom would only pull away harder. If I did nothing, he might be transferred to a fighting unit. I would have to see his commanding officer, I decided. I would have to tell them the truth. He’s too young to be in the thick of the fighting, I’d say. You need to understand he came here as a child. That would fix it. Surely they’d send him home if they knew he was so young. Tom would be furious with me for telling them the truth, that he was not of age, but it might be the only thing I could do.
“Doing the mail isn’t enough,” he said, looking at Violet. “It will never be enough.”
“Oh for goodness’ sake,” Violet said, “you think if you fight you’ll be a man? That is just the living end, Tom.”
Later that week, Miss Ivens had a meeting in Chantilly and I went with her. Violet was back in Paris picking up the new part for her car which hadn’t come last time and so Marjorie Starr drove us. While Miss Ivens was at her meeting I went to see Tom’s commanding officer as I’d planned. Marjorie offered to come with me. I said I’d be all right but thanked her for offering. She was such a good old stick, Marjorie, always offering to help.
I found Captain Driscoll in the tiny office at the rear of the mailroom, his oak desk immaculate but for one folder. “I’m sorry to disturb you,” I said. “My brother Tom is one of your postal workers.”
Captain Driscoll was approaching middle age, with a moustache fashionable in those times, a crisp uniform, greying thinning hair. “Tom Crane?” he said. I nodded. “I can tell from the hair. And the accent. Yes, I know Crane. Doesn’t like doing what he’s told.” I frowned. “Personally, I like an independent thinker but they’re not much good to us here. We want sheep.”
“Yes,” I said, “and he’s been very happy working in your unit, sheep or goat. I just wanted to make sure he stays with you. He’s not as mature as he looks.”
C
aptain Driscoll nodded. “He’s not, eh?”
“And the thing is, he’s very keen to be more involved in the fighting, and I’m not sure he’s . . . mature enough to make that decision.”
“Hmph,” Captain Driscoll said. “How old is your brother?” I looked at him. “I’m not going to discharge him, woman. Just tell me how old he is.”
“He’s just turned eighteen.”
“I knew he was lying. I knew it the first time I laid eyes on him. He’s not the only one, you know. The army’s full of them.”
“I was thinking that if I told the authorities his age they’d send him home. He really doesn’t want to go and I’ve been so happy he’s here in the postal unit.”
Captain Driscoll smiled. “The recruiting sergeants couldn’t care how old the boys are. They just want soldiers. But I care about it. I have a son your brother’s age. One of those sergeants tried to accost him in the street at home, followed him and when he said he was seventeen, told him he was lying and he must be nineteen. When the boy reached our front door, my wife told the sergeant what she thought of him in no uncertain terms. My son’s not over here and he won’t be over here until he’s of age. Then he can decide for himself, but for now, he stays home and looks after his mother and sisters.” Tom had told me Captain Driscoll had six children at home, five girls and this one boy. “I won’t be sending your brother anywhere,” he said. “You have my word.”
I could have kissed his neatly clipped moustache.
In the closing months of 1917, we set up our new hospital at Villers-Cotterêts. While I was involved during the construction phase, Miss Ivens said I wouldn’t go with her and the first contingent. Violet would go with two other doctors and a team of orderlies and nurses. I would remain at Royaumont. I am mostly an even sort of a person, with a calm disposition, but I felt hurt not to be included in the Villers-Cotterêts group. For some reason, Violet’s going bothered me more than the rest. She’d always been on an equal footing with Miss Ivens in a way I never could be, calling her Frances and joking in a comradely way. They shared a background I didn’t. Now I was being left out and I couldn’t help but wonder if this was the reason.
In Falling Snow Page 29