Last Telegram

by Liz Trenow

  “It’ll take months to sort out,” I said, feeling very close to tears.

  Gwen nodded. We both understood what a mammoth task was ahead, even after the windows were repaired, to restock with raw, throw, wind, rewarp, and get the looms weaving again.

  News traveled quickly. Within a few minutes, dozens of people—neighbors, workers, and their families—appeared, and a major clear-up began. Every broom and dustpan was deployed for sweeping, every pair of protective gloves issued to people removing broken glass from the windows, every pirn bin emptied to become makeshift dustbins, every available hammer employed fitting temporary boards at the windows to make the building safe. In the middle of all this activity, Mother arrived, with tears of relief in her eyes as she found us. “What can I do to help, girls?”

  “Cups of tea for the troops?” I said.

  “Wilco. Coming right up,” she replied, and headed off to the canteen.

  Long after darkness had fallen, I called all the helpers together.

  “A thousand thanks for everything you’ve done tonight, you have all been wonderful,” I said. “Tomorrow’s Sunday, and we all deserve a day of rest. On Monday, the hard work starts again. Good night, and God bless you all.”

  “Let’s call it a day too shall we, Gwen? Mother’s gone back to get supper.”

  As we started back to the house, she said quietly, “You were incredible this evening, Lily. You reminded me so much of Harold. They looked at you with such respect.”

  “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me in a long time,” I said, giving her a hug. “We make such a good pair, you and I. I could never have done these things without you.” Gwen kissed me tenderly on the cheek and we went indoors.

  • • •

  I hadn’t heard from Vera for weeks and then, one evening, there was a telephone call from her mother.

  “Please come when you can, dear,” she said. “She’s home for a few days and says she wants to see you.”

  Why hadn’t Vera telephoned me herself? When I pressed her mother for more, she just said, “She’s just got herself in a bit of a pickle. Nervous exhaustion, they call it. I’ll let Vera tell you more herself, dear.”

  “Shall I come now?” I said, feeling a little nervous. I wasn’t entirely sure whether Vera had really forgiven me after my outburst about John. Had I somehow contributed to her stress?

  “As soon as you can,” she said.

  Vera was sitting up in bed, her face even more pale than usual. As I walked in, she said, “Oh, Lily, I’m so glad you’ve come.” The childhood bedroom seemed hardly changed from the times we’d spent many giggly nights there together. Magazine pictures of horses and film stars still battled for space on the flowery wallpaper.

  “What’s all this about nervous exhaustion?” I said, sitting down on the bed, taking her hand. It was trembling.

  “It’s nothing. I just need a few good nights’ sleep.”

  “Have you been on night shifts?”

  She shook her head. “It’s the V2s. Every bloody night, and you can’t hear them coming. It’s almost worse than the Blitz.” She started shaking with great sobs that made me feel helpless. “Oh God, Lily, when is it going to end?”

  “They’re running scared, we just have to carry on for a few more months.” I tried to sound reassuring but wasn’t even convincing myself.

  “I can’t go on,” she wailed. “Every bed is full, and if they don’t die, we just have to do our best to patch them up and send them out again. Firemen, police, ambulance drivers, factory workers. Just ordinary people trying to make the best of it. Most of them won’t ever really recover. They’re burned, or we’ve had to cut bits off to save their lives. Or their lungs are shot from inhaling smoke. The children are the worst. Whatever did they do to deserve this? But every day we have to put on a brave face and pretend it will all be hunky-dory. What else can we do?”

  She pressed her head into the pillow, thin shoulders juddering. I stroked her hair, trying to calm her.

  A little later, when her mother had brought tea, I said, “I’m so sorry, Vera, I hope I didn’t make things worse, having that little paddy with you and Mother over dinner.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said, smiling for the first time. “That’s long forgotten. We all knew why you were upset, but it’s difficult to know what to do for the best.”

  A few days later, she had recovered sufficiently to come for tea at The Chestnuts. “Don’t worry,” I told her when she arrived, “Mother’s bursting to tell you about the latest parcel she’s getting ready for John. You can talk all you like about him, I really don’t mind any more. I’ll go and help Gwen get the tea ready.”

  As I walked Vera home later, she said, quite out of the blue, “What’s going on, Lily?”

  “What do you mean, ‘what’s going on’? With whom?”

  “Between you and Gwen.”

  “Sorry, I don’t know what you mean,” I lied, my stomach knotting.

  “The way she looks at you, when you’re talking. The way she smiles at you. She worships you. You can’t have missed it. There is something going on.”

  “There’s nothing going on,” I repeated, too sharply. I knew exactly what she was talking about: Gwen’s easy intimacy, the pecks on the cheek, the touch on my arm, the hand on my knee. As we’d brought the tea into the drawing room, Gwen had put her hand around my waist.

  “Lily?” Vera paused. “You’re not?”

  “Not what?” I snapped.

  We faced each other in the road, both struggling for words. She spoke first, in a low, quiet voice. “I suspected she was, you know, one of those. But you, Lily?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t understand what you are talking about. Honestly.” Vera’s face was blank with disbelief. “We’re just friends.”

  “How could you?” she shrieked. “What about Stefan? Just a few months after he’s been reported missing? The love of your life, you said. Whatever are you thinking of?”

  “No,” I shouted, my voice resounding down the empty road. “You’ve got the wrong end of the stick completely.” I grabbed her by the shoulders, looking directly into her face. “Listen to me. Can’t you understand? Nothing’s happening. Nothing.”

  She looked down at her feet and started to tremble. “Oh, Lily, I’m so sorry,” she said, in a wobbly voice. “It’s this bloody stress again. I overreact to everything these days. That’s why they sent me home. Can’t seem to keep things in perspective at all. I should never have said those things.”

  “It’s all right,” I said, but it wasn’t. My legs gave way beneath me, and I sat down suddenly on the grass verge, putting my head on my knees. Vera sat down beside me.

  “It’s just…” I started.

  “Just what?”

  “I miss him so much it hurts. I can’t bear it,” I whimpered. “My world’s fallen apart and Gwen’s holding me together. She’s a good woman, Vera, so kind, so generous, so strong, always there. I don’t know what I would do without her.”

  “But Lily, can’t you see what she feels about you? She doesn’t want comfort. She’s thinking of you in a different way.”

  I shook my head miserably.

  Just a few evenings before, as I soaked my aching limbs in the bath with my mind in a kind of reverie, there had been a knock on the bathroom door.

  “Come in, door’s open,” I called, assuming it was Mother.

  Gwen came in, clearly naked under her dressing gown, and sat on the toilet seat. We had never been coy with each other, often parading around in bras and suspenders without thinking, but the way she looked at me now was unnerving. It was too intimate. I felt vulnerable. Then I was thrown completely off-guard when she said suddenly, “Can I get in with you?” For a moment I thought she was joking, but the smile in her eyes was deadly serious and her implication perfectly clear.

  “Oh Gwen,” I said, sitting up and starting to pull my towel toward me, to cover up my breasts. “I’m sorry, I’m just getting out.”<
br />
  Her eyes hooded with disappointment and my stomach knotted as I realized that, unwittingly, I had led her on and now, somehow, I had to disentangle myself without hurting her.

  She nodded but didn’t say another word as I got out of the bath and slipped away to my room. I waited nervously for her usual knock on the door, but she did not appear again, nor the next night. In a way, it was a relief, because I didn’t need her nightly comfort so much these days. I was sleeping so much better now. Nothing further was said, and I was relieved when our easy friendship had started to resume. I’d thought nothing more about it, till now.

  Walking back from Vera’s house, I realized that she was right. My craving for consolation had turned into an unhealthy dependency, and I had been taking a terrible risk with Gwen’s affections. I must find the courage to talk to her, I thought, to make sure we were both clear where we stood.

  A couple of days passed and my resolve wavered. I struggled to imagine how the conversation would go, what I could say without hurting her feelings irrevocably. It was too risky; she was so important to me. I couldn’t imagine life without her. The right moment never seemed to come up. And then it was too late.

  • • •

  “Miss Lily, there’s a man in the visitors’ room, says he’d like to speak to Mrs. Holmes.”

  “Did he give his name?”

  “Sorry, I forgot to ask him.” My secretary looked down at the floor, embarrassed by her omission.

  “Uniform?”

  “No, civvies.”

  “Tell him I’ll be there in a few moments. Get him a cup of something while he’s waiting.”

  Cold callers were rare these days. A sliver of absurd hope pierced my carefully constructed defenses. It was three months since the telegram, yet I’d had no official confirmation of Stefan’s fate. Could this stranger be about to tell me he was alive after all?

  Despite the gray suit, it was clear the young man had seen recent military service: the sallow complexion, a thin face too worn for his years, the brutal haircut parted like a white scar slicing across his head. He held his shoulders stiffly as he stood and formally shook my hand. The left sleeve hung emptily at his side.

  “Mrs. Holmes? Peter Newman. Thank you for seeing me.” The very faintest hint of an accent; not German, but Polish perhaps?

  “Sit down, please,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. The visitors’ room felt incongruous and impersonal. Should I invite him to the house instead, I wondered. No, I’d rather face this without Mother around.

  “Mr. Newman. How can I help you?”

  He smiled, showing sadly crooked teeth, reached for a small khaki canvas bag, just like the parachute bag Robbie had brought to the mill that day, and put it onto the table. I took a deep breath, steeling myself for what he was about to show me.

  “I was a good friend of your husband, Steve,” he said, deftly unbuckling the strap with his one hand and reaching into the bag. Steve. Even now the name sounded unfamiliar. “He was a very courageous man. A wonderful friend. This is for you.”

  I observed, in a detached kind of way, that my hands were trembling as I took the envelope with Stefan’s curly handwriting on it: To my darling Lily. I knew exactly what this was—the letter the troops were all told to write before going to the front line.

  “Thank you,” I said quietly. “Do you mind if I read this later?”

  “Of course,” he said. “In this bag there are some of his effects we thought you might like to have. I will leave it with you.” His effects. What a strange English phrase this foreigner had learned.

  There was a pause and I wondered what to say next. I still felt curiously calm. Everything was now clear. “From your use of the past tense, I take it you’re telling me he’s dead?” I said. “I still haven’t had any official confirmation.” My voice sounded flat and unfamiliar, as if someone else were saying these terrible things.

  He looked a bit surprised, and nodded slowly. “I’m afraid so, Mrs. Holmes. I am so sorry. I didn’t realize you hadn’t heard. Would you like a cigarette?” He fumbled in his pocket with his one hand, and with fascinating dexterity, pulled out a packet of cigarettes and flipped it open, offered me one, then took one in his mouth, took out a Zippo, and lit them both.

  The familiar feel of a cigarette in my fingers and the long pull of smoke gave me courage. “Can you tell me how he died?”

  His eyes were down, deliberately not meeting mine. “They told me to say it was the result of enemy action.” The room fell very quiet. No distant rumble of looms or voices on the stairs. He looked up. “I want to be honest with you, Mrs. Holmes. It wasn’t really like that. He did not die in the heat of battle, but what he did was just as brave, perhaps more so.”

  I followed his gaze to the door. It was ajar. I got up and closed it, my limbs working automatically. When I sat down again, he took a deep breath. “Mrs. Holmes, what I am about to tell you is still an official secret, so you must promise not to repeat it to anyone.”

  “Go on,” I said, surprising myself with my apparent composure.

  “Steve and I and ten others were being dropped behind enemy lines in France,” he started, looking down again, perhaps afraid of the pain he was about to cause. My head went into a spin. Being dropped? By parachute? I knew he’d been on a dangerous mission but this sounded so much braver, and so much more terrifying than any of the scenarios I’d imagined.

  “I didn’t know he’d joined the paratroopers,” I managed to croak.

  “It doesn’t matter what organization we were working for. All you need to know is that we were going there to help stiffen up the resistance.”

  “‘Stiffen up’?”

  “Get them organized, you know, ready for D-Day. As I said, it doesn’t matter.” He looked up at me, checking my response.

  “Go on,” I said again. “Please. I am okay.”

  “It was dark and noisy, and bloody scary in that plane,” he said. “We knew we’d be trying to avoid the flak at the coast, then jumping into enemy territory in the dark, not really sure what we’d find when we got there.” He paused, as if experiencing it all over again, took a deep breath, and started again, talking quite quickly.

  “Steve was so calm, so self-contained. Always the best person to have around in a fix like that. He knew exactly why he was there—settling the score, he used to call it. And in that plane he reminded me. It gave me courage. We had maps inside our jacket linings, printed on silk. He said you wove it, here at the mill?”

  I nodded.

  “He also sewed the threads from his tallith into the lining. As you probably know, he wasn’t religious but he was going to say the prayer when he jumped, he said. You know it? Shema Yisrael? For his mother.”

  “Hannah,” I said, with a shiver. Where was she now? Isaak and the little girls? How had they fared? I’d wanted to write to them when we got the telegram, but of course it was impossible.

  Peter Newman was still talking. “But this is what I most want to tell you, Mrs. Holmes. When we got to the drop zone, we were all standing in line waiting to jump. I was right in front of Steve, close as this,” he held his hand a few inches from his face. “So I could hear clearly what he was saying. He shouted ‘Good luck, chaps,’ and then, just before I jumped, I heard him whisper, ‘I love you, Lilymouse. Keep little Stevie safe for me.’” He looked up and smiled shyly at me. “I thought it might comfort you to know this.”

  I didn’t even feel like crying.

  “Those were his exact words, I can hear them in my ears even now, and I thought, you lucky bastard, forgive my French, Mrs. Holmes,” he said.

  I found myself smiling back at Peter Newman, calm and even happy, grateful to him for telling me about this beautiful moment, and at the thought of my precious boy sending his love across the sky.

  He carried on, his words tumbling over themselves now, as if desperate to tell the story while he still had the strength. “But then it went wrong. I landed on a rooftop and buggered my arm,�
�� he waved his empty sleeve. “Didn’t get rescued for a couple of hours, and by that time, I assumed Steve and the radio ops had landed safely and gone into hiding. The Frenchies found their bodies. They must have died instantly. Still had harnesses and ’chutes on, they said. Christ, I was gutted.”

  “They’d been shot?” At least it would have been a quick death.

  “No, there were no gunshot wounds. It was a bit of a mystery at the time, and when we got back, the top brass couldn’t tell us anything.” Peter Newman shook his head, took a drag on his cigarette, and stubbed it out viciously.

  “They buried the boys secretly near the graveyard, and I got airlifted back home. Couldn’t save the arm but at least I’m here.”

  “Would you take me back there, one day, show me where they were buried?” I said, with a small sigh of something like relief. Even if I didn’t know exactly how Stefan had died, I now knew that he had died honorably, doing something he felt passionately for, with men that he loved. When this was all over, I could visit his grave.

  “Of course,” he said, picking up his empty coffee cup and peering into it with an unfocused gaze. “It would be an honor, Mrs. Holmes.”

  “Can I get you some more coffee?”

  “No, no thank you. You’re very kind.”

  We fell into silence for a moment. There was a question I had to ask, but I didn’t really want to hear the answer. “I know this might be difficult, but was it possible to find out…” I faltered. “Did he suffer any pain, do you think? Before he died?”

  “Well, I did hear something, a bit later.”

  “Please carry on,” I said. Every muscle was knotted with the tension of holding myself together, but I felt a kind of peace. There was nowhere else but this room, this man’s voice, the gentle lilt of his accent.

  “One day in the hospital, I looked at the bed next to me and it was one of our lot, Giorgio we used to call him. He’d been leading one of the other teams. He landed on power lines and lost both his legs, poor bastard. Their radio ops was also killed on landing. When he got back to Blighty, they told him another lad died that night. Same way. That made four of them.”