When Day is Done

  Kate glanced at Mrs Bradley. ‘It’s rather difficult,’ she said. ‘Perhaps if I could speak to you privately?’

  ‘Anything you wish to say can be said before my client,’ the lawyer said frostily.

  ‘We were worried about Mrs Bradley’s health,’ Kate said. ‘As she had no relatives I thought–’

  Her voice trailed away under his intimidating gaze and he finished the sentence for her. ‘You thought she was friendless. I can assure you that that is not the case. Mrs Bradley is an old and valued client of my firm and I am here to look after her interests. My client believes that there has been systematic stealing from her room.’

  ‘But she is mistaken,’ Kate stammered. ‘Those women – they’ve gone now, and they took nothing with them but their own stuff. I checked it myself.’

  Mr Hooper stood and helped Mrs Bradley to rise. ‘Be good enough to take us to Mrs Bradley’s room,’ he said coldly. Anger at his manner and a belated realisation of his hostility gave Kate the courage to say as coldly, ‘One moment. I think my aunt should hear this.’

  Mildred was sitting at the desk in her room, still in the clothes she had worn for the funeral, when Kate burst in and said abruptly, ‘Aunt Mildred, that man who’s with Mrs Bradley, he says he’s her lawyer and that someone has been stealing from her room, and he’s behaving as though he thinks it’s me.’

  ‘What!’ Mildred was on her feet in an instant. She was as tall as Mr Hooper, and with her hat, which looked like a cross between a helmet and a coal scuttle, and her furious face beneath it, she was an intimidating sight as she swept into the hall where Mr Hooper and Mrs Bradley were standing. ‘What’s this I hear?’ she demanded loudly. ‘How dare you suggest my niece is dishonest?’

  Mr Hooper held up his hand placatingly. ‘No, no, my dear Mrs Williams,’ he bleated. ‘It is Mrs Williams? I am here to protect my client’s interests, not to accuse anybody. I am James Hooper of Jones, Hooper and Prendergast, and Mrs Bradley is my client.’ He inclined his head.

  ‘You said there had been systematic stealing from her room,’ Kate said angrily. ‘No, no, I said my client believed there had been stealing,’ he said. ‘If we could go to Mrs Bradley’s room?’

  Mrs Bradley sat regally in her chair beside the fireplace and smiled round at them. ‘I know my nice things are a temptation,’ she said, ‘but to ignore wrongdoing is to encourage it.’

  Mr Hooper took out a list and cleared his throat. ‘Mrs Bradley has listed some items that are missing. I may say that the list can be verified, as Mrs Bradley’s mother mentioned these items specifically in her will.’

  ‘What are they?’ Mildred demanded.

  He began to read from the list. ‘A tea service and dinner service by Royal Doulton, a set of Toby jugs by Royal Doulton, a damask tablecloth and twelve napkins, twelve sterling silver napkin rings—’

  Mildred said abruptly, ‘Stop.’ Mr Hooper peered at her over his eyeglasses and she said scornfully, ‘Mrs Bradley has given away those things as presents over the years. The tea service to young friends who were married from this house, the dinner service to a minister and his wife when they left the parish, the other things to raise money for the Missions. And that was when she was in her right mind. Nobody took advantage of her.’

  Mrs Bradley looked bewildered, and Mildred held open the door. ‘Come down to my office,’ she said curtly to Hooper. ‘I think you’ve been very obtuse.’

  Kate went to Mrs Bradley. ‘I’m sure you’d like a cup of tea, Mrs Bradley,’ she said gently. ‘I’ll ring for Lottie to bring it up and you can show me the new Mission magazine.’

  ‘Are the grown-ups cross?’ Mrs Bradley asked. ‘Have I been naughty?’

  ‘No, not at all,’ Kate said gently, her anger at the accusations vanishing as she soothed the old lady.

  Mildred drew up her own list of the recipients of the gifts so that Mr Hooper could verify her statement, and described Mrs Bradley’s state so forcefully that events moved swiftly. It was arranged that Mrs Bradley should move to a nursing home, and Mr Hooper and his wife did much to achieve the move smoothly for her.

  ‘It’s the end of an era,’ Kate said sadly to Lottie as they cleaned the empty room. ‘Mrs Bradley was always so kind to me. When I came here she realised I couldn’t read properly and she arranged for Miss Tate to teach me. When I think how she was, so dignified, and the way she is now, I could cry. I think I’d rather be dead.’

  ‘But she doesn’t realise the way she is,’ Lottie said. ‘It’s only other people that get upset about it.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Kate said, feeling more cheerful. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. Life’s sweet no matter what.’

  Chapter Twelve

  It was true that Beattie had staged a convenient heart attack late in 1916 and had pulled strings to prevent Rose from becoming a VAD, but Kate was wrong in suspecting that Rose was relieved.

  Her first enthusiasm for the idea on the outbreak of war had soon waned, and for some time she simply drifted along. The war had made little impact on the household at Greenfields.

  Beattie held afternoon tea parties where ladies rolled bandages and knitted for the troops as they gossiped, and Rose helped with bazaars and bric-a-brac sales to raise money for comforts for soldiers and sailors. The servants all stayed on and food was not a problem. Two young boys were taken on to help Mr Phillips extend the kitchen garden, and he also kept hens in part of the extensive grounds, and occasionally drove to farms in the countryside outside Liverpool to buy food. Beattie’s wealth could purchase anything she needed at inflated prices, and she had no uncomfortable scruples about doing so.

  There were no male relatives to worry about and when, as frequently happened, a friend’s son or nephew was killed, Beattie wept with the bereaved mother or aunt, offering the usual platitudes, and felt that she had played her part in the war effort.

  With life so little changed, the war seemed remote to Rose too. She sometimes took comforts to a hospital in West Derby, where soldiers were recovering from their wounds, but by this stage their injuries were decently covered in hospital blue, with only an empty sleeve or a pinned-up trouser leg to show what had happened.

  She still had a busy social round, often accompanied by young officers home from the Front, but partly because they wanted to forget the horrors during their brief leaves, and partly because of the tradition of the stiff upper lip, the war was never talked about. Rose wrote cheerful letters in reply to their letters and field cards, and sent carefully chosen parcels of comforts to them.

  Although she was too intelligent to be unaware of what was happening, and read Mr Phillips’s War Illustrated as well as the Liverpool Echo, which carried reports of speeches in the Commons and long casualty lists, she had an ability to close her mind to anything distasteful. But occasionally something occurred which forced her to confront reality. One such event was in April 1915, when the SS Lusitania was sunk with great loss of life. Many of the crew were Liverpool men, and as Rose was driven down a street of tiny terraced houses she saw groups of shawled women, with small children clinging to their skirts, wailing in despair as the news spread.

  A week later she passed down the street again and saw black crêpe pinned to almost every door, and she felt ashamed of her useless life while others suffered so much.

  The memory of the tragedy troubled her for a time, but soon she was able to thrust it away. The next episode made far more impact on her. Ian Gillespie, the nephew of one of Beattie’s friends, was an admirer who had often been her tennis partner before the war. He was a handsome young man with a lively, carefree manner, and Rose looked forward to seeing him when he came home on leave from the Western Front.

  He had joined the Army on the outbreak of war and been sent to France in time for the first Battle of Ypres. There he had survived the gas attacks, only to be wounded in July 1916 at the Somme. After a spell in hospital in southern England he was passed fit and returned to the Front in October to find the Battle of th
e Somme still raging, with no apparent gain to either side. When he next came home on leave, the battle was finally over.

  Rose had not seen him during all this time, and when he came for her she was shocked at the change in him. He was gaunt and haggard, his face grey, and with a nervous twitch around his eyes. It was a lovely spring evening, and he had borrowed his father’s motor car, so they drove to the countryside to the north of the city, where he stopped the car by a field gate.

  At first all seemed well, and they spoke about people they knew and parties they had attended before the war, but Ian’s nervous twitch became more and more pronounced, and suddenly he burst out, ‘I can’t believe it. Everything just going on as if the war hadn’t happened. And people glorying in it. Hating the Germans and being glad they’re taking heavy losses. For God’s sake, our men are being killed too, just as many of them. Don’t these blasted people care?’

  He was shaking, and Rose instinctively put her arms around him. ‘They do really,’ she soothed him. ‘They just hate the Germans because of the atrocities. You must hate them too, Ian.’

  ‘Not now,’ he said. ‘They’re under orders like us, and it’s all mad. We hear rumours. The war could end now. The Germans were broken at the Somme but the damned old men in the War Office won’t have it. They won’t be satisfied until a complete generation on both sides is wiped out. They’re the ones I hate.’

  He was shaking even more violently now and Rose held him closer and made soothing noises, waiting for him to recover, but he went on, ‘Our orders. We have to send men over the top to walk shoulder to shoulder in daylight, unprotected, facing machine-gun fire. If they wanted the men killed they couldn’t find a better way.’

  Rose was afraid to speak in case she said something that would upset him even more, and he continued, ‘It hadn’t stopped raining. The trenches were full of mud and water, up to our waists. We’d been there for hours, nothing but mud, dead trees, dead men. In front of me a sandbag had gone and there was a head. Not a skull – a head still with hair.’

  He was crying quietly, his head on her shoulder, but he seemed unable to stop talking. ‘I got my orders for us to go over the top and I couldn’t do it. I put my whistle to my mouth but I couldn’t blow it. I couldn’t send my men out to be killed when I knew it was wrong. A sergeant came beside me. “Best time is now, sir,” he said, and I blew the whistle. He knew I was funking it but he didn’t know why. Now I’m not sure why, Rose. Was it for the men or for myself?’

  Rose’s mind was a jumble of emotions. Pity for him, shock because she had never before seen a man cry, a tinge of contempt because it seemed unmanly, and mixed with this, fear for herself, stranded far from home with a man in a state of collapse. Gradually, though, he became calmer.

  ‘I’m sorry, Rose,’ he said, raising his head from her shoulder, then sitting up. ‘I shouldn’t have inflicted that on you.’

  ‘I’m glad you did if it makes you feel better to talk,’ Rose said. ‘And I’m the best one for it. I’d never repeat anything, you know that.’

  ‘I hadn’t even thought of it,’ he said. He blew his nose and replaced his cap before starting up the motor car.

  ‘Do you really think the war could end soon?’ asked Rose as he drove slowly home.

  He shrugged. ‘They say it was the rain and the mud that finished the Somme, men drowning in trenches, but I think the Germans had had enough. Marginally less mad than our crowd, but an armistice could have been tried.’

  ‘The newspapers say we must have complete victory to make things safe for the next generation,’ Rose said tentatively, but he only replied, with a return to his wild manner, ‘It’s the men, Rose. My men. Decent fellows with wives and families. I don’t want to be an officer ordering them out to be killed. I think I’ll resign my commission and re-enlist as a private. That way I’ll only be responsible for my own life.’

  ‘Couldn’t you ask for a transfer, or leave the Army altogether?’ Rose said. ‘You’ve been in from the beginning and you’ve done your share.’ He laughed bitterly but made no reply.

  When they reached Greenfields he turned to her and kissed her gently. ‘Thank you, Rose,’ he said. ‘Will you do something for me? Forget all that’s happened tonight. Just remember all the good times we had before the war.’

  Rose felt cold with fear. ‘I will, Ian,’ she promised. ‘But those good times will come again. I’ll save the first dance for you when you come home again.’ She tried to sound convincing and light-hearted, but he only kissed her again gently and escorted her to the front door.

  It was opened by Essy, looking grim. As soon as Rose was inside, the maid said grumpily, ‘You’re very late, Miss Rose. Madam has been kept awake worrying about you.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Rose murmured as she moved to the stairs. ‘I don’t want anything, Essy.’

  Rose went upstairs while Essy locked the door, muttering about people being kept from their beds. She looked in on her aunt, who was sleeping peacefully, then sat by the window in her own room, feeling too disturbed to sleep. Was Ian going mad? she wondered. Or was he shell-shocked? She had only a vague idea of what that meant, and in spite of constantly hearing about Beattie’s nerves had never heard of a nervous breakdown. She went to the drawer where she kept bundles of letters and cards from her admirers at the Front.

  Two of the bundles, from men who had been killed, were tied with black ribbon, but she searched through the others and found a slim bundle from Ian. The first had been written soon after he arrived in France and was very enthusiastic.

  I was right to join when I did. I know these are early days but I’m having a ripping time and have met several men I knew at Oxford. Not from the ‘inner circle’ of course, men from top public schools. They have a special hut and every comfort, including hampers from Harrods! But we ordinary officers do very well and it’s all very exciting. Also the feeling that what we are doing is important for the future of civilisation. We can’t allow the Hun to overrun the world. Some of the men are also living better than they have ever done. Good warm clothes, regular food and work. “When I compare them with some of the ragged, hungry creatures I used to see in the poorer parts of Liverpool I feel that this war can only change lives for the better.

  Rose skipped the rest of the letter and quickly read through the others, amazed to see how quickly Ian’s enthusiasm had turned to disillusionment and anger at the muddle and waste of life. One written from the dressing station after he had been wounded made the deepest impression on Rose. ‘The nurses are wonderful,’ he wrote. ‘Angels and heroines every one. Frantically busy though they are, they will find time to gently comfort the wounded or hold the hand of a dying man crying for his mother.’

  Rose put the letter down and sat deep in thought. This time she would do it, she would enrol as a nurse, not drift as she had been doing all these months.

  Rose said nothing to her aunt about her plan, but she did tell Essy, who was enthusiastic about it. More because she wants to be rid of me than because she approves, Rose thought cynically. Essy hid her dislike and jealousy of Rose from Beattie, but Rose was always aware of it. Now the maid suggested asking Miss Tasker for a letter of recommendation, which was willingly supplied. Rose wrote asking to enrol as a VAD and enclosing the letter, and was delighted to receive a reply asking her to attend an interview. As it was in London, Beattie had to be told.

  She immediately became hysterical, clutching her heart and declaring that she was dying. Her elderly doctor was summoned and later brought an equally elderly colleague from higher in the profession to see her. Both men reprimanded Rose, telling her that she was selfish to want to nurse when she was needed at home.

  ‘But Essy is here to care for my aunt, as well as all the servants,’ Rose protested.

  ‘Essy is only a servant herself,’ the first doctor said. ‘You are a relative, and Mrs Anderson regards you as a daughter. She’s been good to you and it’s your duty to care for her now and respect her wishes.’ His col
league said much the same, and reminded Rose that there were girls without family commitments who could become nurses.

  She was allowed to go to London for the interview, accompanied by a friend of Beattie’s, but it was clear from the outset that she would not be accepted.

  A few weeks later Kate came alone to Greenfields one Sunday afternoon, and after some general conversation with Beattie and Rose, she and Rose went into the garden. There Rose poured out her troubles to Kate, her anger and resentment that her attempt to join the VAD had once again been foiled by Beattie. ‘She pulled strings again to stop me. I know she did,’ she declared. ‘I want to be useful, Kate.’

  ‘Perhaps you could do as Nell did,’ Kate offered. ‘She was going to join the VAD but her aunt suggested she trained properly as a nurse. She’s nursing people from the slums near the hospital in London, but she says they’ve released trained nurses to tend the wounded and at the end she’ll be a properly trained nurse herself. It’s a hard life, Rose, although Nell enjoys it.’

  Rose could see that Kate had missed the point and said no more about nursing, only telling Kate something of what Ian had said about the Front. ‘Strange to think of that going on just across the Channel, yet things are not much different from usual here,’ she said. ‘Only worry about fighting men and inconvenience with the blackout. I’m sure we’re not in real danger from the Zeppelins.’

  ‘But there’s so much sadness and worry everywhere, with these awful submarines,’ Kate said. ‘So many ships sunk. It seems wrong to complain about food, Rose, when men are losing their lives, but it’s getting desperate, isn’t it?’

  Rose listened in brooding silence and made no reply, and Kate soon left, feeling that despite her protests Rose had once again been relieved to be refused as a VAD.

  Rose passed from frustration and self-pity to acceptance of her fate, as Beattie continued to play the part of an invalid, then to determination, if her role was to be that of handmaiden to her aunt and comforter to men on leave, that she would enjoy herself and take full advantage of the new freedom for women.