The hall erupted into a huge noise of clapping, whoops and cheers as Adam made way for Abigail and two friends dressed in khaki, sparkling in excessive make-up and glittery hair, their faces brimming with confidence at the welcoming applause. They took their places at the microphones and waited patiently for the noise to die down. Abigail announced the first song, a number called ‘There’s a Land’. Miss Grossman began on the piano and after a short introduction, the girls launched in. Tom found himself tapping his feet in time, enjoying the musical spectacle, although one of the voices, he couldn’t tell which, was slightly flat. A second song, called ‘Come Under My Umbrella’, included a short piano solo in the middle, during which the girls performed a synchronised dance, much to the delight of the male portion of the young audience. In no time, the songs were finished and the girls bowed and then slipped away smiling at the rapturous handclapping. Tom clapped heartily but inside his stomach churned. It was Charlotte’s turn next.
Adam returned to centre stage. ‘The Passchendaele Sisters... thank you. We will be hearing more from the Sisters later.’ He waited for the applause to stop. Tom noticed that, having warmed to his task, Adam was smiling now. ‘And now to our second act. Ladies and gentlemen, for an introduction and recital of First World War poetry, please put your hands together and give a warm welcome to...’ He paused for effect. ‘Charlotte Searight...!’
The four adult Searights led the clapping as a terrified-looking Charlotte walked onto the stage and took her place at the middle microphone. She had tied her hair back and wore a long, dark blue skirt and a pale blue blouse. She looked really nice, thought Tom. He noticed she was wearing a pair of earrings, he hoped they were his. How could she think he didn’t love her any more? The applause stopped abruptly. Charlotte stepped forward, clasping a piece of paper. Tom rubbed his hands and noticed his palms were wet with sweat. He had to overcome the temptation to reach for Julie’s hand. He felt acutely conscious that all eyes were on his daughter and that she was standing there in front of this silent sea of people, very much alone.
Charlotte glanced at her notes and began. ‘Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke. These three names are the most famous of the First World War poets...’
‘Never ’eard of them,’ muttered the boy in front of Tom.
‘But there were many, many more. These were soldiers who felt so moved or frightened by what they saw, they needed to write down their experiences of war, death and fighting. The poems were written by soldiers who were still fighting, so they never knew if the poem they were writing would be the last. Many of the poems were written on a scrap of paper or on the back of an old envelope or in letters home to their family and loved ones.’ She’s doing really well, thought Tom. ‘Sometimes, poems were found in the uniforms of men who had been killed, because not all of them lived. Siegfried Sassoon did survive the war and died in 1967, aged eighty-one...’
‘Old git,’ sniggered the boy in front, loud enough to be heard by the nearby rows, who tittered at his remark. Tom hoped to God that Charlotte hadn’t noticed the silly ripple of amusement.
‘But Rupert Brooke died in 1915 and Wilfred Owen was killed in November 1918, exactly one week before the end of the war...’
‘Served ’im right.’ With each comment, the boy spoke louder and found a widening circle of barely muffled appreciation, which only served to encourage him more. Tom looked to see whether there were any teachers at hand, but they all seemed to be stationed at the front of the hall. He caught Robert’s eye and his father looked as if he’d explode any moment.
‘I am now going to read you a poem by each of them...’
‘Oh Gawd, must you?’
‘Will you be quiet!’ said Robert quickly but loudly enough to be heard throughout the hall. It felt as if every head turned to see what was going on. The mutterings and giggles provoked a chorus of ‘shushes’ from the teachers standing at the sides of the hall. Even from the back, Tom could see the look of panic sweep across Charlotte’s face. Whatever confidence she’d gained from the opening would now be unhinged.
‘First... first, I will read a po-poem by Wilfred Owen called ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, which means death with honour, which Wilfred Owen calls the old lie...’
Tom waited for another sarcastic remark, but a couple of teachers had edged their way down towards the end of the hall and the boy remained silent.
‘The poem goes like this...’
Taking a deep breath, Tom psyched himself up. He caught Julie’s eye, her face etched with worry. ‘This is terrifying,’ she whispered. Tom nodded.
‘“Bent dou-double, like old beggars under sacks, knock-knee, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge...”’
And so she continued but Tom couldn’t concentrate on the words, he could only listen to the sound of her voice, listening with trepidation for the slightest quiver or hesitation.
‘“Gas! Gas! Quick boys! An ecstasy of fumbling...’”
‘Ecstasy!’ called out the vile youth in full voice. ‘Fancy some E next time, Charlotte?’ The children collapsed in giggles. Tom could have gladly hit him and for a moment, he thought his father was going to. The nearest teacher merely clicked her fingers at the boy. Charlotte stopped and looked up nervously and then tried to focus on her piece of paper.
‘“But someone still was yelling out and stumbling...”’ Her voice was trailing off and Tom could no longer hear her above the fidgety audience. The teachers glared at the pockets of distracted pupils until they managed to silence the restless mirth and Charlotte’s voice could just about be heard as she reached the end of the poem.
‘“To children ardent for some desperate glory, the old lie: Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori.”’
The parents and teachers clapped. The children followed suit but their applause lacked the previous enthusiasm. Tom leant over to Julie. ‘One gone, two to go.’
‘The next poem was written by Siegfried Sassoon and it’s called ‘Aftermath’.’
Tom braced himself, at least he knew this one, not that it could in any way help his daughter exposed up there on the stage. But Charlotte seemed to be taking an age to get going. Tom moved to the edge of his seat, urging her to start, but Charlotte remained silently rooted, staring at the piece of paper in her hand.
The boy in front yelled out, ‘Get on wiv it!’ The hall collapsed in laughter.
The teacher nearest to Tom finally approached the boy. ‘Shut up, Gavin. One more word out of you and it’s detention every lunchtime next week. Got it?’
With the hall still simmering with barely stifled giggling and the teachers shushing and glaring, Charlotte began. ‘“Have you forgotten yet?”’ The tone of her voice took Tom by surprise. ‘“For the world’s events have rumbled on...”’ Charlotte was shouting above the barely restrained noise. Tom could see it in her expression – her fear had been replaced by anger, she seemed on the verge of tears, but she was fighting on. Tom felt seized by a sudden surge of pride. He wanted to stand up and yell out ‘keep going, Charlotte; to hell with the lot of them, the ignorant sods’. He was desperate for her to reach the end, to get to the final stanza, the lines he could still recite.
But the more Charlotte shouted, the more the children laughed and the more the teachers tried to restore calm, the more they seemed to lose it. Tom turned nervously to Julie. ‘What can we do?’
‘There’s nothing we can do, we just have to sit through it.’
‘QUIET!’ The head’s voice cut through the huge hall, which fell immediately into silence. ‘I will not tolerate this a moment longer. Now, show some respect please.’ Charlotte waited, looking nervously at Mr Nolan. ‘OK, Charlotte, please continue.’
Charlotte looked from the Mr Nolan to her piece of paper. Then slowly, she rolled it up into a ball and threw it into the front rows before leaping off the four-foot high stage. At first, the children were shocked into silence, but as she started running down the central aisle, the children burst into a deafening
round of laughter and cheering which quickly reached a crescendo as she fled. Julie leapt out from her seat at the end of the row, but Charlotte sidestepped her, flapping away her mother’s outstretched arms. Reaching the end, she pushed open the large double doors and charged outside. Julie called out her name as the doors swung back into place.
‘Leave her,’ said Tom standing up.
Julie looked at him as if trying to decide what to do. ‘I can’t, she needs me,’ she said, ‘she needs us.’
Tom watched her as Julie chased after her daughter and out of the doors. He heard his father mutter ‘bloody savages,’ as Mr Nolan restored order and castigated his children for their “unforgivable behaviour”. Tom turned around to see Mark Moyes jogging up the central aisle, past him and out into the playground. Adam was already back on stage waiting for Mr Nolan to finish so he could introduce the next act. Tom looked at the scene before him and he hated it, he hated them. The final words of the Sassoon poem came back to him. As the last of the noise faded away, he heard himself shout out loud. “‘Have you forgotten yet?”’, his voice filling every corner of the hall. Everyone turned around to see where the voice had come from. His parents looked up at him with a mixture of surprise and understanding. ‘“Look up,”’ he seethed, ‘“and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget” you ignorant little...’ His words were greeted by an absolute silence. He turned to leave and caught sight of Rachel, who smiled at him and silently clapped her hands. Pinkbeard gave him the thumbs up. He walked slowly out of the hall, conscious of the noise his shoes were making against the polished wooden floor, but deeply satisfied that on Charlotte’s behalf, he’d got the last word.
Tom slammed the double doors behind him. The playground was deserted except for the solitary figure of Mark Moyes hovering at the school gates, staring down the street. Tom caught up with him, noticing close-to the thin red line on his cheek where he’d hit him. ‘Where did they go?’ he asked brusquely.
‘Down that way; towards the park,’ answered Moyes.
They’ve probably gone to the oak tree, thought Tom. He decided to follow them. As he passed Moyes, he paused. ‘Are you still sleeping with her?’
‘No.’
‘I don’t mind, because I don’t care,’ he said. ‘I just need to know, that’s all.’
‘No, I’m not. I wanted to, but she said no.’ Tom turned to leave, but Moyes called after him. ‘She said she loves you too much.’
His words stopped Tom in his tracks. He turned to face the teacher. ‘She said that?’
‘Yes. Yes, she did.’
‘Oh.’ He absorbed the words. ‘Thank you,’ he said.
*
It was still warm and by the time Tom reached the park, he felt hot and breathless. The park was busy but free of schoolchildren. Another twenty minutes or so, the place would be teeming with them – playing their noisy games, eating their fast food takeaways and leaving a sprawl of litter in their wake. Perhaps he was being overly cynical he thought, but having seen how they behaved during Charlotte’s recital left Tom feeling less than enamoured with tomorrow’s generation. He walked quickly along the tarmac path beside the green wicker fence and past the small café. Shrieking toddlers splashed around in the paddling pool while their parents, sitting on the white plastic seats, sipped their coffees. Tom stopped and gazed up at the huge red oak tree with its long, outstretched arms of twisted branches, the resolute, sturdy trunk layered with its brittle bark, the roots disappearing into the grass. He could see them, about a hundred yards away, sitting on the grass, embraced by the tree’s mottled shade. He left the tarmac path and cut across the grass, which, again, had just been cut. He breathed in its smell, and inched carefully towards the tree, his eyes fixed on them. Approaching, he slowed down, almost walking on tiptoe, not wanting to make his presence known. Julie was kneeling, her back facing him, and Charlotte was lying, foetal position on the grass, her head in her mother’s lap. Somehow, thought Tom, they looked pathetic and so vulnerable under the solid security of the red oak. Tom could hear Charlotte trying to talk between sobs, her whole, delicate body shaking with the effort. Tom crept to their side, about twenty yards away, conscious of his voyeuristic presence. Julie was stroking Charlotte’s hair, talking in smoothing tones, trying to soothe away her daughter’s tears. It took Tom right back to when Charlotte was a little girl, sucking her thumb while huddled up on her mother’s lap listening to the stories Julie used to make up on the spot with such ease.
Tom felt as if his heart was being squeezed from inside at the sight of them together now and the memory of those cherished times. He had never lost anyone close to him, but recently he had been prepared to throw away the things more precious to him than life itself. What must it have been like to know one’s child was growing up without you? What must it feel like to say goodbye to one’s child? He could feel his heart paining at the mere thought of it. How does a man kiss goodbye to part of himself? A brother condemned to die, a child condemned to a childhood without fatherly love and a lifetime of doubt and insecurity. How could a man ever love again when one has already died from the within? What Guy and his father would have given now, thought Tom, to be in his position, to have that second chance, to have one’s future so clearly mapped out in front of one. Guy would have married Mary, the mother of his child and the love of his life; Robert could have had a father’s love.
It had been just over two weeks since the trip to the Imperial War Museum. It felt like months, years even, but it was just two and a bit weeks that separated his old life from his new. And in that relatively short amount of time, Tom had allowed his resentment to take him so far from what was important. And in the process, he had learnt nothing which he didn’t know already, except to realise that he’d never wanted to leave at all. This was his aftermath; the haunted gap in his mind was filled. The words of the poem echoed back to him now with such clarity – he, Tom Searight, had been reprieved, he was ready to go, to claim back his past and grab his future.
He edged closer. In the background, he could hear children playing at their games, the rasping music of an ice cream van, a woman calling for her dog, a couple giggling over a game of Frisbee, the distant rumble of traffic, and then, in the far, far distance, reaching back over the decades, the simultaneous sound of eight rifles taking the life of a blindfolded young man. Charlotte’s fragmented words came clearly to him now as her mother wiped away the tears of a shattered girl while trying to offer words of reassurance. He heard certain names between the sobs, like stones being thrown into a pond, the ripples from which had brought her to this point of breakdown – Mr Moyes, Angus, Gavin, Daddy. Daddy. Tom knew there had been too many tears during his absence. That of Charlotte’s and Julie’s, he‘d seen his father’s anguish, Rachel’s longing, and, from the faded pages of a journal written almost half a century before he was born, he had heard so many more. But he, himself, hadn’t cried, hadn’t dared allow himself the luxury of such introspection. He was always too frightened of what he might have found. Perhaps, he should have listened to himself a long, long time ago. But now, as he listened to Julie speculate on how she and Charlotte were going to have to learn to live without him, Tom felt as if he was eavesdropping from Heaven and finally his eyes reddened.
Slowly, Julie became aware of his presence. She looked at him and brushed away a wisp of blonde hair from her face, a face engraved with maternal concern. Tom so knew that look, the look of a mother who so wants to alleviate the suffering of those too young to know why love should hurt so much, they would gladly welcome their child’s pain. Tom tried to smile. ‘Hello, my sweethearts,’ he said.
At the sound of his voice, Charlotte pulled herself up from her mother’s lap and twisted around to look at her father. ‘Daddy,’ she said wiping her eyes with her sleeve.
‘Yes, sweetheart?’ Tom edged forward. ‘Are you OK?’ He noticed the curling earrings. His shadow fell over his daughter.
Charlotte ran her fingers through
her untied and dishevelled hair. ‘Thanks for the earrings.’
‘That’s all right, my lovely.’
‘Are you coming home?’ she asked quietly. Tom noticed Julie screw her eyes shut at the directness of Charlotte’s matter-of-fact question.
Tom knelt down beside them both. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘If it’s OK with you and Mum, I would like to... very much.’
Julie opened her eyes, swallowed and smiled. Tom stepped over Charlotte, leant down and kissed his wife gently on the lips, cupping her face in his hands. She tried to say sorry, but Tom held his finger to her lips and gently nodded. There was no need for her to say it; he had just as much to be sorry about. He turned to look at his daughter and kissed her on the forehead. Above them, the leaves of the red oak rustled in the gentle summer breeze.
As they walked home, the three of them arm in arm with Charlotte in the middle, Julie said, ‘I thought Alice said you were going back to France this weekend.’
Tom pulled the ticket out from his back pocket. He looked at it and studied the details of departure time and seat number. He shook his head as he rolled the ticket up into a ball before throwing it accurately into a bin.
‘What was that, Daddy?’
‘Oh, nothing. Nothing at all.’
Charlotte shrugged a shoulder and linked her arm back into Tom’s.
‘What made you come back to us?’ asked Julie.
Tom considered the question for a few moments. Then, choosing his words carefully, he said, ‘I suppose it was all down to someone I met just recently.’
‘Really, who was that?’
Tom smiled. ‘Oh, just an old soldier who taught me a thing or two. An old soldier who lost his leg back in 1917.’
The Red Oak (The Searight Saga Book 3) Page 21