Lost Among the Living

by Simone St. James

  In the morning, when dawn finally came, I found leaves scattered on the floor of my bedroom, brown and curled like the palms of hands in supplication, dry and crumbling beneath the soles of my bare feet.

  • • •

  Dottie was waiting in the morning room, her lips beginning to pinch at my tardiness. “You’re wearing one of your new frocks, at least,” she said.

  I put a few scraps of breakfast on my plate, too tired to answer. The horrible night had left me flushed and hot, my eyes gritty. As so often happened when my spirits were low, I wanted Alex with an almost childlike craving. I could see the fine line of his jaw, the strong beauty of his fingers and the palms of his hands. Some mourners found that they could not recall their loved one’s face after a period of time, but I was not one of them. I would be haunted by excruciating memories of every detail of Alex until the day I died.

  Forget, Mother’s voice said.

  “Eat quickly, Manders,” Dottie broke in. “We have work to do today.”

  I glared at her dully, but she wasn’t looking at me. I remembered her son, Martin, his hands clumsy on my shoulder blades as he embraced me. Had Dottie planned to marry me to him all along? How had she thought I would go along with it? I was only twenty-six, but I would never marry again. I pushed my plate away and rubbed my gritty eyes.

  After breakfast we adjourned to the library, which Dottie used as an office. The impressive shelves along the back wall were stocked with books, but I saw immediately that they were dry old volumes, unread and used as a backdrop, like wallpaper. The large desk was covered with neat stacks of papers. In the room’s front corner was a small secretary table, placed near the window. Here she set me with pen and paper, a small moon revolving around her planet, to take dictation of her correspondence in the shorthand I had learned as a secretary. The pen and paper were only a temporary measure, she explained to me, since she had ordered a typewriter for me to use, which would arrive within the next few days.

  Though I had not thought of my former job in years, it was uncanny how quickly I fell back into its habits. As I had many a time in my Casparov days, I blinked the tiredness from my eyes and hunched over my desk, settling into the numbing routine of work. Most of Dottie’s letters were to potential buyers of artwork, listing the pieces she had for possible sale, inviting the recipient to come to Wych Elm House to inspect them in person. There were letters to David Wilde regarding money matters I did not understand, as well as something to another lawyer about taxes on the property. Dottie spoke quickly, moving from one letter to the next as I scratched the words down without time to ponder what I was writing.

  We had spent the morning this way when Martin came into the room. He was dressed just as a prosperous young man at home in the country would dress: wool trousers and a collared shirt under a pullover sweater. The bulk of the sweater filled out some of his hollows, but still there was no mistaking the unhealthy thinness of his body and the waxy pallor of his face. I had seen his prewar photograph so many times that I still felt a jolt when I looked at him, as if I was looking at an oddly familiar stranger I could not quite place. I also felt, to my horror, a shiver of embarrassed revulsion at the sight of him. It was uncalled for, and unkind, but I was still affected by last night’s dream and I could not help it.

  “Good morning, Mother,” he said calmly. He turned his deep brown gaze briefly to me. “Cousin Jo.”

  Dottie glanced at her watch, her expression warring between her habitual disapproval of late sleepers and the impossibility of censuring her beloved son. “It is eleven o’clock,” she said, settling for a statement of neutral fact.

  “The journey yesterday fatigued me, I’m afraid,” Martin said.

  “Are you well?” Dottie asked him. “Have you eaten? It is late for breakfast, but the servants—”

  “The servants fed me properly, Mother. Please don’t worry.” He smiled at her, that charming smile that was so like Robert’s, and I wondered if Dottie could see he was lying, that he hadn’t eaten anything at all. “Do you think I could borrow your delightful companion for a time?”

  My stomach twisted. Dottie shot me one of her narrow-eyed looks, this one somehow thoughtful and speculative. “You wish to speak to Manders?”

  “I wish to go walking with Cousin Jo and show her the grounds,” Martin said easily. “Let me guess—you’ve kept her locked up in here, working her to death. Really, Mother! Cousin Jo is family, not an Egyptian slave. Has she even had a proper tour of the house?”

  Dottie leaned back in her chair, inscrutable thoughts behind her eyes. If my suspicion was right, having Martin and me walk together played into her plans; however, she had not expected Martin to suggest it, and she hated surprises. “Very well,” she said at last. She turned to me as I tried to hide my terrified expression. “Manders, go take some air with Martin. Please return by two o’clock, as I’d like those letters finished by the end of the day.”

  I did not move. My hands gripped the edge of my desk, the knuckles white.

  “Jolly good,” came Martin’s voice. I turned my head, as stiff as if it were on rusty wires, and found him looking at me. He had that meaningful look in his eyes, the one he’d given me yesterday. “Get your coat, Cousin Jo,” he said. “There’s an autumn chill in the air.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It was indeed chilled outdoors; it was the middle of September, and the sunlight was beginning to thin, the wind losing its warmth. Martin had put on a short wool jacket and wound a scarf of dark burgundy around his neck. His brown hair was longish and carelessly cut—the product, I realized, of months in hospital—and when he swung open the front door, it tousled in the wind like a boy’s.

  As I tugged on my hat, a maid descended the staircase behind me, carrying an armful of linens. I turned to her as Martin waited for me in the doorway. “I’m sorry about the leaves,” I said.

  The maid paused. “Pardon, miss?”

  “The leaves in my room.” I was unused to the idea of a servant cleaning up after me, and I felt the need to explain. “I must have tracked them in somehow. It’s a bit of a headache for you, I know. I’ll try to watch more closely next time.”

  But she looked at me blankly. “There were no leaves in your room, miss.”

  “Oh.” I felt myself flush. “Perhaps one of the other maids already cleaned them.”

  “I’m the only maid who does the bedrooms.”

  I glanced at Martin, who was looking at me curiously, then looked back at the maid. Panic tried to close my throat. “I, er—I must be thinking of something else, I suppose.”

  “Certainly, miss,” the maid said, bemused.

  I escaped through the open front door and onto the front steps. “Is everything all right?” Martin asked me.

  I managed a smile. “Yes, of course. Let’s go.”

  He took me over the grounds, starting behind the house. We walked through the gardens—unkempt and dying now—and to the stables, where no horses resided, and the tennis court, where no one played. The tennis court had not been cleaned in years, and piles of dead leaves stood in drifts, straggles of weeds growing through the hard surface.

  “Did you ever play?” I asked, trying to forget my exchange with the maid as I pulled up the collar of my coat and followed him past.

  “Hardly,” Martin replied. “I had no one to play with. Franny was too young—she tried awfully to please me, but she was easily distracted and could never finish a proper game. Alex played with me a few times when he lived here, but he beat me with so little effort I soon became discouraged. He said he learned the game from his father.”

  I didn’t know Alex played tennis—and he had never told me much about his father. I tried to picture a man resembling Alex but older, teaching a six-year-old to play. Where had they practiced? Had they laughed, or was the air tense between them? Had Alex fondly recalled those sessions, or were they memories he
’d rather put away? I’d never know, and I was suddenly jealous that Martin knew something of Alex, of his life before me, that I didn’t. “Tell me about Alex living here,” I said.

  Martin flinched a little, and too late I remembered Dottie’s rule not to speak of Alex. But my companion recovered himself quickly, taking me over the path now around the side of the house. “Alex was twelve when he arrived,” he answered me, “and I was eight, stuck in the countryside with a baby sister and ripe for a bit of hero worship. He was good enough to let me stay in his presence, as annoying as I was. He stayed for three years, and they were the best of my life.”

  We were at the front of the house now, and we followed the path into the trees. I thought briefly of the mist I’d seen from my window—and the mist in my room—but in the crisp sunlight the memory seemed distant. Martin’s pace slowed; he was tiring already, but still he glanced at me over his shoulder and motioned to the woods around us. “This land goes all the way to the sea. Mother’s father bought it for Mother when she married.” He gave me a wry smile. “We’re new money all the way, you see. My great-grandfather was one of those nasty old Victorian industrialists. Children working in his factories, paying his workers pennies, all of that sort of thing. Mother is of his blood. She tried to sell the land here for lumber value just before the war—she thought lumber would be valuable with war coming, and tried to parcel the whole thing off. But she had opposition from the neighboring estates as well as the local government. She was stuck in a legal mire over it for years.”

  I looked around me, feeling the dry hush of old leaves underfoot, listening to the throaty caw of a crow somewhere, and I tried to envision owning a piece of the earth and wishing to sell it off. “So she lost,” I said.

  “She did.” Martin gestured off to the left with one thin hand. “Our property ends several miles that way—there’s a government installation there, though you can’t see it through the trees. I think the installation is the reason she couldn’t sell.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Ministry of Fisheries.” Martin’s breath came deeper now, as if the simple walk through the trees had exhausted him. “An outpost thereof. Lots of boats coming and going, which is rather nice to watch. In the other direction, the border of our land ends nearly in town. The locals will tell you the views are lovely.” He dropped his hands in his pockets. “It will all be mine someday, which is why I’ve come home. That and to continue the family line, of course.”

  My jaw froze shut. With me. He means to continue the family line with me.

  But when we stepped into the strong sunlight of a small clearing and he turned to me, I saw only weariness in his face. His skin seemed thin as parchment, his cheekbones prominent beneath. He sat on the fallen trunk of an old tree and put his forearms on his knees, his thin wrists dangling. He looked up at me, squinting a little. “It really is nice to meet you, Cousin Jo,” he said quietly. “I’ve always wanted to meet the girl Alex married. I’m glad you were here when I returned after all this time. Franny died while I was away, you see, and I thought I’d be here alone.”

  I swallowed past the shards of glass in my throat. Say it, Jo. Just say it. “I cannot marry you,” I blurted into the still air. “I simply cannot.” In the pause that followed, I managed to add, “I’m sorry.”

  Martin sat very still, looking at me. I could see clearly in the bright light that he was ill—not just a case of postwar nerves, as Dottie would have it, but something much worse. He was a man who had looked death in the face, and recently. He kept his wrists on his knees and regarded me with a pensive expression as a lark flew high overhead, crying.

  “Thank God,” he said evenly. “I can’t marry you, either.”

  I blinked, and some of my surprise and relief must have shown on my face because he smiled.

  “Please don’t take it the wrong way, Cousin Jo,” he said. “You are very beautiful, as I’m sure you know. And I know you have a good character, because Alex would only marry a right sort. But the fact remains that I cannot marry Alex’s wife.”

  I felt the sudden sting of tears behind my eyes. “I loved him very much,” I said.

  “So did I.” Martin pulled his gaze from me and looked out into the trees. “Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say I adored him.” He scrubbed a hand over his face, the memory dragging on him. “Worship was so easy with Alex.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “I joined the army because of him. Did you know that?” Martin said. “Signed up because he did. Thought I’d be RAF, but I never made it. It didn’t matter—I was on the same fighting ground as him, fighting the same war. That was all that mattered to me. I thought we’d both come home war heroes.” He shrugged, as if he’d given up trying to figure it out. “And now here we are—I look like this, and he never came home at all. War is a funny thing.”

  “When did you last see him?” I asked, my throat thick.

  “He came to see me in the hospital in 1917. Franny was dead by then, and we talked about it. It put him in a dark mood, I thought.”

  “He was upset over it?” I recalled the careless words Alex had written to me. She has died, poor thing.

  “I wasn’t well—that’s putting it mildly—so perhaps I’m misremembering,” Martin replied. “But he didn’t seem himself. It was odd—Alex had always treated Franny nicely, but he hadn’t seen her in years. Yet he was shaken up. ‘I don’t understand it,’ he said to me, ‘and now I don’t think I ever will.’ Isn’t that a strange thing to say?” He shook his head. “I asked him what he was going to do next—you know, he’d flown so many RAF missions, I thought he must be due for a promotion, anything he wanted. But all he said was ‘I don’t have a bloody clue.’ You know Alex—always so ambitious, striving for the highest thing, making the rest of us run to keep up with him. It wasn’t like him at all.”

  I stared at him, numb. Ambitious? Alex had finished Oxford, then traveled, doing nothing. An aimless fellow with a great deal of education and not much to do, he’d described himself that first night. He was intelligent, of course, and good at everything—but he’d never shown himself as ambitious to me.

  But then, Dottie’s voice said, you weren’t together all that long.

  “I’m sorry,” Martin said to me, looking at my face. “I’ve gone on and on. The point is that we can’t marry, no matter what Mother may want.”

  That shook me out of my thoughts. “Do you honestly think your mother means for us to marry?”

  “Oh, yes.” He smiled a little, the corner of his mouth crooking. A breeze, smelling of leaves and rain, tousled his longish hair. “You caught my little message yesterday, did you? I was trying to warn you, in case you didn’t know. I know Mother well. I need a wife, and Alex left one; it would seem practical to her, as long as she approved of you.”

  “I’m not sure she does,” I said.

  “Of course she approves of you.” Martin patted the pockets of his jacket absently. “If she didn’t, she would have dismissed you long ago.”

  The truth of it computed in my mind. “The trip to the Continent,” I said slowly. “Those three months. That was some kind of a trial, wasn’t it?” I tilted my head back and looked up at the sky. And to think I had started to feel sympathy for Dottie. “My God.”

  “You can’t hate her,” Martin said reasonably. “You have to see things her way. Family comes first. Instead of marrying properly, as was his duty, Alex married an unknown girl of no family. He never introduced you to us. He didn’t even invite anyone to the wedding.”

  “No, he didn’t,” I said. My legs were suddenly tired, and I took a seat next to him on the old tree, keeping a large space between us so we resembled two strangers waiting for a bus. Alex and I had married in Crete, just the two of us. It had been his suggestion, and I’d asked him why. Because, he’d answered, it isn’t anyone’s damned business what I do. Perhaps he hadn’t wa
nted Dottie breathing down his neck. It had been romantic, a whirlwind of sea and sunlight and passion, and I’d had no objection at all.

  “Then, you see,” Martin continued, “the war came, and took Alex with it. Nothing turned out the way Mother planned it. But you behaved respectably as a widow, and there were no accounts that you were a fool. So she took you on to see for herself if you were suitable for the family.”

  I put my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands in a most unladylike manner. “It isn’t just that I don’t want another husband,” I told him. “Any husband. It’s that I truly can’t marry you. The War Office never sent the official notice of his death, and the paperwork is a mess. So under the law I’m not precisely a widow—I’m still his wife. I can’t even get a widow’s pension.”

  “That’s beastly,” Martin said softly. “I assume Mother doesn’t know. I’ll be the one to tell her, if you like.”

  “She’ll dismiss me if we don’t marry.”

  “No, she won’t. Mother has her faults, but she wouldn’t leave a member of the family with no means. Just leave it to me.”

  I looked up at him. He spoke with the confidence of an only son who knows his mother will listen to his wishes. “And what will you do about a wife?” I asked.

  “I’ll tell her to find me another, of course.”

  “That’s madness. Don’t you want to choose your own wife?”

  “My wife for how long?” he asked. He gave me a smile. “I’m not quite healthy, and the war nearly did me in. It’s made Mother frantic. If I shuffle off this mortal coil without leaving an heir, all of this will be for nothing.” He gave a grand wave at our surroundings, indicating the house and the woods. “I’ve known my duty since I was a boy—even more so after it became clear that Fran could never marry. Don’t worry about me, Cousin Jo. After the trenches, and then the hospital, it doesn’t seem like such a bad lot.” He pressed his hands to his knees and stood. “Come. I haven’t shown you the house yet.”