Lost Among the Living

by Simone St. James

  The weather cooperated with my mood, the days dark and chill, rain coming down in angry fits. Whether I was waking or sleeping, Frances Forsyth was never far from my mind. I remembered the anguish in her expression that last time. I believed she had appeared to me in the woods for a reason, that she had sought me out. I found myself looking for her—in the corridors, the parlors, the kitchen. Everywhere I went, I thought I caught the chill of mist and a sickly sweet scent.

  It was not healthy, spending my time alone, searching for a ghost. But I could not stop myself; I had no desire to. Frances felt close to me, as if she were around the next corner. I had no one else.

  I looked up from my typing one afternoon to find Dottie standing in the middle of the library staring at me, smoking a cigarette. I’d had no idea she was there.

  “Manders,” she said. Her feet in their oxfords were placed apart, her body braced on its short, narrow legs beneath the practical suit she wore. “You sold one of my paintings.”

  “Yes,” I said dully. “Two days ago. Mr. Bergeron wished to purchase it, and you were not at home. His men will be here tomorrow to remove it.”

  She puffed her cigarette forcefully, pinching the holder and removing it from her lips. “Dutch House, or so I hear,” she said, naming the painting.

  “I left you a note,” I said. “It’s on your desk.”

  She grunted; we both knew perfectly well she’d read it already. “How much did you get for it?” she asked.

  If she didn’t already know the answer to this, I’d eat my hat, but still I answered. “Six hundred.”

  “Hm.” She puffed the cigarette again. “Acceptable, I suppose.”

  “It was more than you discussed when you met with him.”

  “Not much more. I’d have negotiated harder.”

  “You would, if you’d been here,” I said. “As it is, I employed as much avarice as I could muster.”

  To my surprise, that seemed to amuse her. “You’re not a completely lost cause,” she commented. “I suppose I’ve been busy of late. However, your work is not at an end. Martin and Cora are becoming acquainted, and I will need you on chaperone duty.”

  “You can’t be serious,” I said. “They are both over twenty, and her parents are staying here.” The last thing I wanted to do was play chaperone, like a spinster from the last century. I may as well begin planning my own dusty grave.

  “I agree that it’s stupid,” Dottie said in her usual blunt way. “Martin is hardly going to debauch the girl. However, her parents want the proprieties observed, and I am determined that the thing should be done right. And you will help me.”

  “I suppose I’ll do it if I have to,” I said. “I’m the nearest dried-up old widow in the vicinity.”

  Dottie walked to the ashtray on her desk and doused her cigarette. “Manders, you are glum. It does not suit you. Please don’t tell me what’s bothering you, because I have no interest, as you may have guessed. Just accompany the young lovers whenever I tell you to. Is that clear?”

  I had to admit that it was.

  I awoke that night from another dream, the sheets twisted around me, my face flushed and hot. My heart raced in my chest, thudding in my ears, and my hair was damp with sweat.

  When cold air trickled over my face, I forgot to be afraid. I closed my eyes and inhaled it, savoring the harsh surprise of cold on the back of my throat, breathing it deeply into my lungs. My sweat went cold and gooseflesh rose on my arms and down my stomach beneath my nightgown.

  “Frances?” I said.

  The wind blew against the panes of the window. My nose and cheeks grew cold, and even my closed eyelids felt chilled. When I rolled over on the damp mattress, my hand touched something under the blanket next to me.

  I jerked upward, coming awake. Whatever it was had been tucked into the bed with me, resting almost against my body. The bedroom door was closed; nothing else in the room had been disturbed. I swallowed and pulled back the cover.

  It was a book. A large, flat book, the hard cover gleaming in the moonlight through the window. I touched it tentatively, found the texture of the paper rough. The pages inside were thick, some of them warped, so the top cover did not sit exactly level. I scooted over on the bed, turned on the bedside lamp, and opened it.

  From the first page, I knew it was a girl’s sketchbook. The subjects were domestic: a vase of flowers, leaves on a checked tablecloth, a cat in the old stables behind the house. There was a profile of Dottie, her head bent over her work at the library desk, and another of Martin in his war uniform. All of them were detailed and clearly rendered, as if the artist had taken the time to catch every detail.

  I turned the pages. There was a portrait of Wych Elm House, taken from the woods. Another of the vista that rolled down from the edge of the woods to the village, where I could see the spire of the church and smoke rising from some of the chimneys. I pictured Frances—for this was most certainly her work—sitting on the stile in the lane I’d passed only that day, perched for hours, drawing and drawing until her hands cramped and her feet lost all feeling. I could see it so clearly in that moment, it was as if I’d seen her again.

  I tilted the page with the sketch of the village toward the light, looking more closely. From behind the hedgerow leading to the village she’d drawn a shadow, stretching long and dark, that did not fit with the rest of the scene. A man, perhaps? Or something else? I turned back the page to the picture of the house again and looked at it, too, under the light. There was a shadow breaking away from the main shadow of the house, difficult to see at first glance. And in an upper window, on the third floor, was the shadow of a face in the smudges of pencil, two deep-set black holes of eyes in a white oval.

  She complained of a face that would appear at that very window. A man begging her to let him in.

  It watches me.

  Was it a man? It was impossible to tell. Was this the face Frances had seen in her nightmares, one of the many faces she claimed wouldn’t leave her alone?

  Strangely excited, I leafed through all the pages of the sketchbook. Some of the pictures had shadows in them; some did not. The drawing of Wych Elm House was the only one that featured a face. Some of the book’s pages had been torn out, the jagged edges visible in the spine of the bound book. From outside my window, the dog with the low, throaty voice barked until the sound trailed off in a whining growl.

  I slid my feet over the edge of the bed and opened the drawer in the nightstand, where I’d put the photographs I’d taken from Frances’s room. I picked the photo of Fran and Martin standing in front of Wych Elm House. Then I turned the sketchbook to the drawing of the house and placed it side by side with the photograph under the light.

  It was there, in the photograph—the same shadow in the upper window, behind the children. Two pinpoints of black in a larger shape. I hadn’t seen it before, or perhaps I’d assumed it a natural shadow in the window glass. But now, putting the sketch next to the photograph, I could see what it was.

  It watches me.

  “Frances,” I said softly into the darkness, “is this what you want me to see?”

  There was no answer.

  I gently closed the book, placed it reverently on the table with the photograph inside, and turned out the light again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “Are you all right?”

  It was February 1918, and I was standing in Victoria Station, seeing my husband off after his final leave. He had been home for three weeks—longer than I had expected, longer than he’d ever been home before. And now he was leaving again.

  I gripped his sleeve with my gloved hand. “I’ll be just fine,” I said.

  “You look frozen solid.”

  “No, no.”

  It had snowed the night before, and London was deep in slush, the rims of it icy on the pavements and in the gutters. Filthy half-frozen snow h
ad been tracked through Victoria Station by thousands of hurried feet and continued to be tracked in by thousands more. I wore my thickest shoes, my heaviest coat and gloves, but still I could not get warm. I felt the muscles between my shoulder blades contract in a convulsive shiver, but I fought it down. A headache was making its way up the back of my neck and over the top of my skull.

  “Look,” Alex said, “you needn’t come farther. We can say our farewells here.”

  I gripped his sleeve harder and looked up into his face. “No.”

  He looked down at me, and those extraordinary eyes softened beneath the brim of his handsome, sharp cap. “The train leaves in fifteen minutes, Jo.”

  “Fifteen minutes, then. We should keep moving. You’re going to be late.”

  He looked into my face a moment longer; then he turned away and led me through the crowd. I followed with my arm entwined with his, staring at the line of his shoulder, the weave of his wool coat. I had done this before, seen him off on leave. This was always the worst, these last moments, in the middle of a crowd, wanting to say everything and nothing at once. It was an experience so painful one’s mind suppressed it, like the death of a loved one or the agony of childbirth. Yet there was no avoiding it. I would not say good-bye at home and let him walk away without me any more than I could detach my own limbs from my body and let them walk out the door.

  Still, this was worse than any of the others. I wasn’t well, though I was trying to hide it. I was shaking with cold sweat beneath my heavy coat, my feet clammy and frozen, a fog in my head that shrouded my vision. My stomach roiled, threatening to give up the little breakfast I’d eaten. Fifteen minutes. I just had to get through them one by one.

  Before this leave, he’d been gone nine months. I could recall not a single one of the days of those nine months, not one meal, not one night or morning. I could not tell you what I had done, what clothes I had worn, whether it had rained or been hot or cold. I had kept myself occupied, volunteering for soldiers’ charities, but at the moment I could not recall a single person I had met, not a name or a face.

  I had tried. One must get on with things, after all, and not sit around making a cake of oneself over a man, even if that man was one’s husband. One must not live only for his letters, coming alive briefly when the thin envelopes arrived, not caring that the thick, clumsy fingers of the censor had already handled the page before I did, that a stranger’s eyes had already read my husband’s words. Not much to report from here, my Jo. We are grounded due to fog. The men are playing cards. I can hear the shelling in the distance at the Front. I am picturing you, sitting at the table in our kitchen, reading this, wearing the dress with blue and white flowers you wear so often, your hair tied back, the curls coming loose . . .

  We had come to the entrance to the platform now, and there was a gray-haired man in a crisp uniform and a thick mustache looking at Alex, taking in his uniform and his ticket and giving him a respectful nod. He gave me a nod as well as we passed him, but I barely noticed it, and he was gone, swirling into the crowds behind us before I could think to turn and return the gesture. I could not have turned anyway—my neck seemed to have been soldered into my shoulders in a straight line. I touched my gloved fingers discreetly to my face and sponged the sweat from my temples.

  The platform was crowded, the cold air mixing with the warmth of hundreds of bodies in a horrible miasma. I tried to cover my nose. My feet were numb with cold while sweat dripped under my arms and down my back. Someone bumped into me and I stumbled.

  Alex caught me, his arm coming around my waist as naturally as breathing. “Jo?” he said.

  “I’m all right.”

  He turned away, kept his arm around me. “Pardon me,” he said as he arrowed through the crowd. “Make way, please. My wife is not well. Make way.”

  People made way, of course—Alex never had to raise his voice to be obeyed. It was something in the tone that made you do what he asked almost before he’d finished the sentence. But people looked past him to me, alarm on their faces. A woman pulled her child away by the hand, and two girls, arm in arm, stepped back. Influenza had begun its deadly sweep, leaving piles of bodies in its wake. I tried to look normal, to meet people’s eyes and give them a nod. Not influenza, no, no. I had the presence of mind to catch one woman’s eye and discreetly pat my stomach. Immediately I saw the relief on her face.

  “Make way, please. My wife is unwell.” Alex maneuvered me to a bench on the platform, that someone—whoever it was, I never saw—immediately vacated, and sat me down. He crouched in front of me, balanced on those long legs of his. “You shouldn’t have come,” he said.

  Now that I was sitting and I could see all of him, I felt a little better. I had a clear view of the long, lean shape of him, the dark wool trousers I’d watched him put on that morning, his heavy boots. The hem of his winter wool coat rested on his thighs, and he’d partially unbuttoned it, so I could see the uniform he wore beneath. He set down the rucksack he’d been carrying over one shoulder and leaned in toward me, his eyes never leaving my face.

  “What is it, Jo?” he asked. “Tell me.”

  “I don’t know,” I confessed. “I didn’t feel like this until this morning. I know I haven’t been getting enough sleep.”

  He spoke nearly in a whisper, to avoid alarming anyone who could overhear. “If it’s influenza, for God’s sake . . .”

  “No, no.” I smiled at him. “I really do feel better now that I’m sitting down. It’s nothing like that at all.”

  I hadn’t convinced him, I could tell, but his train was leaving in minutes. He glanced behind him at the track, then turned back to me. “Can you get home?”

  “Yes, of course.” I blinked as pain shot up the back of my head as if I’d been speared with a knitting needle. “This is stupid. I’m here to say good-bye to you, not to make you worry. Please don’t.”

  He glanced back at the train again. In one motion, he pulled off one of his heavy leather gloves and touched his fingers to my face. His skin against mine felt icy, and I realized it was because my own was burning hot. The touch was almost painful, as if my skin was swollen and thin as rice paper, but still I leaned into him as the world tilted a little.

  “I can’t miss this train,” he said.

  “I know,” I replied, my eyes drifting half closed. “The war awaits.”

  “I want to tell the war to fuck itself,” he said, his coarseness shocking me into a smile, as he’d intended. “I do. There’s part of me that would do it in an instant. But, Jo . . .”

  I nodded and put my gloved hand over his. “I hate the war,” I said. I felt strange, disconnected, as if I were listening to someone else. My spine ached.

  “Jesus.” Alex pulled off his other glove and put both hands to my face, the effect like icy blades on my skin. “Promise me you’ll see a doctor. Today.”

  “I promise.” Again someone else was speaking through my lips, making words I barely understood.

  There was a high, shrill whistle, a warning that the train was about to leave, that threatened to split my head in two. I focused on staying still and not throwing up from the pain and the dizziness, still smiling at Alex as if nothing were wrong. He was leaving. I mustn’t worry him.

  He glanced at the train one last time, then picked up his rucksack and put it over his shoulder. He took my face in his hands again and leaned close to me, his clean-shaven cheek against mine, his breath on my ear. “I have done everything wrong,” he said to me, “everything, and you will never forgive me. But stay alive and I will come back to you. I will come back to you. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I said. No, my mind screamed, as high and shrill as the train whistle, though my tongue could not form the words. No, no, don’t leave, I love you, don’t leave.

  Then he kissed my lips and let me go.

  I gasped. My mind scrambled through its fog. I tried to st
and, but my legs wouldn’t obey me. Alex vanished into the crowd—gone, gone. Had he looked back at me? Already I couldn’t remember. It had all been so fast. What sort of kiss had it been? I knew all of Alex’s kisses, what every one of them meant. Had it been one of his passionate ones, or one of his sweeter, gentler ones? I didn’t know.

  I finally levered myself from the bench and pushed myself through the crowd. Now I was just a flushed, red-eyed girl like dozens of others on the platform, stumbling about in grief. I tried to get to the train—I had no idea how long I’d been trying when the train gave a whistle and pulled away. I was pummeled on all sides, pushed and pulled by the crowd, by women waving handkerchiefs, crying children. My cheeks were wet with tears.

  Had he looked back at me?

  I had no recollection of how I got home that day—there were gaps of time that were utterly blank, as if I were asleep. I did not go to a doctor. I could recall sitting on the stairs of the Chalcot Road apartment, pulling off my shoes and sobbing as I rubbed my icy feet. I remembered crying out in pain as I pulled my clothes off my aching skin. I remembered thinking that it was influenza after all, and that I would die, and that Alex would be disappointed because he had told me not to.

  I was sick for a week, sweating and shivering in bed. I did, in fact, have influenza—though I got away with a milder strain that was not deadly, like the Spanish flu. After a week I was as wrung out as a dishrag, the act of merely feeding myself so exhausting I could barely perform it. I stayed in our dim apartment, one day after another. I had no friends or family, in London or anywhere. No one came.