The thoughts whirled in his head. And she was right about something else, too: if he made her a promise he would strive to keep it. She knew him too well.
‘Lass, you don’t know what you’re asking. The thoughts in my head, the things I’ve seen . . .’ He shut his eyes. When he opened them again, the azure-blue gaze was still hard on him.
‘Promise me,’ she repeated.
Seth sighed deeply. How could he explain that he didn’t want to live with himself any more, with the man he’d become? He had faced himself long before the war and he hadn’t liked what he had seen. He liked it still less now.
For the fifth time, Pearl said, ‘Promise me.’
‘All right. I promise.’
It was over two months before Pearl brought Seth home, but at the beginning of March she was finally able to get him installed in what had been her bedroom above the shop. Although the lads’ room was empty she had wanted Seth to have his own room, besides which – and she couldn’t explain this logically – she felt that if James and Patrick’s room was waiting for them, they would come home to it one day. They’d moved her bed and wardrobe into the room she now shared with Nessie; her writing desk she’d fitted into a corner of the sitting room. Seth’s room boasted a new bed and wardrobe, a big easy armchair and small table, and a bookcase.
Pearl tried to make the journey from the hospital as easy for Seth as she could, but by the time he’d climbed the stairs to the flat it was clear he needed to go straight to bed. When she opened the door to his room, Seth stood for a moment staring around him. A fire crackled in the grate, a large bowl of fruit stood on top of the bookcase, and the easy chair was close to the fire with a thick rug for his feet. Pearl had sewn new curtains and a matching bedspread in a cheerful red and cream material which was bright and warm but still distinctly masculine in appeal, and she’d covered two plump flock cushions for the chair in the same cloth. A pile of magazines reposed on top of the table, along with twelve ounces of the tobacco Pearl had noticed Seth smoke in the hospital, and a new pipe. On the long shelf underneath, two bottles of the finest brandy and malt whisky and several glasses nestled on a silver tray.
Seth was a big man, at least he would have been if there was any flesh on his bones. Propped against his pillows in the hospital or sitting in his chair he had appeared thin; now, with his clothes hanging on him, he was skeletal. But it was the look on the gaunt face as he turned to her that caused Pearl to swallow hard. ‘You’ve done all this for me?’
In an endeavour not to burst into tears she kept her voice light. ‘Well, I don’t know anyone else who smokes that particular brand of tobacco.’
‘It’s grand, lass.’
‘If the books aren’t to your taste you’ll have to blame Nessie. She was in charge of choosing them. She’s tried to pick a mixture – Oh, don’t. Don’t, Seth. It’s all right.’
As the tears began to rain down his face she guided him to the bed, not knowing what to do as he began to rock himself almost like a baby. It was Nessie who took charge. Coming to the door, she took in the situation at a glance.
‘Go and make a pot of tea, lass,’ she said to Pearl, sitting down on the other side of Seth and drawing him into her arms as a mother would a child. ‘This is the best thing that could have happened – he needs to cry it out. There, there, lad.’ She was patting Seth’s back as he buried his head in her ample chest, her voice soft. ‘Get it all out, that’s right. It’ll do you the world of good. I know, I’ve been there.’
Pearl was at a loss. She’d never known Seth to cry, not even as a child when their father had leathered him with his belt until the buckle had ripped his skin and the blood had run. He was strong, Seth. Rock – like. He had had the odd quiet day, of course. Days when she’d barely been able to get anything out of him when she’d sat in the ward, and once or twice when she had arrived at the hospital unexpectedly, he’d been staring into space with a frightening look on his face. But this. This was something else.
She took her time making the tea. When she carried the tray to the bedroom door it was to see Seth fast asleep on top of the bed just as he was with his coat still on, and Nessie carefully pulling the boots off his feet.
Nessie gestured for Pearl to leave and followed her out, closing the door quietly behind her. ‘He’s fair exhausted, poor lad.’ Nessie shook her head as they sat down in the sitting room. Pearl poured them a cup of tea each as her friend continued, ‘But now he’s started to let it out, it’s a good sign, lass. Take it from me. If you keep stuff in it takes over, like a poison.’
Pearl supposed Nessie was right. No, of course she was right, there was no question, she told herself, but it had shaken her more than she’d imagined, to see Seth’s grief and pain. Putting down her cup and saucer, she said, ‘Do you think I’ve bitten off more than I can chew having him here, Nessie? At the hospital there were doctors who knew about this sort of thing.’
‘Lass, he’s where he should be, in my opinion. And we’ll see it through together, so don’t fret. Them doctors don’t know everything by a long chalk. But I’d better get meself downstairs and see what’s what. Them girls are willing enough but there’s times I think the Good Lord gave more up top to the milkman’s horse than them three, bless ’em.’ Nessie swallowed her tea, scalding hot though it was, and stood up, patting Pearl’s shoulder. ‘Put your feet up for a bit, lass, and don’t fret. It’ll all come out in the wash and old Meg’s backside with it.’
As Nessie bustled off, Pearl stared after her. Dear Nessie. What would she do without her? And she had been so good with Seth. If only James and Patrick could survive the war unscathed, she would never ask God for another thing in her life. Unscathed. She tutted inwardly at herself. Of course they would have to bear mental scars after all they would have seen and done, but – she shut her eyes tightly, her stomach churning – if they could come home whole physically. Some of those poor men at the hospital . . .
Dear Lord, please help Seth get better. Immediately she’d said the prayer she berated herself. One moment she was promising God she’d never ask Him for another thing if He’d watch over James and Patrick, and the next she was already making more requests. But that shell of a man in there wasn’t her Seth. Pearl bit down hard on her bottom lip. Her brother needed restoring, in body, soul and spirit – and she didn’t have a clue how to do it.
Chapter 22
Most of the older folk were saying the world had officially gone mad. How else could you justify bit lasses in the armament factories earning two pounds and ten shillings a week – more than four times the wage of a trained parlourmaid? And now women no longer felt they needed male company if they wished to eat out; business girls dined alone or with each other, and housewives whose husbands were in the forces went in pairs to the pub or the pictures. Skirts were shorter, respectable women had taken to wearing make-up and smoking cigarettes in public – what sort of world was it going to be when the war was over?
For those women living with the daily fear of the black-edged telegrams, the problems of the future seemed trivial. Men were dying in unbelievable numbers, and America entering the war in the spring of 1917 hadn’t seemed to make much difference. The carnage went on and the telegrams still came. In the summer, as the third battle of Ypres unfolded to the accompaniment of ceaseless bombardments and remorseless rainstorms, it was hard to say which was feared most – the German machine-gunner or the Flanders mud.
James and Patrick wrote home that the fields around Passchendaele Ridge had been turned into quagmires. Men who had survived the relentless gunfire were being sucked to their deaths when they slipped from the duckboards. Stretcher-bearers, up to their thighs in mud, were having to be rescued themselves.
It seemed impossible to Pearl that her brothers could survive such conditions, and yet equally impossible that she would never see them again. It couldn’t – it mustn’t – happen, she told herself, and every time she looked at Seth and the progress he was making, she took hope.
From that first day ten months ago when she’d brought her brother home, Nessie had instinctively seemed to know how to deal with him. That Seth was a damaged and complex individual was in no doubt and, impaired though his body was, it was his mind that was the real battleground. But Nessie wouldn’t let him brood. She’d breeze in on him when he was in one of his dark moods, talking to him at length, making him laugh, even teasing him on occasion. Other times they would talk for hours about the things he had seen and done in the war. At least, Pearl had thought, it was only about that until recently, but then a casual remark Nessie had let drop had revealed that Seth had confided details about his murky life before the war too.
Pearl had been slightly hurt at first. Seth never talked with her like he did Nessie. But Nessie, sensing this, had been quick to reassure her. ‘You’re almost too close to it all, lass,’ she’d said softly, ‘and he values your high opinion of him more than he could express. Now you and I know that’d never change whatever he told you, but he doesn’t understand that, being a man.’ She’d grimaced, making Pearl smile. ‘But this is like a cleansing for him, I think. He needs to bring it all out into the light. Mind, I never imagined I’d ever be placed in the position of a Mother Superior.’
Now Pearl laughed out loud. Anyone less like the head of a female religious order than Nessie Ramshaw was hard to imagine. But she was good for Seth.
By the summer Seth was feeling stronger and he began to help Nessie for an hour or two in the front of the shop. This proved so successful that when the girl who worked for Nessie left in the autumn, having been enticed away by the three pounds a week she could earn in the local munitions factory on the night shift, Seth declared himself well enough to work full time. Certainly a man’s presence, especially one as big as Seth, was a curb on the more unruly element who sometimes came in late on a Friday or Saturday night after drinking in the pub. Being an ex-serviceman who had been invalided out of the Army, Seth was treated with respect by even the roughest of their customers.
So it was with a much more settled heart about her brother that Pearl prepared for the fourth Christmas of the war. James and Patrick had written to say that entertainers, from opera singers to jugglers, were now putting on shows regularly along the front to boost the spirits of the British ‘tommies’. The one they’d been to the night before near Very had included light opera, a Scottish comedian, a Charlie Chaplin impressionist and a trick cyclist – along, of course, with a singalong. The letter was received with mixed feelings by Pearl. She was glad her brothers felt they hadn’t been forgotten by the world in general, but the thought of popular songs such as ‘Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag’ and ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’ being roared out by men who knew they could all be blown to bits the next day was very poignant.
On Christmas Eve, the night of hope, she prayed fervently for her baby brothers once she was in bed, and with her defences low she couldn’t keep the usual guard on her mind regarding Christopher either. She didn’t know if he was alive or dead, lost on some foreign field where so many had fallen, but when she closed her eyes she could picture him as he had been. Whole, handsome, hers. It was a long time before she slept.
On Christmas Day they lifted their spoons to James and Patrick when they ate their Christmas pudding. The War Office had supplied British troops in France with Christmas puddings, and Pearl hoped the day was another brief respite from the carnage for her brothers. Outside the house, a fresh fall of snow was adding to the inches packed hard on the ground, but inside was warmth and comfort – and the thought of loved ones so far away, fighting to preserve what they were enjoying now. It made for a sad, emotional day.
She and Nessie went to the evening service at the parish church, but Seth wouldn’t accompany them. Pearl wasn’t surprised at this. She knew Seth’s views on a God who allowed the bloodbath and butchery of the war well enough now. He didn’t force them on anyone, but if asked he didn’t hold back either. She had listened to him and Nessie having long talks on a Sunday afternoon when they all took the chance to relax after dinner. She rarely joined in because Nessie’s views were so similar to her own that she felt she didn’t have to, besides which she enjoyed listening to the other two. They had some right set-tos.
‘There’ll be more and more folk thinking like I do when this lot’s over,’ Seth had said last Sunday afternoon.
‘Then I pity them like I pity you,’ Nessie had replied spiritedly. ‘It wasn’t God who made the guns and fired the bullets, Seth. It was men. Men started this war with their greed, and when it’s over they’ll still be greedy, that’s the nature of the beast. If the world was run by women there’d be no wars, because what lass wants to send her da or husband or son into battle? Most women have more commonsense in their little fingers than men have in the whole of their bodies. There’ll be some changes now women have won the right to vote, take it from me.’
‘Oh aye, I thought we’d get back to this afore long.’ Seth enjoyed teasing Nellie on this topic. ‘But don’t forget, it’s only women over the age of thirty and it’s not happened yet.’
‘The Commons voted in June, so it’ll be through next year – and we’ll soon have it down to twenty-one, same as men,’ Nessie declared passionately. ‘Some countries have got women MPs already.’
‘May this God you say is on your side help them, that’s all I can say.’
‘I don’t say He’s on the side of women any more than He is of men. I’m just saying you can’t blame the wars and terrible things that go on, on God. He gave us free will to choose to do right or wrong, the Good Book tells us that.’
‘And you believe it?’
‘Aye. Aye, I do.’
Pearl remembered how Seth had suddenly leaned across to Nessie and patted her hand. ‘Then go on believing, lass. I wouldn’t want to take that away from you.’
‘Don’t worry, Seth Croft, you won’t. It’d take a bigger and uglier bloke than you to do that.’
They had looked at each other for a moment and then burst out laughing.
Pearl glanced at Nessie now as they came out of the church. It had stopped snowing although the air was bitterly cold. ‘I wish Seth had come with us,’ she said quietly. ‘It was a beautiful service and it might have given him some comfort.’
‘He’s got a long way to go before that day, lass, but we’ll keep chipping away at him, eh?’
‘It’s you who does that, Nessie. He talks to you like he never talks to me, or anyone else for that matter.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that.’ Nessie was suddenly brisk, dismissive.
‘He does,’ Pearl insisted. ‘I know he thinks the world of you. You’re such a good friend to us both, Nessie.’
Nessie fiddled with her hat, a strange expression flitting over her round face. If Pearl hadn’t known better she would have termed it sadness, but Nessie was never sad.
‘Seth’s a fine man,’ Nessie said shortly. Then, her manner changing, she dug Pearl in the side with her elbow. ‘Come on, get a move on. I know we had a bite before we came out, but me stomach’s thinking my throat’s been cut and that Christmas cake you made is calling.’
Pearl smiled back. ‘Last one in the door makes the tea,’ she said, tucking her arm in Nessie’s, and slipping and sliding on the frozen ground, the two women made their way home.
Seth had been sitting in front of the fire while the women had been gone, his head bent and his big hands palm downwards on his knees. If someone hadn’t looked too closely they would have supposed he was dozing, but they would have been wrong. Although his body was relaxed and still, his mind was very
active – and it was dealing with the problem that had begun to assail it more and more in the last few weeks. Nessie.
A piece of coal slipped into the glowing cave beneath it, sending a momentary firework of sparks up the chimney before harmony was restored, the only sound now in the room the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece.
What would she say if he told her how he felt? And then he immediately answered himself she’d laugh her head off. Then, no – she wouldn’t do that because she was kind; she was kindness itself, was Nessie. No, she wouldn’t laugh at him but he would read the amusement in her face nonetheless. ‘Eh, lad,’ she’d likely say, ‘I’m old enough to be your mother.’ That was what one of the bairns had said the other day in the shop when Nessie had been pretending to rail at him for dropping a pie he’d been wrapping up for the child. ‘Is she your mam then?’
But she wasn’t old enough to be his mother, leastways not unless she’d had him when she was nowt but a bairn herself. There was eleven years’ difference between them, that was all. All! He gave a ‘Huh!’ in his throat. And the stupid thing, the frustrating thing was if it had been the other way round, if he had been forty-two and she thirty-one, no one would have blinked an eye if they’d taken up together.
But all that was relative anyway, because he knew full well she would never look at him in that way. And who could blame her? He’d been in a bad way when he’d first come here – how bad he hadn’t realised until that first night when he’d cried like a baby. He hadn’t cried since he couldn’t remember when, but once started he hadn’t been able to stop, or so it had seemed.
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