Rose was a socialite, a true Mayfair girl. The only child of indulgent parents, and with a healthy trust fund, she always seemed to carry notes, not coins. She was the one who arranged and hosted tea parties and soirees; the one who picked up the bills at the Ritz and other places, and then, afterward, paid for the ridiculously short taxicab rides home for us all. She liked to visit fortune-tellers, and would quite often take a taxicab all the way to the outer suburbs, only to hear, yet again, that a tall dark stranger in uniform was on his way into her life.
But, and even aside from Tom, even before I learned of their “thing,” I’d always been confused by my feelings for her. I admired her bravado, her joie de vivre and her generosity, and yet, in a way, those were the very same qualities I disliked about her, and viewed as shallow and insensitive. She seemed to me to be a girl without poetry in her blood, someone who’d never looked up and noticed the sky; someone who’d simply fail to see the full spectrum, or the differing hues and tones of any single color. But that was Rose. And Rose was Rose.
For a short while our friendship was quite intense. We saw each other most evenings after work and sometimes, at her house, in her room, we took morphia; and then lay about trying to imagine the future, our future. A future. Perhaps that’s the reason it became intense: the morphia, or “morphy” as she called it.
She said to me, “You know, dear, I keep thinking, and really . . . the thing is, soon there’ll be no one left to marry . . . we’ll all end up old maids . . . childless and unloved.” She turned to me. “Doesn’t it worry you, darling? I mean to say, I know you’re engaged and all that, and poor Charlie’s invalided, but what if he has to go back . . . what if something happens to him? It must cross your mind, dear . . . must cross your mind all the time.”
We were lying on her bed, side by side, and as I turned to her I noticed the flecks of red in her hair—Titian red—spread out over the pillow.
“I don’t think about it.”
She turned toward me, on to her side. “Really? Never?”
“No. What’s the point? Whatever will be will be.”
“Clarissa! But you love him—don’t you?”
I closed my eyes. “I suppose so. Sort of.”
She lay back, and for a while we lay in silence, the only noise the rumble of traffic going up and down the wet street outside. Then she said, “But has he made love to you? You don’t have to tell me, of course . . . but I was wondering, wondering if you’re still a virgin.”
I didn’t answer her immediately. The morphia made me drift, made my thoughts loose and shapeless; and it was a difficult question to answer.
“No,” I said, after a while, “he hasn’t made love to me, Rose.”
I didn’t say any more, and neither did she.
And I have no idea who or what she was thinking of, where she was inside of herself, but I was with him.
For a while, I’m not altogether sure how long, but perhaps no more than a few weeks—and I know that it was spring, because I vividly recall the blossoms on the trees as I walked home—we took morphy quite often; most days, I think. It made everything infinitely better, made the world . . . kinder, softer, warmer. And it took away all of my pain and heartache, all of my loneliness, and replaced it with the most sublime sense of peace.
Sometimes, its effects literally transported us to another place. And once, when Rose and I attended a private exhibition of paintings—and had taken only the smallest dose, hours earlier—we both fancied we’d seen the colors change and move about the canvases. Another time, when we read poetry out loud to each other, it was as though I was able go inside the poem, able to see and feel the vibration of every single word.
My mother never noticed a thing. Oh, she’d comment from time to time that I looked a tad pale or tired, but she’d always considered me dreamy, distracted and, I suppose, particularly at that time, fragile. If she thought something was amiss she never voiced it, but that was her character: she’d rather arrange flowers than deal with reality. But I was becoming needy, greedy for my share of grains, and I’d begun to pay Rose, because as she’d quite rightly said, she shouldn’t have to pay for everyone else’s fun.
—
It was Rose who asked me if I’d help out at the kiosk: a small buffet for soldiers arriving back from the trenches, situated on one of the platforms at Waterloo station. She and a few other girls from our neighborhood ran it together, working on a rotation so that it was open around the clock, day and night. We served tea, buns and cigarettes, all paid for by donations, but mainly by Lady Astley, a friend of Mama’s, who’d set it up. So, I continued to work at the Russian Hospital each morning and cycled to Waterloo station each afternoon. There were always at least three of us working there, a few more if we knew it was going to be frantic, when the boat trains were due in. But the time of arrival of any trains was always a matter of conjecture. If they were late in the evening, as they quite often were, we’d all be there until the small hours, and then I’d leave my bicycle chained up at the station and share a taxicab home with the other girls.
Lady Astley came down to see us all at least twice each week, bringing supplies from Fortnum and Mason and often staying for a good few hours, helping to serve tea and chatting with the men. She liked us to look our best, said it mattered to the men. “They need to see smiles and pretty faces when they step off those trains,” she said. And we weren’t just to serve them: we were to greet them, she said; to cheer them up, chat to them and listen to them. After all, they were heroes, each and every one of them, she told us. And so, with a smile on my face, I handed out tea to Tommies and to officers. I chatted to the walking wounded and to the seemingly fit and able, and I sat with those badly injured on stretchers, limbless bodies with boyish faces, holding a teacup to their parched lips, placing a cigarette to their mouths, and then lifting it away as they exhaled. In that miasma of putrid flesh and seeping wounds, blood, dirt, sweat and vomit, I held hands and stared into black-ringed eyes. I smiled at their generosity, their never-ending compliments and propositions of marriage, and sometimes I winked back at them. Yes, I flirted, we all did; even Lady Astley, I think.
And to them all, I was Clarissa.
“’Ere, Clarissa, Arthur says he’s in love with you, already!”
“Clarissa! Another cuppa over here, love, and bring them lips with you, ha!”
The station was always pandemonium when the trains came in, especially at night: filled with volunteers like us, Red Cross workers, nurses and ambulance men waiting to collect the injured. Depending on the time of day, there would sometimes be a crowd of fervently patriotic members of the public to welcome their returning troops with a song, as well as a few vividly painted ladies.
All of the men were exhausted and, not surprisingly, dazed; startled by their welcome, and perhaps the recognition of something near to normality, near to a memory. Many were suffering from the effects of mustard gas: half blind, skin blistered, eyes weeping, stuck together, or covered by a bandage; they moved along the platform in a long automated line, hands upon the shoulders of the man in front, zombie-like.
In the hut, for that’s all it really was, we had an iron boiler, an enormous tea urn, three old jugs and a pail for washing up. But somehow we managed. More than that, we did it all with gusto. Lady Astley’s two daughters, Flavia and Lily, were there almost every day, and Rose too.
I don’t think I’d ever felt as alive or, bizarrely, laughed as much. And this was perhaps what struck me more than anything else: that these men, men who’d been living on their wits, fighting for survival, and in such appalling conditions—for by then we all knew about life in the trenches—could still laugh, and sing; still flirt and smile. My vocabulary expanded, and I learned a few new songs. None of them Mama would have liked, all of them I loved.
“You’re a looker and a half mind, ain’t ya? Gotta sweetheart, love?”
“Here! Bert! Come and meet me new fiancée, Clarissa . . .”
Of course
I looked out for Tom, and for Henry too. And once, during my first few weeks, Jimmy Cooper appeared; astounded and delighted to find me there, thinking I’d somehow anticipated his arrival as I ran toward him shouting out his name. But I never saw Tom. Oh, occasionally there’d be a man down the platform, emerging through the steam, half lost in the sea of pale, thin faces and khaki uniforms, and yes, for a moment, I’d think, it’s him, it’s him. I’d catch my breath, forget what I was doing as I tried to follow that face. And then I’d lose it. It wasn’t him . . . it can’t have been him.
Then, one day, when I arrived to take over from Rose, she said, “You’ll never guess whom I’ve just been talking to, literally—just gone on the last train.”
“Who?” I asked, hanging up my coat on the inside of the door.
“Tom Cuthbert!”
I turned. “Really? Just now?”
“Yes . . . minutes ago, dear,” she replied. “He had a three-day pass, said he’d been down to Deyning.”
She must have seen something, sensed something. “You all right, dear?” she asked, reaching out and touching my arm.
“Yes, fine,” I said, raising my hand to my head. “Just a headache, that’s all.”
“Do you want Flavia to stay? Do your turn, dear? She can, you know . . . she’s already said that. She said she can stay until later.”
Flavia was hovering beside her, the two other girls standing further back.
“No, I’m fine. Truly, it’s nothing.”
Rose lit a cigarette, picked up her handbag.
“Right-o then, see you tomorrow, dear. Don’t expect it’ll be too busy tonight. Nothing much seems to be happening, but you never know.”
She turned to go.
“Rose!”
“Yes, darling?”
“Tom . . . Tom Cuthbert, how did he seem?”
“He looked exhausted, like the rest of them . . . said it was his first leave in ten months . . . said he’d slept for three whole days.”
“Did he . . . did he mention me?” I couldn’t help it; I had to ask.
She looked at me, perplexed for a moment. “No, darling, he didn’t. And do you know I completely forgot to tell him that you were helping here too, completely forgot. How silly of me.”
“Oh well,” I replied, smiling back at her, “not to worry. See you tomorrow then.”
I watched her go. Watched her and Flavia move off down the platform, their arms linked, their heads leaning inward, already deep in conversation. And I stood there completely still. Frozen on that spot. He was here . . . moments ago he was here. I closed my eyes, tried to imagine him standing where I now stood. I breathed in the dusty station air as though inhaling the echo of his energy, his breath. I took myself back through the preceding minutes. I’d been on my bicycle, cycling down the Strand . . . and then over Waterloo Bridge . . . and he’d been there. And I had that feeling once again: the queerest feeling of being out of kilter with the rest of the universe.
He was here.
We had missed each other by seconds.
I turned, went inside the hut, and began stacking the clean cups on to a shelf. Then I unstacked them, and put them into lines. I noticed one was chipped at its rim. A strange, perfectly formed chip, in the shape of a V. I stood there for some time, staring at that chipped cup, running my finger around and around its imperfect rim, until my flesh finally caught its sharp edge, and tore.
—
I was lying on my back, stretched out on the pale pink velvet chaise longue at the end of her bed, and she said, “You know, dear, you’ll ruin your hair, lying like that.”
We should have been at Flavia Astley’s twenty-first birthday party, or at least on our way. But by now it was after nine.
“Do you really want to go, Rose? I’m not sure I can be bothered . . . think I’d rather stay here.”
“Hmm. I think we should . . . don’t you? We’ll have missed the dinner by now, of course, but if we don’t turn up . . . and there’s my parents, your mother . . . we did say we’d follow on.”
An hour earlier, as the front door had slammed shut, and Rose’s parents—along with my mother—had headed off to the Astleys’ party, two streets away, I’d once again taken a needle to my arm, after I’d injected Rose. She only wanted a light dose, she said. She’d taken a sixth of a grain. I had a quarter, I think, or perhaps a little more.
I said to her, “Tell me about your thing with Tom again . . . Tom Cuthbert.”
I don’t know why, but some dark, perverse part of me, my brain, wanted to hear her speak about it. It was a scrap, of something, sustenance, and—no matter how unappetizing—I was famished, my heart desperate. And I thought just to say his name, hear another speak his name, might somehow satiate those splintered molecules of my being.
She lay on the bed next to me, her feet on the pillow, her head propped in her hands.
“Tom Cuthbert,” she said slowly, slurring the syllables, “is really . . . quite . . . delicious.”
I turned on to my side, looked up into her eyes: tiny black pinprick pupils swimming in a watery gray.
“You know, Rose, your eyes are the color of the sea.”
She looked down and smiled at me.
“I think I need to tell you something,” she said. She moved on the bed, pulled a pillow down and rested her chin upon it. “In fact . . . I need to tell you two things, darling.”
“Hmm, and so,” I said, watching her.
“Well, that night with Tom, the time I said I was with him . . . I sort of lied.”
I stared at her. “Sort of?”
“I didn’t mean to . . . he did kiss me . . . but nothing more. I made up the rest.”
I didn’t say anything. I wondered if I’d heard her correctly.
Did she just say she made it up?
After a minute or two I came up with one word to say to her: why?
“Oh . . . I don’t know,” she said, sounding quite angry and burying her face in the pillow.
Then she lifted her head. “You asked me, you egged me on, and I wanted to be able to tell you something . . . something more than the fact that he’d kissed me when he was drunk.” She paused, sighed, and then turned over, on to her back. “You don’t understand,” she said, staring up at the ceiling. “Nothing exciting ever happens to me. No one’s ever been in love with me . . . desired me.”
“But Henry said you were seeing him.”
“Yes, because that’s what I told him. I wanted Henry to think that . . . I wanted to make him jealous. Oh really, Clarissa, I’ve been in love with your brother for years . . . and I don’t think he’s even noticed me.”
“That’s not true. He really does rather like you, Rose, I know that.” I sat up, slowly. There was a quivering sort of glow about the room and I could feel my heart palpitating, my whole body trembling, as though everything were caught in the same vibration. I said, “Tell me the truth, Rose. What happened between you and Tom Cuthbert?”
She rolled on to her stomach, lifted her head and looked back at me. “Nothing, really, that’s just it. Oh, we kissed, but . . .”
“Yes?”
She frowned, began to fiddle with the lace on the pillow. “He was drunk, and it was dark . . . and he seemed to think I was you, dear. You see, he said your name; he kept on calling me Clarissa.”
Chapter Twenty
Charlie and I were married in October 1918, at the church around the corner from our home in Mayfair. He’d told me, and more than once, that it was all he was living for, to marry me. In the end, there seemed little point in waiting. Both Mama and the Boyds had said so. “The sooner you marry the better,” Mama had said. “It will give poor Charlie the motivation he needs to pull through and make a full recovery.”
In the weeks leading up to my wedding Mama had repeatedly told me that I was a little too thin, a little too pale. But I had no appetite for food, and no appetite for marriage. On the day, an hour or so before the service, and sitting on my bed with Rose, I pushed a ne
edle into my vein, and she said, “I’m really not sure it’s a good thing for you to be doing this at this moment in time . . .” Minutes later, she stood with me, holding back my veil, as I’d retched over the lavatory, and then she held me as I cried silently on her shoulder. It was the last time I ever took morphia.
Henry had managed to secure two days’ leave and came home to give me away, and after the wedding we had a small reception at Claridges. Our wedding photograph appeared in The Times, the Tatler and Country Life magazines: Charlie in his uniform, stern faced and minus his walking stick, and me, looking serene and wan in my gown of ivory duchesse satin and Mama’s long lace veil, staring back—unsmiling—at the camera with peculiarly dark eyes. Of course, it was not the wedding my mother had once hoped for, not the wedding she’d planned for me for so many years. There were simply too many missing for it to be a fulfillment of that dream. And there could be no honeymoon. The war was not yet over, and Charlie had to return to Craiglockhart to continue his convalescence and treatment. So we had only one night together, our wedding night, in the honeymoon suite at Claridges.
We were both nervous, and the combination of champagne and pills had made Charlie even more emotional. When I emerged from the dressing room, wearing the long silk negligee I’d selected at Selfridges only the week before, he smiled. “You’re so beautiful,” he said, and then burst into tears. He was sitting on the edge of the bed in his pajamas, and I immediately moved over to him, sat down next to him and held him in my arms. I wasn’t sure if it was wedding-night nerves or something else. But he told me then, through his tears, that I’d made him so happy; that our life together would be good. “We’re going to be so happy together, Clarissa,” he said, looking down at my hand, held in his.
We lay in each other’s arms for quite some time, talking about the future, where we might buy a house, how we’d like it to be. And we talked about the war, the likelihood of it ending in the coming months.
The Last Summer Page 18