Celia conjured up a smile for him, and stepped to the side of him, as she replied, ‘That sounds very sensible. I am looking for my sister.’
‘I come out to meet me mate. He’s bein’ discharged from a military hospital in London – they can’t do nothing more for him.’
Celia’s sympathy was immediately aroused. ‘Is he very badly hurt?’ she asked.
‘Well, they’ve patched him up, he says. His shoulder were smashed and he lost an ear as well. A bit scarred and his hearing’ll never be the same. And he can’t use what’s left of his right arm.’ The man’s expression was suddenly bleak, and Celia realised that he was much younger than he had first appeared to be. Eighteen or nineteen, she guessed.
‘And you?’ Her tone was gentle.
‘Me?’ He looked down at his crutches. ‘I’ll be throwing these away soon, I hope. They say I’ll limp always. But I’ll be able to walk, thanks be.’
‘Good. Where did you serve?’
‘Messpot, Ma’am.’
Mesopotamia. Another place of death, another name for sorrow nowadays. ‘I’m glad you got back here safely,’ Celia said with feeling.
‘Thank you, Ma’am.’
As the wounded man had forecast, the crowd was, indeed, thinning. When a large trolley of luggage was pushed away by a straining porter, a tall, elegant woman in black with a black veil over her face was suddenly revealed. She gestured imperiously to a porter, who came to her immediately.
Celia had not expected to have difficulty in recognising Edna. It had not occurred to her that almost every woman on the train would be dressed in mourning and that a number of them would be veiled. The gesture to the porter was so completely Edna, however, that she smiled again at the wounded soldier, said she hoped he would find his friend, and pushed her way purposefully through a loose group of children, her normal diffident good manners forgotten, in her fear of missing her sister.
‘Edna,’ she called and ran the last few steps towards her.
Edna said to the porter, ‘I have luggage in the van.’ Then, at the sound of Celia’s voice, she swung round and said, ‘Oh, Celia! Where’s Mother?’
Celia stopped. How do you kiss somebody with a thick veil over her face, when no attempt is made to lift it and greet you?
Edna settled it by saying, ‘We have to go down to the luggage van. I have three trunks.’ The porter turned his trolley and walked briskly towards the end of the train, followed by Edna. Nonplussed, Celia dodged between passengers going the other way, and followed her.
The porter was given Edna’s name and climbed into the van to search for her luggage. Edna turned back to Celia. ‘You didn’t answer me. Where’s Mother? Is she ill?’
Bewildered and hurt by her sister’s indifference, Celia straightened her hat, which had been knocked awry during her struggle in the crowd. Before she answered, she had to search for words.
‘Mother is not feeling very well, as you can imagine,’ she managed to say. ‘We are having difficulties about Father’s estate, and she had to go to the bank this morning. So I volunteered to meet you.’ She tried to smile at the veil.
‘I see. I would have imagined that a bereaved daughter was more important than a bank.’ She called up to the porter in the van. ‘Not that one – the green leather one behind it.’
Celia began to tremble. The fear of a panic attack, there on the station, almost brought one on. Edna was right, of course. She was more important – but the situation was hard to explain in one or two words on a busy station.
She took a big breath, while Edna scolded the porter for not lowering the expensive trunk down on to the platform more carefully. Then she said, ‘Well, things have been terribly complicated for Mother and me. I’ll explain it all when we are in the taxi.’ At the same time the train made a big chuffing sound, as it prepared to reverse itself away from the platform.
‘What did you say?’ Edna asked, her voice like a schoolmistress demanding a response from a mumbling child.
Celia made another effort and repeated her remark. A second and a third trunk were added to the first, with sharp admonitions to the porter to be careful. Then Edna ordered the long-suffering man to find them a taxi, which he did.
After he had heaved two trunks on to the luggage platform beside the taxi driver, the porter pushed the third trunk into the wide passenger section. Because Edna was fiddling for change in her handbag, he gave Edna’s hat box and small jewel case to Celia to hold.
Edna pressed some change into his hand. He touched his cap and said resignedly, ‘Thank you, Ma’am.’ Celia guessed that she had not tipped him enough. He then held the taxi door open so that the ladies could step in.
As the taxi jerked forward, Edna gave the driver her mother’s address. Celia closed her tired eyes. She hoped her Mother would not be hurt by Edna’s distant manner.
Edna settled herself in her seat and threw back her veil. Celia felt the tiny movement and opened her eyes. She half-turned to look at her sister.
She was shocked.
A gaunt, yellow visage had been revealed. The hazel eyes, though still quite beautiful, were sunken in black sockets, the chin was long and bony, like their father’s had been. The skin was yellow and wrinkled, like that of a much older person. Deep lines between the heavy black eyebrows added to the woman’s general air of irritability. As Celia stared at her, she sensed, however, a terrible exhaustion behind the irritability.
‘What are you staring at?’
‘You have changed quite a lot,’ Celia replied honestly. ‘I suppose I have, too.’
‘In the awful climate which I have endured for the last seven years, one expects to change.’ Edna drew off her gloves, to reveal hands equally yellow and shrivelled, though still slender and still graced by the magnificent engagement and wedding rings which Celia had, long ago, envied so much. ‘One gets fevers so often that they weaken one.’
Edna leaned back in the taxi seat and gazed out at the bustling, black-clad pedestrians in Lime Street, many of them holding black umbrellas to protect themselves from a sudden drizzle of rain. After the brightly clad, motley crowds of Salvador and Rio, they looked like participants in a huge funeral. Seeing them, Edna felt so filled with anguish that she did not want to face the remainder of her family.
It had been bad enough dealing with Papa and Mama Fellowes’ grief at the loss of their only son and their concern for her widowhood. As if she cared a hoot about Paul – a domineering man, a selfish man at best, a bully determined that she should bear more children.
That, she thought, had been a fight to the finish, because, after Rosemary, she was not going to go through the loss of another child; he had been furious and had taken a Brazilian mistress. She had wished him dead many a time, so that she could be free to be honestly and openly in love with his secretary and occasional translator, Vital Oliveira.
Dear patient Vital, a small man, a nobody but infinitely lovable. Her whole body longed for him.
Amongst the Fellowes family, her despondency and tears had been assumed, naturally, to be for Paul, not from having, perforce, to say goodbye to an almost equally distraught Vital. Both were sufficiently realistic to know that it was highly unlikely that they could ever arrange to be together again, and it had hurt – God, how it had hurt – to part, with that feeling of finality.
Paul was for the first part of their residency in Salvador often away from home, as a great dam was built to create power for electricity. Vital coped with his correspondence and records at the city end of his work. For Paul’s convenience, he lived in the same great house.
Without any knowledge of Portuguese, Edna had been left in Salvador to run their home as best she could. It was Vital who at first translated her orders to the servants, who saw that they did not cheat her, who found her a doctor to supervise her confinement. He brought her an English/Portuguese dictionary, for which she thanked him gratefully, and he recommended a teacher.
Rosemary died when her father was away from h
ome. It was Vital who, silently in the background of her distress, kept the house servants in order, found a gentle nun to sit with her and himself arranged the funeral.
They became the best of friends, and later, secret, desperate lovers. A scandal would have finished Vital and ruined Edna. Both realised that they were financially dependent upon Paul. And it was a miracle that they were not found out, Edna thought. There must have been suspicions, but intrigue was part of the society, and there were other love affairs which were politely overlooked. And, anyway, Paul and I were English Protestants; there was little understanding of us.
But old Conchita, the housekeeper already installed in the house when she arrived, had known. She had seen Paul strike his wife on one or two occasions, and slowly she had been moved to protect the young mother.
Edna smiled grimly. To protect her, Conchita could lie with incredibly fast ingenuity. Small and modest in her black dresses, she looked the epitome of integrity – but she resented Paul’s high-handed manner with his Portuguese staff – and Vital, who also suffered from this, was the son of a friend of hers. She had been a great help to the lovers.
The answer to Edna’s passionate prayers had come in Paul’s death on the way home. She had had no option but to come home with him. A single word out of place and Vital would have lost his job with the company and his excellent reputation as a reliable and gifted employee.
Be careful what you pray for – prayers are not always answered in the way you imagine they will be, her nanny had always cautioned her.
How right Nanny had been. She was free, but it was unlikely that she and Vital would ever meet again.
Unaware of the turmoil in the mind of her sister, Celia had expected to deal with tears and hopelessness, and anxious questions about her mother’s mourning. She had no idea what to say to this wizened shell of a woman. As they edged their way up the hill towards West Derby, however, she felt she should say something about Paul.
‘Both Mother and I were so sorry to hear about Paul’s sudden passing. We both feel dreadful that you should have lost him. Mother sends her fond love to you.’ She paused, and then added, ‘And you have my love and sympathy, too.’ The last words seemed stiff and formal to her, but she did not know what else to say.
Edna’s barely visible lips tightened. ‘Thank you,’ she said equally formally. ‘It was sudden – quite a shock.’ She stared woodenly ahead of her. She had managed to contain her feelings in Southampton while the Port Authorities, all male, had discussed over her head her isolation as an influenza contact. She had, later, done her best to comfort Paul’s parents.
At Lime Street, she had hoped to be met and comforted by her own mother, even if Louise did not know the exact reason for her grief. Instead, she was face to face with her younger sister, and pride would not permit her to give way in front of her.
‘Was it really Spanish flu?’ asked Celia.
‘The ship’s doctor said it was. All the passengers on the liner were terrified that they would get it. I was quarantined in my cabin, and none of them would come near me. The Health Authorities in Southampton would not let us dock until all the passengers had been examined. They wanted to send me to an isolation hospital for a few days.’
‘How awful! Did anyone get it?’ Celia began to relax.
‘Not to my knowledge. I suppose most of the world has already been exposed to it. I told them that. Finally, I asked them to send for my father-in-law – and he came in his car to fetch me. He promised that he would call the family physician before allowing me to mix with anyone – so they let me go.’ Edna’s voice expressed considerable satisfaction at her winning of the battle with the Health Authorities, and Celia was suitably impressed.
‘Why Paul, I wonder?’
‘Oh, Paul? He met all kinds of people in his work and socially. He could have caught it anywhere. In Salvador people get a fever and die and nobody knows what it was that took them. Only something like cholera is quickly identified.’
It seemed a step forward to Celia that she was managing to get Edna to talk to her. ‘Why didn’t you come home from such an unhealthy place?’ she inquired.
Edna considered her answer to this query, before slowly replying, ‘Well, I did not want to come home alone. Paul was general manager of the whole project, as you know – and my father-in-law is a party in the consortium that did the development. Paul felt he must see the work to an end; and he did finish it to schedule.’ Edna absently twiddled her rings round her finger. ‘If we had come home before the war ended, he would probably have been conscripted, in spite of his age. And then he would have lost his life, anyway.’ She bit her lips, as she condemned herself as a great liar.
‘He might have done,’ agreed Celia soberly, and then she added, ‘Dozens of people died, too, in Liverpool from the flu – and they were often the remaining young people in a family. It was tragic.’
‘No doubt.’ Edna sounded remote, uninterested.
Celia felt shocked at such an indifferent reply, and then reminded herself, more charitably, that Edna would be as wrapped up in her own grief as their mother was.
It seems that only I don’t have that privilege, she considered with pain; I mustn’t weep for Tom or George or express the terror I feel at Father’s death; I have to keep on going – but going where?
It’s like walking into a fog.
She felt her sister sigh, and she glanced at her. On the yellowed cheek lay a solitary tear. Poor Edna! Celia took one of her hands in her own, and was surprised when Edna clasped her hand tightly for the rest of the journey.
Chapter Nineteen
For most of the taxi ride through the crowded streets of Liverpool, they sat silently side by side. The thin yellow hand clutching Celia’s told her clearly that Edna was more upset than she appeared, but, as they approached West Derby, Celia felt that she must warn her sister that she was not alone in suffering grief.
‘Mama is still dreadfully upset,’ she began. ‘It is barely a week since Papa passed away, you know.’ She wanted to cry out, be gentle with both of us – please. We are suffering like you are. But she was nonplussed by her sister’s lack of any kindly demonstration of feeling towards herself, so she said no more.
Did Edna care twopence about her father’s death, she puzzled? She had, after all, been separated from her family for seven years, and had been in boarding school before that. Had she, perhaps, forgotten that it was her sister who was sitting beside her, someone to whom she should feel free to express her sorrow for the loss of both father and husband?
In response to Celia’s warning, Edna said impatiently, ‘Yes, I know. Papa Fellowes told me. And Mother wrote to me at Southampton.’ Edna stared out of the taxi window. ‘It is difficult for both of us.’ That it might be difficult for Celia still did not seem to occur to her, for her next remark was, ‘Papa was a very trying man.’
Celia was shaken that her father’s favourite daughter should make such a shocking remark, especially when he was dead; it was certainly not the thing to criticise the dead. From Celia’s point of view, Papa had provided everything for Edna, good clothes, education, a fine wedding and a dowry – had even introduced her husband to her. What more could he have done? She felt resentfully that she herself would have been grateful if he had done any one of these things for her. ‘Whatever do you mean?’ she asked.
Edna’s answer shocked Celia even more. Her sister said, ‘I wondered if she was thankful to be widowed. A lot of women are. And Mother had to manage Father very carefully.’
‘Oh, no, Edna! Mama is quite broken-hearted. And even more so because she is going to lose her home.’
‘What?’ Edna turned so quickly towards Celia that she hit her knees on the trunk which had been heaved into the back of the taxi.
With her right hand, Celia was steadying on her lap Edna’s hat box and jewel case, as well as her own heavy handbag. At the explosive query, she shot a startled glance over the pile at her sister. ‘Didn’t Mama tell you?’ she qu
avered.
‘No.’
In a trembling voice, as if her late father’s financial position were her fault, Celia explained as best she could.
Edna sniffed. ‘Nonsense. I don’t believe it. Cousin Albert has made a mistake.’
Not wishing to quarrel in front of a taxi driver, Celia muttered, ‘We will talk about it when we get in. I am sure Mama will explain it to you.’
‘Indeed, we must talk about it. I have come up here in the expectation of being welcomed home!’
‘Well, of course you are welcome. Where else would you go?’ Celia responded indignantly. At the same time she wondered what Edna would think of the cottage, and she shuddered.
At the thought that she might have to share the cottage with Edna, as well as with her very critical mother, she felt suddenly sick.
During her long day, she had begun to think of the little house as being the beginning of a more open life for herself, despite the work it represented. She felt that everybody she had met that day had been very nice to her and had treated her as a person in her own right. Putting the cottage in order was proving to be a refreshing experience.
As the taxi drew up, Dorothy opened the front door. Her mother, looking exactly like Queen Victoria in her widowhood, came out on to the top step, and looked down at them, with the same woebegone expression as Queen Victoria exhibited in some of her photographs.
Edna left Celia to deal with the taxi driver and the luggage and ran across the pavement and up the wide, gracious steps. Her mother held out her arms to her and she was embraced. They turned and went inside.
By the time Dorothy, Winnie and Ethel had helped the taxi driver to get the heavy trunks up the steps and into the hall, Celia had taken the boxes that had been on her lap upstairs to Edna’s bedroom. She then came down to pay the driver and tip him. She knew from her father that a man who tipped the proper amount received service from the lower classes – woe betide him if he tipped too little. The driver seemed pleased by the amount she gave him, touched his cap to her and went slowly down the steps. She shut the door after him, and, with the other women, surveyed the luggage.
Mourning Doves Page 13