by Hilary McKay
“Good Lord, Miss Vane!” exclaimed Clarry’s father indignantly, as soon as Mr. King drove away. “The rag-and-bone man!”
“He is actually a very knowledgeable art and antiques dealer,” said Miss Vane proudly, “who prefers to source his own stock.”
“He sourced my piano,” said Clarry’s father, who never ever forgot or forgave.
“It was entirely wasted and being ruined by damp,” replied Miss Vane with spirit.
“You’ve changed your tune!”
“Yes, I have, Mr. Penrose,” agreed Miss Vane. “I am happy to say I have!”
Clarry’s father was very much put out. In the past he had never bothered to treat Miss Vane much more considerately than he had Clarry, but at the same time, the option that it might prove useful to marry her and that she would be grateful if he did had always been at the back of his mind. Now he was suddenly alarmed and he stood dithering in the street, half inclined to ask her now and secure her before she did anything rash, half inclined to rudeness.
Rudeness won.
“You want to make sure he doesn’t source you, Miss Vane!” he snapped, and to his dismay she laughed happily, said, “Oh, thank you, Mr. Penrose!” smelled her cowslips, and tossed her head.
“That silly woman Vane is scheming to marry the rag-and-bone man!” he told his family at dinner that night.
“Oh, good,” exclaimed Clarry. “Violet and I can be bridesmaids!”
“I told you years ago that you should snap her up,” Clarry’s grandmother said calmly. “As usual you ignored me, and as always, I was correct. Instead you let this house get into a dreadful state, and left it to me to put right!”
“It was perfectly satisfactory,” said Clarry’s father grumpily.
“It was a disgrace,” said Clarry’s grandmother. She had always been a woman who liked her own way and as soon as she had arrived, she had set about getting it. She couldn’t bear cold rooms, and she detested damp beds, and she didn’t like to see the wallpaper peeling off the walls in the corners. She also liked three hot meals a day, flowers in the windows, clean rugs, and polished floors.
“You can’t find people to scrub for love nor money these days,” Mrs. Morgan told her, but Grandmother had found them. Within a week of her arrival she had the rooms turned out, all the chimneys swept, the paintwork washed, and the paper glued back up.
“I have ordered coal and wood and kindling and opened an account at the general store,” she told Clarry’s father, who was so torn between temper and sulking that he didn’t know what to say. “Also Mrs. Morgan’s neighbor’s niece is coming in for two hours every morning to help with the fires and two hours every evening to help with the supper, and in between I will cope.”
“Er,” he said, sneezing at the smell of polish and glancing ungratefully at the daffodils glowing in the window. “As long as I’m not expected to pay for all this, I suppose I will have to agree.”
“Of course you’re expected to pay for it! What on earth is the matter with you?” demanded his mother, and so he said he had to go out and then fell over Miss Fairfax on the doorstep.
“I’ve come to see what’s going on with Clarry,” said Miss Fairfax.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Clarry’s father, and almost ran away.
Miss Fairfax did not waste time on idle gossip. It had not gone unnoticed at school that their Dark Horse had vanished, and she was determined to find out more.
“Quite a number of people went out of their way to help your granddaughter,” she told Clarry’s grandmother severely, “and naturally they have been disappointed to find that they were wasting their time.”
“I did write to school!” said Clarry, who had come into the room at the sound of her voice. “I’m very sorry, Miss Fairfax. I had to find out what had happened to my cousin, you see.”
Miss Fairfax did not seem to see. Nor was she much moved when she heard the tale of the loss of Rupert, his rediscovery in France, and how at last he had been brought back home.
“Quite enterprising,” she said. “How fortunate he has been. And now he is recovering?”
“He’s making wonderful progress,” Clarry’s grandmother told her. “Luckily he is quite near to us so I have been able to see him often, and every day Clarry visits on her bicycle.”
“Every day?” asked Miss Fairfax, turning to look at Clarry. “Is that really necessary? Is it not, now he is so well, rather a fuss?”
At this terrible word Clarry blushed red with shame and could no longer look at Miss Fairfax.
Peter was even more direct, and he did it in front of Rupert, now promoted to crutches and encouraged to try them outside.
“You’ve got too comfortable with Grandmother fussing over you,” he said to Clarry. “And Rupert here, held captive, so you can have fun playing nurses.”
“Shut up, Pete!” snapped Rupert, who had reached the getting-well stage of feeling like a tiger constantly prodded with a stick.
“No, I won’t,” said Peter. “Clarry was doing all right, except her Greek was rubbish and she could have worked on that. Now you’ve appeared she’s let it all go. You’re not going to stay here forever, and neither will Grandmother. So what will she do? Run around skivvying after our father while she waits for someone to marry her?”
“No, I WON’T!” snapped Clarry, with flaming cheeks, but that night she got out her school uniform and gazed at it. The mushroom hat looked less becoming than ever, but she found herself opening the books.
Rupert was improving every day. One final operation had removed the last of the shrapnel from his leg, and he hardly had a headache anymore. The last of the bandages could come off any day. His temper had improved since they started him on exercises. He could walk with just a stick.
“I shall take him down to Cornwall for some proper sea air,” his grandmother announced, but when Rupert heard this proposal he grinned.
“I’m not going to live with my granny!” he said.
“What, then?” asked Clarry. “You’d hate it with Father and me.”
“Well,” said Rupert, “there are other places. I promised old Irish I’d go and see his family.”
“He died, didn’t he?”
Rupert’s face closed up, the way it did when the war was mentioned. He could not bear it. All the time he’d been ill he had never said a word about what had happened. However, between things the hospital in France had told her, and letters that had arrived when it was heard Rupert had been found, Clarry and her grandmother knew most of it. He was wild the night before, someone had written, light-headed, singing Irish ballads, talking nonsense, burning with fever. He should have been sent back, but we were going over into an early morning attack. We drank a bit, wrote letters home, everyone was jittery. We marched to the front and tried to get some sleep in the couple of hours before dawn.
That morning had come the first blue sky they had seen for weeks, the rain had vanished, and so had Rupert. We know now, wrote the friend, that he must have pushed aside the chap on sentry duty. He probably caught him dozing. Of course, nothing was reported.
“Of course not,” said Clarry. The penalty for sleeping on sentry duty was death by firing squad. Even her grandmother knew that.
We went over the top ourselves minutes later, the letter had continued. And after that everything was hell.
And so Rupert’s escape had gone unrecorded. As had his fevered race across the battlefields of Passchendaele, shedding everything that might have identified him, pushing through the wires and winding paths and bogs, ending not in a leap to green and blue sparkling water, but in a roar of shellfire and a blast that lifted him into a crater where he stayed for three days, unconscious in the good times, singing in the bad, until someone crawled out and found him and managed to drag him back into the chaos of the trenches where there was no one left who knew his name.
He’d been so great for so long, he’d stuck out so much, he didn’t deserve it to end like that, his friend had writt
en.
No one deserves any of it, Clarry had written back.
Now Rupert was watching her face, and she knew, with ice-cold fear, that he was about to tell her something awful.
“Darling Clarry . . .”
“Don’t call me darling!”
“Haven’t I always called you darling?”
“Just say it, Rupert.”
“After Ireland, as soon as they’ll let me . . .”
“No!”
“Yes, I’ve got to. I’m going back.”
“Who have you told?” whispered Clarry at last.
“No one,” said Rupert. “I’m just telling you.”
Forty-Seven
AFTER RUPERT WENT TO IRELAND, they didn’t see him again. He passed his medical in August; he wrote and told them that. Simon, Clarry’s gentle giraffe, sent a message to say, “Tell him not to come.”
But they couldn’t.
Vanessa raged, “How could he do that to Clarry?”
“He could at least have told us himself,” said his grandmother bitterly. She was more distressed than Clarry had ever seen her before.
“The coward,” said Clarry’s father.
Clarry said nothing. She had said it all to Rupert the day that he told her, and it had made no difference, except that they had parted angrily, hurt and hurting, instead of parting friends. Peter said nothing because he sort of understood, although he couldn’t have listed the reasons as clearly as Rupert had.
Rupert’s reasons, spoken aloud to no one, were these:
One: Clarry. He could still hear Peter’s bitter comments: “Clarry was doing all right. . . . Now you’ve appeared she’s let it all go.” And Peter was telling the truth. Clarry had a chance to escape. He couldn’t risk her losing it. Two: That silly kid, Simon Bonnington, who never should have been there, who wouldn’t have been, if it weren’t for him. But if Clarry had already had her place at Oxford, if Simon had been safe at home, Rupert knew that he would still go back. He couldn’t see that he had any choice. His third reason, the one that drove him hardest, was this: It wasn’t finished.
Rupert knew that he couldn’t rest until it was finished. He had to go. He’d left friends there.
When Rupert left them, Clarry’s grandmother went back to Cornwall. Clarry could have gone with her, but she didn’t. She got out her books and the mushroom hat and worked and worked and worked, driven at first by a grim, hungry anguish that waited to clutch every time she paused to think. Even after the pain faded to just a gnawing presence she still went on.
Her books saved her. Miss Fairfax regarded her Dark Horse with pride. “She’s come through,” she said. “She’ll make it now. She’s on the final stretch.”
The war was also on its final stretch, a great last peak of suffering for everyone involved. The smile of the western front had twisted and become jagged-toothed in places, but it was still as insatiable as ever. August passed, and September, and then in early October, just when they could bear no more, another telegram came.
Forty-Eight
GIRAFFES WERE NEVER DESIGNED FOR trench warfare. Simon the Bony One died at the western front, on the last day of September 1918. A sniper shot him, straight through the head. He wouldn’t have known a thing, wrote his commanding officer wearily, although, actually, at that final moment, a great understanding had blown through the elated Bony One. He had died with such a certainty of joy and freedom that if he could he would have shouted out to those who loved him, “Hey! It’s going to be all right!”
But of course, they knew nothing about that.
Vanessa couldn’t bear it. She ran from her pain, not to Clarry or her family, but to Peter in Oxford, who had understood Simon first.
“It’s not fair, it’s not fair,” she sobbed in Peter’s arms. “Say something, don’t just stand there!”
“It’s not fair,” said Peter.
“I can’t bear it any longer! I’ve borne it right from the beginning, and I can’t bear it anymore. Simon never should have been there. Why did he have to go? Bloody Rupert,” wailed Vanessa, answering herself. “Bloody Rupert, that’s why! Oh, why did he have to love Rupert?”
“He always did,” said Peter. “Right from the beginning.”
“I know, I know, he told me,” sobbed Vanessa, weary with tears. “And now look what’s happened because of it. We’ve got to manage without him. For ages and ages. For the rest of our lives. For always, and I can’t. I can’t be bothered.”
In spite of everything, Peter grinned at that.
“Stop laughing! I’ve got to go soon. They only gave me eight hours free. Eight hours, and Simon dead. I’ve got to go back and do the night shift and not fuss and be cheerful. Do I smell of carbolic?”
“Yes, very strongly, but I’m used to it. I suppose you could go to your family for a bit.”
“No, thank you! They’d cling and weep. Cling and weep and I’d never escape again. I can’t live there anymore. When this horrible war is over I’m going to marry the first man who asks me and live happily ever after. Or as close as I can manage. I’ll give it a damn good try.”
“Oh,” said Peter glumly, not liking this plan, and then a very good idea struck him and he asked, “Vanessa, will you marry me?”
“Yes, of course I will, you idiot,” said Vanessa. “I thought you’d never ask!”
Forty-Nine
AND SO THEY REELED THROUGH October, and in November the war ended, and Vanessa, hearing rumors of what was coming, borrowed a motorbike and rode through the night to be with her family at the cottage on Armistice Day. Simon had missed it by less than two months, which was very hard to bear, and for an hour or two they didn’t try bearing it at all. They had reached the cup-of-tea-and-moping up stage when Clarry arrived on Peter’s bicycle, saying, “Oh, Vanessa! I didn’t know you’d be here! I just came to give them a hug. How are they?”
“Heroes,” said Vanessa, who had met her on the doorstep. “But it’s been very damp. You were wonderful to come, Clarry, but don’t go in just yet. It will start them off again.”
“I brought some sugar for Lucy,” said Clarry, so they went across the field to find her. Lucy took the sugar ungratefully, looking over Clarry’s shoulder, and they both knew she was searching for Simon.
“Oh, BLAST!” said Vanessa. “Oh, come on, Clarry! There’s no one about for a million miles. Let’s lie on the grass and howl!”
“Yes, all right, good idea,” said Clarry, but she didn’t howl, she lay on her front with her fists in her eyes and presently she said, “Wouldn’t it have been lovely if there hadn’t been any war? And we were all . . .”
Then she broke off, and didn’t say any more.
The November day became quiet again. Under the hedge, a blackbird turned over dead leaves like someone flicking through a book to find the illustrations. The grass was damp but overhead the sky was a thin crystal blue. At last Vanessa sighed and said, “The moment has passed. It seems that I can only howl spontaneously. Do you think there are spiders out here?”
“What? Oh, probably hundreds.”
“I can’t lie on spiders. I’m fetching the hearthrug.”
“Don’t, it’ll worry your parents. And spoil the smell of the grass.”
“Oh, all right,” said Vanessa. “I can’t really be bothered anyway. Grass is such an old-fashioned smell! Did they ever smell grass in France?”
“Yes, yes, of course they did.” Clarry sat up and took her friend’s cold hand, and held it warm in her own. “Often, and it must have reminded them of home. It is old-fashioned, think how far back it goes. Shakespeare smelled it, flat on his face in the Avon meadows! Arthur, before he pulled his sword from that stone, under the oaks and beeches of the ancient forest . . .”
“Go on, go on!” said Vanessa, gripping her hand.
“The Romans at the end of a day on their Roman roads, setting up camp. Flatbread and cheese for supper, and raisins and onions.”
“Lovely.”
“The people who
raised the henge stones, collapsed, exhausted, staring at what they’d done and wondering if it would last.”
“Hoping the woolly mammoths wouldn’t knock it over,” said Vanessa, “or the dinosaurs. Was there grass in dinosaur days?”
“Not until the Cretaceous,” said Clarry, so seriously that Vanessa really did howl a bit, with laughter, not tears. Then they checked each other’s faces and went to the cottage, and were very brave and cheerful. Later, with Clarry’s bicycle hanging out of the back, they all drove into town where they found bonfires and singing crowds and the pubs full to overflowing.
Vanessa and Clarry leaned wearily on each other and said, “I suppose we should feel wonderful,” but mostly they felt empty.
The years passed.
They heard nothing from Rupert, who as soon as he was released from active service went straight to India to track down the parents who had abandoned him at age three. And when he found them, he realized he should never have bothered; but India was different. He traveled farther and farther north, losing himself in the otherness of the world that he found there.
Clarry went to Oxford, which she loved more even than Miss Fairfax had guessed that she would. She got her MA and her grandmother came proudly to see her graduation but her father, when invited, said he’d really rather not.
The spare key to the cricket pavilion eventually found its way back to England, along with a few other bits and pieces. It absolutely baffled Simon’s mother, who sat rocking and gazing at it for hours some days, until Peter happened to visit, glimpsed it in her hands, and exclaimed, “I never thought I’d see that again!”