The telegram to say Jack was “missing” arrived the day after Cecily found out—had it confirmed—that she was expecting the first of their “unruly horde.” She had already posted a letter to her husband, saying:
My darling man, I have news! Are you sitting down? I imagine that you are. I imagine you are lying on your horrid uncomfortable bunk as you read this. But even so, brace yourself, darling . . . you are to be a father! Yes, that’s right, YOU ARE TO BE A FATHER! This means that you really do have to stay safe and come back to me . . .
Cecily did not cry, she did not shout. She sat down. And she stayed very still and very silent for some time, holding on to that telegram, pondering that word: missing. Missing was not dead, she reasoned; missing was inconclusive. And Jack had promised. It took her a while to realize that the strange whimpering sound, the sound of an injured animal, was coming from within her and not from outside.
Hours later, she walked out from her cottage toward the village, toward Temple Hill and Cora. It was early autumn, the sky was clear and cloudless, the hedgerows still green, and purple with blackberries. But she saw none of the day. She walked in a daze along the gritted road, past the whitewashed cottages and tile-hung shops of the village, across the stepping-stones of the ford, and up the rabbit-hole tunnel toward the house. Not dead, not dead . . . missing, not dead . . . From time to time she placed her hand upon her stomach and thought of the life within her. And in her head she heard his voice: I promise . . . never.
She kept her gaze steady as she passed her former home, determined not to look at the gate, lest something of him—and her—was still there, an impression caught in the ether and only visible once lost. But at the very top of the track, as she emerged from the shadows, the sound of a motorcycle’s acceleration on the other side of the valley made her stop and look up. She followed its sound along the winding lane toward the village, turned and stared back down the track, willing him to appear, anticipating the sight of him coming up the hillside toward her, to explain. She thought she could hear the machine, spluttering, stumbling through the ford and out the other side. But no one and nothing appeared at the bottom of the track, and as the sound of the engine slowly faded, she too moved on.
Cora was in her usual place, usual chair, leaning forward and peering through her old lorgnette at the newspaper laid out on the card table in front of her.
“Aha!” she said, glancing up as Cecily entered the room. But her smile quickly fell as she took in Cecily’s expression. And before Cecily could speak, she whispered the name as a question. “Jack?”
Cecily nodded. “Missing.”
Cora closed her eyes.
If there was a specific time, a moment Cecily could identify as the start of Cora’s mental collapse, when she had finally given in, given up, surrendered her mind, her sanity, that was it. The prospect of his loss—more loss—was simply too much.
As though shutting out reality, trying to deny that moment, Cora kept her eyes closed. But even through sealed eyelids tears escaped. And Cecily, unsure and impotent, powerless to alter facts and details, unable to offer hope, simply stood and watched. Then, with her eyes still closed and seemingly unable to speak, Cora nodded. As though it were news she had been waiting for. When she finally opened her eyes, she said, “We shan’t give up hope. We must wait for him. He’ll find his way back to us. He’ll find his way home.”
The newspapers were quick to include Jack’s name in the Roll of Honor. Captain J. G. Staunton, RFC, was listed under “Missing,” above the column titled “Previously Reported Missing, Now Reported Killed,” and another, “Previously Reported Missing, Now Reported Prisoners of War.” And the London Gazette kindly included him in their “List of Dead.”
Jack had been missing for seven months by the time the letter arrived from the War Office. It enclosed a copy of the Geneva Red Cross “List of Dead,” and read: “Staunton J. G., RFC, seen to fall in an air fight near Bixschoote . . . In view of the lapse of time, this report will be accepted for official purposes as evidence of death.” Ten days later, Cecily gave birth to their son.
As the taxicab turned onto Piccadilly, Cecily glanced at her wristwatch and thought of her boy. He was staying for a few days with her mother and Rosetta, whom he adored, and who idolized him. Rosetta had looked after him as a baby so that Cecily could continue to teach at the school. And her new charge had given her a new lease of life. Each day and in all weathers a bonneted Rosetta had pushed the perambulator proudly through the village, disappearing into the lanes, singing songs to little Jack. One of his first words had been “Etta,” which Rosetta had now officially adopted as her name.
Even then, during those very first days and months of her son’s life, Cecily had spoken to him about his father, telling him how brave and fearless he was. And as her son grew bigger, she would hold him on her hip, pointing to the man in the framed wedding photograph on the mantelshelf and repeating the word Daddy, until one day he finally said it as well: “Dada!” And Cecily wept.
She had taken her son to visit his great-grandmother, but by that time Cora had been distracted at best, and entirely absent at worst. There were glimmers, the odd moment when she seemed to know, appeared to realize that the baby in front of her was in fact Jack’s son, her great-grandson. But there had also been occasions when she had stared at the baby in Cecily’s arms, frowning, and asked Cecily to whom the child belonged. Once, possibly prompted by confusion over the name Jack, and after Cecily had once again tried to explain that Little Jack was Jack’s son, she had asked her, “Is it my baby?”
It was sad and bizarre and comical. And Cecily had had to remind herself how Cora might think such a thing. Lost in time, she had grasped the name, the name of a former husband with whom she had had her babies.
“No, dear, he’s not your baby. He’s my baby,” she replied, looking at the old lady through tear-filled eyes.
How Walter had laughed when she told him of that. He said, “How can a woman of eighty odd think she has a baby?”
“Because she doesn’t and can’t let herself see the here and now. Inside her mind she’s still young, forever young. She’s gone back in time.”
Walter Gamben had been returned from the killing fields of France invalided, minus a leg, in the spring of 1918. Cecily had visited him at the military hospital at Winchester. Months later, after he had been discharged and returned home to Bramley, he had asked her to marry him. It was Armistice Day, the whole village half-deaf and dizzy from the sound of the church bells, everyone riding on a wave of euphoria, drunk on the idea of peace and the future. How many marriage proposals must there have been that day, Cecily later thought.
She had told Walter that she could not marry him, that she was still in love with her husband, still in love with Jack. She had tried to explain to him that some small part of her refused to believe that Jack was not coming back. For he had promised her and she could not give up on that promise. Not yet. Walter said he understood, and that he’d wait. “Even if I have to wait ten years,” he said, smiling at her with such optimism, such hope. Then he said, “You know, I sometimes feel guilty . . . guilty that my happiness has been brought about by another’s misfortune. For had Jack been here you wouldn’t be with me now.” Cecily told him he was wrong, told him she would still have been there for him; “the whatifs could go on and on—what if I’d never met Jack, what if there had never been a war—but we’re all part of each other’s lives, each other’s story, and always will be.”
But it was the unwritten story, the one about herself and Jack, that she most often returned to, and dreamed of: the what if he is alive, what if he comes back to me. She had already spent what seemed like a lifetime imagining that story. A story bound up in missing faces and places, and journeys yet to be taken. It was the fantasy of youth and idle optimism, pulled forward in time and springing back like elastic. Nothing could change the past; it had happened, it had gone, b
ut what if . . . what if . . . what if . . .
But the war had ended and Jack had not returned. He had not come back to her. He had not been able to keep his promise. And as life took on a new normality, hope faded and loneliness set in. Each evening, alone in her bed, Cecily returned to her musings, to Jack, and their unspent future . . .
They would have been happy together, surely, blissfully happy and in love. They would have gone on to have more children, that “unruly horde” they had spoken of. And they would have lived in Bramley, possibly at Temple Hill. After all, it was the perfect house for a large family. There would have been a swing in the garden, a slide, bicycles lying about the place; and noise, oh, so much noise. She would glance up from the manuscript in front of her, look out through the window and see them, see him—her husband, the father of her children. And he would sense her gaze, turn to her and smile.
How it could have been, how it should have been, if only . . .
It had been impossible for Cecily to let go of that dream, and of him, Jack. It sustained her, kept her warm, offered her sanctuary and became her escape. It was the luxury in her life, that imagining, that what-if. And she realized she could write it any way she wished, change and alter it at whim; introduce new situations, new characters, test Jack’s love for her and test her own for him. And thus, night after night, she rewrote history. There was no declaration of war and Jack never fell from the sky. No one aged or died, and time simply moved back and forth, like waves upon a shore. Days were repeated, rerun with amendments and with added color and detail. And she returned again and again to that moment when the world had spun on its axis and everything around them—and beyond them—had seemed possible and within reach.
Cora had once said to her, “We all have a plan . . . a plan of how our lives will be, but it is never what happens because we’re all mortal, all fallible. And because human beings make mistakes—follow others’ mistakes. We are easily led from our path. But we can find our way back, eventually, if we are able to remember what it is we first wished for.”
On Armistice Day, after she had returned home from the celebrations, after Walter’s proposal, Cecily sat up until dawn reading through her old journals. Thinking of her son, his future, she deliberated on destroying the blue cloth-covered books. So much had been promised, so much had been hoped, and she had no wish for him to one day read and feel that loss. Then she picked up her pen and wrote:
It is that morning of once before now, that morning I first saw you . . . and I feel the heat. I see lambent ferns and waist-high nettles . . . a demoiselle butterfly skimming the pond. I see dragonflies, minnows and jam jars, yellow gorse and purple heather, and poppies, scarlet and black. I see fox-colored tiles and tall chimneys, and lines of silver on blue. And you say, we have our whole lives ahead of us. Our whole lives, you say, looking back at me.
Now it is early evening. The sun has slipped beneath the trees. I move through the last remnants of slanting sun upon grass, golden, parched and dry, and I hear you whispering: when this whole rotten business is over . . . when this whole rotten business is over, you say. And my heart burns but I am still. I can wait. I can wait.
The sun slips further, I hear the first owl, and I feel the edge of summer.
The baby in my arms laughs as I swing him through that fading twilight, round and round, and round again. And when I stop and look up I see you standing by the hedge once more in your cricket whites, smiling back at me, at us.
Yes, it was a stunning thought, my darling. You were my stunning thought, burning and poignant and blurring my mind.
Cecily glanced up at the lights of Piccadilly. That dark time had gone. It was over. The only thing that mattered now was the man waiting for her in the bar of the Café Royal. And their future together.
“Anywhere here is fine,” she said to the cabdriver, pulling her wallet from her bag.
Chapter Twenty-four
The letter lay unopened on the shelf of the mantelpiece. Sylvia sat with Cecily’s manuscript scattered about her.
She had looked through it, read a number of chapters. But it was appalling—and quite insensitive—she thought, for Cecily to have brought it to her. Then again, the girl had always been presumptuous. Had overstepped the mark years ago. And Cora was naive and silly to have trusted her so. As for the manuscript, it was, as far as Sylvia could make out, simply the work of a rather vivid imagination, and not an accurate account of Cora’s life at all. Loosely based, Cecily had said. Well, it was certainly founded on delusions, presumably Cora’s. What on earth had she told Cecily? And what could she, Sylvia, say to Cecily about it?
It was curious to Sylvia that Cecily had been unable to remember the people at the farm. When Sylvia said, “And what about that nice young family at Meadow Farm?” Cecily had stared back at her blankly. “The Abels, I think they were called,” Sylvia had added. No, Cecily shook her head. “They can’t have been there for very long,” she said. “It’s been with the Stephenson family since before the war.”
Of course Sylvia was testing Cecily to see what she knew. When Cecily went on to talk of Cora’s confused ramblings, and the mention of “someone called Uncle John,” it was obvious to Sylvia that she had never been told the name, the full name. Thus, she had never made any connection with the people at the farm. Uncle John was simply Uncle John: a monster, deprived of identity, and now confined to fiction. Sylvia had made sure of that. And she had done so out of loyalty and love, nothing more.
In truth, Cora had never consciously told Sylvia the full name either; certainly not then, not that summer. But Sylvia had a long memory, there had been little to cloud it. And even during Cora’s fever, at the height of her delirium, when she repeated the name out loud, Sylvia already knew it. She knew John Abel and the Uncle John mentioned in Rome all those years ago to be one and the same.
When Sylvia visited the farm, she had done so in order to establish whether one John Abel was related to the other John Abel. It seemed almost too much to hope that this would be the case, that a young farmer would be able to furnish her with those missing pieces of a story which had fascinated her for the best part of fifty years. And yet there were too many coincidences for there not to be a link, for she had heard the rector inform Cora that the family came from Suffolk.
Sylvia had duly told the young man that she heard he hailed from Suffolk, and then lied, telling him that her parents, too, came from that county, the Woodbridge area, and that they had spoken of a John Abel, one who had married a woman by the name of Frances . . . a Frances who had gone to live overseas? The young farmer clearly knew something of the story, for he had nodded and, glancing at his wife—smiling knowingly, Sylvia thought—he said yes, that would be his great-uncle John. Then he turned to Sylvia. “You’re not from the Mothers’ Union, are you?”
Sylvia shook her head.
“Parish council?”
“No. I’m simply staying in the village for a while and I . . . I heard the rector mention—”
“Ah! That old busybody, I might have known.”
“John!”
“We came here to get away from Nosey Parkers,” he said, staring at Sylvia.
“John!” his wife said again.
“I do beg your pardon,” said Sylvia, turning away, about to head back to the village.
Then he began, “I never knew him, but I know enough about him . . .”
He had been a shoemaker, he said, like his father before him. “It was the family trade, see, then.” And yes, she was correct, his namesake had married a woman named Frances, or Fanny, as she was known, the daughter of a local tin man. They had moved away from Woodbridge to the East End of London. But things had gone wrong there, for his great-uncle’s wife had “up-ed and off-ed,” left her husband and disappeared without trace. “It were the great mystery in the family, that.”
“And your uncle—great-uncle—whatever happened to him?”
The young farmer looked at his wife and then back at Sylvia. “He’s long since been gone.”
Sylvia smiled, nodded. “Of course, I realize he must have passed away by now but do you know where he passed away? Did he . . . live for long after his wife departed?”
“Lived till he were nearly ninety. Never married again, couldn’t, you see.”
“Yes, I see,” Sylvia said, thinking aloud. “But something must have made her—your great-uncle’s wife—flee like that, in the depths of the night, and taking the poor child with her?”
“Who said anything about night? Or any poor child?” he asked, narrowing his gaze.
“Oh, forgive me. I’m a writer. I somehow imagined that it was at night . . . and I thought I heard tell that there was a child involved.”
The three of them—Sylvia, the young John Abel and his wife—stood under the shade of a stone archway leading to the farmyard, where a pile of manure lay steaming in the sunshine. John Abel leaned on his rake as he explained to Sylvia that it was his grandmother who had first told him the story of how her brother’s wife had vanished.
“She knew her, of course, knew Fanny Abel. Didn’t like her.” He shook his head. “Said she had had highfalutin ideas. Woodbridge not good enough for her . . . London not good enough for her! No pleasing some folk, eh?”
“No, indeed.”
“And you’re right, as it happens, there were a child, a girl, but not theirs, some relation of hers, of Fanny Abel’s. My grandmother reckoned she and the girl must have went overseas, changed their names, because he looked for them for years, did Uncle John, placed advertisements in the newspapers, done all of that.”
The Memory of Lost Senses Page 30