All My Sins Remembered (15 page)

Nathaniel came home, bringing the evening papers with him. Eleanor hurried to meet him as she always did, as soon as she heard his key in the lock. Their eyes met, telling one another, No bad news. Not yet. Only then did Nathaniel kiss her. Tabby and Alice came running and he lifted them up in turn and swung them in the air, growling like a bear to make them laugh and then scream to be put down again. Julius came more slowly down the stairs and Nathaniel clasped him briefly. They were the same height, now.

Evenings in the Woodstock Road belonged to the family. It was one of the things Grace particularly liked about staying with the Hirshes, that there had never been the starching and combing before the stiff half-hour visit to the drawing room that was always the routine at home.

Before dinner Eleanor and Nathaniel always sat in the big, comfortable room at the back of the house that looked down over a narrow wrought-iron balcony into the garden. Nathaniel sometimes played Pelmanism with the children, all of them ranged in a circle around the mahogany table. A lamp with a shade of multi-coloured glass threw flecks of different-coloured light on the ring of faces. On other evenings Eleanor played the piano or Julius his violin, and the children took it in turns to sing. Nathaniel particularly enjoyed the singing, and would join in in his resonant bass. His voice was so unsuited to the sentimental Victorian ballads that Eleanor favoured that the children would have to struggle to avoid collapsing into furtive giggles.

At other times there were the general knowledge games that Grace dreaded because she seemed to know even less than Tabby, and she would hurriedly suggest charades or recitations as a diversion. Jake’s special piece had always been a theatrical rendering of ‘How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’; when she closed her eyes on this evening’s tableau of Eleanor sewing and Julius and Nathaniel playing cards with the little girls, Grace could hear him intoning ‘I sprang to the stirrup’. He always snatched up the invisible bridle and bared his teeth like a brigand.

There was no Jake tonight, of course. They felt his absence. With her new empathy Grace knew that Clio, hunched over a book in the corner of the room, was not reading but thinking about him.

Jake’s place was taken by two of Eleanor’s convalescents. They sat near to her, talking quietly. But for this difference the well-worn room looked just as it always did, with its sagging seats and piles of books and newspapers, and the murky picture of steamers on the Rhine that always hung on the wall facing the French windows.

But Grace was possessed by the realization that everything was changing. The war had crept in here, into the Woodstock Road as well as Stretton; she had not even understood how significantly. She tasted a mixture of resentment and apprehension, dry in her mouth.

When Clio’s eyes wandered yet again from her book they met Grace’s. Even the old ground between them was changing its contours, but they were both glad of that. They needed their new friendship now.

Before dinner, Nanny came to take Alice and Tabby back up to the nursery. Nathaniel poured sherry into little cut-glass thimbles for the men, and there was general talk until it was time to go in to dinner.

Tonight, one of the housemaids had placed the evening post on a silver tray that stood on the hall table. When the family crossed the hall on the way to the dining room they saw that there were two thin blue foreign envelopes lying side by side.

Eleanor moved with surprising speed. She scooped up the two letters from Jake and then, seeing the inscriptions, she held one of them out with a little involuntary sigh of disappointment.

‘One is for you, Grace.’

It was the first letter she had received in the Woodstock Road. The others had been addressed to Stretton, or Belgrave Square. She took it, feeling the harsh crackle of the envelope between her fingers. She put it straight into the pocket of her skirt, without looking at it. She felt that the Hirshes were watching her, as if she had taken something that was rightfully theirs.

‘Shall we go in?’ Nathaniel murmured at last.

Eleanor opened her letter and had read it before the maid placed the soup tureen on the table in front of her. She looked up from the single flimsy sheet of paper.

‘He’s well,’ she said. ‘There is – there was when he was writing, rather – a kind of lull. He calls it the calm before the next storm.’

There were tears plainly visible in Eleanor’s eyes, but no one was careless enough to see them. She refolded the letter and handed it down the table to Nathaniel, and then began briskly ladling soup.

Captain Smith, one of the convalescents, said, ‘I admire what your son is doing, Professor. I was in one of those hospitals before they sent me back home. They do a fine job.’

He wanted them to know he understood Jake’s beliefs, wanted them to be aware that he didn’t consider him a shirker. It was not the Captain’s fault that he sounded like Hugo. Grace’s eyes met Clio’s again.

Nathaniel lifted his head. ‘Of course,’ he said.

The letter passed to Julius, and then to Clio. They were greedy for the news, there was no question of politely waiting until dinner was over.

Grace felt the generosity of it when Clio passed the blue paper to her in her turn. She was aware of the second letter burning in her pocket.

Jake wrote of the work he was doing, but only as numbers, how many casualties arriving, how many hours on duty, how few hours sleep. The rest of the letter was taken up with his thoughts on John Donne, whose poems he had been reading, and with reminiscences of home. He recalled the day of the picnic beside the river.

Grace gave the letter back to Eleanor. ‘Jake will be a good doctor,’ she said to fill the silence, but the random remark struck a chord of optimism. It looked ahead to a better time, beyond the necessity of survival. Eleanor’s face softened.

‘I believe so,’ she said.

The maid came to clear away their soup plates.

After dinner, it was usual for Grace to sit with Clio and Julius while they read or worked, but tonight she left the table and went quickly up through the odd layers of the house to the room she shared with Clio. She half sat and half leant against her high bed, and opened the envelope.

The letter was longer. There were three sheets of the flimsy paper, each one closely covered with Jake’s black handwriting. Grace bent her head, and began to read.

The words burned off the page. There were no careful sentences here, nothing like the letter he had addressed to Nathaniel and Eleanor. Jake had simply written what he felt, disjointed snatches of it, letting the raw suffering lie where it spilt. It was these images that had informed his earlier letters, the awkward and troubling missives that she had not wanted to look at again, but Jake had kept them veiled, somehow, saving her eyes. Now he had passed some last point of endurance, and Grace saw clearly what Jake was seeing.

Oh, Grace, the horror of it. Grace, do you hear me? I hold on to your name, like a clean white river pebble in my fingers.

They come in all day and all night, stretchers, cargoes of what were once men, pulp and jelly of flesh, turned black, bones like splinters.

Crying and screaming and praying, or lying mute like children.

I am afraid of each day, each death.

We are close to the lines here, I can hear the guns.

We run like ants, doctors and orderlies and bearers, like ants over the blood heaps, but we can do so little. Death keeps coming, the tide of it. Some of the men I work with indemnify themselves with a kind of terrible laughter, but I can’t laugh, Grace. All I can see and hear and smell is the suffering. Each separate pain, loss, life gone or broken.

The deaths are all different. We have to leave them, most of them, to the chaplains or themselves. There was a boy like Hugo, younger, who screamed and cursed. His anger poured out of him as fast as blood. As hot. And another man, an old Cockney, wept for his mother. Like a baby cries, like Alice.

I have tried to read. I know there is beauty and order somewhere, but I can’t recall it. I look at the words on the page, and I see death. I try to see your face, Clio’s face, my mother’s.

I am afraid of death, I am afraid of life like this, I am afraid for us all. I think of Hugo, under the guns. I think of all our deaths, yours and mine and the others; the same deaths, over and over, each of them different.

I have tried to assemble the disciplines of logic, and marshal the proofs of what human suffering has won for humanity, but I can find no logic here. There is only madness. I am afraid that I am mad.

Grace, you should not have to hear this. Forgive me.

I think of you, and of home. Julius and Clio. Of you, especially.

All this will end, it must end. But when it is done, whatever the outcome, nothing can be the same as it once was. I am sad for what we have lost, for what we are losing every day.

Grace lifted her head, but she didn’t see the room with its two white beds and her own gilt-backed hairbrushes laid out beside Clio’s on the dressing table. She could only see Jake, and after a moment she looked down again at the last page.

The black handwriting had deteriorated so much that she could only just decipher the words. Jake was writing about Donne again, but not in the detached, analytical way he had done in Eleanor’s letter. As far as Grace could understand, he had taken some of the poems as speaking directly to him. They had taken on a significance for him that she could only guess at.

There is one, ‘A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day’, do you know it? It is about loss and grief. There is one couplet: ‘He ruined me, and I am re-begot Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.’

It runs in my head, all the time, while I am doing my antlike scurrying. We are all re-begot as nothingness by this war. The evil of it, the waste.

I have to go now. We live in a canvas shelter, and I sit on my camp bed to write this on my lap by candlelight. Perhaps you can’t even read the words. Perhaps I should not send them to you, but I need to reach out. It is another weakness. I am afraid of my own cowardice, too.

You are so clean and white, Grace, like nothing here.

When will it all end?

For some reason Jake had signed not his name but his initials. It made Grace think again of the schoolroom at Stretton, of their old secure and undervalued world.

She said aloud, ‘You are not a coward.’

The window opposite her had been left wide open after the warmth of the day, but the night air was icy now. It rolled in like a hill mist and Grace shivered as it touched her bare shoulders.

She did not move, or fold the letter into its creases again. She knew that she would never forget the way Jake spoke to her out of it.

It was the letter’s fusion of two voices that touched her most profoundly. There was the old Jake, who had whispered their secrets to her in the hot summer before the war began, and from whom she had in the end retreated. Out of fear of the unknown, out of childish impatience. And there was the Jake she did not know, who had witnessed the field hospital. The images of it came to her now, in Jake’s disconnected words,
pulp and jelly of flesh, bones like splinters
…

And just as Jake had become two Jakes, boy and man, so the world had split into two worlds, old and new. Not only for herself, Grace understood that, but for all of them.

Images of the old world were all around her. There was this room with its mundane evidences of their girlhood, and in the framed snapshots on Clio’s tallboy there were memories of Christmases, holiday games at Stretton, beach cricket in Norfolk or Normandy.

The new world was obliterating everything that had once been familiar. Jake and Hugo in France were part of the fearsome new world, and the officers who came to mend themselves in this house, and so were the newspapers with their black headlines and their casualty lists, and even the women who served behind shop counters where there had once been men were part of it too.

For a long time, for almost two years Grace realized, she had thought of the war as a momentous event that touched them all, but as an episode that would eventually be over, leaving the world to continue as before.

It was on that day in October 1916, the day of Jake’s letter, that she understood there could be no going on as before.

If Hugo came home again, he would not be the same boy who had marched off in his fresh uniform. Jake would not be the boy who had kissed her in the angle of the hawthorn hedge. For all of them, whatever they had done, there would always be the speculation: If there had been no war. If part of a generation had not been lost.

Grace read the last, scrawled page of the letter once more.

I am re-begot

Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.

But then she put the pages aside. The blackness of the lines stirred an opposing determination in her. Grace found herself making a bargain with a Providence she had never troubled to address before.

Let them come home, she bartered, and we will make something new out of ‘things which are not’. We don’t cease to exist, those of us who are left. We’ll make another world.

She could not have said what world, or how, but she felt the power of her own determination as a partial salve.

Behind her, the bedroom door creaked open and Clio slipped into the room.

‘Grace? It’s so cold in here.’ She went to the window, closed it, and drew the curtains over the square of darkness. She did not ask, but Grace picked up the pages of the letter and gave them to her.