Come the Hour (8 page)

Amy took the turkey out of the oven, basted it carefully, and put it back. ‘Has he got a girlfriend?’

‘I don’t know.’ Tessa laughed. ‘I don’t think he’d tell me about it anyway. I think he’s rather shy with girls. That’s boarding school for you, I expect. They don’t get much chance to meet girls, do they?’

‘What about you?’ Amy said.

‘No chance.’ Tessa put some dishes in the sink. ‘I’ve got too far to go. I’m not going to go all wobbly about some male. I might think about it when I’m about fifty.’

Amy laughed. She looked at Tessa’s bright head bent over the sink,
washing up the dishes. She has so much to learn, she thought, her heart aching a little. Tessa was just at the beginning. She saw medicine as a clinical science: note the symptoms, make a diagnosis, apply the treatment, job done. She hadn’t yet had to watch someone die because there was no way to treat them: no cure for septicaemia, pneumonia, TB, and many other diseases. She knows nothing of love, she thought, of driving passion. And she knows nothing of loss, of the pain of it. Her heart ached more, with the hope that her daughter would never know the latter, never have to go through what she had gone through, never have to see what she had seen.

How do you accommodate to it, she thought? How do you change from a carefree student who knows nothing of the world, to someone who can bear the suffering and pain of other people? How do you learn not to be overwhelmed by it, and stay steady and useful and do your job?

She remembered the shock of her first day on a ward as a clinical student. There she had seen a woman in dreadful pain, longing for death, and no one had been able to help her. The next day, mercifully, she was dead. It was her first brush with such suffering. And then came the shock and horror of the outrageous, inhuman suffering in the trenches in France, and the deadening pain of loss for those who loved them. Johnny, her first love, had died, killed in the Royal Flying Corps. There was joy too – joy of a new life beginning, of a patient getting better, defeating death.

Tessa was humming a dance tune – something of Fred Astaire’s, probably, shrugging her shoulders to the rhythm. Life, Amy thought. You can’t put life into a test tube, my darling Tessa. Life you have to learn with your heart, not your brain.

Tessa turned to her and smiled. ‘You look very thoughtful, Mum.’

‘It’s nothing,’ Amy said. ‘I was just thinking how lovely it is to have you all at home again.’

Amy’s father sat alone in the sitting room, sipping coffee, and listening to the carols on the wireless. He knew Amy so well. He could read her face, more or less knew what she was thinking. She was still worried, he knew that, even though the Prime Minister seemed to have sorted things out with Germany. He had to admit to himself that he was
worried too. You couldn’t trust the Nazis to do what they said. Look what they’d done already, bombing Spain. This Czechoslovakian thing was a disgrace. The Nazis did what they liked and no one attempted to stop them. What would they try next? If they did anything, it would be Poland, for sure. They were already making noises about Danzig. And what would the rest of Europe do about that? He feared, as Amy and Dan must, for his grandchildren, for all the young ones.

He got up and walked around the room, touched a silver bauble on the Christmas tree, making it swing, glinting in the firelight. He remembered all those bleak Christmases without Amy when she went to the hospitals in France in the Great War – year after year of appalling work for her and appalling worry for him. He remembered her pain and her tears, sobbing on his shoulder. She lost her first love, Johnny Maddox, shot down in an aeroplane. Then she lost her best friend, Helen, blown up by a bomb in the hospital encampment. What she must have seen and endured! Things he could scarcely imagine. He was suddenly angry, outraged. Surely she had suffered enough pain and loss? Surely they all had, the Germans too? How, in the name of God, could anyone contemplate another war? He didn’t know how she could bear it if it happened again. Human beings could only take so much without breaking. The last war had proved that, there had been men with broken minds as well as bodies.

She had never really told him about her war. Whenever he asked her questions she avoided them, laughed them off, or brushed them aside. But he had seen her war in her face, in her eyes, heard it in her silence. How could one possibly know or feel what it was like? No wonder she was terrified that it might happen again. Where could she go for comfort? He assumed that she talked to Dan about it. Thank God for Dan. He had been there with her. He knew. He understood.

Nora laid the table in the kitchen for Christmas dinner. She spread a spotless white cloth and decorated it with a sprig of holly and some Christmas crackers. At least they were going to have a real Christmas dinner this year – a roast chicken. Last year had been terrible; Jim had been out of work again and it was a struggle to feed them and pay the rent. They’d had a rabbit pie. No Christmas tree, just some paper
chains she and Sara had made. This year the kitchen was warm, a big fire burning in the grate. Jim had bought a treat – a bottle of sweet sherry and some cider to have with dinner. The delicious smell of roast chicken filled the house, and the tangy scent of the onions and the dried sage leaves she’d rubbed between her hands to crumble them into the stuffing. The Christmas pudding, with a few silver threepenny bits inside it, to be discovered with feigned but delighted surprise, bubbled in the simmering water at the back of the stove.

Sara hovered in the kitchen, savouring the scents. She touched the holly, bright with berries. ‘It looks lovely, Mum,’ she said. The berries gleamed red, almost too perfect to be real. Funny to think that inside each berry were the seeds, tiny little things you could hardly see that, amazingly, were going to be the next holly trees. How did they do that? How did they know that they were holly trees, and not roses or rabbits?

‘That smells good,’ Jim said. ‘It’s a long time since we had a chicken.’

Sara had watched her mother preparing the chicken. It had been bought from the butcher ready plucked of its feathers, but her mother had to pull out its innards, saving the neck and the heart and liver to make the gravy.

Her mother made a face. ‘I hate doing this,’ she said, ‘putting my hands in here, all cold and slimy.’

‘I’ll do it,’ Sara said. ‘I’d like to,’ but her mother shook her head.

‘I don’t know why you want to be a doctor or a nurse,’ Jim said. ‘It’d be worse than chickens, putting your hands inside people.’

‘Not a nurse,’ Sara said. Jim gave an exasperated sigh and Nora glanced at him and shook her head. Sara only had time for a brief look at the heart and liver before they went into the saucepan.

When she woke that morning her stocking had been on the end of her bed, as usual. She still had a stocking, though she didn’t believe in Father Christmas any more. There was the usual orange and a few nuts in the toe. There was a pair of warm woollen gloves that her mother had knitted, and some new pencils and a notebook, and a new pencil-case that her father had made for her, beautifully veneered in soft, silky wood. Her real present had been unexpected. Nora and Jim handed it to her in the sitting room, a small box, longer than it was wide. They
waited, expectantly, for her reaction. She opened it carefully. Inside was a fountain pen, dark blue with a gold band round the middle. She gave a little gasp. A fountain pen! She could fill it with ink and write and write without dipping her pen in the ink all the time. It was perfect. She filled it from the ink bottle and wrote her name carefully in the notebook. The writing looked different already, firm and even and grown up.

After Christmas dinner she sat at the table, writing with her new pen in her new notebook. What should she write?
My autobiography
, she wrote at the top of the page. As she wrote, she remembered quite a lot of her early childhood, before they came to London. She remembered the long, straight road in Trafford Park, grey and unrelenting: no trees, no gardens, not a flower or blade of grass. She remembered the back yard with the outside toilet, freezing on winter nights. She remembered the lamplighter coming to light the streetlamps with his pole and his ladder, and how she had been afraid of the Sisters of Charity with their great white headdresses, going about the streets among the really poor. When she was little she thought they had no faces. This street wasn’t that much different, but at least the toilet was inside and they had a proper bathroom. Things were better here, and her father had a proper job. She knew how important that was.

She remembered her father coming home with his eyes red and streaming when he’d had a job for the day, loading lime on to lorries at one of the factories. She remembered him pulling up the grate over the drain in the street because he’d dropped a half crown and it had rolled, almost purposefully, into the drain, and sat there, glittering. He had lain down in the gutter to fish it out – half a week’s rent. She remembered her mother’s desperate tears when he lost his job again. He had a job now, but she knew that her mother was always worried. She never felt safe.

There was one other memory that she found very hard to put into words. It seemed to have a meaning for her that she couldn’t quite describe. One summer’s day, when she was quite small, she had been in the back yard playing on her own, her mother busy in the kitchen. It was summer. She looked up into the intense blue sky and she saw a little aeroplane turning and looping, making a noise that sounded almost like words, coming from far away. It was beautiful, dancing in
the sky, glittering in the sun. As she watched, fascinated, it came to her quite suddenly that this was not just a thing that happened to be in the world. It was not a bird, flying on its own. There was a man inside, making it fly, and somewhere, somehow, a man had made it. She had realized, with a shock of amazed excitement, that people could do this – they could make things and change things and make things happen. All kinds of things; there were all kinds of things to think about.

Looking back, it seemed to her that it was the first time that she had ever felt separate, a person on her own; as if, for the first time, the world had revealed itself and she was looking out into it with her own mind and her own self. She was her own person. She ran inside to her mother, to tell her this amazing thing, but she was too little, she didn’t have the words. ‘I saw an aeroplane,’ she remembered saying, and her mother smiled and nodded. There was so much more to it than that. She wrote it down now because it seemed important. She didn’t really know why, but it was something that she always remembered.

My mum is still worried
, she wrote.
She still thinks my father is going to lose his job and we’ll have no money and have to go on the dole, or she thinks there’s going to be a war with the Germans
.

She wrote on a new line,
I am going to grammar school now and I’m going to be a doctor when I grow up
.

Even as she wrote, she didn’t connect the reality of the world she lived in with the reality of the words on the page. They seemed, somehow, quite separate, as if one had no effect on the other. She was nearly twelve. Her father, he had once told her, had a job in a steel works when he was twelve, and her mother had been in domestic service when she was fourteen. They didn’t know anyone who hadn’t left school at fourteen. They certainly didn’t know anyone who had been to a university. She worked hard at school – she loved it, but she had no idea how she was going to get where she wanted to go. Medical school. She didn’t even think about it, or what she was going to do if it didn’t happen. Childlike, she just saw the goal as a kind of reality, already achieved.

A
my drove the twins to the station when term began again. The platform was crowded with young men with the same rowdy energy, squash rackets, hockey sticks, flying scarves – all the paraphernalia of being young, being free from responsibility. But she sensed a change. They seemed to her to be more subdued, the laughter and the jumping about and the energy not so free. Perhaps it’s me, she thought, perhaps it’s all in my mind.

She was trying to suppress the memory of standing on the platform at Victoria Station in 1914, watching endless streams of innocent, untried young men on their way to the killing fields of France. There had been laughter then, and jokes and calling voices and backslapping camaraderie, but behind it all there was a reservedness, an apprehension. Those were young men, many of them just boys, going into unknown dangers, not knowing what waited for them in France, unable to imagine anything so terrible. She shivered and tried to shrug off the thought.

Tessa noticed. ’Are you cold, Mum?’ she asked.

‘No,’ Amy said. ‘Just a goose walking over my …’

Tessa kissed her cheek. ‘Got to go. See you at Easter.’

Amy watched the train pull slowly out of the station. She understood now how her own father must have felt, watching her leave for France at the beginning of the war, wondering whether he would ever see her again.

Charlie and Tessa settled down in a crowded carriage. One of the young men smiled at Tessa. ‘Are you a student,’ he asked, ‘or just visiting?’

‘She’s a student,’ Charlie said, before she could answer. ‘A medical student. She’s got someone’s leg in her suitcase.’

The young man flushed, looking shocked, bemused.

‘I’ve only got the bones,’ Tessa said hurriedly. ‘I’ve been studying them in the vacation.’ The young man looked away and didn’t speak to her again. He looked, she thought, thoroughly disgusted.

When they got out at Cambridge she dug Charlie in the ribs. ‘What are you trying to do?’ she said, laughing. ‘Ruin my marital prospects?’

Charlie grinned. ‘Merely revealing that he was a complete twerp. You have to admit that I was right.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You were right. Obviously an anti-woman-doctor diehard. Anyway, I’m not in the market. Five years and three quarters to go.’

Charlie carried his suitcase up the staircase to his room and unpacked. He realized that he had a certain amount of envy for Tessa. He envied her complete assurance about her future, her determination about where she was going. What was his future? The Civil Service, perhaps, or the Colonial Service, or teaching. He couldn’t quite see himself spending the rest of his life as a housemaster in some minor public school, or swatting flies under a solar topee in some remote part of the Empire. He had no idea where he was going, no matter how much he thought about it. It was like an itch that he couldn’t scratch. Most of the acquaintances he’d made seemed to be the same, but most of them didn’t seem to worry about it. That was OK he supposed, if you came from a rich family and didn’t have to work for your living.

The exception, he thought, was Arthur. Arthur seemed to know where he was going all right. He seemed to know where the whole world was going. Was he right? If so, then he, Charlie, and all the others, would have no decisions to make.

He walked to the window and looked out over the quad. It had not changed much since it was built, some of it in the sixteenth century. Would it survive now? Or would some vicious German bomber wipe it out in an instant, intent on destroying everything the British held dear, intent on breaking their spirit, wiping out their history? Frightening us to death.

Students were arriving, talking in groups, silently watched by the ancient stones, by mullioned windows that had looked out on the same scene for hundreds of years. All-out war would make no differences amongst them. The scholars and the dilettantes, the swotters and the time-wasters, those who studied every day in their rooms and those who spent the day messing about on the river, would all have the same future. For God knew how long. And a sizeable number of them would never have to think about it again. They would not be here. They would be a name on a village war memorial, a photograph on a cottage sideboard. Would he be one of those? These ancient stones, God willing, would still be here, a reminder, watching over the generations to come. The thought was a kind of comfort.

He remembered Arthur’s amused remark about knights on horseback. In a way, Arthur was right; that was how he felt. If it came to it, that would be what he wanted. Face-to-face combat with another man – not firing a huge gun, or scattering machine-gun bullets, or dropping bombs, not knowing who or what it might wipe out at the other end. When they were settled in he would go to see Arthur again.

‘Hello Tessa.’ Rita bounded into Tessa’s room. ‘Good Christmas?’

‘Yes,’ Tessa said, ‘it was lovely. Just the family.’

Rita sat down on the bed. She looked excited, bursting with news. ‘Guess what I did in the vacation.’

Tessa smiled and shrugged. ‘What?’

Rita held out her left hand. ‘I got engaged.’ Her third finger bore a small diamond solitaire.

Tessa was almost shocked. ‘But – how can you?’ she began. ‘You’ve got all this to do …’ Her voice tailed off.

Rita looked pensive. ‘I can still do it,’ she said. ‘Being engaged won’t stop me.’

‘But when are you thinking of getting married? You know they might not let you stay here if you are married.’

‘We’ll wait,’ Rita said defensively. She turned the ring on her finger. ‘He’s in the army, you see – a lieutenant. We wanted to make it official.’

‘But you’ve got three years just at Cambridge, and then there’s the clinical training,’ Tessa said. ‘It’s a long time.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ Rita was even more defensive. ‘If he has to go away, if I don’t see him for months at a time, I want him to know that I’m here and I’ll wait, no matter what happens.’

Tessa stared at her. She couldn’t imagine anything that might divert or distract her, but then, she couldn’t imagine having those feelings, having those dreadful worries. She sat down on the bed and smiled and gave Rita a hug. ‘Well, congratulations,’ she said. ‘It’s great news and I hope you’ll be very happy.’

Rita slipped off her ring and hung it on a chain and put it around her neck. ‘I just hope he doesn’t have to go,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what I’d do if …’ Her eyes glistened.

Tessa took her hand. ‘Why does everybody think that war is inevitable? Mr Chamberlain has sorted that out.’

‘My fiancé thinks it is,’ Rita said, ‘and he ought to know.’ She touched her ring with her fingers. She coloured a little. ‘Tessa,’ she said, ‘do you know anything about sex?’

‘What do you mean?’ Tessa said. ‘I know how babies are conceived. You must know that. You must have done biology at school and we’ve done human reproduction in physiology lectures here.’

Rita coloured even more. ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘But it’s sort of skimmed over, isn’t it? They don’t tell you anything about feelings. I always thought you only did it if you wanted a baby. You know – you got married and did it and had a baby and then if you wanted another one you did it again. My mother never told me anything. It was absolutely taboo. I thought perhaps, with your mother being a doctor….’

‘Well, what is it you want to know?’

Rita bit her thumbnail. ‘My fiancé says people do it all the time, whether they want babies or not. He says they do it to show they love each other.’

‘You mean he wants you to have sex with him before you’re married?’ Rita nodded. ‘But you might get pregnant before you’re married.’

‘He says there are ways of preventing it. And he says he’d marry me at once if I did.’

‘I see.’ Tessa said. She knew about contraception, from her mother, but she didn’t really see. She had never imagined herself having this
problem. Her mother had explained it to her as far as she could, but it had all seemed theoretical to her. Marriage and sex could wait. That was somewhere in the future.

‘Have you ever done it?’ Rita said.

Tessa, despite herself, was shocked. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Of course not.’ She paused. ‘But then, I’ve never been in love with anyone.’

Rita sighed. ‘I don’t know who to ask.’

‘Whoever you ask,’ Tessa said, ‘they’ll say no. If you’re asking me, I’d say it’s not a good idea.’

‘I just wish he wasn’t going away. I wish there wasn’t all this about war. If we got married I suppose I’d have to give up my training.’ Rita got up. ‘I’d better go and unpack. You won’t say anything to anyone, will you?’ She left, closing the door gently behind her.

Tessa crouched before the fireplace and put a match to the fire. There’s so much I don’t know, she thought. I’m going to be a doctor; I ought to know about these things. She remembered her mother’s anger one day, when she came home from work. She heard her telling her father. One of her patients, a girl of sixteen, had become pregnant outside marriage. ‘They’ve locked her away,’ her mother said, ‘the authorities. She’s been put in a mental hospital with a “diagnosis”,’ she pronounced the word with utter scorn, ‘of moral insanity. God knows what that means and God knows when they’ll let her out. And she’s not the only one. And the man gets away scot free. He’s only got to deny it and there’s no way of proving that he’s the father. Moral insanity! Good God. It’s ignorance. If these girls were given a bit more information, it wouldn’t happen so often.’

How had Rita got herself into this situation, she thought? She couldn’t allow herself to be involved with a man if there was going to be a war. How could you live with that kind of fear and worry? It would be nightmare enough worrying about Charlie. How would she manage her feelings? Am I a coward, she thought? Would I falter and break if it all got really bad? Handling bits of the human body were one thing if they were long dead. How would she cope with those other realities, with violent pain and death? I’ll ask my mother, she thought. She’ll know. She’s been there. She had never talked about it, but she knew. There were a lot of things she needed to know.

Arthur was in his room when Charlie went up to speak to him. He was making one of his innumerable cups of tea. ‘Hello Charlie,’ he said. ‘Come in and take a seat.’ He poured and handed Charlie a cup of tea. ‘Just a social visit?’

‘Not exactly,’ Charlie said. ‘I wanted to ask you something.’

‘Fire ahead.’

‘I believe you’re in the University Air Squadron,’ Charlie said. Arthur nodded. ‘Done my first solo and short cross-country. Not far off a private licence.’

‘Do you have to be an engineer or something to get in?’ Charlie asked, ‘or will they take anybody?’

‘They won’t take just anybody,’ Arthur said. ‘You’d have to show some kind of ability. Why? Are you interested? Do you see yourself having a nice little hobby playing with an aeroplane?’

‘Arthur,’ Charlie said, annoyed, ‘I’m not a complete wet. I’m prepared to fight if it comes to it. I just think I’d rather do it in the Air Force.’

Arthur smiled a grim smile. ‘Why? Do you think it would be an easy option?’

Charlie stared at him for a moment. Did he, he wondered? Did he think it was an easy option, spending a war living in England probably, or at least sleeping in his own bed at night? ‘It isn’t that,’ he said. ‘I don’t quite know what it is. Perhaps I just want to see my enemy – one to one, man to man.’

Arthur grinned again. ‘See yourself as a fighter pilot, do you? Only kill the man who’s trying to kill you? The old white knight again. What if they put you on bombers? What if you had to fly over Germany and drop your bombs on cities full of civilians? What then?’

Charlie hesitated. It was something he had not been able to decide about. Not that he would have the choice. ‘I expect I’d have to do what I was told,’ he said.

‘Too damn right.’

Charlie said nothing, watching Arthur’s face.

‘Why do you want to talk to me about it?’ Arthur said softly. ‘You’re
not like me. You’ve never had to fight for anything, have you, Charlie? You’ve just been given everything. Most of the men at this university are the same. Born with silver spoons. Just look at them. Dawdling dandies, most of them, come here to finish off a gentleman’s education, and then out into the tight little world of the old-boy network. Most of them look down on people like me with scholarships – working-class upstarts.’

‘I don’t,’ Charlie said, irritated. ‘My parents aren’t like that; they’re both doctors. My mother does a lot of work in the slums.’

‘Maybe she does,’ Arthur said, ‘but it’s charity, isn’t it? Charity hospitals, soup kitchens, hand-me-downs from charitable ladies. It’s disgusting. These people have a right to a better life. They thought they’d get it after the last war, but they didn’t.’

Charlie didn’t know what to say. He had a flash of memory of Germany, of their heartless strength. They seemed prosperous enough, but surely that couldn’t be the way to go. There was a better way of living, of thinking. ‘Is there going to be a war, Arthur?’

Arthur gave his gusting laughter. ‘There’s a breathless hush in the close tonight, Charlie, and it isn’t going to last. And who’s going to be fighting? Blokes like me. Have you forgotten those blokes at the Oxford Union who said they wouldn’t fight for King and country?’

Charlie was stung, annoyed. ‘We’re not all dawdling dandies,’ he said. ‘Some of us do think, you know. And sometimes diplomacy is best. The pen is mightier than the sword.’

‘I know that,’ Arthur said. ‘Strangely enough, some of us think so too, but sometimes only the sword will do.’

‘Can you get me into the Air Squadron, Arthur?’ Charlie asked, ‘without the rhetoric.’ His voice held an edge that Arthur seemed to recognize.

‘I can take you along,’ Arthur said, ‘but I can’t guarantee anything. I’ll take you on Saturday. Meet me here at eight o’clock. Wear something warm.’

Charlie went back to his room. Them and us, he thought. Why is it like that? Maybe part of the German strength was the way they had united the people, made them feel that they were all equal, even if it was in some kind of oppression. Why were his countrymen only equal
when they were fighting, and mostly not even then? The equality didn’t seem to last. Kipling had it in a nutshell: ‘Tommy’ was almost an insult in peacetime, but ‘Tommy’ was a hero when the drums began to roll. No wonder Arthur was so cynical.