Dying in the Wool (11 page)

I waited to see what else he would say.

‘I’m right aren’t I?’ he said, looking at me sadly, like a little boy who can’t join in a game.

‘I don’t know. Why do you think I’m here?’

‘To look for her father, of course. Well? Am I right?’

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

I shrugged. ‘It’s been a long time. I’m not sure that I’ll succeed where others have failed.’

He leaned forward, sighing. Dropping his head towards his knees like a damsel recovering from a faint. When he straightened up, there was a hardness in his face, so that he looked much older. ‘We’ll hit the rocks before we begin. I don’t understand why she has to go on looking. It gets worse instead of better. I honestly think she won’t marry me if she doesn’t find him. It obsesses her, night and day. Yet all through our courtship, she pretended enough for me to think I was the one who mattered. Now it’s Dad this, Dad that. If only she’d been here for him and so on and so forth. I feel so helpless, as if it’s somehow my fault.’

‘It’s traditional I suppose, for a bride to be walked to the altar by her father. It’s only natural … that she should be thinking of him, wanting him to be there.’

‘Is it? She has her Uncle Neville, and she has me.’

‘It’s not a reflection on you, Hector.’

‘Oh but it is. And she won’t find him, and it will always be there, between us, as if it was somehow my fault.’

‘How could it be your fault?’

‘The nearest person always takes the flak. We all know that.’

‘She simply wants to know, one way or the other, and I shall do my best to try and help her. People do sometimes turn up after years and years. It has been known.’

He ran his hands through his hair. Something about his gesture seemed so young. I realised he must still have been at school when Joshua Braithwaite went missing. And if he were still at school …

‘Do you remember much about that time, Hector?’

He shifted uneasily on the sofa. ‘I hate leather sofas. We shan’t have one.’

It was tactless, but I had to say it. ‘You must have been what? Fourteen, fifteen at the time?’

‘Yes.’ He stood up and went to the window, then suddenly turned. ‘I don’t talk about that time. It only serves to remind us both that Tabby was already grown up and off doing important things and I was … I loved her even then. I used to read those stories about knights and ladies, and I was the knight, and she was the lady who might give me a favour to carry into battle. But of course she was the one who went off to war, and I …’

‘And you were what, Hector? In the boy scouts?’

He nodded.

Footsteps on the stairs. Tabitha’s voice. A woman laughing.

I said, quickly, ‘Sometime, will you talk to me about that? Your time in the scouts, and when Mr Braithwaite went missing?’

‘Only if you promise not to tell Tabitha.’

‘I can’t promise that.’

‘Then I can’t talk to you about it.’ He avoided meeting my eyes. ‘Anyway, there’s nothing to tell.’

Tabitha and her future mother-in-law swept into the room, looking so happy. Tabitha introduced me to Hector’s mother, Mrs Gawthorpe, a stout cheerful woman with a round open face.

She shook my hand warmly. ‘Tabitha was just telling me about how you and she met at a hospital in Leeds.’

‘St Mary’s,’ Tabitha said.

Monday, 21 August 1916

TABITHA

Nurse Tabitha Braithwaite had been working since five a.m. They were short of staff in St Mary’s. One of the domestics had not turned up for work. Tabitha collected the urine bottles. She assisted men who could not manage alone. There were drinks of water to distribute, floors to be mopped, surfaces scrubbed down, teas handed round, then breakfast. On the shell shock ward, some bad cases needed help with everything. Their shaking got in the way of the most basic tasks.

The man in bed ten lay beyond speech now. Yesterday, when he arrived, she had begun to write a letter for him. He grew tired and they agreed to finish it today. The letter crackled in her pocket as she walked. Under the sheet and counterpane, his knees jerked. For two or three seconds, his legs would be still and then a foot would raise the covers as though it thought itself in a match, ready to take a goal kick.

With one hand cradling his head, holding him still, she helped him drink, putting the hospital cup to his lips. His baby bird mouth gaped. A low groan came from somewhere deep inside as water trickled onto his chin. His twitching jaw made a clicking sound. Not having his notes yesterday, she had left the ‘T’ on his forehead, alerting
Sister, uncertain whether the tetanus injection had been given to him.

Now she walked round with the doctor and ward sister, pad in hand, making notes, feeling fraudulent. Nurse they called her. But her training had been rushed and felt haphazard.

At bed number ten, while the doctor and sister conferred, Tabitha gently wiped the T from the man’s forehead. The tetanus injection had come too late to prevent lockjaw. The patient had a name: Stanley Spence. Stan to friends and family. Tabitha knew this because yesterday evening, when he was still clinging to hopes of staying in this world, they began the letter. She recognised his accent. He was from Keighley, a millwright. When she told him she was the daughter of Braithwaites Mill, he chuckled. It tickled him to have her look after him. A boss’s daughter.

By quarter to three she felt frayed at the edges and leaned against the wall in the sluice room. There was a shudder, as if someone in the adjacent room had hammered on the wall. The vibration rattled a shelf, causing a urine bottle to fall and break. That was all she needed. More work. At least it was empty. Tabitha went to find a dust pan and brush.

‘Is someone hammering?’ she asked.

‘It felt like a tremor, a quake,’ Sister said. ‘It’s upset the men on the shell shock ward.’

Tabitha had seen men die before. But this seemed so unfair, to have come all this way, to be so near home and yet to be beyond hope. She should be off duty now but would not go. Stan Spence’s hands shook. Wool-gathering fingers folding and unfolding grasped the air.

She took his hand. He sighed. Something inside him seemed quieter now, reassured by her touch. She had placed screens around the bed and pulled her chair close.

A stranger’s voice startled her. ‘I’ve come to relieve you.’

Tabitha turned. A young woman appeared by the side of the screen. She slid into view and stood by the bed. Tabitha did not want to be relieved. She felt knotted to the chair. This was where she would stay, for eternity, or at least for Stan Spence’s eternity.

‘Sister sent me.’ The woman went round to the other side of the bed. She was about Tabitha’s age, with an open friendly face, smooth healthy skin and lively eyes – too alive to belong in this corner of last resorts.

She perched on the edge of the bed. You weren’t allowed to sit on the beds. Sister was a stickler over that.

‘Sister says report to the office,’ the woman said gently. ‘You’re off duty.’

Tabitha did not trouble herself to shake her head. The man in the bed did enough shaking for both of them.

His other hand flailed on the counterpane. The intruder took his hand and held it. Each of them stroked a hand, Tabitha on his right, the intruder on his left. Stan Spence seemed calmer, and to sigh, but only for a moment.

It was as if invisible bolts of lightning jolted Stan’s frame. Some sound came from deep inside him, a terrible rasping noise, like a machine that needed more than oiling.

Tabitha leaned forward and encircled him in her arms to hold him still. He rolled towards her, and back, and towards her. Some powerful leaping motion seemed to propel him forward, as though to catch the thin-spun thread of his own life.

And then he was still, and grey as undyed fleece. That change in his skin seemed too sudden, too dramatic, too unnecessary. As if Death was laughing, and impatient.
I’ve got him now. He’s mine.

Tabitha stroked his still hand, and thought of him strolling among the looms of a mill. The man who could fix things and get the weaver working again. She knew he had children. He mentioned them in his unfinished letter.
She thought of Edmund, her brother. Killed in action, the telegram had said. She thought of how he had held a cricket bat, and how he always said she held it wrong.

Stan Spence must have held a cricket bat, and laughed, and hit a ball for six. She hoped so.
Howzat?!
Edmund had called.
Out! Out!

Tabitha watched the intruder close Stan’s eyes and cover his face.

They walked side by side back to the nurses’ room. Tabitha went to tell Sister that Stan Spence had died. She felt for his letter in her pocket, and wondered what to do. She was too tired to think, worn out and useless. Her brain had turned to lint.

Sister told her to get herself off duty now, and rest.

The woman who had tried to relieve her made them cups of tea, using the old tea leaves in the pot because that’s all there was till tomorrow. The woman didn’t speak, but everything about her quiet confident movements spoke sympathy and understanding. It soothed Tabitha to have someone else there, making the tea, saying nothing. The woman had chestnut hair, caught with combs at the nape of her neck. She wore an ambulance driver’s uniform. She looked as alert and intelligent as Tabitha felt insipid and undone. Even something as simple as letting her legs walk her off duty posed an insurmountable task.

The woman set down the tea and took out cigarettes, lighting Tabitha’s for her.

The action, and the deep inhalation, brought Tabitha back to life. She remembered that she had been on the go for twelve hours without time to stop, until now.

‘Sister called you Braithwaite,’ the woman said. ‘What’s your Christian name?’

‘Tabitha.’

‘I’m Kate. Kate Shackleton.’

Tabitha took Stanley Spence’s letter from her pocket. If
she did not do this now, her courage would fail. She would finish Stan Spence’s letter. Setting her cup on the desk she reached for the scratchy communal pen and dipped it into what was left of the scrunchy disgusting ink. Not looking at what had gone before, she wrote,
Must say ta ta for now, Your loving husband, Stan
.
Kissses to the children.

Earlier that day she had checked his address from the records and written an envelope. She folded the letter carefully and reached for the envelope.

Kate looked over her shoulder. ‘Is that for the man who just died?’

‘Yes. But what do I do? Mrs Spence will receive this letter and think her husband is alive. Then a telegram will come. I can’t put PS I am dying. PPS I have died.’

‘Where does Mrs Spence live?’ Kate asked.

‘She lives in Keighley,’ Tabitha answered. ‘Not far from the railway station. Stanley was a millwright. He thought it was a hoot to be cared for by me. We have a mill, you see.’

Sister looked in on them. Tabitha and Kate exchanged a swift glance as Tabitha slid the letter into her pocket. Sister would insist on doing things by the book, posting the letter, arranging for notification in the usual way.

‘I told you to take some rest, Braithwaite,’ Sister said. ‘And haven’t you a home to go to, driver?’ She had forgotten Kate’s name.

Sister clomped out. She put the whole of her foot on the floor at once, not heel first in the usual way. They listened to her plod along the corridor.

‘She makes more noise than a woman clattering to the mill in clogs,’ Tabitha said.

Kate started to laugh. ‘Take some rest, Braithwaite!’ Kate giggled.

‘Haven’t you a home to go to, driver?’ Tabitha demanded, shaking with laughter.

‘Isn’t it terrible to laugh?’ Kate said.

‘I know.’

‘I have petrol enough to take you to the station. Would you get a train to Keighley at this time, and if you did, could you get back?’

Tabitha felt some energy returning. ‘Yes. I can do that.’

She felt she owed it to Stanley Spence. What fury would Mrs Spence feel when she found out how close Stan was to coming home. How near, and yet gone forever.

And that was how Tabitha came to call home, unexpectedly, for a brief visit.

It was mad to have done it, to have gone to see Mrs Spence and break such news. At nearly midnight, she had no chance of getting back to St Mary’s. She found a cab driver willing to urge his tired horse to take them to Bridgestead. She left him on the drive while she went indoors to find the fare, expecting to have to bray on the door to wake the house.

The door was open. The housekeeper emerged in her dressing gown. Dad wasn’t there. Mother wasn’t there. Tabitha had to scrabble about in her room until she found some cash.

When she had paid the cab driver, she asked where her parents were. On hearing that her mother was with Aunt Catherine, she hurried towards the mill house, forgetting her exhaustion, running across the two fields. Aunt Catherine must have taken a turn for the worse. Tabitha could not bear another death. Please God, don’t let her die too. Not today.

Aunt Catherine was sleeping. Tabitha and her mother went into the big dining room. Under the gaze of the stuffed birds, Tabitha felt a pang of fear in her guts.