Gather the Bones (22 page)

“Evelyn?”

“Yes, my dear aunt. I confronted her with it and she told me that she judged it better that I consider my mother dead than to live with the scandal of having a mother who was a bolter.” He brought his gaze back to Helen, seeing the shock in her eyes. “So you see it is quite possible that Suzanna tried to contact her children but someone, maybe her mother-in-law, destroyed the letters.”

She stared at him, her brow furrowing as she struggled to master her emotions. “Oh, Paul, I’m so sorry. I can’t believe Evelyn could be so heartless.”

He shrugged. “It was a long time ago and I’ve no doubt Evelyn’s motives were pure.” But he could still feel the stab of pain as he thought of those missives consigned to the flames, the words of love and comfort from his mother that he had craved, disappearing in an instant. He changed the subject. “Is there anything else you need to do in London?”

Helen shook her head. “I just need to collect my suitcase from Angela’s flat.”

“If you don’t mind the company, we’ll catch the five PM train.”

* * * *

Angela sat on a stool, chewing the end of a brush, regarding her canvas of Waterloo Bridge as Helen and Paul entered the flat. It appeared to take her a moment to comprehend Paul’s presence. When she did, her eyes widened and she jumped off her stool like a startled rabbit.

“Paul!”

“Hello, Ange. You don’t look particularly pleased to see me.”

“Of course I am,” she said. “I just wish I’d known to expect you.”

As she spoke, her eyes flicked across the room to the paintings of Alpha and Omega, still on prominent display. Paul stood quite still in the doorway, the color draining from his face. Slowly, as if drawn to the paintings, he crossed the room and picked up the third canvas.

He turned to Angela, his eyes blazing. “Why...?” he started to say but seemed unable to find the words to express himself.

“I’m an artist, Paul.” Angela said.

Paul set the painting down and turned for the door. “I’ll go and hail a cab, Helen. Be quick or we will miss the train.”

Angela cast a despairing look at the door as it slammed behind him and sat back on her stool, fumbling for a cigarette.

“Sod it,” she said as the match she broke against the flint. “Sod it! Sod it! Sod it!” She flung the matches at the painting. “Why did you have to bring him back here?”

“I didn’t even think about the paintings,” Helen said. “I’m sorry, Angela.”

Angela’s shoulders sagged. “I suppose he had to know about it some time.”

Helen collected her case from the spare room.

“I don’t know what to say to him,” Angela said. “Tell him...” She lit another cigarette. “Tell him I love him too much to hurt him.”

Helen stood in the doorway. “Do you really want me to tell him that?”

Angela shrugged. “No...yes...tell him what you like.”

Paul waited on the corner, his hands thrust into his trouser pockets. When he saw Helen approaching, he flagged down a cab and they proceeded in silence to Euston station.

* * * *

The taking of tea in times of stress was a peculiar preoccupation, Paul thought, staring at the cup of brown liquid that Helen had ordered for him. He had no taste for it. A whiskey would have been preferable.

He lit a cigarette and looked out of the window of the café at the passing throng on the station, drawing slowly on his cigarette.

“She’s never shown it,” Helen said at last.

He brought his gaze around to her and frowned. “What?”

“The painting. She’s never shown it.”

How could he explain that it wasn’t the painting itself? He didn’t care one way or another what Angela painted. He admired her talent for bringing the visceral reality of war to a two dimensional canvas. The stark representation of the ruined church that had served as a field hospital had torn a jagged hole in his memory. Over the smell of coal smoke from the trains, he could once again smell that strange mixture of blood, excrement and antiseptic.

“What does she call it?” he asked to divert his thoughts.

“It forms a triptych. She calls it Alpha and Omega.”

Paul gave a snort of laughter. “The beginning and the end?”

Helen nodded.

“It was not personal, Paul. She’s an artist. She saw only a representation of an idea.”

Paul stubbed his cigarette out.

Helen continued, trying to fill the silence between them. “I can see how you would feel it was an–” she struggled for the right words, “–an invasion of privacy.”

“It’s not that.”

Paul’s eyes moved away from her, staring back at a place he didn’t want to remember but remembrance had jerked itself up through the blackness like the rotting flesh of a long dead corpse had done in the trenches.

He took a swig of his nearly cold tea.

“We’ve a train to catch.” He knew he sounded brusque but the memories tugged at him and he had no time for social niceties.

Picking up Helen’s suitcase, he strode off, leaving her running to keep pace with him. They found an empty carriage and he stowed the case on the luggage rack. Helen sat down opposite him and unfolded a magazine she had bought at the station.

As the train pulled out, Paul looked at her, seeing the concern in her face. He wanted to share his thoughts with her but the words and the pictures in his mind couldn’t bring themselves into a cohesive whole.

“Helen…” She looked up, fixing him with her steady gaze.

As he wondered where to begin, the door slid open and a young couple pushed into the carriage with nodded apologies and the moment passed.

Paul looked away, conscious that Helen still watched him with hurt and confusion in her eyes. He stared out into the peaceful, lush, English countryside but saw only the mud, filth and death of a battlefield in Flanders.

* * * *

British Field Hospital, Furnes Belgium, September 22 1917

Somewhere above him, a single light bulb swayed, casting shadows across a ceiling painted with a mural of some biblical scene. Bits of the ceiling had collapsed leaving several of the wandering Israelites armless or legless.

A shadow loomed over him.

“Well, sorr, ‘tis good to see you.”

Devlin. He tried to speak but the words only circled in his head.

“Walker packed your trunk so I found some excuse to visit headquarters and brought it in for you. Don’t think you’ll be coming back to us for a while, sorr.”

He could hear footsteps, a woman’s heels clacking on the stone floor.

“Sergeant Major Devlin.” Angela’s voice.

“Mrs. Lambton, sure it’s good to be seein’ your pretty face.”

“Enough of your Irish charm, Devlin. How are things at the front?”

He shook his head. “Battalion’s been broken up, scattered through the Brigade, no officers and hardly any men.”

Angela frowned. “No officers at all?”

“Well as ye know, the Colonel’s back in old blighty with a broken arm, the Major...” Devlin looked at the bed. “And with Cap’n Collins and Cap’n Morrow both dead...” He stopped and Paul heard a stifled gasp from Angela. “You didn’t know?”

Angela’s voice sounded strangled. “No. How?”

Devlin shrugged. “As near as we can say, he was caught in the same shell blast as the Major. Only the Major came back. We don’t know what happened out there and we’ve no body to bury that we could see so we just suppose that he’s dead. Missin’ in action they’ll call it officially and that’ll be what they tells the family.”

Back and forth the light bulb swayed.

Charlie... Charlie is dead
.

The words echoed in time to the swaying light as Devlin continued, “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you.”

“No, it’s all right. Thank you, Devlin.”

It seemed a long silence before Devlin spoke again. “How is he?”

Were they talking about him now?

“They’re waiting for his condition to stabilize and then they’ll ship him back to England.”

“Ah well, his war’s over, I’m thinking. It’s poor sods like me that’s got to go back to the lines. I brought his things. Figured he wasn’t coming back.”

“Thank you, Devlin.”

“Well, Mrs. Lambton, I’ll be biddin’ you good day.”

As the sound Devlin’s boots faded, someone picked up his hand. Angela. Angela had been here before. Angela...he felt her lips brush his fingers.

“Well this looks cosy!”

Another shadow blocked the light bulb. A staff officer, his uniform crisp and immaculate came into his line of sight.

“Tony. What are you doing here?” Angela said.

“Same thing as you, Ange.”

“I’ve just learned about Charlie,” she said. “Oh, Tony, he’s dead.”

Her voice sounded muffled as if she had buried her face in her brother’s pristine tunic. Charlie is dead, Paul thought.
Angela is crying because Charlie is dead
.

“There, there, old thing,” Tony said as Angela’s sobs subsided to choking gulps.

“How’s Paul?” Tony asked.

Angela sniffed and blew her nose. “Not good. They’ll put him on the boat train as soon as they can and get him out of here,” she said. “Does Evelyn know about Charlie?”

“She got the telegram advising he was missing in action. I managed to ring Ma and she tells me that Evelyn is carrying on stoically. Sir Gerald is the one they are worried about.”

“Does Evelyn care that Paul is still alive?”

“Of course she cares, Ange. He’s all she has left. She will see it as her duty.”

* * * *

‘
Duty, duty must be done, the rules apply to everyone and painful though that duty be to shirk the task of fiddle-de-dee...
’ the words of the Gilbert and Sullivan song that Charlie used to sing whenever some particularly unpleasant task came his way, clanged through Paul’s head. He hated Gilbert and Sullivan.

“Pardon?” Helen looked up from her magazine.

“
Duty, duty, must be done
...” Such a catchy tune. He wasn’t even aware he had been humming it.

Paul swung his gaze to her puzzled face.

“Nothing,” he said.

Chapter 15

Paul poured himself a whiskey and walked over to the window. He propped himself on the wide windowsill. In the glorious summer evening the view across the village and the church was mesmeric and he wondered if his silent, ghostly companion had sought this view as a solace to his own troubled soul.

Paul looked up half-expecting to see Robert standing sentinel beside him but he was quite alone.

He hadn’t told Helen that the spirit of Robert Morrow had begun to haunt him when his uncle had given him Robert Morrow’s copy of Homer’s
Illiad
in the original Greek for a twelfth birthday present. From that day, he had seen glimpses of a man in the library but it was only when he had returned to Holdston after the war and taken over the main apartment that Robert had become an almost permanent fixture at the window. Watching and waiting.

Now he knew why Robert kept his vigil. He waited for his Suzanna to come home. There had been times on his own long road to recovery when it had seemed easier just to let it all go, close his eyes and never come back, but at those times he had begun to sense a silent, watching, presence. A shared pain between two men that reached out beyond the restrictions of time. Robert Morrow had become his companion on the journey. He reached across and picked up his copy of the
Illiad
from the table. Opening the battered cover, he read the inscription. “
To my darling husband, Christmas 1805, SJM.
” Suzanna’s gift to her soldier husband.

He had carried the battered leather volume with him through the blood and mud of the trenches, using the long, idle hours to translate it, a soldier’s translation of that other bloody conflict. From the penciled marks in the margins, Robert had undertaken a similar exercise one hundred years earlier. He had also recorded the dates and details of his own campaign on the Spanish Peninsula in the back pages. Paul had added his own war to Robert’s and the connection that reached out through blood and battle had been forged.

He frowned and drained his whiskey. Robert hadn’t survived the dreadful battle of Badajoz. Robert had taken his own life, as much a victim of that war as if he had died on the battlefield. A quick, familiar rap on the door brought him back to the present and he turned as Evelyn entered. He slid off the windowsill and greeted his aunt.

“You look tired, Paul,” Evelyn remarked. “I thought the trip to London may be too much for you. Is your leg bothering you?”

He gave her an exasperated glare. “For God’s sake, Evelyn, I’m not an invalid.”

Evelyn met his angry eyes with hurt in her own and he felt a stab of guilt at snapping at her. “I’m fine, but thank you for your concern,” he added.

“How was Angela’s exhibition?” she asked.

“A triumph,” Paul replied, unable to disguise the brittleness in his tone as he remembered the paintings she had not shown.