Gifts of War (21 page)

WILL TURNED ONE
in March 1916. Five of us celebrated his birthday: Will himself, of course, though he didn’t know too much about it; Sam; me; Lottie—who was still with us, babysitter in chief—and Whisky, a small Highland terrier puppy who was Will’s first birthday present. Sam, Lottie, and I shared a bottle of Scotch and sang songs from a new revue we had seen in the West End, called
“Hullo!”

Sam and I had settled into the flat, and flat routine, and Chelsea routine remarkably easily, considering we had come straight from Middle Hill. In fact, we hardly talked about Middle Hill or about Stratford. It was painful for Sam to look back—Wilhelm disappearing, and the school board ruling that never happened—and I now had two obsessions: intelligence analysis and Sam herself, and so I didn’t look back either.

So far as our landlord was concerned, and the local shopkeepers, Sam and I were married, and Lottie played along.

We spent the winter exploring London, and here I have to admit Lottie came in very useful. It had soon become clear that she was going to find it very difficult to get another job in the theater. The music halls were doing well—in wartime, everyone wanted a good laugh, or to hear some familiar sentimental tunes. But the straight, or “legitimate” theater, as it was called then, and which was the theater that appealed to Lottie, was having a thin time. So the few weeks that she had been intending to stay turned into a few months. In fairness, she was most helpful. She always managed to have somewhere else to go at
weekends, so that Sam and I could be together on Saturdays and Sundays.

We loved our weekends and, once we had bought a better push chair for Will, we walked all over London. And not just the nice bits, the pretty bits, the parks and the areas with big houses, but the other places too, the industrial areas, the canals, the warren of forgotten lanes and wharves by the river. We got to know all the bridges, the railway sidings, the lock-up specialist shops underneath the railway embankments. We explored new pubs, the great Wren churches, the bits of Shakespeare’s London that were still extant. We learned where the new omnibuses were garaged at night, where the police stabled their horses, the Jewish shops that were open on Sunday.

And, of course, we talked.

Sam talked about life in Bristol.

“It’s a port, of course, which means there was no shortage of foreigners when we girls were growing up, and maybe that helped stoke my wanderlust. Early on, before he took to drink, our father told us lots of stories of far-off places—Lagos, Haifa, Montevideo. He had seen whales and crocodiles and polar bears.
Imagine!
He brought us dolls from Africa and jewelry from India.” She bit her lip in the way that she had. “After he turned to drink and violence, we tore the dolls apart and threw the jewelry in the river.”

Sam spoke a little bit about her mother, and her mother’s singing voice, inherited by Lottie. “She knew
so many
prayers by heart, and so much poetry. The dresses she made were always meticulous—she invariably used the narrowest of ribbons, complicated stitches that few other people could do, and she chased all over the place for unusual silks and cottons; suppliers were always doing her favors because she was so pretty, and the dresses she made were so striking. And because of that, my sisters and I always won fancy-dress competitions at
school. We became well known in the area where we lived because of the costumes our mother made.”

She talked about how their father always blamed his wife for giving him four daughters and no sons. “Toward the end, or when he had been drinking, they argued about it, a lot, and it may have contributed to our father’s drinking. But that was an excuse in my view. On the other hand, I did—do—miss having a brother. At teacher training college, my best friend was close to her brother, and she made it sound fun, just as your relationship with Izzy sounds fun. A family of all girls can be a bit of a hothouse, an echo chamber of petty rivalries and grievances.”

Did Sam want me as a brother? It crossed my mind, of course, but on our walks she would put her arm in mine, we would hold hands; we grew closer gradually.

And we complemented each other. I knew a lot about science but, of course, Sam was very familiar with Shakespeare, his tragedies and comedies, his Iagos and Malvolios. She may not have seen the nightclubs of Munich or the trenches of Flanders, as I had, but her grasp of psychology was astute. Shakespeare had something to do with that.

On weekdays, Lottie offered to babysit as often as we wanted. That’s when Sam and I went to the theater, to concerts, or to lectures at the Royal Institution or the great hospitals. And it was at one of the lectures in that spring of 1916 that Sam got talking to a woman who was a teacher. I never did know whether Sam offered her services or whether the woman, as Sam said, let slip that there was a vacancy at her school, and that Sam might just fill it.

She didn’t say anything to me on the way home, or the next day, or the day immediately after that. But that Saturday, after Lottie had gone off to stay somewhere and we were taking Will for a walk (which
is to say, I was pushing him along Chelsea Embankment), Sam said, “How would you feel if I went back to teaching?”

I looked at her without saying anything for a moment. Will was gurgling away.

“What about Will?”

“Lottie says she’ll look after him.”

“You’ve already discussed it with Lottie?” I was… I was out of sorts.

“It was Lottie who gave me the idea.”

“What!”

Sam put her hand on my arm. “Don’t get angry. I’m trying to be helpful and practical here.”

“Practical? How?” I remember that this was the first cross word I had exchanged with Sam.

It didn’t last. She raised herself on tiptoe and kissed my cheek, even though we were in the street, in public. “Hal, you’ve been wonderful to … to Will, to me, to Lottie. We can’t go on just accepting your generosity—”

“I don’t know why not—”

“No!” She said it softly, but insistently.

Will was looking up at us. The gurgling had stopped.

“I love having a baby, Hal, I really do. But I miss teaching too. Lottie’s obviously not going to get a job anytime soon. The woman I met at the lecture the other night said there was a vacancy in their school and, well…”

She faltered.

“Well?” Why was I helping her out?

“I went to see them yesterday.” She smiled. “The job is mine if I want it.”

“Don’t they want references?” That was my second cross word.

“They know the college where I trained, and it has a good name. I told them what happened at Middle Hill, and the headmistress was understanding. A big city like London is different—they have seen plenty of women made pregnant by soldiers. We are going to need all the people we can breed after the war. The headmistress said she doesn’t have to tell the rest of the staff but, so far as she is concerned, it won’t be a problem.”

A horse-drawn cart went by and Will focused on that.

“And did you tell them who Will’s father is?” I couldn’t help myself.

Sam’s face flushed. “Of course not. I told them I was married now.” She still didn’t raise her voice, but put her arm in mine. “You’ve got a sister, Hal. I’ve never met her but I’ve read her letter and I’m sure I’d like her. You’d do a lot for her, wouldn’t you?”

I nodded.

“Well, think of the situation from my point of view. If I work, there’ll be more money around
and
I’ll be able to pay something to Lottie, for looking after Will. She’ll have a bit of money to spend, to buy those books and magazines she likes, on the lives of the toffs, and she’ll feel more useful, she won’t feel she’s sponging off us—off you—all the time.”

She squeezed my arm. “And I won’t become a drudge, weighed down by baby talk, baby habits, and baby timetables. And there’ll be less pressure on you—after all, he isn’t yours.”

“Sam!” I shook myself free of her arm. Cross word number three. “How can you say that? I
love
Will—doesn’t it show? Do you mean you want me to spend less time with him? What are you saying?”

Will had his attention back on us now.

“I didn’t mean it like that, Hal. Don’t react so.”

“Well, what
did
you mean?”

She reached out again and took my hand. “It just seemed… it seemed like a good solution all round, that’s all. It will be like when we first met—”

“No, it won’t! Not at all. Don’t you like the way things are?”

“Yes—yes, I
do!
Don’t react so, Hal.”

I noticed she didn’t attempt to cancel the plan.

There was a silence between us.

Then she went on: “I don’t want anything to change between us, Hal. But you’re doing interesting work, and I want to do something too. Actually, it was that letter from your sister that set me thinking. She’s more or less my age, and she’s doing something useful, worthwhile. I can’t just spend my hours with Will—I have to … I have to be more
active
. Remember our conversation in that station in Birmingham? When I said I wanted to get more involved in the war? I’ve rather let that drop since we’ve moved to London, but I haven’t changed my view. Teaching in a poor area is more useful than teaching in Middle Hill and it’s something I know. Also, the school has a lot of projects linked to the war, so I can be more involved, as involved as I want to be. You don’t mind that, do you? You’re doing important work now.”

“Lots of women see raising children as a full-time job.”

“If we had more than one, maybe …”

She said it softly, but it still cut right through me. I know I flushed. “I did tell you before—”

“Yes, you did, Hal. You’ve done nothing wrong. Nothing, nothing. I’m not criticizing you—how could I, after all you have given me. That evening, in the cricket field, when you asked me to come to London, you did say I could go back to teaching.”

We walked on. Not very far, and then we turned back. Our appetites for fresh air had evaporated. Mine certainly had. But what she said was true. I
had
promised she could go back to teaching.

On the way back, after several hundred yards of silence, during
which time even Will thought it safer to fall asleep, I said, “Where
is
this school?”

“Notting Hill.”

“When do they want you to start?”

Without looking at me, she said, “I can start on Monday if I want.”

“Does that suit Lottie?”

She nodded.

“So it’s all signed and sealed.”

“I’ll be paid four pounds, six shillings a week, Hal. We can do a lot with that.”

“We don’t need money—”

“Lottie does, and I’d like some of my own too. I’d like to buy you presents, for instance, with my own money.”

“I don’t need—”

“But
I
want to give them to you.”

We went to bed that night in silence. It was a first. While Sam was still in the bathroom, I put down my book, turned off my bedside lamp, and lay on my side, with my back to where Sam slept. I heard her come out of the bathroom, smelled the sweep of her as she got into bed and switched off her light. Suddenly I felt her body against mine and she kissed the back of my neck. As she kissed me a second time, I realized that she wasn’t wearing her nightdress.

The Sunday after the night Sam and I first made love we went to take a look at the school in Notting Hill where she was scheduled to teach—I wanted to know what sort of place it was, what sort of life Sam would be taking on. We walked some of the way but there was a new motorbus route that went up Kensington Church Street. We took Will and Whisky.

The school, when we reached it, could hardly have been more different from Middle Hill. It was surrounded by high wire netting, part of it was next to a railway bridge, and part was edged by a canal, marked off by a row of palings in disarray. Rural it was not.

I pointed to the canal, the railway bridge. “You don’t object to all this?”

“We’re in the middle of London, Hal, not Middle Hill. The children here need educating just as much as there. Maybe more so.”

Children were playing in the playground, even though it was Sunday. The wire fencing was far from complete. They were scruffy children, dirty even. I wasn’t happy.

“I hope you know what you’re doing, Sam. My mother would call this the rough end of town.”

“Oh, it’s rough, all right. That’s part of the attraction for me.”
She slipped her arm through mine. “When am I going to meet your mother, by the way?”

I was long overdue for a visit to my parents. I had not kept my promise, to Izzy, that I would get in touch with them more often.

“Don’t change the subject,” I said, but I squeezed her arm. They would have to meet Sam soon.

When Lottie came back to the flat that night, I could see she was nervous. She knew what had been going on and wasn’t sure how I would react. She was, however, ambushed by Sam.

“It’s all settled—Hal has agreed.”

That considerably exaggerated what we had worked out—that I had agreed to a month’s trial, in case the whole thing turned out to be a disaster. Sam glossed over that, and Lottie burst out smiling, in relief. As on a previous occasion, she rushed across to me and gave me a big kiss.