Gifts of War (30 page)

“Anyone hurt?”

“That’s the good news: no casualties. No physical casualties, anyway. But the family will have to go to the workhouse, they’ll miss school, they’ve got hardly any clothes left, and no toys at all. Even if they do come back to school, they’re going to be unteachable probably. We simply lack the means to cope with them, and they’re not the first and they won’t be the last.”

“So what can be done?”

“I don’t know.” Will had fallen asleep, soothed by the movement of the bus. “I just feel there ought to be some sort of service; some sort of expertise ought to be developed, for these … well, victims really, there’s no other word.”

We got off the motorbus in a gloomy silence at Southampton Row and walked through Bloomsbury Square to the British Museum. When we arrived there our mood darkened still more. The gates were
closed and a typed note, pinned to a placard, said that owing to the scarcity of curators, all of whom were on active duty, the museum was closed indefinitely.

“You look pale, Hal. You should get yourself a girl—a woman—to look after you.” My mother had kissed me the moment I set foot in the house, and then she had stepped back. “Is your wound a burden to you? Do you… do you feel honor-bound to tell women about it? Does it… does it make a lot of difference?”

I’d been home less than two minutes and already she was grilling me. My mother was like that. At least it meant that my father had kept his side of the bargain and not told her about Sam.

Of course, my mother’s questions were spot-on. Sam’s predicament suited my predicament and formed part of the arrangement— and bond—between us. But I wasn’t about to tell my mother all that.

“I don’t tell women straightaway,” I said. It was more or less true, in that it was the way I had played it with Sam. There hadn’t been anyone else.

“But you have to tell them at some point, I expect, before it gets too serious.”

I moved away without answering.

Fortunately, my father came in just then; he had been paying off the taxi man.

“Drink, Hal?” he said, going to the bar. “Whisky?”

“I’d love one,” I replied. I was tired from the journey, but I was also shocked, knocked sideways, torpedoed, as Izzy would say, by my mother’s appearance. Her complexion was florid—and not just her face; the skin on the backs of her hands was florid too. Her voice had deepened and she had lost weight. I did not like what I saw and I
silently reprimanded myself for not coming home sooner. Izzy had been right to insist I make an effort.

Dad gave my mother her gin and me a whisky. As I think I said, he himself always drank brandy and soda, an old-fashioned drink that I had never been able to get used to. We were in the library, which was a good deal smaller than the drawing room proper, and which I preferred.

“I was just telling Hal he looks a bit thin, undernourished, and that he should get himself a nice girl. He needs to put on some weight.”

“He’s not the only one,” said my father easily, and neatly moving the conversation away from me. “What are we having for dinner?”

“Chicken, of course. But a big one, one of ours, one of the few we have left. You won’t go hungry, not for now.” She sipped her gin.

“I’ll take out a bottle of the Montrachet, then,” my father replied. “It’s a celebration of sorts.”

“Yes,” said my mother, setting down her glass on a small table. “Do try to get down here more often, Hal. It’s lovely to see you, and I worry so—”

“Mother!” I growled. “Don’t give me that. You are very definitely
not
the worrying kind, at any rate not for a grown son living in London. Now, I can understand you worrying about Izzy—”

“We had a letter yesterday!” she chimed in.

“Good, I’d like to read it later. When he was in London, Dad told me she has a man.” He had let this news slip out, on the steps of the Athenaeum, as we were parting.

My mother sniffed. “He’s married.”

“That’s unlike you … to be so conventional, I mean.”

It was true. My mother knew her own mind, had her own arguments always, wherever they led.

“It’s not a question of conventionality or otherwise, Hal. Married
men only rarely leave their wives, so I do not foresee a happy future for your sister
—that’s
what I mean. I would have thought she had more sense.” She shook her head and sipped more gin.

After a short silence, she went on: “Seriously though, Hal, does your wound make things a problem with girls?”

“Mother!” I began, but my father got in first.

“My dear, Hal’s twenty-five, a grown man who’s been in a war and seen life. Don’t treat him like a—”

“I’ll treat him how I like, Arthur, I’m his mother. Because he’s grown up, and fought on that stupid, evil Front, does not mean that I—or you, for that matter—will stop caring for him, or looking out for him.”

She glanced at her watch. “I think I’ll have a walk round the garden before dinner. I’ll leave you two to talk men talk. Einstein!”

Einstein was the family Labrador, so called because, though adorable, he was monumentally stupid.

They disappeared through the door to the hall, and we heard them in the garden.

After another short pause, when both my father and I drank our drinks, I said softly, “I’m shocked, Dad. She looks really bad.”

He nodded his head. “The worst of it is, she won’t stop smoking. Your mother is so sensible in every other area of her life—as you well know. But the smoking clearly makes her cough worse. She has coughing fits that last for minutes on end, and if you think her skin is purple now, you should see it then. I don’t know what to do.”

“What do the doctors say? Did that man in Harley Street help?”

He shook his head. “They’ve washed their hands of her. If she goes on smoking, her coughing will only get worse, her lungs less efficient until…” He gloomily drank some brandy.

“Is there anything I can do in London?”

“I don’t think so. We could have yet another opinion, I suppose, but…” He looked up at me. “You know, sometimes I think she’s doing it on purpose—”

“No!”

“I mean it. I ask myself sometimes if she’s … if she’s trying to kill herself, if deep down she’s depressed and wants to end it all.”

“Depressed? Mother? She’s always seemed perfectly sane to me— brutally so at times.”

“Hmm. That’s what I mean. She’s been profoundly affected by this war—I mean, we all have, but your mother’s
angry
about the whole show; the stupidity has really got to her.” He lifted himself out of his chair, fetched the whisky and brandy decanters, and refilled our glasses. “You know she’s always been fiercely moral—and, well, I rather think she feels this war is just about the most immoral thing that could happen. All those young men being sent to their deaths— and young women too. It’s eating away at her insides.”

“But that wouldn’t make her clinically depressed, would it?”

My father shrugged.

After a pause, I said, “Perhaps I can help after all. There are one or two new psychiatric techniques about at the moment. Shall I try to find someone?”

“It’s an idea,” he said. “But whoever you found would have to be prepared to come down here. There’s no way she will travel to London. How is your own situation?”

“Still the same. I’m still happy, content. You don’t need to worry.”

“I don’t worry, but nor do I approve. What you are doing is not right, Hal, it really isn’t. We can’t tell your mother.”

I let the subject drop. I could hear my mother and Einstein in the hall. Izzy had mentioned something about psychiatry, when we had dinner in Stratford, and Sam, too, was reading this Freud man. I decided to explore the possibility of a specialist when I returned to
London. It would make me feel useful. I had never dreamed my mother might be depressed.

When I told Sam about Izzy’s latest letter to my parents, she pulled a face and shook her head. We were walking by the river, slowly, letting Will try his legs rather than have it easy in the pushchair.

“I envy your sister, being so near the Front, doing something practical. And I can see that emotions there can run very high. She couldn’t help what happened to her—”

“My mother wouldn’t agree.”

“Maybe your mother… I don’t know… maybe your mother hasn’t been faced with a situation where … where she couldn’t help herself.”

I knew what she was thinking, of course. “But Izzy’s situation isn’t like yours, Sam. When you fell for Wilhelm, you didn’t know the war was going to break out, but Izzy knew right from the start that this … Alan, was married. There’s a world of difference. I know she’s been working in a hothouse, been closer to danger than she ever dreamed possible, but… she could have kept her distance.”

Sam didn’t say anything for a moment. Some barges were going downstream and she lifted Will so that he could see over the Embankment wall. He pointed and said something in his incomprehensible protolanguage. She set him back down on the pavement again and we resumed our slow progress.

“Lottie’s been in touch with Faye, and Faye’s going out with a married man.”

This was news to me. I knew that the sisters talked—Sam and Lottie, that is—but in general Sam kept me abreast of everything. Or so I’d thought. I would have assumed that had Lottie and Faye reestablished contact, Sam would have told me straight off. Maybe she was.

“Faye has had a lot more experience with men than Izzy has,” I pointed out.

“True, and maybe Faye will handle her situation better than Izzy will handle hers. But ask yourself this: if someone knows in advance that someone they like, someone they feel strongly about, someone they could become attached to, is already married, and yet they go ahead anyway, doesn’t that… doesn’t that say something about the strength of their feeling, the force of their attachment? Is it something that, even in Izzy’s case, can be avoided? Would it have made a difference to you if I had been married when you met me? In a sense
I
was
married—engaged, anyway—and it didn’t seem to … it didn’t put you off.”

“Sam, you can’t compare me with Izzy or Faye. Come on! Had Wilhelm been right there, in Stratford, nothing would have—”

“I know. I know. I’m just saying … before you condemn Izzy, remember how we all can get bowled over in different ways, blown this way and that by circumstances. I agree that, probably, in her case, and seeing it from my point of view, falling for a married man was not the wisest thing she has ever done. But you—we—don’t know that. Treat your sister like an adult, with her own mind and sense of survival.”

I let the subject drop. I could see that what Sam said made a kind of sense, but I wasn’t fully convinced. And I could see that all our conversations of the emotional kind always came back to one thing: her encounter with Wilhelm.