No Peace for Amelia (7 page)

‘That's an excellent idea, Charles,' said Mama. ‘I think I shall write a few letters too. We have to let those in authority know the outrage this has been, on a pacifist household such as this.'

Mary Ann and Amelia exchanged glances. They didn't either of them think those in authority would be
particularly
impressed by outraged letters from Amelia's mother. Her record as a model citizen was not entirely untarnished, for she herself had been arrested a couple of years ago for a breach of the peace while attending a Suffragette meeting, and had spent some time in gaol.

But this didn't appear to occur to Amelia's mother.

‘Now,' she went on, ‘I expect Mary Ann has a lot of catching up to do and would be glad to have her kitchen to herself for a while. I suggest that all Pims evacuate the kitchen. You will stay, Mary Ann, dear, won't you? We'd be lost without you, and I think Amelia would just die of grief. We do trust you, and we know you wouldn't
betray
our trust, whatever your political feelings might be. Isn't that right?'

‘Oh yes, Ma'am,' said Mary Ann fervently, resolving on the spot never again even to dream of using this house as a hiding place for anything even remotely connected with violence. She would personally dispose even of
Edmund
's toy gun in the dustbin, and that was the very last she would ever have to do with guns of any description.

T
he flower head that Amelia had randomly but
lovingly
snapped off and stuck in her buttonhole stood now in a little porcelain bud vase. Its purply blue spears had glowed staunchly for some days, and its searing
yellow
streak had gladdened her heart. But now it was
starting
to lose its gleaming hues, and the petals were turning mauve and papery and sad. Amelia touched it
sorrowfully
with the tips of her fingers as she pored over her task, and it rustled a papery rustle.

When Frederick’s letter had arrived, Amelia had been suffused with happiness. It lay there innocently by her breakfast plate, looking fat and exotically stamped and full of promise. It meant he was alive, of course, which was a relief, but it also meant that he cared enough to write to her. She didn’t even need to read the letter to know that much. The mere fact of its being there, plainly addressed, in the Quaker style, to
Amelia Pim, was assurance enough.

‘Aren’t you going to open your letter, Amelia?’ Edmund had asked, spitting toast crumbs across the table cloth.

‘Yes,’ Amelia had replied vaguely, happily, not
opening
it.

‘Well, go on then,’ Edmund urged her, wriggling on his chair.

Slowly, Amelia had picked up the letter and slit it open with her knife. It wasn’t as long as it looked. It was fat mainly because Frederick had written on thick, lined paper, not because he had written a great deal. She tried not to be disappointed when she saw it was just a page and a half long, and she made a point of reading it very slowly to make it last. She didn’t want the happy feeling to go away.

But no matter how slowly she read it – and she paused every now and then to look over the top of it and give Edmund instructions about staying on his chair and not smearing butter in the marmalade dish – she couldn’t make it last more than a minute or two, and she couldn’t avoid noticing that the letter sounded strained and odd.

‘Is it from Frederick Goodbody, Amelia?’ asked Edmund.

‘Of course it is, Edmund,’ Mama intervened. ‘Who else would be writing to Amelia from the Front? And don’t ask questions with your mouth full.’

Frederick sounded thoroughly miserable. He
described
the boat journey, which Amelia had expected
would be such fun, but he made it sound uncomfortable and sickening, and then he described a long march they had had to make when they’d arrived in France. He couldn’t say where they were going or why, of course, in case the letter should fall into enemy hands, but it seemed to be a terribly long distance to travel on foot. He said his boots were too tight and the leather too hard and he’d had to take them off in the end, because they blistered his feet and the blisters broke and festered. He tied the laces together and hung the boots around his neck. He sounded as if he was sorry he had ever joined up.

‘How is Frederick, dear?’ asked Mama gently.

‘Well. Very well,’ said Amelia curtly, folding the letter up again and putting it under her plate. Her head felt fuzzy.

She wondered why he had bothered to tie his boots around his neck. Why didn’t he throw them away if they were no good to him, and why didn’t he ask for a pair that fitted? She tried to imagine walking for miles and miles and days and days in ill-fitting boots with infected feet, and then she tried to imagine walking the same
distance
barefoot, with the added encumbrance of boots hanging about your neck and swinging against your chest or shoulders at every step, not to mention the backpack you would have to carry also, and your gun.

‘What does he say, Amelia?’ asked Edmund.

‘Edmund,’ said Mama in a warning tone.

The boy stuffed more toast into his mouth and waggled his legs emphatically and defiantly.

Amelia poured coffee for herself and her parents. Her hand shook, and it wasn’t just the weight of the coffee pot. There was a pricklish feeling at the back of her throat.

Edmund swallowed hard, licked his lips ostentatiously, to prove his mouth was empty, and asked:

‘Has he killed anyone yet?’

Amelia gave a little gasp and spilt some coffee on the snowy white tablecloth.

‘Edmund!’ thundered Papa. ‘That’s quite enough.’

‘I was only …’ Edmund started to squeak.

‘You will only be sent out of the room if there is
another
word out of you,’ said Papa.

Amelia was exasperated by Edmund, but she couldn’t bear the thought of a scene. So she put on what she meant to be a bright tone and said:

‘He says he had a lovely trip on a big boat, and they had sea shanties all the way and rum to drink. And now they are living in tents, like explorers, and have picnics for every meal, and adventures every day.’

But it didn’t come out bright at all. It came out in a semi-hysterical, high-pitched, gabbled monotone.

‘Gosh!’ said Edmund, half-frightened.

‘Don’t, Amelia!’ said Mama.

Amelia rammed her plate down harder on the letter, crushing it flat, and said:

‘Could we now please talk about something else? The price of cocoa perhaps? How is the commodities market this morning, Papa?’

‘Gosh!’ whispered Edmund again, and reached for some more toast.

That had been yesterday morning. Now she was calmer, of course. She should never have opened the
letter
in public like that. She could have coped with it much better if she’d been in the calm of her own room. She wouldn’t make that mistake again. Now she was trying to reply to this oddly disappointing letter, which sounded as if it had been written by a stranger. Well, it hadn’t been written by a stranger. It was Frederick, even if he was tired and confused and regretful, and she was plainly going to have to cheer him up.

Mama had said certainly she might write to Frederick. If she felt the urge to send him knobbly knitted socks and cocoa tablets, she could do so too, for we must
distinguish
between the war and the soldiers, Mama said, and so long as Amelia wasn’t planning on sending
gunpowder
or poisoned arrowheads, she could certainly correspond with Frederick. ‘Poor lamb,’ she added. This had been a great relief to Amelia, but now that she had the freedom to write, she didn’t know what to say.

She wondered whether socks would be such a good idea to send after all. Stout socks might afford some
protection
against the leather of stiff boots, but if the boots were too small, thick socks would only make it an even
tighter squeeze, and if the socks were knitted and
knobbly
, they would chafe the blisters. Silk socks would be best, light silk ones next to the skin. She would see if she could get silk socks for Frederick. Even cotton ones would do, if they were fine enough. That would be a kindness. And she would advise him to ask for a
better-fitting
pair of boots. She thought Napoleon quite wrong to say that an army marched on its stomach. No amount of good feeding could compensate for ill-fitting boots.

She wrote these thoughts down, about the socks and asking for better boots, and she added the bit about
Napoleon
, because she thought it was clever and showed she could sympathise with a soldier’s hardships and also that it was rather wise.

She wanted to tell Frederick all about what was
happening
at home, the raid, for example. But just as she tried to compose a sentence to describe it, it occurred to her that these nasty, horrid soldiers who had invaded their house were comrades-in-arms, in a sense, of
Frederick
’s. Perhaps it wouldn’t do to tell him about the raid. And because she couldn’t tell him that, she couldn’t tell him how they had nearly lost Mary Ann, because of course that story depended on knowing about the raid.

She thought then that she might tell Frederick about the new straw hat she had just bought – her Easter
bonnet
it was to be. It had a most realistic bunch of fruit tucked into the band on one side, which gave it a
colourful
glow, all cherry red and plum purple and banana
yellow against a deep and satisfying glossy green. But then she thought this sounded a little frivolous and
selfish
, in view of the problems with the boots.

She thought and thought, but she could come up with nothing, no news to tell him, no plans she could share, nothing. She looked at the two short paragraphs she had already written, thanking him for his letter and giving him absurd and grannyish advice about his footwear. She couldn’t even send him greetings from his family, for they never mentioned him, not even Lucinda, whom she saw every day at school. After that first day, when she had wept on Amelia’s shoulder, she had never breathed another word about her brave and errant brother.

In exasperation Amelia added a final paragraph to her letter, telling Frederick that his family was well – that much at least she could vouch for, and certainly Lucinda was bouncing with health – and that she and her family were well, and expressing the devout if rather pointless hope that he too was well, and finally that she missed him very much. She regarded that last sentence, and wondered whether she ought to scratch it out. It
embarrassed
her, now that she had written it. But on reflection, she thought a scratched out sentence would be an
irritation
and in any case would make her letter such a mess that she would only have to write it all out again. So she left it in.

Then came the problem of the closing greeting. ‘Yours truly,’ that was what you said. Not ‘Yours faithfully,’ not
to a close friend. But ‘Yours truly’ sounded stiff and strange. She looked at Frederick’s letter. ‘Your
Frederick
,’ he had signed it. That was nice. It made her feel warm. He was telling her that he was her Frederick. Yes, that would do. She would return the compliment. ‘Your Amelia,’ she added to hers with a flourish, squiggling her signature dramatically across the bottom half of the page so that it didn’t look so blank and empty.

She reread the letter. It sounded flat and cold to her, in spite of the felicitous ending. What could she do with it? Tentatively, she added a few crosses at the bottom, for kisses. She hoped that wasn’t too forward. Ink kisses didn’t really count, did they? She hoped not. She needed to send him something. She looked again at the fading iris. With a sudden smile, she snatched it out of its little vase, snipped the wet part of the stem off with her thumbnail, and patted the remaining stem against her blotter, to be quite sure it was dry. Then she folded the letter and slipped the papery flower inside it. She sealed the letter quickly into an envelope and addressed it,
before
she could change her mind about the iris and the kisses, and walked swiftly out and deposited it on the hall table, where all letters for the post were put.

She laid her index finger against the boldly written address, where the envelope lay pale and stark on the gleaming walnut patina of the table, and felt the dry flower crinkle under her fingertip. With a quick
gesture
she lifted her hand and kissed her fingertip and
then laid it swiftly on the envelope again.

After that, she turned away with a swish of her skirts and went upstairs to take a fresh look at her Easter bonnet.

E
dmund was curious about the little evergreen twig that Mary Ann brought home from church on the Sunday before Easter. She flounced in, twirling it
between
her finger and thumb, said she was ‘kilt with the long gospel’ and put her ‘poor feet’ up on a butter box in the kitchen to rest them while she had her breakfast. She always had breakfast after church, which Amelia thought an odd custom, but Mary Ann explained that you had to go to Mass fasting.

‘Like a pilgrim,’ said Amelia, recognising an idea from stories of the Middle Ages.

‘Not really. It’s only down the road,’ said Mary Ann. ‘That’s a palm, Edmund,’ she went on. ‘I got it below in the church out of a big wicker basket. It’s specially blessed, and everyone gets a bit today.’

‘It’s not a palm,’ said Edmund, regarding it
suspiciously
and sniffing its sharp, sweet, hair-oily scent. He
thought it a very odd idea to bless a piece of tree, even if it was a special blessing.

‘Of course it is,’ said Mary Ann, jabbing her fork
joyfully
into a thick wedge of black pudding, studded with suet. ‘It’s Palm Sunday. Thanks be to God for Sunday and a bit of meat for breakfast.’

Amelia and Edmund raised their eyebrows at each other over Mary Ann’s head. (Edmund had only just learned to do this, and he looked comical, his thin, fair eyebrows disappearing like a shot under his fringe.) They both thought it didn’t necessarily follow. No matter what day it was, you couldn’t discount botany. But they didn’t like to argue, especially since it was blessed. And anyway, it didn’t do to argue with Mary Ann just now. She hadn’t been quite her sparky self since the raid and they were all careful not to upset her.

In spite of everyone’s thoughtful avoidance of conflict with her, Mary Ann was as nervous as a hen all that week coming up to Easter. She jumped every time anyone came into the kitchen, and she seemed to listen with a special intensity to everything people said, as if she was afraid of missing something. Amelia asked her once or twice if anything was the matter, but Mary Ann
strenuously
denied it. She said the last days of Lent always made her a bit edgy, that was all. Amelia couldn’t worm any more out of her, but she was sure there was more to it.

She was quite right. There was much more to it. Mary
Ann had been unnerved by the raid, but she had been even more dismayed by a letter she had just received. It was from her brother Patrick, again. This is what he wrote:

Mary Ann was all in a dither on receiving this letter. She knew perfectly well what it was that Patrick and his friends were planning, and she knew from the inept and dangerous way he underlined the words that the Rising against English rule was planned for Easter Sunday. She knew too that she should be glad in her heart that this wonderful day was at last about to dawn, when her country would strike for freedom and the power of the oppressor of centuries would be overturned. But she was deeply shaken by the tone of foreboding in her brother’s letter. He clearly didn’t expect to survive the uprising. He wrote without any mention of a hope of
victory
, only in the expectation of death.

And Mary Ann knew he was right. England might be a little shaken up by the action of the Volunteers, a little put out that Ireland should rise up against her while she was at war in Europe. Certainly she would be distracted.
But there wasn’t much chance that anything these
passionate
and committed friends of Patrick’s could do was going to make much of an impact on a world imperial power the like of England. It was like a mouse trying to overthrow an elephant. Sincere though they were, they were only playing at soldiers, like Edmund with his toy gun.

Mary Ann felt powerless and confused. She knew it was going to happen, this foolhardy, glorious,
illadvised
and utterly splendid and passionate action, and there was nothing she could do about it, only hope and pray. She hadn’t much hope, but she could pray.
Panic-stricken
, she realised there wasn’t even time to make a novena. It would all be upon them within a week. All she could do was pray like mad for the time that was left.

But she wasn’t sure what it was that she should pray for. She knew that if her prayers were to be successful, she must pray with a clean heart, sincerely and without reservations. Really, she should be praying that the whole wretched thing would never happen, that their plans would be discovered, the leaders imprisoned, the rest disarmed and the whole thing end in fiasco. But she knew how passionately Patrick and his friends believed in the justice of their cause, and she couldn’t bring
herself
to pray for such a drastic outcome to their action.

She thought then she might pray that nobody would be hurt, but she soon realised that that was a cowardly prayer. She knew that if there were guns they would be
fired, and it wasn’t into the air to frighten the horses that they would be fired. You couldn’t have it both ways – not pray that the Rising would be abandoned or
discovered
before it happened and at the same time pray that there would be no bloodshed. It was a conundrum. Of course, she could pray simply that Patrick might be safe, but that was a selfish prayer, and Mary Ann knew of old that God wasn’t likely to look kindly on someone who prayed that her brother might be saved while others were killed, others who had nobody to pray for them, perhaps. She puzzled and worried a lot over it all, and all the time she was thinking it through, it irritated her no end that she was wasting time on worrying that she could be spending on praying – for whatever it was she wanted.

In the end, she thought that she would just pray that all would be well, and she would leave it to God to
figure
out the best solution. And she had a very good week in which to pray – it was Holy Week, the week before Easter, and her employers were most anxious to ensure that she was able to attend all the special Easter
ceremonies
of her church. They told her just to down tools and go at any time when there was a service she wished to attend.

And there were plenty of those. First there was a long service on the Thursday. Amelia asked her about it, why it took so long, and Mary Ann shrugged her shoulders and said the priests took ages to wash the men’s feet.
Amelia was intrigued and horrified and thrilled all at once. It sounded much more interesting than sitting in silence at a Meeting for Worship with nothing to watch, but at the same time slightly nauseating.

‘You mean really their feet? Did they take their shoes and socks off?’ Amelia was imagining corns and long
yellow
horny toenails and ripe red bunions sticking out at odd angles and wondering whether there wasn’t an
unpleasant
smell of sweaty sock.

Mary Ann gave her a curious look.

‘What do you mean, really their feet? If I say they washed their feet, then of course they took off their shoes, didn’t they?’

Really, Amelia’s questions were so bothersome when Mary Ann had such a lot of serious praying to do.

‘Well,’ replied Amelia stoutly, ‘if you say to wipe your feet, you don’t really mean your feet, you mean wipe your shoes on the doormat. This might be the same thing.’

‘Well, it isn’t the same thing,’ said Mary Ann, illogically exasperated. ‘They take off their shoes and socks and they really have their feet washed with real water in a real white enamel kitchen basin with a blue rim, just like that one over there in the sink.’

‘And do they dry them with a stripey towel like the one on the back of the door?’

‘Lawny! No. They have a special white linen towel, like in a hotel.’

All this talk of washing feet reminded Amelia of
Frederick’s bruised and bleeding feet. It would be nice if someone washed his feet for him in a blue and white enamel basin and dried them with a fine linen towel. She hoped he had got new boots and she wondered if there was an ointment or unguent she could send him. A zinc cream perhaps, to soothe sores and blisters.

On Friday, the afternoon service went on for hours too. This time, Mary Ann said that all the people queued up to kiss a crucifix, the thought of which sent a little shiver up Amelia’s spine. Mary Ann described to Amelia how the church was all gloomy and the statues were covered in purple drapes, like huge and knobbly
parcels
, and the priests wore black or purple vestments too, for mourning. She thought this was strangely
appropriate
to her personal circumstances, but of course she couldn’t explain this to Amelia.

On Saturday, the main Easter ceremony was late at night. Amelia thought Mary Ann shouldn’t go out so late on her own, and she begged Mama to allow her to
accompany
her friend. Mama put down the book she was reading, and took off her spectacles. She thought for a moment, and then she observed that it wasn’t usual for people of different persuasions to attend each other’s places of worship.

‘Well, I could just sit at the back and not really
participate
. I could close my eyes even, and pretend not to be there. I’d be like a hansom cab driver, Mama, driving a fare to an event, and then just waiting until it was over,
to drive the person home again.’

‘No, Amelia, that’s not my point at all. If you did go, the last thing you should do is lurk at the back like a valet at a ball. I don’t for one moment think there would be any harm at all in your attending this service if you did so in the right spirit. My concern is that you should respect other people’s practices and not ogle or watch in a spirit of vulgar curiosity.’

‘Oh
no
, Mama,’ said Amelia. She
was
curious of course, but she hoped she wasn’t vulgar.

‘Well, in that case, I think you might go.’

Mama was a real sport.

And so it was that on the night of Holy Saturday,
Amelia
Pim attended the Easter Vigil at the local Roman Catholic church, which was in fact the chapel of the
Passionist
community of Mount Argus – specialists in Easter, you might say. She wore her best coat and hat and her gloves, and she carried an umbrella, not because it was raining, but simply because she thought it made her look sober and respectable, and it gave her something to hold on to, but inside she felt like a little girl on her first day at school gripping her satchel with intensity and with mixed feelings of curiosity and apprehension. There was something terrifyingly, deliciously exciting, scandalous almost, in the idea of entering this forbidden territory.

When the girls first heaved against the heavy doors and swung them slowly open, the church was in
complete
darkness, and it smelt of candle wax and a sweet
heavy scent Amelia couldn’t identify. A tiny red light glowed far away in the distance. Amelia and Mary Ann fumbled their way to a pew. All around them, people muttered and breathed, and Amelia could hear the click of rosaries in the dark.

Then came an eerie chanting sound in a foreign
language
– Italian it sounded like. The chant was almost monotonous, but every now and then the voices dipped or soared to a new note, and then fell back to the
previous
even tone on a single note. The effect was weird and compelling in the unlit church.

Suddenly there was a loud thudding clap, as if a large book had been snapped shut in the darkness, and then someone started to light candles, one by one, first on the altar, high up and far away. When the altar was aglow with points of light, suspended in the darkness, the light began to move along, like a firefly leaving a gleaming trail behind it. People had small candles in their hands, and the light was passed from pew to pew, and from person to person, in a giant and sacred relay action. Gradually the light worked its way along the pews and down the nave, across the transepts and into the aisles, till at last the whole building was lit with the soft warm glow of candlelight. It was like the most spectacular birthday cake, and Amelia drew her breath in.

As the church emerged from the gloom, she began to distinguish people around her, in their greatcoats, and the women in their hats, neighbours all of them. One or
two looked askance at Amelia, and nudged each other, but Amelia looked away so as not to meet their disbelieving eyes. She stood staunchly by Mary Ann.