The Edge of the Fall (23 page)

Celia shook her head. ‘No. I've never been engaged. I'm just interested.'

Mrs Wadden raised her eyebrows. ‘Dear me. I thought things were so desperate for the young, these days. I am glad you all have
the time to come out on holiday.' She patted Celia's hand. ‘Still, I think you're quite right, dear. Find interests, things to talk about with young men. That's the way to find a husband.'

Celia nodded, looked back at the scant lamb chop and potato on her plate. She didn't say:
I was an ambulance driver, my friends were here
. Or what really drove her:
my brother was killed for cowardice, somewhere near the Somme
. Tom's words echoed in her mind.
He shouldn't have been there. He was ill
. Mrs Wadden was still talking, turning to Mr Elms now. She'd been wrong to come, Celia thought, as she paid up her pounds to the agent, hoping to find Michael and understand.

Now, four days later, she wished she was with the fiancé hunters. There was a group of them, just a few metres away from where she was standing with Captain Evans. They were weeping, all four of them. The captain in charge, a plump man, was trying, ineffectually, to pull one up who had fallen to the ground. She was dark-haired, pretty, scrabbling at the earth. ‘I know he's here!' she was crying. ‘He fell here!'

None of the men had come home, so their bodies must be buried around the battlefield. Of course, they were supposed to be in graves, but everyone knew it hadn't always been like that – some were just thrown under the earth on which they fell. That was what they were all looking for, bodies, bones and if not that, belt buckles, buttons, badges. Most soldiers had their uniform sent home, covered in trench mud. But not Michael. She should have suspected something then.

Michael's probably here. Somewhere in a field, away from the other men. He fell and then they left him there, threw soil over his face
. The group of women had their backs to her. She crouched down on the soil, touched it with her hands. The grass on it was green and thick, strengthened by blood.

‘Come along!' Captain Evans said, his voice casting reedily on the wind. ‘Next trench. This one has a mock-up of the men's water-warming machine.'

Celia watched her group rouse themselves, drag their heels after him.

*

Celia stayed for another week. She couldn't go home. If she arrived in Stoneythorpe, she thought, they'd be able to guess everything she'd seen, it would be written on her face. She wandered around the same places again and again, looked around the town. She waited in cafes, restaurants. She walked the same trail, over and over the trenches and the nearby hill. She saw the same groups of people, women, men, fiancé chasers, a school trip, a group of old women – mothers, maybe. Different people, but they were all the same.

‘What are you doing here still, miss?' Captain Evans sat next to her. She was in a bar, staring at a cup of coffee.

She looked back at him, trying not to notice his scarred eye. She'd seen him leading tour after tour, maybe twenty, always saying the same thing. He hadn't got any better at being a leader.

‘I'm looking for someone.'

He pulled up the chair, awkwardly dragging his lame leg. ‘May I join you?'

She shrugged.

He sat down. ‘Did he die here?'

She shook her head. ‘Yes. My brother.'

He touched the cup and saucer. ‘I see the people who won't leave, you know. You're not the only one. Girls who can't go, want something more than what this pile of grass can give. They're like ghosts. You're turning into one of them. You should go home,' he said. ‘You have a home?'

She nodded. ‘I do.'

‘I'm sure they're missing you.' He smiled a little, a hopeful smile she recognised. ‘Can I buy you a drink, miss? Something stronger than coffee?'

She blushed, knew she shouldn't, knew she should say no to his large plain face. His hope. ‘Yes,' she said. ‘Why not?'

He took her to a door around the side of a restaurant. They climbed the stairs, listening to the noises from below. It sounded like a student trip; they were always the rowdiest.

She followed him up to a tiny room in the attic, only just big
enough for a bed, a table and a box for clothes. He had books piled up next to the table. German poetry, she saw. She felt cracked at the thought of him sitting up here at night, listening to students laughing downstairs, readying himself for more women like Mrs Wadden, who saw his weakness immediately. ‘The room smelt musty and cold.

‘I should get some wine,' he said. ‘I forgot about that.'

She sat down on the rickety chair next to the table. ‘There's no need. Really.'

But he was determined, he set off downstairs, leaving her in his room, gazing at the pile of books. When he came back, with an old-looking bottle and two glasses, she smiled at him and thought – that's what I will do, I'll smile. I'll keep smiling when he passes it to me, then I'll drink it and then listen to him talk, I'll keep smiling and listening, ignoring the shouts of the students downstairs, I'll lie back with him, let him talk, his face furrowed with worry as if I were a lost tourist, wandering around the wrong trench, then I'll lie on his bed and we'll both try to forget.

He would replace Tom in her mind, remove his imprint from her soul.

She gathered up her shawl. He was still asleep. It seemed, at the last minute, too unkind to leave before saying goodbye. She patted his hand.

He stirred. ‘You're dressed,' he said.

‘I have to go.'

‘Let's go and eat something,' he said. ‘You must be hungry. They do good eggs in the cafe downstairs, they've learnt the English taste.' He was talking too quickly.

The hope in his face was too much. She shook her head. ‘I shouldn't stay. I should go back'

‘You could stay a while. Sounds like you need a holiday.'

‘Probably not.'

He flushed awkwardly. ‘I'm—'

‘Don't worry,' she said, her face more flushed than his. The
fumbling in the dark, the pressing forwards, and then him finally –
I'm sorry, miss – Celia. It just won't
—

‘Please don't think about it,' she said. ‘It happens to everyone. Means nothing.'

He shook his head. ‘With a girl like you.'

Don't
. ‘Aren't you doing a tour today?'

‘Yes, but not until two. So we can spend the morning together. I doubt you've ever seen the view from the Lelac hill? It is very beautiful. We could go after taking something to eat.'

She looked away so she didn't have to see the light in his eyes. It wasn't as easy to forget as you thought, even in the midst of the physical thing. ‘I should go. I really think I should. My family need me.'

‘Not straight away?'

She looked at the floor. It was scratched, thin. What had a room like this even been, before the war? ‘Yes. I'll go to the hotel and collect my things.' She felt ashamed of herself for even thinking the words, but she couldn't bear him, couldn't bear the thought of gazing at him over an egg, trailing up a hill with him, trying to admire a view through the clouds.

He nodded. ‘I wouldn't like you to be alone. I will accompany you. Wait one minute.' She sat down on the single chair, averting her gaze as she heard him thumping around, pulling on clothes, splashing water. She hadn't washed.

When he was dressed, they set off down the staircase, still noisy with the voices from the cafe. He walked with her to the hotel, talking all the way. His deep voice, always trying to laugh, drove into her mind. He waited downstairs – not outside, even though she asked him to – while she packed up her trunk. She thought the manager on reception was smiling. Then Captain Evans waited with her while the hotel car came.

At the station, he shuffled his feet and talked about how the weather was improving. Then he began talking about when he might return to his family. He might come up to London, he thought. She couldn't bear to answer. There were three women
staring at them, she felt sure, listening. She knew she shouldn't care, but she did.

‘I'm fine here, really I am. You don't need to stay.'

‘I can't leave you here. It's at least twenty minutes until the train.'

She turned to him. ‘Please. I'm quite well here. You can go.'

‘I wouldn't hear of it.'

She touched his hand. ‘Really. I would prefer it.'

She saw it, watched his face sag. His big, plain, hopeful face. ‘You'd prefer it?'

She nodded, blushing. ‘I'm sorry,' she said.

Then his face darkened. ‘Sorry?'

She nodded again.

‘I don't need anyone to be sorry. Not for me. Least of all you.'

She stared at him, his scarred eye, lame leg, a few hours away from taking another group of fiancé chasers round the battlefields. She meant to say something, couldn't. She dropped her eyes.

‘Goodbye then.' She looked up, and he was turning, dragging his lame leg after him. He walked slowly, not looking back. She resisted the urge to run after him, say she was sorry. There would be no point. He'd crumple up her address, throw it away.

It took her nearly four days to get back from France. The trains had been full, then she'd been delayed at Dover – delayed by herself. She couldn't bear to go home. So she stayed there, afraid, two nights in a grimy hotel by the coast, adorned with pictures of boats and seascapes. She avoided all the glances of the men in the cafes and the hotel. She walked past the newspaper sellers, ignoring them, all the stories they'd run about Louisa still burning in her mind.

PART TWO

FIFTEEN

Stoneythorpe, May 1919

Louisa

‘We weren't expecting you yet.' The pale-haired girl hung by the door, hand clutching the edge. ‘Mrs de Witt said you were coming later.'

‘Well, here I am now.' Louisa stared back at her. She wasn't going to apologise, why should she?
I am an orphan
, she often wanted to say, to old men who pushed past her on the street, shopkeepers who turned up their noses.
You should be kind to me
. But they'd probably only turn back on her and say,
Me too!
‘Everyone's an orphan nowadays', she'd read in a ladies' magazine while waiting for one of Mrs Handley's fittings for her Stoneythorpe trousseau. ‘It is positively
chic
.' Her mother's face as she died filled Louisa's mind, that horrible stuff that looked like jelly in her mouth, holding out her bent, skeletal hand, the blackened nails, begging people to touch her, kiss the cheek that smelt like rotten leaves. Louisa wanted to seize up the magazine, the photographs of the pretty ladies in hats gazing out to sea over the sides of boats, the articles about lipstick, and dash them all to the ground.

‘They've all gone to town to buy presents for you. But you're here now.' The girl's accent was terribly thick – and unbearably slow. She sounded to Louisa more like a farm girl than anything else. She supposed Aunt Verena must be stuck for servants. Although Mama had often said that her sister always had a talent for hunting out the most slatternly and cheeky maids available – and appointing them. ‘Verena couldn't even manage her doll's house as a child,' she'd say, crossly. ‘Even that was a mess.'

‘I left my boxes at the bottom of the drive,' said Louisa, deciding that the girl wasn't going to ask after them. ‘The driver wouldn't bring me any further.'

The girl sighed loudly. ‘I'll send Thompson for them. Come in, then.'

Mind you, Louisa admitted to herself, as the girl leant back and pushed open the door into the handsome marble hall (cleaner than it had been the last time she'd visited), Mama might have been wrong. The front of Stoneythorpe was untidy with ivy, the gardens overgrown and full of weeds, but it looked solid and beautiful, still here, not empty like their home; at least it still had a
purpose
. Mama had been wrong about quite a few things, after all – not just servants and girls, but what Matthew wanted, the war, how Britain would be stronger after it was all over. Most of all, she'd been wrong about herself; declaring she'd be fine to go to visit that hospital, where all the men were ill, saying she'd be quite well and you only got diseases if you were weak or afraid and she wasn't anything of the kind. Three weeks later, there she was, coughing, a purple tinge gathering around her mouth and the skin of her eyes, her skin hot, hot, hot, no matter how much they sponged her forehead, brushed back her hair. Louisa stared at the maid's back and realised her eyes were welling up. She lifted her hand to wipe away the tears, felt them fall harder. She leant against the wall, let the dust of it coat her hands. The image of her mother flowed up in front of her; the last time they'd been at Stoneythorpe, that dismal afternoon of Michael's funeral when Celia and Verena were barely able to speak.