The Foreshadowing (2 page)

Now he looked up from his paper for the first time, to fix his eyes on Tom.

“And where’s that blasted girl?” he went on, meaning Molly, our maid. “Don’t we pay her enough to do that?”

Tom ignored him and carried the plates out to the kitchen.

“No harm will come to the strong,” Father said. “The brave.”

He started to read the casualty lists again. I don’t know why he has to do it. He spends all day with the sick and the dying in the hospital.

“Where is Molly?” Father snapped.

“Cook’s away and Molly’s busy,” said Mother.

“Alexandra,” Father sighed. “Help your brother.”

I jumped up and tried to lend a hand, but I could only think about George. He had been at the front; he had been killed. That was not unusual, not anymore. But I had dreamt that it had happened, the night
before
news of it had reached us.

Was that possible?

Over the following days I tried not to dwell on it.

I continued my studies during the day with Miss Garrett and in the evenings I sat with Mother. She’s always busy organizing her circle of friends, as well as running the house, and Cook, and Molly, who’s sweet, but scatterbrained.

I tried again to persuade Father to let me help around the wards, but still he refused. He says it’s not fitting for a girl like me, and once his mind is made up, it usually stays that way.

Although I tried to forget George, I couldn’t. Images of his death came to me; I don’t know where from. One morning I was sitting at my mirror, brushing my hair and thinking how long it was getting, when into my head came a picture of George’s mother reading the telegram that gave her the news. I saw George caught on the wire, the barbed wire of the no-man’s-land between our trenches and the enemy’s. But that may have been my imagination. I don’t know how he died.

I was frightened, but the days passed and I told myself it was a coincidence. Thousands of men are being killed in France each week, and the fact that I dreamt about the death of one of them could be nothing more than chance. I even wondered whether I might have already heard about George’s death and not taken it in. Maybe it had already been posted in the lists and Father had missed it. It seemed unlikely, but I clung to this explanation until time allowed me to put it to one corner of my mind, if not to forget about it entirely.

But after what happened yesterday, I can no longer pretend it is my imagination.

Mother and I were walking down Middle Street. We passed the Hippodrome, where I used to love to go to see the circus when I was little. I dawdled outside, remembering a silly act we’d seen there once featuring Dinky, the high-diving dog. Mother pulled my hand.

“Come on, Sasha,” she said. Sometimes she still uses my pet name, as though I’m her little Russian princess.

The sea was in front of us. It’s late October, and there was a grim gray sky above us. Waves were being whipped against the seawall by fierce winds. As so often, the town was full of soldiers; a mass of khaki uniforms.

We would have walked up to the hospital to see Father, but it looked as if it might start to rain any moment. People scurried past us; a horse and empty cart hurried for home, its driver glancing nervously at the sky.

“We’ll take the tram,” Mother said, so we turned and cut through to the Old Steine, to the stop outside Marlborough House.

There was a long queue. Everything was perfectly ordinary as we waited for the tram. When it arrived the ladies jostled a little to be first on, but in a good-tempered way.

Mother looked at the gathering clouds.

“Come on,” she said, taking my hand.

“No,” I said.

She glanced round at me, surprised.

“Don’t play games, Alexandra, I’m cold and it’s about to rain.”

“I’m not,” I said.

I didn’t know what was wrong.

I just knew I didn’t want to be on the tram. That I
mustn’t
be on it.

A soldier waiting behind us was impatient.

“Come on, darling,” he said, “get a move on.”

But I didn’t move.

I could see Mother was embarrassed. The soldier pushed past, bumping into me as he got onto the tram. He spun round on the step. I stared straight into his eyes.

“Sorry, gorgeous, can’t hang about,” he said. There was a cheeky smile on his lips, but as he looked at me, the smile lost its life, and died on his face.

I
knew
he was going to die. I don’t know what else I can say. I saw it. Not in France, not in the war, but soon. Here.

“Are you feeling all right?” Mother said, not cross now, thinking I was unwell.

“I don’t want to go on the tram.”

“Sasha . . . ,” Mother began, and then stopped. She sighed.

People pushed onto the tram, but the soldier stood on the step, still looking at me. Mother saw him, and I think it was that, and no other reason, that made her let me have my way. I knew what she thought about “rough” men.

“We’ll walk,” she said, and the tram moved off.

As it went, the soldier was still staring at me.

I watched it go. Mother tugged at my arm, impatiently, but I couldn’t move. It was as though I was rooted to the spot. It all happened very slowly then. But somehow very quickly too. The tram got up to speed and rumbled away toward Grand Parade.

The rain began to lash down then, very suddenly.

A wheel lifted from the tracks somehow, on a point, maybe. The tram came off the rails and lay down on one side with a tremendous crash. It hit a wall and there was a shower of sparks and rubble.

I was aware of noise all around us. The noise of the tram hitting the wall seemed to take the longest time to reach us, and to be the quietest sound. The sound of screaming was the loudest.

Mother finally dragged me away. Last night, before I went to bed, I asked her why we had left, and she told me that there was nothing we could have done. That lots of people, too many, perhaps, had immediately swarmed around the tram to help others off. The police had arrived, and ambulance cars took the injured to the Royal Sussex, where Father used to work until he was put in charge of the Dyke Road hospital. I still feel I should have done something. I should have helped.

This morning I read in the paper that most people in the accident had not been too badly hurt, but that one man had been killed.

A soldier.

Thinking back to yesterday, I remember feeling one emotion from my mother. Fear. But not fear of the accident.

Although she doesn’t know that I have remembered, I know what she’s thinking about. She’s thinking about a day long ago, when I was five.

99

War. That’s all there seems to be.

It’s all around us. Nothing is unaffected by it, no one is immune. Everyone has suffered, everyone has lost someone, or at least knows someone who has. There seems to be little else in the newspapers, little that anyone talks about.

It is over a year now since the war began, but it seems no time at all since I sat listening to my brothers arguing about it, and with Father, too. I was sixteen then, and not supposed to have an opinion. But I sat and listened, in the corner of the room, while they talked. It may have been the actual day we declared war on Germany.

Edgar and Father were very excited, Tom was quiet.

“You don’t want to enlist in the ranks,” Father said to Edgar. “You can take a commission. With your OTC experience you’ll be snapped up.”

“It would have been better if I was a regular already,” Edgar said. “It’ll all be over before I get there. By the time I get a commission and hang around on a parade ground for months, it’ll all be over.”

“Then better you don’t delay. Move quickly and you’ll get your share of the glory.”

I was listening to Father, but I was watching Tom. Edgar and Father stood by the dining room table, poring over the morning’s
Times.

Tom was gazing out at the sea lapping way beyond the West Pier, his thin frame silhouetted by a bright summer’s sun outside. It made me think as I often did that it was hard to imagine my two brothers were related. Edgar’s so much bigger, and stronger. He never seems to worry about things, he just does them, whereas Tom worries about everything and everyone. I’m told that once, when I was little, I was crying about a dead bird in the garden, and he put his arm round me and told me that animals go to heaven too. I don’t suppose that’s true, but he wanted to make me happy. That’s how much he worries about people.

Father turned to him.

“Never mind, Tom,” he said. He meant because Tom was still only seventeen, and too young to enlist for almost another year. “You can still go to Officer Training Corps and then you’ll be ready. Maybe the war will still be on.”

“Father!” Edgar exclaimed. “Don’t talk nonsense. That’s the sort of rot the pacifists spout.”

Father didn’t like being spoken to like that, not even by Edgar.

“Edgar,” he said, tersely. “I am simply trying to keep Tom’s chin up. It’s a shame for him to miss out when you’ll be away fighting.”

Edgar glanced at Tom.

“He wouldn’t go anyway,” he snarled. “He’s only too glad he’s too young.”

“What do you mean?” Father said.

“Just what I say.”

“That’s an unkind—” Father began, but Tom interrupted him.

“It’s true,” he said.

That stopped us all for a moment. It was the first time he’d spoken.

“What?” Father spluttered. “You’re not falling for all this Socialist nonsense, are you? I won’t have a pacifist in my house!”

“No, Father,” Tom said. I could see he was scared of Father. “No,” he said. “I’m not a pacifist. But I don’t want to fight.”

Father tried to interrupt, but Tom was brave enough to keep talking.

“I want to train to be a doctor,” he said. “Like you.”

What could Father say to that? He calmed down a bit.

“That’s a good thing, Thomas,” he said. “A good thing. But there’s a war on now. If the occasion arises for you to do your bit, then you must! You will go and fight.”

He seemed to think that was an end to the matter, but I, for some unknown reason, decided to speak.

“Why should he go and fight,” I said, “if he doesn’t want to?”

Edgar turned on me.

“Stupid girl! You don’t understand anything about it. Don’t interfere.”

I wasn’t surprised. Edgar says things like that to me. If he says anything to me at all, that is, these days.

I could feel my face flushing red.

“I only let you stay here because I expect you not to speak,” Father said. “You don’t understand these matters. That’s all there is to it.”

He sent me to my room. Tom forced a smile as I went, but I could hear their row go on as I went upstairs.

I shut myself away, and stared out to sea. I suppose I should have been hurt by Edgar, and Father, but I’m used to their ways. That’s just how Father is, with everyone in the house. Not just me. Mother, too. I wonder sometimes what she was like when they got married, but I can’t picture her. I only know her as she is now, at Father’s beck and call. But I know he loves us, really. I know he does. And Edgar, well, it’s simply that it’s not that long since we were children, and we had fun sometimes. It’s just sad it’s not like that anymore. We’ve all crossed a line; it has to happen sooner or later. Even Tom and me. I know I’ll never be as close to him as when we were children, however much I try.

I could half see my reflection on the glass, and half the world outside. Across the waves, not so very far, I could imagine France. Everyone I knew was excited about the war, everyone in town, and we heard later there had been mass celebrations in London, in Trafalgar Square.

I looked across the water to France, and felt like the only person in the world who thought the war was a bad thing. That only bad things would come of it.

98