The History Room (9 page)

‘Can I have a word?’

She turned round from the fridge. ‘Hang on.’
Two litres semi-skim,
she wrote on the notepad. ‘If I don’t get this down on paper this second I’ll forget where
I was.’ She shut the pad. ‘Was it about the oven? It’s working fine since the electrician came out. Turns out the circuit was overloaded.’

‘It wasn’t the oven. It was the pretend baby in the cupboard: the reborn doll.’

‘Oh.’ The word gave nothing away.

‘I wanted to ask you about the gown it was wearing.’

She looked down at the pad.

‘Only someone took it out of the drama department. That’s locked up at night. And when there aren’t lessons going on up there.’

‘That second-year kid.’ She shook her head, as though reproaching herself for her carelessness. ‘Olivia what’s-her-name. She’s got sharp eyes.’

I said nothing.

‘I only borrowed the clothes over a weekend.’ She sounded defensive now. ‘My sister’s baby was christened a week last Sunday and she didn’t have anything to put him
in. I washed and ironed the gown and the cap when we’d finished. Even spray-starched them too.’

‘So you brought the clothes back in here?’

‘So I could sneak – I mean take – them back to the drama department later on.’

‘But that didn’t happen?’

She looked at me, eyes cold. ‘Someone nicked them from my bag while I was doing lunches.’

‘When?’

‘The day before they found that doll in the cupboard. Must have been the Tuesday. I noticed that the clothes were missing. I just thought I’d forgotten to put them in my basket after
all. Went home and checked. But they weren’t there. So I knew they’d been taken from the kitchen. Thought it was one of the kids, mucking around.’

‘Did you see anyone come into the kitchen while you were working?’

She shook her head. ‘But you’ve seen what it’s like in here when we’re cooking and serving up. Crazy. The Queen could wander in here and help herself to a banana and I
wouldn’t notice her. Teachers come in to pinch bits of fruit or yoghurts. Kids, too.’ She walked to the sink. A dishcloth was soaking. She wrung it out and hung it over the taps,
arranging it so that the ends were neatly lined up. Watching her tidy the kitchen was soothing. It made me remember being a small child again and sitting in the kitchen in our apartment with my
mother, drawing on scraps of paper while she cooked supper. I ought to tell Tracey off for taking the clothes without asking first. I should ask more questions but I couldn’t be bothered.

‘You’ve had a bit of a time of it, haven’t you?’ she said.

It wasn’t a question. For a second emotion threatened to overcome me. I swallowed hard. It was impossible to interpret Tracey’s tone. She might have been expressing concern or even
mild surprise.

‘Yes,’ I muttered after a pause. ‘It hasn’t been easy.’

She fiddled with the detergent bottles for a moment, giving me time, perhaps. ‘I’m sorry about taking the robe and cap without asking. I just thought the drama department would say
no. And the baby looked really sweet in them.’

‘I bet he did. Don’t worry.’ What did it matter?

She looked down at the white plastic mules she wore in the kitchen. ‘It’s not the same without her.’

I didn’t have to ask whom she meant. ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s not.’

‘Sometimes when I’m planning new menus I want to ask her what she thinks. Susan always encouraged me with my ideas.’ She gave me a little glance as she called my mother by her
first name, as though afraid she’d overstepped the mark.

We stood there in the kitchen for a moment, saying nothing. Then I muttered a farewell and walked back through the main door, dodging the crowds of children heading to their second period, some
dawdling, some bustling, all seeming far more purposeful and self-assured than I’d ever been at that age.

I’d never been a pupil here myself. Dad had thought it wiser for Clara and me to go to a girls’ day school in Oxford when we’d finished at the village primary. When the other
girls found out where our parents lived they were incredulous. ‘Your Dad’s head of Letchford but you don’t go to school there? Why not?’ Sometimes I’d resented the
fact that pupils my age would be lolling around on the sunny lawns or floating petals in the fountain at lunchtime while I’d been banished. But Dad had probably been right. School and home
were best kept separate.

Letchford was starting to feel less like my home now, though. Something had been taken from me when my mother had died last August. I glanced up at the golden stones of the building, seeking
reassurance; the reassurance that came from living and working around a house so many hundreds of years old, where people had received bad blows and carried on. How many times had messengers come
to the door to pass on news of a soldier husband or son’s death in battle? The family had taken the news, mourned quietly, and then carried on with life. But I didn’t feel any strength
emanating from the house this morning, though the sun had burst through the clouds, and the walls and remaining leaves on the trees around the grounds were gilded. Again I brushed against the
rosemary and this time the scent mixed with something bitter in my stomach; longing for my husband, the anxiety I’d felt ever since he’d first gone off to fight. Iraq first and now
Afghanistan. You marry a soldier, you know there’s always a chance they’ll be blown up, shot at, kidnapped, tortured. That they’ll come back maimed and hurt. I’d known all
that.

For the rest of the morning I stood in classrooms teaching like an automaton, feeling the attention of the children ebbing around me. From time to time I’d give myself a mental kick and
manage to regain their attention. At lunchtime I slouched back towards my apartment, not wanting to face the others in the staffroom.

As I crossed the front lawn two boys dressed in cadet force uniforms walked past me. On their way to some drill session. The sight of them made my stomach curdle. Originally Dad hadn’t
been keen on the idea of a cadet corps at Letchford. It had taken some years of pressure from parents before he’d agreed. I watched the two fresh-faced lads as they strolled away.

It’s bad when two of them come to the house. They don’t ring, they come by car and they knock on the door. A man and a woman: a casualty notification officer, I think, and another
officer of some kind, I forget the exact rank or title. But it’s obvious why they’ve come even before they open their mouths. And even if you’ve prepared yourself a thousand times
for the moment, told yourself it could happen, told yourself not to be complacent, you want to scream that they’ve made a mistake, got the wrong Hugh Cordingley. And yet you know that they
haven’t, that it’s your Hugh Cordingley. This is real.

I was putting my marking and lesson plans into my bag and trying to find my bicycle padlock. I’d left the radio on in the kitchen and kept meaning to go and turn it off. In the meantime, I
hummed along to some silly little song whose name I never knew but which I could never listen to again. Fate waits until you’re not concentrating, until you’ve looked away. Sometimes,
when it’s really bad, I almost imagine that Hugh was blown up because I wasn’t paying attention, wasn’t keeping him safe in my mind.

After they’ve told you, they do the tea bit and ask if they can ring someone for you. They called Mum. She was with me in Wiltshire in just over an hour. But they waited there with us. I
kept on thinking that I’d have to remember how kind they’d been so I could tell Hugh. He always liked to know these things. They kept explaining the arrangements. Everything was being
done for my husband, I wasn’t to worry on that score. They’d keep me posted. The team that had rescued him had been on an emergency course in an A & E department. They’d known
what to do. He’d been stabilized at Camp Bastion. He’d be on a plane back to England within hours. Please be reassured, Mrs Cordingley – may we call you Meredith?

And then Mum arrived and I sank into her and there were more people in the room, kind women, wives of other servicemen in Afghanistan, and they were in the background just
doing
things:
taking the dog for a walk, making calls to the head of my school, putting the kettle on again and again. It had happened enough times before by then, the bad news from Afghanistan. I’d even
been one of the comforters myself on a few occasions. I’d never belonged to the base in the same way as non-working wives. Each morning I’d cycled off to teach at a school in the town,
so I hadn’t attended all the coffee mornings, the charity functions, the mother and toddler sessions. But still I’d been a part of the community.

And Clara came down to the camp, too. God knows how she’d managed to get time off and find someone to look after the children for her at such short notice, but she came to be with me.
While we waited for the arrangements to be made we sat in the little sitting room. All I could see was the threaded silk on the sofa cushion I held on my lap. I kept my eyes on those threads,
knowing that if I lifted my eyes up the world would crash in on me and I’d be lost. Hugh was hurt. Hugh was damaged. Hugh had lost a leg. I repeated the words over and over, trying to make
sense of them. Every now and then I’d jump up and pace the small sitting room. Samson would spring up from his usual station on one of the rugs Hugh had brought home on his last leave. Poor
dog, he thought my pacings were the cue for a walk. Then I’d disappoint him by flopping down again and returning to my contemplation of the sofa cushions.

I did have to lift my eyes up eventually. Clara and I drove to Birmingham at the same time as the Globemaster plane from Kandahar airport was landing. At Selly Oak hospital I held Hugh’s
hand and looked at his face again. His eyes were closed, he wasn’t conscious. I kept thinking he’d open them up and grin at me, but he didn’t. I wanted to shake him, shout at him
to wake up. Clara asked all the questions I wasn’t able to articulate. She had lists of telephone numbers and emails. She booked me into a B. & B. nearby.

I would have stayed by his bed all round the clock but they wouldn’t let me.

It took a week before he came back to us. ‘Stay back!’ he’d shouted at me when I received the call that he’d regained consciousness and went to see him in the critical
care unit. ‘It’s not safe, get back.’ Then his eyes had registered horror. ‘Where are the rest of them? Where are they?’

I knew he was asking about his men, the men he’d loved. I didn’t know how to tell him. I didn’t know when he’d start to remember. Or whether to pray that he never
did.

Meredith

But I woke happy, those autumn mornings at Letchford. Or, if not happy, at least content. Sunlight dappled my wall. Birds sang. I couldn’t recall why a heavy grey object
hovered just beyond my consciousness. Then I’d remember. My husband was still in terrible pain. I couldn’t help him. The space in the bed beside me would probably always be empty. My
mother would never again wave to me across the staffroom or push a bowl of raspberries from the garden into my hand.

Today I told myself I’d block the return of memory. I’d feel light,
full of energy. Here I was, not yet thirty, healthy, in good work, in pleasant accommodation, blessed with a supportive sister. And father, I made myself add. Though the relationship between my
father and myself was shifting. More and more I found myself watching out for him in assembly, noticing that his hands sometimes shook as he read from the match reports, that sometimes his glasses
had smears on them, or a button was loose on his jacket.

I tried springing out of bed to outpace sorrow. I dashed Samson round his morning walk as though grief were nipping my heels. The dog threw puzzled looks at me and quickened his pace to keep up,
eyeing unsniffed blades of grass with regret. I ate a breakfast consisting of a roughly cut slice of bread and a glass of orange juice. No time to make coffee. I retuned the radio to the breeziest
and most vapid local station I could find and turned up the volume. I showered and washed my hair rapidly, without care. I needed to be in the classroom, in front of the students. They
wouldn’t allow me a second for self-pity.
Come and get me if you want me
, I told the grey mass.

Last night I’d dreamed I was running down a corridor lined with doors. Classrooms, I thought, at first. It was my first day at a new school and I was running late. I’d thought
I’d be teaching English but they told me I had to take physics, a subject I was not qualified to teach and had hated at school. I was given the number of a classroom and told to hurry, the
children were waiting. As I ran along the corridor I realized the classroom doors were smooth grey metal, without windows, cold and hygienic in appearance.

I was in a morgue. There’d been a terrible mistake; Hugh wasn’t dead, it was my mother who’d died, but the bodies had been switched. If I didn’t find him in time they
were going to bury my husband alive. Sweat beaded my brow. I wrenched open door after door to find Hugh. Each room was empty, except for the very last, where a young girl in a short purple
tunic-style dress stood.

‘He’s not dead.’ I tried to explain how I knew this. ‘Please tell me where he is so I can save him.’

She looked unconvinced. ‘If he’s not dead, why aren’t you at his bedside?’

I couldn’t explain that my husband had sent me away, that I hadn’t been any use to him.

‘You let him go, didn’t you?’ She looked scornful.

‘I didn’t mean to.’

‘Why did you let them cover me up again?’ she asked. ‘I liked people looking at me again.’

I didn’t know what she meant.

And I’d woken up, lying back against the pillows and listening to the birdsong, relieved.

I walked into the main hall on my way to lessons and saw Emily in front of the mural. She’d tied up her long hair today and it hung in a tight, low ponytail. Her face was free of any kind
of make-up. Once again I admired her white porcelain skin. She was scrutinizing the plaster repainted during the restoration. One of her fingers traced the image of my mother as a young woman. My
parents were proud of how my father had managed to restore her so that she looked exactly as she had done before she’d been scraped off, but Emily seemed to be looking for signs of what was
underneath. ‘She’s beautifully done, isn’t she?’ I felt the note of challenge in my tone.