The Last Summer (19 page)

Three weeks after my father’s death, late one evening, we received a telegram. Mama read it out. And for an indeterminable time everything stopped, and I was there and not there.

Then I screamed.

A scream so loud it shattered and splintered into a dreadful chorus that rattled and shook my brain and bones and cells and soul. I grabbed the telegram from Mama’s hand, threw it on the fire, ran out of the room into the hallway, and then outside, into the square; and I continued running, zigzagging down streets, through mews, on and on, as though I could escape from that moment; escape my brother’s death and run back through time.

Eventually, I stopped running. I stood in the darkness on a street corner and looked up at the sky. It’s a mistake, I whispered; it’s mistaken identity.
Mistaken identity . . . identity mistaken . . . not George . . . would never let himself get killed . . . professional soldier . . . mistake.
Then, shivering, my head pounding, numb with shock and the cold night air, I turned and began to walk home.

When Mama led me upstairs, holding on to my hand, she said to me, ‘We have to be strong . . . we have to be brave; we have to be heroic, like George and William.’

Oh yes, Mama, they’re all heroes . . . they’re dying by the thousand to be heroes.

She made me take a pill, told me it would help me sleep, calm me. But I didn’t need a pill, for there was nothing left in me; no sound to make, nothing to say.

The telegram I’d destroyed had informed us that George had been badly wounded at Flers-Courcelette, and that he’d been taken to a casualty clearing station, where he’d died from his wounds, hours later, on September the seventeenth. George had died exactly ten days after Papa’s death, and I wondered if he’d known, and I hoped he had not. Mama had of course written to both him and Henry, but she’d refused to send either of them a telegram and had delayed her letters to each of them until after Papa’s funeral.

Still in the depths of a very private grief, my mother was plunged further. And though she’d spoken of bravery and strength, it was then, immediately after this unspeakably cruel coincidence, that I saw her character momentarily crumble. For days after we learned of George’s death she remained within her room, in her bed, unable to speak, unable to eat, unable to cry. In the space of twenty-four months she’d lost two of her sons, her husband, and her home.

Unlike Will, George was returned to us. Mama arranged for
his body to be collected from Waterloo station and taken to a nearby undertaker. On the evening of his return she finally rose from her bed. She asked me to accompany her to the chapel of rest, but I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing George, dead, so I waited in the motor car while she went inside. When she finally emerged from the building and stepped back inside the car, she looked even more fragile, and unspeakably pale. I took hold of her hand, and she turned to me and smiled.

‘He’s at peace now,’ she said. ‘He’s with William, and Papa.’

The following morning we returned to the chapel of rest, and I watched as my brother’s coffin was carefully placed inside the hearse, our wreath of white lilies laid on top. Mama had been adamant that we should accompany him, that he should have every honour befitting a beloved son, a fallen hero. She’d shuddered when the undertaker had visited us and spoken about train times to Guildford and onward connections. ‘I shall take him,’ she’d said, as though she planned on driving him there herself.

We followed the hearse slowly and in silence through soot-blackened streets, through the wide leafy avenues of newly built suburbs, and then out on to the meandering country lanes. It had rained heavily overnight and the roads were awash with mud, fallen branches and debris from the fields and hedgerows. A few miles from the churchyard, where the road forks in two and the postbox stands on a grassy triangle, there had been a landslide, forcing us to take a different route: the road past the entrance to Deyning. And I remember thinking, it’s meant to be, we have to take George this way. And as we came round the bend in the road, over the brow of the hill, I could see the chimneys, the rooftops in the distance.

I said, ‘There it is, Mama, there’s Deyning.’ But she didn’t look. And even as we passed by the white gate she didn’t turn her head.

At the church there were a few of the staff from the house,
including Mrs Cuthbert, Mr Broughton and some of the servants from London. Mabel and Edna – both now employed at a factory near Croydon – Stephens and Wilson, Venetia, Aunt Maude and a handful of Mama’s friends made up the small gathering of mourners. Inside the tiny church, we prayed for George’s soul. We prayed for peace. And we sang. We followed the coffin out of the church, down the muddy pathway towards the mausoleum. And there, I watched my brother’s journey end. Weeks away from his twenty-first birthday, his life was over.

. . . ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ . . .

I felt my eyes sting, my lip begin to quiver. I turned to Mama, standing next to me. She held her gloved hands firmly in front of her, her heavy black veil concealing any private agony. I heard the iron door close. I glanced over at Maude, who looked to Mama and then moved towards her. I bit my lip, clutched on to my purse. And as I closed my eyes I heard myself whisper my brother’s name:
Georgie
.

A few days later a brown paper parcel containing my brother’s uniform arrived at our home in London. I unpacked it myself, in the hallway. It stank, was stiff with mud and blood: George’s blood. I stood holding it, looking at it, unsure of what to do with it. It wasn’t until Mrs Watson appeared and placed her arms around me that I realised I was crying.

‘But what will you do with it?’ I asked, as she tried to take it from me.

‘It’ll have to be burned, miss . . . you can’t keep something like that, now can you? And if you ask me, it’s not right it’s been sent back here, not right at all.’ She pulled the last remnants of George from my hands. ‘Should never have been sent here,’ she repeated. ‘I’ll get Mr Dunne to deal with it. Now don’t you worry . . . you go upstairs and Mrs Watson’ll bring you a nice cup of tea.’

I saw them do it. Saw them burn it, in the garden outside. I watched from my bedroom window. George’s blood, posted back to us for old times’ sake, rose up in a plume of dark grey smoke and disappeared into the London dusk. And Mama knew nothing about it.

In the weeks that followed, ever mindful of her own decorum, my mother struggled to regain her former equilibrium, but she appeared unsure of herself and, I suppose, of the events taking place around her – over which she had no control. She became needy of me, reluctant to leave the house, and she fretted endlessly about Henry, the last of her boys. Her boys: her three boys, now one. Looking back, I realise it was also around this time that she began to worry about money.

I comforted myself with the knowledge that George, a born soldier, had died as he would have wished: in battle, fighting for his country. Unlike Will, and a professional soldier, George had never had any doubt about his duty; never been tortured by any moral dilemma about the notion of war or, it seemed, of killing men. I remembered the debates my brothers had had in those tense days immediately before war was declared. George had been resolute, uncompromising in his views, whilst Will had prevaricated, and Henry been somewhat flippant.

Without Papa, and with Henry away, I had to be strong. I heard my father’s voice in my head: ‘You must be strong, Clarissa . . . stay strong for your mama.’ And so for a number of weeks, perhaps even months, I ran my mother’s home. I dealt with the servants, handled the accounts and tried to keep the place looking as it always had. I wrote to friends and family, and I wrote to Henry, informing him of George’s death. I mourned my brother, cried in private, and I wondered not if, but when another telegram would arrive. What then would we do?

The intoxication of youth, snuffed out, extinguished in a matter of months, left in its place only a numbing sobriety. For
too many young souls had already been sacrificed, too many lives shattered. And to those of us left standing, impotent, on the sideline, with splintered hearts and broken dreams, light had all but vanished from our lives. No matter what happened in the future, things could not be undone. George and William, and thousands upon thousands of other young men would never be coming home. None of us could return to that briefest of moments before the war, when the heady anticipation of a life unfulfilled lay before us. It had gone for ever.

Each day I had studied the casualty list published in the newspaper, running my finger down it, quietly saying the names out loud and all the time silently pleading with God for there not to be a Granville, a Boyd or a Cuthbert on the list. But after George’s death I stopped looking. I no longer wished to see that ever-growing list of names. I even suggested to Mama that we cancel our daily newspaper delivery. But she was insistent upon following events. As long as Henry and others she knew were out there in the trenches, she could not abandon her vigil.

Like me, the newspaper editors appeared to be growing demoralised and losing their patriotic fervour. They were preoccupied by the country’s grievances, and the outcry against the food shortage seemed to outweigh the outcry against the guns and munitions shortage. A ‘Food Controller’ was hastily appointed by the government, but with German submarines increasing in number almost daily, there was little for him to control. There were complaints, too, that too many shirkers had evaded the ‘call-up’, that Mr Asquith and his government had not been forceful enough, and the whole country seemed to be in an angry, malevolent mood.

Night raids had become more frequent. The maroons sounded and I’d head down the four flights of stairs, from plain carpet to patterned carpet to marble and then, finally, to the linoleum of the cellar steps, along with Mama, Mrs Watson, Mr Dunne,
and whomever else was in the house at that time. There, we’d all sit around an old pine table, trying to play cards by candlelight, once or twice to a juddering vibration, and the tinkling of the chandelier in the hallway above us. I’d watch Mama fix her gaze upon the ceiling, concentrating, willing the monstrous thing not to fall. But I can’t recall any hysteria or melodramatic outburst. When the all-clear eventually sounded, there was never a rush, never an immediate departure back up the linoleum-covered steps. We’d all invariably sigh, sit in silence for a few minutes, then, slowly, collect ourselves and begin the move back upstairs by candlelight: Mama to her Chippendale Chinoiserie and hand-painted silk walls; me to my rosebuds.

Mama continued going to church and, though I usually accompanied her, I’d begun to feel ambivalent about a god who presided over so much death and destruction. I no longer wished to take Holy Communion, though I did, simply to keep Mama happy. The body and the blood of Christ: what did it mean any more? I mimed the words of hymns;
all things bright and beautiful
and England’s
green and pleasant land
no longer resonated with the times. And I found myself questioning the words of our prayers.
He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die
. But there could be no resurrection, I thought; no bugle would ever herald
their
return. The dead were dead and would never be coming home. They lay buried in the blood-red mud of another country for all eternity. How serene could peace be after this? How sweet would any victory be?

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil . . .

The valley of the shadow of death . . . it seemed to me a fittingly concise description of our country. For though we weren’t living in those squalid trenches, though we weren’t facing that endless juddering barrage, we were living through a
time of extraordinary darkness, when life seemed only to be about death.

I had heard nothing from Tom, nothing at all, but Mama had been kind enough to tell me that Mrs Cuthbert was well, and still at Deyning. Then, one evening, as we sat playing piquet, she said, ‘I hear Tom Cuthbert’s an officer now . . . a captain. He was mentioned in despatches . . .’

And there he was again.

I imagine she thought it safe to mention him, now that I was engaged to be married. Both she and Papa had been delighted by my engagement. She’d told me that I’d made my father very proud, and happy; that it was the one good piece of news in years.

‘Oh really? I replied, without looking up.

‘I know you quite liked him, Clarissa. I know you and he had a . . . a friendship,’ she continued, arranging the cards in her hand, ‘but it could never have worked, never. You must realise that by now,’ she added.

I glanced up from my cards. For a moment I contemplated saying something; telling her that I hadn’t
liked
him, I’d loved him, and always would; that it wasn’t a friendship, it was a love affair. But then I thought better of it. After all, she’d been through so much.

I looked back at my cards. ‘Mrs Cuthbert must be very proud of him,’ I said.

‘I’m sure. He was a nice enough chap. Your father always said that, had a great deal of time for him.’

I looked up at her. ‘Yes, I think he rather liked him.’

She smiled, closed her eyes for a moment. ‘I’m sure he did, but he was a servant, dear. I don’t suppose your father would have liked the idea of him as your suitor.’

‘He was not a servant, Mama. He was studying, studying law . . . and he may yet end up practising it.’