The Storms of War (43 page)

Sometimes she even wished for Jonathan. He at least thought she was brave, clever, strong. She had written back to him only once, with the news that the house was now a hospital. She’d told him that they were all well, and that she’d tell no one about what he’d said. She couldn’t think what else to write. When she thought about that night, her mind snagged around it: her offering herself to him, his proposal of marriage. She had decided that he’d done it because he felt sorry for her. He had done it out of pity, and that made her shrink from the thought of him.

‘Celia, stop looking into space. Come and see this patient. The girls are making up a bed for him. He’s waiting down there.’ Jennie pointed at the marble benches. Celia could see the scattering of men moving around in blue pyjamas and gowns. One man was sitting on a bench alone, his head in his hands.

‘Let’s go then.’ She followed Jennie down the stairs. As they walked, she thought she saw the man’s head move slightly. His
hand touched his ear. She strode towards him. She knew before he raised his head.

‘Tom,’ she said, standing in front of him. She didn’t have to turn around to know that Jennie had gone. ‘Tom. It’s me, Celia.’

He looked up. His eyes were scarred, the eyelids thick with lotion, his face flushed with patches of red from burns. There was grey in his hair. His head and arm were bandaged.

‘They told me I was just coming to a country house. I never thought in a million years it would be here. I suppose it makes sense, though. Near my mother.’

She charged on, wanting to keep Mrs Cotton from her mind. ‘We persuaded Mama to give it up. It was right, don’t you think?’ If he moved up, she could sit down beside him. But he did not, and she could not find the courage to ask.

‘You’ve changed it a lot.’

‘It’s a hospital now. I hope Papa would approve. I wrote to you that he was taken away, but I don’t know if you got my letter.’

‘No. Michael told me anyway. It was a shock.’ His face darkened.

‘You didn’t receive my letters? I sent some to your mother. I don’t suppose I really expected her to send them on.’ The soldiers ambled around them, limping on crutches, clutching bandaged heads. She saw them out of the corner of her eye, silently begging them not to stop and ask for tea or help with medicine. She hoped Tom would not ask how many letters exactly. She had written so many hundreds in her head, but in the end not even a dozen on paper.

‘Perhaps she did. Letters went missing. Have you heard from your father recently?’

‘We never do. We have to think that it’s a good sign. He’s still alive. What has happened to your eyes?’

‘I went out again after the last place. Passchendaele. It was hell. More men died in mud than were shot by the Germans, if you ask me. A grenade splintered up into my eyes. I keep them closed most of the time. Some of it went into my head too. I think they want to watch me to see it doesn’t move around too much in there.’

‘Are you in much pain?’ she said. How weak her words sounded.

‘Sometimes I forget it.’

‘Have they given you something?’ She stood there, still willing him to ask her to sit down.

‘I don’t want anything. I want to feel it. I hate seeing the rows of medicated men. We might as well be dead animals.’ He dropped his head back into his hands.

‘I’ll find out about your bed,’ she said, for something to do.

She hurried down the hall, pushing her way through the men, burst into the office. ‘When will Tom Cotton’s bed be ready?’ she demanded. Matron looked up from her papers, one eyebrow raised. ‘If he has just arrived, two hours, like everyone else.’

She slammed the door and hurried back. ‘Let’s go outside,’ she said to him. She could not bear to see him sitting for another minute. He got slowly to his feet. She linked her arm through his unbandaged one. She tried to imagine him as one of the other soldiers, with whom the touch of skin meant nothing at all. But the thought that his bare arm lay under the sleeve was almost painful. They walked through the door.

Outside, she felt the sun pool on her face. She gripped his arm more tightly. ‘I’ve been thinking a lot about you,’ she said. ‘I’ve missed you.’ Jonathan burned through her mind, her pleasure with him at the restaurant. She pushed him away.

‘I don’t know what I have been thinking about. War, I suppose.’ The grenade splintering up into his face, breaking into his eyes. He must have screamed terribly in the ambulance, she thought, hoping they got him the morphine quick.

She was about to ask about the other girl, then pulled herself back. She would be coming to visit him soon, and that was that. The memory of offering to marry him was one that raked over her, made her want to wake up and moan. She would pretend she hadn’t.

‘There was a man in my ward who screamed, always at the same time, midnight. He screamed for as long as it took for them to get to him to sedate him. The nurses said he had been found under piles of dead bodies.’

A group of men were sitting watching two others playing draughts. Celia and Tom walked past them. She realised they were heading to the rose garden.

‘I heard something about Michael. I was out with … a friend of his and another man came up and started talking.’ She watched Tom pale and stare at the ground. ‘He said he’d been shot by our own side.’ She stopped, surrounded by the paths that once had been Verena’s homage to Versailles. A nurse ahead of them was pushing a soldier in a wheelchair.

‘I’m sorry, Celia.’

‘It’s true then. He was shot as a coward.’

Tom coughed roughly. ‘Not a coward, Celia, no. Don’t say that. He was ill. He heard the shells all the time, even when they weren’t falling. He had lost so many men. What happened was wrong. We were there to shoot Germans, not English.’ He started walking again. They were almost at the fountain, crumbling and musty with leaves, so stoppered up it might never work again. She reached out to touch it, the stone comforting, secure.

‘You were there.’

‘No, no, I didn’t mean “we” like that. I was sent away a month before to fill … The signallers had lost a lot of men in a shelling. I heard that it had happened. I am sorry, Celia.’

‘Professor Punter said Michael died saving you. But you weren’t even there when he died.’

‘That’s right. I’m sorry.’

‘You knew when I came to see you. You didn’t tell me.’ She watched him gazing at the grass. As a child, she had spent hours lying on it, attempting to be the same size as the insects, trying to tell which ladybird was which from her book: harlequin, two-spot, Adonis. She wished she could be back there now, hold tight to Michael and say:
Don’t go! You mustn’t go!

‘I couldn’t. Don’t you see?’

She held on to the fountain, feeling the grit of the stone, clutching it so hard that it might have crumbled away in her hand. The scars looked even darker on his eyes. ‘Who shot him?’

‘I don’t know. They chose men from the regiment. I heard it
was a group of thirty or so. I don’t know who … You know, if I did know, maybe I would have killed them. If I’d known, I’d have stopped it.’

‘How could you have done that?’ But her heart swelled at his bravery, at the thought that he might have stood up to majors and generals and pulled her brother free.

‘I would have found a way.’

He took his arm from her and held his head in his hands. She put her other hand on the fountain. Her heart was falling away from her chest, she felt, miserable at the thought of Michael, yet big with pride that Tom might have saved him. It was too much feeling, she thought. She thought again of the awful grenade, thrown into his face, she supposed, the flame and the heat; he must have felt his skin was on fire.

He looked up at her. His face was wet with tears, the burnt patches scarlet. ‘I hear that gunshot every hour. It’s in my head. He’s there, in front of them. I know he was brave until the end.’

‘I think so too.’ She did. Tom was right. The army was in the wrong, not Michael.

‘I wasn’t there for him. They sent me away to another battalion. If I’d been there, I could have helped him go over to fight. I would’ve encouraged him.’

‘I’ve tried to imagine it. Over and over. I can’t think how he must have felt.’

Tom pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. ‘Best not to think that way, Celia. He died a terrible death, it’s true, but being in the trenches meant awful death also. Some men in my regiment died because they could not get out of the mud. We had to leave them to be sucked in.’

She let go of the fountain. The smell of the dead leaves was too strong. ‘Come, let us walk on.’ She stepped on to a new patch of grass. They had the same stuff in France, little seeds pushing through the soil, turning green. ‘I wanted to die when I heard about Michael. I thought – how am I supposed to bear this? I thought of you. I knew it, you know, I knew you weren’t there. If
you’d been there, you’d have tried to help him.’ She felt a rush of shame that she had ever doubted it.

Tom looked down. ‘Yes.’

‘When I think of it now, it still makes me want to die.’

‘Don’t say that. He fought bravely, honestly. Have you told your mother?’ He reached out – she thought for her arm – then drew back.

Just ahead of them was her dell, the small entrance to it overgrown with thorns. She had only been in it twice since she had been back. Both times it had not been the same: too damp, cold, and there was no longer any charm in being alone. ‘None of them. I never will. Mama couldn’t bear it. She talks about his heroic fighting with his regiment.’

‘He
was
a hero, Celia. He didn’t deserve such a fate. He wasn’t a coward, you know. It was the shock. He should’ve been in a hospital.’

They had reached the rose garden, the stems bent under the weight of their thorns. She supposed they wouldn’t flower next year if no one had cut them back. Tom crouched down on the grass. She sat next to him and felt his body quiver as he wept. The tears poured down her face too. He put his hand on her knee. ‘I’m sorry,’ he was saying. ‘I am sorry.’ She wanted to hold his bandaged head, touch his scarred eyes, stop the splinters from moving around in there, make him well.

There was a cooling as a shadow passed over her head. She jerked up to see nothing. ‘It must have been a bird,’ she said. ‘We should go back, Tom. If you aren’t there, your bed might be given to someone else.’

‘We were so young here,’ he said. ‘I thought … well … I expect you know what I thought. I thought things were going to be different.’

‘We’re not so old now.’ She was staring at one of the rose bushes. That once sported yellow flowers, she felt sure of it, though maybe no more, the blossoms lost under thorns. She looked back at Tom, his poor eyes swollen from crying.

‘You know that’s not true. I feel old.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘You wanted to write books in Paris cafés.’

‘So I did. I don’t want to now. I don’t know what I want to do when the war ends. If it ends.’

‘Of course it will. One day.’

‘Come, let’s go back. Before I get in trouble for taking you out without permission.’ She thought of taking his arm again, did not. ‘No wonder you didn’t want to see me when I came to the hospital. You knew about Michael.’

‘I wished I could have said to you that I was there, I tried to stop them, helped him run away. But I didn’t arrive back until weeks later.’ He put out a hand, touched the tip of one of the bushes, avoiding the thorns. ‘What they did was wrong.’

‘You know, I even wondered if you were ashamed of me, if that was why you turned me down.’

‘There was something …’

‘What?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

She was suddenly impatient. ‘Well maybe it can wait, then. Come on, let’s go back.’ He would have saved Michael and that was enough to know. She wanted to run, but it wasn’t fitting for a nurse. Instead, she walked beside him, head bowed, slowly. Stoneythorpe rose up in front of them.

Ten days later, Tom and Celia were out walking together. He let her take him out most days, although he barely uttered a word.

She watched him carefully for signs of improvement, a quicker walk, eyelids less bowed down perhaps. So she didn’t hear what Tom said when he first spoke. She had to ask him, and he repeated: ‘Someone’s coming towards us.’

She glanced up. A shabby-looking old man was walking their way. It must be a relative of one of the men, wandering in the wrong direction as they often did. Where were they going to put this one? He was wearing a pulled-down hat and he had a long beard. He was weaving towards her, his feet tripping unsteadily. Even though she could not see his face, there was something oddly familiar about him. She stared harder, trying to make it out. He put up his hand and waved. She stared again.

‘That’s your father,’ said Tom, just as the thought was crystallising in her mind. ‘That is Rudolf. My—’

She didn’t stay to hear what he was saying, for she was running, dashing towards her father. ‘Papa!’ She hurried over the flower beds and the grass, holding her skirts out of the mud, rushing towards him, her heart in her mouth. She flung herself into his arms. ‘Papa!’ She smelt old clothes and tobacco as he held her. She looked up at him, and he was weeping. ‘You came back. They set you free.’

‘My Celia,’ he said, holding her by the shoulders. His accent had got even thicker. His face was almost obscured by an unruly grey beard, his hair grown wild and long. He looked like one of the poor men who sat on the corners in London, unkempt, holding blankets over their shoulders. ‘You are a grown-up now.
A lady.’ Tears ran down his face. ‘My little girl. I wanted to be here for it.’

‘Three and a half years, Papa. A lot has happened.’

‘I know.’ He stroked her hair. ‘I cannot think what you have seen. But I am here now.’

‘Yes.’ An icicle struck her heart. ‘Why did they set you free?’

‘Medical grounds, they said. Who knows? Some of the other gentlemen said they thought the war is soon to be over. I don’t know. Never look a gift horse in the mouth is an English saying that I was always very fond of.’

‘Yes, of course.’ The general reared up in her mind. She had signed herself to him in France, flourishing his pen under the portrait of the country stream. He had fulfilled his promise. Now she would have to go to him. He could ask her to do anything, hold down soldiers, tell them evil words. She could not hide.

‘Come,’ she said. ‘Let us go in. You must want to sit down. Have you seen Mama?’

‘No. I arrived and I saw you first, walking in the gardens. I left my bag by the door.’ Celia was flushed with panic about her mother. Verena would be in shock, she wouldn’t be able to bear it. She might have a heart attack.

‘They drove you here?’

‘I came by train like anyone else. I didn’t write. I think I could not quite believe it was true before I arrived here. After all, they could have taken me back at any time.’

‘Yes.’ They still could, if she did not go to the general.

‘Father …’ She hesitated. ‘You received Mama’s letter? About Michael?’

He ruffled her hair. The gesture that had felt so natural before he was taken was odd now.

‘Yes. I received it. I cried to the wall. And now it is just a sharp ache – here.’ He held his hand to his chest. ‘My poor Celia. You loved Michael so. And now he has left us, taken from the fields along with thousands of other men’s sons.’

She leant against him. His voice sounded strange to her, not the one she knew. The years had changed him, she thought, or
else she remembered him differently. The picture she had of her father – tall, kindly, patrician – was not the man in front of her, who was sunken, shabby, not even clean. She felt a stab of remorse for noticing the dirt under his fingernails.

‘His body may be in France, but Celia, you know he is in heaven now, with the angels. God is looking after him. He is safe there, happy.’ He patted her hand. ‘Let us pray for him.’

‘Now?’

‘Yes. Let us kneel and pray.’

Celia blushed. She had gone to church with the rest of them before, bowed her head, prayed and sung the hymns. She had not given it much consideration, except to think that she would not do that sort of thing in Paris. Now, the very act of praying seemed wrong. If God existed, he was sick and ill and not looking at his humans at all.

‘Come, daughter—’ Rudolf broke off. ‘Is that Tom behind you?’ He shaded his eyes. ‘That boy over there? My eyesight is not what it was.’

She turned. Tom was sitting on the grass, watching them.

‘Yes, Papa. He’s been injured, quite badly.’

‘Poor Tom. I did not know it.’ He held up his hand. ‘Tom, my boy! Hi there!’ He began shuffling towards him. ‘How are you?’ Tom was standing up and holding out his hand to be shaken when Rudolf grasped him and hugged him. ‘My boy!’ he was saying. ‘My dear boy.’

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Celia could hear Tom saying. ‘I’m sorry.’

Celia watched them as though they were actors in a play. Eventually Rudolf waved her over. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘We will all three of us pray together. For Michael.’

He held their hands and they knelt on the grass. Rudolf began to speak. ‘Our Father, we commit your child, Michael, to Your care. He died bravely, trying to save others. He is with You in Heaven. Have mercy on our souls.’ Celia squeezed her eyes shut, unable to look.

Tom replied. ‘Have mercy on our souls.’

She heard footsteps behind her. She turned, and Verena was
standing there. Her mouth opened, but no words came. Rudolf and Tom started from each other.

‘Wife! I was just coming to find you.’

Verena’s mouth quivered and her eyes leaked tears. Rudolf hurried to her, held her in his arms. Celia stared at them and looked away. It was too painful to watch them, her parents, now two old people, holding each other, buffeted by the wind. She gazed back towards the house. The general danced in her head, smiling as she signed the papers, handing them over.
You will come,
he said.
Even if it takes some time.
She saw the future: Rudolf and Verena living content in Stoneythorpe, Tom too, while she was sent to Germany to ask soldiers cruel questions while they were tied down to boards.

That night, they had a family supper in Rudolf’s old study to celebrate his return. Thompson got out the silver plates from the cupboard, dusted them off and found three bottles of red wine in the stores. Verena had lit some candles. Celia found an old gown at the back of her wardrobe that was only a little too short. Usually, she, Verena and Emmeline ate at different times, sometimes in the study, usually on the wards, hurrying through their meals so they could help the men eat theirs.

‘Don’t make Papa talk,’ Verena had pressed Celia beforehand. ‘Don’t ask too many questions.’

‘I’m not fifteen any more,’ Celia said. ‘I know.’ But she did need to be told, really. She wanted to ask him everything: how life had been there, whether he had suffered. Anything so she did not have to think about the general. Her mind reeled. What would he make her do?

Rudolf and Verena, Emmeline and Celia balanced their plates on the desks in the study. It was such a long time since she had eaten properly, Celia thought, she could barely remember how to do it. Mrs Rolls served up the same casserole and suet pudding as the men had – no time to make anything other – but added swirls of top-of-the-milk to the casserole and some special jam to the pudding. Thompson passed the food and drink around, his
hands shaking. Jennie and Mrs Rolls came up too, sat with them on Verena’s special invitation, accompanying, not eating.

Celia spent every moment covertly gazing at her father. Thompson had shaved off Rudolf’s beard and cut his hair before dinner, but it only showed off how small and wrinkled his face had become. He had grown thin and sunken, smaller in height. His eyes were a yellowy colour. She saw that he barely spoke, instead was constantly opening his mouth and licking his lips because they were so dry. He stopped in the middle of eating to pitch himself double and cough for what seemed like nearly a quarter of an hour. He looked like he had been away for twenty years, not close to four.

Celia reminded herself that he probably thought she looked older too. Jonathan had flattered her when he said she had got prettier. She was taller, thinner, her hair dull, tiny lines around her eyes, shadows in her face where once there had been plump skin. The rest of the family too, she thought, staring at them all as they ate. Verena would pass as twenty years older than she was, no longer upright, plumper around the middle because she hadn’t worn her corset since Rudolf left, her hair still long, but dry and straw-like. Celia supposed she should cut it off.

She looked up at the portraits of them around the fireplace, her sister smiling out. Emmeline did not strike as hard as she once did. Her skin and hair were paler and her eyes were grey in some lights. The men teased her because they found her amusing to talk to, not because she was a rare bird to be goggled at, as she had been before the war. For real beauty, most of them preferred Nurse Lloyd.

Celia wondered if Arthur was the only one of them who might look as he had before the war. She could barely even remember his face – when she thought of him, she just imagined versions of the few photographs that were still displayed over the mantelpiece in the study. She supposed he was the same: tall, black hair falling over his forehead, smiling when he had a new plan he wanted you to enthuse about. Paris was a city of pretty girls, and restaurants
like the one she had been to with Jonathan. She supposed Arthur occasionally thought of his family, brushed them out of his mind.

‘You are deep in thought, Celia dear,’ said Rudolf.

‘Oh no. I was listening. I am just … so pleased to have you back, Papa.’ He was right, she had been paying only half attention. They had been talking about the house and the arrangements. She had drifted away when Verena was describing in detail the plans of the Dowager Lady Redroad and the matron, the new routine of the servants, how each room was used, the renovations they had been told to do to make the place fit for a hospital – a ramp for the wheelchairs, extra cleaning for the places where there might be operations.

‘Everything has been so well planned, my dear,’ Rudolf said. ‘I am very impressed.’

Verena spooned up the last of her casserole and smiled. ‘Thank you, husband.’ It was all over: the dead horses, the anger, the padding around the empty house crying after the ghosts of her absent family. Celia wanted to cry out:
Is this it? Is this all we are going to say? We have all seen the worst of our souls and we are sitting here discussing the timings for luncheon and the storage arrangements in the cellar. Men
died
on me.

She knew that she was being childish. She was the youngest once more, cross at the conversation of her parents, not speaking out.

She looked across at Emmeline, bowed over her plate. ‘Emmy,’ she said, under cover of further conversation about the cellar. ‘Do you wonder what it was like for Father in the camps?’

Emmeline opened her eyes wide. They looked paler than ever. ‘I thought Mama told you not to ask questions. Why do you want to? He is back, he’s alive and that’s enough, thank you. I don’t want to know.’

‘Don’t you think he might want to tell us?’ Her gaze flickered up to the portraits over the fireplace, Rudolf and Verena, then one of each of them. Celia had been ten, remembered hours of her legs itching as she posed, wanting to leap up.

‘No. I wouldn’t if I were him. He wants to look forward. You’re always the same. Forever dwelling in the past.’

‘What is that, girls?’ Rudolf called across Verena.

‘We were just discussing how pleased we were to have you back, Papa,’ said Emmeline. ‘We’re very lucky.’

‘Yes,’ said Rudolf, smiling widely. ‘We are together. Thanks to the mercy of God. I always hoped He would reunite me with my beloved family. And now He has done so.’

Celia hung her head. A leprechaun little God with pale eyes and hair brushed over his forehead. The general took off his glasses and sighed.
What do you girls want?
Verena smiled at her, the first true, open smile that Celia had seen her mother give since returning home.

‘The house is much changed,’ Rudolf said. He was standing with Celia at the back of Stoneythorpe. ‘I cannot sleep without walking now,’ he had said, asking her to come out with him. ‘In the camp, I used to walk thirty times around my bed at night.’ So they were walking ten times up and down the back of the house as a replacement. They had managed five and he was stopping for breath. The sky was darkening, the first bats looping overhead.

‘Everything’s changed, Papa.’

‘You did what you could. You cannot keep a house in wartime, I suppose. I do not think there is much to do to improve it at the moment.’

‘No, Papa. After the war.’ Although they couldn’t, she thought, not really. All their money was going into keeping up the hospital, and she couldn’t think what would be left. Though, now her father was free, he could manage the factories himself, so more money would come.

‘Lady Lenley begged me to keep her roses. I think they’ve just about survived. I wonder what she would think of the rest of the house.’

‘We should invite her back to see.’

‘If she’s still alive. I expect she probably is not. I wish I had brought you a present, Celia. I thought of all the presents I might
have given you for your eighteenth birthday. So many things I have not seen. I have not been here.’

‘That’s not your fault, Papa. It’s war. We’re lucky we have each other still. Come, can you walk again?’

He took her arm and moved forward. ‘My poor Celia. All the things I wanted to give you. Everything I wanted to tell you. Do you know that when buying a book, you should touch the ends of the last page, to see if they’re quite sharp; then you will know how long it will last. You know that now, I suppose.’

‘No, I don’t know about buying books.’

‘I think you are being kind to me.’ They stepped around a plump squirrel digging unafraid in the soil. ‘I lay in my bed in the cell and thought of what I would like to buy you. Dresses and ornaments, books. I had such plans for the birthday ball. We would invite the finest families, you would be the belle of it all. Stoneythorpe would be admired. Even your mother’s family would come.’