Wake: A Novel (27 page)

“What have you been doing today, then?” he says, slowly. “Besides making stew.”

“I was…”

“What?”

She is silent.

“Go on.”

He keeps passing his thumb lightly over her wrist. His touch is turning her to liquid. She leans back against the table.

“I was…speaking with Ivy.”

“Oh, yes?”

“She wants me to go down to the abbey with her, tomorrow.”

“To watch the burial?” He presses lightly, his thumb on her pulse, and she can feel herself, beating against him. “And what did you say to that?”

“I just—” And suddenly it seems wrong not to tell him, not to share this with him, and so she reaches for him, clasping his hand. “I went to see a woman, Jack, earlier today.”

“What woman?”

“Someone Ivy went to see in the war.”

“Oh?”

“She’s”—she gives a small laugh—“supposed to be able to talk to the dead.” The air between them has changed again: It is stiller, but it is not a pleasant stillness. It is clenched, like a fist. She can feel his grip leave hers, the flesh detaching, drawing back. He lets go of her hand.

“She lives in Walthamstow. The most ordinary house—you’d never think it…”

“Think what?”

“Well—that—someone like that lived there.”

He is silent, bringing his hands together in his lap.

“Are you all right?” she says quietly.

“Go on,” he says. “You went to see this woman. Tell me what happened.”

She feels a bit sick.
What did happen, then?
She can’t remember. Her palms are damp. “I—took a photograph with me.”

“A photograph? Of what?”

“Of—Michael. I took a photograph of him. To show to her.”

“You took a photograph of
Michael
?”

“Yes.”

“And what did she say?”

“She told me not to look at it again.”

“What did she tell you that for?”

“She said it wasn’t good for me.”

In the force of her husband’s scorn she can feel it wither, this feeling she has had all afternoon, feel it curl and die like a plant in the frost.

“Something lifted,” she says. “And I felt lighter.” Her voice peters out. She can hear how ridiculous, how stupid, it sounds.

There’s silence again. The matting on his chair creaks as he leans backward.

“How much did you pay her?”

“I—”

“Go on,” he says. “How much?”

She swallows. “Ten shillings.”

He shakes his head and stands up. “You’re mad,” he says. He comes toward her, and for a moment she thinks he will hit her, but he doesn’t; he puts his fingertip to her forehead instead, and presses there. “You’ve been mad for years. Living with the bloody dead. You might as well be dead. You think you’re a wife? You think you’re a real wife?”

She opens her mouth, closes it again.

“Do you?”

“I was going to—just then. I was going to—”

He takes his finger away, but she can feel where it was, burning against her skin. He grabs his hat and pulls it on.

“You’re not a real wife,” he says. “You’re a ghost. You’re nothing but a fucking ghost.”

Victoria Station. A mother stands against a barrier, her young son beside her. She has been here since eight o’clock this morning, determined to get a decent view. She has. She can see the empty platform that the train will come into: platform eight by the Buckingham Palace Road.

Since she read about it in the papers she has been determined to be here, to bring her son to see his father. Her boy is almost four now and looks just like him. The same blue eyes, the same strong brow.

She met him when she was fifteen. They were married two years later. He went away two months after that. Their son was born when he was away in France. She went and had a photograph taken, holding their baby up to the camera. She knows he had the picture on him when he died because she was sent his things. They arrived with the postman, a parcel of bloody uniform and, inside the jacket, a bundle of her letters and the photograph of her and their son. She was horrified, incredulous, putting her baby in the garden and locking the door. She rinsed the uniform, soaking out the blood. But not too much. She wanted it to smell of him still. Then she dressed a tailor’s dummy in it.

She keeps it beside the bed.

It has been hard to keep her son amused for the long hours they have waited. They have played all sorts of games. She has told him all about his father—all of the stories she can think of. Whenever her boy has needed to pee she has held him up over the barrier so that he could do it on the platform. She got some funny looks for that, but she wasn’t prepared to lose her place, and as the day has worn on, everyone has started doing it; most of the men have had a go. There was even a woman who squatted down on the ground, her skirts ballooning around her like a strange sea creature.

But all around her, now, she can feel the crowd stirring. The train is coming; it’s time. She gathers her son, and he puts his arms around her neck. “He’s coming,” she whispers, to his neck, to his ear. “Daddy’s coming now.”

The boy looks around him. “Where is he? Where?”

“Shhh.” She strokes his head. “He’s coming on the train.”

The train approaches, and there’s a moaning in the crowd, and then they start pushing, jostling from the back. The woman is pressed hard against the barrier. Someone screams, “Stop it! There are children here. Stop!”

The woman holds her child tighter. The pushing gets harder. On the other side of the barriers, officials move with clipped, hurried purpose. Then, as the train pulls into the platform, the barriers fall and the crowd swarms out. At first, she cannot see anything, just smoke and the steam that billows high up to the roof of the station, until the smoke clears and she can see the carriage. There’s an electric light inside. Some of the young men are trying to climb up onto the carriage roof, and everything is chaos, and all around women are sobbing, loud and unrestrained.

“There’s your father,” she says, pointing. “There he is.”

“Daddy!” he calls. “Daddy?” Her son wriggles from her arms and runs forward.

Young men still pour onto the pavement. Policemen run here and there now, shouting at them to get back. The woman has a terrible vision of her son, trampled by running feet. She darts after him, but a large policeman holds her back.

She screams for her boy. She can see him, twenty feet from her, looking wildly to and fro. Then another policeman stops, leans down, takes her confused son by the hand, and leads him back to her. The mother bends forward, gathering him up. She sobs into his neck, holding him tight, tight.

There seem to be no streetlights anywhere out here, only the hunched, low shapes of buildings, and then scattered yellow lights at the bottom of the hill. Evelyn cannot remember which way she came. She walks a few steps forward and then remembers: Down the hill is where the docks are.

Her feet are numb blocks at the ends of her legs. All the time she was in Rowan’s house, all the time he was talking, there was no fire. She has no idea how long she was in there for. It might have been two hours; it might have been six.

She passes the workers’ café and sees the corner table where she sat and ate her sandwich, the chair she sat in stacked neatly on top. At the bottom of the hill she reaches the row of shops, deserted now, the costermongers all padlocked up, the benches empty of their sullen men. She walks until she reaches the bus stop. There is no sign of a bus, and only one gaslight stutters in the distance; otherwise the street is dark.

The thought occurs to her that she could be stuck out here in Poplar for the night. She would freeze to death surely, if she were. Would she go back up to Rowan’s house and beg him to take her in? She shakes her head. It’s as though everything is sluggish: her thoughts, her blood. Of course she won’t freeze. If it comes to it then she can walk home from here, or at least to somewhere she can get a bus or a cab. It can’t be that far back to Primrose Hill—five, six miles at the most?

There’s a figure walking toward her. A man, his body braced against the cold. She shrinks into the side of a building, unsure whether he has seen her or not. He will pass close by her soon. Rowan’s words come to her, and she can almost hear the men now, whispering across to one another in the hostile night:
Cushy, mate, cushy.

The man passes her without a word.

She tries to light a cigarette but is shaking too badly to manage it. How long has she been shaking for? Has it just started? Or has she been like this since she left the house? Or before? While Rowan was speaking? She doesn’t know. High, many-windowed warehouses tower over the road to her left. The street is silent, but it is not an easy silence; it is the silence of heavy things, of cranes and ships, stilled and waiting to move.

She’d asked him where the boy’s grave was, just before she left.

They buried him there.

“I went back out there, the first chance I got. Found the way. One Sunday morning. Found his grave. They’d buried him in the corner. I could tell by the dirt. It was fresher than the rest.”

“They didn’t put a cross?”

“No. But there were fields all around there. They were proper fields still, not like nearer the front. I went out into them and—they were proper fields with proper grass, and they were covered in flowers. I picked a bunch of them. Blue flowers. I didn’t know what they were called. I left them there for him.

“But you know what was funny? When I came home, I found them growing in my garden. My wife had planted them. Borage, she said they were called. For courage. She’d planted them for me, to keep me strong. And so as I’d come home. What do you think about that?”

Courage.

She didn’t know what she thought about that.

Standing here, now, in the cold street, Evelyn realizes something: that this meeting was what she has been waiting for—for someone to share their truth with her. After four years of war, and two more years of ex-soldiers, day in, day out, this is what she has wanted; this is what she has sought. Someone’s truth. Not their cheer, not their bravery, not their anger, not their lies. And in four years of war, and two years of its aftermath, no one—not Fraser, not her brother, no one—has shared with her their truth.

And yet now she has heard it. Now she knows that somewhere, upriver in this city, is her brother, this man who ordered Rowan to fire on his friend.

Now that this truth is inside her, a part of her, it is not diamond hard and gleaming as truth should be but shadowed, rimed in fear and sweat and murk and grime. There is no elevation in it, no answers, and no hope.

Thursday, November 11, 1920

Jack isn’t there when she wakes; Ada knows this without opening her eyes, and when she pulls herself up in bed, even in the dark room she can see that his side of the blanket is smooth. Last night she stayed awake as long as she could, imagining him in the pub, drinking himself blind, rolling his cigarettes, speaking of her to the other men.

My wife.

My mad bloody wife.

Or worse.

But the empty space beside her fills her with thin fear. He has never, not in all their years of marriage, spent the night away from home.

Where did he go, then, when the pub closed? He must have found a bed somewhere. A thought comes to her, jolting her forward, as though someone has passed electricity through her back. What if he was with someone else? Another woman? A woman who had given him what she hadn’t, or wouldn’t, or had forgotten to? She thinks of the way he looked at her, last night; the contempt in his twisted face.
You’re not a real wife. You’re a ghost. You’re nothing but a fucking ghost.

She knows that there are ways to find women. Easily. A man has only to look. How much would it cost? Less than her ten shillings? Her ten shillings to speak with the dead?

She had been ready, though, last night.

Too late; she had been ready too late.

She pulls the covers off and gets to her feet, goes over to the curtains, and pulls them back a little way, peering out into the darkened street. Most of the windows have their curtains drawn, and though the sky to her left is a faint trace lighter, the dawn looks to be a way off still. The houses are all shuttered, except Ivy’s window across the road, where a small light burns. The curtains are open and Ada can see her, in her bedroom, moving about. From this angle she can see only half of her face, turned away. One heavy arm is lifted behind her back, fastening her stays. When she has tied them, Ivy reaches over and picks something up from her bedside table and puts it in her mouth. Her teeth. Ada steps closer to the window as Ivy disappears, and although it seems wrong to be watching her like this, unguarded, unaware, she stays where she is, willing her to return.

When she comes back, Ivy is moving stiffly, all in black, in a high-necked old-fashioned dress from a different time.

Ada knows just how that dress feels, knows how heavy it is, how it smells. She has a similar one, packed in a chest at the end of her bed; she last wore it for her mother, twenty-three years ago.

Ivy lets down her hair and begins brushing the long white sheet of it, then twists it into a rope and pins it in place. She looks pale and aged and heavy, but, standing at the window, Ada can see the young woman she used to be: Ivy laughing, pregnant, holding her baby son in her arms, her small daughters clinging to her skirts.

Ivy finishes with her hair and walks over to the window, looking to the sky, as though to assess what the weather has in store. The sight of her—of her black dress and white hair, her upright carriage, dressed in mourning for her son—is so still, so arresting, that it makes the hairs on Ada’s neck stand up.

And Ada turns, hurrying now, and lights the paraffin lamp by her bed. She brings it back over to the window, signaling out into the dark. She sees Ivy start, look across. The two women regard each other across the street. Ada lifts the lamp to her face.
“Wait,”
she mouths.
“Wait for me.”

Thin remnants of mist drift over the streets as Evelyn leaves the flat, but she can already see the clouds separating to show the blue behind them and feel the surprising presence of the sun. She heads south toward her brother’s house. He will not have left yet, she is sure of that; she has risen early to be sure to get him at home.

But however early she may be, the streets are already filling with black-clad people, walking toward town. They want to get a good position for the ceremony, she supposes. Good luck to them. Rather them than her. Still, there is a new-swept feeling about the city. Something of hope. The paths in Regent’s Park look as though they have been sluiced clean. When she reaches the terrace of houses where her brother lives they are lovely in the morning light, which strikes off the cream stucco, turning them a mellow gold. She takes the rattling lift to the fifth floor, where Jackson, her brother’s man, greets her at the door.

“Good morning, Miss Evelyn.” He looks surprised to see her. “Are you here to see Captain Montfort?”

“Yes, I am.”

“He’s just getting dressed.”

She walks past him into the dim hall. “Really? Then I suppose I’d better wait in here.” And before he can do it for her, she opens the door to the living room and steps inside. The curtains are pushed wide and the bright morning is flooding the large room. She feels obscurely cross that her brother should be up already. It’s as though he has beaten her to something, small but significant, like the games they used to play when they were children; the sort she always hated to lose. The room, however, is in some disarray, the carpet rolled back and the table pushed to one side, as though someone were just about to sweep the floor. The door to her brother’s bedroom is closed.

“Ed?” she calls.

“Eves? Coming. Just give me a minute.”

She circles the low table. She’s never much liked this flat. It used to belong to their father, who lived here when he was in town. They used to visit as children, she and Ed, on trips up to the zoo with their nanny. They would be ushered in to greet him and stand, stranded in the middle of the floor, their nanny retreating to a safe distance, waiting for their father to make a pronouncement on their height, or the weather, as though they were the children of a family to whom he was distantly related and about whom he was distantly concerned. In those days the low table came up to her waist. The flat is Ed’s now, and has been for years—ever since the middle of the war when their father retired.

The door to the bedroom opens and Ed stands there, hair freshly slicked, wearing a sober black suit. He is tying a black tie. Two medals are pinned to his chest, three stripes on each. “Eves.” He crosses the floor toward her. “Glad you decided to come.” He looks tired, as ever, the shadows beneath his eyes deeper and more purple, and as he kisses her she can smell alcohol and toothpaste mingled on his breath. It is strange, she thinks as she pulls away; he always smells of it, has done for years now, but she has never yet seen him drunk.

She shakes her head, impatient. “I’m not coming.”

“Oh?” He pulls his tie tight. “Why not?”

“I can’t think of anything worse.”

“Really?”

“I think so, yes.”

He finishes with his tie and puts his hands up. They are shaking a little, she notices. “I’m sorry to hear that. But let’s not get into anything now, shall we? Not today?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re reacting rather extremely.”

“Well, the whole thing disgusts me.”

“
Disgust
is a strong word.”

They are into it already.

“
Really?
This is supposed to make it all right, is it? This burial? This pulling a body from the earth in France and
dragging
him over here? And all of us standing, watching, weeping? Clapping at the
show
?”

“All right, Eves.” He sighs. “Tell you what. Why don’t you fix us both a drink?”

“What sort of a drink?”

“Whiskey should do it.”

She thinks about making a comment about the hour, but from the smell of him, it’s immaterial, and besides, she herself has hardly slept. Whiskey seems like a good idea. She crosses to the cabinet and pours out a couple of generous measures, hands a glass to Ed, and takes hers to the open window, where she lights a cigarette. Below, on the road that skirts the park, is a steady stream of people, moving right to left. She takes a sip of her drink. Above the terraces opposite, the sun continues to burn away the clouds. The people move in a sudden, bright light. She sees a few of them pause and lift their faces to the sky. She checks her wristwatch. Eight-thirty. She takes a swift drag of her cigarette. “I went to see Rowan Hind yesterday. The man you swore you couldn’t remember.” She turns to him. “He lives in Poplar. Have you any idea where that is?”

She sees her brother’s eyes stray to the clock on the table beside him. It angers her. “You’ve plenty of time.”

“I’m meeting Father at half past nine.”

“You’ve still got plenty of time.”

“The crowds—” There’s a twitch of skin at his jaw as he grits his teeth. “All right,” he says. “Go on.”

“I went there yesterday. To Rowan Hind’s house.”

Ed nods.

“He told me something I think he’d been wanting to tell someone for a long while.”

“And what was that?”

“It was about a private called Michael Hart.”

Her brother’s eyes flicker.

“Who was shot by firing squad in 1917.”

He takes a mouthful of his drink. A strange expression crosses his face. She cannot read it. It is gone before she can even try. He holds the whiskey in his mouth before swallowing it down. “Yes,” he says. “That’s right.”

“What do you mean, ‘Yes, that’s right’?”

“I mean yes, I remember. I was there.” He says nothing more, just stands perfectly still, legs slightly apart, glass held before his chest, his body tense with a sudden military bearing she has forgotten he possessed.

“Is that
all
? Is that all you’re going to say?”

“What, Evelyn?” He opens his hands. “It’s hardly a secret. It’s there in the military records, for anyone to see. Now why don’t you tell me what this is really about?”

She swallows. “He told me that you sent Private Hart out on a burial party.”

“Did I?” His jaw twitches again. “Well, I’m sorry, but I really don’t remember.”

“Rowan said that he was in a dreadful state. That his company had been decimated.”

“Rowan?”
He looks incredulous. “It’s
Rowan
now, is it?”

She cracks her thumbs into her palms.

“Is that what Private Hind said?”

“Yes.”

“Well.” He gives a tight smile. “You’ve obviously been talking to the highest authority, Evelyn. Well done. You’ve found your little private in Poplar and you’ve constructed your little story and you’ve made up your little mind. And I have much better things to do than to spend precious minutes changing it for you. So, if you’ll excuse me.” He turns and goes into his bedroom, slamming the door behind him.

She stares after him, astonished. She kicks the table in front of her. The pain brings tears to her eyes. She goes over to the door and knocks on it. After a few seconds he comes out again. He looks as though he is barely containing himself.

“I’d really rather you’d leave, Evelyn. It’s getting late and I have to go.”

“Why didn’t you write to his mother?”

“What?”

“Why didn’t you write to his mother? Michael Hart’s mother—Ada, she was called Ada. Did you know that? Why wasn’t she told?”

“I think I probably wrote to his mother that her son died of his wounds. Which was the truth.” He pushes past her, over to the cabinet.

“How can you live with yourself?” she says, under her breath.

“Excuse me?” He speaks quietly, his hand on the decanter.

“How can you live with yourself?”
she says again, louder now. “How can you put on your medals and strut about like a
fool
when all the while you have blood on your hands?”

“You stupid, fucking
bitch.
” He flings the decanter at the wall in front of him, where it shatters into a thousand tiny shards and a dark stain spreads, horrible, on the wall. He turns to face her, his hands clenched into fists. “I’m not your
scab,
Evelyn. I’m not your fucking
scab,
here to be picked away at.” He is shaking. “You know what your trouble is?”

“What’s that, then?” She feels as though cold water is being poured down her spine.

“You
are bitter,
” he says. “And you’re alone. You’ve loved one person, in your entire life, and he was taken from you, and that was a desperate, desperate thing to happen and I’m so sorry. And I’ve always been sorry. But many people suffer much worse and remain decent human beings—perhaps even better human beings than they were before. But you’ve used that one death as fuel ever since to hate the world.”

“No, I haven’t. You’re wrong.”

“What, then? What don’t you hate? Go on, Evelyn. Tell me.” His face is twisted.
“What don’t you hate?”

“I didn’t use to hate you.”

For a moment he looks stunned, but then shakes his head, almost laughing. “For God’s sake, Evelyn. You’re utterly bilious. Look at yourself. You poisoned yourself in that ghastly factory and now you’re poisoning yourself in that horrible job. And I fail utterly to see where this moral high ground comes from—you, who worked stuffing shells.”

“That was different.”

“Was it?” His lip curls. “Of course it was, Evelyn. Of course. Go on, why was that?”

She opens her mouth. “I—” Closes it again.

He shakes his head. “You look for the ugly and the rotten and you find it everywhere, and then you spend the rest of your time shoving it down everyone else’s throats. And do you know what? Do you really want to know what? It’s utterly selfish. Because all you care about is prolonging your own pain. Have you ever, Evelyn, just once, stopped and faced the fact that Fraser’s death was something that happened to
him,
rather than something that happened to
you
?”

At first, she cannot tell which is stronger, the anger or the grief. The anger wins. “How
dare
you? Don’t you
dare
speak like that to me.” She storms across the room and hits him, as hard as she can, across the face. Her hand is half open and the blow is awkward, but when she pulls her hand back the pain feels astonishingly good.

“Come on, then.” He grabs her wrists. “You want to hit me? Do it properly then, for Christ’s sakes, come
on.
”

Something surges in her, and then they are fighting, and he is hitting her back, and she is aware, somewhere in the back of her mind, that this is what she wants. That this, too, feels good. But then he has stopped—has moved away from her and is crouched in the corner of the room, and she is on her hands and knees gasping for breath.