Wake: A Novel (28 page)

A terrible noise fills the room.

His back is shaking. It is a moment before she understands that he is weeping. That her brother is crying in awful jagged sobs.

“Ed,” she says. “Ed?”

He doesn’t hear. He is lost in it.

“Eddie?”

A burst of cannon fire comes from outside. It rattles the windows in their sockets. Instinctively, Evelyn falls to the ground.

They walk a couple more paces forward. The bus, which they had to wait so long to get on, since every one that passed them in Hackney was already full, dropped them off at the top of the Charing Cross Road. The conductor, red-faced and sweaty, shouted the news to the packed, expectant lower deck: “Can’t get you any closer than this, I’m afraid. Trafalgar Square’s already closed.”

It has been slow going, in this thick crowd, walking in their heavy, unaccustomed clothes. Ada’s hat, decorated as it is with flowers and marbled fruit, is heavy, too. The morning was proving so warm that they had to stop a little while ago and take off their coats, and as well as their coats, they both carry flowers, like all of the women around them, cut from their gardens before the sun was up. Ivy has the last of her roses, Ada, late-flowering Michaelmas daisies in her hands. But the morning has taken its toll on these, too, and they are beginning to wilt.

“We must be nearly there now,” says Ada, more in hope than certainty. She has no idea where they are. The road they are on is opening to a great square, but in the packed crowd, it is impossible to see far in front—impossible to get any bearings at all.

“Oh, my goodness.” Ivy grips Ada’s arm. “Look!” She points to a large building with a tower topped by a bristling metal orb. “I know that place,” she says. “I went there once.”

“What is it?”

“The Coliseum. I saw a variety there, years ago. Bill took me when we were young. Oh, it’s ever so nice inside.…” Ivy’s face is pink with remembrance. “We saw these performing seals. And these swimmers, in tanks. Oh gosh, it was something. You should have seen it, Ada. You wouldn’t have believed it!”

The sight of the theater seems to liven her up, and Ivy scans the scene in front of them with renewed vigor. “Let’s go over there.” She points to the steps of a large church to their left. “If we climb up there we might see a little bit more.”

They push their way through the heaving crowd. The church steps, which are already thick with people, still have a little space at the back and they are able to squeeze their way through. The view is extraordinary: Spread below them the square is entirely black as far as they can see. Buses and motorcars are stranded in the middle of roads that are full of barely moving people, so it looks as though the vehicles are trapped in a river of tar.

“That’s Nelson,” says Ada, pleased to be able to recognize something herself. The base of the column is thick with people. No stone can be seen.

“Doesn’t look like much is going to be coming past on the road here, does it?” Ivy looks worried, confused.

Ada feels the edge of panic. “Where shall we go, then? Shall we stay up here? We don’t even know where it’s supposed to be coming past, do we?”

They look back to where they have come from, from where people keep coming. Soon that direction will be immovable, too. A sound, low and rumbling, like distant thunder, reverberates off the buildings, disturbing the crowd.

“What was that?” Ivy grips Ada’s arm.

“I don’t know. It sounded like guns.”

“You think everything’s all right?”

People are looking around, whispering, looking for confirmation, for comfort from their neighbors.

“It’s fine.” A tall, well-dressed man standing nearby addresses the crowd. “It’s cannon fire. That’s the beginning of the procession. They’ll be leaving Victoria soon.”

“Where’ll they come from, then?” Ada turns, glad to find someone who knows something at last.

“Over there.” The man points ahead of them. “That’s the Mall; Buckingham Palace is at the end of that. They’ll come out of that arch and turn down Whitehall.” He points to a wide street, a little closer to where they stand. “Then they’ll head down to the Cenotaph and the abbey from there. You won’t get close to the Cenotaph, of course, that’s tickets only, but you might get a place on the corner there if you’re quick. We’ll be staying here. My mother doesn’t like the crowds.”

Behind him, a young woman and an older woman nod hello, and two quiet children look at Ada with grave gray eyes.

“Thank you,” says Ada.

The man lifts his hat. “Good luck.”

They stare out at the multitudes, the slowed black human tide.

“Do you think we’ll get there?” asks Ivy doubtfully.

“That’s what we came for, isn’t it?” says Ada.

“You’re right.” Ivy nods, steeling herself. “Come on then. Let’s go.”

Eight soldiers from the Grenadier Guards enter the railway carriage and drape the coffin with a tattered Union Flag. The flag has been used many times before, as an altar cloth, at one of the makeshift services before battle, at Vimy Ridge, High Wood, Ypres, Messines, Cambrai, and Bethune. The soldiers place a steel infantry helmet and a webbing belt on the top.

The cortege forms—massed bands, pipes and drums, the pipers in their kilts, the gun carriage, the pallbearers: field marshals, admirals, generals. Then, behind them, a thousand ex-servicemen ready themselves, six abreast. In all the great vaulted space of the station only the odd clink of a buckle and the stray small scratch of cloth can be heard.

Then, from Hyde Park, a battery of nineteen guns fires a salute. The soldiers stand to attention. The echo of the guns lingers in the air as the band plays Chopin’s Funeral March, and the cortege starts to move.

Standing in the crowd, just at the entrance to the station gates, a young man watches the cortege move past.

He is thinking of his best friend. The boy he grew up with on the streets of Battersea. He was eighteen and a virgin when he died; his life pooling onto the ground around him. The white shock on his face. A hole where his groin should have been.

The young man closes his eyes. He can feel the skin on his face tighten in the unexpected sun. Why him? Why was he spared? He wasn’t the best of them. Nowhere near. He could reel off a list of better men. He can’t even get a job.

But he has a wife—a girl who waited for him—whom he married just after the war. And a child now, too. A little girl. He watches them sometimes, when they don’t know he is looking. They are like miracles, the pair of them: the smooth intactness of them. He loves to listen to the hushed voice of his wife as she rocks their child to sleep.

He thinks of what he will do tonight, when he gets home. He will kiss his wife, he thinks, he will give thanks for her, and then he will bury himself inside her, as far as he will go.

When the rumbling has passed, Evelyn lifts her head.

Her brother is sitting on his heels, his back to the wall. His face is lumpy and raw with tears.

“What was that?” she says.

“It will be a part of the ceremony,” Ed says. “I’m sure.”

“More guns?”

“Sounds like it.”

“Can’t they think of a better way to honor the dead?”

He opens his hands.

She wipes her sleeve across her cheek. Her hands are stinging. “How could you do it?”

Ed sighs. He tips his head far back, as if the answer might lie somewhere above. A raised red weal stands high on his left cheek, and Evelyn sees now that he has a painful-looking bruise, too, on his right eye.

“It was the most terrible piece of line,” he says. “We’d been wading in mud for months. And once someone goes, it spreads. At least, that’s what the generals thought. By the time they got their hands on it, that was it. It was 1917. The Russians had gone; the French were turning. They were absolutely terrified of mutiny. By the time I got back from that clearing station it was already in the hands of the tribunal. There was nothing that I could do.”

Evelyn nods. She can see that. “But why pick him? Why pick him to fire on his friend? It seems so—cruel.”

“Standard practice, I’m afraid. It was meant to keep the men in order.”

“And did it work?”

He looks away. “I should think it probably did.”

“What about his mother?”

“Whose? Hart’s?”

“Yes.”

“We were told not to write the truth. And anyway, you really think the poor woman needed to know?”

“I think it was her right.”

“Her right? I’m not so sure about that.” Ed looks down at his hands. “What about Hind?” he says. “Do you think he’ll ever go back there? Tell her?” He glances back up.

“I think if he was ever going to do that he’d have done it by now.”

“And did he tell you? Where she lives?” Her brother’s face is tight.

She shakes her head. “I thought about asking. But it’s not my place, is it? Not my story to tell.”

“Then why did he want to see me?”

She looks at her brother. Takes a breath. “I think he wanted to understand. But when he’d finished talking…he didn’t ask me. Not for your address. Not anything. And I would have given it. But once he’d spoken of it once, and someone had listened, I think that seemed to be enough.”

Ed nods slowly.

The air between them finally stills.

He takes two cigarettes from his case and hands one to her. She leans in to his light. They smoke in silence for a while.

“Do you want to know something, Eves?” he says eventually.

“What’s that?”

He shifts back against the wall and wipes his face with his hand. “In a minute,” he says, “when I’ve finished this cigarette, I’m going to get up and go outside and walk as far as I can get toward the Cenotaph. And I hope that I am going to watch as they do this thing. I want to. And whatever you may think, I think it’s a fine thing.”

He rubs the point in between his eyes. It is the gesture of an exhausted man. It reminds her of someone. It reminds her of Rowan Hind.

“This might make people feel better, and it might help them to mourn. It may even help me. But it won’t put an end to war. And whatever anyone thinks or says, England didn’t win this war. And Germany wouldn’t have won it, either.”

“What do you mean?”

“War wins,” he says. “And it keeps on winning, over and over again.”

He draws a circle in the air with his cigarette, and it’s as if he is drawing all of the wars, however many thousands of them, all of the wars past and all of them to come.

“War wins,” he says bitterly, “and anyone who thinks any differently is a fool.”

Hettie sits on the edge of her bed, staring out into the small, sunlit room. She has been up since first light, has hardly slept. Her nose is blocked, eyes swollen, her chest scraped jagged and raw. She is sure her brother must have heard her crying through the walls.

Last night, walking home from the tube, her coat wrapped tight over Di’s dress, she’d prayed that she might be lucky, that by some glorious stroke of luck her mother wouldn’t be in.

But she wasn’t lucky. It was not a lucky day.

She could feel the air, the anticipation keen as a blade as soon as she opened the door. Her mother was out of the kitchen before she had the chance to hide. “Go on, then,” she hissed. “Tell me. You just tell me. What lies do you want to tell me this time?”

“I’m sorry, Mum—I—”

“You’ve been out since yesterday afternoon.
Where’ve you been?
”

“Di’s.”

“
Don’t
you lie to me.” Her mother came toward her, stopping halfway down the hall, her hand held to her mouth. “What’ve you done?”

“Nothing.” She shrank back from her.

“You have. I can see it. Take off your hat.
What have you done?
”

It was only then Hettie realized that her mother was talking about her hair.

So she pulled off her hat and raised her chin.

Her mother turned pale. “When?”

“Yesterday.”

“It’s that friend of yours, isn’t it? That filthy little friend?”

“No,” said Hettie. “It was me. I wanted to. It was all my idea
.”

“
Don’t
you answer back to me.”

And her mother slapped her, then, hard across the cheek.

Hettie puts her hand to it now. Her face is sore. Everything is sore. It is as though she has shed her skin and there is only the soft painful inside left.

She takes a deep breath and looks down at her hands in her lap. In the room next door she can hear Fred stirring in bed. Soon he will go out for his walk. She hasn’t got much time.

She stands up and goes quietly downstairs. Her mother is in the kitchen, sitting with a cup of tea. Hettie stands in the doorway and watches her. The bowed shoulders, and her face, unguarded, collapsed into its contours of disappointment and loss. It is not a face Hettie wants to inherit.

“Is there anything in the pot?”

Her mother looks up, surprised. She nods.

“Enough for two more?”

“I expect so.”

Hettie takes a tray and two cups and pours out the tea, adding sugar and milk.

“What are you doing?” says her mother.

“I’m taking it to Fred.”

She can feel her mother’s incredulous silence follow her as she takes the tray out of the room. She climbs the stairs, puts the tea on the floor, and knocks on her brother’s door.

She hears a rustling inside.

“Fred?” she says quietly. “Are you awake?”

Hesitant footsteps, and then her brother opens the door in his pajamas, his hair ruffled from sleep.

“Here.” She bends down and holds out the tea. “For you.”

He looks down at it, back up at her. Blinks, then reaches out and takes it. “Thanks,” he says, his pale eyes questioning.

“I want you to do something for me, Fred,” says Hettie. “Say yes. Please.”

The sun is surprisingly warm, surprisingly bright. Though the street she stands on, the one bordering the park, is quiet, to her left, down on the Euston Road, Evelyn can see a great moving mass of people. She turns away from them, taking the entrance to Regent’s Park. But she doesn’t escape the crowds; they come toward her, relentless, families carrying picnic baskets, children in their mothers’ arms, women, everywhere women, old, tired-looking women, their hair pinned beneath hats from another century; younger women, their hair shorn and their black skirts short. The same fixed expression is on all of their faces, as though they have sewn themselves in, as though they are determined not to spill before the appointed time, the time that the newspapers and the politicians have decreed for mourning. Eleven o’clock.