We've Come to Take You Home (7 page)

SEVENTEEN

O
NE
. T
WO
. P
LEASE, NO
, it couldn't be. Three. Four. The clock chimed five. But what clock? And where? Because there was no such clock in the house, there never had been. Sam hauled herself out of bed. Where was she? Everything was wrong. This wasn't her bedroom. The ceiling was too low and there was just one window. The floor was wooden and black rather than carpeted and brown. There was a fireplace instead of a radiator and just in front of her, where there should have been a door, there was a wall.

Her mind followed her legs over to a washstand. Her arms and hands poured water out of a jug into a bowl, picked up a rough cloth, soaked it in the lukewarm water and washed her face. They unbuttoned the top of her long-sleeved nightdress and, reaching down inside, gave each armpit a good scrub. They did the same between her legs. They dragged a comb through her hair and then tied it back in a ribbon.

A pile of clothes lay in a crumpled, unwashed heap on a rickety chair beside the bed. First one thick, black, wool stocking, then a second, was rolled up her leg and over her knee. Next were a pair of knickers that were so long and baggy they would have been too large for someone three times her size.

The nightdress she was wearing was tugged off and a sleeveless, knee-length slip pulled over her head. A corset was jerked up bit by bit over her hips until the top was digging into the skin below her breasts. She looked down, through
somebody else's eyes, powerless to stop what was happening, as her hands tightened the laces, forcing her chest out and her waist in.

Fingers she didn't recognise did up the ten buttons on the long-sleeved, floor length, brown dress. They tied an apron securely around her waist. Her feet slid themselves into a pair of lace-up, black leather ankle boots lying on the floor beside a chair.

Her hands straightened the bed and plumped up the pillow. Her feet walked her over to the door. Her right hand opened it. On the floor, directly outside the bedroom, was a glass jar. Inside the jar was a single white rose.

Sam opened her eyes. Her heartbeat slowed. She was inside her own body, in her own room and she was lying on her bed. The ceiling was not too low. There were two windows and brown carpet on the floor. And the door leading out onto the landing was exactly where it should be, on the other side of the room. And it was seven o'clock at night. Not five o'clock in the morning.

She'd definitely heard those chimes. But her mother had always refused to have a grandfather clock or anything similar; the constant chiming, on the hour, every hour, would keep them awake all night. And the chimes had sounded very distant. As though they were coming from a long way down in a much larger house, the sort of house that had attics, a basement and several floors. Not the modern, brick box type of house Sam and her parents lived in.

She slid off the bed and padded over to the window. The lights along the promenade always came on at sunset, as late as eight o'clock in the summer and as early as four o'clock in the winter. Today was Sunday, it was November, and the wind was howling in off the sea and there they were, twinkling away off into the distance, even though there was nobody around.

The first time she'd been at the fair, on the ghost train,
sitting in the cab with Leo. The second time, she'd been running down the road, trying to reach her father's car. She hadn't really thought about it, she'd been so worried about the accident, her father being in hospital, whether he would ever come home again, but now this slip into another world had happened again. And this time when she was asleep, in her bedroom, safe inside her own home.

She opened her bedroom door. There was no glass jar and no white rose. She padded down the landing. The door to her parents' bedroom was closed. She raised her hand to knock and then lowered it. She should let her mother rest.

She went on, slowly, down through the silent house. The rain started as she entered the kitchen, a single drop, then several, then a squall. She pulled down the blind and closed the curtains.

It could have been any other Sunday evening. The kitchen was filled with the smell of her mother's chicken casserole simmering in the oven. Apples, bananas and oranges were neatly stacked in the blue and white bowl her parents had brought back with them from Morocco and a bunch of lilies, pink ones, were sitting in a glass vase on top of the bookcase which contained her mother's constantly expanding collection of cookery books.

A bottle of red wine was sitting there, opened and only partly finished. She poured herself a glass. She took one sip. And then a second sip. There were some lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber and a packet of mixed peppers in the fridge. She would make a salad and then go upstairs and wake her mother.

She sliced up the green and then the red pepper. And she poured herself another glass of wine. She cut the cucumber into thick slices and then cut each individual slice into four. She poured herself a third glass of wine.

She couldn't remember drinking her very first glass of wine. It was probably on holiday, with her parents, perhaps
when they were on one of their camping trips in France. And the glass had probably contained more water than wine. But she could definitely remember smoking her first cigarette. Her mother was out, and her father putting up some shelves downstairs, when she sneaked out of her bedroom, down the landing and into her parents' bedroom. She unzipped her mother's handbag. She searched through all the tissues, used and unused, the soggy chocolate bars and the crumpled up parking tickets and shopping receipts until she found a lighter and a packet of cigarettes.

She sneaked back down the hallway into her room. Sitting on the edge of the bed, with the door closed and the window wide open, she smoked first one, then two, then three. It was when Sam was smoking her sixth that she began to feel as if there was a cheese grater lodged inside her chest. She lit and then took a drag on the seventh. She stubbed it out. All she could taste, all she could smell, was cigarettes. They were in her hair, on her clothes; they were everywhere. There was no way either her mother or father, if they came into the bedroom, would not know, instantly, that she had been smoking.

She opened her bedroom door and crept down the corridor to her parents' bedroom. She unzipped the handbag, put the cigarettes back where she'd found them and then zipped the handbag shut. She crept back down the hallway into her bedroom. It still stank. And the mug she'd been using as an ashtray was full of cigarette stubs.

Back out into the hallway, this time into the bathroom. She closed the door, locked it and then emptied the stubs into the toilet. She flushed and then flushed again. The stubs were still there. She closed her eyes, flushed again and then opened her eyes. They were still there, bobbing up and down in the bottom of the toilet. Someone tried the door handle. There was a knock. A voice, her father's, asked if she was all right. She said nothing. He asked her to open the door. She did so.
He walked into the bathroom, glanced down at the toilet and then turned to look at her. And he laughed.

Her parents hadn't had an argument. No one had asked anyone to leave. Her mother and father were together and everything was going to be fine. It was somebody else's father, not her own, who was in the intensive care unit. In just a few minutes, her mother would walk into the room and they would sit, the two of them together, at the kitchen table. Her mother would scold her for drinking the wine and then pour a glass for herself.

The phone would ring, her mother would answer it and it would be her father saying that he was in his hotel room and he was missing them. Her mother would hand her the phone and he would ask her how she was and what had she done that day. She wouldn't tell him about the three glasses of wine she'd drunk. But he would guess – and he would laugh.

For a moment she believed her own lie. She heard footsteps on the stairs, the door opened and there was her mother. But then the feeling of control slipped away leaving her naked to the truth she had been trying so hard to avoid. Her mother was asleep upstairs and, she, Sam, was sitting, very alone and very drunk, at the kitchen table.

She walked out into the hallway, up the stairs and along the landing to her parents' bedroom. She knocked on the door, nothing, and knocked again, much louder, again nothing. She opened the door.

‘Mum…'

She groped her way across the room.

‘Mum?'

Her mother was lying, fully dressed, on top of the duvet. Her face was blotched and her eyes were puffy. In her hand was a scrunched up paper tissue. Several others lay scattered over the bed and on the floor. Sam stepped back.

What good would be done in waking her mother up? What
was the point in going over and over something which had already happened; even if her parents hadn't had the argument, her mother hadn't told her father to leave, he would still have left for the airport, the girl would still have walked out in front of his car and he would still be hooked up to machines in the intensive care unit. Nothing would be altered. Nothing would be changed.

She crept out of the bedroom, closing the door behind her. She crept back along the corridor, down the stairs and into the kitchen. She picked up the bottle of wine and emptied its contents, every single last drop, into her glass and opened a second bottle.

EIGHTEEN

May 1917

T
HE INSIDE OF THE
compartment crashed to black. She screamed. And then it was daylight again. The train was still thundering on and the young soldier sitting next to her was smiling.

‘Have to get used to ‘em, love, tunnels, there's lots of ‘em between here and London.'

Jess and her mother had always stopped to wave at the trains thundering past on the other side of the river, north to London and south to the coast. But she had never been on one, not until that morning.

She pushed her way into the carriage, along the corridor, into a compartment and down onto a seat. Outside, villages, fields and valleys were soon replaced by houses, chimneys and factories. And the colour of the countryside, the blue of the sky, the green of the fields, the pink of the blossom on the trees, was replaced by a dirty grey. The sky was grey. The houses were grey. Even the people were grey.

But Clapham Junction station wasn't grey: it was black. The air was full of soot and it smelt so bad it hurt to breathe. There were people everywhere, scurrying around like ants, going upstairs and downstairs, into tunnels and out of tunnels. The platforms went on and on, stretching off forever into the distance.

Jess stood there, holding tight onto her suitcase, doing exactly what her mother had told her to do; get off, stand on the platform, don't move, not to worry, the Major would soon
find her. That had been half an hour ago. The train on which she had arrived had pulled out. A second one had pulled in and was already pulling out. And still there was no sign of the Major.

Jess took the letter her mother had given her out of her pocket. It was from the Major and his wife and printed on it, at the top, was an address: Eaton Villa, Glebe Road, London SW11. Her mother insisted that she should have it ‘just in case'. Was ‘just in case' waiting for half an hour on a platform with no sign of the Major? Had they forgotten her?

Her suitcase was getting heavy. Her mother had told her not to put it down; it would only get stolen. She put the case down and sat on it. If someone wanted to steal her case they would have to steal her too.

‘Jessica? Jessica Brown?'

A big man, completely bald, arms swinging, was marching down the platform towards her.

‘Explosion last night at a munitions factory in east London. Seventy-three dead, hundreds injured. They're still digging them out…'

The Major picked up her case and marched off. She ran behind him, along the platform, down a flight of steps and into a tunnel. More steps, another tunnel, and they were outside the station.

A car, if one came into the village, had been regarded as something to be kept well away from; you couldn't trust them not to explode. But now, right in front of where she was standing, there they were, hundreds of them crawling up and down the road like a mass of giant beetles.

She'd never seen anything like it. Cars and horses pulling carts, and strange-looking things which looked like very tall cars, with people sitting both inside and on top, were all jostling for space along a narrow stretch of road. And she'd never heard so much noise. At home, any travel or transport
had always been done by horse and cart. The carts, like the ones here, had big iron-shod wheels but they'd made hardly a sound clip-clopping through muddy farmyards and down country lanes. But in London, those same iron-shod wheels going over stone cobbles made enough noise to waken the dead.

There was an angry honking of horns as the Major stepped off the kerb. He marched, weaving in and out of the traffic, without hesitating, towards the other side of the road. Jess stood there, frozen, as a car crawled by just inches from where she was standing. She took a deep breath and stepped off the kerb. A second car crawled past. A person was driving it, and there may well have been people sitting inside it, but all she could see was its shiny, polished metal.

She continued forward. The Major was alive and well, and still marching, and so was she. A large cart drawn by two horses, loaded up with barrels, rumbled towards her, sparks flying from its metal wheels. She should wait for it to pass. But the Major had already reached the pavement and was now striding off down the street. She walked out in front of the cart. If she hurried, didn't hesitate, she would make it. One step, two steps, but just as she'd reached the middle of the road, her feet slid out from underneath her.

She crashed down, face first, onto the wet cobblestones. The cart wasn't stopping. It wasn't even slowing down. She would be crushed to a pulp as the metal clad wheels rolled, without stopping, over her shattered bones.

A hand tugged at her arm. She was dragged her up onto her feet. She was pulled forward, out of the way of the cart, round the back of a car, round the front of a second car and up onto the pavement on the other side of the street. Before she could say thank you, the barefooted boy wearing the ragged remains of a red, grey and tartan waistcoat was back, darting in and out of the traffic, bucket in hand, scooping up horseshit.

She struggled to keep up, sweating inside the heavy coat, her new boots pinching, as the Major marched ahead. They passed a baker, a butcher, a tobacconist, a draper and a milliner. The baker and butcher had their shutters down. Other shops, although still open, had windows which had been boarded up.

The queues of people waiting to buy food back home in her village had been long but the queues they were walking past now, here in London, snaked out of the shop, along the street and round the corner. It was impossible to tell where one queue ended and another began. And no one was talking to anyone. The women were just standing there, hollow-eyed, sunken-faced, their shoulders drooping, one in front of the other, all dressed either in black or grey, waiting their turn.

A shopkeeper, sleeves rolled up, a long white apron tied round his waist, came out of a grocer's shop and said something she couldn't hear. The queue lurched forward. A group of women started shouting. Others started screaming. Two women prodded and poked him in the chest forcing him back, step by step, towards the doorway. A woman picked up a stone. She hurled it at the shop window. There was a loud crack, followed by silence, and then glass exploded out onto the street. Jess had heard talk, at home in the village, of food riots in the cities. Now she was seeing one.

‘Fighting on the streets, next thing there'll be a revolution, like in Russia. Damned Bolsheviks…'

She followed the Major right into a narrow street. Houses were lined up, shoulder to shoulder, on both sides of the road. There was not an inch of space between them. The cottage where her family lived may have been poor, with only one room, but there was nobody, to their left, right or opposite, watching and listening to everything they were doing. And they had a garden, all planted up with vegetables, beans, onions and potatoes, and flowers, like her mother's blue cornflowers, and when you walked down the path, and out through the
gate, there were fields, and hedgerows and trees. Not grey stone and red brick.

At the end, facing directly towards them, was a tall building, also red brick. The roof had fallen in. All the windows had been blown out and the walls, the ones that still remained, looked as though they were about to collapse. A child's boot lay abandoned amongst the broken glass and brick dust covering the ground. The Major stopped. He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket.

‘There was an air raid. The teachers took the children down to the basement, to the infants' classroom, where they would be safe. The bomb went straight through the roof, into the empty boys' classroom, down through the empty girls' classroom, and into the infants' classroom where all the teachers and children were sheltering.'

The Major blew on his nose long and hard.

‘Eighteen dead, more than a hundred injured.'

The war had always been in France. But now it was happening here at home. The white plane, with the black crosses painted on the underside of its wings; she now understood why her father had ordered her back to the cottage. But a thatched roof and mud walls wouldn't be much protection if one, single bomb could rip apart a solid, brick-built building like this.

The Major stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket. He picked up her suitcase and marched off. She followed him down more streets lined with houses; Ebbs Road, Honeywell Road, right into Hillier Road and then, finally, left into Glebe Road.

She stared up at the Major's house. Eaton Villa was like nothing she'd seen before. With its soaring turrets, pointed arches and snarling stone lions, it looked more like a church than a family home.

‘My wife's never recovered from losing our two oldest boys.'

The Major put his key in the lock.

‘To lose them both within a month of each other, both in the fighting in France, was just too much. It broke her heart.'

The Major turned the key. The door opened.

‘The house is too large for just the two of us and with no help it has been difficult to keep things as we would like. Getting the letter from your mother was a blessing.'

She followed the Major into the hallway. She stopped, her mouth open, staring up in astonishment, at the vaulted ceiling, the jewel-coloured tiled floor and the glowing wood-panelled walls. The house, from the outside, looked like a church. Inside, it was a castle.