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Against the white pillow, his skin is as red and fragile as poppy petals. His blond hair is darker, his brow broader, and his jaw harder; but in sleep his face has the same unguarded innocence of the boy she knew at Coldwell, the one she scrubbed clean of workhouse grime on the day he arrived, revealing the bruises on his bony back. She wanted to believe then that his worst days were behind him, that Coldwell would offer a new start and a place of safety for him, as it had for her.
Frederick Henderson had poisoned that hope for them both.
The starched sheets crackle as Joseph twitches beneath them, his head twisting on the pillow. In the lamplight she can see that his eyelids are flickering, his scabbed and crusted lips moving wordlessly. She wonders where he is, what landscapes he is moving through in his dreams. She wonders if Jem is there, and wishes she could follow.
She folds her hands to stop herself from reaching out to wake him. And settles in to wait as long as it takes.
Chapter 35
Nottinghamshire
July 11th 1916
Eliza walks along the lane from the little country station between high hedgerows frothing with cow parsley. Up above, the swallows are swooping and circling in the fathomless blue, but if they’re singing their squealing song, she can’t hear it: her ears are still ringing with the clang and clamour of the factory. For twelve hours, while the city slept, she has been stuffing explosive into shell cases and hammering it down, and now her arms ache and her back hurts and her dry mouth tastes of iron.
The shift finished at six o’clock, when a pear-drop sun was rising over the chimney pots. It’s high in the sky now, hard and hot on the top of her hat. In the hours in between, she has been back to Elsie’s house on Albion Street for a breakfast of strong tea, with bread and jam, as she often does (more so recently, with the news dripping in from France all the time; Elsie dreads going home to find a telegram or a letter from the commanding officer of the Pals Battalion her husband, Bert, joined in the first week of the war). Sometimes Eliza stays there for the day, crawling into the creaking bed in Elsie’s tiny back bedroom, when sleep is already dragging at her and the journey back to Lane End Cottage seems too arduous. But today some superstitious impulse has brought her home.
Two days ago, a postcard arrived from a convalescent home in Surrey, with her name written in a stranger’s stout hand on the front, and Jem’s name on the back. Below it was a list of printed statements. I am quite well, and I am being sent down to the base had both been crossed out with a firm stroke of the pen.
I have been wounded remained.
So did A letter will follow shortly.
That’s why she’s come back. The thought of a stretch of unbroken sleep in Albion Street before going back to the factory this evening was almost overwhelmingly tempting, but she needs to see if the letter has come. Throughout the night shift, the noise and activity had made it possible not to think about Jem being wounded (where? how?) but in the stillness of the countryside, there is nothing to stop the prickle of dread, like iced water dripping down her spine.
As she walks, her feet kick up dust from the road. By the time she arrives at the gate of Lane End Cottage her skirt is claggy with it, and she thinks wistfully of the hard pavement on Albion Street, swept clean daily by its waiting women. The cottage itself looks like something you might see on the lid of a chocolate box, with rosy bricks and diamond-paned windows and pale pink roses clambering around the front door. The rain a couple of weeks ago has made everything grow like mad, and the grass is lush and glossy, matted with daisies and tumbling over the path. The boughs of the plum and damson trees in the little orchard to the side are already laden with fruit, green and hard now, but promising a plentiful autumn.
But still, she feels a weight settle across her shoulders as she fits her key in the lock and shoves open the front door. Not just at the thought that a letter might be waiting but at the damp fug of neglect that folds around her as she steps inside and the guilt that accompanies it. All those ripening plums and damsons don’t feel like a blessing so much as a reproach. A very obvious reminder of her domestic shortcomings.
She thinks, quite suddenly, of the stillroom at Coldwell and its shelves of jams and bottled fruits made by Mrs Furniss. How effortless she had made it seem, that order and neatness. That efficiency. The tasks of each season accomplished on time, the rhythm of the vast house kept ticking with the same constancy as its many clocks.
Eliza has spent the last five years trying to be Kate Furniss, and only managing a tin-plate, ha’penny replica of the real thing. A flat, flimsy paper doll, to Mrs Furniss’s painted porcelain.
Her heart catches a little as she sees a letter lying on the floor behind the door. She picks it up. The handwriting on the front is elegant and looping—obviously not Jem’s. She stares at it as she carries it through to the kitchen and is oddly reluctant to open it. Leaving it on the table, she goes over to unhook a teacup from the dresser and fills it from the tap at the sink (installed by Jem and Joseph the summer before the war). She swallows the cold water and looks around sadly, taking in the dead flies on the windowsill, the layer of dust furring the stone-cold range, and the spectre of her failure rises up once more.
She tried to make the best of it here. They all did. That terrible winter, when the three of them were still reeling from what had happened… Jem had gathered them into a sort of patched-up, makeshift, damaged family and looked after them. Taken the first job he found that came with a house and done his best through the bleak time that followed. (The time she didn’t allow herself to think about.)
It wasn’t his fault he couldn’t love her.
At the beginning she’d thought that didn’t matter, and that she would be content just being with him. It wasn’t what she’d dreamed of, but it was an awful lot more than she’d hoped for back at Coldwell when he’d barely noticed her. In some ways it would have been easier if he’d turned out to be difficult to live with; selfish or disrespectful, demanding or bad-tempered, but he hadn’t.
It just wasn’t the life either of them wanted.
It wasn’t really any life at all.
She gulps the last mouthful of water and leaves the cup on the draining board. If it hadn’t been for the war, they might have gone on like that for years, all of them quietly unhappy, Jem pining for the woman he’d lost, Joseph fighting his demons alone and mostly in silence, her mourning the baby she never even wanted and going quietly mad at the relentless grind of domesticity; the endless battles against mud and dust, cold and heat, shortage and surplus, boredom and loneliness. The constant need to produce meals that took hours to prepare and minutes to consume.
The war jolted them out of their torpor. Though she is as aware as anyone at home can be about the horrors of Over There, she can’t help feeling that the changes it has brought haven’t been all bad… not for her, at least. She’d rather fill shells in a factory than be a skivvy in service any day. She might not have a man, but she does have freedom, independence, and a decent wage, and there’s a lot to be said for that.
She yawns widely. Today she is going to pack up the rest of her clothes and go down to the farmhouse to leave the key with Mrs Burgess, along with Elsie’s address, before heading back to Albion Street for a bit of shut-eye before the evening shift. It was Elsie’s suggestion that Eliza should stay there more permanently. She likes the company, to make up for Bert’s absence, and she could do with some help with the rent. For her part, Eliza would certainly rather be spared the expense of the rail fare back to Little Langley, and the long tramp through the lanes to an empty house, a cold range, and a damp bed at the end of a long shift. So long as Mrs Burgess doesn’t mind forwarding on any post, there’s nothing to keep her here, except memories and the last vestiges of stubborn hope.
(Maybe, when he comes back—if he comes back—he’ll be ready to accept that he’s not going to find her… Maybe he’ll have missed me, and realised I was what he wanted all along…)
Her eyes swivel to the letter on the table. She suddenly feels so crushed with exhaustion that it is an effort to push herself away from the sink to retrieve it. The postmark is Brighton, and there is something evocative about the graceful script—it makes her think of well-ordered accounts in a ledger and neat rows of jars on a shelf. Yawning, she tears open the envelope and pulls out another, folded inside it.
Her heart falters.
This one is addressed in Jem’s writing. Her name. There is a piece of notepaper tucked in beside it. It flutters in her trembling hand as she unfolds it and sees the name at the end.