KDBookOnline
Share Us
His writing. His words. His voice.
Dear Eliza, I am writing this quickly before we move up into the line for whatever action is coming. If anything should happen to me, I want you to know that you are the beneficiary of my possessions and effects, such as they are. Look after yourself and live well. You deserve to be happy.
With my love,
Jem.
P.S. If I don’t make it through, can I ask you to keep safe the enclosed? In the hope that one day you’ll get the chance to pass it on.
She moves the page aside and the air leaves her lungs in a rush as she sees the second envelope that it has been wrapped around.
Mrs Kate Furniss.
As she unfolds the densely written pages, she is gasping, tears already stinging in her eyes, spilling down her cheeks and splashing onto the words. Impatiently she dashes them aside and begins to read.
She doesn’t know how long she sits there. Time becomes fluid, abstract, and she tumbles back through the years to that sultry summer. Looking back, it seems it was a time suspended between two worlds: the Victorian one occupied by Sir Henry Hyde—a world of candlelight and carriages, and this modern age of motorcars and machine guns. A time of brief and shimmering happiness.
He takes her back there, and the emotions she has carefully folded away and packed into the past come tumbling out, like an old suitcase opened and upended, enveloping her in the textures and scents of that time. When she looks up finally, the families are gone, replaced by a few strolling couples and groups of soldiers on leave—some in Canadian uniforms—looking for amusement. The tide has come in and the light is different.
She is different too. It’s like a protective cloak has been wrenched off her, leaving her exposed in the teeth of a savage gale. It is impossible to separate how she feels into distinct emotions—it is everything at once: relief, joy, love… elation, and frustration. Yearning. Astonishment. Bitterness and regret.
She gets stiffly to her feet and swipes at her cheeks. She walks quickly, taking no notice of the Canadians who stare at her with interest and call out. She barely registers where she is going, only aware that it isn’t back to Belgrave Place, because Mrs Van de Berg’s house is too narrow and hushed and decorous to contain the tornado of her thoughts and the wild drum of her heart. As she walks, some of the confusion falls away and she finds that one emotion emerges, phoenix-like, from the chaos.
Anger.
She turns to go onto the pier, pushing against the tide of people flowing out of the concert hall, where a band has just finished playing. She shoulders through them, past the deckchairs and the amusement machines (Lady Palmist—Automatic Reading of Your Hand. KNOW THYSELF) until the crowd has thinned and the gaps between the boards beneath her feet show sea instead of shingle.
How can fate be so cruel? How dare it bring her this glimmer of hope and consolation, only to keep it dangling out of her reach?
It is just a week since he finished writing the letter, hardly any time at all; but it has been a week like no other, when the world has split open and unleashed a boiling lava of chaos and destruction. She feels dizzy with panic as she thinks of the convoys and casualty lists, the mud and the blood and the stunned men at whose bedsides she has sat. Everyone’s dead, one had said, with a kind of horrified awe, describing how he had returned to his regiment’s assembly point on that first day to find only twenty men remaining of the four hundred who had left the trenches that morning. Jem had known he might not survive. That was why he’d written.
But still, it is unthinkable. Impossible.
It is… intolerable.
She walks as far as she can, to the very end of the pier, and grips the railing as the evening breeze (cooler now) tugs at her hat. Behind her, the beach and the rows of smart houses and hotels along the seafront seem far away, and she leans forward, as much as she can, every fibre of her being straining towards France.
She has got used to being unhappy. She has long since given up expecting anything different, but the letter has thawed her frozen heart. The feeling has returned to it, a thousand times more painful than the blood returning to cold fingers held up to a fire.
‘Don’t you dare be dead, Jem Arden,’ she sobs out loud to the reeling gulls. ‘Don’t you bloody dare. You’d better still be out there somewhere. You’d better still be alive. You can’t not come back to me now.’
Later, when it is going dark and she has cooked and cleared away Mrs Van de Berg’s dinner (Rissoles again, Simmons? I know there are shortages, but I’m sure there’s no need to let standards fall quite so much), she walks back to Lewes Crescent.
She is far from certain that she will be allowed to see Joseph at this hour. Visiting times are strictly maintained, and the nurses regard the groups of tremulous mothers, sisters, and sweethearts that shuffle into the wards, the gruff fathers who stand around stiffly, getting in the way, as something of a trial, often leaving the men more unsettled than they found them. However, just as she is trying to explain to the purse-lipped night sister sitting at the desk in the entrance hall, Corporal Maloney appears, on his way off duty.
‘If you’ve come to take me dancing, Miss Simmons, I’m afraid I’m going to have to pass,’ he says with a half-hearted wink.
‘I’ve come to see Private Jones,’ she says. ‘He was brought in earlier. I understand it’s not really allowed, but I—I know him, you see. From… before.’
Corporal Maloney’s face loses its teasing expression. ‘Young lad who was on Rodney Ward? Sister’ll be pleased to have someone to sit with him. He’s been giving out something shocking this afternoon—got an awful bee in his bonnet about going to hell because he’s killed someone, which isn’t really what the other lads want to hear. We had to move him to a room on his own in the end. The chaplain’s been in and he’s quieter now. Doped up to the eyes, but I reckon he’d benefit from the company of an old friend.’ He makes a weary attempt at a grin. ‘Not that I’m saying you’re old, of course, Miss Simmons.’
At the night sister’s nod of assent, she follows him through the inner hall and along to a small anteroom behind the old dining room, where footmen must once have waited with their dishes and tureens for the butler’s signal. It is a box, higher than it is wide, its panelled walls painted that pale green that was fashionable when these houses were built. There are shutters at the long window, and the bottom half has been folded closed while the top half is open, showing the darkened sky.
The room contains a single iron bed with a locker beside it, on which a lamp is lit. Beside the bed there’s a canvas-seated chair.
‘He didn’t like being in the dark,’ Corporal Maloney whispers, nodding at the figure in the bed. ‘Poor kid. If he’s eighteen, I’m Lord Kitchener. Anyway, I’ll leave you to it.’
She mutters a thank-you and sits down, waiting until the orderly’s footsteps have died away before she looks properly at the figure in the bed. Her heart turns over and, for the second time that day, tears rush to her eyes, though she can’t say whether it is because Joseph looks so recognisably the same, or so very altered.