A Winter's Child (5 page)

They had met on a Channel steamer, both of them coming on leave, she to visit acquaintances in Devon, he to sort out the complexities of a young wife who was expecting a child which could not possibly be his. They had stood on deck, a cold wind in their faces, and measured each other, both of them already seasoned pawns in the murderous war games of – ageing generals, both of them fully aware that their youth – whether or not their bodies survived – had already been sacrificed for nothing. He had been for eight continuous months in the trenches and his eyes were full of crucifixions by barbed wire and the swelling corpses which could not be recovered from No-Man's-Land, his nostrils plagued by the stench when they eventually blackened and burst open. She had been nursing gassed, burned, blinded men, and then either preparing them for burial or labelling them as ‘survivors' and shipping their choking, crippled remains back to England. A line of them had come aboard with her, shuffling up the gangplank in single file, each sightless man with a hand on the shoulder of the sightless man in front of him, a doctor to lead the way, Claire bringing up the rear. And whenever she closed her own clear eyes she could still see their macabre procession shuffling – eternally stumbling – engraved for ever, perhaps, on the inside of her eyelids. But if she and Paul had been spiritually crippled, mentally drained, or had passed far beyond mere disillusion to a blank acceptance of evil, their bodies, their senses, had refused to age accordingly.

Like Jeremy he had gone directly from university to the front, an officer immediately in charge of the lives of men whose only experience of command had been as captain of his school cricket eleven. He had learned rapidly about death and had so far managed to survive. She had gone straight from the schoolroom to her three-day bridal bed and then to those terrible encampments where she had seen death so often that she had started to hold herself aloof from life. They had spent a day together in London missing their respective trains, but when he had asked her to stay with him she had refused. On the platform, waiting for the Devon train, he had taken her in his arms as if she had always belonged there, kissed her with all the long-stored passion there would be no time to give, and she had scrambled into her compartment and closed the door, her head reeling, but glad – fiercely glad – to be making her escape from wanting him.

She would be safe now, or so she had imagined. But a few days later, having made financial provision for the girl he could barely remember that he had married, he had found the village and the inn where she was staying.

‘Here I am. If you send me away I'm not sure I can go.'

He had not said ‘I may be killed next week or the week after' since that was the first thing she had understood about him. But walking hand in hand down green English lanes which seemed less real to Claire in their quiet wholesomeness than the mud-soaked margins of battle, the moment came when refusing him appeared more painful, a degree more unthinkable than the desperate hazard she understood to be love.

For the two weeks of his leave they made love with the same sense of condensing weeks into moments, years into days, which she had known with Jeremy. And then, miraculously, as if they had both surrendered a second virginity, they had passed beyond urgency to a harmony of body and spirit which seemed to them to be timeless.

Her life became Paul, his letters, his leaves, the absolute joy of his presence, of eating with him in indifferent cafés, of sharing a narrow bed with him in French inns and cheap English seaside hotels, of strolling through nervous wartime streets or along empty sands vicious with barbed wire, talking to him and watching him answer, looking at him, touching him.

The war became Paul too, a terrifyingly simple matter of one man's survival. With each newly delivered letter in her hand she knew that he might already be dead. She was in a position to know, and to be reminded, every minute of every day, of the many obscene variations in which he could die. She was aware too, with atrocious clarity, of what shellfire, rifle fire, fire itself, mustard gas, a bowie knife, might – without killing him – do to him; of the crippled, castrated wreck she might discover one day, in a hospital bed which would be Paul. She got up every morning knowing it. She ate with it, worked with it, slept with it. Somehow – because what else was there to do? – she coped. She could have gone mad, of course. But to do so – or at least to admit to a higher degree of insanity than everybody else, since they were
all
mad by then, surely? – would not really have offered a lasting solution. And she did not consider it in any case.

They agreed to make no plans, yet, nevertheless, they made them. In order to avoid a scandal, with which his wife was too young and his mother too conventional to cope, he had acknowledged paternity of his wife's child, thus making divorce a chancy issue when the war should be over. Not that he would care to institute proceedings against ‘poor old Gwen'in any case, since he belonged to a world where such things were simply not done. If she would divorce him then he would be grateful and glad and would immediately marry Claire. If not, then they would just go ahead and make a life together, not in provincial, narrow-minded Faxby, of course, and certainly not in the even more strait-laced, ecclesiastical community where Paul's father was expected to become a bishop, but in some corner of the world where honest emotion might find a welcome. They were both of them too cautious, too wise, too superstitious to long for that golden future yet, nevertheless, they longed for it, believed in it, could accept no compromise.

It had taken her four anguished weeks to learn that he had died of wounds on a hot, dusty afternoon in September, 1918, since the friend he had asked to contact her in the event of his death had been killed an hour before him and, in the end, she had learned of her loss in a short, embarrassed letter from his wife. To Gwen Daneleigh that letter had been the repayment of a debt. By acknowledging her child, Paul had saved her from disgrace and she knew she had no right to begrudge him his love for Claire. She had even tried to be glad of it, for she was a well-meaning girl who meant no harm to anyone. But certainly – if he had lived – it would have caused her a great deal of pain. Definitely, most definitely, she had not wanted Paul to die. She desperately clung to that. But now, since he
had
died, she would no longer be obliged to go through the agonizing processes of divorce, would be safe both from scandal and from sympathy, from the constant anxiety that someone – her mother – or Paul's mother – would find out that Paul was not the father of her child. Now no one would ever know. And when she finally came face to face with Claire across the chintz-covered table of a London teashop she had been appalled not only by the taut, controlled ferocity of Claire's grief but by the unnerving penetration of her dark eyes which saw all too clearly that Paul Daneleigh's official widow could not manage to grieve at all.

‘Can I do anything?' she had said, flustered, intimidated. ‘Is there anything of his that I can give you?'

‘Nothing,' Claire had told her and getting up without another word had walked away.

The war ended a month later, on the 11th November, giving rise to an explosion of rejoicing on the home front and a great, puzzled silence which fell like a quick blanket of fog along the trenches. The war was over. There was dancing in the streets of London and Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, Faxby, bonfires burning, jubilant, hysterical men and women hugging and kissing, singing themselves hoarse, drinking themselves ecstatic, amorous, senseless. While in France, not far away across the narrow stretch of water, two armies huddled in the November rain behind lines of barbed wire, facing each other across the obscene litter of No-Man's-Land as they had done for four years: except that now there was the silence. The war was over. It had killed nine million young men and crippled thirty-seven million others. But now it was over. Crabbed signatures on dry paper had ended it. What had begun it? Very few had retained even the inclination to wonder. But now the last shot had been fired, or so somebody had said. And we had won. Somebody had said that too. Slumping down into the familiar muck and muddle of the trenches there were men on both sides who no longer felt inclined to care.

Two men died that night in the ward where Claire still continued to cope. Three more, she thought, would hardly last until the following afternoon. There were still wounds to dress, last messages to be hastily scribbled down, lies to be told to the bereaved about the manner of a man's dying. It was quick. It was clean. It was merciful. Never – never – had it been any of those things. But the words came so automatically to her that she wrote them with her hands alone, entirely shutting off her mind. There was still work to do, hospital trains to empty and fill, those terrible telegrams to be sent. And already, invisible, insidious, more lethal in its way than mustard gas, there was the Spanish influenza which would consume, world-wide, more human life than the war itself had done. Someone had told her that in one particularly plague-ridden area the civilian dead were being packed in orange boxes for lack of sufficient coffins.

‘Really?' she had said and continued with the compassionate falsehoods she had been writing to a dead boy's eighteen-year old wife.

She returned to London in December and, having sent no word to her mother of her arrival, spent Christmas alone in a London boarding house, staring at a blank wall, greeting the New Year, the first year of peace, when it came, with hollow indifference. She had wandered for a bleak month or two thereafter, trailing herself on a frozen pilgrimage of the south coast hotels she had shared with Paul, losing him afresh at every trysting place, punishing herself until the urgency of her mother's letters and her own shortage of cash recalled her to Faxby.

It was the last place on earth she wished to be. But, as the train drew into the familiar station, she knew that her destination as such no longer mattered. She had told no one in Faxby of her relationship with Paul, knowing her mother would have been unable to see beyond the facts of a wife and child, fearing just a little, perhaps, in spite of herself, the combined authority of Edward Lyall and Benedict Swanfield, of whom she had been somewhat in awe on her wedding day.

Would either of them intimidate her now? She very much doubted it. But the fact remained that she was coming home under what she could only describe as false pretences, the widow of a man whose family might not require her to be heartbroken after so long but would surely expect her to remember him. Poor Jeremy. She tried again to reconstruct his face, her mind filling instantly and distressfully with the quizzical grey eyes, the fine blond skin, the lean narrow head of Paul Daneleigh. No-one else. Paul: and a blur of identical strangers. But with that too she could cope since not only the war but her training as a ‘lady'had taught her to pretend. She allowed the train to come to a decided halt, put on the new, Cossack style coat with its fur collar and hem which she had bought with the last of her money, knowing how much it mattered to her mother that she should look smart. She picked up her bag and gloves, adjusted her rather dashing little feathered hat, remembering as she did so the explanations she would be expected to make about her shorn hair and, realizing that she had grown unaccustomed to explaining herself to anyone, stepped out into a dull Faxby afternoon.

For the past four years she had travelled constantly in harsh and dangerous conditions and would have experienced not the slightest difficulty now in organizing the conveying of herself and her various trunks and boxes to her mother's home in the quiet suburb of Upper Heaton. But Faxby did not like to see quite this kind of enterprise in its young ladies and, before her hand left the carriage door, she remembered that for her mother's sake she must leave such things to Edward Lyall.

‘Claire?' Was it a question? She turned her head, smiled, held out her hand in a cool but pleasant fashion, a grown woman just faintly amused at the suddenly human size of a childhood ogre. But, in fact, her composure was less than it seemed, for If she had been unable to remember her own husband she had experienced no such difficulty with her mother's, who appeared to her now completely unchanged, the same taut, dark face and narrow scholarly shoulders, the same fastidious, slightly pained expression of a man constantly overburdened by some distasteful duty, his nerves permanently overwrought, his sensibilities overstrained.

‘Good afternoon, Edward. How are you?'

‘Oh – one mustn't complain, you know. And you? A good journey?'

‘Passable. You are looking well, Edward.'

‘Ah yes – I dare say. But that has always been my problem, as you know. I look well, therefore everybody assumes I feel well, which is sadly very far from the case.'

He was a hypochondriac still, she thought, at any rate, and smiling politely she stood aside, as Faxby believed a woman should, while he fussed and fretted and wore himself out over the disposition of her baggage, regarding its dilapidated condition with considerable alarm. All too clearly these bags and boxes had been stored in army huts, dragged about in the mud of field dressing-stations, transported on hospital trains which Edward Lyall did not even care to contemplate, much less transfer their possible contamination to the boot of his car, his spare bedroom and his attic.

‘Good Heavens, Claire – one wonders why you thought it necessary to accumulate so much.'

They had not met for almost four years. Both of them would have preferred never to meet again. But because of Dorothy Lyall who was Edward's wife, Claire's mother, they regarded each other as inevitable and, in their separate fashions, had long since decided to make the best of it.

‘Come along then. Your mother will be waiting. I said we would be home by teatime.'

And realizing that the daily ceremony of tea with hot buttered toast and raspberry jam was of far greater importance to Edward than any woman's return from France, she climbed into his elderly Talbot and briefly, with a spasm of distaste soon over, closed her eyes.