The Memory of Lost Senses (42 page)

On Jack’s last leave, Cecily savored each second of each minute, barely sleeping so that she could watch him while he slept, take all of him in. And that was all he did, sleep, for three whole days. But on his final day they had gone back to Brighton, with Cora.

The place had been crowded with army personnel and couples unashamedly walking hand in hand; young women in their Sunday best clinging on to their sweethearts; parents walking proudly alongside their uniformed sons—all of them enjoying those precious hours before the inevitable “Adieu” and that grim journey back across the Channel. Under the strange and intense winter sun that day, the young men in uniform appeared to Cecily almost iridescent. They were there and alive, but not really there; destined for glory, destined for death, they were already going, already gone, already ghosts.

And there were the others, too, the walking wounded and injured, in mud-caked tattered uniforms, staggering on crutches, sitting along the promenade in bath chairs; some missing limbs, others disfigured or badly burned. Jack had made a point of stopping to speak to them, shaking hands, slapping backs, making jokes. They all did that, Cecily noticed. As though they had been at some macabre, nightmare party and could laugh about it now, momentarily, before reentering that doorway, and the cacophony of the theater.

Cora had seen injured soldiers many times before, she said, after the Crimea, as first deserters and then disoriented soldiers slowly made their way home to England; and on the streets of Rome, after Garibaldi marched on the city. She told Cecily that she thought her sensibilities had long ago been anesthetized to life’s tragedies and war’s casualties, but even she struggled with the sights that day.

They had sat hand in hand opposite Cora on the train journey back to Linford. And from time to time Jack lifted her hand to his lips and held it there, eyes closed, as Cora chattered on. But there had been signs, even then, of Cora’s confusion and muddled memory; early signs, which went unnoticed.

“Did we have luncheon today?” she had asked.

And they both laughed, thought she was ragging them. Jack said, “Yes, and you said it was daylight robbery. Three shillings, remember?”

She shook her head.

“Whitstable oysters, consommé, turbot Marguery, fillet of beef and peach cardinal. A feast!” Jack said.

She smiled. “Ah yes, of course.”

Later, alone in the bedroom of their cottage, they had lain on the bed staring at each other. He said, “Don’t cry, please. I’ll be back soon, a few weeks . . .”

“Promise me, promise me hand on heart you’ll come back . . . promise me you shan’t let yourself get killed?”

He held his hand to his heart. “I promise.”

“And you’ll never ever forget that promise, will you?”

“Never.”

Against the odds, Jack had survived almost two years in the Royal Flying Corps, and had been promoted from Flying Officer to Lieutenant. But he had been in Number One Squadron, deployed on reconnaissance duties and not fighting. When he telephoned Cecily two days after returning to duty to tell her that he was to be promoted to Captain and that the squadron was to become a dedicated fighter squadron, she said nothing. She closed her eyes and knew: knew immediately that aerial combat would be infinitely more dangerous than reconnaissance. But he seemed oblivious to any peril, and spoke only of his new airplane, a Nieuport 17, and its powerful engine and large wings.

The telegram to say Jack was “missing” arrived the day after Cecily found out—had it confirmed—that she was expecting the first of their “unruly horde.” She had already posted a letter to her husband, saying:

My darling man, I have news! Are you sitting down? I imagine that you are. I imagine you are lying on your horrid uncomfortable bunk as you read this. But even so, brace yourself, darling . . . you are to be a father! Yes, that’s right, YOU ARE TO BE A FATHER! This means that you really do have to stay safe and come back to me . . .

Cecily did not cry, she did not shout. She sat down. And she stayed very still and very silent for some time, holding on to that telegram, pondering that word: missing. Missing was not dead, she reasoned; missing was inconclusive. And Jack had promised. It took her a while to realize that the strange whimpering sound, the sound of an injured animal, was coming from within her and not from outside.

Hours later, she walked out from her cottage toward the village, toward Temple Hill and Cora. It was early autumn, the sky was clear and cloudless, the hedgerows still green, and purple with blackberries. But she saw none of the day. She walked in a daze along the gritted road, past the whitewashed cottages and tile-hung shops of the village, across the stepping-stones of the ford, and up the rabbit-hole tunnel toward the house.
Not dead, not dead . . . missing, not dead
 . . . From time to time she placed her hand upon her stomach and thought of the life within her. And in her head she heard his voice: I promise . . . never.

She kept her gaze steady as she passed her former home, determined not to look at the gate, lest something of him—and her—was still there, an impression caught in the ether and only visible once lost. But at the very top of the track, as she emerged from the shadows, the sound of a motorcycle’s acceleration on the other side of the valley made her stop and look up. She followed its sound along the winding lane toward the village, turned and stared back down the track, willing him to appear, anticipating the sight of him coming up the hillside toward her, to explain. She thought she could hear the machine, spluttering, stumbling through the ford and out the other side. But no one and nothing appeared at the bottom of the track, and as the sound of the engine slowly faded, she too moved on.

Cora was in her usual place, usual chair, leaning forward and peering through her old lorgnette at the newspaper laid out on the card table in front of her.

“Aha!” she said, glancing up as Cecily entered the room. But her smile quickly fell as she took in Cecily’s expression. And before Cecily could speak, she whispered the name as a question. “Jack?”

Cecily nodded. “Missing.”

Cora closed her eyes.

If there was a specific time, a moment Cecily could identify as the start of Cora’s mental collapse, when she had finally given in, given up, surrendered her mind, her sanity, that was it. The prospect of his loss—more loss—was simply too much.

As though shutting out reality, trying to deny that moment, Cora kept her eyes closed. But even through sealed eyelids tears escaped. And Cecily, unsure and impotent, powerless to alter facts and details, unable to offer hope, simply stood and watched. Then, with her eyes still closed and seemingly unable to speak, Cora nodded. As though it were news she had been waiting for. When she finally opened her eyes, she said, “We shan’t give up hope. We must wait for him. He’ll find his way back to us. He’ll find his way home.”

The newspapers were quick to include Jack’s name in the Roll of Honor. Captain J. G. Staunton, RFC, was listed under “Missing,” above the column titled “Previously Reported Missing, Now Reported Killed,” and another, “Previously Reported Missing, Now Reported Prisoners of War.” And the
London Gazette
kindly included him in their “List of Dead.”

Jack had been missing for seven months by the time the letter arrived from the War Office. It enclosed a copy of the Geneva Red Cross “List of Dead,” and read: “Staunton J. G., RFC, seen to fall in an air fight near Bixschoote . . . In view of the lapse of time, this report will be accepted for official purposes as evidence of death.” Ten days later, Cecily gave birth to their son.

As the taxicab turned onto Piccadilly, Cecily glanced at her wristwatch and thought of her boy. He was staying for a few days with her mother and Rosetta, whom he adored, and who idolized him. Rosetta had looked after him as a baby so that Cecily could continue to teach at the school. And her new charge had given her a new lease of life. Each day and in all weathers a bonneted Rosetta had pushed the perambulator proudly through the village, disappearing into the lanes, singing songs to little Jack. One of his first words had been “Etta,” which Rosetta had now officially adopted as her name.

Even then, during those very first days and months of her son’s life, Cecily had spoken to him about his father, telling him how brave and fearless he was. And as her son grew bigger, she would hold him on her hip, pointing to the man in the framed wedding photograph on the mantelshelf and repeating the word
Daddy
, until one day he finally said it as well: “Dada!” And Cecily wept.

She had taken her son to visit his great-grandmother, but by that time Cora had been distracted at best, and entirely absent at worst. There were glimmers, the odd moment when she seemed to know, appeared to realize that the baby in front of her was in fact Jack’s son, her great-grandson. But there had also been occasions when she had stared at the baby in Cecily’s arms, frowning, and asked Cecily to whom the child belonged. Once, possibly prompted by confusion over the name Jack, and after Cecily had once again tried to explain that Little Jack was Jack’s son, she had asked her, “Is it
my
baby?”

It was sad and bizarre and comical. And Cecily had had to remind herself how Cora might think such a thing. Lost in time, she had grasped the name, the name of a former husband with whom she had had her babies.

“No, dear, he’s not your baby. He’s my baby,” she replied, looking at the old lady through tear-filled eyes.

How Walter had laughed when she told him of that. He said, “How can a woman of eighty odd think she has a baby?”

“Because she doesn’t and can’t let herself see the here and now. Inside her mind she’s still young, forever young. She’s gone back in time.”

Walter Gamben had been returned from the killing fields of France invalided, minus a leg, in the spring of 1918. Cecily had visited him at the military hospital at Winchester. Months later, after he had been discharged and returned home to Bramley, he had asked her to marry him. It was Armistice Day, the whole village half-deaf and dizzy from the sound of the church bells, everyone riding on a wave of euphoria, drunk on the idea of peace and the future. How many marriage proposals must there have been that day, Cecily later thought.

She had told Walter that she could not marry him, that she was still in love with her husband, still in love with Jack. She had tried to explain to him that some small part of her refused to believe that Jack was not coming back. For he had promised her and she could not give up on that promise. Not yet. Walter said he understood, and that he’d wait. “Even if I have to wait ten years,” he said, smiling at her with such optimism, such hope. Then he said, “You know, I sometimes feel guilty . . . guilty that my happiness has been brought about by another’s misfortune. For had Jack been here you wouldn’t be with me now.” Cecily told him he was wrong, told him she would still have been there for him; “the whatifs could go on and on—what if I’d never met Jack, what if there had never been a war—but we’re all part of each other’s lives, each other’s story, and always will be.”

But it was the unwritten story, the one about herself and Jack, that she most often returned to, and dreamed of: the
what if he is alive, what if he comes back to me
. She had already spent what seemed like a lifetime imagining that story. A story bound up in missing faces and places, and journeys yet to be taken. It was the fantasy of youth and idle optimism, pulled forward in time and springing back like elastic. Nothing could change the past; it had happened, it had gone, but what if . . . what if . . . what if . . .

But the war had ended and Jack had not returned. He had not come back to her. He had not been able to keep his promise. And as life took on a new normality, hope faded and loneliness set in. Each evening, alone in her bed, Cecily returned to her musings, to Jack, and their unspent future . . .

They would have been happy together, surely, blissfully happy and in love. They would have gone on to have more children, that “unruly horde” they had spoken of. And they would have lived in Bramley, possibly at Temple Hill. After all, it was the perfect house for a large family. There would have been a swing in the garden, a slide, bicycles lying about the place; and noise, oh, so much noise. She would glance up from the manuscript in front of her, look out through the window and see them, see him—her husband, the father of her children. And he would sense her gaze, turn to her and smile.

How it could have been, how it should have been, if only . . .

It had been impossible for Cecily to let go of that dream, and of him, Jack. It sustained her, kept her warm, offered her sanctuary and became her escape. It was the luxury in her life, that imagining, that what-if. And she realized she could write it any way she wished, change and alter it at whim; introduce new situations, new characters, test Jack’s love for her and test her own for him. And thus, night after night, she rewrote history. There was no declaration of war and Jack never fell from the sky. No one aged or died, and time simply moved back and forth, like waves upon a shore. Days were repeated, rerun with amendments and with added color and detail. And she returned again and again to that moment when the world had spun on its axis and everything around them—and beyond them—had seemed possible and within reach.

Cora had once said to her, “We all have a plan . . . a plan of how our lives will be, but it is never what happens because we’re all mortal, all fallible. And because human beings make mistakes—follow others’ mistakes. We are easily led from our path. But we can find our way back, eventually, if we are able to remember what it is we first wished for.”

On Armistice Day, after she had returned home from the celebrations, after Walter’s proposal, Cecily sat up until dawn reading through her old journals. Thinking of her son, his future, she deliberated on destroying the blue cloth-covered books. So much had been promised, so much had been hoped, and she had no wish for him to one day read and feel that loss. Then she picked up her pen and wrote: