One breath, that was all she needed, but it wouldn’t come.
Darkness fell swiftly, at first an enemy, but then a friend.
Snow
11 February 1910
A BIG WOMAN with the forearms of a stoker woke Dr Fellowes by clattering a cup and saucer down on the pot table next to his bed and yanking open the curtains even though it was still dark outside. It took him a moment to remember that he was in the freezing-cold guest bedroom at Fox Corner and that the rather intimidating woman bearing the cup and saucer was the Todds’ cook. Dr Fellowes searched the dusty archive of his brain for a name that he knew had come to him easily a few hours earlier.
‘It’s Mrs Glover,’ she said, as if reading his mind.
‘So it is. She of the excellent pickles.’ His head felt full of straw. He was uncomfortably aware that beneath the frugal covers he was wearing only his combinations. The bedroom grate, he noted, was cold and empty.
‘You’re needed,’ Mrs Glover said. ‘There’s been an accident.’
‘An accident?’ Dr Fellowes echoed. ‘Something has happened to the baby?’
‘A farmer trampled by a bull.’
Armistice
12 November 1918
URSULA WOKE UP with a start. It was dark in the bedroom but she could hear noises somewhere downstairs. A door closing, giggling and shuffling. She caught the high-pitched cackle that was Bridget’s unmistakable laugh and the rumbling bass note of a man. Bridget and Clarence back from London.
Ursula’s first instinct was to clamber out of bed and shake Pamela awake so that they could go downstairs and interrogate Bridget about the high jinks, but something stopped her. As she lay listening to the dark, a wave of something horrible washed over her, a great dread, as if something truly treacherous were about to happen. The same feeling she had had when she’d followed Pamela into the sea when they were on holiday in Cornwall, just before the war. They had been rescued by a stranger. After that Sylvie made sure they all went to the swimming baths in town and took lessons, from an ex-major in the Boer War who barked orders at them until they were too frightened to sink. Sylvie often retold the tale as if it were a hilarious escapade (‘The heroic Mr Winton!’) when in fact Ursula still clearly recalled the terror.
Pamela mumbled something in her sleep and Ursula said, ‘Ssh.’ Pamela mustn’t wake up. They mustn’t go downstairs. They mustn’t see Bridget. Ursula didn’t know why this was so, where this awful sense of dread came from, but she pulled the blankets over her head to hide from whatever was out there. She hoped it was out there and not inside her. She thought she would feign sleep but within minutes the real thing came.
In the morning they ate in the kitchen because Bridget was in bed, feeling ill. ‘Hardly surprising,’ Mrs Glover said unsympathetically, doling out porridge. ‘I dread to think what time she staggered in.’
Sylvie came down from upstairs with a tray that hadn’t been touched. ‘I really don’t think Bridget is well, Mrs Glover,’ she said.
‘Too much drink,’ Mrs Glover scoffed, cracking eggs as if she were punishing them. Ursula coughed and Sylvie glanced sharply at her. ‘I think we should call Dr Fellowes out,’ Sylvie said to Mrs Glover.
‘For Bridget?’ Mrs Glover said. ‘The girl’s as healthy as a horse. Dr Fellowes will give you short shrift when he smells the alcohol on her.’
‘Mrs Glover,’ Sylvie said in the tone she used when she was being very serious about something and wanted to make sure people were listening (Don’t trail muddy footprints into the house, never be unkind to other children, no matter how provoking they are). ‘I really do think Bridget is ill.’ Mrs Glover seemed suddenly to understand.
‘Can you see to the children?’ Sylvie said. ‘I am going to telephone for Dr Fellowes and then I’ll go up and sit with Bridget.’
‘Aren’t the children going to school?’ Mrs Glover asked.
‘Yes, of course they are,’ Sylvie said. ‘Although perhaps not. No – yes – they are. Or should they?’ She hovered, fretfully indecisive, in the kitchen doorway while Mrs Glover waited with surprising patience for her to come to a conclusion.
‘I think keep them at home, for today,’ Sylvie said finally. ‘Crowded schoolrooms and so on.’ She took a deep breath and stared at the ceiling. ‘But keep them down here, just now.’ Pamela raised her eyebrows at Ursula. Ursula raised hers back although she wasn’t sure what they were trying to communicate to each other. Horror mainly, she supposed, at being put in Mrs Glover’s care.
They had to sit at the kitchen table so Mrs Glover could ‘keep an eye on them’ and then, despite their violent protests, she bade them get out their schoolbooks and do work – sums for Pamela, letters for Teddy (Q is for quail, R is for rain) and Ursula was set to practise her ‘atrocious’ handwriting. Ursula thought it vastly unfair that someone who wrote nothing more than shopping lists in a blunt hand (suet, stove blacking, mutton chops and Dinneford’s magnesia) should be passing judgement on her own painful script.
Mrs Glover meanwhile was more than fully occupied with pressing a calf’s tongue, removing the gristle and bone and rolling it up before squeezing it into the tongue press, an altogether more fascinating activity to observe than writing out Quick wafting zephyrs vex bold Jim or The five boxing wizards jumped quickly. ‘I would hate to be in any school where she was mistress,’ Pamela muttered, wrestling with equations.
They were all distracted by the advent of the butcher’s boy, ringing his bicycle bell noisily to announce his arrival. He was a fourteen-year-old called Fred Smith whom both the girls and Maurice admired tremendously. The girls signalled their ardour by calling him ‘Freddy’ while Maurice called him ‘Smithy’ in comradely approval. Pamela had once declared that Maurice had a pash on Fred and Mrs Glover, who happened to hear, slapped Pamela in passing on the back of her legs with a balloon whisk. Pamela was very put out and had no idea what she had been punished for. Fred Smith himself addressed the girls deferentially as ‘Miss’ and Maurice as ‘Master Todd’, although he took no interest in any of them. To Mrs Glover he was ‘young Fred’ and to Sylvie he was ‘the butcher’s boy’, sometimes ‘that nice butcher’s boy’ to distinguish him from the previous butcher’s boy, Leonard Ash, ‘a sneaky rogue’ according to Mrs Glover, who had caught him stealing eggs from the henhouse. Leonard Ash died in the Battle of the Somme after lying about his age when he enlisted and Mrs Glover said he got what was coming to him, which seemed a rough kind of justice.
Fred handed over a white-paper package to Mrs Glover and said, ‘Your tripe,’ and then deposited the long soft body of a hare on the wooden draining board. ‘Hung for five days. It’s a beauty, Mrs Glover,’ and even Mrs Glover, disinclined to praise in the best of circumstances, acknowledged the hare’s superiority by opening a cake tin and allowing Fred to choose the biggest rock bun from within its usually clam-like innards.
Mrs Glover, her tongue now safely in the press, immediately began skinning the hare, a distressing yet hypnotic process to witness, and it was only when the poor creature was stripped of its fur and exposed, naked and shiny, that anyone noticed Teddy’s absence.