Rachel went to get Nurse Wiggins, who confirmed what by now they were both beginning to believe. In her deep, inviolable silence, their mother was still the dominant figure in the room. But then, Nurse Wiggins pushed the drooping head back — it had fallen forward so her chin was resting on her chest — and so her mouth fell open. Suddenly, she looked dead. Nurse Wiggins said she’d have to fasten up the jaw. And then there were sheets to be changed, the body to be washed…
The sisters sat together on the bed in Rachel’s room while the nurse finished the laying-out. Rachel was twisting a handkerchief round and round in her fingers. “Why is it such a shock? It’s not as if we weren’t expecting it.”
“Look, why don’t you go back to bed and try to get some sleep? It’s not as if you can do anything.”
Before parting, they went back to their mother’s room. She lay there, gray and remote, penny weights on her eyelids, her jaw bound up with a white cloth. Nurse Wiggins had put a posy of flowers between the clasped, brown-spotted hands. Immediately, Elinor wanted to snatch them away, it seemed so false somehow, but then Mother had always loved flowers. Rachel touched the cooling face and whispered, “Good-bye, Mum.” Crying, she turned away.
Elinor went to her own room, also grieving, not for what she’d lost, but for what she’d never had, and never could have now. As she climbed into bed, Paul half woke and reached out to her, so she cried in his arms and let him soothe her to sleep.
When, a few hours later, she woke she heard her mother’s voice say, as loud and clear as if she’d been in the same room: I knew. And from that moment, Elinor ceased to feel anything Rachel, or anybody else for that matter, would have recognized as grief.
The next day she hardly thought at all; she made telephone calls, sent telegrams, worked her way through her mother’s address book, coming across the names of relatives and friends dimly remembered from childhood, but often finding, when she set out to contact them, that they’d died years ago. Her mother’s eldest sister was so frail she might not be able to make it to the funeral, but her two younger sisters certainly would, along with various other relatives, nieces, nephews and cousins, and then of course there were the grandchildren. Gabriella, though heavily pregnant, had decided she would come. Rachel wanted to keep Mother at home till the funeral — it was the family tradition — but Tim, who’d arrived from London in the early afternoon, said: “No, not in this heat”—and the undertaker backed him up. So the sisters held on to each other in the drawing room, while the undertaker’s men sweated and strained to negotiate the stairs.
A great deal had been achieved in a short time, only now there was emptiness. Mrs. Murchison was busy in the kitchen, preparing, for the first time in over a week, a proper sit-down dinner. She’d managed to get river trout for the main course, with potatoes and other vegetables from the garden, and she’d made an apple pie. “I don’t know who she thinks is going to eat that,” Elinor said, though Paul thought he might. And no doubt Kenny as well, if he chose to appear. He was being elusive, even by his own impressive standards. The last few days he’d simply raided the kitchen whenever Mrs. Murchison’s back was turned and eaten whatever scraps of food he managed to find behind the garden shed or out on the marshes. He was becoming almost feral and nobody seemed to give a damn about it except Paul.
When dinner time came, Kenny was, predictably, missing.
“Paul, do you think you could find him?” Rachel asked.
“I thought I heard him come in just now.”
“Well, he’s not here.”
Paul went first into the garden and looked up at the sycamore tree. Alex had used this tree as a refuge when he was a boy: the “safety tree” he used to call it. It interested Paul that Alex, with his privileged background, had felt the same need for a refuge from the adult world as Kenny did, who was so much more obviously disadvantaged. Oh, Paul didn’t underestimate the psychological pressures on Alex. Nobody could grow up in Toby Brooke’s shadow and not be distorted in some way; deformed, even. Paul’s view of Alex was a good deal less favorable than either Rachel’s or Elinor’s.
“Kenny? Kenny? Dinnertime.”
It was growing dark; he’d almost certainly have come in by now. So Paul trailed to the top of the house, knocked on the nursery door and went in. Kenny was kneeling on the floor beside his bed, playing with toy soldiers. He’d laid them out, hundreds of them, khaki and gray, facing each other across no-man’s-land: an appropriately mud-colored stretch of lino. The soldiers had belonged to Alex. As a child, he’d been obsessed with fighting the last war, convinced he could do a better job than the generals. And who am I to argue? Paul thought, persuading his stiff leg to bend. But really there was no time to get involved in this particular game. “Dinnertime, Kenny.”
He didn’t even look up. “Too hot.”
“Apple pie? Custard?”
No answer. Paul picked up two of the little soldiers and laid them on the palm of his hand. Officers, wearing the dated uniform of the last war: tunics, peaked caps, breeches, puttees. He remembered the advice supposedly given to German snipers: Look for the thin knees. Take out the chain of command. They’d changed the uniform later, made it slightly more difficult to pick out the officers. He felt a sudden impulse to talk to somebody who’d been there; no, not even talk — just be with him. Share what there was to share, in silence. Nobody here he could do that with: certainly not Tim, who’d spent the last war behind a desk in Whitehall.
His silence caught the boy’s attention. Kenny was adept at screening out nagging and shouting: he simply didn’t hear it. Any more than he heard his own name being called. Attention means trouble, and trouble comes fast enough. But now, looking across the battlefield, Paul found those curious, copper-colored eyes fixed on him. Purple shadows underneath. He looked tired; tired of life. No child should look like that.
“Who’s winning?” Paul asked, searching for a point of contact.
“Us.”
“That’s good.”
“You won’t tell them, will you?”
“Tell them what?”
“That I got the soldiers.”
Paul was shocked. “Nobody minds, Kenny. You play with anything you like. It must be really boring, with nobody to play with. At least at school—”
“School’s boring. I hate it.”
“What about it? What don’t you like?”
“The way they pick on us.”
“The other boys?”
“Yeah — and the teachers.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“Dunno. I don’t talk like them? And…” A sudden, painful, disfiguring blush. “Me hair.”
“But it’s all grown back.”
“Doesn’t stop ’em shouting, ‘Baldy, don’t sit by him, he’s got nits.’ ”
“You haven’t got nits.”
“Doesn’t stop ’em saying it.”
“Perhaps if Auntie Rachel went down—”
“You joking? I’d really get me head kicked in then.”
As he spoke he was scooping up handfuls of tiny khaki soldiers and dropping them into a wooden box. Heavy losses for one small square of lino. Perhaps they’d been defending a salient. Paul turned the two little figures over and over in the palm of his hand. Suddenly, he glanced up and saw the boy watching him.
“Were you in it?”
“The war?” Paul looked down at the battlefield. “Yes.”
“Were you wounded?”
“Ye-es.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Knee. Since you ask.”