‘It always used to be so neat and tidy, we used to be proud of our station, but he seems not to care as he did. His son was killed at Mons. Do you remember Kemble’s boy? Or else he is too old, it has got too much for him.’
And it was true that the paint was flaking off the name sign, there were cracks in the green bench, a few sweet papers and cigarette packets lay as they had been dropped, in corners, to gather the summer’s dust.
‘Perhaps they don’t let him have any money for refurbishments.’
‘It isn’t a question of money. He could take a pride in things.’ She poked at a dandelion, growing up through a crevice in the stone, at her feet. ‘He has let everything go.’
She looked as if she would never let go, would never allow herself to loosen her corset, to have a crease in a dress or a spot of dirt left on her glove. She did not stand still beside him but walked up and down in the sunlight, casting a long, rippling shadow. She might have been nervous. Hilliard saw the young woman with the child watching her, saw Kemble the station master watching her. As he himself watched her. Was she aware of it?
It was very quiet. A pair of cabbage-white butterflies fluttered up and down like tiny kites blown by some breeze. But there was no breeze, no movement of air at all. Sun. Heat. Country silence. The rustle of his mother’s dress as she turned towards him again.
He thought, she has told me that Kemble’s son was killed, at Mons, and has gone on to speak of other things. Does she not know? Does she not think of it?
She said, ‘We look forward to your letters.’
Her skin was hardly lined, it had the moist look of chamois, though there was a tightness about the eyes and throat which revealed her age. He wondered if Beth felt bitter that she did not inherit such beauty, as he did. For he had his mother’s features, though they were arranged less disdainfully, he had the same grey eyes and pale hair and length of limb.
He looked at the gloved hand holding the parasol, at the small, flat ears beneath her hat. Should he say something to her? What would be the truth?
‘I shall not worry over you. I promised myself that when you first went away. Your father says that you will all be home by Christmas, in any case, it will be all over. And there is really no point in one’s worrying or one would simply never stop.’
‘Oh, no. Quite.’
‘There are so many things one could begin to imagine.’
Could they?
‘So many things are possible.’
Yes.
‘So you see, one simply tells oneself not to worry.’
Kemble had come out of his office holding the flag. Across the metals of the rails, the heat shimmered. The girl with the child had not moved, was still watching Constance Hilliard. Nobody else had come. He knew that when he left here he would not be able to believe it would all continue to exist, would go on in the same way, no matter where he himself was, or what happened to him. A small station, ill-kempt, with a ridiculously large clock. Butterflies. Long grass and sorrel. Half a mile away, the sea. Hawton.
‘Really, John, it’s quite like your going off to school, only then there always seemed to be more of a rush and a fuss, you never organized yourself in those days, you always chased about the house and forgot things and made us late. You haven’t forgotten anything today?’
‘I don’t think so.’
He knew that he had not, that there was nothing left of himself at Cliff House, only pieces of a past belonging to some stranger. Everything he had, everything he was, stood on this quiet platform in the sunlight, a tall young man in uniform, who had seen what he had seen, who knew – some belongings packed into a dark valise. Nothing more.
In the distance, the train was coming, very slowly, leaving behind a trail of steam, each puff of which remained separate upon the air.
‘Really, I think I shall have to ask Mr Kemble to ring up for Plummet, it is getting altogether too hot to walk back to Cliff House. I have to lunch with the Callenders and I do so hate getting dusty. But I should get dusty. I should have to change again. Perhaps I am dusty already?’
‘No, mother.’
For she was not. When the train pulled out, he looked back for a long time and saw her tall figure in the huge hat and the cream-coloured skirts, standing motionless in the sun. They did not wave to one another. On the opposite platform the girl sat, holding the child, transfixed by the sight of Constance Hilliard. And the picture of the two of them like that remained in his mind and was thrown up by it every so often, without reason, during the weeks and months that followed, like some painting remembered from a gallery. There were moments when he forgot that it had not, in fact, been a painting, had been real.
The train was almost empty. He put his case up on the rack and unbuttoned his tunic and dozed, watching the parched fields and thick, lustreless trees glide by the window, thinking of nothing, neither past nor future. He had, again, the odd sense of completeness, of holding everything within himself, of detachment.
It was the thirtieth of August.
By three o’clock in the afternoon there was nothing left for him to do. He had been to The Army and Navy Stores and gone slowly from counter to counter buying what he needed, and after that, looking, looking. The war had brought out a fever like that of Christmas among manufacturers and salesmen, there were so many possible things to buy, expressly for the men in France. Hilliard watched people buying them, mothers, aunts, sisters, wives, who had no idea what might be really suitable, who wanted to send something extra, who were misled by the advertisements and the counter staff into ordering useless gifts to be packed up and sent. He saw bullet-proof waistcoats and fingered them in amazement, remembering the bullets, saw leather gauntlets, too stiff and thick and hot, saw ornamental swords and pistols of use only to gamekeepers, saw the shining new metal of entrenching tools and spurs.
But he wanted to buy something then, something that was entirely superfluous, an extravagance, a gift to himself. He moved about among the women and could see nothing, felt as he had felt on a day’s outing from school, when the money his father had given him burned a hole in his pocket and he was almost in tears at the frustration of finding nothing he desired to buy.
He spent more than two pounds on a pale cane walking-stick with a round silver knob, and, carrying it out into the sunlit street, felt both foolish and conspicuous, as though he had succumbed to the temptation of some appalling vice. The cane looked so new. At school it had been the worst possible form to have an unblemished leather trunk with bright buckles: the thing had been to kick it, or to drop it several times from luggage van on to station platform. Now, he felt like a soldier who had not yet been to France, because of the cane: people looked at him and he wanted to shout at them, ‘I have been before, I have been and now I am going back. I know.’
There was nothing that he could think of to do. Outside Victoria, crowds of women and soldiers and children gripped hard by the hand. An old woman in a black veil fed the pigeons. The heat was unbearable, striking up from the pavement. He had not eaten and did not want to eat. There were three hours before his train.
And so he went into the shadow of the station, where it was a little cooler, and found a bench and sat, his cases and the cane walking-stick beside him, sat for three hours. At first he bought a paper, and did not read it, bought an orange from a barrow, and did not eat it. Only watched the gleaming trains come in and go out under the vaulted roof and saw, beyond it, the curve of blue sky. He felt nothing, no particular fear or despair.
The world came and went, then, for three hours, inside Victoria station. Men departed for the front and returned from it, and he saw those who came with them to say goodbye, and those who walked in agitation up and down the platforms, waiting, saw partings and greetings, saw the waving and the tears. He thought of his own farewell to his mother, remembered her still figure in the cream-coloured dress. Once or twice he made as if to move, to get up and stretch his legs, go for a drink in the bar, walk outside and take a look at the sky and the pigeons and the taxi-cabs, but in the end he did not, he simply sat, watching.