And when I ask myself what went wrong the only answer I can come up with is the war. In those first weeks it seemed to throw us together — and then there was that mad weekend in Ypres, in the room with the big shiny brass bed and the view over the rooftops — which aren’t there any more. Apparently, you can look from one end of the city to the other and there’s hardly a wall left standing that’s above knee height. But Paul and I became lovers there in that doomed city, the first bombardment started while I was there, and somehow the war has always followed us. It made us and then it unmade us.
Because late in 1915, Paul enlisted — and not for medical work this time — no, he volunteered to fight. And I know he says he volunteered because everybody knew conscription was coming anyway and he didn’t want to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to the front — but still he did it, and from that moment on things began to unravel between us. It became harder and harder to know what to write.
So that’s the truth, I think, or as close as I can get to it. The war brought us together; the war tore us apart.
At least he’s back home now, and that’s one less to worry about. I’m so frightened for Toby. Of course I’m worried about Kit Neville too, he’s in the same unit, facing the same dangers, but fear has an awful way of revealing the truth. Toby’s the one I couldn’t bear to lose. Nobody else, not even Paul — certainly not Kit, though I’d be terribly upset, of course, if anything happened to him.
I sat on a bench for a full hour and listened to the night sounds. The soft explosive hooting of an owl seemed to be compounded of blood and fear. And I thought, nothing’s safe any more.
5 August 1917
I knew I wouldn’t sleep and I didn’t. The room was too hot so I had to leave the window open, and the thud-thud of the guns went on all night. I tried to cry; I’ve never found it easy and it seems almost impossible now. I manage a couple of sobs, and then give up in disgust. And, of course, I tell myself there’s nothing to cry about. Yet. Only, as the night hours pass, that belief starts to wear thin.
This is difficult to write. Just before dawn I got dressed, walked down through the sleeping house, across the garden and into the fields beyond. I was trudging uphill, feeling spikes of stubble jab my ankles, and then, just as I reached the top, the sun rose — huge, molten-red — and at that moment I knew — not thought, not feared, knew — that Toby wasn’t coming back. Not that he was dead, I didn’t think he was dead, it was quite precise: he wasn’t coming home.
Ten
Days went by before she stood at her bedroom window and watched the telegraph boy — ‘boy’ you called him, though he was a middle-aged, even elderly, man — all the boys were in France — dismount from his bicycle and push it up the hill.
At one point his head disappeared behind the hawthorn hedge — the lane dipped sharply there — and she convinced herself, standing motionless at the window, that he would never reappear. She had willed him away; even when, slowly, his peaked cap reappeared and then his head and shoulders and he stopped to mount his bicycle, even then, she knew it was in her power to prevent the telegram being delivered. There were other farmhouses, other families, further down the lane. The Smeddles had three sons; they could afford to lose one of them. She’d have swept all three Smeddle boys off the face of the earth without a second thought if by so doing she could have prevented Dodds coming through the gate and crunching up the gravel drive. Listening to the doorbell chime, she almost shouted out: Don’t answer it, he’ll give up, he’ll go away. If he went away it wouldn’t have happened. Only by now she was halfway down the stairs. She looked over the banisters at Mrs Robinson, drying her hands on her white apron as she hurried to answer the door. Then Elinor’s mother came out of the breakfast room, her face blank, but fearing the worst because these days no telegram was innocent. She, too, disappeared into the porch and, a minute later, Elinor heard a thin, despairing cry. That doesn’t sound like Mother. Elinor’s hands gripped the banisters. Doesn’t sound like her at all.
Mother became a white slug lying on the sofa in the living room. Rachel, with her two boys and their nurse, moved into the house and was in constant attendance, though after the first week she began to get resentful. She had a husband working in the War Office, resigned to staying at his club all week, but expecting home comforts at the weekend and deserving them too. She had a house to run, two small children, who were so much easier to manage at home with their own toys and beds and a garden to run around in, this garden wasn’t even fenced in, and the pond, for God’s sake, ten feet deep at the centre if it was an inch … And what did Elinor do? Go off and see her friends in London, and not just there and back in a day, either. No, she stayed away two or three nights at a time. It was perfectly plain what should happen. Elinor should stay at home and look after Mother, freeing her, Rachel, to see to her husband and children who were, after all, her primary responsibility. Elinor could go on painting — if she really felt she had to — but it was absolutely clear where her first duty lay, and it was jolly well high time she started doing it too.
Elinor refused.
‘You are so selfish,’ Rachel said. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody as selfish as you.’
‘Yes, I am selfish. I need to be.’
Their father said very little, but Elinor knew he agreed with Rachel. Everybody — the aunts, the uncles, the second cousins twice removed, Mrs Robinson, the village, the farmer, the farmer’s wife, for all she knew, the farmer’s dog — agreed with Rachel, but it was only her father’s opinion that hurt.
It made no difference. She went back to London on the next train and forced herself to paint. She had very little contact with other people. She seemed to be surrounded by a great white silence, long echoing corridors, doors opening into empty rooms. On the rare occasions when she had to meet people, she barely coped. A solitary visit to the Café Royal lasted a mere twenty minutes, before she began to feel anxious to get away.
Round about this time, she went to see Paul Tarrant in the Third London General Hospital because really there was no alternative: she had to go. As she walked down the centre of a long ward she kept her eyes fixed on the bed at the end, afraid of the injuries she might see if she looked to either side. She wasn’t good with hospitals at the best of times and some of the war wounds were so dreadful she couldn’t bear to look at them. Paul was sitting up in bed chatting to a middle-aged couple. His eyes widened with surprise when he saw her; her letters had become so infrequent he may well not have expected her to come.
The man beside the bed stood up and Paul introduced him as his father. He had Paul’s way of ducking his head when he shook hands, but not Paul’s looks. The woman was Paul’s stepmother. To Elinor’s dismay, they showed every sign of leaving her alone with Paul though they’d travelled three hundred miles for this visit. She could see they were slightly in awe of the nice middle-class young lady their son was walking out with. She supposed some such term as ‘walking out’ would be the one they’d choose.
‘No, please,’ she said. ‘Don’t leave on my account. I can only stay a few minutes anyway.’
And it was a few minutes. Afterwards she thought she might have done better not to have gone at all, since she and Paul had not managed to have any real conversation. The surgeon was pleased with him; he might get quite a bit more movement in the knee, probably not the full amount, but enough to get around. No, crutches, then? No, no crutches. He thought perhaps a nice stick with a swan on the handle. Out of hospital, probably by the end of the week, then a convalescent home in Dorset for a month after that. Looking forward to that, never seen Dorset. Had she ever been? And so it went on, until she was able to take her leave. After a second’s hesitation, she bent to kiss him, and felt his father and stepmother exchange a glance. Then she was off down the ward as if all the fiends in hell were after her. She might have deceived his parents about the warmth of her regard, but she was under no illusion that she’d deceived Paul.