Not long after the telegram arrived, Elinor was standing on the terrace when once again a postman turned into the drive. This time he was carrying a big brown-paper parcel entwined with thick, hairy string. It was addressed to her parents. Already fearful of what it might contain, she took it into the conservatory where Rachel sat by their mother, who lay stretched out on the sofa. She’d hardly moved since the news of Toby’s death. Her skin seemed to have slackened, as if she’d shrunk away inside it. Until recently, she’d still been considered a beautiful woman, though nobody would think so now. Again, the image of a moist white slug came into Elinor’s mind. It filled her with guilt, but then, almost at once, her impatience returned. She couldn’t bear the weeping and wailing that punctuated her mother’s long silences. Elinor was determined not to grieve, and particularly not to grieve like that. Her own first reaction to the news had been a blaze of euphoria; immediately her fingers itched to grab a brush and paint. Grief was for the dead, and Toby would never be dead while she was alive and able to hold a brush.
But now here the three of them were. They looked at the parcel, trying to decipher the postmark, and then at each other.
‘Well,’ Rachel said.
Suddenly sick of the suspense, Elinor began trying to unfasten the knots, but her fingers felt swollen and stiff.
‘Ring for Mrs Robinson,’ Mother said. ‘She’ll have some scissors.’
Mrs Robinson’s eyes widened when she saw the parcel. She looked, rather shamefacedly, excited, as indeed she had when the telegram arrived. She’d been genuinely fond of Toby, but still, his death was drama in a humdrum life. She’d talk about him in the village post office; no doubt the family’s bereavement had enhanced her status there.
‘It’ll be his things,’ she said. ‘They send them back. They did with Mrs Jenkins’s lad.’
The scissors were duly fetched and the string cut, but even before the first layers of brown paper had been stripped away something entirely unexpected entered the room: the smell of the front line. Filthy water, chlorine gas, decomposition — and because it was a smell, and not a sight, Elinor was defenceless against it. She walked, stiff-legged, to the window where she looked out over the lawn and trees, not seeing anything, every nerve and muscle in her body fighting to repudiate that smell.
When she turned back into the room they’d got the parcel unwrapped. Tunic, belt, a periscope, breeches, peaked cap, puttees, boots — all reeking of the same yellow-brown stench. Elinor’s mother touched the tunic, timidly, stroking the sleeve nearest to her. At first, she seemed entirely calm, but then her mouth twisted, a crease appeared between her eyebrows and she began to cry. Not like an adult; no, this was the dreadful, square-mouthed wail of an abandoned baby.
Rachel gathered the things together and thrust the bundle into Elinor’s hands. ‘Take it away.’
‘Where shall I put it?’
‘How do I know? Just get rid of it, for God’s sake.’
Elinor backed out of the room — bumping into Mrs Robinson, who’d heard the cry and was rushing in to help — and took the parcel upstairs to her own room, then along to Toby’s room, but then she remembered that her mother often came up here and sat in the window, for hours on end sometimes, looking down the road into the village, to the train station where she’d seen him for the last time. He wouldn’t let anybody go to London with him.
Nowhere seemed to be the right place. In the end, she wrapped everything up again as best she could and took the parcel up into the attic where she pushed it deep into a recess under the eaves. Right at the back, out of sight. Then she piled old blankets and a rug in front of it, anything to fend off the smell. Closing the door at the top of the stairs, she felt as if she’d disposed of a corpse. Out of sight, out of mind, she told herself.
Only it never was, quite. That smell broke the last numbness of shock. The following day Elinor’s mother left for Rachel’s house; Elinor was left alone, and glad to be alone. The parcel containing Toby’s clothes remained in her mind, but separated from her waking consciousness, like a nightmare whose every detail is forgotten, though the fear survives, poisoning the day.
Now that she could work at home, there was no need to go back to London. She spent all the hours of daylight painting in the barn across the yard, creeping back into the house at dusk, often forgetting to eat at all. At night, she slept in Toby’s room.
Painting numbed the pain; nothing else did. In the evenings, when she was too exhausted to work, she sat in front of the fire, trying to read. Usually, she had to abandon the attempt because nothing stayed in her head. She could read the same paragraph half a dozen times and still not be able to remember what it said. Above her head the floorboards creaked as if somebody were pacing up and down in the corridor outside his room. She paid no attention to this. It was a trivial manifestation of her state of mind; no more.
For long stretches of time he might not have died at all. He wasn’t present, but then he hadn’t been present for most of the past two years. There was no body. No grave. No ceremony. Only his spare clothes, the stuff he’d left behind when he went into the line for the last time, and they’d been pushed out of sight.
At first, this limbo state didn’t bother her, but then, as the days and weeks went by, not knowing how he’d died became a torment. She had to make his death real; otherwise this half-life could go on for ever. She knew there were people who cherished the malignant hope that their sons or husbands were still alive, prisoners of war perhaps, or mad, wandering the French countryside with no memory of who they were, or lying in a hospital bed too badly wounded to communicate at all. These were hardly consoling thoughts, and yet people clung to them. Anything, rather than face up to the finality of death. But it was finality that she’d begun to crave.
She knew so little. What did ‘Missing, Believed Killed’ actually mean? What degree of certainty did it imply? Apart from the telegram and the official letter that followed, there were only two brief notes, one from Toby’s CO, another from the Chaplain. She read them again and again. How short they were, how grudging. She’d been puzzled by that at the time, though nobody else seemed to notice anything amiss. And there was another thing: Kit Neville, who was in the Royal Army Medical Corps and had served with Toby, hadn’t written.
The more she thought about that, the more extraordinary it seemed. She wrote to him, asking if he knew anything about Toby’s death. No reply. Thinking he might not have got the letter, she wrote again. Still no reply. She bought The Times and searched the columns of wounded and dead for Kit’s name, convinced that something dreadful must have happened to him — nothing short of serious injury or death could excuse his silence — but his name wasn’t in the lists. Of course it might have been in previous issues, but no, if he were back in London she’d have heard.