Alice's Girls (15 page)

‘How could that happen?’ the young man asked. The matron shrugged.

‘Lumps come and go,’ she said. ‘Nipples can pucker for a variety of reasons. Probably the sister’s death had something to do with it.’

Some hours later, when Gwennan, wearing her sling, might have been preparing to exploit her invalid status, she had other concerns on her mind.

‘Is it very painful?’ Alice asked, glancing at Gwennan,
who was sitting, frowning into the cup of tea Alice had put in front of her.

‘Pardon?’ the girl said, vaguely, adding that no, since she had taken the two aspirins the matron had suggested, it didn’t hurt much as long as she kept still. ‘Mrs Todd?’ she asked suddenly. ‘Do you believe in miracles?’

They drove across the Exe valley to a riverside pub which Alice recognised as the place where she had once been lunched by Oliver Maynard, a naval adjutant from a nearby Fleet Air Arm establishment, who had sought her company when she had first arrived at the farm.

‘You’ve been here before?’ Roger asked her, noticing her reaction to the terrace where half a dozen tables were set for lunch. When she told him how it was that she knew the place he smiled. ‘Ah, yes, the commander fellow. I remember him.’ He was recalling, Alice guessed, his own success in beating off a rival. ‘Wonder what became of him? Where shall we sit?’ Alice chose a table, deliberately avoiding the one she and Oliver had shared and at which she had refused his suggestion that they should take their relationship a stage further towards the affair he obviously had in mind.

The lamb chops were succulent and the home-made raspberry ice cream so delicious that Alice and Roger both indulged in second helpings of it.

Roger became silent as they drank their coffee. Alice sat, the brim of her straw hat shielding her eyes from the
sun, gazing across the valley and very aware that Roger was watching her. He leant forward and covered her hand with his. He was looking at her intently now and she met his eyes.

‘You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to, Roger,’ she said, sensing that there were facts he wanted her to know but that he was unsure how to broach them.

‘I need to explain these things that happen to me, Alice. And why I react as I seem to, to some situations … and people. I’ve been trying to work out why. And I certainly owe you an apology for – yes I do, Alice,’ he insisted, when she smiled and shook her head. ‘I am very fond of you. More than fond. You know that. You’ve told me a lot about yourself and what happened between you and your husband … Not, perhaps, in so many words, but I’ve seen what you went through as a result of his treatment of you and how you’ve coped with it all. And what have I done since we met? Nothing but burden you with my complicated afflictions and lumber you with my incomprehensible behaviour.’ She smiled but he obviously intended to be taken seriously. ‘I haven’t succeeded in asking you to marry me but you are too perceptive not to be aware of my feelings for you. So, why haven’t I proposed marriage to you?’ He paused, uncertain of her reaction. ‘You have obviously sensed that I have problems with my relationship with Christopher and that I react in an unhealthy way to … to … well … accidents, such as poor Margery’s death. And yet I have failed to confide in
you. Failed even to pay you the compliment of believing that you would have the intelligence and the …’ he hesitated and then, very quietly continued, ‘the compassion to understand why it is that I have been stupid enough to allow something that happened so long ago that it feels as though it belongs to an altogether other life, to ruin the present and possibly contaminate the future too!’ He called the waiter over to their table and asked for more coffee and a second brandy. Alice suggested they should take the drinks down to the riverbank, where a solitary table and chairs stood on the landing stage. They made their way down the sloping bank and settled themselves at the table. Roger watched the waiter unload the tray, Alice poured the coffee, slid Roger’s cup over the surface of the table to him and sat, cupping her brandy glass while Roger lit a cigarette.

‘I was at public school when the First World War started,’ he said at last. ‘My father had been head boy in his day and an older cousin was, when I arrived there, captain of the school cricket eleven.’ They watched as a heron flapped languorously across their field of vision and landed clumsily in the shallows on the far side of the river.

‘I am listening,’ Alice said, swirling the brandy slowly round her glass.

‘To begin with everyone thought the war was a bit of a lark,’ Roger said. ‘We believed it would all be over by Christmas, of course. Everyone did at that point. No one had the slightest idea about what really lay ahead. Some of
our sixth-form boys, who were old enough, marched off to volunteer – and we all cheered. We younger ones were green with envy. We felt cheated. After a few months the headmaster began reading out names of old boys who’d been reported missing or killed in action. Some of them were the older brothers of my friends. You’d file into assembly, there would be prayers and a hymn. Then the head would read out the names – Howarth major, when you were standing next to Howarth minor. But we still cheered when the next group marched off, and there were white feathers for anyone who didn’t volunteer and a wooden leg for our best rugby player when he came home on crutches and with his face scarred almost beyond recognition. There was, we began to understand, a darker side to this war. Some people tried to ignore it. Which would probably have been the best thing to do. Maybe that’s what I should have done, and maybe, even then, I was guilty of having an unhealthy reaction to it all.’ Roger flicked his cigarette stub out into the river. ‘You would have been too young to remember much about it, Alice, but that war caught me at a time when I was, I suppose, at my most impressionable.’

‘And suggestible?’ Alice asked.

‘Possibly. But at the time, you don’t know that you are suggestible, do you?’ Alice shook her head. She had been a toddler when the war began. Having lost both her parents almost before she could remember them, she was being mothered by her Aunt Elizabeth. She vaguely recalled Armistice Day, or possibly only thought she did,
having been told about it and subsequently seen newspaper photographs and newsreel footage of celebrations which always looked grainy and grey, suggesting to her that it was the images she remembered, rather than the actual events.

‘My closest friend at school was Robert Thomas,’ Roger told her. ‘We called him Rob. His older brother, Leo, had been at Oxford when the war began and he’d enlisted, become an officer and survived most of the early scraps. Ypres, Mons and so on. He seemed to have a charmed life. I had met him once when I was staying with the Thomas family in the summer holidays of 1913. Rob and I became a bit obsessive about the war. We put together a scrapbook full of facts and newspaper cuttings about it. We had a sort of roll of honour, adding the names of boys from our school as they were reported dead or missing, week after week. We listed their rank and regiment, any decorations they had been awarded and the circumstances of their deaths – if these were known. More often than not, they were not known. They simply vanished along with thousands of others. Bodies never recovered. “Known only to God” as they were afterwards described. Then, in 1915, Leo was wounded at the second Battle of Ypres. He died, not cleanly but horribly, of gangrene, after they amputated first one and then the other of his legs.’ Alice didn’t speak but slowly shook her head. ‘It had a curious effect on Rob and me.’

‘What effect?’

‘It made us angry!’

‘Understandably.’

‘Incredibly angry. And there was nothing we could do with the anger. We wanted to— ’

‘To put an end to the carnage. To see the war stopped.’

‘No! Not stopped, Alice! We wanted it won! We wanted the German army routed! Otherwise our people would have given their lives for nothing! And we felt an overwhelming sense of guilt! Those men were dying! They were going out into the trenches, facing what had to be faced and we, because we were too young, were not! You see, in our eyes we were men by then! At sixteen we were strong and fit! We asked, repeatedly, to be allowed to volunteer and were refused. But in the end we managed it.’

‘Managed to enlist? At sixteen?’

‘Some friends of Leo’s told us how to apply to the medical unit. We’d be used as stretcher-bearers. Bringing the wounded in from the lines and delivering them to the field hospitals.’ Alice was staring at him in astonishment. ‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘We had no concept of what we were in for, and even now, even after all this time …’ He fell silent and Alice watched as he swallowed his brandy and gathered himself. ‘We worked in pairs. One at each end of a stretcher on which we laid the injured and the dead. Often our load consisted of more than one man – or the body parts of more than one man. We slithered through the mud, Alice, pulling men and bits of men out of the gore and then struggled back to the bright lights of a tent that
passed for a hospital, where we delivered our load. The casualties who didn’t survive that initial journey were laid on the ground, side by side, outside the tent. The luckier ones were patched up and transported to a larger hospital, and if they made it that far, shipped home to die or recover.’ He spoke fluently and in a low voice, as though he was visiting territory no less painful for being familiar to him. ‘We worked together, Rob and I, through what became a disorienting nightmare. Nothing we had read, or seen or heard had prepared us for what we experienced. We were covered in blood. And not only blood, Alice. Other things. Guts. Brain. Bone fragments. Our clothes and our skin were sticky with it. The air we breathed tasted of warm blood! I remember looking at Rob and seeing his face, just recognisable under his tin hat. He stared at me and saw, I’m certain, his own feelings mirrored. Over and over again we delivered our dying and our dead and over and over again we were ordered back to the lines. Days and nights ran into each other. I don’t know which of us cracked first. I remember that there was a group of riflemen behind us, moving forward to relieve a section of men in the trenches. We would have been silhouetted against the gunfire ahead of them and they must have seen us drop the stretcher and turn back. Which of us turned first I don’t know. We ran together, clinging to each other, aimlessly, away from the lines. The riflemen claimed afterwards they thought we were Germans infiltrating Allied lines. Or deserters – no one had much time for them. Anyway, they fired. I sensed
the impact when Rob was hit and felt him go down.’ Roger had finished his brandy. He sighed and looked at Alice almost as though he was glad to be back with her, here above the river on a quiet afternoon.

‘And …’ Alice hesitated. ‘He was dead?’

‘I supposed so.’

‘And you?’

‘That was when it all got very strange. I have absolutely no recollection of anything that happened to me from then on, for almost a whole year. I discovered, slowly, afterwards, that our headmaster used contacts he had in the War Office, and that because I was under age and more or less out of my mind, it was decided that I was not to be shot as a deserter but repatriated, in a straightjacket. My treatment must have been pretty radical. Whatever it was, I knew nothing about it because a lot of heavy sedation was involved. Even after I was released into the care of my parents I was out of things most of the time. They took charge of me. Their way of dealing with it – they saw the entire situation as a colossal failure on my part – was to deny it ever happened. They were deeply embarrassed about it, and everyone – friends, neighbours, even family – was told I had been extremely ill, having been infected by the blood of a diseased frog which I had been dissecting in a chemistry class at school!’ His face broke, briefly, into a wry smile. ‘I was forbidden to mention my escapade in France and was so damaged by the whole situation that for a while I almost believed my parents’ story! I certainly
didn’t, to begin with, have the strength to resist them. When I asked what had happened to Rob they refused to tell me. Eventually I made my way to his parents’ house. I had remembered that they lived in Weymouth and I rode there on my bicycle. It was a heck of a way and I could barely stand by the time I turned up on their doorstep! I suppose I must have known Rob was dead. I think I just needed to have it confirmed after my parents’ evasiveness. Rob’s father gave me the details. He was shot dead. Both of us, Rob posthumously, were charged with desertion and vilified for falsifying our ages on our application forms. Rob’s mother reacted badly to my visit. She needed to believe I had instigated the whole wretched scheme. But I hadn’t. We were equally determined, Rob and I. Equally committed. It must have been impossible for her. I mean, there I was, gaunt, sick and shaking. The last time she’d seen me I’d been a robust schoolboy, knocking tennis balls about the garden with her son.’

‘But you were alive, Roger, and her boy was not.’

‘Precisely. Pretty hard on Rob’s father too. But he was very decent about it. Lashed my bike onto the back of his car and drove me home – I doubt if I’d have made it otherwise. Set me back a few months, that episode did. Back to the phenobarbitone, etcetera. It was about then that I started to accept the fact that if I was going to survive – you feel you have to, at that age, the will to live asserts itself despite everything – I had to do what my parents wanted. Handle it their way. So I did. I went
to agricultural college. Time passed and I had begun taking over a share of responsibility for the farm when my mother, who had been in poor health for some time, died, and father, to everyone’s surprise, remarried and took off for Bournemouth where his second wife already lived in some style. So there I was, walking wounded by then, psychologically speaking, but coping, getting to grips with the running of the farms. That was when I met Frances. She was a …’ he hesitated, uncertain how to describe the young woman he had married when they had both been barely out of their teens. ‘A fragile person,’ he continued. ‘With a dependent disposition. I think this did me good in a strange way. It encouraged me to take charge of things. She never did know what a mess I was, under my carapace! We were living “happily ever after”, Frances, Christopher and I, when we lost her – quite suddenly, as the result of a pregnancy that went wrong and revealed a more serious problem. Chris was only nine years old at the time. I didn’t handle that very well. Didn’t know how to help myself, or the boy. I think I was scared, Alice. I felt as though I’d fought my way through a lot but that I couldn’t expose myself to any more … Any more loss, I suppose I meant. I just wasn’t up to it. Then, when Chris joined the RAF, I was faced with two possibilities. One was that I might lose him altogether. And the other was that he might … might lose himself, in the way I had lost myself in my war. And then, when he did, when he cracked up … Well, you know how I reacted. I have no excuse, Alice. But there was a reason
for it, and the reason was that I was incapable of anything else. Anything better. I love that boy, Alice. But I failed him. He has survived that failure and is, understandably, in the process of making a life for himself without my destructive input. I don’t propose getting in the way of that.’