Spare Brides (41 page)

‘It was such a celebration.’

‘Please don’t.’ Lydia shifted uncomfortably on her seat.

‘You should. You should remember,’ Sarah urged. ‘You should think carefully about what you are throwing away. I admired, so heartily, your huge trousseau. The slips and knickers all trimmed with lace, each set fitted into perfumed pads and embroidered with L and L intertwined.’

‘Well, Dickenson has a gift with embroidery.’

‘Talking of gifts … the things you received! A sapphire pendant, a tiara, rings, bracelets, pins, clocks, candlesticks, cufflinks, wine coolers.’

‘But does any of it mean anything?’

‘First-edition books, ink stands, art.’

‘I don’t need any of it.’

‘Don’t you?’

Lydia shook her head. Sarah was beginning to feel desperate. She considered how else she might make her friend understand the gravity of her situation.

‘You think he’s marvellous because he fought in the war.’

‘Yes, yes, I do.’

‘He’s marvellous because he
survived
the war. That’s all. Lawrence survived too. There isn’t a real difference.’

‘How can you say that? You of all people. After what you lost.’

‘I’m trying to save you, Lydia. I have to be honest. Believe me, I don’t want to think so much. I know that deviating from the inherited wisdom, in any way, might hurt me. I need the disciplines of faith and valour, otherwise vicious bitterness will run unbridled. Questioning why and what for is a luxury I can ill afford, but for you, my friend, I’ll run that risk. There’s so much at stake.’

Sarah knew they’d fed her lies. She tried to pretend she didn’t know, because it was too much to have lost him and to have been lied to as well, but she did know. They’d returned Arthur’s uniform. It was horrifying. It was torn, back and front, where the bullet had entered and left. The khaki colour had all but disappeared; the uniform they returned to her was grey and brown, caked with mud and stiff with blood. It smelt not of him but of earth and death. It was worn and damp. Sarah had itched just having it in her parlour. There was blood on the trousers too, and they were torn at the leg. Cut away by the look of it. She didn’t understand that. She’d been told the bullet in the chest was clean and quick, but the uniform suggested three wounds: chest, leg and hip, all on his right-hand side. The torn trousers suggested an examination, maybe attempts at repair, which meant it had taken longer than they’d said for him to die. Sarah didn’t understand why they’d sent these garments of horror home. So shabby and vulnerable; that wasn’t how they’d been taught to think of their men. And then, a day or two later, a worse thought had struck her. If she had his uniform, what had they buried him in? Was there an immaculate spare? Oh God, she hoped so. But she’d never been able to ask anyone.

The carnage had damned Sarah to live the rest of her life in a world devoid of assurance or sanctuary; a world in which everything and everyone she loved existed under a heavy and dreadful cloak of fearfulness. What if there was another war and her son, John, had to fight? What if Molly died in childbirth, or they were both lost in an automobile accident? Love was continually besmirched by the threat of death. Joy and pleasure were without duration. She longed for a sense of security. Since losing Arthur, she’d only ever had the briefest of hints that it existed anywhere, and that was when she was at Clarendale, in Lawrence’s safe, steady and practical company. How could Lydia even consider giving that up?

‘Do you remember the day I received the telegram?’ Both women received telegrams on a regular basis. News of births, party invitations and train delays were all communicated this way; however, they knew exactly which telegram Sarah referred to. Some things were enormous.

‘Yes, I do.’

‘I was on my way out of the house. Delivering jam to a neighbour or some such.’

‘Right.’

‘I was wearing my blue taffeta. The one I’d bought on our trip together to Paris, before, when one could buy pretty frocks.’

‘I know the dress you mean. I’ve always admired it.’

‘Do you know what I thought, after the postboy brought the news?’ Sarah met her friend’s gaze; Lydia moved her head an infinitesimal amount from left to right. ‘I thought, if only I’d left the house an hour earlier. Or ten minutes earlier. If I hadn’t been there to receive him.’

‘He’d have left the telegram. The news would have been there when you got home.’

‘Yes, but I’d have been a wife, with a husband, for a day longer; the children would have had a father a day longer. We’d have had an extra day even if he hadn’t. Do you see?’

Once he was dead, she’d had nothing to do. Even though the war had continued to rage, for her it was all over. The worst had happened. It was, at least, the end of trepidation, although it was the beginning of profound and unrelenting grief. An unfathomable, abolishing void. She was swallowed by a sense of walking in a dense fog, which hid all there was to see and stifled all there was to hear. Her grief was aloof and rigid.

‘I’d do anything to buy another day, another hour, ten more minutes. I’d give up every possession I own; I’d sell my soul. I’d certainly get over a ridiculous notion that my man had somehow dodged it.’

Lydia looked saddened and sorry. ‘It’s not Lawrence I want to buy time with. You say you’d give up every possession.’

‘Yes.’

‘But you think it’s strange that I’m prepared to do so.’

‘I’m saying I’d give it all up for Arthur. Arthur was my husband.’

‘Arthur was the man you loved.’

Sarah pulled her eyebrows together, causing her forehead to fold like a fan as she expressed her displeasure. ‘It won’t do.’

‘But it is.’

‘Is what?’

‘It is what it is. And it’s impossible to be anything else.’

Sarah tutted, vexed. ‘You must hate yourself.’

‘Sometimes, but never when I’m with him.’

A
VA HAD HAD
a long day. She’d spent it at Marie Stopes’s mothers’ clinic in Holloway. The family planning clinic had opened (with much hullabaloo) in March, and Ava worked there in a voluntary capacity, as a secretary, two or three days a month. She told herself that the voluntary position allowed her an advantageous degree of flexibility so she could pursue other interests; truthfully she’d have liked a more permanent role. Not that she needed an income, but she enjoyed being at the forefront of this social change; it was so unquestionably useful. However, as she wasn’t a qualified doctor or nurse, there wasn’t a suitable post for her, especially as, unlike practically every other establishment in Britain, the family planning clinic preferred to hire married women. If they employed single women to officially advise on contraception, they ran the risk of attracting more adverse publicity. The secretaries were seen by many as powdered hussies and were often described as ‘no better than they ought to be’. Ava would have confronted any controversy – some thought she courted it – but Dr Stopes and her husband felt differently and would not make her a permanent offer. Besides, the clinic had not been the roaring success Dr Stopes had anticipated. The numbers that attended were modest. Since March, just ninety women had sought advice on contraception and fourteen more had wanted advice on how to become pregnant. With an average of just one or two clients a day, the time spent at the clinic could drag. Ava always managed to read
The Times
from cover to cover.

It had been impossible, considering the environment, for Ava not to ponder on Lydia’s situation. She was only a few weeks pregnant; she’d missed just one of her monthlies. Ava’s first thought on hearing this was that perhaps Lydia wasn’t pregnant at all; she was hardly eating at the moment and rather excitable; that sort of thing could affect a woman’s cycle. But Lydia had excitedly told her about morning sickness and tender breasts. It did seem as though she might have caught. Ava knew of enough pregnancies that didn’t make term. She wondered whether Lydia’s would. Whether it was for the best or not. Edgar’s son, Lawrence’s heir. It was an age-old problem and not an insurmountable one, providing Lydia could be persuaded to be sensible about the whole question.

After work, the private detective she’d hired dropped by to debrief her on his early findings. Ava wasn’t sure what she was looking for exactly, but she’d know it when she found it. A deterrent. A tangible, irrefutable reason for Lydia to walk away. This business between Lydia and the sergeant major could never work, because all they had to keep them together was love, and in Ava’s experience love was the epitome of ephemeral. The sooner it was closed off the better. Disappointingly, the detective – a short, clever, far too worldly-wise sort of man – didn’t reveal an awful lot that she didn’t already know. Lydia had told her that Edgar Trent hailed from Middlesbrough, the son of a shopkeeper; he had opted to work in the shipyards and had enlisted the day he turned eighteen, just three months after it had all begun. His war history was familiar to her and rumours of his heroics were verified by army records, as was his rank and his salary. He paid his rent a month in advance; he was never late. He had no recorded debts or loans. He did have a bank account, and after making a discreet call to a very dear friend of hers who was on the board at Lloyds, Ava discovered that it was a very modest savings account into which he paid a meagre amount every month. The difference between what he earned and his obvious outgoings was considerable. Ava considered whether this man was, after all, truly a saint and sent a sizeable sum home to his parents each month. She really couldn’t find anything disappointing about him.

‘Did you follow him?’ She felt grubby asking the question.

‘Yes, it’s all logged here.’ The private detective slid a brown leather notebook across the table. He kept his chubby fingers on it for a moment longer than necessary, leaving sweaty prints. Ava waited until they’d vanished before she picked up the book. No doubt the detective had formed theories as to why she might be interested in the sergeant major; he probably assumed she was compromised. Ava didn’t care. She was entirely focused on stopping Lydia spinning into a catastrophe.

The log was strangely exciting. Although there were no lurid details – simply a record of Trent’s comings and goings – Ava felt a wave of intimacy as she read that he left his lodgings at half past seven in the morning, walked to his office for eight, bought a paper from a street vendor on the way. Knowing that the man had eaten fried fillet of lemon sole at Maison Lyons, Marble Arch, at lunchtime was somehow oddly personal. She couldn’t help but imagine his strong jaw and mouth masticating. No wonder Lydia was helpless.

‘What do you mean by this, “Some animosity with waitress”? Was it to do with the bill?’

‘No, miss. I don’t think so. I was sat at a discreet distance, so unfortunately I could not hear the details of the conversation, but the disagreement happened before the bill was presented.’

‘Was it to do with the food quality, then?’

‘No. I’m pretty certain the gentleman was happy enough with his food. Didn’t leave a scrap on the plate. I got the feeling the aggravation was altogether to do with a different source. It looked personal to me.’ The detective lingered over the word
personal
in a distinctly unsavoury way.

‘Did it now? Did you talk to the waitress and ask her what it was about?’

He licked his lips. ‘She wouldn’t talk to me, said she was too busy, but I got her name. Ellie Edwards.’

There was nothing else of note in the forty-eight-hour account of Sergeant Major Trent’s activity. Ava wrote out a cheque and gave the man cash for expenses. She instructed him to continue his surveillance and had the maid show him out. He left behind him a slight whiff of indecency that made her want to throw open the windows and let in fresh air.

The next day Ava caught a cab to Lyons on Marble Arch. The maître d’ insisted on showing her to a table himself. He picked one in the centre of the vast room so as to show her off to as many of the other customers as possible; this frequently happened to Ava and she barely noticed. Today she was all grace and charm; she smiled profusely and then asked if she could speak to Ellie Edwards.

‘Is there a problem, miss?’

‘Not at all.’ The maître d’ waited for further explanation, Ava beamed at him but refused to elaborate.

He flushed and then muttered, ‘She’s serving that table over there. I’ll send her to you the moment she’s finished.’

‘Would you? You are too, too good.’

Ellie Edwards was a chubby, confident-looking girl with fashionably bobbed hair. Ava noticed, and appreciated, her carefully tweezered brows and scarlet lipstick; she wore her short uniform with aplomb.

‘Mr Walsh said you asked after me, miss.’ Some girls of Ellie Edwards’s social class were intimidated by women of Ava’s sort, and most women, of whatever class, were intimidated by Ava in particular. However, Ellie did not show any sign of excessive courtesy or dissolve into desperate kowtowing; she stood with her back straight and her chin jutting out. Her stance was assertive, almost combative. Ava recognised a woman who could hold her own.

‘Yes, do sit down.’ She gestured to the other seat at her table.

‘I’m working, miss. We’re not allowed to sit with the customers.’

‘Perhaps you can make an exception.’

The waitress seemed torn. She was reluctant to acquiesce to the wealthy woman’s suggestion, and Ava guessed that she didn’t want to appear too obliging. There were a number of discontented workers with this sort of attitude, even in the service industry – especially in the service industry – and Ava was used to encountering it. On the other hand, the girl clearly relished the opportunity to flout her boss’s rules by sitting with a customer. In the end she sat down but refused to pull her chair right up to the table.

‘What do you want me for?’ she asked. ‘You’re not a customer of mine. I always remember my customers.’

Ava smiled brightly, although she felt a distinct lack of warmth for the chippy young woman. ‘I’m sure you do. I imagine you are an excellent waitress. I’m not here to complain about anything.’