The Jewel Box (11 page)

Monday arrived. As Grace pushed through the revolving door into the Pearson’s building, something was clenched tight inside her stomach. She almost couldn’t bear to look into her office—and when she
did
look, it was empty. Of course it was. The idea that he would be in there, first thing in the morning, was a ludicrous one. The post was brought around at 9:30, and there was nothing from O’Connell.

She was playing ridiculous games with herself, inside her own head. She had been, all week. The fantasies had gathered momentum and gone rolling off on their own. A pram that someone had let go of, careering down steps, like Battleship
Potemkin
.

Knowledge and Despond landed on her shoulders with a great, sickening weight. He would not appear. He would not telephone. He had not sent and would not send a note. The interview was done and dusted. She was no longer the mythical Diamond Sharp to him. She had told him who she really was. And she had told him about her connection to John Cramer. It was all over before it had even begun.

II.

The Rivals

Nancy
had already written three letters to George by the time Grace even attempted a letter to Steven. It wasn’t that she didn’t
want
to write to him. It was just that she didn’t know what to say or how to say it. Everything had changed so much and she couldn’t decipher her own feelings. And her awareness of the great screes of stuff that Nancy was sending to George only made it harder.

“Dearest Steven,”

This greeting had taken over an hour one Sunday after lunch. She’d switched from “Dear” (too formal) to “Darling” (the opposite) to “My dear” (fond maiden aunt), all with much
scrumpling of paper, before settling on “Dearest.” This exhausting internal struggle—plus the writing of the date, “September 10, 1915”—was the limit of the afternoon’s productivity.

In the evening, Grace returned to her desk to try a little further.

“I hope this letter finds you well. I think of you often and wonder how you are getting along.”

(
Maiden aunt again.
)

“Hampstead is dull and gray without you. Nancy and I have no company at the pictures and are forced to partner each other for dancing.”

(
Too moany—and when it came to the dancing, not entirely true.
)

“I miss you so much, my brave one, and pray each night for your safe return.”

(
Heavens!
)

She gave up, and another week passed. A week of dull university lectures and essays. A week during which Nancy fired off two more letters to George. By the following Sunday the guilt was weighing heavily on her. What sort of a person was she, to leave poor Steven languishing without so much as a hello, when surely all and sundry were reveling in their missives from home? It wasn’t as if she didn’t like him, after all. It was just…But could one in all fairness call it writer’s block (as she was beginning to) when the block concerned the writing of a mere letter?

Sick of the inside of her own head, she waited for the
household to go to bed, and then tiptoed into the living room and took out the bottle of dry sherry from the drinks cabinet. Helped herself to a good large glassful, gulped it down and poured a second to take upstairs with her. If that didn’t do the trick, then nothing would.

Dearest Steven,

I’m drunk on Daddy’s sherry—believe me, it’s the only way I shall ever succeed in getting this out. The thing is, you’ve turned me frightfully shy. I thought I knew you, both of you, but suddenly there’s a different you and a different George, and even a different Nancy. I feel I’m the only one of us who is still clinging to the past, to the idea of us as a foursome. The rest of you have moved on. I know that doesn’t make sense and I apologize for that (I shall blame the sherry!), but there you have it. I have been tongue-tied when it comes to letter writing, but I promise you I’ve been thinking of you all the time.

Steven, whatever happens, I want you to know that I shall never forget that night in the garden. I know I was rather cross with you at the time, but that was just because of the surprise of it, and a degree of confusion. Truly, it was a very special night. And you are quite the best kisser I’ve ever kissed.

I’m not saying this very well (again, the sherry). I think about you when I’m alone. I feel a lot for you—the sort of feelings I can’t talk about, even with the sherry.

There. I hope that makes you smile. Steven, I have no idea what you’re living, and I’m sorry if this is all just awfully trivial to you. I can’t pretend that I
remotely understand this war, or what it must be like to fight in it.

I’ve been unforgivably slow in writing to you, but I hope you’ll forgive me all the same. Write back when you can, and take good care of yourself and George. I want you to come back soon to kiss me again.

The following morning, after breakfast, a much refreshed Grace (with not the slightest trace of a headache) headed upstairs to fetch the letter, intending to take it to the post office before she could change her mind.

I shan’t read it again, she told herself—but then of course she did. And blushed. Then she read it again and blushed some more and stood procrastinating.

Buck up and think of Steven, she told herself. You’ve written it and now you must send it.

So she placed the letter in an envelope, sealed and addressed it, and went downstairs to fetch her coat and keys.

But in the few minutes she’d spent upstairs, the doorbell had rung and the world had moved on. Through the open doorway to the living room, she saw Mrs. Wilkins sitting in a chair, her face in her hands, and Mr. Wilkins over by the mantel, staring into the empty fireplace. Daddy was delving in his drinks cabinet—a look of surprise flitting briefly across his face when he held up the sherry bottle and saw how little was left.

“Here’s Grace.” Mummy had spotted her, and was advancing toward the door. There were tears on her face. “Come in here a moment, darling. Where’s your sister?”

Grace’s heart began to pound. Her hand opened and the letter fell to the floor. She heard her own voice say, “Which of them is it?”

Steven had been killed in shelling at the Loos Battle. His death changed everything. The Rutherford girls had been in a bubble while the war went on somewhere else. They knew people who’d died, of course. But nobody crucial had been snatched away from them until now. Nobody intrinsic.

Grace went on at university for a time but it all seemed so irrelevant, with Steven dead and George still out there. There had to be something more useful she could do. Despite her parents’ protests she dropped out and got a job at a munitions factory, in the belief that the most direct and effective way to contribute was to build weapons with her own lily-white hands. Weapons to kill the men who’d murdered Steven.

It was good to be an automaton, working hard and with no time for moping about. But the other women, all of whom came from less-privileged backgrounds, looked on her with an odd mixture of awe and contempt. Unable to comprehend why someone of Grace’s means should have
chosen
to work alongside them, handling the TNT that caused jaundice and led to them being nicknamed “Canary Girls” rather than taking an easier, loftier sort of job, they treated her with suspicion, and kept away from her. The only other well-to-do type was the Welfare Supervisor, whom Grace quickly realized had landed her senior role purely as an accident of birth. This woman’s personal style was to attempt to conceal her incompetence and inarticulacy beneath a façade of refined delicacy—rather as one might disguise an ugly mess in the corner of a room by throwing a lace cloth over it. The supervisor, Emily, made friendly but condescending overtures to Grace—her
particular brand of friendliness being far more objectionable than the mild hostility of the other women. More intolerable still were Emily’s whispers of a plan to elevate Grace “off the production line” to work alongside her.

“It was always a silly idea,” said Harold. “Such a waste of a good brain. You should give it up and go back to university. If you’re bothered about doing your bit, you could do something voluntary like your mother and sister.” Nancy, who had taken an office job by day, was fund-raising for war-widowed families in dire financial straits. Catherine, along with many others in the WSPU, had joined the Women’s Police Service, and spent her evenings patrolling the Heath in a uniform, giving wayward girls a jolly good talking-to, and routing out the couples with a big stick.

In the end, it was a second family tragedy that made Grace give up her factory work, though not to go back to university. In February 1917, Harold died of influenza, plunging the family into a profound state of shock that lasted way beyond the funeral. Through the period of acute loss, each of them tried and failed to stifle a private realization that persistently nagged: that bronchial Harold had been quietly ill for ages, and none of them had so much as acknowledged it, he least of all. With so much war bereavement going on around them, they’d lost track of the fact that they were vulnerable at home, too. For a while the household was the proverbial chicken that continues to run about after its head has been cut off. Grace and Nancy went out to work as before, and Catherine continued to tread her beat. But the fires were not lit in the evening because Harold had always been the one to light them. Nobody considered what tasks might be left undone because Daddy wasn’t there to do them, nor what further tasks might need to be tackled as a result of his death. Nobody so much as entered his study.

Chance dictated that it was Grace who happened to be at home on the day when the maid awkwardly announced that while she understood the family were having a hard time, so was she without her weekly wages. It was Grace who answered the door when the milkman stopped by to say he would have to stop delivering if they didn’t settle on the spot. It was Grace who took the telephone call from the family solicitor who wanted to know what the devil was happening about Harold’s affairs. And so Grace was the one to finally sit down in the dusty study and start searching through files.

The factory work had been a sort of game, she realized. She’d been motivated primarily by a sense of duty and patriotism, but she now saw that her first duty was to her family. Catherine might be presenting a cheerful coping exterior but Grace could see beyond that. Mummy was in a kind of frozen state—unable to step into Daddy’s shoes in any meaningful way, unable to comprehend even her own emotions. And Nancy dragged listlessly about the house with red eyes and a short temper—still the youngest, the child.

Grace would deal with the paperwork and settle the unpaid bills. She would make the difficult discovery that her father had far less money than any of them might have expected. She would look for a job that paid much more than the factory. She would find one at Pearson & Pearson.

Nancy
and George were married at 11:30 a.m. on December 22, 1917. They’d had to postpone twice because of canceled leave, and this opportunity had arisen because George had been sent home wounded. He’d been back at his parents’ house for a good few weeks, recovering from an operation on his right leg at Queen Alexandra’s Hospital in Highgate. A number of small scraps and shards of what appeared to be granite were removed from the leg, and George kept them as souvenirs, saying they were pieces of someone’s grave. He’d been holed up in a churchyard during a heavy shelling bombardment at Ypres, and a tombstone very near him had taken a direct hit.

It wasn’t the fairy-tale wedding Nancy had dreamed of—taking place, as it did, at the local Register Office, with just a smattering of friends in attendance. But there was
nonetheless a romance to the occasion. Nancy was dashing in her squirrel-edged winter coat on that clear, frosty morning, her eyes sparkling. George, now a captain, cut a romantic figure in his uniform, propped up on crutches. He had about him a new remoteness and seriousness, but this was romantic in itself. He had been at the Loos Battle, where his brother was killed (now more than two years ago). He’d survived the Somme and the third battle of Ypres, and had come home to give his fiancée the nicest possible Christmas present: himself.

The day was a difficult one for Grace. Throughout the ceremony the brave-faced Catherine gripped her hand so hard that she could all but hear the cracking of bones. Although neither was clad in black, Grace felt they were a heavy, tragic presence, the pair of them. Widows in the corner. Certainly it was clear that the sympathy in the faces of their guests was directed not just at her mother, but also at her. The wedding had reminded them all of something they’d long forgotten—perhaps something that many of them had not even realized until today: If Nancy and George were one half of an equation, then she and Steven were the other. If Nancy was marrying George, then Grace must have lost Steven. But much as she didn’t like herself for it, it wasn’t Steven who was uppermost in Grace’s mind today. Beneath her cheerful exterior she was struggling to quench something that kept surging up: the growing conviction that George should be marrying her, not her sister. His changed persona merely intensified her certainty that she understood him far better than Nancy ever would. What a mess she and George had made of their lives on that one, stupidly passionate and impulsive day in the summer of 1915. And how arbitrary everything had been since then. Really, you couldn’t allow yourself to think about it all
for too long—it was all so unbearably, horribly, and in Steven’s case tragically, arbitrary.

After the ceremony there was a drab lunch at the nearby Woolton Hotel. Gray chicken soup followed by foul-tasting beef in aspic served with carrots and floury potatoes, and then spotted dick with congealed custard. You had to go heavy on the drink just to be able to get it all down. As the afternoon wore on, Grace began to benefit from the numbing effects of the alcohol, and her fixed smile grew brighter and glossier.