The Summer Before the War (49 page)

Hugh clasped their hands and tried to offer them money, but the two were scathing in their rejection.

“Keep it,” said Bill. “Champagne and cigars cost a lot here in port.”

“Spend it on a woman, guvnor,” said Archie. “Put a smile on that long face of yours.” They drove away, still exchanging rude comments on Hugh's personal appearance and general stuffiness, and he understood at last that such earthbound ruffians formed as indelible a part of England's fabled backbone as any boys from Eton's playing fields.

The hospital was also a collection point for patients bound for England, and the wards spilled into two warehouses on the docks, where patients were cared for and maintained until the arrival of a hospital ship to take them home. Organization in these warehouses was slightly looser than in the main building, and Hugh was able to persuade several orderlies that Snout the batman might stay with his officer, Captain Wheaton. Once they and Daniel were settled together, Hugh told Harry Wheaton to look after them while he went to secure passes to England on the next ship.

“Not sure what I can do except watch them drool,” said Harry, who was busy trying to look brave and interesting for a pretty nurse in a starched white apron bringing tea along the row of beds.

“Make sure they keep drooling,” said Hugh. “Just don't let them die while I'm gone.”

In a large open office on the docks, he found his surgeon, Colonel Sir Alex Ramsey, surrounded by two walls of filing cabinets and pressed into a corner by the desks of clerks and nurses, who had their own rows of filing cabinets. Overhead large green-painted metal lights cast an unhealthy pallor on the proceedings.

“As you can see, things did not turn out as we had intended,” said the surgeon. “They have me running half the hospitals. I spend my days with a paper knife, not a scalpel.” He did not, however, look displeased with such an arrangement.

“I have been kept busy,” said Hugh. “You did not mislead me as to the experience I would gain. It may have been at the expense of some poor souls who got me instead of the more experienced surgeon.”

“A head injury hospital is still in the cards for next year or so.”

“I suppose that means the war will be going on awhile, sir?”

“We are making plans to see it through,” said the surgeon. “What can I do for you, my boy?” Hugh told him a brief version of what happened and begged him to assign his little group of three passes for the next ship to England. The surgeon too hesitated over the private.

“He's underage, sir,” said Hugh.

“Well, I suppose we must prove our commitment to the men and show we assign no preference to officers,” said the surgeon. “I expect you'd like to accompany them?”

“I do have leave owed to me,” said Hugh.

“And will you be using some of that leave to pay a visit to my daughter?” said the surgeon. Hugh felt a throb of panic in his chest, which he pushed away. His sense of honor struggled for a moment with his need to see his cousin safe. He tried to conjure Lucy in his mind, but instead he could only see Beatrice Nash, laughing on his aunt's terrace, her hair coming down from its pins in a sudden breeze. He opened his mouth to speak, but the surgeon stopped him.

“I'll understand that as a no,” he said. “A pity, but it can't be helped. She's taken up with young Carruthers, you know. He joined the Coldstream Guards.”

“I'm very happy for her,” said Hugh.

“You are the better surgeon,” he added. “But you understand, it can't be helped. I'll have to take him in with me.”

“I do, sir,” said Hugh. He was relieved to see the red-brick house and the fine consulting rooms officially disappear from his future. He was happy to let go of the dream of being the renowned London surgeon, for he had no interest now in what seemed like the shallow trappings of fame and society. Instead he could only see the little red rooftops of Rye, all huddled under the church, and the broad green of the marshes at sunset, the dark bluff of the Sussex hills behind, and a small cottage on a steep cobbled lane.

“Ten-day pass,” said the surgeon. “Best of luck to you, my boy.”

While they waited for a hospital ship, Hugh consulted with the other doctors, changed dressings himself, and talked the nurses into bringing extra beef broth, extra butter, extra blankets. He used his credentials to be allowed to stay all day, and at night he slept on the floor by Daniel's cot, rolled in a blanket. If love and care could shepherd his cousin and the others safely home, he was determined to provide both.

But Daniel grew worse as the others grew stronger. He was intermittently subject to a high fever that left him shaking and covered in sweat. His skull had not been broken open, which would have been a sure mark of death, but his head wound did not heal as fast as Hugh would have liked, and he suspected his cousin's brain was swelling. Daniel began to be confused about his surroundings, and he called a nurse Auntie several times.

On the morning that the hospital ship appeared in the English Channel, Daniel seemed calm and strangely lucid after a night of trembling sweats.

“I am not going to leave this place, Hugh,” he said. “All night I dreamed of Aunt Agatha and Uncle John's garden, and of you and me smoking on the terrace, and I knew I was sitting there for the last time.”

“Don't speak that way,” said Hugh. “The ship is coming, Daniel.”

“I'm not afraid,” said Daniel. “I think Craigmore is waiting for me. I am only sad to leave you all, and I don't want you to be sad.”

“The ship is coming now,” said Hugh.

“I need you to take care of the boy,” said Daniel. “To get him home to his mother.”

“We will take him home together.”

“Is Wheaton awake?” asked Daniel.

“I would be sleeping if you weren't chatting like fishwives over there,” said Harry, his gruffness hiding his emotion.

“I'm so sorry about your father, Harry,” said Daniel.

“If you see him up there, smoke a cigar with him for me,” said Harry. “Tell him not to come and rattle all the dressers when I borrow his guns for the shooting.”

“A lovely sentiment,” said Daniel. “And I thought you such a brute, Harry.” He seemed cheered by such a spirited exchange, but his breathing was very shallow.

“You will come home with me,” said Hugh. “I insist.”

“I need to give you my poems,” said Daniel. He reached with some difficulty under his pillow for his small black notebook. “Lock them in a drawer if you must, but perhaps you will ask Beatrice Nash to edit them.”

“Not your friend, Mr. Tillingham?” asked Hugh.

“No, no, he would edit them to death in his own image,” said Daniel. “Your Beatrice has a light touch. If you wish to publish them, give them to Beatrice.”

“She is not my Beatrice,” said Hugh.

“Make her so, Hugh,” said Daniel. “She is so obviously meant to put up with you.”

“Daniel, you must be strong,” said Hugh. But Hugh could feel a tear on his cheek. His vibrant younger cousin was so very frail; his skin seemed to have already assumed the strange, waxy translucence of death.

“Will you write me a letter, Hugh, as they do for all the boys who must leave us?”

“Of course,” said Hugh. He fumbled for a pen and found a blank page at the back of the notebook.

“Give my father the respects of his son and tell him I hope I have performed my duty,” he said. “To my Uncle John, write that I send all the love a nephew ever gave a loving uncle.” He paused to catch a fleeting breath and added, “Tell Celeste she made me the happiest of men and restored my name and spirit with the gift of her hand. I hope she and the child will live a happy life.”

“And what message have you for Aunt Agatha?” said Hugh. Daniel did not reply. He seemed to be fading into sleep. “Do not leave her unforgiven, Daniel. Do not leave her with anger, Cousin, for my sake if nothing else.”

“Tell her I always knew,” said Daniel faintly.

“That she loved you?” asked Hugh.

“Tell her I always felt her great love like a blanket around me. Now I am come to the edge of the place she feared”—he paused and seemed to stare as if at a new landscape—“tell her I can better understand why she tried so hard to save me. I have caused her fear to come true.”

“It is not your fault,” said Hugh. “You did your duty.”

“Oh, Hugh, she will be so unhappy,” said Daniel. “Tell her I will die with her name on my lips.”

“You are half my life, Cousin,” said Hugh. He could barely write for the tears moistening the paper and smudging the ink. “You can't leave me to go home to Sussex alone. Please don't go.”

“You are half my life too,” said Daniel. “Live for both of us, Hugh. Love for both of us. And for goodness' sake try to be a little less stuffy.”

“Am I writing that down too?” asked Hugh, smiling and crying at the same time.

“Yes, dear Hugh. It is the unexpected note that makes the poem. You, Hugh, are the unexpected note.”

She wrote to Daniel
every day, setting aside the hour from ten to eleven in the morning to sit in her study and stare at the bare branches of the trees, and the frost under the hedges, as she composed her careful lines. It was a bitter winter, and the glass study was unheated. Jenny brought a hot brick for her feet, as usual, and she wore gloves with the fingers cut out; and the cold and the wisp of her breath added the proper dimension of penance to the ritual.

She did not beg him to love her again, or to forgive her for what she had done in her fog of anxiety and fear. She did not seek to burden him with her pleading. Instead she wrote a cheerful account of the small events that stack, one upon the other, to build an ordinary day. She wrote of Smith and the gardener hacking the last frozen cabbages from the ground. She wrote of having to speak sternly to Cook, who had discarded her boots, and wore only men's socks in the kitchen on account of her inflamed bunions. She reported in detail on Celeste's contentment and how determined she was not to let her increasing girth keep her from the sick visiting and her needlework. She had made lace for baby bonnets and donated much of it for other young mothers at the church, and she played the piano weekly at the hospital and the almshouses.

They were keeping chickens behind the stable house and were drawing plans to turn over the lawn in her private garden to plant vegetables in the spring. From a surfeit of caution, she was careful not to catalog John's comings and goings. She referred to “an uncle of yours” and reported on such interesting news as his being an absolute baby about having a tooth pulled at the dentist and his new interest in acquiring goats, goats offering milk and meat while being better sized for a large in-town property than a cow. Jenny and Cook, she reported, had balked at the idea of eating goat, as if offered rattlesnake or crocodile, and “an uncle of yours” was in complex negotiations to have the goats sent to a farm when the time came, to be exchanged for a smaller portion of a butchered lamb.

She did not ask him for anything in return. She begged no letters or poems. She did not include phrases that hoped to hear from him, or longed to see his face. She simply sent him her small, carefully described miniatures of his home in hopes he would be cheered by the portraits; and she kept private her secret hope that he would not wince to see her figure wandering in the scenes she described.

Agatha had stopped looking at the newspapers and the illustrated periodicals, the ladies' journals with their sideways glances at the war. Every recipe for meatless pie or economical carrot Christmas pudding, every instruction for sock knitting or notice of a bandage drive, was a little stab in the heart, more painful than the daily bulletins of fact. She set them all aside and lived beyond the comfort of stoking and nursing and picking at her fear. The constant and patient performance of her duties was her new ritual, her book of hours. The writing of the letter in the morning, the visiting hours, the careful dressing for dinner, even when the dinner was meatless and she and Celeste sat at a card table in the drawing room to save lighting the dining room fire. The winding of the clocks, the ordering of winter feed for the horse, the continued care for refugees, and the inspection of boots to send to the cobbler. She invested each with her full attention and left no room in her mind for the luxury of pain.

Christmas had come and gone with subdued warmth. Beatrice Nash and Mr. Tillingham came to dinner. Agatha gave Mr. Tillingham a small book of old Latin poems picked out at an antiquarian book dealer John favored, just off the Charing Cross Road. Beatrice gave him an ivory bookmark that had been her father's, and Celeste made him an exquisite lace cloth for his spectacles. With some flourish, Mr. Tillingham presented each lady with the same faux shagreen glove box he had given his secretary. His frugality was expected, but his lack of concern to differentiate in any way among the ladies had been of obvious hurt to Beatrice. Agatha hoped her gift to Beatrice, of an old calfskin-bound copy of Chaucer with color illustrations, would offer some compensation. She and John had a letter from Hugh, stiff in the boy's formal way, and filled with positive tales of his lodgings and the efficiency of the hospital. He did not complain of conditions or tell what horrors he might have seen; for this Agatha was grateful. She read the letter aloud after Christmas dinner, and Celeste produced a postcard, all embroidered wool flowers and a printed sentiment, on which Daniel had scrawled brief Christmas wishes to all at home. The card was passed around, and Agatha took it greedily in her hands and traced the signature with her finger as if it might summon Daniel to the room.

The card rested on the mantel in Celeste's green room, and Agatha sometimes slipped in to pick it up again and look at the loop of the penmanship. If Jenny or Celeste came in unexpectedly, she would wipe a finger along the mantel and blow away imaginary dust before ordering a second dusting, or shake out the curtains and wonder aloud if they needed retrimming.

Today she wrote that the March winds had died down, and with the days growing lighter and the nights shrinking back from their winter dominance, the snowdrops and early daffodils were defying the frost to bloom in the south-facing beds. She did not draw any conclusion or hopes from these facts, she merely let them blossom across her thin letter paper in the loops of her pen. Despite the bare elm tapping on the glass of her study windows, and the frigid cold radiating through the glass, she could almost imagine spring in the sharp blue sky and the small sparrows fluffing out their wings and sharpening their beaks on the branches.

The telephone rang in the bowels of the house, and she blocked the sound from her mind. She was not to be disturbed during this particular hour, and Jenny would let the caller know she was not yet about. A tap on the door violated her careful arrangement and caused her pen to drop a blot on the page.

“I'm sorry, ma'am,” said Jenny. “But it's Mr. Kent on the phone, and he insists.”

The jolt of fear, the deep breath, the suppression of any visible trembling; Agatha rose slowly, blotted her letter on the mat, and placed her pen in its holder.

“Tell Mr. Kent I'll be right there,” she said, letting the maid hurry down while she took off her gloves, and the woolly blanket she used as a shawl, and proceeded in a dignified glide through the upper hall and down the polished stairs. No point in running and perhaps slipping, twisting an ankle. No point in assuming her husband was calling from London with some emergency. Better to keep to one's carefully constructed life of patience…

“I got a coded telegram from Hugh's surgeon,” said John. “Grange, Wheaton, Bookham, Sidley STOP Blighty bound STOP HS Folkestone 18:00 STOP.”

“Oh my God, they're hurt,” said Agatha.

“I telephoned Major Frank at the hospital, and he's sending his ambulance. They're coming home, Agatha.”

“I must get to Folkestone,” she said.

“I'm taking a train in an hour,” said her husband. “Let me handle this, Agatha. We don't know what we'll find.”

“I'm coming,” said Agatha. “No force on earth will keep me from those docks.” She put the telephone back in its cradle and called wildly for Celeste, Jenny, Cook, and Smith. The household came running.

Beatrice was leaving school to go home for her midday dinner when Agatha Kent all but overtook her on the street with no greeting.

“Mrs. Kent? Agatha?” called Beatrice.

“I can't stop,” said Agatha. “I have to get to Folkestone and of course the car was taken weeks ago and all the trains are hopeless these days so I have to find anyone with a car or a lorry.” Most of the private cars had been acquired by the army for war service, and the trains were so slow and full of troops that travel had become difficult.

“A pair of horses might get you there in a few hours,” said Beatrice. It was over thirty miles to Folkestone, but a horse might do the trip in four or five hours at a trot.

“But they would be spent and lame from the effort and I would not get home again.” She stopped and took a deep breath. “The boys are on a hospital ship with Harry Wheaton and young Sidley,” she added, looking stricken. “They may all be badly injured. We just don't know.”

“Alice Finch,” said Beatrice. “We must find Alice Finch.” Alice had managed to get her motorbike grudgingly exempted as part of her beloved motorbike and bicycle messenger corps. The corps included certain stalwart ladies, some scouts, and assorted amateur male cyclists too old or young for military service, who enjoyed the thrill of cycling through the dark, carrying messages between shoreline sentry posts.

“A motorbike?” asked Agatha. “I don't know.”

“Nonsense,” said Beatrice. “I only hope she can take both of us because I'm coming with you.” She gave no thought to her afternoon classes. An image of Hugh, bleeding and pale on a stretcher, was before her eyes as they hurried up the hill to Alice's cottage and rousted her and Minnie Buttles from their luncheon. Alice agreed at once to take them, and Minnie ran to find them goggles and a pair of motorcycle breeches for Beatrice, who would have to ride astride. The motorbike was dragged from the shed, and Agatha pushed and shoved into the sidecar, an extra can of petrol under her feet. Then Beatrice tucked the unfamiliar breeches firmly into her belt and climbed behind Alice. A running start, pushed from behind by Minnie, and the engine roared to life. Alice opened the throttle, and in a sight that brought shopkeepers to their doors and made the dogs bark, three ladies flew down the high street and away across the marsh, hair and hat ribbons flying in the wind.

The Folkestone docks were chaos to the untrained eye. Lorries and ambulances crisscrossed the yards with no apparent care for the processions of soldiers, stretcher bearers, and walking wounded, who marched like ants from warehouse to warehouse. A large, badly painted steamship was moored in the middle of the chaos. A red cross painted on the funnel was its only protection from the U-boats that patrolled the Channel. Men were unloading stretchers from the deck and a lower cargo door, while those who could walk hobbled down the gangplank as best they could. Many were on crutches, some wheeled in bath chairs. Several men were carried down by orderlies, sitting on regular metal chairs.

From the steep hill above, Alice quieted the engine to say, “Looks like they have the perimeter guarded. I'll try to use my credentials to get you as close as I can.” As Alice's credentials consisted of a certificate she and Minnie had printed up in their studio, and handed out to all members of their messenger corps, Beatrice had no comfort that they would be allowed anywhere near the ship.

Fortunately, the brand-new private, on the smallest checkpoint, was already overwhelmed in managing his rifle and a clipboard while having to raise and lower the heavy barrier.

“Motorbike Brigade, transporting nurses,” shouted Alice as they approached. “Can't stop in case the plugs give out.” She pulled a certificate from her coat and gave it to him as she continued to coast the motorbike forward slowly with her feet. “Open up sharpish, lad,” she barked. “Don't want to decapitate two matrons with the barrier, do we?”

“No, ma'am,” he said, and though his eyes widened at the incongruity of women in trousers and oily goggles, he ran to raise the barrier and wave them through, his rifle falling off his shoulder and hanging at a dangerous angle from his elbow. Alice drove all the way to the gangplank to park the motorbike among a row of waiting ambulances.

As they watched, the crowd began to seem less random. Beatrice detected patterns in how the injured were moved: some to ambulances, some to a makeshift hospital building. She could see several men with clipboards and lists giving directions as the stretchers came off the ship. Nurses moved up and down the rows of men, checking their injuries.

“We should ask a man with a clipboard,” said Beatrice. “They have the lists.”