The Wild Dark Flowers (33 page)

And he certainly did not want to acknowledge the very first thought that had come to his mind; he was too ashamed of it. For his first thought had been,
Please God, let him be dead.

William suddenly realized that Charlotte was looking at him steadily. “It’s just too much,” she said sadly.

“Yes, it is,” he agreed.

She came to him, and put her arms around him.

After a moment, he kissed her cheek. “Would you please make a telephone call for me?”

“Of course,” she said. “Who would you like to speak to?”

“My solicitor, Bretherton,” he told her. “Tell him to come here this morning, as soon as he can.”

*   *   *

H
arry Cavendish had begun to feel quite desperately bored.

Hooge-Haldane had gone long ago, almost rushed out of the sheds on the wharf, holding up one bandaged hand by way of good-bye. He’d be going to Exeter, of all places; the train had been already rumbling in the sidings nearby. “Don’t forget Claridge’s!” Harry had joked after him, and felt at once ridiculous, propped up on his elbows, and surrounded by empty stretchers.

“I say,” he called out. There were a knot of medical staff and army officers by the doors of the shed, silhouetted in the bright sunshine. “Not going to leave me here?”

He slumped back. Christ, it felt as if his body were tethered to two great planks of wood. He could feel his toes, but very distantly; everything else was either numb—in patches—or itching unbearably, or—more of this—thudding with pain, quite distinctly, in seemingly electric lines. One or two of those lines seemed to stretch into his body, his stomach and groin.

The night on the boat had been quite the most disgusting of his life. He had not felt alone, as he had done on the train with the corpse in the bunk above him, nor was he afraid. He had simply been most awfully sick. And he was not the only one. The man next to him had thrown up all over him as the boat pitched and rolled; and, as if that weren’t enough, the poor devil stank—a dreadful reeling stench.

As soon as they had got out of harbor, they had felt the ship veer to port, and it had continued that way all night, zigzagging, he supposed, to avoid torpedoes.

“Wretched fellow, the Hun,” Haldane had complained. “Chasing ships. Coward’s war.”

They’d heard about the
Lusitania
; someone who had got off the ship and was bound for the front had told them. It set off a feverish reaction among the troops; there in the hold that night somebody started shouting in an accent they didn’t recognize, and men had swarmed over the poor fellow, who, it turned out, was from Scotland, and had reverted to Gaelic in his fever. It was taken to be German. Four nurses had been obliged to pull three full-grown men off the raving infantryman.

What a comedy we’re in
, Harry had thought. And then he hadn’t been able to hold it in anymore, but he had tried to vomit carefully. “I say, Haldane, I’m about to puke and shall do so in a gentlemanlike fashion,” he had joked apologetically. And failed. Haldane was as splashed as the rest of them.

“If I had a fist, I’d connect it with your eye,” he’d told Harry sourly.

Seasickness was a wonderful thing. It had the capacity to overrule any other pain a man might be feeling. At least, that was Harry’s own experience. He couldn’t vouch for the horrible cases on deck, fighting for every breath, green in the face from gas, not mal de mer. “Oh mine papa,” he’d whistled brokenly. There it was again, the papa song. He’d sung that a few centuries back when they first picked him out of the aeroplane. Between retches, he tried the word again. “Papa, papa.” Would his father come and get him from Folkestone? He hoped so. He would rather like to see his father again. Solidity in the shifting sands of madness: calm in the face of riot and mayhem.

Dawn had come as a welcome shaft of light through the salt-caked portholes. A nurse had come round and given them tea and said that she could see the shore. “England,” he had breathed to himself. And, “I should like to see little Sessy.” And then to his shame, he had begun to cry. Haldane had slumped down at his side. There had been no jolly words about bucking up or seeing the bright side; Haldane wept too, there in the half-light. They had looked at each other, and knew that it was a moment shared that they would never breathe to another living soul.

The crunching of the ship against the dock, the sensation as she was nudged and tied and the engines died, was glorious. He’d looked down at himself and saw the man alongside spirited away, and all the others.

“I say!” he called again now. “Have pity, fellows!”

One of the RMC officers came striding purposefully towards him. “Cavendish?”

“That’s the ticket.”

“We have you down for Liverpool.”

“Ah no. . . . That won’t do at all.”

“Awkward lot, aren’t you?” the officer replied, unmoved. “You’ve got a very visible mother on the dock standing by with an ambulance.”

“God bless her.”

“I shall want to speak to both you and her when we get you on dry land.”

“Speak away,” Harry said, smiling broadly now. “But for God’s sake, let me out of here.”

*   *   *

I
t was Friday, the fourteenth of May.

London was not the city that Octavia had known all her life; it was not even the city that she had known last year when Louisa had been presented at Court.

She sat in the morning sunshine of the Grosvenor Square house, looking out at the street. Thinking of last year was like looking back on some sort of fairy tale. She remembered Louisa in that beautiful pink silk dress at the Chasteris Ball: ethereal almost, lit by candlelight as she had come down the stairs. She remembered her in the dressmaker’s, and Charlotte’s head on her own shoulder, complaining at the hours that it had taken to fit Louisa’s clothes. She remembered going to tea with Hetty de Ray; God, so long ago; twelve months that might as well be fifty.

She looked up at William.

Sitting opposite her, he was regarding her with a mixed expression: concern, sadness, and his old and habitual immovability.

“Tell me what is in your mind,” he said.

She gave a small shrug. “I really don’t know,” she told him. “It’s too much, almost. Everything.”

He made no comment. His eyes strayed to the newspaper. “Intolerable behavior,” he observed.

The
Times
was full of the riots in London and Liverpool. German businesses had been attacked, mobs of hundreds—some said thousands—strong rampaging through streets, breaking windows, tearing shops to pieces. Over one desolate ruin had been painted the words “Go to hell, Hun.”

William gave a wan smile. “It was the Kaiser himself that spawned that word,” he mused. “He gave a speech when I was in Parliament, a speech to his troops going to China in 1900. He told them to give no quarter. He said that the Huns had gained a name for themselves ‘as still resounds in terror a thousand years later.’ He said that the name of Germany should sound the same. Hence . . .” He waved his hand expressively at the photograph.

“Then he has his wish,” Octavia murmured. “He has his dirty name now.” She felt numb. How like William it was to know the political context; how like him to retain his level appreciation of history. She wished she could manage a tenth of that objectivity.

“I’ve been up to see Harry,” William continued quietly. “He’s got over it, I think. Not so much angry now, as resigned.”

She closed her eyes briefly, not wanting to think of that Monday morning on the harborside. Of the stale-smelling harbormaster’s room where the RMC doctor had told her of her son’s true condition, while Harry himself fretted outside in the ambulance. “It isn’t a case of merely recuperating at home,” she had been told severely. “He must be operated on again. The compound fracture of the right leg must be reset. As for the left leg, it’s not so bad, but again must be broken back.”

“Broken again?” she repeated, aghast.

“We do our best at the front,” he replied. “But it’s largely a case of clearing out debris, and preventing further infection.”

She had gone to Harry, her darling boy, her son, looking so much older, with a curious dead light in his eyes. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell him then. He, in turn, took her distress for concern at the rickety, shambling state of the ambulance. “I say, this is luxury,” he had told her. “You should have seen the places I’ve been carted through, and other men’s problems. Don’t cry, Mother, for God’s sake.”

She obeyed him. She brought him home, and the staff had all turned out on the steps of the house that afternoon, and he was carried into his own bedroom upstairs. They got him settled, and he had slept the sleep of the dead. William had said as much, and she had caught his arm. “No, not that,” she told him. “Don’t say that.” Her throat had felt burned out; she had been on the brink of a fever.

William had taken her arm and drawn her into the dining room. There, among the polished mahogany and the deep fringed curtains and the silver—such immaterial details, but they snagged at her vision luridly, all the patterns and reflections—he had said to her, “You’ve heard of the
Lusitania
business by now, of course.”

She had sat down at the empty table in whose deeply polished shine she could dimly see her own blurred reflection. Only a few hours before, she had asked someone to fetch them something to eat as the ambulance dragged itself out of Folkestone, and a boy had come back with bread and cheese, grinning from ear to ear. He had also got them a newspaper. She had taken it from him, seen the first page, asked the driver to stop, and walked away from the van, the newspaper in hand. Since then, even with Harry, she had felt remote, anaesthetized. The effort to seem calm, and to attend to Harry, had made her feel as if she was slowly dying of some raging heat.

“Yes, I’ve heard,” she told William on Monday.

“I’ve asked Bretherton to contact the US Consul in Queenstown,” he had said. “To find news of him.”

She had no words to give William. She looked up at him gratefully. Passing out of the room to see his son, he had placed a hand briefly on her shoulder.

She thought now that it was the most affectionate thing that her husband had ever done; not only instructing Bretherton, but in the wordless and delicate sympathy of that fleeting touch.

*   *   *

S
he gazed at him now. “I’m not being secretive,” she said quietly. “But I simply don’t know what I feel.”

Already, the newspapers were moving on. Octavia’s eye ran over the page, and saw an article about the “scandalous shortage of shells on the western front.” She tried to make sense of it. Harrison had been out there; they had heard of his death only yesterday. Tall, blithe-looking Harrison, who had always worn such an air of calm. He was already buried before they had known of the price he had paid; the major involved was mentioned in dispatches.

A telegram had arrived at Rutherford. “The dreaded yellow note has come for Harrison,” Bradfield had told William, over the telephone. “And the Reverend Whittaker too, we’re told, from the village.” Octavia had sat for some time in her room, wondering if Harrison had a family she ought to tell, and realizing that she did not know. It had plunged her further into despair.

The
Times
was full of photographs of those who had survived the
Lusitania
, and those who had been lost. 128 Americans had died, and 94 of the 129 children. In all, over twelve hundred were gone. On the same day that Octavia had brought Harry back from Folkestone, 140 bodies were buried in Ireland with no identification at all; it was estimated that nine hundred more would never be found, for they had gone down in the ship, or been washed farther out to sea.

The US Consul complained that of those Americans who were left, many could not be persuaded to identify the corpses that filled the morgues. It was all too much for the disoriented survivors; those that had no relatives on the ship were already out of Ireland, catching ferries to Liverpool, sitting up all night in the public areas of the ships with their lifebelts on, too afraid to sleep. The US Consul despaired of keeping track of them: the missing, the fleeing, and the dead.

The first train of survivors that had reached London had arrived in London on Sunday—the very day that Octavia had been packing to go to Folkestone. She had not spoken a word to the staff; no one had told her. She had gone for the evening train at Charing Cross, and never seen the newspaper hoardings: shielded from private car to first-class carriage, she had not heard a single voice saying the
Lusitania
’s name. By Monday morning, Smythe had assumed she knew the story.

John Gould had probably been dead for almost three days before she was handed the newspaper in the ambulance.

William began to speak again now. “Bretherton has sent me this letter,” he said. He got up slowly, and handed it to her; walking away, he turned his back, and stood by the fireplace, staring down at his feet.

The letter was dated Wednesday, May 12.

Your lordship,

Octavia read,

There is a sad state of affairs in Queenstown. I instructed my agent to inspect all mortuaries, and to inquire at the Cunard office and with the US Consul. It has taken some time; as you may imagine, every possible point of information is full of the bereaved.

I’m afraid I have little absolute news of Mr. Gould. My agent was told in the Cunard offices that just before the ship went down, Gould was seen with two small children by the rail close to the lifeboats, and upon further inquiry we have learned that a male child named Joseph Petheridge was brought in alive on the auxiliary patrol trawler the
Indian Empire
, and has said that he jumped into the ocean by the side of a man who told him that his name was John Gould. This boy was placed in the Queens Hotel, where my agent has spoken to him. He has given us a description that tallies with your own, but the child did not see Mr. Gould after the ship went down. Sadly, the bodies of the boy’s mother and sister have been found; both were buried on Monday.