A Winter's Child (36 page)

Benedict came into the room looking like a man who has been at the office all day.

‘Good evening, Miriam.'

And she smiled at him sweetly, his father's wife who had been brought up to believe she had a right to his service. How much power did he really have over her? Claire had no doubt at all of his ability to control Edward or Nola. He had set her mind at rest as to that. But if Miriam threatened to make a scandal could he prevent it? Or indeed – and the idea lashed out at her suddenly – if that blue chintz room next to his own appeared desirable to him, or convenient, would he even wish to?

‘I have been telling Claire she is not looking well,' said Miriam.

‘Perhaps not.'

And, for a sickening moment, behind their voices she could hear

the blue chintz door gently closing, the well-oiled click of a key

in the lock.

She had not expected Christmas to be easy and, having decided that much, she further made up her mind – as she had done in France – quite simply to get on with it. This was not the first time in her life she had had too little sleep, too many cigarettes, too much alcohol; not the first time there had been too many calls on her time, too many demands – all of them urgent to those who made them – too much to do, a constant, hectic changing of place and mood and rhythm. She had done it all before in France and, compared to that,
this
– she told herself – was easy, often pleasant, unlikely to be fatal. Her body adjusted. Her nerves adjusted. Like a great many others who frequented the Cocktail Bar of the Crown Hotel she embarked on this hot tide of pleasure with the bracing of her spirit, the gathering together and seasoning of her physical resources which had been necessary to endure the thunder of the guns.

She fell into bed on Christmas Eve blessing Faxby's Licensing Committee for its insistence on respecting the sanctity of Christmas Day and then got out again since no civic authority had been able to control the alcoholic intake of Euan Ash whose voice very soon awoke her, raised in no Christmas carol of love and peace and good cheer, no ‘Sleep Holy Babe'nor ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen' but a song she had heard many a time above the sound of wet slogging feet on muddy roads:

‘If you want the old battalion
We know where they are.
They're hanging on the old barbed wire.'

She closed her eyes, hoping she might ignore it. But his voice went on and on, high and eloquent with the whisky which would have stupefied any other man. Or at least, any man who had not used it day in day out in the trenches to blur his sensibilities and reinforce his desire to stay alive. Claire understood that. But others – the older and rather more substantial residents of Mannheim Crescent, for example – did not and, hearing him pass vigorously from song to verse, she turned over on her back and groaned.

‘”Good-morning, good-morning!” the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of'em dead,
And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
“He's a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.'

She heard a window open on the floor above, a man's gruff voice and then more than one growling something that was not applause in the street outside, a rumble of dissent as Euan, having finished one poetic rendering, launched into another; a deep-throated muttering through which his clipped public school accent, trained to be heard above the din of rebellious natives or across the floor of the House of Commons, suddenly broke free.

‘Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.'

She had heard the poem before. She knew the poet was dead, killed by machine-gun fire in the last month of the war at the ripe age of twenty-five. She knew that if she heard any more she would not sleep again that night but would sit, her eyes aching and burning, avoiding that line of shuffling, yellowing men. She put on her coat and shoes and ran outside.

‘Gas! Gas! Quick boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling.
And floundering like a man in fire or lime …'

He was standing on the garden wall, precariously balanced, looking, brittle, insubstantial, a wraith through which the cold Christmas wind could easily blow when one compared him to the thick-set, middle-aged men – the grocer from the corner, the coal merchant, a short-sighted but burly book-keeper – confronting him.

‘Euan,' she called out. A moment longer and other burly middle-aged men – the local constables – would be called to take him away. And in any case, she couldn't bear it.

He smiled at her sweetly.

‘Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.'

‘Euan!'

‘In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.'

In her dreams too.

‘Euan, come down.'

‘There are children in bed up there,' growled the coal merchant, ‘And women. It's not decent.'

‘It's Christmas Eve,' said the grocer, as if he had found a talisman.

‘He wants locking up,' said the book-keeper, ‘and in a strait-jacket too if you ask me.'

‘Why,' enquired a female voice from a high window, ‘doesn't somebody send for the police?'

‘If,' quoted Euan, still in good voice and by some miracle keeping

his balance,

‘If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face.'

She got him down the only way she could, by standing behind him and tipping him over so that they fell together in the garden on a heap of rotting leaves which broke their fall but did nothing to dampen Euan's poetic ardour.

‘Fat civilians wishing they
Could go and fight the Hun.
Can't you see them thanking God
That they're over forty-one?'

But he was on his own ground now, behind his own garden gate and since no one really wanted the trouble of the law and the inconvenience it entailed on Christmas Eve, the woman up above shut her window with a sharp crack, the trio of honest tradesmen contented themselves by growling ‘Bloody lunatic'.

Sitting up on the compost Euan smiled at them angelically. ‘Oh absolutely – Lieutenant Euan St John Bardsley Ash, Military Cross, at your service.'

She got him inside the house, her flat not his, since he had no heating and she did not expect to leave him straightaway.

‘Do you really have a Military Cross, Euan?'

‘Yes. Or I did. I put it down somewhere and never picked it up again. God – I feel awful.'

‘Yes-I know.'

He had been drinking heavily for days, cooking eggs and beans and dubious sausages and leaving them uneaten on greasy plates for her to throw away, and now, through his thin shirt, the hollow wall of his chest, she could hear the rasping labour of his lungs, recognizing the scarred legacy of gas which would return every winter of his life.

She brought blankets, pillows, pushed her two armchairs together and deftly made him a bed into which he allowed himself to be placed, wrapped up, ‘settled down', and then, with an alcoholic flash of urgency, jumped to his feet.

‘I'm just on my way to Edinburgh –'

‘No – Lieutenant Euan St John Bardsley Ash – you are not! Get into bed.'

‘Ma'am!'
He sketched a military salute, overbalanced and fell back giggling and shivering into the careful nest she had made him.

‘I'm cold.'

‘Yes. Are you going to be sick?'

‘No – no – old soldiers never do that. They never die either, they just –'

He became graphic, bitter, obscene and she ignored him, cocooning him in blankets, raising him on the pillows just in case, checking his temperature, listening only to the effort his breath had to make – would have to make every winter now, every damp spring, every humid summer – as it forced a passage through the clogged debris the gas had left behind.

Somewhere, not too long ago, a trench had filled up with gas not necessarily discharged by enemy hands but British gas – quite possibly – blown back on a neutral wind, to clog British chests, blind British eyes, cause the fumbling for gas-masks which did not always work, the choking and the green drowning of the poem he had thrown so defiantly a few moments ago at those men, all of them safely over forty-one, who wished to see the war dead and buried – like the youth of those who had fought it – and forgotten. She knew he would not tell her where the attack had occurred. She did not wish to know. She waited, listening to more snatches of verse, an occasional ribald marching song, until he fell suddenly asleep in the middle of a word, as she had seen men die.

‘Good night, Euan.'

There was no answer. She put his cold hands under the covers, noted that the shivering was less violent, his temperature not alarming, that he was drunk which did not particularly require her attention rather than diseased which might, and went to bed herself just four hours before it would be time to get up again.

It was not Benedict as it turned out but Parker, the chauffeur, who came to fetch her to High Meadows, rather fortunately perhaps, since she was cooking an omelette for Euan when he arrived and made no bones about asking him to wait, giving him a mug of coffee and leaving him to draw whatever conclusions he liked as to what this thin young man with a bricklayer's flamboyant check shirt, a public school accent, and a hacking cough might be doing in her flat.

‘You'd better stay tonight as well, Euan. It's warmer. I won't be back until tomorrow.'

And no doubt Parker, she thought, would also feel free to put his own interpretation on that.

She had managed to avoid the blue chintz room on Christmas Eve, pleading pressure of work, but Faxby's Licensing Committee, by offering her a day of rest to follow and Kit Hardie by extending it to Boxing Day, had made it impossible for her to upset Miriam's plans. She was to spend Christmas Day with ‘the family', on Christmas Day night she was to be tucked up, warm and snug and safe, in the blue chintz bed, to be served a leisurely breakfast on Boxing Day, an ample lunch, and to be released to the world outside Miriam's charmed circle as late as possible on Boxing Day Afternoon, not a moment before ‘that nasty old job'reared its ugly head to claim her.

‘There is simply no one to drive you into Faxby any sooner,' Miriam had told her gently, not caring in the least how little time these arrangements allowed Claire to spend with her mother. ‘Parker is not on duty after twelve o'clock on Christmas Day, you see – and I don't like to ask Benedict.'

The blue chintz room, therefore, awaited her, bearing on its door a pretty china plaque with her name in blue letters surrounded by blue flowers, a fire beaming a cheerful welcome from a blue-tiled fireplace, a little maid in starched cap and apron beaming just as cheerfully as she arranged Claire's dressing table, tucked her nightdress under the pillow, hung her clothes in the wardrobe, calling her ‘Miss'instead of ‘Madam', as befitted a young lady of the house, permanent, dependent, rather than a visitor.

The day was cold, clear, lightly frosted, perfect Christmas weather, the house a giant Christmas grotto of tinsel and holly in bright, sturdy branches; pale, strategic mistletoe; a Christmas tree from a Dickensian fantasy, laden with parcels, red candles, tinkling gold and silver bells, crowned by a fairy in a white crinoline, golden-haired, blue-eyed, a foot tall, made specially and secretly, long ago, on the instructions of Aaron Swanfield, from a portrait of Miriam.

She had worn a white crinoline herself that year for her Christmas dance and had posed charmingly – so everyone had said – beneath the Christmas tree to receive her guests, Aaron so proud of his ‘portrait fairy'that he had refused to offer a cigar to any man who did not immediately notice its resemblance to his wife.

She had been twenty-eight that Christmas Day, ten years married and still able to wear silver-spangled white satin and a white rose in her hair, still ‘pretty Mini', the sole object of her husband's romantic adoration. She was fifty-three now in well-corseted powder blue as Claire caught her first glimpse of her, coming back from church, her cheeks pink with the weather, her carefully assembled flock behind her, Polly in a grey velvet cloak and hood trimmed with white fur looking pointedly angelic; Nola, the eternal huntress, draped in her double fox pelts; Eunice in the black fur coat which always looked too big for her, surrounded by her four sons, two large, two small, Justin in a sulk because his escapade with the school chambermaid had not, after all, won him a permanent aura of wickedness, Simon in a sulk because he had not yet had an escapade at all, the two little boys simply bored; Toby and Benedict walking behind immaculate and neutral as men often seem on these traditional occasions. And Claire, hurrying into the hall to greet them, was aware, quite suddenly, of the two strangers, two neat, dark, slender young gentlemen – she could not call them boys – keeping themselves courteously but decidedly apart, Nola's children – Benedict's children – home from school for the holidays and finding it, as she had always done herself – an uneasy and unfamiliar place.

‘Claire,' Miriam was at her most endearing, ‘you will just have to forgive me. I told you to be here in good time – yes, I know I did. I was even a little sharp about it – and now here we are, late from church, held up, dear, quite against
my
will, by all the young men who just had to come and whisper some nonsense or other to Polly – and one or two good souls who were kind enough, to offer the season's greetings to me. Give me a kiss, dear. There now everybody – off coats and hats.'