Before the Dawn (4 page)

Later, I'm not sure how much later--weeks? months?, I saw Alix. I was in my bedroom, about to draw the curtains, and she was across the way, in her bedroom, about to draw hers. We stared at each other through two blurred panes of glass and she waved once, slowly, in acknowledgment. In, perhaps, forgiveness. Jamie hadn't come to visit for at least a few weeks by then. He seemed to have completely forgotten me.

After  a moment I slowly, painfully waved back.

A month later—two?—they moved. Alix married Derek, and they were gone. No forwarding address, nothing. By that time the pain had lessened to a dull, throbbing ache. I’d seen Jamie in the street a few times, staring from my sitting room window, saw him look guiltily away when he happened to catch my eye. After awhile he never even looked in my direction.

Then, one afternoon in late summer, I received a phone call. A girl named Tracy with a chirpy voice told me I’d been recommended for the town’s tutoring program.

“Two afternoons a week in the community centre,” she explained. “These are disadvantaged children, boys and girls who need a positive adult role model in their lives.”

I swallowed, licked my lips. “And you say I was recommended? By whom?”

“Alix Shepherd. She’s a friend of mine, and she said you’d be fantastic. What do you think? You want to come down to the centre and have a look?”

Tears stung my eyes. Funny, how easily I could cry now. I thought of Alix, living her life with Derek and Jamie. A family. Not my family, never mine. I understood it; I accepted it.

“Well?” Tracy asked again, a touch of impatience to her voice now.

I smiled, felt those lifeless lines bend and stretch to form a new shape. A circle.  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I would.”

M
EMORY AND DESIRE

He came home in April. Alice Montgomery stood shivering on the train station platform. She wore a summer dress, her pink silk with lace trim, even though it was several years out of date. The last time she’d worn it was six years ago, in June 1914, when she and George had wandered by the river and watched the boats bobbing on the water.

She still remembered the feel of his hand in hers, their fingers interlaced, brown against white. She could almost hear his low, mellow chuckle, meant only for her ears.

When she had put the dress on that morning it had given her a small, fragile hope, an unfamiliar sensation.

Now, clad in the thin material, the collar worn, lace faded, she shivered. Despite the bright, pure blue of a sky studded with fleecy clouds, a chill wind blew mockingly down the rail line.

"The train's due any moment." Alice’s mother-in-law Katherine arrived with a brisk click of heels. "Mr. Soames said there was a bit of trouble down at Leyton.”

“What kind of trouble?” Alice asked.

Katherine glanced at Alice sharply. “Some of these fellows have a difficult time coming home.”

Alice nodded, the words echoing in the empty space inside her. Some, she thought, not all.

"That dress has seen better days," Katherine said, without spite.  "But perhaps it will be an encouragement to George. You wore it before he left, when we picnicked by the river."

Alice nodded. There was little Katherine did not remember. Alice felt the opposite. She could not remember anything sometimes, and this could be rather pleasant.

"You ought to be prepared," Katherine said abruptly, her face averted as she scanned the empty horizon for the first plume of smoke from the train's engine.  "He will most likely be terribly thin, and we don't know what he's been through."

"Yes." Alice had not thought of what George might look like. After three years in a German prison camp, she did not want to imagine it. She’d found she preferred not to think of George at all.

They’d been married for two months when he left for the Front, which was, Alice had considered, a not insignificant amount of time.  Two months was certainly long enough to get to know someone rather well. And yet, in retrospect, those months seemed hazy, as if the events had happened to someone else, and Alice had only heard about them.

She could remember some things, glimpses of a fragile happiness, yet as distant as a newsreel. She knew what it felt like to lie in George’s arms, to listen to his heart beat, to taste his sweat.

She thought of their chats while they brushed their teeth in the evenings, the comfort and wonderment of talking with her toes tucked under her nightgown, George with his pajama bottoms on, but not his top.

And then she wondered just who that had been, because surely it hadn’t been her. It hadn’t been George. It had been two strangers she watched in her mind, with an idle sort of curiosity.

A thin wisp of smoke curled in tendrils against the sky, and Katherine drew in her breath. "It's coming. It's here."

The porter scuttled forward, ducking his head. They were the only three on the platform.

It was too late for there to be parades and fetes for the returning soldiers. It was 1920, and people were tired. They didn’t want to care. They didn’t even want to know.

The train trembled to a stop. "There, now."  Katherine stood alert, a smile hovering, ready to form.

"He'll be all right, won’t he?" Alice hadn't realized she'd spoken aloud till Katherine gave her a quick, quelling glance. She blushed in shame. 

The door swung open, and a man in an Army uniform stepped out. He was thin to the point of gauntness and his eyes were luminous in his drawn face.

There was a moment of silence, barely a second, but Alice knew one of them should have stepped forward. It was a second too late, a second that spoke of awkwardness, of hesitation, of terror.

"George."  Katherine moved quickly to embrace her son, her arms not quite touching him.  George's arms closed around her, also not touching, a matter of form.

"Mother."

Alice watched them and knew it was her turn to speak.

"Hello, George."

His eyes traveled to her, resting on her briefly. He looked mildly surprised. "Alice." He nodded once and burdened by her mother-in-law's expectation, Alice darted to George's side and stood on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek. He hesitated before bending down to pat her on the shoulder, methodically, as if she were a dog.

"I've brought the car," Katherine said. "Drove myself, would you believe.” She let out a high, brittle laugh that seemed to echo down the empty platform. “Petrol is impossible to obtain still, of course you know that..."

"Of course." George fell into step with his mother, Alice trailing behind.

There was another awkward moment when they reached the car, for naturally George would be expected to drive, and yet he did not. They stood by the door, silent, suspended, and then with an ironic little bow he stepped aside for his mother to take the wheel, and opened the door for Alice to sit in the back.

All the way home he averted his face, gazing out at the neat hedgerows and chocolate-box cottages with a look of cold indifference. Alice watched his face covertly and with a growing sense of fear.

The man she'd married was a stranger, she'd no doubt about that. She’d expected that. She’d cultivated it.

One night, when they didn’t know whether he was dead or captured, when she’d still kept hold of that bit of herself that hadn’t been absorbed by the War, by the blood and dirt, and the thought of the blood and dirt, she’d indulged in a frenzy of worry and terror.

She’d seen his face contorted in pain, blank in death. She heard him screaming, crying, pleading, and then silence. She thought of him coming home, a mere husk, and she thought of him not coming home at all. She didn’t know which one she preferred.

Her stomach churned, her heart beat fiercely, her nails dug into her palms, her limbs twisted and writhed in denial, until she stumbled from bed and vomited in the chamber pot.

After that she decided she would not endure that again. She would not live on the thin vapor of hope.

Katherine drove the car up the long, sweeping drive to Longworth House. It was a pleasant house of Georgian brick, two rows of blank windows glittering in the late afternoon sun.

Alice had lived in this house since her marriage.  Originally, it had been a temporary arrangement till George was established in his father's law firm. 

In those first few months, Alice had spent idle afternoons wandering through Longworth. She'd imagined her and George in some cozy nest, perhaps with him reading to her in the evenings by the glow of a coal fire, her head on his knee, his hand stroking her hair.

It was a vague image, not fully realized, not even fully imagined. It had never been meant to sustain her.

Then George had volunteered for the Front as soon as the battles lines were drawn. It had been, although unsaid, a matter of principle.

Alice remembered holding her hands out and saying, “Please, George.” He had drawn her into his arms. “Don’t,” he said. “If you say any more, I shan’t be able to go.”

She’d loved him even more for that. Or at least, she managed to believe she did.

So Alice had swallowed her plea and waved George off cheerfully, knitted him socks and mittens, arranged for The Times to be delivered to his bunker. She’d written insipid yet newsy letters about life in Longworth. She’d rolled bandages, planted cabbages, and felt her soul being absorbed through her fingers and her silent lips, into this thing called War.

When George had gone missing, presumed dead, Alice had remained suspended between doubt and hope, unable to move, even to think, certainly to feel. The absorption was complete.

Her father had written, suggesting she return home. Alice thought of his Cambridge house, dusty and full of books, with longing. She had even mentioned it to Katherine, her voice strangely flat.

Katherine, always so brisk, so calm, had rounded on her fiercely. “You realize, don’t you, that if you do that, you’ve given up. You’ve given up on George.”

Alice had stared at her mother-in-law in surprise. “But I have given up,” she said.

And yet she stayed. She wrote her father, she refused to hope, and she let life pass into an amenable drifting.

As the car stopped in front of the house with a sputter, the cook and gardener rushed out to the portico, their faces a revealing mixture of fondness and fear.

"Master George!" James, with a certain over
-
heartiness, came forward to shake George's hand.  "We're glad to have you back, sir, yes, we are."

"Thank you, James."

Katherine stood by his elbow, her expression one of determined placidness.  "I've asked Hettie to set tea out in the drawing room.”

They stood in the entrance hall, the sunlight from the stained glass window above the door catching the dust motes suspended in the air. 

"I think, Mother, I'd like to rest.  It's been a tiring journey, as you can well imagine."

"Of course." If Katherine was disappointed, she did not show it. "Shall I have Hettie send a tray up? Perhaps you will join us for dinner.  Six o'clock, as always." She smiled, as if in apology, and Alice thought how strange that was. Katherine went into the drawing room.

Alice stared at George. There was no smile on his face, no light of shared understanding in his eyes which stared back at her, aggressively blank. She imagined him sweeping her into his arms as he once did. She imagined her wanting it.

Then she looked away and asked in a diffident voice, “Shall I help you upstairs?"

"Do you think I’m an invalid?" George asked in a tone of mild curiosity, and Alice could only shrug.

“I don’t know what you are.”

His thin lips twisted into a smile. “That’s an honest thing to say.”

“Do you not want me to be honest?” Alice asked. “I don’t know what you want.”

“What do you want, Alice?”

She stared at him before answering. “I want nothing.”

“Nothing. That’s what I want too, then.” He started upstairs with slow, heavy steps.  "Come up if you want."

Alice followed him. She was not sure if she wanted to. The painful process of learning to love one another again seemed far too much work, too much effort, and for what? She imagined him kissing her, and shuddered. She did not know who he was. She had learned to forget.

When he finally arrived in their old bedroom, now tidied to a point of sterility, he sank on the chair by the bed with a gasp.  His face was white, and sweat gleamed on his forehead.

"Let me take off your boots."

He stretched his legs out, saying nothing. Alice knelt and began to unlace his boots with stiff fingers.  She felt like a caricature of a loving wife, playing the part by instinct and manners.

The first boot resisted, and she tugged gently, not wanting to seem indelicate. She glanced up and saw George watching her with that same expression of cold amusement.  She tugged harder, and the boot came off with a jerk, causing her to tumble backwards.

George made a short, barking sound, and Alice realized it was laughter.  She threw the boot on the floor and looked up at him. "We thought you were dead."

"I know."

"They'd sent a telegram. You might be dead, you might be in prison camp. I suppose they wanted us to take our pick."