Born to Trouble (34 page)

Seth smiled. ‘You turned it round with the shop. By, the number of times I had to bite my tongue when someone or other was saying what a grand little place it was. Croft and Brothers. We liked that.’

‘Why did you bite your tongue? You should have told them I was your sister.’

‘Nay, lass. I’d never have done that to you.’

‘What do you mean, done that to me? Seth, I love you. Can’t you understand? You’re part of me and the lads, our flesh and blood.’ She stared into the rough, coarse-grained face that bore little resemblance to the brother she’d known as a child. He looked tired and terribly ill, his big frame reduced to nothing but skin and bone.

She looked down at his hand in hers, the big knuckles and crooked little finger which had never healed properly after their father had deliberately broken it one day when Seth had tried to stop him hitting her. She had been only five years old at the time, but she remembered it distinctly. Their father had broken only the one finger on Seth’s left hand because that meant he could still work for McArthur the next day as usual. Speaking softly, she said, ‘From when I can remember you’ve been there for me, Seth – for us all. Trying to do your best and looking after us. I’m proud to be your sister.’

‘You wouldn’t say that if you knew the things I’d done.’

‘I don’t care what you’ve done. Anyway, that’s all in the past now. You said yourself you’ve paid your dues.’

‘I said Fred and Walter had.’

‘It’s the same thing. And I repeat, I don’t care what you’ve done. I love you. I want you to get better. Please, Seth, I can’t bear to lose you a third time. There’s room at home, you could come and live with us until you’re feeling better.’

‘I won’t get better, lass.’

‘Not if you don’t try – no, you won’t.’

Seth moved his other hand over hers. ‘Look, lass—’

‘No.
You
look.’ It probably wasn’t the way to talk to a desperately ill man, but Pearl had heard the resignation in his voice and the words the Matron had said were fresh in her mind.
No interest in getting better. The mind can make the difference between life and death.
‘All your life you’ve been a fighter, so why are you taking the coward’s way out now? I don’t want to hear a nice little speech about you being proud of me, I want you to be part of my life. I need you. The lads need you. I don’t know how they’ll be when they come back from all this, but I do know they’ll need you to help them make sense of it all. You’ll need each other.’

‘I couldn’t take care of Fred and Walter. What makes you think I can do any better with James and Patrick?’

‘Oh, Seth.’ His face had undergone a change, and for a brief moment she had seen the pain he was trying to conceal.

‘I miss them, Pearl. They followed me into war like they followed me in everything else. If I hadn’t said I was going to enlist, they wouldn’t have. I killed them.’

‘No, you didn’t! They were grown men with minds of their own, you know that at heart. And when you were lads you could have no more stopped Da putting them with McArthur than stopped him doing the same to you. Like you said, you all felt you were paying your dues for the past.’

‘In – in my dreams they call out to me to save them, but I can’t. I hear them. All the time in my head I hear them.’

‘That will get better. I promise you, it will. And like you said, they both died quickly. Maybe if you’d waited until you were all conscripted they might have had painful lingering deaths.’ Her fingers tightened on his. ‘The thing is, Seth, it was their time to go. It’s not yours. I know Matron Gordon thinks you can pull through if you try, and so do I.’

He shook his head on the pillow. ‘Pearl, I know you mean well, but—’

‘No buts.’ She bent and kissed his brow. ‘Please, Seth, no buts. I know you can get over this if you want to, and I need you. We need you. I know that sounds selfish, but that’s how I feel. What – what if the lads don’t come back . . .’

Seth interrupted her brusquely. ‘Don’t say that. Don’t even think it.’

‘I can’t help it.’ She made a small motion with her head. ‘I think it all the time under the surface. I’ll be all on my own then and I can’t bear the thought of that.’

‘Don’t upset yourself. Now come on, wipe your eyes. James and Patrick will come home, I feel it in my bones.’

‘Whether they do or don’t, I want you too.’ They stared deeply at each other again. ‘Will you try, Seth? For me. Will you?’

He moved restlessly. ‘Pearl . . .’

‘Promise me.’ The time was nearly gone and now her voice was urgent. ‘Promise me, Seth. I know if you do you’ll keep your word.’

Seth’s lips moved in a wry twist of a smile. ‘Your faith in me is humbling,’ he said with a touch of mockery.

Pearl wouldn’t be deflected. ‘Promise me.’

He had wanted her to come today so he could clear his conscience, he had wanted her to be soft, sympathetic – accepting of his imminent demise. He was tired, so tired, and the thought of slipping away into a place where he didn’t have to think any more, where he was responsible for no one, where there were no demands on him, was sweet. Some of the men here feared death, but it was life he feared – Pearl was right about that. He should have known she’d react as she had. She had called him a fighter and maybe she was right, but Pearl was the same. Fred and Walter hadn’t had that in them – he didn’t know about James and Patrick, they were virtual strangers – but he and Pearl were cut from the same cloth.

The thoughts whirled in his head. And she was right about something else, too: if he made her a promise he would strive to keep it. She knew him too well.

‘Lass, you don’t know what you’re asking. The thoughts in my head, the things I’ve seen . . .’ He shut his eyes. When he opened them again, the azure-blue gaze was still hard on him.

‘Promise me,’ she repeated.

Seth sighed deeply. How could he explain that he didn’t want to live with himself any more, with the man he’d become? He had faced himself long before the war and he hadn’t liked what he had seen. He liked it still less now.

For the fifth time, Pearl said,
‘Promise me
.’

‘All right. I promise.’

It was over two months before Pearl brought Seth home, but at the beginning of March she was finally able to get him installed in what had been her bedroom above the shop. Although the lads’ room was empty she had wanted Seth to have his own room, besides which – and she couldn’t explain this logically – she felt that if James and Patrick’s room was waiting for them, they would come home to it one day. They’d moved her bed and wardrobe into the room she now shared with Nessie; her writing desk she’d fitted into a corner of the sitting room. Seth’s room boasted a new bed and wardrobe, a big easy armchair and small table, and a bookcase.

Pearl tried to make the journey from the hospital as easy for Seth as she could, but by the time he’d climbed the stairs to the flat it was clear he needed to go straight to bed. When she opened the door to his room, Seth stood for a moment staring around him. A fire crackled in the grate, a large bowl of fruit stood on top of the bookcase, and the easy chair was close to the fire with a thick rug for his feet. Pearl had sewn new curtains and a matching bedspread in a cheerful red and cream material which was bright and warm but still distinctly masculine in appeal, and she’d covered two plump flock cushions for the chair in the same cloth. A pile of magazines reposed on top of the table, along with twelve ounces of the tobacco Pearl had noticed Seth smoke in the hospital, and a new pipe. On the long shelf underneath, two bottles of the finest brandy and malt whisky and several glasses nestled on a silver tray.

Seth was a big man, at least he would have been if there was any flesh on his bones. Propped against his pillows in the hospital or sitting in his chair he had appeared thin; now, with his clothes hanging on him, he was skeletal. But it was the look on the gaunt face as he turned to her that caused Pearl to swallow hard. ‘You’ve done all this for me?’

In an endeavour not to burst into tears she kept her voice light. ‘Well, I don’t know anyone else who smokes that particular brand of tobacco.’

‘It’s grand, lass.’

‘If the books aren’t to your taste you’ll have to blame Nessie. She was in charge of choosing them. She’s tried to pick a mixture – Oh, don’t. Don’t, Seth. It’s all right.’

As the tears began to rain down his face she guided him to the bed, not knowing what to do as he began to rock himself almost like a baby. It was Nessie who took charge. Coming to the door, she took in the situation at a glance.

‘Go and make a pot of tea, lass,’ she said to Pearl, sitting down on the other side of Seth and drawing him into her arms as a mother would a child. ‘This is the best thing that could have happened – he needs to cry it out. There, there, lad.’ She was patting Seth’s back as he buried his head in her ample chest, her voice soft. ‘Get it all out, that’s right. It’ll do you the world of good. I know, I’ve been there.’

Pearl was at a loss. She’d never known Seth to cry, not even as a child when their father had leathered him with his belt until the buckle had ripped his skin and the blood had run. He was strong, Seth. Rock – like. He had had the odd quiet day, of course. Days when she’d barely been able to get anything out of him when she’d sat in the ward, and once or twice when she had arrived at the hospital unexpectedly, he’d been staring into space with a frightening look on his face. But this. This was something else.

She took her time making the tea. When she carried the tray to the bedroom door it was to see Seth fast asleep on top of the bed just as he was with his coat still on, and Nessie carefully pulling the boots off his feet.

Nessie gestured for Pearl to leave and followed her out, closing the door quietly behind her. ‘He’s fair exhausted, poor lad.’ Nessie shook her head as they sat down in the sitting room. Pearl poured them a cup of tea each as her friend continued, ‘But now he’s started to let it out, it’s a good sign, lass. Take it from me. If you keep stuff in it takes over, like a poison.’

Pearl supposed Nessie was right. No, of course she was right, there was no question, she told herself, but it had shaken her more than she’d imagined, to see Seth’s grief and pain. Putting down her cup and saucer, she said, ‘Do you think I’ve bitten off more than I can chew having him here, Nessie? At the hospital there were doctors who knew about this sort of thing.’

‘Lass, he’s where he should be, in my opinion. And we’ll see it through together, so don’t fret. Them doctors don’t know everything by a long chalk. But I’d better get meself downstairs and see what’s what. Them girls are willing enough but there’s times I think the Good Lord gave more up top to the milkman’s horse than them three, bless ’em.’ Nessie swallowed her tea, scalding hot though it was, and stood up, patting Pearl’s shoulder. ‘Put your feet up for a bit, lass, and don’t fret. It’ll all come out in the wash and old Meg’s backside with it.’

As Nessie bustled off, Pearl stared after her. Dear Nessie. What would she do without her? And she had been so good with Seth. If only James and Patrick could survive the war unscathed, she would never ask God for another thing in her life. Unscathed. She tutted inwardly at herself. Of course they would have to bear mental scars after all they would have seen and done, but – she shut her eyes tightly, her stomach churning – if they could come home whole physically. Some of those poor men at the hospital . . .

Dear Lord, please help Seth get better
. Immediately she’d said the prayer she berated herself. One moment she was promising God she’d never ask Him for another thing if He’d watch over James and Patrick, and the next she was already making more requests. But that shell of a man in there wasn’t her Seth. Pearl bit down hard on her bottom lip. Her brother needed restoring, in body, soul and spirit – and she didn’t have a clue how to do it.

Most of the older folk were saying the world had officially gone mad. How else could you justify bit lasses in the armament factories earning two pounds and ten shillings a week – more than four times the wage of a trained parlourmaid? And now women no longer felt they needed male company if they wished to eat out; business girls dined alone or with each other, and housewives whose husbands were in the forces went in pairs to the pub or the pictures. Skirts were shorter, respectable women had taken to wearing make-up and smoking cigarettes in public – what sort of world was it going to be when the war was over?

For those women living with the daily fear of the black-edged telegrams, the problems of the future seemed trivial. Men were dying in unbelievable numbers, and America entering the war in the spring of 1917 hadn’t seemed to make much difference. The carnage went on and the telegrams still came. In the summer, as the third battle of Ypres unfolded to the accompaniment of ceaseless bombardments and remorseless rainstorms, it was hard to say which was feared most – the German machine-gunner or the Flanders mud.

James and Patrick wrote home that the fields around Passchendaele Ridge had been turned into quagmires. Men who had survived the relentless gunfire were being sucked to their deaths when they slipped from the duckboards. Stretcher-bearers, up to their thighs in mud, were having to be rescued themselves.

It seemed impossible to Pearl that her brothers could survive such conditions, and yet equally impossible that she would never see them again. It couldn’t – it mustn’t – happen, she told herself, and every time she looked at Seth and the progress he was making, she took hope.

The hearty, rosy-cheeked doctor who had spoken to her at some length before she had taken Seth home, had been at pains to explain that her brother would never be completely fit again. But, he’d added, with plenty of good home cooking and commonsense, there was no reason why Mr Croft shouldn’t live to a ripe old age. If Pearl could see the doctor now, she’d add, ‘And Nessie Ramshaw.’