Mourning Doves (34 page)

Timothy George stowed his godmother’s wheelchair in the back of his van, and drove her and her thin graceful companion, Rosemary, back home from the ceremony at the cenotaph to Celia’s old-fashioned house in Hoylake.

All three of them were cold and rather dispirited.

Timothy George went straight upstairs to his apartment on the second floor. He thankfully turned on the electric fire in his bedroom and changed out of his uniform, which was a little tight around his waist. He hung the garments on hangers, and unpinned his medals and laid them carefully on the dressing table. He stood, for a moment, frowning down at them, and wondered if his son, a pillar of a London bank, would keep them after he himself was gone. He doubted it.

He went slowly downstairs to join Celia.

Celia’s house, which she and Alec had bought on their marriage, had seen many changes.

After Celia’s marriage, Louise and Edna had continued to live in the cottage at Meols, until, one day without warning, a glowing Edna had calmly introduced to Louise a small, neat stranger with charming manners. His name was Vital Oliveira, who had just arrived from Brazil to work as a translator for a big Liverpool fruit importer.

During the long correspondence with his beloved, he had not been idle; he had sought assiduously a post in England, by writing to every British company he had ever been in
touch with. It was Edna who had suggested the Liverpool Fruit Exchange as a possible source of work, and through them he had finally reached a company which bought and sold fruit in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries. His excellent references, some of them from British companies, finally got him a decent post as translator. He would have to travel from time to time, but his base would be in Liverpool.

He had been in England two months, when he and Edna had announced to a startled Louise that they were to be quietly married within a month.

Since the couple wished to live in Liverpool in order to be near Vital’s place of work, Louise had been thrown into a panic at the idea of being left alone in the Meols cottage.

Celia had wanted to offer Louise a home in her new house, but Edna would not hear of it. ‘She’ll start to bully you again, Celia, like she did when you were young,’ she said forcefully. ‘She could ruin your marriage. And, if I had her, she would probably ruin mine. Better by far that she should remain in the cottage.’

Through an employment agency, they found a penniless, cultivated lady to be a companion-help to Louise. Though Louise complained steadily about her, the arrangement actually suited them both very well. They lived out quite productive lives in the cottage by continuing Louise’s interest in the fate of deaf-blind veterans.

In later years, as she began to interest others in the desperate plight of these unfortunate men, Cousin Albert became a fund-raiser for her, and did much to provide Braille lessons and teachers for them. Their joint compassion was a first step in a journey lasting nearly thirty years, to keep the deaf-blind army privates from being put into mental asylums and conveniently forgotten. Dear Mrs Lou won some battles, but lost many others. She became known to many of the men as a tender presence who
smelled of lavender and was not afraid to hug them. She was a much loved lady.

Warned by the startling sensations caused by Sergeant Richard Williamson’s gentle fingers on her face when she had first met him, she kept her personal feelings rigidly to herself, though, in her heart, she knew that probably the kindest thing she could do for any one of them would be to take him to bed. Upheld by Victorian principles of the nobility of self-abnegation, however, she never took advantage of their loneliness, and simply hoped they might find their own compassionate young women. And a few of them did. For herself, it was a bitter inward battle.

Louise made generous use of the cottage’s spare bedroom by offering free seaside holidays for anyone who was both deaf and blind. They were specially good about this when they received requests to accommodate tiny tots who were so afflicted. At Mrs Lou’s, a number of children, for the first time, explored the feel of sand in their hands and waves breaking over their tiny feet, and the lovely cosy lavender-scented comfort of being rocked in Mrs Lou’s lap.

While she had the physical strength, Louise worked steadily to try to improve the lives of deaf-blind servicemen. In a country exhausted by the greatest war in history, however, there was a tendency to deal, first, with the greater number of men who were blinded but not deafened.

Over many years, poor Louise was to have considerable problems with the military’s medical community, as she struggled to give a better life to her doubly disabled boys. Steeped in nineteenth-century attitudes towards medicine, abominably snobbish, they might bestir themselves for officers, but, as far as they were concerned, too often the other ranks were born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upwards, and must, like Job, patiently endure their suffering. She had discovered to her horror that the usual way of disposing of them, if they were deaf-blind and had no
family to whom they could be sent, was to put them into lunatic asylums. If they were not insane when they went in, they frequently soon became so in their desperate confusion. This tragic information fired her with even greater determination to help them.

It was only years later, after another war, that she came into touch with the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston, Massachusetts, and was able to suggest to others interested that there should be special training for teachers to work with the deaf-blind, particularly in military hospitals. The names of Helen Adams Keller and her wonderful teacher, Anne Sullivan, became an inspiration.

Celia and Edna ran the antique business until Edna’s marriage, after which Alec and Celia, helped by Ethelred and John and an art student or two, managed to run it, while, in quick succession, Celia gave birth to three healthy, mischievous boys, Peter, Paul and Bertram. They finally sold out in the second year of the Second World War.

The Second World War had brought them little but grief. When their last-remaining, third son, Bertram, was killed in Sicily, Celia and Alec offered part of their house as a home for his young widow, Margaret, and her twin boys. The second and third floors were made into a self-contained apartment for them. Celia and Alec occupied the ground floor, and, in later years, after Alec’s death, the basement had been made into a living room and bedroom for a carer for Celia.

The grandsons were a consolation to Alec and Celia, as well as to Margaret. Alec had done his best to be a helpful grandfather to them, though he had not lived to see them grow into adulthood.

They were a cheery pair of young scamps, not in any way scholarly, and, in a country where jobs had become difficult to find, they had, after they left school, both joined the Navy.

To mitigate her loneliness after their departure, their
mother continued to share Celia’s house. Celia, desperately lonely after her own widowhood, was very glad to have her continued company. It was the merest chance that both lads happened to be on the same ship when, while serving in the Falklands, it was hit by a missile and sank.

Although they were not the only family to suffer losses in all three wars, Celia had, at first, thought that both she and their mother would go mad with the remorseless grief which seemed to stalk the family. ‘It’s so often the same families who serve,’ she cried out in her sorrow.

Though friends were kind, and Margaret’s mother left the hotel she owned in Devon and came north to comfort her daughter, the two women could find no relief.

Celia felt suddenly very old and weak. She said to Margaret one day, ‘My dear, you are still fairly young. On the other hand, I won’t last long. You could make a new life. What about going to help your mother with her hotel? You would meet people. Begin a new life.’

So Margaret found Rosemary, an unemployed Trinidadian, to come to live with Celia, and then went down to Devon.

Unable to move around very much or go out without help, Celia thought she would die of boredom, never mind grief, though Rosemary became devoted to her and was happy in the small, private domain she had in the basement.

Then Timothy George was widowed. After his Royal Air Force service in the Second World War, he had run a small engineering firm in Birkenhead, and he and his wife used periodically to come out to Hoylake to visit his godmother. After his wife’s death, he turned to Celia for comfort, the one person who had consistently shown him affection since the day he was born in her mother’s house.

She persuaded him to move into the upstairs apartment.

‘I shall leave the house to you, anyway,’ she told him. ‘I haven’t anyone else to leave it to.

‘Rosemary could look after both of us – she’s a cheerful
person to live with. And here, in Hoylake, you would have one of the best golf courses nearby – lots of male company.’ She had chuckled mischievously, as she added, ‘And I wouldn’t complain if you found a nice lady to share the flat.’

Though Timothy George doubted he would ever find another female companion, even if he wanted one, he felt that the arrangement would, at least, relieve him of the bother of housekeeping. He had, also, a great affection for Celia; he had, since boyhood, frankly shared his troubles with her, because she had often had more time for him than his own frail, harassed mother. She was not nosy, either – she wouldn’t want to know every detail of where he had been or what he had been doing.

So he agreed.

Rosemary was consulted, and for a much bigger wage, she was willing to look after them both. It was a strange little household, but it worked extremely well.

This afternoon, the three of them were to share a cold lunch in Celia’s apartment, and Timothy, with the familiarity of a son, knocked and then entered her room.

Before going to attend to the lunch, Rosemary had helped Celia into an easy chair. She was napping, and her new white wig was a little awry on her head. He went over to a side table, and poured himself a whisky and soda. The clink of glasses woke Celia and, as she straightened her wig, she demanded one, too.

As she watched him pour the whisky, she remembered the baby put into her arms so many years ago. It seemed fitting that, in lieu of her own darlings, this child should be her final consolation, and she smiled faintly.

Her hand was surprisingly steady as she took the glass from him, and he sat down beside her. She held the glass so that a stray ray of sunlight lit up its rich amber colour.

She was silent for a little while, twiddling the glass between her fingers. Then she said, ‘You know, Timmy,
what with an Empire and two World Wars plus the Korean War – and the Falklands – this old country of ours has been drained of male brains for a couple of hundred years.’

Timothy snorted. After all, he thought, he himself was still here.

To humour her, however, he agreed. ‘Administering an Empire must have been pretty draining,’ he said lightly. ‘All the hundreds of bright young sparks serving from India to the Caribbean who got killed off by yellow fever, malaria, cholera – and the Khyber Pass.’ He grinned, as he mentioned the famous Pass. ‘When I was a lad, if you didn’t have a great-uncle killed at Rorke’s Drift, you almost certainly lost one defending the Khyber Pass.’

‘True,’ agreed Celia. ‘My mother’s brother was killed in India.’ She sipped her whisky, letting it slide around her mouth to savour it. ‘At the service this morning, I was thinking what a different place Britain would be, today, if we hadn’t lost those men – and then two consecutive generations in the wars. So many of them were well educated or highly skilled. Just think, we might even have had a government of men and women who knew what they were doing!’

This was so close to what he himself had been thinking after the service that he burst into sardonic laughter.

‘Well, we did produce Margaret Thatcher,’ he reminded her.

‘She came too late, and she wasn’t clever enough to keep us out of the Falklands,’ Celia replied, her eyes suddenly full of tears for the third generation. ‘Poor Mike and Dave.’ She held out her glass to him. ‘Would you get me another glass of whisky please, dear? I feel a little low today.’

He was immediately contrite, and poured another drink for her.

She took the glass from him and stared absently into it, as if she saw in its golden depths the long procession of lost legions, taking away with them their own, unused,
individual brilliance, their skills and their seed. Then she sighed; she knew that she would soon join them.

As she lifted her glass, she suggested, with forced cheerfulness, ‘To all our beloved absent friends. May they rest in peace.’

He turned to look down at her. So tiny, so old, he thought, yet so indomitable. He touched her glass with his.

‘Amen to that, my dear,’ he said very gently. ‘Amen.’

This is a novel and its characters are products of my imagination, its situations likewise. Whatever similarity there may be of name, no reference is intended to any person living or dead.

I gratefully acknowledge information and advice regarding the Hoylake and District War Memorial from Mr J.T. O’Neil of Hoylake, Mr R. Jones of West Kirby, and Mr K. Burnley of Irby; help regarding costume from Mr Richard Brown, Victoria Public Library, Westminster, London; and information regarding flora of the area from Mr J.T. O’Neil of Hoylake and Miss Jemma Samuels of Wallasey. The background information which they supplied was invaluable, and I thank them all.