That Forgetful Shore (25 page)

“I can do better,” says Ben. She looks into his face, his wonderful, handsome, ravaged face. This is not the boy she married, and the love she had for that boy will have to change, grow and stretch, if it can ever fit this damaged man.

“We'll go to the party,” he says. “Your friend's party.”

“But – the 'flu …”

He shrugs. “You were right. I've faced worse than influenza and lived. I can't give up living now, when I've done it for so long, can I?”

She laughs a little, at last, and sits down to write a note thanking Alice for her invitation, and saying they will be there.

Kit thinks Ben might change his mind, but having promised to go to the party, he keeps his word. He is so biddable that he even agrees to don his dress uniform and his medals, which he has refused to do since coming home. So Kit gets her moment of glory, wearing a new frock, sweeping into the huge foyer of the Penney's house on Circular Road on the arm of her war-hero husband.

That is the high point of the evening; the rest is disappointing, though not disastrous. Appearing at a dinner party, in uniform, seems to be as much effort as Ben can make. He is quiet throughout dinner, making only a few attempts at conversation. He answers questions that are asked of him as briefly as possible, but refuses to be drawn into war stories. “It's still difficult for him to talk about,” Kit excuses him at one point, when a particularly persistent older man wants to know the story of his Military Cross. She lays a hand gently on Ben's arm, but he moves away.

“Glad to be back on the Rock?” someone else asks Ben. “Or do you wish you were still over there, to finish mopping up the Huns?” News of the war is on everyone's lips tonight; it can only be a matter of weeks or even days before there is peace.

Ben is silent for a moment, then he says, “No man in his right mind could ever want to go back to the Front.”

Only one of the men present was overseas; Frank Tuohy, who was wounded at Gallipoli and sent home. He nods in the awkward silence that follows Ben's words, but no-one else knows where to look.

Ben clears his throat. “Of course, when I was discharged, the Regiment had been withdrawn – we were sent to Montreuil, to guard General Haig's headquarters. Some people thought it was quite an honour, but –”

“Haig!” Frank Tuohy spits, and he and Ben meet each other's eyes.

“Oh, now, Haig's a good man…he's gotten our boys this far …” Alice's husband George blusters.

“Gotten them this far?” The deadness of Ben's expression changes for the first time: his jaw clenches as he turns on George. “He sent our boys, as you call them – and you're right, they were boys – into battles that couldn't be won. Used them as cannon fodder – and for what? For what? A few yards of mud that would be lost again a month later!”

Again, there's the little silence, which George Penney breaks. “But surely now, that victory is in sight –” His wife is the one this time to put a hand on her husband's arm, but it's a restraining touch, not a comforting one.

Ben says, “This victory wasn't won by men like Haig – it was won by our men in the trenches. The men that the generals were willing to throw away.”

“No more war talk!” Alice says brightly, clapping her hands. “Really, it's too dreary. I've had four years of nothing but war talk, and I'm fed to the gills with it. Surely we can find something more cheerful to discuss?”

Efforts are made to introduce other topics of conversation, but with the dictum that they cannot talk about the war, the conversation naturally comes back to the 'flu epidemic, which is even less cheerful than the war. The war, at least, shows signs of ending, while the epidemic is getting worse, both here in St. John's, and abroad.

“Four new cases confirmed this week,” says Violet Windsor, whose brother is a doctor. “And Miss Dickinson has died – isn't that tragic? After she was so brave, nursing overseas, to come back here and catch the 'flu while nursing the sick, and die of it? It's like something in a novel!”

“You needn't sound like you relish it so,” says Alice. She was friendly with Ethel Dickinson, who was a few years her elder and went to the Methodist College rather than to Spencer.

The evening wears on, alternating between 'flu talk and war talk, neither of which does much to lift anyone's mood. People excuse themselves within an hour after dinner, and after the second couple leaves, Kit sees the mute appeal in Ben's eyes and nods. They thank Alice and George, and shake hands as the maid brings Ben's coat and Kit's wrap.

“Was that so bad?” she asks as they walk up Military Road.

“Yes,” Ben says. “It was as bad as I'd imagined. But not,” he adds, “as bad as facing German artillery. Not quite.”

So they end the evening laughing together, and along with the day's headlines about the armistice talks, Kit sees the entire day as a positive sign, a sign that things are getting better. It will not be easy, of course. With Ben's recovery, as with the war, there will be setbacks, but surely victory and peace will come.

The next day he seems drained, as if the party has taken every ounce of energy. He is reluctant to get out of bed, and Kit encourages him to lie in and rest. She has a troubling thought as she goes downstairs for breakfast – what if he begins taking to his bed day after day, if his nerves get worse instead of better?

Ben gets up later in the day, but he's still tired and withdrawn. Kit, wishing she had work to do, reads a novel and writes letters. She will not focus on Ben's troubles; she will be positive and cheerful.

She is so fixed on being positive and cheerful that it takes her till the following day to admit that there is more wrong with Ben than nerves or melancholy or shell shock. She has become accustomed to these things, so accustomed that they blind her to the fact that he's running a fever.

“It's nothing,” he insists. His eyes are glazed, and he's shivering, although he is sitting up in his accustomed chair with a blanket over his shoulders. Shivering, but his skin is hot to the touch. “A touch of cold, I think. You mustn't worry.”

“Mustn't worry? Ben, fifty people have died in St. John's – and I – I made you go out to a dinner party. A party! Why didn't you talk sense, make me stay at home?”

“Katherine. Stop fretting. I've been sick before; I had a fever in the trenches one time…I was delirious, saw things that weren't there – I came through that. I'll come through – whatever this is.”

Kit smiles, tries to make herself believe him. But Ben does not get better; by nightfall his fever is higher and, over his protests, she calls a doctor. The few minutes she waits outside the door while the doctor examines Ben seem like time has slowed, as if those moments are as long and vacant as the years she and Ben spent apart, as if another four years will pass and empires rise and fall before the physician steps out of the room and says, “Mrs. Porter –” And then everything speeds up all at once.

Late that night, in the hospital, Kit tries to understand this strange stretching and squeezing of time. A day ago her worst fear was that Ben would never fully recover, never be able to work, never be himself again. That, she now realizes, was the good time, the time when things were going well, however difficult they might have seemed. Now Ben is in a hospital bed, another statistic, the newest influenza case. When she goes to his bedside and hears the harsh pull of his breath, sees the gray pallor of his skin, she wishes she could go back to the night she received Alice's note, wishes she could tear it up without ever showing it to Ben.

She takes his hand. “Be careful,” the nurse says. “You don't want to expose yourself.”

Too late for caution
. “Ben,” Kit says. “Ben, can you hear me?”

His eyes flutter open and shift in her direction, and he draws another ragged breath. “No, no, don't try to talk.” Kit has already seen the effort it costs him. “It's fine, everything will be fine. You'll get through this – the doctors will help you, you'll recover, and then everything will be all right. It doesn't matter if you – even if you can't work again, I don't care. I'm sorry I've been so impatient – I really don't mind …”

“Hush, Katherine,” he says, and coughs. He looks like he wants to say more, but then just shakes his head.

Kit, too, wants to say more, to find the charmed words that will reverse the spell of his illness. If she could go back to the doubts and difficulties of a week ago, she would embrace them with the sympathy and courage a good war bride ought to show. It can't be possible, after all, that he could survive four years of war, live through the hell of the Western Front, only to die in a hospital bed in St. John's with a racking cough and a raging fever.

She sits beside him all night, watching his chest rise and fall, as if she can be certain he will keep breathing if she doesn't take her eyes off him.

In the morning, when the doctor has finished examining Ben, he turns to Kit and says, “Mrs. Porter, my dear, you're going to have to be very brave.”

But I already was!
Kit wants to scream.
I was brave for four years, just as I was supposed to be, and now I'm supposed to have my reward.
She turns away from the doctor, from her husband in the bed, to look out at the street through a window glass streaked on the outside with dust and dirt. She places a hand against the glass and dimly sees her own reflection press back.

Triffie

Missing Point
November, 1918

Dearest One,

How hard it is for me to write this letter, imagining the pain you must feel!! I cannot grasp it, though I have felt the Sting of Loss myself. But I think now that my loss is not to be compared to yours. I felt I had lost a piece of myself when our Will died – for you know I loved him – but you have lost your helpmate, your true love, your soulmate. And what a Cruel Fate – to lose Ben so soon after being reunited! Truly, you have been dealt the hardest blow I could imagine, and I wish with all my heart that I could get on to-morrow's train and come to St. John's to be with you, to comfort you as you once did for me.

Triffie lays down the pen. What is there to say? Words on paper are bald and cold in the face of grief. No letter could have carried her through the dark days after Beaumont-Hamel, and she means it when she says that Kit's loss is far worse than hers was. To lose a husband you truly loved, one who had finally returned after a long absence, would be unthinkable.

Trif envies Kit and Ben's love story; it has all the hallmarks of romance, and though she only met Ben the once, she saw in him every quality she could have wished for in her own ideal mate. If such a love was not to be her own destiny – and clearly it isn't, she thinks, looking across the room at Jacob John who is already in bed, snoring after a hard day's work – then she could wish nothing better for her dearest friend. To have Ben home from the war and dead on the day the armistice was signed is unthinkable.

Worst of all, Kit is not even coming home for Christmas where she might recover from the blow with Trif by her side. She is going to Elliston to spend the holiday with Ben's family, where his body has been sent on ahead to be buried in the little churchyard there.

Kit wrote:

I did not want to think of him lying in the cemetery here in St. John's, so far from his home and family, especially when I have no idea what my own Future might hold or whether I might someday lie beside him. Some days it seems that consummation is
devoutly
 
to
 
be
 
wished
, and the sooner the better. Forgive me for saying such things, but I have such Dark Thoughts on these long winter nights, and to whom can I utter them if not to you?

I wish I could be with you for Christmas and New Year. What a sad New Year this will be, 1919, the year I dreamed would bring the fulfillment of all my long-held hopes and wishes! But I think it would be cruel if I did not accept Captain and Mrs. Porter's invitation. They are even more crushed than I am, for they never got to see Ben after he returned. At least they have some comfort in the news that Lije has safely completed his service in the Navy and will be home in the new year, but they held out hope of having Ben home for the holiday season. Now I will come alone, and visit him one last time in the graveyard there, and then go on to…to what? I do not Know, and
Cannot
 
Imagine
.

“Come New Year's, I means to go into St. John's for awhile,” Trif tells Jacob John a few days later.

“To stay with Kit?”

“Yes. I think she needs the company, though she never came out and said so.”

He nods. “How long is awhile?”

“I don't know. I thought to take the youngsters with me, not knowing how long I'll be gone for.”