The Last Summer (26 page)

‘Oh?’

She sighed. ‘To be honest, I’d be more than happy to have him as a lover for the rest of my life.’ She moved closer. ‘The things he knows, Clarissa . . . seriously, darling, it would make your hair curl. I said to him, “I don’t know where you’ve learnt about women, but surely it can’t have been in the trenches.”’

‘And what did he say?’

‘I can’t quite recall now. I think he said it was Paris. You know they all go there, don’t you?’

‘No I didn’t know. You mean they go there to pick up women?’

She laughed. ‘Oh Clarissa, really. They don’t need to pick
them up, they pay for it, darling. And you know what they say about French prostitutes . . .’

‘No,’ I said, beginning to feel dizzy. ‘What do they say?’

‘Well, that they invented everything. Every debauchery known to man . . . or woman, ha! And they’re everywhere at the front, brothels all over the place. Apparently there are more cases of syphilis and gonorrhoea there than anything else. Isn’t that just so horrendously . . .’ she glanced about the room, searching for the word, ‘sad,’ she said at last.

Suddenly I felt sick. ‘Must be the morphia,’ she said, and showed me to the bathroom.

I looked at myself in the mirror. He’d made love to her. He’d said her name and made love to her. I closed my eyes.
He made love to her as I had his baby
. I saw myself back in my room at St Anne’s in Plymouth; saw them together on her bed. And then I vomited.

‘Are you all right in there, darling?’ Rose asked through the door.

‘Yes . . . yes, I’m fine,’ I said, staring back at the girl in the mirror. ‘You go down. I’ll see you there.’

‘Are you sure? I can wait, dear.’

‘No, Rose. You go back down. I’m fine . . . I’ll be along in a jiffy.’

I heard the bedroom door close, and stood staring at my reflection. My eyes appeared unusually large and dark; my complexion a luminous ivory. I picked up the tablet of rouge on the marble washstand in front of me, and applied it to my cheeks. A touch of colour:
a mask; theatre; a beautiful sad creature from a Greek tragedy.
I lifted a tortoiseshell hairbrush, pushed it through my shorn hair, away from my face.

‘You’re not Clarissa,’ I whispered. ‘Clarissa doesn’t look like that.’

I walked slowly down the staircase, moving my hand along
the polished wood of the handrail, and then on, through a small sea of vaguely familiar faces.

‘Clarissa!’

‘Are you quite all right, dear? You look a little pale . . .’

‘Clarissa?’

I smiled, kept moving, looking ahead of me all the time, and then on into the Millingtons’ ballroom, into the crowd. I closed my eyes, lifted my arms, swaying in time with the music:
this is good; this is fine . . . I am good, I am fine.

I opened my eyes; saw Jimmy standing in front of me.

‘Clarissa?’ He sounded strange, quite far away.

‘I think I need to go home now, Jimmy,’ I said.

Later, in my room, I lay on my bed, staring at rosebuds, drifting. I smiled. I was home now. I was safe. He was gone. All I needed to do was bury him. I had to extinguish every sensation I associated with him. But how? How do you kill everything you’ve ever felt to be good without killing some of yourself?

I rose from my bed, walked across to my desk, opened the drawer and pulled out my journal and pen . . .

You may survive this war, but from today you are dead to me.

I climbed back into my bed and pulled the covers up. I wanted to be lost; I wanted to be found: found by him. I wanted him to feel my pain and beg for my forgiveness. I wanted to give myself to someone, anyone, and for him to know. For him to
feel
each touch, each and every kiss, like small shards of glass pressed into his flesh.

I would do it. I would.

I would make him feel the pain.

I stared at pink rosebuds between slow blinks, and I hated them. I’d never again be the girl on the gate, longing, and waiting for friends. I’d never again be the girl he’d made love to in the park. I’d never walk across a meadow and hear a lark or a cuckoo
with that same sense of wonder. I’d never watch the sun set and feel at one with the universe or gaze up at the moon and stars and feel that same sense of awe. And I’d never again look at a baby and smile.

Oddly enough, it was around this time I began to see more of Rose. I couldn’t and didn’t blame her for what had taken place between her and Tom. After all, she had no idea, knew nothing at all of my seemingly doomed relationship with Tom Cuthbert, or the child I’d given birth to months earlier. But then neither did he. And in reminding myself of that, in reminding myself of that pertinent fact, and knowing that he had been with Rose
after
he’d learnt of my engagement to Charlie, offered me a degree of comfort.

Rose was a socialite, a true Mayfair girl. The only child of indulgent parents, and with a healthy trust fund, she always seemed to carry notes, not coins. She was the one who arranged and hosted tea parties and soirees; the one who picked up the bills at the Ritz and other places, and then, afterwards, paid for the ridiculously short taxicab rides home for us all. She liked to visit fortune-tellers, and would quite often take a taxicab all the way to the outer suburbs, only to hear, yet again, that
a tall dark stranger in uniform
was on his way into her life.

But, and even aside from Tom, even before I learnt of their
‘thing’, I’d always been confused by my feelings for her. I admired her bravado, her
joie de vivre
and her generosity, and yet, in a way, those were the very same qualities I disliked about her, and viewed as shallow and insensitive. She seemed to me to be a girl without poetry in her blood, someone who’d never looked up and noticed the sky; someone who’d simply fail to see the full spectrum, or the differing hues and tones of any single colour. But that was Rose. And Rose was Rose.

For a short while our friendship was quite intense. We saw each other most evenings after work and sometimes, at her house, in her room, we took morphia; and then lay about trying to imagine the future, our future.
A future
. Perhaps that’s the reason it became intense: the morphia, or ‘morphy’ as she called it.

She said to me, ‘You know, dear, I keep thinking, and really . . . the thing is, soon there’ll be no one left to marry . . . we’ll all end up old maids . . . childless and unloved.’ She turned to me. ‘Doesn’t it worry you, darling? I mean to say, I know you’re engaged and all that, and poor Charlie’s invalided, but what if he has to go back . . . what if something happens to him? It must cross your mind, dear . . . must cross your mind all the time.’

We were lying on her bed, side by side, and as I turned to her I noticed the flecks of red in her hair – Titian red – spread out over the pillow.

‘I don’t think about it.’

She turned towards me, on to her side. ‘Really? Never?’

‘No. What’s the point? Whatever will be will be.’

‘Clarissa! But you love him – don’t you?’

I closed my eyes. ‘I suppose so. Sort of.’

She lay back, and for a while we lay in silence, the only noise the rumble of traffic going up and down the wet street outside. Then she said, ‘But has he made love to you? You don’t have to
tell me, of course . . . but I was wondering, wondering if you’re still a virgin.’

I didn’t answer her immediately. The morphia made me drift, made my thoughts loose and shapeless; and it was a difficult question to answer.

‘No,’ I said, after a while, ‘he hasn’t made love to me, Rose.’

I didn’t say any more, and neither did she.

And I have no idea who or what she was thinking of, where she was inside of herself, but I was with
him
.

For a while, I’m not altogether sure how long, but perhaps no more than a few weeks – and I know that it was spring, because I vividly recall the blossom on the trees as I walked home – we took
morphy
quite often; most days, I think. It made everything infinitely better, made the world . . . kinder, softer, warmer. And it took away all of my pain and heartache, all of my loneliness, and replaced it with the most sublime sense of peace.

Sometimes, its effects literally transported us to another place. And once, when Rose and I attended a private exhibition of paintings – and had taken only the smallest dose, hours earlier – we both fancied we’d seen the colours change and move about the canvases. Another time, when we read poetry out loud to each other, it was as though I was able go inside the poem, able to see and
feel
the vibration of every single word.

My mother never noticed a thing. Oh, she’d comment from time to time that I looked a tad pale or tired, but she’d always considered me dreamy, distracted and, I suppose, particularly at that time, fragile. If she thought something was amiss she never voiced it, but that was her character: she’d rather arrange flowers than deal with reality. But I was becoming needy, greedy for my share of grains, and I’d begun to pay Rose, because as she’d quite rightly said, she shouldn’t have to pay for
everyone else’s fun
.

It was Rose who asked me if I’d help out at the kiosk: a small buffet for soldiers arriving back from the trenches, situated on one of the platforms at Waterloo station. She and a few other girls from our neighbourhood ran it together, working on a rota so that it was open round the clock, day and night. We served tea, buns and cigarettes, all paid for by donations, but mainly by Lady Astley, a friend of Mama’s, who’d set it up. So, I continued to work at the Russian Hospital each morning and cycled to Waterloo station each afternoon. There were always at least three of us working there, a few more if we knew it was going to be frantic, when the boat trains were due in. But the time of arrival of any trains was always a matter of conjecture. If they were late in the evening, as they quite often were, we’d all be there until the small hours, and then I’d leave my bicycle chained up at the station and share a taxicab home with the other girls.

Lady Astley came down to see us all at least twice each week, bringing supplies from Fortnum and Mason and often staying for a good few hours, helping to serve tea and chatting with the men. She liked us to look our best, said it mattered to the men. ‘They need to see smiles and pretty faces when they step off those trains,’ she said. And we weren’t just to serve them: we were to greet them, she said; to cheer them up, chat to them and listen to them. After all, they were heroes, each and every one of them, she told us. And so, with a smile on my face, I handed out tea to Tommies and to officers. I chatted to the walking wounded and to the seemingly fit and able, and I sat with those badly injured on stretchers, limbless bodies with boyish faces, holding a teacup to their parched lips, placing a cigarette to their mouths, and then lifting it away as they exhaled. In that miasma of putrid flesh and seeping wounds, blood, dirt, sweat and vomit, I held hands and stared into black-ringed eyes. I smiled at their generosity, their never-ending compliments and
propositions of marriage, and sometimes I winked back at them. Yes, I flirted, we all did; even Lady Astley, I think.

And to them all, I was Clarissa.

‘’Ere, Clarissa, Arthur says he’s in love with you, already!’

‘Clarissa! Another cuppa over here, love, and bring them lips with you, ha!’

The station was always pandemonium when the trains came in, especially at night: filled with volunteers like us, Red Cross workers, nurses and ambulance men waiting to collect the injured. Depending on the time of day, there would sometimes be a crowd of fervently patriotic members of the public to welcome their returning troops with a song, as well as a few vividly painted ladies.

All of the men were exhausted and, not surprisingly, dazed; startled by their welcome, and perhaps the recognition of something near to normality, near to a memory. Many were suffering from the effects of mustard gas: half blind, skin blistered, eyes weeping, stuck together, or covered by a bandage; they moved along the platform in a long automated line, hands upon the shoulders of the man in front, zombie-like.

In the hut, for that’s all it really was, we had an iron boiler, an enormous tea urn, three old jugs and a pail for washing up in. But somehow we managed. More than that, we did it all with gusto. Lady Astley’s two daughters, Flavia and Lily, were there almost every day, and Rose too.

I don’t think I’d ever felt as alive or, bizarrely, laughed as much. And this was perhaps what struck me more than anything else: that these men, men who’d been living on their wits, fighting for survival, and in such appalling conditions – for by then we all knew about life in the trenches – could still laugh, and sing; still flirt and smile. My vocabulary expanded, and I learnt a few new songs. None of them Mama would have liked, all of them I loved.

‘You’re a looker and a half mind, ain’t ya? Gotta sweetheart, love?’

‘Here! Bert! Come and meet me new fiancée, Clarissa . . .’

Of course I looked out for Tom, and for Henry too. And once, during my first few weeks, Jimmy Cooper appeared; astounded and delighted to find me there, thinking I’d somehow anticipated his arrival as I ran towards him shouting out his name. But I never saw Tom. Oh, occasionally there’d be a man down the platform, emerging through the steam, half lost in the sea of pale, thin faces and khaki uniforms, and yes, for a moment, I’d think,
it’s him, it’s him
. I’d catch my breath, forget what I was doing as I tried to follow that face. And then I’d lose it.
It wasn’t him . . . it can’t have been him.