round the door. ‘I’m going into Sidcup. Anything you need?’
My husband, thought Julia, but she said nothing because it would be unkind to say such a thing to a woman like Rose.
Rose knew perfectly well that nobody had ever really expected her to be a wife. She’d only been sent to live with Peter’s family in the hope that someone in Kent might marry her, as no one in Wiltshire would, but the hope was only ever mild. She might have been a little in love with Peter when she was young, but everyone – including Rose herself – recognised her now as a woman without marital or romantic needs. Those who bothered to think about her – including, again, herself – thought her lucky to be so, in this depleting landscape where many girls were likely to be left bereft of their expectations.
Rose had scorned the role circumstances offered her: china-mender, correspondence maintainer, ageing wallflower. Instead, back in 1913, she had joined the Kent VAD. At the first training camp in the summer of 1914, when 170 of them had been available to tend a dragoon who had fallen off his bicycle, and the Herne Common local paper had sent a photographer, Rose had identified a different type of woman that she was able to be. She had enjoyed the cricket matches. She liked sleeping in the round tents, learning how to use a biscuit tin as an oven. She liked her grey cotton dress, her army regulation lawn cap, her linen cuffs and collar, county badge and epaulettes, her white gloves for field work. She had looked at Miss Latham, who had served in the Balkans, and the Marchioness Camden, who visited and spoke so encouragingly. She was touched when the Dragoons’ band appeared to play for them, in gratitude for their kindness to the boy on the bicycle. She liked that when the cadets from New College took part in an ‘engagement’, playing the parts of both the invading Hun and the defending Englishmen, she was capable of putting her training into action so efficiently. She liked the slightly bemused looks Julia gave her.
Rose was quite aware that the real thing would be very different. Mrs Blanchard, who had served as matron to an ambulance column in the Franco-Prussian war, had made that perfectly clear. Despite that – no, because of it – I can do this, Rose had thought. By September 1914 she had been attached to a hospital near Folkestone, and had taken up smoking.
Now, in the doorway, she looked at beautiful Julia in the morning light and pitied her. Though beauty was not Julia’s only quality; it could only be the first thing about her. When she entered a room, nobody thought: There is a generous, determined, kind-looking woman. Her kindness, her determination and her flashes of wit were, in everyday life, dazzled out of view by her rich pale hair, her tiny waist, her glowing skin, the surprise of her dark blue eyes, and the slight dip at the bridge of her straight nose, ‘the imperfection which makes you perfect’, as Peter called it. Few people cared about her better virtues. And as she was an adoring wife, not the type to exploit the male response, what was she supposed to do with it? It was only for Peter, and Peter wasn’t there. In a world increasingly made up of women and old, or sick, or juvenile men, unmanned men, it was of no benefit to her. Indeed, it must be a disadvantage. There are always women ready to hate another woman for her beauty, Rose knew that. She had been included – unwillingly – in enough nasty little conversations behind the backs of pretty women by other plain women who assumed, wrongly, that Rose would share their jealousy as she shared their dull looks.
So Rose pitied Julia for her beauty, or thought she did. But Julia had learnt to love her own beauty, because beauty was her currency, and other people valued it so highly. Each day since Peter had left, after breakfast, she sat on the needlepoint stool by the french windows, morning sun streaming in, and tuned his cello. She made a lovely picture. She had thought about it, and she had laughed at herself for having thought about it. She had considered how most charmingly to cast the cello aside (without causing it damage) in order to run into her husband’s arms when he appeared in the doorway. She had laughed at herself about that too.
She missed him so much. What was the point of doing anything without your husband to do it for? She had tried more public-spirited ways of helping out. She’d launched straight in at Elliman’s when they went over to munitions, gamely pulling on a hideous pair of overalls (‘I honestly, genuinely look like that elephant your uncle Kit sent the pictures of from India,’ she said to Rose) and packing explosives into long, tubular shell cases. She couldn’t stick it. ‘The girls are terribly coarse and vulgar, and they don’t like me, and anyway Peter wouldn’t want me all chemical and yellow.’ She couldn’t be a VAD because ‘Well, my hands . . .’ she said, but she was doing herself a disservice there. It wasn’t vanity. It was a horror of blood, an abrupt, puking horror, which helped nobody, and which she was ashamed to admit to. It was easier to confess to vanity. People expected it of her, anyway. She knew that.
A stint at the Department of Pensions in London ended with a kind reprimand from an elderly civil servant driven to distraction by some truly shambolic filing. Only after these false starts had Julia discovered that her real war work was exactly the same as her peace work: Peter.
It started with making nice things for Peter: sandbags, for example. Beautiful sandbags, of quality canvas, or even linen, and she embroidered his regimental crest in the corner: a wild boar’s head with a crown on, the motto ‘Sic Petit Arcadia’ – ‘thus he reaches heaven’. She saw no irony in it at that early stage. Mostly they were used as pillow cases, and for one general, as a shoebag for his dress shoes.
After that hand-knitted socks, scarves, vests, long-johns; cakes, letters, parcels of cigarettes and chocolate with loving messages on the back of amusing picture postcards, selections of the new gramophone records . . . that lovely recording of E lucevan le stelle, by Leo Szilard, that he loved . . . But she grew bored with doing that because she couldn’t see the results, though his thank-you letters were charming. More importantly, she felt, or perhaps more controllably, things should be nice for Peter when he came home.
Rose did not notice Julia’s inability to be satisfied. ‘You don’t really need to . . . I’m sure he’ll write and let us know when he’s coming,’ Rose would say, from time to time, but really she had more important things on her mind – so what if, after the sandbags, Julia had no faith in the wartime post? (So many letters and telegrams flying this way and that! Who knew where they might not end up? He was perfectly likely to turn up unannounced.) And, anyway, Julia had no faith in anyone else’s understanding of what Peter needed, and Julia had nothing else to do.
And when he had come back after training, his farewell few days before leaving for France, Julia’s joy had been so extreme that there was no room for anything else in the house: for anyone else’s emotions, or for silence, conversation, mutual enquiry, rest, forgiving each other the fights there had been about him joining up in the first place . . . and then he had gone again, and she had returned to plumping the cushions. It took her fifty-three minutes to plump every cushion in the house, if she didn’t hurry.
What Rose didn’t know was that Julia spent every night with the same phrases and memories and resentments and ancient conversations lining up at the end of the bed, waiting to take their turn in tormenting her, and woke every morning in howling loneliness for her husband, her sheets too smooth and her bed too tidy, with a hunger for things to be right just as strong, desperate and justified as that of any scared soldier, any exhausted ambulance driver, any battle-weary medic.
Rose thought Julia appallingly self-conscious, the kind who never got anything done. If she applied half the energy she applies to herself and the house to something useful, think what she’d achieve! She’s just going to disappear in a cloud of lavender water one of these days . . . But Rose wasn’t being entirely fair. Considering that Julia had been bred and trained to be a beautiful wife, and nothing else, she wasn’t doing too badly.
‘No, thank you, darling,’ Julia said. ‘I don’t need anything.’
*
Purefoy
