not.’
It runs in my head, all the time, while I am doing my antlike scurrying. We are all re-begot as nothingness by this war. The evil of it, the waste.
I have to go now. We live in a canvas shelter, and I sit on my camp bed to write this on my lap by candlelight. Perhaps you can’t even read the words. Perhaps I should not send them to you, but I need to reach out. It is another weakness. I am afraid of my own cowardice, too.
You are so clean and white, Grace, like nothing here.
When will it all end?
For some reason Jake had signed not his name but his initials. It made Grace think again of the schoolroom at Stretton, of their old secure and undervalued world.
She said aloud, ‘You are not a coward.’
The window opposite her had been left wide open after the warmth of the day, but the night air was icy now. It rolled in like a hill mist and Grace shivered as it touched her bare shoulders.
She did not move, or fold the letter into its creases again. She knew that she would never forget the way Jake spoke to her out of it.
It was the letter’s fusion of two voices that touched her most profoundly. There was the old Jake, who had whispered their secrets to her in the hot summer before the war began, and from whom she had in the end retreated. Out of fear of the unknown, out of childish impatience. And there was the Jake she did not know, who had witnessed the field hospital. The images of it came to her now, in Jake’s disconnected words, pulp and jelly of flesh, bones like splinters …
And just as Jake had become two Jakes, boy and man, so the world had split into two worlds, old and new. Not only for herself, Grace understood that, but for all of them.
Images of the old world were all around her. There was this room with its mundane evidences of their girlhood, and in the framed snapshots on Clio’s tallboy there were memories of Christmases, holiday games at Stretton, beach cricket in Norfolk or Normandy.
The new world was obliterating everything that had once been familiar. Jake and Hugo in France were part of the fearsome new world, and the officers who came to mend themselves in this house, and so were the newspapers with their black headlines and their casualty lists, and even the women who served behind shop counters where there had once been men were part of it too.
For a long time, for almost two years Grace realized, she had thought of the war as a momentous event that touched them all, but as an episode that would eventually be over, leaving the world to continue as before.
It was on that day in October 1916, the day of Jake’s letter, that she understood there could be no going on as before.
If Hugo came home again, he would not be the same boy who had marched off in his fresh uniform. Jake would not be the boy who had kissed her in the angle of the hawthorn hedge. For all of them, whatever they had done, there would always be the speculation: If there had been no war. If part of a generation had not been lost.
Grace read the last, scrawled page of the letter once more.
I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.
But then she put the pages aside. The blackness of the lines stirred an opposing determination in her. Grace found herself making a bargain with a Providence she had never troubled to address before.
Let them come home, she bartered, and we will make something new out of ‘things which are not’. We don’t cease to exist, those of us who are left. We’ll make another world.
She could not have said what world, or how, but she felt the power of her own determination as a partial salve.
Behind her, the bedroom door creaked open and Clio slipped into the room.
‘Grace? It’s so cold in here.’ She went to the window, closed it, and drew the curtains over the square of darkness. She did not ask, but Grace picked up the pages of the letter and gave them to her.
‘Read it,’ she said in a low voice.
Afterwards Clio sat down beside Grace on the edge of the high bed. She was ashamed that amidst all her love for Jake, and fear for him, there was a shiver of jealousy that he should have written in such a way to Grace, not to herself, or Julius. And yet she understood that in the terrible hospital Jake needed to reach out to his ideal of whiteness and cleanliness, his smooth river pebble. That was not a family entity, and so Jake turned to what was closest to home, to Grace. So she told herself.
The two girls let their heads rest together, the smooth roll of hair and the thick plait the same colour and texture, side by side. They were still sitting in the same position when Julius found them. He took his place next to Grace, making the same arrangement as on the garden bench.
He still felt happy, remembering that he had kissed her.
The letter did not surprise Julius, neither the horror of it nor Jake’s image of Grace. His vivid imagination had led him closer to the reality of what Jake was suffering, and he loved Grace to the point where he would have been more surprised to find that his brother did not.
It did not occur to Julius to feel jealous.
‘I wish he would come home,’ Clio said savagely.
‘He will, and Hugo,’ Grace promised. ‘Everything will start again. We’ll make it.’
When Eleanor came up, the letter was hidden in the folds of Clio’s dress. All three of them knew that it was for the magic circle alone. They felt that for even Eleanor to see it would be a betrayal.
That night, although she had not had the nightmare for years, Grace dreamt of her own death by drowning.
The turret room was growing familiar. As he lay in bed the soldier had learnt the contour of it, the regular square of one side and then the hemispherical opposite bulge where the tower was grafted on to the red brick absurdity of the house.
He had looked up at the turret, blinking his sore eyes at the white winter sky, when they wheeled him into the house from the ambulance. Since he had been brought home from Cambrai he had seen nothing but the rigid lines of the hospital ward, and this apparition of a house with its crenellations and gables had made him momentarily afraid of hallucinations again. He had gripped the wooden arms of the wheelchair and found them solid, and had looked again to see that the house was solid too, an architect’s fantasy castle planted in the North Oxford street. There were bare-branched cherry trees in the front garden, and a child’s discarded wooden engine beside the path.
As they lifted him up the steps a woman had come out to greet him. She was statuesque, dressed in a plain grey afternoon dress, with her coils of dark hair put up in the pre-war fashion.
‘I am Eleanor Hirsh,’ she said, smiling at him. When she held out her hand it was as if they were being introduced in a London drawing room. After the months in the trenches and the indignities of hospital, the simple gesture was like a benediction. When he took her hand he saw that there were no rings except for a thin wedding band and a small diamond, and that the fingers looked as if they were accustomed to harder work than
