Dennis forgot, momentarily, that he was in a wheelchair with his head bandaged and all his senses dislocated. He made a little bow from the waist that was almost courtly.
‘Welcome to my house,’ Eleanor said.
The nurses and the driver who had come with him from the hospital half pushed and half carried his chair up into the house. There was another nurse here, and Peter Dennis had a confused impression of a dark-brown hallway, many more stairs and passages, children’s faces solemnly watching him, all blurred by renewed pain as he was lifted out of the wheelchair and carried up to the turret room.
He heard that his attendants called the dark-haired woman Madam or Mrs Hirsh, but that the children’s voices rising up through the house cried ‘Mama …’
The room they put him into was blessedly quiet, and filled with the reflections of light from the pointed windows in the turret. The new nurse helped him into the high iron-framed bed and he lay back against the down pillows and closed his eyes.
Eleanor took Tabby and Alice down to the kitchen with her. ‘You mustn’t make too much noise,’ she told them. ‘Captain Dennis has been very ill, and now he will need to rest quietly.’
‘May we go and see him?’ Tabby asked. ‘I could show him my sewing.’
‘Perhaps, in a day or so.’
‘Did a German shoot him, as well?’ Alice demanded. It was her standard question.
‘Captain Dennis was very brave. He was fighting to defend what he believes in, and he was wounded. But the German soldier who fired at him was probably just as brave, and defending his own in the same way.’
It was a variation on Eleanor’s standard reply. With her own pacifist sons, her husband’s German blood and the male Strettons’ fierce jingoism to reconcile, she felt it was the best she could do.
‘Like Hugo?’
‘Yes, of course, like Hugo,’ Eleanor answered. That was safer ground. She did not object, for once, to Cook handing out iced biscuits to the little girls. They took their prizes and ran out into the garden before Eleanor could change her mind.
Eleanor instructed Cook that the driver and the nurses who had accompanied the ambulance would probably require tea before returning to the hospital. Then she saw that Mrs Doyle had already put the kettle on the hot plate of the big black range. The kettle sighed and a wisp of steam issued from the curved spout. Eleanor nodded her satisfaction, and the two women smiled at each other. Their relationship was unconventional, but Eleanor did not run a conventional household.
Mrs Doyle had been widowed in the first year of the war and had left her husband’s Oxfordshire village shortly afterwards to return to service. Before her marriage she had been employed as a parlourmaid in a great house, and had no experience in the kitchen. But Eleanor had lost a series of cooks who could not adapt to Madam’s haphazard housekeeping, and she was glad to offer the post to the capable-looking Mrs Doyle. Her instincts were correct. Mrs Doyle proved herself to be a naturally talented cook, producing the sweet cakes and pastries that Nathaniel loved as well as economical ragouts and vegetable pies, and managing to direct the shopping and weekly menus for the family whilst giving the impression that Eleanor was really in charge. Everyone ate much better food, and a new state of calm overtook the household.
The secret of their relationship was not a secret between the two women. They felt a comfortable and open respect for one another, and as the war continued they also became friends. Mrs Doyle’s dependability freed Eleanor to concentrate on her convalescent nursing work, and as the time passed the Woodstock Road house became less a rest home than a hospital extension.
By the beginning of 1918 the flow of casualties was so relentless that there were never enough hospital beds available. Eleanor and Nathaniel had begun to accept into the house men who were still seriously ill, simply because their taking a man who could be nursed at home meant that a bed was freed for another who could not.
One trained and one volunteer nurse now came to the Woodstock Road every eight hours, in shifts around the clock, but it was still Eleanor who took responsibility for the recovery of her patients. They did recover, almost all of them had done, some with a rapidity that surprised the doctors.
‘You should have been a professional nurse,’ Nathaniel proudly told his wife. ‘You have a great gift for it.’
‘Can you imagine my dear mama countenancing anything so dreary and dangerous? Permitting her daughters to do any work at all, however genteel?’ Eleanor sounded cheerful, but she was touched by a wistful sense of opportunity missed, of an unexperienced life running parallel to her own that she could only imagine, never know for sure. She consoled herself with the fact that she was doing what she could, now that it was needed, although it seemed so little.
Nathaniel had laughed and refolded his newspaper. ‘I can not imagine,’ he had said.
Eleanor and Mrs Doyle now had enough experience of both nurses and ambulance drivers to know that they needed tea, and slabs of cake as well. Mrs Doyle set out the plain white kitchen cups and cut a cherry cake into symmetrical pieces, and Eleanor welcomed Captain Dennis’s escorts into the kitchen.
‘Is he comfortably settled?’
‘The journey’s taken it out of him, all right,’ one of the nurses said. ‘But I reckon he’ll do well enough when he’s rested himself.’ There was no ‘madam’. She spoke with a brusquely businesslike air, one professional to another. Eleanor noticed it and felt a mild satisfaction. Only Mrs Doyle frowned and held up the big brown teapot as if to threaten the woman with it.
‘Won’t you sit down, if you have time?’ Eleanor invited.
They settled themselves around the scrubbed table, and Eleanor sat down with them. She took a cup of tea from Mrs Doyle and paid her a joking compliment about the even distribution of the cherries in the sponge. Only the driver stared and looked uncomfortable, but he was the only one who had never been to the Woodstock Road before.
The nurses talked about patients and their prospects. Eleanor stayed just long enough to drink her tea, and then she said a smiling goodbye and went off upstairs to see if her newest patient was comfortable.
‘She’s the lady of the house, is she?’ the driver sniffed. ‘Funny sort of a set-up you’ve got here, the mistress sitting drinking tea with our sort, isn’t it?’
‘More of a lady than you’re ever likely to encounter,’ the cook snapped. ‘And a finer household, too.’
The man appeared not to have heard her. He rubbed his whiskers with the palm of his hand. ‘It’s the war, isn’t it? Changing everything, all the old ways.’ He shook his head lugubriously, ready to insist that no change he had ever experienced had ever been for the better.
Nathaniel came out of the Examination Schools and began to walk up the honey-walled curve of the High. He had been lecturing on Old French vowel-shifts and his mind was still busy with the fascinating labyrinths of word-formations and Germanic borrowings. It was the middle of the afternoon and Oxford was at its busiest, but Nathaniel was oblivious to the cyclists who swept past with their gowns fluttering, the tradesmen’s vans and carts and omnibuses and private cars that clogged the road, and even the fellow dons who passed in the opposite direction and glanced at him in the expectation of a greeting. He had forgotten to button up his overcoat and it flapped around his legs as he walked, but Nathaniel
