Not that she’s seen him, it’s all been in words, speaking out plain about the adventures he’s been having but how all he’s looking forward to, he writes, is his Grace, and her laugh and pretty face again. When she reads his letters, they make her feel that there’s somebody who wants to look after her and she doesn’t have to
worry him about going off to marry somebody else. Joseph will hold her in his arms and tell her how much he likes her. It also makes her think that, even what with all that’s happened, there is good somewhere, and her wickedness might not stop it coming to her.
Even though the world and his wife have now been in and out of the library and there’s been not a flicker of notice about the book that is missing, Grace can’t help but sometimes lay her head on the pillow and think she can still feel it under the mattress. At least she’s as good as stopped the lying, for there’s nobody left to lie to. And after Michael went to France she wrote to him to say that she’s now working as a maid for her employer. Though she said that it’s only because the business has shut, for there’s not much trade overseas you can do with those U-boats skulking around. She told him that she’d rather be working in a nice house than a munitions factory, and it keeps her in place to go back to her old job as secretary when the war is over.
The war’s changed now. It’s not being all proud of our boys any more, it’s worrying sick, and it makes Grace’s insides tremble whenever her thoughts go there. This week the news has been so frightful: sixty thousand wounded in just one day, and a third of those dead. She can’t not think of all those dead boys, and wondering whether it’ll be Michael, Joseph, James even, next.
There are more in the newspaper every day. At least sweeping and cleaning you have to keep your eyes open and find the dirt; it’s the jobs you don’t need to think about that let your mind wander. So she’s careful, Grace, when she’s polishing silver and falling into a rhythm, for it’s then that the pictures grow in her head. Young men, as far as she can see, lying there with bits blown off them, covered in other people’s parts, too. That’s Michael’s job now, fetching the ones that aren’t quite dead, and that’s not a thought to have. Not just what it’s like out there, turning them over to see what still moves, it’s the guns, too. ‘Conchie’ they call him, Conscientious Objector it says on the forms. Won’t fire a gun but will run in to
pick up the dead and not an idea if it’s safe. She hadn’t wanted him to go, he had just told her he was leaving, now that the rest of the family was gone.
She can remember the last time they were together, before he left. More than a year ago, it was; they were sitting in Kensington Gardens, the sun warm on their faces and neither of them saying a word. Michael wasn’t even tapping his feet on the ground, and Grace, well, she was far from sure she believed in God any more. Not after. No, not after …
Even though they were all to come by breakfast time that May morning, Aunt Ethel had done teacakes for Peggy and Jenny and Alice – a treat for Ma and Da too, for eggs, now, they weren’t easy to find. When her lodger came back with the evening paper, she’d seen it, that three trains had come together on the line from Carlisle. The two of them looked at the teacakes and all the dinner gone cold, and she knew. She wrote to Michael in London. He hadn’t had her letter until he was back from work on the Wednesday, then he’d written on to Grace. He was running, he wrote, to catch the evening train north, he’d find them, he promised. Then he’d send word, no, he’d come around to tell her it was all right. Even with everything, the thought of Michael turning up at the house and finding out how long she’d been in an apron and cap had given her a fright.
At morning break on the Friday, Michael’s letter in her pocket, Grace had asked for the newspaper. Susan whispered to her in a way that is pretending to be on your side because it is a whisper, but puts you down. ‘Mr Bellows has it. You’ll wait your turn.’ And, for the first time since Grace arrived, and, my word, it was something that she hadn’t let them out before, tears were rolling down her face. She sniffed them up, kept breathing so as she could answer their questioning, but all that came out was: Michael, the letter being from him, even that he was in the law, and Gretna, and that all of them, the family, had been on one of those trains. Her voice ran out.
All of a sudden there was a fuss, and she thinks Mr Bellows said he’d look for her, and Summers was going through the old newspapers they used for lighting fires. ‘It was Monday,’ said Susan, ‘that’s when we first saw it, not that it’d happened then, Saturday it was. Thank the Lord none of us are Scots, I said.’ Well Thursday’s and Wednesday’s had been burnt, and Tuesday’s too, but Monday’s
Times
was still there. Then Mrs Wainwright said, ‘Let me,’ and, ‘For heaven’s sake, someone give the girl a cup of tea.’
Mrs Wainwright opened the newspaper on the table and picked her spectacles up from the chain around her neck. She folded through the pages and then stopped, smoothing down the creases as though it were a dress. Grace could see her scanning the lines and she thought of Miss Sand and learning to read the Lesson out aloud. Read it through first, Miss Sand had said, so as you don’t stumble on your words. Mrs Wainwright went on reading, more than just the first few lines. Then she looked up, took her glasses off and said, ‘My dear, I can’t read this out to you. I don’t think you should read it, either.’
Grace’s head was spinning with not wanting ever to see and wanting to read it right away. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘if you don’t mind, I’d like to look now.’ They couldn’t stop her, could they? The teacups were cleared and space made and the newspaper moved and folded out and pressed down in front of her and they all sat round her, as though ready to catch her if she fell.
She couldn’t take it all in, just fragments like
worst ever
, and
more than a hundred dead
. And to think they’d been talking about it all week, Grace too. It had made her come over a little queer even then, before she knew. What with it being so close to Carlisle, the fire might creep all the way along the track to home.
‘They’ll be all right,’ Mrs Wainwright was speaking dead soft, ‘there are survivors, plenty of them, it’ll just take a while for them to find their way home. Your brother’s up there now and he’ll find them in a trice. And some jumped clear.’ Grace wasn’t sure how far a nine-, ten- and twelve-year-old could jump.
Troop Train Disaster, five trains were in it, including the local one her family was on, she knows now. Her head was stew, words leapt out at her as she tried to read it.
Heavy death toll. Stated last night to be 158. The King has sent a telegram
, she read. Well, that’s all right then, a telegram from the King must make things all right, but what’s she thinking? It’s the words that came after that which made her choke. More words.
Burnt alive. Scorched and charred. Little bundles of blackened bones and flesh
. And she turned to the side, right where Susan was beside her, and felt the contents of her stomach rising.
Grace was put to bed for the rest of that day, and told to stay there for the next. Yet when she woke up proper on that same afternoon, she dressed ever so carefully and went downstairs. She found Mrs Wainwright, who started to give her a telling-off for being up, not resting, but Grace begged to be given something to do. ‘It’ll keep those thoughts, Mrs Wainwright, from running all over my mind.’ ‘You’re dressed for the morning, Grace,’ Mrs Wainwright replied. ‘Go and change before anyone sees you, and then you can sit down at the table and polish knives and forks.’ Grace looked down at her skirt, blue print she’d put on, not black.
The following week the newspaper stopped mentioning it. Instead there were just lists of names of Mr Asquith’s new Coalition Government, and the servants’ hall changed to chatter about the politicians who came to the house. The Prime Minister of course. Mr Lloyd George too, with Mr Lansbury, even though he went to jail for women to vote. Lord Kitchener, that moustache, well, you couldn’t miss him, not when he’s on all those posters up and down the land, telling men to join up. Mr Bellows says she has them from all sides, Lady Masters. Grace took in not even half of it all. She couldn’t think about Lady Masters’ guests.
Still, they wouldn’t let her alone on Sunday. ‘You can’t be worrying,’ said Mrs Wainwright, ‘I’ll take you with me.’ And they’d gone to church where Grace prayed so hard that she forgot to breathe, and had to steady herself on the pew in front, though she wasn’t thinking of them as angels, wouldn’t let herself do that.
Afterwards, she walked around the park with Sarah. When they came back, Grace pulled out the case from under her bed to go on with her sewing, a dress for Peggy, the eldest of her younger sisters, because if she goes on with the sewing for her then she must still be alive. Grace is making herself feel sure that they are, that Michael will find them, for Michael can do anything.
Next day Grace went to find Michael, to catch him before he came to her. There he was, eyes black like he’d not seen a wink of sleep. It was the train back down, he said, all night, and he’d given up his corner seat, the only one where you have a chance of sleeping, head leaning against the window. For a lady, he told Grace. Though, don’t she dare call him a gentleman, he said, just because they do things like that. His chambers gave him an hour to see Grace; after three days off, he’d catching up to do.
Michael told her he had started in the hospitals in Carlisle, that’s where they’d all been taken. He’d searched the beds for a woman, or a man without scraps of uniform, or a figure small enough. When he asked about those people he was told to go up the railway to Quintinshill; there was a farm building there and a village hall up the road at Gretna. Grace asked him whether they’d put together hospitals there like those field hospitals out in France. And Michael had looked away, the edge of his lip that she could still see curled in. When he turned back his eyes were like he’d caught flecks of dust, and he told her that everyone had been taken away by then. All the soldiers, they went to Edinburgh. There had been a woman and child, just one child, but a man had come to claim them. ‘And they went with him?’ Grace asked. Michael shook his head. They weren’t going anywhere of their own accord any more.
The fire burnt for two days. The cries stopped, Michael’s been told, not so long after the crash. Michael had been to the house, had to settle it, he said, before the month was up and the next rent was due. He asked the neighbours, just in case they’d all gone somewhere else. It was the early train, they all said, so as they’d be back
by tea. The early train, and wasn’t it a shame. Shame, too, that you need a body for a funeral.
Michael brought back for Grace Ma’s silver-backed hairbrush that she’d been given as a wedding present and her glass bead necklaces, and the photographs for the two of them. The silver spoon too. He hadn’t seen the point of anything else, no place to put the furniture. Besides, it was all he could carry on the train. She walked back to chambers with him and waited while he went in and came out again. Then Grace took the bus back to Park Lane, with all she had left of her ma and da and three baby sisters in a small brown paper bag.
And Grace’s mind is again in the park with Michael the next Sunday after that.
They couldn’t talk about anything that’s not Them. But they couldn’t talk about Them either, not without her eyes swimming. Her mind was off, drifting, wishing they had something practical to do, plans to make, a funeral, possessions not yet sorted. But it’s all done, or will never be. She reached out her hand to find her brother’s and rested it on his. It clenched into a fist below hers.
‘I’ll … I’ll write,’ she heard him say.
‘Yes,’ said Grace. Then she swallowed. She hadn’t heard Michael stumble on his words since he came to London. But it wasn’t that which was making her search for air, it was the realisation that she hadn’t heard something he’d said. ‘Best if I send what I can to you,’ he continued. ‘Leave you in charge, Office Girl.’
His fist still clenched, he turned to her stiffly and kissed a part of her cheek not shielded by her hat. Grace couldn’t speak as it settled in her mind what he was doing. People kept passing; Michael didn’t speak either. Then at last she found the breath to try. It felt as if she were reaching out to grab him and pull him back.
‘What about all those things you’ve said, Michael? About the war?’
But her fingers caught only air.
He shook his head. ‘I have to do something, after—’
‘It wasn’t the Germans that did it.’
‘As good as. Anyways, what’s the point in staying here now?’
Grace looked down. So what did she count for to Michael?
A year ago, it was, that Michael went, and now Joseph is coming to visit. Joseph who writes at least a dozen times as much as Michael, even though Grace sends so many letters to her brother.
Joseph’s train goes in the morning, and he’ll come by early this evening. Susan, bless her now only half-hard heart, told Mrs Wainwright that he’d been in such a hurry when he came last week that he hadn’t had time to wait for Grace to return. So Mrs Wainwright has given Grace this evening off.
Let’s hope he’s not in a hurry for everything, Grace, Mrs Wainwright tells her. And Grace is a little taken aback. But it’s with the best will that Mrs Wainwright’s mothering her. Anyways, she’s the only mother Grace has now.
Yes, Mrs Wainwright.
Thank heavens for Number Thirty-Five, for it’s Grace’s family now, even if the house is part dead, most of it dust-sheeted over. Miss Beatrice has been gone three months and Master Edward out there, too. Lady Masters comes up less and less, as though she doesn’t want to see the house empty as it is. When she does, though, there’s a dinner Of Great Importance, they are told, and the guests’ names are only whispered around the servants’ hall. It’s us women, says Susan, she’s trying to have more of us in the war, so that afterwards they can’t say we didn’t fight too.
As for the refugees, they’ve nearly all left; it was too far from the munitions’, though Mussyur Durot, he’s still here with his family, and well brought up they are. He was the one who could speak English and now the others have gone he doesn’t look half so pale as he did when every word had to be turned by him. He was a businessman, he said, breweries, and more than one. You could tell that if you watched Madame Durot when she arrived, don’t think she’d lifted a duster before. Now she’s brandishing a broom in her
fraying fine lady’s clothes. Confusing the visitors, said Susan when she started. Makes it look like we can’t do it ourselves. Her lady-ship’ll start moving us down to the country, and having us clean out the hospital as that strange house is now, and it’s overflowing.