That was hours ago. I don’t even remember how I got back upstairs. I must have run here for safety, to my own place.
I don’t know what to do.
I have the card in front of me, and cannot stop looking at it, at the writing.
Writing that is now stained with my tears.
I can still see what it says, in Edgar’s writing, but it is what I heard when I read it the first time that has told me what I most fear.
The words are there just as they were before, when Father read them. But as I read them I heard Edgar’s voice, and he was saying something quite different.
“I must go now. I had a bayonet put into my back as I was doing the same to another man. I must go now. I am dead and I must go.”
I heard it only once, but it was clear enough; the minute I touched the card a shock shot through me.
I am dead and I must go.
I have sat for hours, shaking and crying. I am too scared to do anything, to talk to anyone. It is light outside now, I can hear the gulls screeching dimly at the back of my brain, but I cannot move.
I can’t even bring myself to get Tom, though I want him to be here more than anything.
I know I’m right, but no one will believe me.
What am I going to do?
There’s a knock at the front door.
I look to see what time it is. Later than I thought. It’s gone nine.
It strikes me dumbly that no one knocks on a door at nine o’clock on Christmas morning.
I know who it is.
I hear Mother going downstairs.
Clutching Edgar’s card, I open my door, go down the stairs, and reach the top of the landing just as Mother opens the front door.
I hear one word, spoken quietly, in a tone of terrible respect.
“Telegram.”
That’s all.
And then I hear Mother screaming.
She’s screaming and screaming.
58
Though the events of Christmas morning are months ago now, I can still see them all as if it has just happened. In some ways I can see things even more clearly now than I could at the time, because then my vision was obscured by shock and pain.
Now there’s only pain.
57
Tomorrow will be June the twenty-fifth.
It’s six months since we heard that Edgar had been killed. It is five days more than that since the actual moment, but details are still hard to come by.
The telegram was brief and to the point, and to be honest, it didn’t really matter at the time. But now I want to find out more about it. I want to know everything, though we may never know it all.
We had a memorial service for Edgar in early January, but there was no funeral because there was no body to bury. He was buried somewhere in Belgium, in a military cemetery.
A letter we had later from a friend of his, another captain in his battalion, said he had been killed leading a raiding party into the enemy trenches. He said Edgar had been very brave and the raid had been a big success.
But that’s a lie.
Just as I had heard Edgar tell me he was dead, I had seen a horrible tableau of the moment.
The panic. The complete chaos. No one was brave, not Englishman nor German; there was only horror and fear and utter bestial panic as Edgar’s party arrived in the wrong place, as they killed and were killed, and as a couple of lucky men managed to stagger back to their own trench, their only success being alive to report what a disaster the whole thing had been.
But I said nothing of that to anyone.
Mother and Father cling desperately to the idea that their son died a hero’s death, as if it makes any difference. Death is death. But if it helps them to think that, then it is well enough, I suppose.
56
Six months.
The longest of my life. We have been pretending, and pretending, and pretending, all this time. That life could go on, that the war would end soon, that Edgar would come home, that it isn’t really happening.
Now we know the truth.
Mother is broken, Father is sullen, and Thomas?
Thomas has gone.
That is almost the saddest thing about Edgar’s death.
Something changed in him that Christmas morning.
He didn’t cry, not like Mother and me. Father shouted and cursed, but Tom went silent, immediately.
Now he is in France.
55
It was only a few days afterward, maybe not even into the new year, that Thomas told us he was going to join the army.
Mother took it badly, and begged him not to go, but Father . . .
I had thought he would have been overjoyed, even delighted that he had finally won the argument with Thomas, but he wasn’t.
“Very well,” he said, but his voice was toneless. “You should go. I am proud of you for coming to the right decision. You can make us proud and keep the memory of your brother alive.”
I can’t believe what Tom did when Father said that.
He hit him.
There and then, he struck him across the chin. Father stumbled back and sank into a chair, but what is even more amazing is what happened next.
Nothing.
I was ready for Father to explode, to beat Tom, throw him out, at the very least curse him. But he sat in the chair, looking like a tired old man, and rubbed his chin.
Tom glared at us all, then turned on his heel and left. As he went I saw drops of blood from his knuckles stain the carpet in the hall.
54
That moment, six months ago now, that lives on so vividly with me, was forgotten, or rather ignored by us all.
Tom went back to Manchester after Edgar’s memorial, hardly saying another dozen words to any of us.
Not even to me, and I could hardly bear that.
One thing was clear, he intended to join up.
Father made some ’phone calls, and as with Edgar, he managed to secure a commission for his son, though Tom would be in the Royal Army Medical Corps.
Then, without warning, Tom arrived back in Brighton. Father had been trying to make contact with him for days, to let him know about his commission, and was a little annoyed when he just strolled into the kitchen through the back door one day in January.
“I’m leaving,” he said.
We all looked puzzled; he had only just arrived back.
“I’m leaving for France.”
“I don’t understand,” Mother said. “Father’s got you a place in the RAMC, you can’t be leaving yet.”
Tom looked from her to Father.
Neither of them said anything; then Tom put his hand out awkwardly to Father. He left it there for what seemed an age, until finally Father took it and shook it.
“Thank you,” Tom said.
Mother smiled.
“It’ll be fine in the RAMC,” Father said. “Much safer, but you can still . . . you know. Help.”
Tom stepped back abruptly.
“No,” he said. “You don’t understand. I’m grateful to you for trying, for getting me the place. But I’m not taking it.”
“What?” Father said, his voice pinched with disbelief.
“I’m not taking a commission. I’ve enlisted with the Twentieth Fusiliers, in Manchester, the Public Schools Battalion. As a private.”
I saw Mother put her hand to her throat, and the color drained from her cheeks. I stood up and grabbed Tom, begged him not to go, but he wouldn’t listen. I asked him what had changed, why he didn’t want to be a doctor anymore, and a hundred other things, but he wouldn’t talk.
Mother was trying, and failing, not to cry; Father stomped around the kitchen, starting sentences, then stopping them, hot under the collar.
“But Tom,” Mother pleaded. “You’ll be safer in the RAMC, and you want to be a doctor, don’t you? Don’t you?”
Tom looked at her, miserably, his lip trembling.
“There’s no use in it.”
That’s all he would sa
y.
53
He left in January. It’s June now. Winter ended, spring came and went, and now summer is here.
The house is so quiet. Father is working longer hours than ever. Mother speaks of nothing but what is necessary, and I have been left to myself, day in, day out, going crazy.
I have far too much time to think, far too much.
I think about everything that has happened to me, and to my family, and it does me no good at all. I pray like the stupid little girl I am to be young again. For all this not to have happened. For Edgar to be alive and for Tom to be happy. I long to be a young girl playing in a summer’s garden, but even that desire has bad memories. Then I understand how naïve I am. That past, that happy past, is gone. Long gone. I will never have it back. Now I can see what it is that put distance between me and my family. It goes all the way back to Clare. Mother was scared by it, and has spent all her time since then trying to keep at bay a future she didn’t want me to face. Father disbelieved it, and withdrew from me, and Edgar took his lead from Father, as always. Only Tom kept some faith with me, probably just because he was too young to do otherwise than keep loving his little sister.
And that’s the feeling I’ve had all this time. Guilt that I lost my family because of what I am, and that they lost faith in me.
One day, I tried to talk to Father about becoming a nurse again.
He seemed to listen, but he wouldn’t agree. Then I made the mistake of reminding him that Edgar had said I should have the chance to be a nurse, and that I ought to be given the chance again.
It was a mistake to mention Edgar’s name.
At the end of May it was my birthday.
I am eighteen.
In a few days time it will be Thomas’ birthday. On the first of July he will be nineteen. I wonder where he will be. When he was in Manchester he wrote all the time, but he’s silent now. Of course, it’s harder for him to write than it was for Edgar. Edgar was an officer and had more privileges. Tom is a private, and all we have had from him are two or three postcards that the army issues. They have a list of banal phrases on them, and Tom just crosses out the ones that don’t apply.
Both times he has crossed out all the phrases on the card except the first.
I am quite well.
And he has signed it. That is all we know.
52
I had had no more premonitions since the moment I touched Edgar’s Christmas card, but last night the raven came back to me in a dream.
I heard the beat of its wings, drumming louder and louder. It came right up close to me.
Its wing drifted across in front of my face, so close that I could see the barbs of each feather. The wing swung like a huge black curtain across the stage of a theater, and lifted to reveal a thousand ravens swinging around the treetops of a blighted wood.
The ravens parted, and I saw a gun.
The gun fired, with a violent bang that shook me awake in an instant.
Just before I was pushed out of the dream, I glimpsed one more thing.
The bullet’s target.
Thomas.
It hit him. He’s going to die.
51
At last my time has come.
I know it from the foreshadowing of Thomas’ death.
I don’t know how, but as I lay awake shivering after the dream, I know it hasn’t happened, and that maybe it won’t for some time. It is definitely something that has yet to be.
I don’t know why this is happening to me, or how it does. It feels as if someone is playing games with me, with my life, my destiny. Or with that of my family.
Finally I have the chance to do something with what I have seen.
I know it’s no use to talk to my parents about it. They thought I was living with fantasies before. If I tell them I know Tom is going to die, they’ll probably think I’ve gone mad.
I have to live with this curse now, the curse that is to know the future but never to be believed.
When the sight came to me before—for Clare, for that soldier, for Edgar’s friend, for those patients, for Edgar himself—it did no good.
What was the use? Edgar was dead, but I had no warning; I only knew a few moments before we found out from the telegram.
But this time . . .
This time is different. I’ve been given time to do something with what I have seen. And even if I am wrong, it makes no difference to what I’ve decided.
There’s a big offensive due to start soon; the papers have been full of it. The British and French armies have been gearing up for something massive for months, or so we’re led to believe. If that’s true, then many men will die, but Tom isn’t going to be one of them, because I’m going to stop it.
I’ve planned it all.
Although Father has kept me from the hospital, on several occasions I’ve bumped into nurses I know. We’ve chatted, and they’ve told me about the comings and goings. Lots of young girls have been volunteering to go to France as Red Cross nurses. The hospitals there are desperate for them.
I know where they sail from, and to, and where they go next. The boats leave almost all the time from Folkestone. Dover’s too dangerous, so they sail from Folkestone, a bit farther down the coast. From there, the nurses head to Boulogne, or to Rouen.
And tomorrow, there’s going to be one more nurse joining them.
I don’t know where Tom’s battalion is, but they’re somewhere in Flanders, and once I’m there, it shouldn’t be too hard to find out where.
Then I’m going to bring him home, and stop his death ever having the chance to happen.
If it’s true that I lost my family, and that they lost their faith in me, then this is my chance to mend it all. I want to heal the rift between us, make everything all right again. If I save Tom, then maybe they’ll understand me at last, and I will get them back.
I will save Tom.
It’s my only hope. I must do it.
I must.
PART TWO
50
I’ve been in France for nearly a week, and this is the first chance I’ve had to stop and think.
A week, but it feels like a year, so much has happened.
When I was on the ship, I thought vaguely that I would keep a diary of my journey in France, but I see what a ridiculous idea that was. There wouldn’t have been time, and one week’s experience of the real nature of the war is enough to make me want to forget everything I’ve seen, not make a permanent record of it.
It’s Saturday morning, and I’m sitting in the canteen. All around me are the noises of the rest station, and the sound of trains. I can scarcely believe I’m here, in France. Soon I’ll be moved to work in No. 13 Stationary Hospital, based in huts up on the cliffs, but I’m being given two weeks’ experience in the rest station first. They say it will give me a taste of what I’m likely to encounter. I couldn’t tell them, of course, that I don’t intend to stay that long. As soon as I can find out where Tom is, I’ll be moving on.
The rest station is part of the railway station, converted from rooms along the platform into a suite for ambulance work. We have a surgery and dispensary, a storeroom, and a staff room. We cook outside on large portable boilers.
The reason the rest station is here is because the wounded men roll right into our hands, in trains that have come down from close to the front line. We’re the first port of call. We give the men something to eat and drink, clean them up and maybe dress their wounds. Then on they go, to hospital in Rouen, or a convalescent camp in Havre. If they’re lucky, they might be heading for a ship home.
There’s another thing that can happen. They can die in the rest station, and be taken away to be buried.
It’s an incredible place, full of people throughout the day and night, full of noise and activity. All around, people are speaking English, which surprised me at first, but there are very few Frenchmen here. This place seems to belong to the British Army now, and the few remaining Frenchmen are either very old, or young b
oys. The rest are away. Fighting. Those who are here work as orderlies and porters, like the old man who runs the platform. He’s in charge of his own little army, composed mostly of boys, and they work continuously, and efficiently. The station is now a station and hospital combined, and runs very smoothly, from what I’ve seen. There’s even a tiny track on the platform itself along which runs a small wooden truck, to move supplies and medicine from one end of the platform to the other. All day long the Frenchman shouts at his boys, who scurry about on the truck, taking rides and fooling about when they think no one’s looking.
I left Brighton last Monday. That was the twenty-sixth, but first I had to prepare my escape.
49
Escape it was. I knew there was no way to tell my parents what I was going to do. All I could do was post a letter before I left Brighton. It will scandalize them, and their acquaintances, when they discover their daughter has vanished, but I can’t help that, either. This is a difficult world now.
On the Sunday before I left, I had to undertake the first part of my plan. A small mission without which none of what I have achieved so far would have been possible.
It was early evening. It was warm, though not bright, but Mother didn’t bat an eye when I said I was going out for a short walk.
“Take a coat,” she called from the kitchen. “It looks like it might rain later.”
That was all she said, but how was she to know of the nervous beat of my blood?
“I’ve got one,” I said.
I walked out of the house and turned down to the seafront, but soon doubled back by turning up Montpelier Road. There, I was lost in the throng of people taking the evening air. I made my way to the hospital.