Lost Among the Living (16 page)

“A
re you all right?”

It was February 1918, and I was standing in Victoria Station, seeing my husband off after his final leave. He had been home for three weeks—longer than I had expected, longer than he'd ever been home before. And now he was leaving again.

I gripped his sleeve with my gloved hand. “I'll be just fine,” I said.

“You look frozen solid.”

“No, no.”

It had snowed the night before, and London was deep in slush, the rims of it icy on the pavements and in the gutters. Filthy half-frozen snow had been tracked through Victoria Station by thousands of hurried feet and continued to be tracked in by thousands more. I wore my thickest shoes, my heaviest coat and gloves, but still I could not get warm. I felt the muscles between my shoulder blades contract in a convulsive shiver, but I fought it down. A headache was making its way up the back of my neck and over the top of my skull.

“Look,” Alex said, “you needn't come farther. We can say our farewells here.”

I gripped his sleeve harder and looked up into his face. “No.”

He looked down at me, and those extraordinary eyes softened beneath the brim of his handsome, sharp cap. “The train leaves in fifteen minutes, Jo.”

“Fifteen minutes, then. We should keep moving. You're going to be late.”

He looked into my face a moment longer; then he turned away and led me through the crowd. I followed with my arm entwined with his, staring at the line of his shoulder, the weave of his wool coat. I had done this before, seen him off on leave. This was always the worst, these last moments, in the middle of a crowd, wanting to say everything and nothing at once. It was an experience so painful one's mind suppressed it, like the death of a loved one or the agony of childbirth. Yet there was no avoiding it. I would not say good-bye at home and let him walk away without me any more than I could detach my own limbs from my body and let them walk out the door.

Still, this was worse than any of the others. I wasn't well, though I was trying to hide it. I was shaking with cold sweat beneath my heavy coat, my feet clammy and frozen, a fog in my head that shrouded my vision. My stomach roiled, threatening to give up the little breakfast I'd eaten. Fifteen minutes. I just had to get through them one by one.

Before this leave, he'd been gone nine months. I could recall not a single one of the days of those nine months, not one meal, not one night or morning. I could not tell you what I had done, what clothes I had worn, whether it had rained or been hot or cold. I had kept myself occupied, volunteering for soldiers' charities, but at the moment I could not recall a single person I had met, not a name or a face.

I had tried. One must get on with things, after all, and not sit around making a cake of oneself over a man, even if that man was one's husband. One must not live only for his letters, coming alive
briefly when the thin envelopes arrived, not caring that the thick, clumsy fingers of the censor had already handled the page before I did, that a stranger's eyes had already read my husband's words.
Not much to report from here, my Jo. We are grounded due to fog. The men are playing cards. I can hear the shelling in the distance at the Front. I am picturing you, sitting at the table in our kitchen, reading this, wearing the dress with blue and white flowers you wear so often, your hair tied back, the curls coming loose . . .

We had come to the entrance to the platform now, and there was a gray-haired man in a crisp uniform and a thick mustache looking at Alex, taking in his uniform and his ticket and giving him a respectful nod. He gave me a nod as well as we passed him, but I barely noticed it, and he was gone, swirling into the crowds behind us before I could think to turn and return the gesture. I could not have turned anyway—my neck seemed to have been soldered into my shoulders in a straight line. I touched my gloved fingers discreetly to my face and sponged the sweat from my temples.

The platform was crowded, the cold air mixing with the warmth of hundreds of bodies in a horrible miasma. I tried to cover my nose. My feet were numb with cold while sweat dripped under my arms and down my back. Someone bumped into me and I stumbled.

Alex caught me, his arm coming around my waist as naturally as breathing. “Jo?” he said.

“I'm all right.”

He turned away, kept his arm around me. “Pardon me,” he said as he arrowed through the crowd. “Make way, please. My wife is not well. Make way.”

People made way, of course—Alex never had to raise his voice to be obeyed. It was something in the tone that made you do what he asked almost before he'd finished the sentence. But people looked past him to me, alarm on their faces. A woman pulled her child away by the hand, and two girls, arm in arm, stepped back. Influenza had
begun its deadly sweep, leaving piles of bodies in its wake. I tried to look normal, to meet people's eyes and give them a nod.
Not influenza, no, no.
I had the presence of mind to catch one woman's eye and discreetly pat my stomach. Immediately I saw the relief on her face.

“Make way, please. My wife is unwell.” Alex maneuvered me to a bench on the platform, that someone—whoever it was, I never saw—immediately vacated, and sat me down. He crouched in front of me, balanced on those long legs of his. “You shouldn't have come,” he said.

Now that I was sitting and I could see all of him, I felt a little better. I had a clear view of the long, lean shape of him, the dark wool trousers I'd watched him put on that morning, his heavy boots. The hem of his winter wool coat rested on his thighs, and he'd partially unbuttoned it, so I could see the uniform he wore beneath. He set down the rucksack he'd been carrying over one shoulder and leaned in toward me, his eyes never leaving my face.

“What is it, Jo?” he asked. “Tell me.”

“I don't know,” I confessed. “I didn't feel like this until this morning. I know I haven't been getting enough sleep.”

He spoke nearly in a whisper, to avoid alarming anyone who could overhear. “If it's influenza, for God's sake . . .”

“No, no.” I smiled at him. “I really do feel better now that I'm sitting down. It's nothing like that at all.”

I hadn't convinced him, I could tell, but his train was leaving in minutes. He glanced behind him at the track, then turned back to me. “Can you get home?”

“Yes, of course.” I blinked as pain shot up the back of my head as if I'd been speared with a knitting needle. “This is stupid. I'm here to say good-bye to you, not to make you worry. Please don't.”

He glanced back at the train again. In one motion, he pulled off one of his heavy leather gloves and touched his fingers to my face. His skin against mine felt icy, and I realized it was because my own was burning hot. The touch was almost painful, as if my skin was swollen
and thin as rice paper, but still I leaned into him as the world tilted a little.

“I can't miss this train,” he said.

“I know,” I replied, my eyes drifting half closed. “The war awaits.”

“I want to tell the war to fuck itself,” he said, his coarseness shocking me into a smile, as he'd intended. “I do. There's part of me that would do it in an instant. But, Jo . . .”

I nodded and put my gloved hand over his. “I hate the war,” I said. I felt strange, disconnected, as if I were listening to someone else. My spine ached.

“Jesus.” Alex pulled off his other glove and put both hands to my face, the effect like icy blades on my skin. “Promise me you'll see a doctor. Today.”

“I promise.” Again someone else was speaking through my lips, making words I barely understood.

There was a high, shrill whistle, a warning that the train was about to leave, that threatened to split my head in two. I focused on staying still and not throwing up from the pain and the dizziness, still smiling at Alex as if nothing were wrong. He was leaving. I mustn't worry him.

He glanced at the train one last time, then picked up his rucksack and put it over his shoulder. He took my face in his hands again and leaned close to me, his clean-shaven cheek against mine, his breath on my ear. “I have done everything wrong,” he said to me, “everything, and you will never forgive me. But stay alive and I will come back to you. I will come back to you. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said.
No,
my mind screamed, as high and shrill as the train whistle, though my tongue could not form the words.
No, no, don't leave, I love you, don't leave.

Then he kissed my lips and let me go.

I gasped. My mind scrambled through its fog. I tried to stand, but my legs wouldn't obey me. Alex vanished into the crowd—gone, gone.
Had he looked back at me? Already I couldn't remember. It had all been so fast. What sort of kiss had it been? I knew all of Alex's kisses, what every one of them meant. Had it been one of his passionate ones, or one of his sweeter, gentler ones? I didn't know.

I finally levered myself from the bench and pushed myself through the crowd. Now I was just a flushed, red-eyed girl like dozens of others on the platform, stumbling about in grief. I tried to get to the train—I had no idea how long I'd been trying when the train gave a whistle and pulled away. I was pummeled on all sides, pushed and pulled by the crowd, by women waving handkerchiefs, crying children. My cheeks were wet with tears.

Had he looked back at me?

I had no recollection of how I got home that day—there were gaps of time that were utterly blank, as if I were asleep. I did not go to a doctor. I could recall sitting on the stairs of the Chalcot Road apartment, pulling off my shoes and sobbing as I rubbed my icy feet. I remembered crying out in pain as I pulled my clothes off my aching skin. I remembered thinking that it was influenza after all, and that I would die, and that Alex would be disappointed because he had told me not to.

I was sick for a week, sweating and shivering in bed. I did, in fact, have influenza—though I got away with a milder strain that was not deadly, like the Spanish flu. After a week I was as wrung out as a dishrag, the act of merely feeding myself so exhausting I could barely perform it. I stayed in our dim apartment, one day after another. I had no friends or family, in London or anywhere. No one came.

I lay in bed one night as I was recovering, listening to the rain out the window and watching the wall. The signs had come that day that once again I was not pregnant. I would not have Alex's child. I was alone.

Someone should write a poem, I thought, about the women. Not just about the men marching bravely to war and dying, but about their
wives, their girls, their mothers and sisters and daughters, sitting in silence and screaming into the darkness. Unable to fight, unable to stop it, unable to tell the war to fuck itself. We fought our war, too, it seemed to me, and if it was a war of a different kind, the pain of it was no more bearable. Someone should write a poem about the women.

But I already knew that no one ever would.

W
e were approaching All Hallows' Eve, the tail end of autumn, when the last drifts of wet, loamy scent left the air and the world began to lose color.

“I'm sorry you got dragged into this, Cousin Jo,” Martin said. He tugged his scarf tighter around his neck. “You must know it wasn't my idea.”

“I know,” I replied. We were standing outside, waiting for Cora. Martin and Cora were to go walking, and I was to accompany them, the awkward old stick of a chaperone. It wasn't the first time.

“She's rather nice, you know.” Martin turned and looked back toward the house, where the front door opened and the figure of Cora, swathed in a wool coat that looked expensive even from a distance, emerged. “I think I may ask her today.”

I hadn't thought I would be surprised, but I was. “Are you certain?” I asked.

“Mother has a schedule,” he said with a hint of humor. “In any case, I think we'll get on well enough, for as long as I'm alive.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Please don't tell me you've been saying that to her,” I said. “It's hardly the ideal way to court a woman.”

That made him smile. “I haven't, I promise. Though I hardly know the ideal way to court a woman, do I? I've never done it.”

“I'm sure you're doing fine.”

He gave me a curious look. “How did Alex court you?” he asked.

The memory gripped me heavily for a moment, fraught with emotion, then let me go. “He took me to dinner,” I replied.

“That was all?”

“That was all.”

Martin gave a low whistle.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Manders.” This was Cora, approaching us with her hands in the pockets of her expensive coat, a perfectly matched cloche hat on her head. Despite the sophisticated clothes, her gait was awkward, the coat hanging heavy on her gawky frame. She looked almost pretty, the cold air flushing her thin cheeks beneath her tilted eyes. She gave me a smile of even, white teeth.

“Good afternoon, Cora,” I said. If she insisted on addressing me like an ancient matron, I might as well act like one.

Martin glanced back at the house, where undoubtedly at least one parent was watching us from a window. “Let's head off and figure out today's route.”

He offered Cora his arm, and she took it, squeezing it a little and turning the smile on him. Martin said something to her as they walked, and Cora laughed, the sound honking over the trees. “You're a funny one,” she said, her voice drifting back to me where I followed behind them. Then she leaned in toward him and said something I couldn't hear.

I sighed. Chaperoning was positively the worst job in the world, worse than taking Dottie's abuse in the library or listening to Casparov's innuendoes. So far, I'd had to sit out of earshot as the two of them strolled among the abandoned stables and the overgrown tennis courts. I'd brought a book with me the second time, when it became clear I didn't particularly need to stare at the courting couple as they sat side by side, talking quietly, Cora occasionally laughing at Martin's jokes. Today they'd decided to walk in the woods. I swallowed my dread and tried to appear calm about it. It wouldn't do for the dried-up
chaperone to go raving about mists and dogs barking and Martin's dead sister at the crucial point of the courtship.

When we were well into the trees, Martin stopped and Cora dropped her hand from his arm.

“Where d'you want to go?” Martin asked her.

Cora snapped her sleeve smartly and checked her watch. “I don't know. How long will satisfy them?”

“Forty-five minutes or so,” Martin said. He turned to me. “What do you think, Cousin Jo?”

I shrugged. “Forty-five minutes sounds good to me.”

“All right,” Martin said. The wind blew through the trees, and the tips of his ears were already growing red with cold. He turned to Cora. “That gives me enough time to take you over the rise toward the village before we have to turn back. It's a bit steep in places, though. What do you think?”

She bit her lip, her eyes on Martin's face. “I'm dressed nice and I didn't eat much breakfast,” she said. “Can we do something easier?”

In that moment, I began to like Cora Staffron. Despite her thin frame and no doubt knobby knees, she was hardy and could have done the walk—or even a longer one—without losing her breath. It was Martin who would struggle. I silently applauded her.

“Easier? Yes, I suppose.” Martin thought it over, oblivious to the subtext. “We'll go toward the village. Then I'll bring you around the
back way by the path through the woods. No rocks that way. Sound good?”

“Well, sure,” Cora said.

Martin turned back to me. “Right back here in forty-five minutes, then. Do you have somewhere to go, Cousin?”

I paused in surprise, and his cheeks flushed. It had been demeaning enough to follow them about before, but now I was to be overtly abandoned. I recovered myself. “Yes, of course,” I said.

Cora looked at me brightly. “You should have brought some birding binoculars. You could have smuggled them under your coat and no one watching would know.”

I stared at her. She really did see me as ancient. “Or perhaps I should have brought a flask.”

She only laughed. “Wouldn't that be funny!”

I agreed it would be, and we went our separate ways. It was a relief of sorts—I realized as I stepped into the shadowed silence that I had been straining even to make the most meaningless small talk. But I did not want to be alone in the woods, even on a sunny day. When they were out of sight, I paused on the path, and my gloved hand slipped into my pocket and touched the piece of paper there.

Keep it together, Jo.

The fear closed around me for a full moment as I listened to the soft sounds of the forest, the wind rushing through the trees, the far-off calls of birds. I could not go back to the house, or everyone would know that Martin and Cora were alone. And I could not follow them and intrude.

So I kept walking. Martin had told me once of a particularly nice vista over the sea, in the other direction from the village, so I took the path away from my charges. I made my way over the treacherous ground on numb feet, stepping over ruts and puddles, sweating beneath my coat and hat as I climbed a rise, the wind chilling the thin perspiration on my forehead.

When I finally reached the place, I stopped in silent wonder. I was at the very western edge of the woods, on the side facing away from the house and the village, at the place where the trees ended. Just past my feet was a clearing that fell off and sloped sharply down, and beyond it the rocky terrain wound along the coast toward the horizon. The ocean was gray and cold below me, the shore sharp and forbidding, but still the view was breathtaking. I let the wind buffet the brim of my hat and the collar of my coat, taking in the vast expanse.

Just visible several miles down the shore was a low and blocky set of buildings, clustered within a fenced-in square of land. It sat quiet and dull in the sunshine, placed right on the edge of the water, where several small boats were moored. This must be the Ministry of Fisheries, where Colonel Mabry claimed to be assisting somehow. It looked sleepy and silent, and I saw not a whisper of movement.

I turned back to look at the water. There were no pleasure boats, no sloops or neat little sails. This was choppy water, deep and cold. Far on the horizon was the silhouette of a large ship, its smokestacks belting into the sky. Seabirds crisscrossed the shoreline, calling to one another in high, shrill voices. I saw not one other human figure.

I am alone,
I thought.

The wind stung my eyes, but the tears on my cheeks were not from the cold. Here, in this remote place where no one could see me, I did not wipe them away, but let them dry, salty, on my skin.

Keep it together, Jo.

I pulled the letter I'd received this morning from my pocket, unfolded it, and looked at it for the hundredth time. The wind flapped the page sharply, but I held on, watching the words blur.

We are very sorry to inform you that Mrs. Christopher passed away last night in her sleep. There was no warning, and she spent yesterday as usual, so the doctors have declared that her heart stopped as she was sleeping.
Though this news must grieve you, please accept our assurances that Mrs. Christopher went to her Maker peacefully, without struggle or pain, and that she rests now in the arms of Heaven as innocent as a child, as all of our patients do.

There are certain arrangements to be made . . .

I lifted the letter higher, watched it flap in the wind. I thought of my mother, her beautiful hair, her porcelain skin, the fine bones of her wrists, the dark half circles under her eyes like bruises. All of those years with the refrain in the back of my mind—
Where is Mother? What is she doing? Is she all right?
—were over. She had been a mystery, a labyrinth of rooms I could not know, and now she was gone, unknowable forever, and I had no one left to worry about. Had she remembered me, even as she died? Had there been any memory of me at all?

I doubted it. Mother and I were strangers; last night I had been in my bedroom at Wych Elm House, reading a book by lamplight, as she had been dying. But without Alex she was all I had, the only thing mooring me to the earth. With Mother gone, I suddenly felt as insubstantial as the leaves in Wych Elm House, as transient as Frances Forsyth's face printed in nitrate on a piece of paper. Someday I would vanish, and no one would ever know I'd been.

Where is your Mother?

The wind tried to snatch the letter from my hand, but I would not let it go. Eventually I folded it again and put it back in my pocket. Then I wiped my eyes.

I turned my steps away and walked back toward the path, to meet Martin and Cora as they came my way.