The Dust That Falls from Dreams (20 page)

‘But he’s going to kill us all!’ cried Mrs McCosh.

‘Stay away, Mama, and he’ll only kill me.’

‘How can you say such dreadful things? Don’t you mind dying? He’s not even a gentleman. What do you think people will say when they hear you have been immured in a room with a man to whom you are not even related?’

‘He was Ash’s best friend,’ said Rosie, bridling, ‘and I’ve spent the whole war looking after men who weren’t gentlemen.’

‘Heaven knows what it might have done to your morals,’ replied her mother, whereupon Rosie went back into the room and re-emerged with a long-necked Wedgwood vase, which she hurled at her mother with extraordinary force, so that it shattered on the wall, next to her head. As Mrs McCosh looked at her, wideeyed with astonished outrage, Rosie said coldly, ‘What do you
say of the morals of someone who did practically nothing for four years while millions of young men died?’ Then she went back into the sickroom, slamming the door behind her. Mrs McCosh sat down in a chair on the landing and said to herself, ‘But I got a gun after Myrtle was killed. I went to welcome the wounded at Charing Cross. I had Belgian ladies to tea. I took fruit to the Cottage Hospital.’ She would never have dared confront her own mother in such way when she had been young, and now she was quite uncertain as to how to comport herself. It was true that she had greatly provoked her own mother, but now she was helpless in the face of her own angry adult daughter. One thing she knew was that it was no good expecting her husband to take her side. ‘I am quite alone,’ she said, and decided to write to the King.

Rosie sat at Hutch’s bedside, not worrying about whether or not she was going to catch the Spanish influenza. Hutch was almost her last connection with Ash, now that his brothers were also dead, and his parents paralysed by grief. She fetched her madonna from under the bed in her own room, and put it under that of Sergeant Hutchinson, and she brought in her Bible and her prayer book, and the rosary that nobody knew she had, and which she had learned to use from a Roman Catholic missal that she had bought at Westminster Cathedral. Fingering the beads, she repeatedly told the Mother of God that she was blessed amongst women, and her muttering certainly seemed to have a calming effect on her patient.

Hutch was running an extremely high temperature, he was coughing drily in his stupor, and his tongue was coated in a thick grey fur. His eyes and nose were running, and when he awoke it was almost impossible for him to talk, so sore was his throat. Rosie knew that it was quite unrealistic to expect him to eat anything, so she gave him honey from a spoon for his throat, tea and weak vegetable soups, planning to add milk and eggs when he began to recover.

In a hospital, Hutch would have been given mustard baths, but Rosie was not strong enough to carry him to a bath on her own, so she propped him on the side of the bed and made mustard baths for his feet, which he did enjoy when he was lucid. Millicent
ran up and down stairs with bowls of freshly boiled water, into which Rosie stirred Friar’s Balsam, so that the air in his room could be kept moist in appeasement of his cough.

For his throat, Rosie made a cold compress of methylated spirit and water, and poultices of linseed for his chest and for the space between his shoulder blades, to relieve the pains. She realised all over again that she actually enjoyed the extreme fatigue of caring for a desperate case. To help him sleep profoundly she gave him a weak solution of potassium bromide, and to his recumbent and sterterous body she read the poems of Rupert Brooke, as if by reading to one of his comrades she could reach Ash’s shade. As he was unconscious, she also read her own poems, and this gave her a strange feeling of excitement and agitation. ‘I should work more at this,’ she thought. ‘This is something I really do want to do.’ She had no idea whether her verses were any good, but it was like a forefinger prodding her in the small of the back. She thought that, even if she were not particularly good at present, she would eventually become so.

In the meantime Mr McCosh sent a telegram to Netley to inform them that his daughter was fully engaged in looking after a sick soldier in Eltham, and requesting leave, which was shortly granted, since the flow of new casualties to that hospital had abruptly slowed to a trickle after 11 November. He sent another telegram to the police station in Walthamstow, asking them to locate Hutchinson’s family and tell them the news, and he sent yet another telegram to Armoury House to reassure them that their soldier had not deserted but was in fact gravely ill.

Millicent was in an extreme state of distress, brought on by helplessness. She knew that Rosie was right to exclude her from the sickroom, but at the same time she could not bear it, and could scarcely concentrate on her work. She made frequent mistakes, and was inclined to run sobbing from the room at short notice. Cookie found herself with a greatly increased workload, and grew bad-tempered, so that when Mrs McCosh unwisely accused her of deliberately spoiling the food, she inadvertently prompted a resignation crisis that Mr McCosh was only just able to avert by means of charm and his considerable ability to cajole.
‘Don’t ever do that again,’ he said to his wife, ‘I practically had to offer to marry her.’

‘The servants are the concern of the lady of the house,’ she replied, to which he responded, ‘And the lady of the house is the concern of its master.’

After four days, it became evident to Rosie that Sergeant Hutchinson’s disease had become malignant. She saw a strange heliotrope cyanosis developing, there was discharge in his ears, and he had terrible pains in his abdomen and chest that reduced him to breathless spasms. When she listened, she was sure that he was developing pleurisy, and when he began to cough up something sticky and bloody, she knew he had got pneumonia.

At this point she did what she should have done before, and called Dr Scott. He himself had just recovered from the disease, which he had caught in mid-October, and was now suffering from a kind of depression both in body and spirit that made it very difficult for him to work at all.

He examined the patient and listened to Rosie’s account of what she had done, and her apologies in case she had proved inadequate. He looked at her sadly and said, ‘My dear, you couldn’t have done better. You’ve done exactly what any doctor such as myself would have recommended. I have always had the greatest admiration for what you and your sister Ottilie have done in this war, and indeed, I would nowadays, after everything I have seen and learned, go so far as to say “Piffle” to anyone who asserts that a woman cannot make a good doctor. However, he now has pneumonia, as you have rightly found for yourself, and against a bacillus there is absolutely nothing one can do. It will certainly be some kind of pneumococcus. I wouldn’t be surprised if nephritis has also set in. I would have to take a urine sample, of course. I fear that his heart has been considerably weakened.’

‘Is there no hope?’ asked Rosie tearfully.

‘He’s going to drown,’ said the good doctor. ‘It is, at least, a peaceful death. Was he a man of faith? I think you might do well to call in a priest.’

‘Oh!’ exclaimed Rosie. ‘After getting through the whole war! It’s so unfair!’

‘He didn’t get through the war, my dear. He has been exhausted
by the war, and this is how it’s got him after all.’ He paused and sighed. ‘We all die, my dear, some soon and some late, but we all die. One might even feel a little envious.’

‘I know what you mean, Doctor,’ said Rosie softly.

Sergeant Leonard Hutchinson, as so many do, waited until dawn before he died, whilst Rosie was asleep beside him in her chair, her Bible open at the Book of Job. Her former colleague might have seen angels in the form of his comrades coming to carry him away, but there was no one to see anything. He breathed less and less often, more and more shallowly, until there was a pause that seemed to last for minutes, and then he breathed one last rasping breath.

When Rosie awoke, she leaned over him and kissed him on the forehead. Before leaving the room she turned the mirrors to face the wall, then she went down the garden to Bouncer’s grave and sat in the smoke-fogged air until she grew too cold.

At his funeral in Walthamstow, where Mrs McCosh surprised everyone by her wailing, shots were fired over his grave, and the shell of one more valiant soul was swallowed up by the ravenous earth.

Millicent was prostrated by grief and by the collapse of her beautiful dreams, and it was the sisters and Cookie who carried her through it. Rosie learned very quickly not to offer her the consolation of religion. The first time she tried, Millicent turned on her with fiery eyes and said, ‘No! No!’ running away with her hands over her ears. It was God she blamed for the theft.

Oddly enough nobody in the family was infected by the influenza until the second wave struck in late February. On the day that France proposed the idea of setting its frontier with Germany at the Rhine, the whole household, including Cookie and Millicent, were abed, helpless with fever, whilst Rosie struggled to look after them, although herself most terribly ill. It was only when they were beginning to recover that she took to her bed and slept in a fever for three days, tormented by strange dreams about weddings, and about the wounded men she had attended at Netley.

R
osie was waiting for the cats’ meat man. She was perched on the window seat of the large room at the front of the house, where the family Bible lay open on a lectern. Here, each evening, her unbelieving but respectable father would read the next chapter, and then they would all say the Lord’s Prayer together before going into supper in a modest and humble frame of mind. They called it ‘the morning room’ even though it had no clearly discernible connection with mornings and did not receive the full light of the sun until the afternoon. It overlooked a classical porch, painted white, and a neat gravel driveway devised in the form of a crescent, so that carriages might have no trouble coming in and going out. This crescent contained a patch of lawn planted with the young walnut tree whose leaves Mr McCosh loved to see turning yellow in the autumn.

Rosie was not busy. There was a limit to the amount of time one could spend sewing or reading, or playing Ezra Read on the piano, or walking down to the Tarn to watch people throwing tennis balls for their dogs, or thinking about all the people who had been killed, or just looking at the rose beds, and now she was fretting with boredom. It was utterly horrible to have nothing to do after having been frantically busy for years. When she was bored, her mouth filled with a metallic taste, as if she had been sucking on a copper penny. She had the tune of ‘Gilbert the Filbert’ running through her mind, as she seemed to have done ever since 1914. It had become so much a part of her stream of thought that she barely even noticed it any more.

Although the room faced west, it received plenty of light even quite early in the morning, because its windows were very large. Sometimes Rosie and her sisters just sat on the bench that had been built into the bay, and watched the world go by in the street outside. It was upsetting to see so many amputees, but on the
other hand it was nice to watch the costermonger with his barrow full of apples, and the fishmonger who brought his fish up from Brighton in dog carts that dripped with melting ice. Rosie did not know what kind of dogs they were, but they were lean, powerful and shaggy, and clearly enjoyed their gruelling job.

Best of all was the cats’ meat man, a strong, roaring Irish fellow in his late forties, with a patriarchal ginger beard, who passed up the street every other day with a basket of horseflesh on his head, fresh from the knacker’s yard. Unlike the other mongers, he varied his cry from day to day, and it was always amusing to hear whatever he came up with next, but it was usually a variation on keeping your cat on the mat happy and fat.

So Rosie sat on the long blue cushion with nothing to do but wait for the cats’ meat man, even though, despite being an inveterate rescuer of abandoned and lost cats, she did not at that time have a cat at all. Before he could pass by, however, a Phelon & Moore with sidecar turned into the driveway trailing a pretty plume of blue smoke. It came to a halt, the driver fiddled with the levers on the handlebars, and the machine gradually died, with a series of putterings and small percussions that sounded like petulant afterthoughts. The driver was wearing goggles and a leather flying helmet, and before he removed them, Rosie had the exciting but impossible idea that it might be Ash, not dead after all. There was something very similar about his personal atmosphere. She leapt to her feet, her heart fluttering, and put her hand to her lips. He dismounted, flexed his shoulders as if he had been riding a long time, came up the steps to the door and rang the brass bell vigorously.

No servant came to answer. There was no footman or butler any more, and the two female servants who were left were down in the kitchen and the scullery. Rosie hesitated. She was reluctant to open the door in case the visitor might think that she was a servant, even though she was far from being attired as one, and in any case, the sight of the young man who might be somewhat like Ash had made her feel nervous and apprehensive. She felt that she just wanted to go to the back of the house and out into the garden.

Nonetheless she took the few steps to the door and opened
it. She could not help but giggle a little at the sight of the young man, because he was wearing enormous fug boots, a Sidcot flying suit, and looked somewhat like a panda in reverse, his face black with travel dust, and the rings around his eyes perfectly white.

‘I do believe it’s Rosie!’ exclaimed the young man. He removed his cap, and held out his arms as if to embrace her, but then remembered himself, and extended a hand for her to shake. ‘Remember me?’ he asked mischievously. She noticed that he smelled not unpleasantly of castor oil.

Nonplussed by his informality, she hesitated before exclaiming, ‘Daniel? Daniel Pitt? From next door?’

The young man smiled. ‘We haven’t seen each other since we were about ten, I wouldn’t think.’

‘I did get a little news about you from Ash, at the beginning of the war. It was never quite the same after you and Archie moved away. The Pals were very diminished.’

‘Well, we couldn’t live in our former style, unfortunately, after Father was killed. We found a little place in Frensham, and then we moved to Sussex, to Partridge Green. And now I’m calling in to see my old playmates. How is Sophie? And Christabel? And Ottie? Are you all well? And your mother and father?’

‘All well,’ said Rosie, ‘but everything’s changed such a lot, as you can imagine. The servants have gone, and my mother is really not herself any more. She was caught in the Folkestone raid, and she’s hasn’t been the same since.’

‘Oh, I am sorry. And Bouncer? I suppose he’s long dead by now. I loved wrestling with him. Such a nice dog.’

‘He’s in the orchard, with a rose climbing out of him, and up a Bramley.’

‘I must go and pay my respects. I remember when you found him and brought him back. Your mother wasn’t best pleased.’

‘No, she wasn’t. It’s been the same with all the cats, but she comes to love them in the end. Do come in. It’s a great surprise to see you. I’m very pleased, of course,’ said Rosie, and she stood aside to let him in. ‘I’m very sorry that I didn’t reply to your sweet letter about Ash. About being grateful on behalf of France. I was…well, I was too…’

‘Please, I do understand. I wasn’t expecting a reply. After I sent
it I wondered if you’d even remember who I was. Where shall I put my motorcycling paraphernalia?’

‘Oh, just leave it in the morning room. There’s no one to take care of it just now. We don’t have servants any more, just a cook and a maid.’

‘It’ll take care of itself,’ he said, and he unfastened his flying jacket, laid it across a chair, and put his goggles and helmet on top of it.

‘I’ve just remembered the last time I saw you,’ said Rosie.

‘Yes?’

‘You came round to say goodbye, and you gave each of us a little box wrapped up in newspaper, with string instead of ribbons, and we opened them after you’d gone.’

‘Oh gosh, I do remember.’

‘Inside mine was a frog, and you gave Christabel a toad, and Sophie had a newt, and Ottie had some kind of fat little golden-coloured snake. It was so horrid of you. You can’t imagine the panic, particularly when Ottie opened the box and saw the snake.’

‘It was a slow-worm. It actually isn’t a snake at all. It’s a kind of lizard without legs. If you pick it up by the tail, it drops off.’

‘I remember,’ said Rosie. ‘Believe me, I remember. Our footman picked it up, and he was left with a tail writhing and wriggling in his hand, and the rest of it went to hide under the chaise longue.’

‘Did you all scream?’

‘We certainly did.’

‘I was only ten. My sense of humour is a little more sophisticated these days. Making girls scream plays a very small part in it.’

‘You put a worm down my front once.’

‘Did I really? Oh dear. Would you like me to go?’

‘Oh no. Do stay and have some tea. I’ll ring for Millicent. I expect she’s in the kitchen. I’m afraid that Sophie and the others went for a stroll down to the Tarn.’

‘Oh, I remember the Tarn. Everyone said that it was so deep it had no bottom.’

‘They still say that, and it’s still not true.’

As Daniel sipped his tea and munched his way through a plate
of shortbread, Rosie took her chance to see what he was like these days. He was not like Ash at all. His hair was black and shiny, he had penetrating and worryingly blue eyes, and he wore a thin military moustache. He spoke with the slightly languid drawl that officers liked to affect, but did not exaggerate it as some did, and he did not, thank God, wear a monocle. He was long-legged and slenderly built, which gave him the misleading air of being even taller than he really was, and there was something vigorous about him that appealed to her. She was an active person herself, but these days she seemed condemned to spend far too much time as a sedentary.

‘How are you? How are things?’ asked Rosie.

Daniel laughed softly. ‘A perfect mess, as always.’

‘And how is your dear mother?’ asked Rosie, and Daniel laughed again.

‘She hardly changes. A little grey and lined, but still elegant and very naughty. She still pokes people with a parasol and flirts with the postman. She’s as French as she ever was, and only speaks English if she has to, except that sometimes we speak a truly dreadful kind of mishmash of French and English at home. She can now pronounce the “th”, though. No more zis and zat.’

‘I’d almost forgotten you were half French,’ said Rosie.

‘Maman
never lets me forget it. She insists upon pronouncing my name the French way.’ He paused. ‘It turned out that being francophone was quite useful during the war.’

‘I imagine it must have been.’ She sipped her tea. ‘Oh, you might be just the man! Can you read something to me?’ Before he could assent, she dashed out of the room. He heard her footsteps on the stairs, ascending and then descending. A little breathless, she came into the room and handed him a very prettily bound book with a soft leather cover that had ‘Autographs’ inscribed in gilt italic writing on the front of it. She took it from him again and flicked through it. ‘Here we are,’ she said, and handed it back to him. He began to read:
‘Quittant sa douce canadienne, le gars se fait soldat
–’

‘No, no,’ interjected Rosie. ‘Can you translate it? My French isn’t terribly good.’

‘Oh, I see. Sorry. It says “Leaving his sweet Canadian girl, the
fellow makes himself a soldier in the English army in France where the fighting is. When leaving he said softly to himself, ‘Canada, I will love you always, the woods, the rivers and the fields. But I also love the Canadian girl, faithful in the country where she waits for me.” ’

‘Oh dear,’ said Rosie, her eyes welling with tears. ‘Poor man. That was Corporal Larvière. He got septicaemia.’ She reached out her hand and took the book, flicking through it to find another passage. She handed it back and he saw
‘Chantons soldat chantons même si les blessures saignent
…’ He translated: ‘ “Let’s sing soldier let’s sing even if our wounds bleed and if our voices have to rise higher than the highest torment louder than the cannons even if the wounds bleed and the heart breaks sing of hope and implacable hate by this beautiful autumn sun and the pride of remaining kind when vengeance would seem to us so good.”

‘That’s extraordinary,’ said Daniel. ‘No punctuation but it makes a beautiful kind of sense.’

‘He was called Georges,’ said Rosie.

‘Gone west?’

‘No, but there are things he’ll never be able to do. He would have been a wonderful father, I expect.’

‘This is a tremendous book,’ said Daniel. ‘I’d like to read all of it one of these days. Such lovely cartoons. All the cap badges and photographs, the silly rhymes, the fond messages. It’s a treasure.’

‘I’ve got three,’ said Rosie. ‘I look at them and it makes me think that those years of hard work really were worth it. Quite a lot of them say that they love me and will never forget. I mean love in the proper sense. I loved them too. They were my boys.’

‘Did you know that both my older brothers died in South Africa? Only just after my father?’

‘I see their memorial every time I go to St John’s,’ said Rosie. ‘What happened?’

‘Enteric fever got one and an ambush got the other. You can imagine how dreadful it all was for my poor mother after what happened to my father.’

‘I can imagine,’ said Rosie. ‘What regiment are you in? I’m not sure I recognise your uniform.’

‘This is the important bit,’ said Daniel, pointing to the wings
above his left chest pocket. ‘Royal Air Force. Personally I preferred it when we were the Royal Flying Corps, but reorganising everything is a military passion, I’m afraid, and they decided to bung us together with the Royal Naval Air Service. We have completely incompatible habits and traditions, even in the manner of toasting the King. They sit and we stand. The rest of the uniform is Service Corps. Not very glamorous, but it’s what I could scrounge when I came over, and all my proper Royal Flying Corps stuff is being laundered, and we haven’t got our RAF ones yet. It’s a bit complicated. By the end of the war none of us was wearing anything that was related to the unit he was with. I had a wonderful Sikh uniform, but I left it behind. The soldiers at the trenches all looked like tramps, tied up with bailing twine and wearing captured hats. And boots without socks or puttees.’

‘I remember,’ said Rosie. ‘What did you mean by “came over”? From where?’

‘I was in India. North-West Frontier, busy with all those tribesmen who want to kill each other and us too. I was in Rattray’s Sikhs, but then I volunteered for the Frontier Scouts. My brother Archie was out there with me. I expect you remember him. He got in the papers once.’ She nodded, and he continued. ‘Anyway, I did a very disgraceful thing.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yes. I deserted.’

She put her hand to her mouth in horror.

‘I didn’t want to spend the war involved in some sideshow, so I deserted. We had three months’ leave per annum anyway, so I took ship home and immediately volunteered for the Flying Corps. By the time they caught up with me I was back in uniform and serving in France.’