The Storms of War (24 page)

‘But you will have to go to war, sir?’

He shook his head. ‘No indeed. And I won’t claim weak lungs like Janus. I’ll tell them no.’

‘But you can’t do that!’

‘Women don’t fight. Some of you could, I’d bet. Why should we? Not till Asquith himself is in the trenches with the King will I go there too.’

They had reached a tea shop, a rather dowdy-looking place with cakes that were obviously painted and artificial in the window. Celia had not been to a tea shop since Verena had taken her seven years ago, after shopping in Kensington. Emmeline was clattering through, calling out to the staff to pull tables together and asking for their best cakes. Three sleepy-looking waiters leapt to attention and hurried off for tea. They all sat down and Celia found herself squeezed in between Mr Sparks and the smart woman in purple.
She was still reeling at the thought of Mr Asquith and the King in a trench.

‘And glasses too!’ called out Mr Janus. He took out from under his chair a black bottle with a golden top.

‘Champagne!’ said Emmeline, clapping her hands.

‘Got at I can’t tell you what expense,’ he said. ‘Secret stuff!’

‘Don’t wave it around,’ said the smart woman. ‘They might take it from us. Lloyd George will outlaw drink soon, I tell you.’

‘I read in the newspaper that he said that out of the Germans, the Austrians and drink, our greatest foe was drink,’ volunteered Celia.

‘He would say that,’ said Mr Sparks. ‘Anything to deny the workers some relief.’

Mr Janus laughed. ‘Anyway, no police around here. That’s the good thing about war. No one to check up on us.’

‘There is nothing good about war,’ said Mr Sparks sternly, as a waiter placed glasses in front of them. Another brought three steaming pots of tea.

‘Oh come now, Rufus,’ said the smart woman. ‘I imagine you have been trying to indoctrinate Miss de Witt here.’ She held out her hand to Celia. ‘Pleased to meet you, Miss de Witt. I am Jemima Webb.
Miss
Webb, and not about to change it. Don’t listen to a word Mr Sparks says. Where would we be without the willingness of men to fight and defend what is right?’

‘Why don’t you start passing out white feathers now?’

‘No, indeed not, Rufus. I’ve told you many times that men must be encouraged by fair means.’

‘By which you mean romantic pipe dreams about the King?’

‘Oh stop it, you two,’ said Emmeline, holding up one of the teapots. ‘Who is for tea before it stews itself to bits?’ The waiter took it from her and she smiled her thanks, then turned her head to the two other men at the table. ‘Now, George and Edward, I don’t believe you have met my sister, Miss Celia de Witt?’

‘Surely the young lady is Miss de Witt now that you are married, Mrs Janus?’ said George, a thin-faced man with handsome eyes.

Emmeline blushed. ‘That’s true! Celia, you have had a promotion thanks to me.’

‘It is a pleasure to meet you, Miss de Witt,’ said George.

‘I concur,’ said Edward.

‘We have heard so much about you, Miss de Witt,’ said Miss Webb. ‘Very splendid that you could join us on this happy day.’

Celia realised that her bunch of pink flowers was crushed on her lap under the table. She pulled them out. In front of her was a sad artificial flower in a tiny vase. She plucked it out and put her flowers in the vase instead. ‘There!’ she said. She could not manage any other words. She knew what Miss Webb would expect her to say: that she was happy too, that her parents would have loved to see the wedding. But she could not. ‘It has been a surprise,’ was all she could manage.

She thought with shame of Verena giving her money, hoping she might bring Emmeline back with her. At this precise moment, her mother was in bed – would Jennie read to her in Celia’s absence? – thinking of Celia, probably picturing her arguing with Emmeline, pressing her to come home. Not drinking champagne, celebrating with people she did not know. And yet Emmeline looked so happy.

‘Come on, new little sister,’ said Mr Janus. ‘Tell us what you think.’

Celia was blushing furiously. ‘I – I always thought you wished for a great ceremony, Emmeline.’

Emmeline waved her hand. ‘Oh, that was in the old days. Everybody gets married in a hurry now. That sort of thing just gets in the way.’ Mr Janus put his arm around her and she settled against him, holding up her bouquet.

‘Now,’ said Miss Webb, putting her hand on Celia’s, ‘let us have no more of Mr Sparks and his ideas. We should all help the cause. Women too. Have you thought about it, Miss de Witt?’

‘She is too young!’ called Emmeline from across the table. ‘What are you thinking, Jemima?’ A waiter put down a plate of iced buns. ‘Have a cake and stop talking.’

Miss Webb took a bun and popped one on to Celia’s plate.
‘I have signed up, Miss de Witt. I think it is our duty. I have volunteered to be a nurse, a VAD. I hope to be assigned a hospital soon.’

‘So you will have a job patching up the poor souls that our government sends to war,’ said Rufus. ‘Smoothing their brows and making them think their sacrifice was worth something.’

‘Oh stop that. The good in life must be fought for, Rufus. Like the vote; we fight for that.’ She patted Emmeline on the hand.

‘It’s thanks to all the fighting that we got married at all,’ said Emmeline. ‘The minister is so used to marrying men at the last minute who don’t want to go to France as single men.’

Mr Sparks shrugged. ‘It’s different, Jem, to fighting for the vote. By which you mean parading around the street with placards.’

Jemima turned her back on him. ‘I can count on your support for that, can’t I, Miss de Witt?’

Celia thought carefully, holding her glass. The last time she’d really thought of the campaigners was before the war began, when Tom had joked about her burning the tea house. All that seemed a million years ago. Now they’d called a truce with the government, no more demonstrations – and the prisons were full of Germans like her father.

‘I think ladies should be allowed to represent themselves,’ she said, repeating what she had said in a school debate three years ago. Miss Davis had picked her to do it, because everyone else refused. Then, it sounded lost. The other girls had looked at her uncomprehendingly and her opposition, Mary Hedges, won by thirty votes. But this time, it sounded clear, real, as if there was some sense behind it. Miss Webb nodded, smiling.

‘Oh, quite. It is fine for us to bear their children, plan their meals. But decide which men are to run the country? They simply won’t allow it.’

Celia swallowed her protest – my father isn’t like
that
– for she might cry if Jemima asked her a question about Rudolf. ‘But I thought the campaigners had stopped for the war.’

‘Well, yes, you are quite right, we have directed our efforts elsewhere. But we are always
thinking
about the vote.’

‘Jemima, please,’ called Mr Janus. ‘It is our wedding day.’ He leant over with the bottle of champagne and poured a little into their glasses. ‘Let’s drink!’ he said. ‘To Emmeline and myself! And to the future!’

‘To the future!’ they all called, and clinked glasses. Emmeline’s face was joyous, its regularly handsome features reflected in the fogged-up window of the café.

‘We shall go on honeymoon later,’ said Emmeline next morning, ‘when Samuel has sold some more paintings. In the meantime, we must see London together.’ She was up in her gown and making Celia tea again. Celia’s head was messy with staying up late and listening to Miss Webb and Mr Sparks argue about politics, debating with Mr Janus whether wars did or did not improve art. After the café, they had come back to the flat and talked. All of them, Celia discovered, had been at university with Mr Janus. Miss Webb had been at the women’s college but, she said, had grown so bored with women’s society after spending so much time with her father as a child that she frequented the library just to get some male company.

The six of them talked a lot about university, as well as general politics, and teased Miss Webb about her campaign for votes for women. She would sigh theatrically, ‘Only Miss de Witt understands me,’ and pat Celia’s hand. The touch was like heat on Celia’s spine. Miss Webb, who was like no woman she had ever met. She lived alone in her own flat, which she said was full of books, prided herself on looking ‘smart but never pretty’, and was knowledgeable about everything from politics to what one artist in Paris said to another at an exhibition.
How do you know so much?
Celia wanted to ask her. Instead, she tried to shuffle up next to her, eager to hear her speak, hoping that a little of her shine would rub off.

Emmeline handed her the tea, graceful, giving her a gift. ‘I feel so tired,’ she said, yawning.

‘Do you think Miss Webb will get married to one of her friends?’ asked Celia. Surely Mr Sparks – surely all of them – was desperately in love with her?

‘Jemima?’ Celia raised her eyebrow. ‘That I doubt.’

‘I think she is very brave to help the war effort.’

‘They say the ladies are more important than ever. Only single ladies, though.’

‘Not you.’

‘No. Samuel needs me.’

‘His lungs seem fine to me.’

‘Celia, you forget how ill he was. With all that gas out there, he would not survive five minutes.’

‘I hope the gas doesn’t go near Michael.’

‘I’m sure it won’t. I will just go and see if Samuel is awake. Then you and I could go out while he gets on with his painting. He needs quiet to work.’

Celia sat on her bed, holding her tea. She had never slept on such a hard bed. She had woken up three times during the night. The wedding and the champagne tore around her mind. Verena and Rudolf loomed up in her thoughts and she blushed with shame. Her father had talked so often, so proudly about giving away Emmeline in marriage. And he was imprisoned somewhere they did not know, while she had watched her sister marry with no one to give her away.

Emmeline popped her head around the door. ‘Actually, sister, I am going to rest again. If you want to walk out, it’s only a little way to the British Museum. Turn left, right, walk straight, then left again.’

Celia gazed at her boots. She would have to go out. She pulled on her dress and her shawl and seized a book from the pile on the shelf, then pulled the door closed behind her and hurried down the stairs, avoiding the brooms and the bicycle.

She breathed in the cold, grimy air of the street and stared around her. It looked nothing like the London she remembered as a child. Emmeline’s square and the next one too were empty of people. The houses were poor, some of the doors entirely lacking in paint and railings missing from the front.

In the old days, she remembered, the streets she saw from the carriage were packed with people selling things – flowers,
food, books – polishing shoes or telling fortunes. Women bustled around choosing what to buy; men strode about with papers under their arms; governesses led children by the hand. Now she turned into the main road and there were just a few people shuffling past, mainly women, clutching bundles, their faces the colour of uncooked pastry. It couldn’t be more different to the bustle around Waterloo. And this area hadn’t even been bombed! The thought of a bomb immediately made her look upwards. She should check, she thought, she should always check! She imagined herself in Emmeline’s flat, staring out of the window as the giant silver monster floated over. In Stoneythorpe, she had lain in the garden and gazed up at the sky, wondering if one would pass over her on the way to London. All the time, she had two Londons in her head: the bombed-out shell and the normal one. Neither was accurate, she thought, picking her way over a road filled with holes.

She found the British Museum, but the front gate was locked and bolted up in chains. She gazed through the railings, then walked around the other side looking for a different entrance. Perhaps she was too early. She stood gazing at the huge building, full of mummies and sculptures. Rudolf had taken her when they lived in Hampstead, just the two of them. The Egyptian mummies were his favourite; he told her stories about the Old Kingdom rulers (he liked them more than the later ones) and their gods, Isis and Osiris. She had stared at the parchment rolls, thinking how nice looking all the Egyptians seemed to be.

‘No chance of going in there, miss.’

She turned to see an old man with a broom. One eye was red and watering.

‘Is it closed today?’

‘Shut last week, miss. Not enough men to work there.’

‘When will it open?’ She could hardly bear to look at his eye.

‘Never, they say. You new in town?’ He winked the good eye.

She blushed and turned away. She spent the next few hours wandering around Emmeline’s square and the surrounding streets, wishing there were some shops to visit. The cold air blew through
her coat. Finally, as the sky began to turn grey, she went back to the flat. Mr Sparks and Jemima were there with pies and a yellowish drink that tasted terribly sweet but had a strange aftertaste. It wasn’t like anything she’d ever tried before. She told them that the British Museum was closed, and Mr Sparks said it was a scandal. Miss Webb asked her what she wished to do when she was older, and Celia told her that she hoped to live in Paris and write. After that, Miss Webb grilled her about Paris and which books she had read until Celia was blushing and Emmeline shouted at her to stop. ‘We are naturally artistic, us de Witts. You like my drawings.’

‘I do, Emmeline dear. I just wish you would apply yourself more carefully. One needs proper ambition these days – like your sister.’ Celia stole a look at Miss Webb, when she was talking to Emmeline, admired her hazel eyes. She felt shy that she had told them all her plans. She felt ashamed of hardly having read much more of Freud in a year.

After Miss Webb and Mr Sparks went home and Emmeline and Mr Janus had gone to bed, Celia prowled around the flat. She looked at the paintings, great blobs of colour, yellow, blue and red, that must mean something, although who knew what? She gazed at the easel full of paper, the palette of oils. She pulled out things from the cupboards, sorting through old green bottles and wooden boxes, looking at broken pencils, scraps of paper, letters, and food that looked too old to eat. Emmeline had brought nothing with her, but Mr Janus had clearly come to the flat with the assorted detritus of years. She found his old essays from college, textbooks, and a pile of keys that did not fit the front door. After finishing the cupboards, she turned to the shelves. She opened a sketchbook and flicked through pages and pages of drawings of Emmeline. A second sketchbook underneath it bore a big ‘E’ on the front. She tugged it out and looked at pictures of – as Emmeline had said – fruit, Miss Webb, people in the street below. The rest were all pictures of Mr Janus, sitting, standing, looking from the window. Celia came to one of him lying down and snapped the book shut – what if Emmeline had drawn him with fewer clothes on?

She heard stirring from the next room, and jumped into bed.
Her head was dizzy from the drink. She knew she should write to her mother, but she could not bear to tell her what had happened and that she had been there – as a bridesmaid, no less. She remembered then that she had stuffed the money her mother had given her in the bottom of her case to be safe. She should give it to Emmeline as a wedding present.

Next morning, Celia woke to see Mr Janus in the kitchen, fiddling with the kettle. She pulled the cover tightly around her.

‘Good morning,’ he said, walking past her.

‘Hello … Samuel.’

He perched gingerly on the edge of the sofa. ‘Emmeline was telling me about all the things that have happened to your family. I was very sorry to hear about Mr de Witt. And now your mother is unhappy too.’

‘Yes,’ said Celia, thinking miserably of the notes in her case. ‘She misses everyone very much.’ She could smell the hair oil that made his hair slick and black.

‘I am sorry for your mother.’

‘Me too.’

‘It’s an evil thing, this war.’

‘So Mr Sparks says.’

‘I agree with him. Hard to get a word in, sometimes, when Rufus is talking, but he’s right, don’t you think?’

‘We have to protect the King!’

‘But would it be so bad if Germany did invade? They aren’t going to kill us, are they? You know, Celia, this war is all about making profits for big business: guns, ships, the rest.’

‘My father is in business. He’s not making any money.’
You just don’t want to fight!
she wished she could say.

‘He must be, you know. Otherwise your house would have to be sold.’

‘His partners are looking after the factories. Mr Lewis does a lot.’

He shook his head a little, superior. She wanted to say something, anything to prove to him that she wasn’t the foolish young girl he thought her.
I am not your pupil any more,
she wanted to say.

‘If you got better, you would have to join up.’

‘If they say my health is good, I’ll object to it on moral grounds.’

‘What are you two talking about out there?’ shouted Emmeline.

‘Art!’ he called back. He smiled at Celia. ‘I should take her tea to her ladyship.’

Celia nodded. She was being stand-offish, she knew, rebuffing his attempts at being friendly. She lay back on her mattress and opened the book from the shelf she had started last night, a history of modern art. She supposed she might as well learn to keep up with Miss Webb.

She had been so busy thinking about going to London, so preoccupied that Verena might refuse to let her go, not give her any money, she’d hardly thought about how it would be to actually be there. She had just wanted to be somewhere that was not Stoneythorpe, somewhere she didn’t have to bear witness to Verena’s unhappiness every day. She had thought she would be spending most of the time drinking tea inside Emmeline’s large house, somewhere like Hampstead. She hadn’t thought they would be so central to London, that she would have so much freedom, that Emmeline’s friends would be like Jemima. It was dizzying, really.

Sometimes, over the next few days, she would dream she was at Stoneythorpe and wake heavy with dread. Then she realised she was in London and relief flooded her mind – followed by a brief pang of guilt for leaving Verena alone. The days filled themselves, pleasantly; she would accompany Emmeline on a walk in the morning to buy bread from the crowded bakery on Marchmont Street and pies from the shop around the corner. They took their time about the errand, for Mr Janus painted in the flat in the mornings. Emmeline marched her quickly past the letters painted on the wall of the abandoned house on the way:
MEN SHOULD FIGHT.

At lunchtime, they shared a cake on the bench in Russell Square, the cool grass long and unkempt over their feet. Emmeline would put her face towards the sun while Celia read or stared at the pigeons hopping about begging for crumbs. Usually, in the
afternoon, they would go to the shops in Oxford Street. It was almost entirely full of women: the dark-haired conductress on the bus holding up her ill-fitting skirt so she would not stumble up the stairs; the tall girls serving in shops (even in the men’s departments, Emmeline said); the group of women in overalls who Emmeline said were street cleaners.

‘You could work in one of the shops, maybe,’ Celia said.

‘Imagine!’ said Emmeline.

Celia looked in the long, smudged windows of a shop selling things for the home, at a pile of saucepans and a fan display of plates, wondering if she should buy Emmeline a present with Verena’s money. Her mother might prefer her sister to have an actual present, a tea set or a pretty vase, maybe. But there were so many things in the shops that she did not know where to start. The money sat under her bed, burning a hole there.

In the evenings, she waited for Mr Sparks and Miss Webb to pay their usual visit. She listened to them argue about the war, or the books they had read, trying to remember every word that Miss Webb said. She listened until she was almost falling asleep on the sofa. Sometimes she would wake to find Emmeline bustling around her, making her bed and tucking her in.

One morning, after a particularly late night arguing about Mr Sparks’s theory of the legacy of Darwin, Celia was awake first. After three chapters of her modern art book – she was nearly finished and felt she had learned a lot for when she went to Paris – Emmeline came out. She shuffled to the kitchen, made some tea, then came and sat on Celia’s bed. ‘So, Celia. What are your plans?’

Celia looked at her blankly.

‘You must have an idea of what you are going to do.’

‘What, today?’

‘No, sister, in the
future
.’ Celia stared at her. Emmeline sighed. ‘I mean, when are you going to go home?’

‘Home?’

‘Yes. Don’t look like that. You can’t stay here for ever, you know.’

‘Well, I know, but I thought …’ Celia trailed off. She didn’t know what she thought. She supposed she had expected their days of sitting in the park and passing lady clerks in shops, conversations with Miss Webb, to stretch on. ‘Please let me stay.’

‘Oh come now, Celia, Mama will want you home, you know that.’

‘I like it here.’ She knew as she said the words how miserably selfish they were. Mama was lonely.

Emmeline sighed again. ‘You see, Samuel likes to paint here. And although you are not here in the daytime … you know … he finds the fact that this is a bedroom a bit – well, it is hard for him to concentrate. And, Celia, be practical, we don’t have any money.’