‘Shall we go in?’ Nathaniel murmured at last.
Eleanor opened her letter and had read it before the maid placed the soup tureen on the table in front of her. She looked up from the single flimsy sheet of paper.
‘He’s well,’ she said. ‘There is – there was when he was writing, rather – a kind of lull. He calls it the calm before the next storm.’
There were tears plainly visible in Eleanor’s eyes, but no one was careless enough to see them. She refolded the letter and handed it down the table to Nathaniel, and then began briskly ladling soup.
Captain Smith, one of the convalescents, said, ‘I admire what your son is doing, Professor. I was in one of those hospitals before they sent me back home. They do a fine job.’
He wanted them to know he understood Jake’s beliefs, wanted them to be aware that he didn’t consider him a shirker. It was not the Captain’s fault that he sounded like Hugo. Grace’s eyes met Clio’s again.
Nathaniel lifted his head. ‘Of course,’ he said.
The letter passed to Julius, and then to Clio. They were greedy for the news, there was no question of politely waiting until dinner was over.
Grace felt the generosity of it when Clio passed the blue paper to her in her turn. She was aware of the second letter burning in her pocket.
Jake wrote of the work he was doing, but only as numbers, how many casualties arriving, how many hours on duty, how few hours sleep. The rest of the letter was taken up with his thoughts on John Donne, whose poems he had been reading, and with reminiscences of home. He recalled the day of the picnic beside the river.
Grace gave the letter back to Eleanor. ‘Jake will be a good doctor,’ she said to fill the silence, but the random remark struck a chord of optimism. It looked ahead to a better time, beyond the necessity of survival. Eleanor’s face softened.
‘I believe so,’ she said.
The maid came to clear away their soup plates.
After dinner, it was usual for Grace to sit with Clio and Julius while they read or worked, but tonight she left the table and went quickly up through the odd layers of the house to the room she shared with Clio. She half sat and half leant against her high bed, and opened the envelope.
The letter was longer. There were three sheets of the flimsy paper, each one closely covered with Jake’s black handwriting. Grace bent her head, and began to read.
The words burned off the page. There were no careful sentences here, nothing like the letter he had addressed to Nathaniel and Eleanor. Jake had simply written what he felt, disjointed snatches of it, letting the raw suffering lie where it spilt. It was these images that had informed his earlier letters, the awkward and troubling missives that she had not wanted to look at again, but Jake had kept them veiled, somehow, saving her eyes. Now he had passed some last point of endurance, and Grace saw clearly what Jake was seeing.
Oh, Grace, the horror of it. Grace, do you hear me? I hold on to your name, like a clean white river pebble in my fingers.
They come in all day and all night, stretchers, cargoes of what were once men, pulp and jelly of flesh, turned black, bones like splinters.
Crying and screaming and praying, or lying mute like children.
I am afraid of each day, each death.
We are close to the lines here, I can hear the guns.
We run like ants, doctors and orderlies and bearers, like ants over the blood heaps, but we can do so little. Death keeps coming, the tide of it. Some of the men I work with indemnify themselves with a kind of terrible laughter, but I can’t laugh, Grace. All I can see and hear and smell is the suffering. Each separate pain, loss, life gone or broken.
The deaths are all different. We have to leave them, most of them, to the chaplains or themselves. There was a boy like Hugo, younger, who screamed and cursed. His anger poured out of him as fast as blood. As hot. And another man, an old Cockney, wept for his mother. Like a baby cries, like Alice.
I have tried to read. I know there is beauty and order somewhere, but I can’t recall it. I look at the words on the page, and I see death. I try to see your face, Clio’s face, my mother’s.
I am afraid of death, I am afraid of life like this, I am afraid for us all. I think of Hugo, under the guns. I think of all our deaths, yours and mine and the others; the same deaths, over and over, each of them different.
I have tried to assemble the disciplines of logic, and marshal the proofs of what human suffering has won for humanity, but I can find no logic here. There is only madness. I am afraid that I am mad.
Grace, you should not have to hear this. Forgive me.
I think of you, and of home. Julius and Clio. Of you, especially.
All this will end, it must end. But when it is done, whatever the outcome, nothing can be the same as it once was. I am sad for what we have lost, for what we are losing every day.
Grace lifted her head, but she didn’t see the room with its two white beds and her own gilt-backed hairbrushes laid out beside Clio’s on the dressing table. She could only see Jake, and after a moment she looked down again at the last page.
The black handwriting had deteriorated so much that she could only just decipher the words. Jake was writing about Donne again, but not in the detached, analytical way he had done in Eleanor’s letter. As far as Grace could understand, he had taken some of the poems as speaking directly to him. They had taken on a significance for him that she could only guess at.
There is one, ‘A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day’, do you know it? It is about loss and grief. There is one couplet: ‘He ruined me, and I am re-begot Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.’
It runs in my head, all the time, while I am doing my antlike scurrying. We are all re-begot as nothingness by this war. The evil of it, the waste.
I have to go now. We live in a canvas shelter, and I sit on my camp bed to write this on my lap by candlelight. Perhaps you can’t even read the words. Perhaps I should not send them to you, but I need to reach out. It is another weakness. I am afraid of my own cowardice, too.
You are so clean and white, Grace, like nothing here.
When will it all end?
For some reason Jake had signed not his name but his initials. It made Grace think again of the schoolroom at Stretton, of their old secure and undervalued world.
She said aloud, ‘You are not a coward.’
The window opposite her had been left wide open after the warmth of the day, but the night air was icy now. It rolled in like a hill mist and Grace shivered as it touched her bare shoulders.
She did not move, or fold the letter into its creases again. She knew that she would never forget the way Jake spoke to her out of it.
It was the letter’s fusion of two voices that touched her most profoundly. There was the old Jake, who had whispered their secrets to her in the hot summer before the war began, and from whom she had in the end retreated. Out of fear of the unknown, out of childish impatience. And there was the Jake she did not know, who had witnessed the field hospital. The images of it came to her now, in Jake’s disconnected words, pulp and jelly of flesh, bones like splinters …
And just as Jake had become two Jakes, boy and man, so the world had split into two worlds, old and new. Not only for herself, Grace understood that, but for all of them.
Images of the old world were all around her. There was this room with its mundane evidences of their girlhood, and in the framed snapshots on Clio’s tallboy there were memories of Christmases, holiday games at Stretton, beach cricket in Norfolk or Normandy.
The new world was obliterating everything that had once been familiar. Jake and Hugo in France