For a long time, for almost two years Grace realized, she had thought of the war as a momentous event that touched them all, but as an episode that would eventually be over, leaving the world to continue as before.
It was on that day in October 1916, the day of Jake’s letter, that she understood there could be no going on as before.
If Hugo came home again, he would not be the same boy who had marched off in his fresh uniform. Jake would not be the boy who had kissed her in the angle of the hawthorn hedge. For all of them, whatever they had done, there would always be the speculation: If there had been no war. If part of a generation had not been lost.
Grace read the last, scrawled page of the letter once more.
I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.
But then she put the pages aside. The blackness of the lines stirred an opposing determination in her. Grace found herself making a bargain with a Providence she had never troubled to address before.
Let them come home, she bartered, and we will make something new out of ‘things which are not’. We don’t cease to exist, those of us who are left. We’ll make another world.
She could not have said what world, or how, but she felt the power of her own determination as a partial salve.
Behind her, the bedroom door creaked open and Clio slipped into the room.
‘Grace? It’s so cold in here.’ She went to the window, closed it, and drew the curtains over the square of darkness. She did not ask, but Grace picked up the pages of the letter and gave them to her.
‘Read it,’ she said in a low voice.
Afterwards Clio sat down beside Grace on the edge of the high bed. She was ashamed that amidst all her love for Jake, and fear for him, there was a shiver of jealousy that he should have written in such a way to Grace, not to herself, or Julius. And yet she understood that in the terrible hospital Jake needed to reach out to his ideal of whiteness and cleanliness, his smooth river pebble. That was not a family entity, and so Jake turned to what was closest to home, to Grace. So she told herself.
The two girls let their heads rest together, the smooth roll of hair and the thick plait the same colour and texture, side by side. They were still sitting in the same position when Julius found them. He took his place next to Grace, making the same arrangement as on the garden bench.
He still felt happy, remembering that he had kissed her.
The letter did not surprise Julius, neither the horror of it nor Jake’s image of Grace. His vivid imagination had led him closer to the reality of what Jake was suffering, and he loved Grace to the point where he would have been more surprised to find that his brother did not.
It did not occur to Julius to feel jealous.
‘I wish he would come home,’ Clio said savagely.
‘He will, and Hugo,’ Grace promised. ‘Everything will start again. We’ll make it.’
When Eleanor came up, the letter was hidden in the folds of Clio’s dress. All three of them knew that it was for the magic circle alone. They felt that for even Eleanor to see it would be a betrayal.
That night, although she had not had the nightmare for years, Grace dreamt of her own death by drowning.
The turret room was growing familiar. As he lay in bed the soldier had learnt the contour of it, the regular square of one side and then the hemispherical opposite bulge where the tower was grafted on to the red brick absurdity of the house.
He had looked up at the turret, blinking his sore eyes at the white winter sky, when they wheeled him into the house from the ambulance. Since he had been brought home from Cambrai he had seen nothing but the rigid lines of the hospital ward, and this apparition of a house with its crenellations and gables had made him momentarily afraid of hallucinations again. He had gripped the wooden arms of the wheelchair and found them solid, and had looked again to see that the house was solid too, an architect’s fantasy castle planted in the North Oxford street. There were bare-branched cherry trees in the front garden, and a child’s discarded wooden engine beside the path.
As they lifted him up the steps a woman had come out to greet him. She was statuesque, dressed in a plain grey afternoon dress, with her coils of dark hair put up in the pre-war fashion.
‘I am Eleanor Hirsh,’ she said, smiling at him. When she held out her hand it was as if they were being introduced in a London drawing room. After the months in the trenches and the indignities of hospital, the simple gesture was like a benediction. When he took her hand he saw that there were no rings except for a thin wedding band and a small diamond, and that the fingers looked as if they were accustomed to harder work than writing invitation cards.
‘And you are Captain Dennis.’
Peter Dennis forgot, momentarily, that he was in a wheelchair with his head bandaged and all his senses dislocated. He made a little bow from the waist that was almost courtly.
‘Welcome to my house,’ Eleanor said.
The nurses and the driver who had come with him from the hospital half pushed and half carried his chair up into the house. There was another nurse here, and Peter Dennis had a confused impression of a dark-brown hallway, many more stairs and passages, children’s faces solemnly watching him, all blurred by renewed pain as he was lifted out of the wheelchair and carried up to the turret room.
He heard that his attendants called the dark-haired woman Madam or Mrs Hirsh, but that the children’s voices rising up through the house cried ‘Mama …’
The room they put him into was blessedly quiet, and filled with the reflections of light from the pointed windows in the turret. The new nurse helped him into the high iron-framed bed and he lay back against the down pillows and closed his eyes.
Eleanor took Tabby and Alice down to the kitchen with her. ‘You mustn’t make too much noise,’ she told them. ‘Captain Dennis has been very ill, and now he will need to rest quietly.’
‘May we go and see him?’ Tabby asked. ‘I could show him my sewing.’
‘Perhaps, in a day or so.’
‘Did a German shoot him, as well?’ Alice demanded. It was her standard question.
‘Captain Dennis was very brave. He was fighting to defend what he believes in, and he was wounded. But the German soldier who fired at him was probably just as brave, and defending his own in the same way.’
It was a variation on Eleanor’s standard reply. With her own pacifist sons, her husband’s German blood and the male Strettons’ fierce jingoism to reconcile, she felt it was the best she could do.
‘Like Hugo?’
‘Yes, of course, like Hugo,’ Eleanor answered. That was safer ground. She did not object, for once, to Cook handing out iced biscuits to the little girls. They took their prizes and ran out into the garden before Eleanor could change her mind.
Eleanor instructed Cook that the driver and the nurses who had accompanied the ambulance would probably require tea before returning to the hospital. Then she saw that Mrs Doyle had already put the kettle on the hot plate of the big black range. The kettle sighed and a wisp of steam issued from the curved spout. Eleanor nodded her satisfaction, and the two women smiled at each other. Their relationship was unconventional, but Eleanor did not run a conventional household.
Mrs Doyle had been widowed in the first year of the war and had left her husband’s Oxfordshire village shortly afterwards to return to service. Before her marriage she had been employed as a parlourmaid in a great house,