The secret of their relationship was not a secret between the two women. They felt a comfortable and open respect for one another, and as the war continued they also became friends. Mrs Doyle’s dependability freed Eleanor to concentrate on her convalescent nursing work, and as the time passed the Woodstock Road house became less a rest home than a hospital extension.
By the beginning of 1918 the flow of casualties was so relentless that there were never enough hospital beds available. Eleanor and Nathaniel had begun to accept into the house men who were still seriously ill, simply because their taking a man who could be nursed at home meant that a bed was freed for another who could not.
One trained and one volunteer nurse now came to the Woodstock Road every eight hours, in shifts around the clock, but it was still Eleanor who took responsibility for the recovery of her patients. They did recover, almost all of them had done, some with a rapidity that surprised the doctors.
‘You should have been a professional nurse,’ Nathaniel proudly told his wife. ‘You have a great gift for it.’
‘Can you imagine my dear mama countenancing anything so dreary and dangerous? Permitting her daughters to do any work at all, however genteel?’ Eleanor sounded cheerful, but she was touched by a wistful sense of opportunity missed, of an unexperienced life running parallel to her own that she could only imagine, never know for sure. She consoled herself with the fact that she was doing what she could, now that it was needed, although it seemed so little.
Nathaniel had laughed and refolded his newspaper. ‘I can not imagine,’ he had said.
Eleanor and Mrs Doyle now had enough experience of both nurses and ambulance drivers to know that they needed tea, and slabs of cake as well. Mrs Doyle set out the plain white kitchen cups and cut a cherry cake into symmetrical pieces, and Eleanor welcomed Captain Dennis’s escorts into the kitchen.
‘Is he comfortably settled?’
‘The journey’s taken it out of him, all right,’ one of the nurses said. ‘But I reckon he’ll do well enough when he’s rested himself.’ There was no ‘madam’. She spoke with a brusquely businesslike air, one professional to another. Eleanor noticed it and felt a mild satisfaction. Only Mrs Doyle frowned and held up the big brown teapot as if to threaten the woman with it.
‘Won’t you sit down, if you have time?’ Eleanor invited.
They settled themselves around the scrubbed table, and Eleanor sat down with them. She took a cup of tea from Mrs Doyle and paid her a joking compliment about the even distribution of the cherries in the sponge. Only the driver stared and looked uncomfortable, but he was the only one who had never been to the Woodstock Road before.
The nurses talked about patients and their prospects. Eleanor stayed just long enough to drink her tea, and then she said a smiling goodbye and went off upstairs to see if her newest patient was comfortable.
‘She’s the lady of the house, is she?’ the driver sniffed. ‘Funny sort of a set-up you’ve got here, the mistress sitting drinking tea with our sort, isn’t it?’
‘More of a lady than you’re ever likely to encounter,’ the cook snapped. ‘And a finer household, too.’
The man appeared not to have heard her. He rubbed his whiskers with the palm of his hand. ‘It’s the war, isn’t it? Changing everything, all the old ways.’ He shook his head lugubriously, ready to insist that no change he had ever experienced had ever been for the better.
Nathaniel came out of the Examination Schools and began to walk up the honey-walled curve of the High. He had been lecturing on Old French vowel-shifts and his mind was still busy with the fascinating labyrinths of word-formations and Germanic borrowings. It was the middle of the afternoon and Oxford was at its busiest, but Nathaniel was oblivious to the cyclists who swept past with their gowns fluttering, the tradesmen’s vans and carts and omnibuses and private cars that clogged the road, and even the fellow dons who passed in the opposite direction and glanced at him in the expectation of a greeting. He had forgotten to button up his overcoat and it flapped around his legs as he walked, but Nathaniel didn’t notice the cold wind either.
If he had stopped to look around him it would have been to notice, with the same sadness even though it was for the thousandth time, that the faces of the undergraduates who swept by him were either too young, no more than boys, or else they were much older, and shadowed with experience. There were only one or two young men of the right age, and they were in khaki uniforms.
Still preoccupied with his own thoughts, Nathaniel passed the golden front of Queen’s and hurried on, intending to cross Radcliffe Square in the direction of the Bodleian. But when he reached the corner of Catte Street he had to wait to allow a brewer’s dray to pass ahead of him, and while he stood hesitating something made him look sideways, across the High.
Through the traffic he saw two young women. They were balanced on the edge of the kerb, one of them leaning on a bicycle, the other carrying a shopping basket. They were laughing, their heads held close together, and their rosy faces were bright with happiness. They looked very alike.
His first response was abstract admiration. An instant later he thought of Eleanor and Blanche, with their lifelong conspiracy of friendship. These two reminded him of the older twins. And only then, emerging from his preoccupation, did he see that the two were not strangers at all, but Clio and Grace.
He realized with a little shock that they were grown up, not children any longer. And as soon as the pair of faces dissolved into familiarity he lost the sense of how similar they were.
Clio was wearing her school coat and a dark felt hat with a coloured ribbon, and her schoolbag was fastened to the front of her bicycle handlebars. Eleanor allowed her to cycle to school now, because Clio insisted that all the other girls did. By contrast, Grace wore one of the well-tailored suits that Blanche’s dressmaker made for her. From somewhere, probably her mother’s wardrobe, she had purloined a fur tippet and cut it up to make a turban. The fur made a dark cloud around her face. The shopping basket was an incongruous accessory. It looked very heavy.
Nathaniel changed course and ducked through the passing traffic to greet them. They swung round at once with pleased cries of ‘Pappy!’ and ‘Uncle Nathaniel!’
‘What’s the joke about?’ he asked, wanting instinctively to be a part of it. The girls looked blankly at him.
‘I don’t think there was a joke, really,’ Grace answered. ‘We were just laughing. I’ve been to the Lending Library. Look.’ The basket was full of books. It was one of Grace’s responsibilities to select novels for the patients. She chose out of the depths of her ignorance, with results that varied from inspired to comical.
Nathaniel tilted his head to one side to read the titles on the spines. ‘Martin Chuzzlewit, mmm, mmm, Zuleika Dobson. That’s interesting. All very suitable. And where are the two of you going now?’
‘Home. Unless we can come with you? Out to tea?’
Nathaniel had been planning to do some work in his rooms, but the idea of tea was tempting.
Clio begged, ‘Please, pappy? Tea at Tripps’? You know it’s meatless day today. That means vegetable sausage for dinner, doesn’t it?’
The Hirsh household always obeyed the government’s edict for helping with food shortages by doing without meat on at least two days a week. But even Mrs Doyle’s version of the invariable vegetable sausage was no great favourite.
‘Tripps’ it is,’ Nathaniel said briskly.
The tea-shop on the corner of the Broad was an old favourite. Nathaniel