Chapter 18

 

“Tony?” Helen paused in removing her gloves as a man rose from the comfortable chair by the fireplace where he had apparently been plied with tea and cake by Cousin Ann, who sat beaming across from him. She waved at the door. “I saw the car. I can’t believe it’s you.” She moved toward him and caught his hand, smiling with genuine warmth into his genial face. “What brings you all the way up here?”

“I have to say, old girl, you were not easy to find,” he said. “The only address I had was the post office, but fortunately these hills don’t seem to be overrun with stray Australians so the good lady there was able to direct me.”

Helen detected a change in tone and a sudden serious cast to his face.

“Is everything all right?”

“Uncle Tony.” Alice, who had just entered the parlour behind her mother, saw him and leaped toward him in delight.

He caught her and returned her enthusiastic hug. “Hello, sprite! Can you excuse me? I need to talk to your mother for a few minutes.”

Alice released her arms and looked from Tony’s face to her mother’s. Her brow furrowed with concern.

“Come and help me find some eggs for our supper, Alice.” Cousin Ann rose stiffly to her feet and held out her hand.

Helen gave her daughter a reassuring smile. “And then get ready for luncheon.” She looked at Tony. “You will join us?”

Tony smiled. “Of course.”

They both waited until Alice and Ann had left the room, Ann closing the door behind her, leaving them alone together in the quiet parlour. The sonorous tick of the clock on the mantelpiece seemed to fill the room and Helen turned to Tony, her chest tight with anxiety.

“What’s the matter? What’s happened? Is it Paul? Evelyn?” Her fear grew with every word.

“No, they’re both fine,” Tony said. “It’s...” He paused. “It’s Charlie.”

Helen’s eyes widened. “Charlie?”

“They’ve found him, or at least they think it’s him. A telegram arrived at Holdston a few days ago.”

She felt her breath catch in her throat and she sank into the nearest chair.

“Are they sure?” she said at last.

“No, but the details fit. An officer of the Warwicks, captain rank found at the site of that last action. Paul’s left for Belgium to do the formal identification. I have to let him know I have found you.”

“Paul sent you to look for me?”

Tony nodded. “He thought you should be there, when they...inter him.”

Helen nodded her head. “Yes, yes, of course...” Her hands twisted in her lap. “How’s Paul?”

Tony shrugged. “Hard to tell.”

Helen balled her hand into her fist and pressed it to her mouth.

“When you get a telegram that says ‘missing in action,’ you always wonder,” Helen said. “You wonder if there’s any chance that one day...”

A tidal wave of emotion overwhelmed her and the tears she had never been able to properly shed for a husband she knew in her heart was dead, welled up. Tony took her in his arms, holding her, stroking her hair as if she were a small child.

As the tears subsided, she dabbed ineffectually at her swollen, reddened eyes with Tony’s pristine white monogrammed handkerchief and leaned against his shoulder as they sat looking into the empty grate of the fireplace.

“What do I have to do?” she croaked.

“I’ll telegram Paul to say I have found you and then if you can pack a few things, I can take you to meet up with him and Evelyn in Belgium.”

“You’ll come too?”

He nodded. “Of course. Charlie was my friend as well, don’t forget, Helen.”

She swallowed. “Alice will be wondering where we are.”

“How will you tell her?”

Helen sighed. “I don’t know how much grief she will feel for a father she never knew. I suppose I shall just tell her as it is. She can stay here with Ann. I don’t think it would be right to take her. Maybe later...when...”

Alice received the news with silence. For a long time, she sat still, looking beyond both adults to the high, wild mountains beyond the windows. She rose to her feet, crossed to her mother and threw her arms around her neck. The maturity of her action, indicating that her mother needed comfort, not her, started the floodgates afresh and after a lunch she barely touched, Helen, wrung out like a dishrag, curled up in a ball on her bed and slept, leaving Tony to make the arrangements for their journey.

* * * *

“They won’t let me bring him home!” Evelyn wailed as Helen entered Evelyn’s suite at the Hotel Metropole in Brussels. The woman, who had all but driven her daughter-in-law from her home, now fell weeping into her arms.

Tony heaved a sigh. “Evelyn, I’m sure Paul has explained this to you. Under the charter of the War Graves Commission, he must be buried where he fell.”

“I want him in the family vault where he belongs.”

“Even if it were permitted to bring him home, I think he belongs here,” Helen said, trying to maintain a hold on her own emotions.

Evelyn looked up at her and opened her mouth but Helen preempted her. “I am his wife, Evelyn. It is my decision.”

Evelyn subsided on to a chair, her chest heaving with the effort of controlling her emotion.

Helen knelt down beside her and took her hand. There was so much she wanted to say to the mother of the man she had loved but their last, angry confrontation still lay between them like a yawning gulf.

“Where’s Paul?” she asked gently

Evelyn snuffled into her handkerchief. “He went to Ypres to make the formal identification. He said he’d be back by tonight.”

Paul did not return until after supper. He walked out of the rain into the hotel foyer where the little party sat waiting for him. Helen and Tony rose as one to meet him. Evelyn didn’t move.

His appearance shocked Helen. The dark circles under his eyes, and heavy lines of strain written on his face, made her wonder if he had slept at all since the news had reached him.

“Helen, I didn’t expect you here so soon.”

“Is it him?” Helen asked between stiff lips.

He nodded and took her hands in his. He looked into her eyes and she read the question there.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I’m not going to make a scene. I’ve shed all the tears I can for the moment.”

Evelyn gave a strangled cry. Paul released Helen and caught his aunt as she fell into his arms, her sobs muffled against his sodden coat.

Helen pried Evelyn away and put her arms around her shoulders.

“Let me take you to your room,” she said.

Evelyn nodded and leaning heavily against Helen allowed her to lead her into the lift and upstairs to the bedroom. As Helen ran a bath, Evelyn just sat on the edge of the bed, as if incapable of moving. Helen paused in the doorway to the bathroom and looked at the broken woman. She wondered how she could penetrate the wall Evelyn had built around herself.

Kneeling down in front of her mother-in-law, she undid her shoes.

“You’ll feel so much better after a bath.”

“Don’t treat me like a child, Helen,” Evelyn said with a trace of her old spirit.

Helen rose to her feet, holding Evelyn’s shoes. “I didn’t mean to patronize you.” She set the shoes down on the ground. “I’ll leave you to it. Would you like me to have some hot chocolate sent up?”

Evelyn caught her hand and looking up at Helen, her face softened. “Helen,” she said. “I know you loved Charlie and he loved you. The things I said before...”

“...are forgotten,” Helen said. “Do you want me to stay?”

Evelyn shook her head. “I want to be alone.”

When Helen returned to the men, she found they had ordered brandy. A third glass stood on the table. Helen picked it up and took a sip.

“How is she?” Tony asked.

Helen shrugged and glanced at Paul. The look that passed between them said more than words. Evelyn would not be all right.

Paul fumbled in the pocket of his jacket and pulled out an envelope. He emptied the contents on to the table. Tunic buttons, badges of rank, a regimental symbol and, blackened and almost unrecognizable, a gold locket. With trembling fingers, Helen picked the last object up and felt the tears rising again.

With a monumental effort, she choked them back. “I gave this to him, when he left,” she said.

She had bought the piece at an expensive jeweler in Collins Street in Melbourne and had her photograph taken especially for it. If she could open it, she knew the inscription would read, Always loved, H.

“I know,” Paul said. “He never took it off. It left me in no doubt.”

Helen clasped the locket so tightly she could feel it digging into the palm of her hand. She looked up at Paul.

“What happens now?”

“The funeral will be the day after tomorrow at the Tyne Cot Cemetery. Tony, can I leave you to hire a car?”

“Whatever you want me to do,” Tony said. “Look, you two have things to talk over. I’ll see you in the morning.”

They watched him go and Paul picked up the glass of brandy. “What do we have to talk about, Helen?”

She looked at him. “I want you to tell me how you are.”

His face gave nothing away as he said, “I never intended to ever come back, least of all to do what I have to do. What I should have done six years ago.”

“What do you mean?”

“I never forgave myself for leaving him there. I should have brought him back.”

“He was dead, Paul, and you were in no condition to bring him back to the lines. You know that.”

Paul raked his fingers through his hair. “It’s not something I can intellectualize. I survived, he didn’t. That’s what I live with.”

“Nothing I can say can change that, Paul.”

“No.”

“But for what it is worth, I’m certain had it been Charlie sitting there, not you, he would say exactly the same thing.”

He rose to his feet. “For what it’s worth, Helen, thank you.” She heard the bitterness in his voice. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

She watched him walk away, his shoulders square, his back straight, despite the awful burden that he seemed to carry.

* * * *

The next day Helen procured a shapeless black dress, coat and hat. Just wearing the awful clothes brought her soul down.

She looked at herself in the mirror one last time and then straightened, lifting her chin. She was Helen Morrow and she owed it to Charlie to behave with the dignity he would have expected of her.

Tony and Paul waited in the foyer of the hotel, so unfamiliar in their stiff, immaculate uniforms that it took her a moment to recognize them. Evelyn sat in one of the chairs, in full mourning, her face obscured by a heavy crepe veil that made her look like a bedraggled crow. Helen took her arm, and led the shattered woman out of the hotel to the waiting car.

The weather continued bleak and damp and Helen stared out of the foggy car window as the countryside changed from pleasant fields and hamlets to an unrecognizable landscape of ruined villages, barely passable roads, devastated forests of tree stumps and a bleak landscape of churned fields. If she could have imagined the end of the world this is what it would have been like.

Many of the villages through which they passed had been completely destroyed leaving nothing more than piles of rubble where there had once been a bustling little town with bakers, butchers, churches and homes. Some new buildings had begun to rise from the ruins, but the deeper they drove into the Ypres Salient, the more dismal the landscape became. What had once been fields were now nothing more than wild earthworks from a painting of hell, dotted with small cemeteries of rows of white crosses, like a grim harvest of death.

She stole a glance at the two men, but their faces told her nothing. Evelyn’s face concealed behind the heavy veil was also unreadable. The woman sat straight as a ramrod, her black gloved hands folded over a small black handbag.

The car halted at one of the larger cemeteries. In a far corner of the field, a knot of men in khaki waited for them beside a fresh mound of sodden dirt.

“The regiment sent a contingent,” Paul said, as he helped Evelyn out of the car. “They’re all men who served with us.”

He took Evelyn’s arm in his and led her across the field. Tony took Helen’s arm and they followed.

The regiment had also sent a bugler and the chaplain. The soldiers snapped to attention as the mourners, led by Paul and Evelyn, crossed through the maze of white crosses to the freshly dug grave that awaited Charlie.

For the first time Helen had a sense of Paul as the man he had been in the trenches. Charlie had described him as an officer the men would have followed to hell and back. Looking at the respectful faces of the men who waited for them, she could see for herself now that all these men had been to hell and back and owed their survival to their commanding officer.

The sight of the coffin, not so much a coffin but a slender box covered in the Union Jack, brought the reality home to her. She gave a strangled gasp and at once felt a hand under her elbow. She knew without turning that it was Tony.

The internment was short but poignant. The men formed a funeral party with their firearms reversed and carried the coffin at a slow march to the grave where they laid it with reverence in the dark, damp earth of Flanders, the earth that held Charlie these long six years. The men saluted their fallen comrade and the words of the internment were intoned, Helen removed her glove, stepped forward and picked up a handful of the clay. The dirt fell on the lid of the coffin with a hollow thunk.

As the bugler played the Last Post, Helen stood looking down into the dark hole, not seeing the coffin, but Charlie, bare-headed, his fair hair bright in the autumn sun, whooping with delight as they brought the cattle down from the high country. That would be how she remembered him, not here, not in this bleak field.

When it was over she stood with Evelyn and waited while Paul talked to the men. She watched the way they stood, the way they laughed, easy in his company and yet deferential. Tony leaned against the car smoking a cigarette, deep in his own thoughts.

Paul strode through the cemetery, no trace of his limp. The uniform he wore had sent him back to the time before his injuries. He reached the car.

“It’s going to rain again,” he said. “I suggest we stop in Ghent for lunch and then back to Brussels.”

“Paul.” Evelyn spoke for the first time, throwing back her veil. Helen was shocked to see how old she looked, as if the events of the day had aged her twenty years. “I want to see where...where he died.”

Paul’s face tightened. “No, Evelyn. Don’t ask that.”

Her lip trembled. “Please, Paul. I want to understand...”

“Seeing won’t help you understand,” Paul said.

He broke her pleading gaze and looked away, into the watery sky with the heavy storm clouds closing in on them before giving a cursory nod of his head.

Helen looked away. She didn’t share Evelyn’s desire to see, to understand. When Charlie had left her standing on Station Pier in 1915, he had walked out of her life into a world she could never share, even in his death. Her Charlie would always belong to the mountains in that far off country he had come to love so much.

As if he could hear her thoughts, Paul turned to her and their eyes met in perfect understanding. Evelyn’s wish would take them both to a place neither wanted to go.