BUTTERWOOD, 1919
He was thinner, and in uniform, but every bit of him was there that she could see.
Her feet seem anchored to the floor. She said, ‘You’re dead.’
He grinned. ‘I’m not. I was a prisoner of war in Germany till three weeks ago. They thought I’d be worth interrogating, so patched me up to ask me questions. I would have written to you from France, but I didn’t know your exact address. I thought I’d get here faster than a letter.’
She simply stood there, feeling her face begin to smile, as colour seeped back into a world she hadn’t known was grey. It was just like in the shell hole. She couldn’t get to him . . .
‘Well, Miss McLain,’ he said. ‘You have two choices. You can offer me a cup of tea then send me politely on my way, or you can kiss me.’
Finally, she could move again. His lips were warm.
She stopped teaching six months after the ceasefire, when enough male teachers were available to staff the school. The boys decorated the classroom for her last day with garlands of daisies and a few roses stolen when none of the new ground staff were watching, or, just possibly, when they turned their backs so that they didn’t see.
She spent the next two years living the life she would have led if the war had never happened — almost. Weekends staying with Alan’s family, tennis parties at the vicarage, quiet evenings by the fire while Papa read to them, Dickens or his beloved Tennyson, and she and Mama stitched tea cloths and tablecloths and embroidered underwear for Jean’s hope chest, which every girl was supposed to prepare from eight years old or so, but Jean’s had been abandoned when she’d left school for the post office.
Miss Pigeon still ran the post office — her father had been lost at Passchendaele — but the postal assistant was a man who’d lost his foot at Amiens, and deliveries were done by two men who muttered as they walked, unable to leave the ghosts of war behind.
The ghosts were everywhere, but you never spoke of them. You could not speak of them. Mind and body simply froze the thoughts. Even she and Alan never spoke of the ten days they’d spent in France together. Only ten days. A lifetime, and another life.
She and Mama and Papa rarely spoke of William and Arthur, except to ask God to watch over them each night at evening prayers, though their photos on the mantelpiece were kept dusted and the black ribbons around the frames washed and ironed each week and replaced when they faded.
At times Jean even wondered if it had happened at all. It was a nightmare, skulls grinning at her from the trench wall, Sergeant Lawson who’d saved her life but never lived to know it, how they had left Mealworm lying in the mud. It could not have happened.
Then she’d see the ghosts reflected in the faces of men who had returned and knew that it had.