Simmie was never sure in her own mind what it was about Helen that first attracted Daniel Goodworth. Her Ashby pedigree might have appealed to someone of Dan’s background, she supposed, and of course men generally were susceptible to female admiration the flattery of a woman’s admiration – although in fairness there had always been something in poor Helly’s helplessness that virtually begged a kind man to love her and protect her. Whatever its inspiration, the effect of the Bury cowman’s gentle barn-door courtship of Helen Ashby through the summer of 1920, was to face her grandmother eventually with the choice of dismissing the man or of sanctioning his elevation to the status of a relative; and the old lady who’d fought so hard to maintain standards through the war, accepted the inevitable with her usual pragmatism.
‘Can’t say I like the idea,’ she said bluntly, ‘not one bit. But there you are, Miss Sims, he is too good a man to lose. We’ll get the trustees to make him up to Manager, seein’ he’s doing the job anyway – and then look sharp about gettin’ Helly to the church, before that young ram beats us to it and cuckolds the parson.’
So in the spring of 1921, shortly after lambing and three days before her thirty-fifth birthday, Helen became Mrs Daniel Goodworth. And Warry Hurst, a onetime Bury stable boy who now worked as a motor mechanic in Eastbourne, had driven them home from the church in the new Ford motor car Mrs Ashby hired for the occasion. It had seemed appropriate somehow, that wedding car; a symbol of the changes that the twenties brought to Sussex.
Elsewhere, from Seaford and from Brighton, ranks of hideous little brick boxes were steadily advancing up and over the bare downs. ‘Homes fit for heroes,’ they called them – even as they sold them to successful profiteers, or to hearthrug strategists for whom the Western Front had never been much more than a line on a map – while the ‘heroes’ themselves, so many of them, were forced to stand in dole queues.
In Sellington things were rather better. As Meriel had once predicted, the cereal market had slumped after the war with the abolition of guaranteed prices. But with a rapidly expanding dairy herd and more land down to grass, the Bury farm had suffered less than most. Little Stumpy Pyecroft and Cook’s nephew, Shaver Tinsley, had both returned gratefully to their work in the valley. In 1920 the last old plough-horse, Caesar, was replaced by a new Titan motor tractor. A petrol engine now drove the threshing tackle in the aisled barn; and by the autumn of 1922 a steady rise in milk receipts emboldened Dan Goodworth and the estate trustees to invest in a modern vacuum-milking unit for the cowsheds.
It could be said that as far as the Bury farm was concerned, the years following the war were good ones; years of growth and reconstruction. But inside the house, antique clocks still chimed the quarters, antique plumbing gurgled, and sparrows chavished in the eaves much as they always had. Electricity had been laid on to the cowsheds and outbuildings as a matter of necessity. But Mrs Ashby still refused to contemplate its harsh light in the house. Old Cook still clung stubbornly to her open range. In many ways routines had settled back into the old, slow pace of Edwardian times – before Meriel breezed in from South America to set the household by its ears.
Meriel’s own condition had changed very little through the years. She rode now, endlessly, on a lively little Welsh pony that Dan had found for her at Heathfield Fair. Up over the downs – to Crowlink, Birling Gap and the ruins of the Belle Tout lighthouse on the cliffs – she rode astride, drew energy and borrowed excitement from the movements of the pony, returning breathless with some of the old sparkle in her eyes. But it never lasted. In the confines of the house she was as bored, as uncommunicative as ever – sitting for long periods in total silence, refusing to participate, refusing to remember anything but the far distant past. She accepted Patrick as she accepted others, seldom speaking to him or seeking his company. Never treating him as her own son. From the age of thirteen, the boy had boarded at his father’s old school at Lancing. Tall and gangling now, with hands and feet too big for his body and a shy, uncertain smile that reminded Simmie so much of Ned, he bore his mother’s indifference as children bear what they have to from their parents – although in his holidays he liked to be with Dan out on the farm, or on the hills with old Vine and his Southdown sheep.
Margaret Ashby had also withdrawn to a great extent from the day-to-day routines of the Bury household. Feeling her age at last, she often declined to join the family for luncheon or tea, attending dinner only for the sake of form. In recent years her visits to London and her accountant had become more exhausting and less frequent, until they finally lapsed altogether. Helen kept the farm books now. The old lady even turned her back on her beloved Red Sussex cattle, devoting her time to copious letter writing in her upstairs sitting room and daily assaults on The Times newspaper.
Despite everything, in spite of all that had happened, it suited Simmie – the feeling of calm and of permanence that had returned to the old house. The housemaid Gertrude had left long since, snapped up after the war by a wealthy neighbour. But Gladys was still with them, by now as much a part of the Bury staff as old Cook at her range or Zachy Cheal bent over his hoe in the kitchen garden. And now it was to Simmie that they all came with their menus and laundry lists, and for their morning orders. On the rare occasions when Meriel chose to talk – when she felt like reminiscing about Australia or Chile, or her exciting voyage between the two on the coal clipper Catriona – it was to Simmie’s crowded little den that she came. When Patrick tore his good school suit, it was Simmie’s invisible mending that concealed the damage from his great-grandmother. When the faded rose brocades in the drawing room needed replacing, it was Simmie who chose the fabric and made the new curtains up. And it was to Simmie that Helen whispered the thrilling news of her first pregnancy, even before she had told Dan. All her life Simmie had yearned to be needed as the Ashbys of Sellington so clearly needed her – and the peace she found in Sussex was reflected in the atmosphere of The Bury itself throughout those post-war years.
Even death when it returned to the old house seemed ready to come quietly now without fuss. In the summer of 1925, Margaret Ashby celebrated her ninetieth birthday by failing to dress for dinner for the first time in her adult life; and the next day, exhausted by processions of visitors, she declined to rise at all. ‘Doctors, what do they know?’ she muttered in response to Simmie’s urgings to sit up on her pillows at the least. ‘If I choose to run the risk of pneumonia, well that’s my business, isn’t it.’
So in bed she stayed, no longer daunting; a flattened little figure in men’s striped pyjamas and an absurd boudoir cap which Helen had once made for her – demanding The Times still and Simmie’s clear voice to read it, but withholding her customary verdicts and criticisms of the news. As if the world had placed itself at last beyond the reach of her advice.
The course of the pneumonia when it came was predictably swift. The old lady lay still, breathing with difficulty but making little effort to resist. Sitting beside her, reading at random of hatless ladies in Parliament and the coming of the automatic telephone, Simmie experienced the same feeling of capability that she’d drawn from Cécile Llewellen in the days of her last illness – as if she had already taken the old lady’s mantle of responsibility onto her own slim shoulders.
Margaret Ashby recognised it too. ‘Up to – up to you now,’ she rasped out at the end of that last long afternoon, just when Simmie had felt sure the power of speech had finally left her.
‘Listen – listen, Simmie…’ It was the first time she’d ever used that name in all the years they’d known each other. She saved a breath for it; and as she spoke a frail little hand reached out and fluttering feebly. Simmie caught it, and held it fast between her own, leaning over to catch each laboured word.
‘Yes, Mrs Ashby, I’m here. I’m listening,’ she reassured her. ‘Is there something you need to tell me?’
There were sticky deposits of mucous at the corners of the old lady’s mouth. Her breath smelt sweet and a little bad, like a neglected apple store. Her eyes when she opened them were misted, drowsy. Yet there was strength in her still. Just a little – something she’d been holding back ’til now.
The social observances of death – the old-fashioned, draped farm waggon which was to carry Margaret Ashby’s coffin up the hill to Sellington church, the genteel barbarity of a wake in the Bury dining room; these things were for others to organise – for Dan and for Helly. Simmie’s business now was with the living, and it couldn’t wait.
‘We have so few years, so very few,’ she thought as the train pulled into Richmond station. ‘They must be used. They mustn’t be allowed to go to waste.’
It was a new experience to drive up Richmond Hill in a motor cab; to see slouch-hatted men, slouch-figured women with powdered faces all but exposing their knees, where Simmie had herself once swept the pavements with her skirts. Impossible to believe all that was more than thirty-five years ago – that before the end of next year, she herself would be sixty! And did the fast and the wealthy still meet in the park, she wondered, chauffeur-driven now in their glossy black limousines? Or had the war finished all that too?
The view from the hill was the same at least, almost exactly as she remembered it, with the silver curve of the river through the trees and the little pleasure boats and all the coloured parasols, as gay and carefree as if nothing of any great consequence had happened in the years between. And now within a few minutes, just a few minutes, she would be meeting him again – here of all places. How life turned in circles!
As she alighted from the cab and paid the driver, Simmie recalled so well how she had been that other time, waiting by the railings with her heart beating like a hammer. Now she felt numb and empty, searching for a response within herself that was not there. The railings where she’d left the daisy chain had gone, long gone to the war and to munitions. The old hotel façade had gone as well, replaced with a modern opulence of red brick and Portland stone. The new door she must enter was grander, even more imposing than the original – overshadowed by a sculpted shield and vast Corinthian pillars that gave onto a marble vestibule of equally epic proportions. Inside there was a porter’s desk, looking a little lost amongst the grandeur; and from somewhere beyond it the sound of music.
Simmie cleared her throat. Robert had spoken that other time, she’d merely had to walk. But this time it was she who had to ask. Mrs Ashby had said it – it was up to her now. She had to ask for him by name.
‘Good afternoon;’ the sound of her own voice echoing through the vestibule – but calmer, more remote than she expected.
The porter looked up. ‘Yes?’
‘I was told to ask for – that is, I’ve come to see…’
‘Yes?’
The casual friendliness of the man’s smile seemed strangely inappropriate to Simmie. Then, all of a sudden, the words leapt out of her.
‘I’ve come to see Mr Edwin Ashby.’
Before she died, his grandmother had managed to convey the facts of Ned’s survival and his whereabouts, but very little more. Now, in a small office off the main reception hall, the Matron of the Star and Garter Home for Disabled Servicemen enlarged on that information.
‘An unusual case, Miss Sims.’ She prefaced the remark with a look of professional disapproval. ‘Not at all the kind of thing we would expect to have to cope with here at the Star, I assure you.’
But for Simmie, who normally deferred to anyone official, this unbending woman in her starched bonnet and ridiculously goffered collar was no more difficult to face than the hall porter. She was here now and must go through with it, that was all. She had arrived to state her mission. Now the only thing that really mattered was seeing Ned.
So she simply nodded and waited politely for the woman to get to the point.
‘We don’t have access to his entire medical history, you understand.’ The Matron leafed through a pile of typewritten notes on the desk before her. ‘He first came to us at our convalescent home at Sandgate, via the Brook Street Hospital for Facial Injuries in London – then came on here when we finished rebuilding the old Star and Garter Hotel last year. According to his records he was also at the Third London General in Wandsworth, Queen Mary’s at Sidcup and the Fourth Stationary Hospital at St Omer. But very likely he’d have been through at least half a dozen field hospitals and evacuation units in France before that. You see, there was nothing to identify him by the time he reached St Omer – no uniform or identification discs, or papers of any kind. And naturally he wasn’t able to tell anyone who he was or where he’d come from until he was fit enough to use a pen.’
The Matron glanced up, followed the direction of Simmie’s gaze to the corner of a full plate photograph that was projecting from her notes, and hastily tucked it away again out of sight.
‘I’m not sure how much you know, Miss Sims, of Mr Ashby’s… um, of his present condition?’ she enquired.
‘Really very little, I’m afraid. His grandmother was only able to tell me that he was badly disfigured and unwilling to leave the Home, or see anyone from outside it.’
‘An over-simplification.’
The Matron closed the file to face Simmie squarely across the desk. ‘Disfigurement certainly, along with other severe injuries: loss of all nasal cartilage, lips, lower mandible, which of course means speech – impaired hearing, the loss of one eye…’
‘Oh-ooh…’ Simmie’s hand flying to her mouth stifled the rest.
All the way from Sellington, on trains and railway platforms and in the backs of taxis, she had been nerving herself, preparing to face the worst however bad – preparing not to flinch. Yet in the end, all it had taken to pierce her armour was a single sentence; the briefest catalogue of words – that and the memory of a sixpenny wax doll her mother had once given her. She’d put it to bed with the sun full on its face; such a sweet little face – and come back to find its mouth and chin had fallen in, quite melted away…
‘Oh dear, I’m so sorry. How silly of me.’
She found her handkerchief and mopped up quickly, grateful to the Matron for staying where she was. For failing to touch her or say anything too kind.
‘It was a shock. I didn’t know, you see – had no idea his injuries were so extensive.’
‘Yes, they are extensive.’ The Matron’s voice had lost a little of its asperity. ‘But believe me, my dear, there are many others right here in this building in a considerably worse condition. The majority of our cases here are paraplegics you know; amputations and spinal injuries. Very few of them can walk as Mr Ashby can. Or could survive on their own outside the Home, as he could tomorrow if he chose.’
‘But I thought you said – his jaw…?’
‘Prosthetics, Miss Sims, modern prosthetics.’ The Matron awarded her the briefest little smile of reassurance. ‘Why, with his dental and facial prostheses in place you might say Mr Ashby looks almost as good as new!’
‘But I don’t understand. Do you mean some kind of cosmetic surgery?’
‘No, no not surgery – although naturally they’ve done all they can at Sidcup and at Brook Street. No, prosthetics are external contrivances of one sort of another. Mechanical dentures for example, operated on springs and hinges. It’s remarkable what they’ve been able to achieve in that field since the war; really quite excellent results. In many ways you could say your Mr Ashby is a very fortunate fellow,’ she added, ignoring the expression on Simmie’s face. ‘He could well have died a dozen times you know during his early treatment – from shock or haemorrhage. Or during anaesthesia. But he’s unusually strong, you see, and basically very healthy. Not at all a Star type. To all intents and purposes what we have here is a home for ‘incurables’, Miss Sims, which most certainly he isn’t.’
‘Do you mean that you want him to leave the Star and Garter?’
‘But of course! Isn’t that what we’re discussing? Why you’ve come – to help us persuade him to go home?’
‘Well no, I – that is to say I didn’t know. I came to see him, see how he was – and to beg him to send some message to his wife. Or at very least to let me tell her that he’s still alive. I think it could do her so much good, you see…’
‘Just a minute, Miss Sims,’ the Matron’s apron crackled audibly as she leant forward over the desk. ‘Are you trying to tell me that his wife doesn’t know that he’s alive? Because if so, I have to tell you that she must certainly have been informed by the War Office when the people at the Third London General discovered who he was. She’d have to know!’
‘No, I’m afraid it’s true, she really doesn’t know. I’m still not certain how it happened in the first place. But I think they must have made contact with his grandmother while Meriel – while his wife was still out in France. She went out to look for him you know, after the Armistice.’
‘But he had visitors at Wandsworth and at Sidcup, even at Brook Street. It says so in his files. And he’s had letters. Naturally we assumed that his entire family knew.’
‘No, just one visitor and one letter writer you see. His grandmother used to say that she was going up to see her accountant in Chancery Lane, and of course we had no reason to disbelieve her. When she first heard the news, I imagine she decided to see him herself before breaking it to the rest of us. And I do remember her telling Mr Ashby’s sister that Meriel should not have gone abroad, that there was still a future here for her. But I gather that when she did see him, Mr Ashby made her promise not to tell us. I believe that he can’t bear for anyone to see his face, Matron, even now?’
‘Few of them in that condition can without some sort of prosthetic camouflage.’
In her agitation the Matron had forgotten to be reassuring. ‘But let me have this perfectly clear, Miss Sims. Are you saying that Mr Ashby’s grandmother never even told his wife that he’d survived?’
It was Simmie’s cue to tell her all the rest – of the old lady’s plan to speak to Meriel the moment she returned from London – of Meriel’s subsequent defection to the beach and all the horrors that had followed. She told her of the doctor’s caution to avoid confronting Meriel with anything that would distress her. And even when she’d said it all, had somehow felt the need to go on talking – to try and make the antiseptic woman understand and sympathise.
‘I’ve thought about this a great deal in the last twenty-four hours as you can imagine, Matron, and believe that I can understand something of how Ned must have felt. His wife was so proud of his looks, you see – in love with them right from the start. So with this dreadful disfigurement, he’d be so fearful, wouldn’t he, that she might be unable to love – even to pretend to love him? That she’d be physically repelled. And how could a sensitive man face that prospect?’
‘In the same way that other men in his condition face it – as we who nurse them have to face it daily. By developing an immunity to pity and self-pity, Miss Sims,’ the Matron told her crisply. ‘No I’m sorry, but it’s not our function here to help people to hide from their responsibilities.’
To emphasise the point she gathered up Ned’s file and tidied it into a drawer of her desk. ‘If I’d had the slightest inkling of his domestic situation I’d never have accepted Mr Ashby in the first place. He’s fit now, as fit as he will ever be, and clearly has an obligation to his family to overcome any reservations he may have about his appearance. You say he has a little boy?’
‘Well, Patrick’s seventeen this year.’
‘Just so – and very much at an age when a lad needs a father, wouldn’t you say?’
In command of the situation once more, the Matron pressed an electric bell on her desk, and rationed out another of her bracing little smiles. ‘Miss Sims, I think we understand each other now. So I’ll leave it to you to help the man see reason.
‘Ah, Staff Nurse, take this lady down to see our Mr Ashby in the Quiet Room, will you? I believe he is expecting her. And do pop in again when you are through, won’t you Miss Sims? I’d very much like to hear how you got on.’