Christmas dinner was, Eleanor had been forced to admit, a miserable failure. There had been an awful silence after James had left the room; no one had looked at anyone else. It simply wasn’t done, to leave a table like that. James had committed a terrible breach of manners, and no one knew how to respond. The war, with all of its devastation, hadn’t prepared them for a moment like this. Eleanor had had a sudden, terrible urge to laugh, and then a far stronger one to weep. She put a hand over her mouth to keep herself from either reaction.
James’s mother half rose from the table, stayed by her husband’s hand. “Let him be, Helen,” he said quietly. “Let him be.”
Finally Anne roused herself and asked her husband to serve the goose, and eventually, after a few endless, silent minutes, everyone began to chat normally, or at least with the pretence of normality. James did not return to the table.
Afterwards Eleanor felt a surge of shame for her own thoughtless folly, that she’d convinced herself a roast goose and a couple of Christmas crackers could actually cheer anyone up. The grief they all felt for the loss of Walter was too deep for that, and it seemed almost offensive that she’d thought such a paltry celebration, one of paper chains and frivolity, could make a difference.
And it wasn’t, she knew, just about Walter. After the initial relief and joy that had gripped the country when the Armistice had been signed, the nation now seemed to have slumped back into hopelessness. Soldiers’ demobilizations had been delayed and the newspapers were full of angry or pleading letters from parents and wives and sweethearts who wanted their men back.
And the men who did come back were not the same as those who had left. They weren’t the bright-eyed laughing boys who had gone off to war with a jaunty step, promising to return by Christmas back in 1914, and neither were they the smart men in khaki who talked about giving Jerry what for. No, these men, Eleanor thought, were gaunt, hollow-eyed strangers; some of them missing limbs, others blind or scarred. And even the ones with no visible wounds at all, like James, still seemed different – somehow less.
In the weeks and months after Christmas James and Katherine still, at least to Eleanor, seemed strained and almost strangers to each other; Katherine had thrown herself into volunteering, and went up to Carlisle several times a week. James had joined his father’s law practice in Whitehaven, and only came to the vicarage one evening a week, when he and Katherine would sit stiffly together on the settee with cups of tea and make awkward conversation. Once, Eleanor offered to play the piano for them; Katherine had huffed impatiently but James had said, “Why not let her? I’d like to hear something lively. God knows, I’d like to feel it.”
This comment, made half under his breath, left a little frisson of awkwardness in its wake, and then Eleanor, rather defiantly, started playing Al Jolson’s latest song from America, “Wedding Bells, Will You Ever Ring For Me?”, until Katherine stood up and nearly banged the piano lid on her fingers.
“Honestly, Eleanor, you’re such a child,” she snapped. “I don’t even like that modern music,” she added, flushing, seeming to realize she had overreacted. She went back to the settee and sat down, smoothing her skirt. Eleanor glanced at James, curious as to his reaction, but his face was blank, his gaze distant, as if he hadn’t even heard the music.
It wasn’t only in the vicarage that things were tense and miserable. All around the country the dreaded influenza continued to rage, killing thousands; jobs were scarce and people were desperate. This was not, Eleanor thought, what victory was meant to look like, but then some people questioned whether the Armistice had been a victory at all.
Life in Goswell continued, as it did everywhere. Andrew Sanderson preached from his pulpit, and Anne went back to her Sunday School classes and visiting the poor. The winter set in, cold and icy; the puddles in the sheep pasture were frozen solid and mean little flakes of snow drifted down – not enough to cloak the world in soft whiteness, simply a reminder of how cold it was.
Still there were moments of pleasure amidst all the bleakness and sorrow. One afternoon in February Eleanor stepped past a wounded veteran selling bootlaces from a tray around his neck so she could buy a bar of chocolate – the first she’d seen in years – from the sweet shop Mrs Charters ran from the front room of her house; the windowsill had become worn down from all the schoolchildren who leaned on it to look at her wares.
Eleanor held the bar of chocolate, marvelling at the sight of it, wrapped in crisp gold paper and feeling heavy in her hand. “I can’t actually remember the last time I saw chocolate, Mrs Charters.”
Mrs Charters nodded sagely. “It feels like the war’s over properly now, doesn’t it?” Her gaze slid instinctively to the man outside the shop. “That’s Billy Sutherland,” she whispered. “Lost an arm at Passchendaele. He was meant to work at the scone-flour factory up the street, but he can’t now, poor lad.”
Eleanor nodded, her throat going tight, and on the way out she bought several pairs of bootlaces from Billy that she didn’t need.
Back at the vicarage she went to the sitting room, intending to enjoy her bar of chocolate, but she found she had no appetite for it any more. She stared out the window instead at the muted grey landscape of February: stark, leafless trees and muddy, frozen pasture. Even the sheep looked lost and forlorn, as hopeless as she felt, huddling together.
“What are you doing moping about?” Katherine asked as she came into the room with her usual brisk step; Katherine always seemed as if she were going somewhere, as if she had plenty of things to do. Eleanor roused herself guiltily; her sister always made her feel lazy.
“I was just going to eat this chocolate,” she admitted. “Mrs Charters had some in today, for the first time in years.”
Katherine raised her eyebrows. “And you were going to eat it all yourself, alone in here?”
Belatedly Eleanor realized how piggish that must seem. “I don’t want any now,” she said, and held it out to Katherine.
“Well, I don’t want it,” Katherine retorted, stepping back as if Eleanor were forcing her to take it. “Give it to someone who might take some pleasure in eating it – one of our returned soldiers, for example.”
“I suppose I shall,” Eleanor said, and placed the bar of chocolate on the table. Perhaps she should have given it to Billy Sutherland, when she’d bought the bootlaces. Or would he have seen that as charity, and been offended? Just like Katherine had said when James had returned, she didn’t know how to be any more, with Billy Sutherland or with anyone.
“I don’t understand what’s happened,” she said, and Katherine glanced at her sharply.
“What on earth do you mean?”
Eleanor shook her head slowly. “The war has ended but nothing’s gone back to the way it was.”
“Did you suppose it would?” Katherine demanded, all impatient scorn. “Nearly a million men dead, another million wounded, and thousands now dying from the influenza. How on earth could anything be like it was?”
“I know,” Eleanor said quietly, but the truth was, she hadn’t known. Before Walter had died, she’d believed they could go back. She’d had to believe it, childish, naïve fancy that it had been. She’d pictured them all playing croquet on the lawn just as they had in the summer of 1914, when war had been nothing more than a passing thought, a careless whisper. Eleanor certainly hadn’t paid any attention to it, and the thought that had sustained her through those long and terrible years, through the missing and wounded and killed men, from farmers’ sons she’d barely known to boys in church she’d talked and teased with, had been that they could go back. They’d return to the way things were, as much as they could.
But perhaps you could never go back. Perhaps there was only this endless march of time forward, and to what? She felt as if she had nothing to look forward to, nothing but more of the same: endless days marking time, doing nothing.
“When will you and James set a date for your wedding?” she asked Katherine.
Katherine stiffened, her shoulders hunching slightly before she deliberately relaxed and smoothed a hand over her immaculate hair. “Why are you asking that?”
“It would be something to look forward to, at least,” Eleanor answered. “A wedding is a happy occasion.”
Katherine’s mouth tightened. “We haven’t set a date yet.”
“What are you waiting for?”
“James has only just started at the practice,” Katherine said. She picked up one of the lace doilies their mother was forever embroidering and smoothed it needlessly. “And the war’s only just ended. We still have butter and sugar rationed – we wouldn’t even be able to make a proper cake.”
A cake was hardly a reason to postpone a wedding. “Do you love him?” Eleanor asked boldly.
Katherine looked up from the doily and straightened, her eyes flashing. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous? How is it ridiculous to ask such a question?”
“Because it implies that you think I don’t,” Katherine answered shortly. She tossed the doily back onto the table, where it lay, rumpled and wrinkled. She had not, Eleanor noticed, actually answered the question.
“At least you have someone to marry,” she said. “I shan’t find someone.” Most girls her age wouldn’t, Eleanor knew. There simply weren’t enough men left to marry. The papers had been full of the bleak outlook for her generation.
“You might have to lower your standards a little,” Katherine answered. “But you could find someone, if you were of a mind to marry.”
Eleanor could not quite keep from making a face. She did not want to marry a man with a missing arm or worse. She knew that most likely made her seem snobbish and selfish and unkind, but she wanted a man who was whole in both body and soul, a man like Walter or James before the war, laughing as they swung their croquet mallets around by the handle, full of life and possibility and fun.
Katherine watched her for a moment, her face contorting in what Eleanor thought might actually be sympathy before she shrugged and straightened the doily once more. “It could be worse, you know,” she said, and left the room.
February slouched into March: cold, wet months, dark and damp and joyless, at least for Eleanor. While the rest of the family went about their business, she stayed at home, rereading Walter’s letters until it became too painful to do so, and then spending hours simply staring out the window at the sheep pasture which had turned into nothing but mud and puddles.
“You must get out, Eleanor,” Anne chided one March morning, when Eleanor sat curled up in the window seat of her bedroom, her hair undone and an old shawl around her shoulders. She’d picked up a book of poetry but had no inclination to open it.
“Go with Katherine to Carlisle, and help with—”
“I have no desire to sort through piles of mouldy old clothing,” Eleanor answered, turning her face away from her mother’s.
“I don’t suppose you would do it for mere pleasure’s sake,” Anne answered. “But think of the good of your soul.”
“My soul is too weary for anything to benefit it,” Eleanor replied, thinking that quite an elegant answer, but her mother would have none of it.
“Then your soul is in dire need of the medicine of good works,” she replied with asperity. “You are feeling sorry for yourself, and it does no one any good, least of all yourself.”
“You sound like Katherine. She berated me for buying a bar of chocolate.”
“I will not deny you life’s little pleasures,” Anne said after a pause, “for heaven knows we all need them. But you cannot live for pleasure, Eleanor.”
“I didn’t even eat the chocolate,” Eleanor protested. She hadn’t given it to Billy Sutherland or anyone else, either. She’d simply left it in a drawer.
Anne gave a small sigh. “You know I am not simply talking about chocolate.” Eleanor didn’t reply and she continued, “I have Mrs Belmont and her daughter Susannah coming to visit in a few minutes. You know that George Belmont has gone blind from that dreadful gas?”
Eleanor swallowed. “Yes, I knew that,” she said quietly. George had been in her Sunday School class; he’d always shared his conkers with her. She had not seen him since he had returned from France a few weeks ago, one of the last to be demobbed.
Anne reached out and touched her hand. “Come down, Eleanor, for your sake as well as the Belmonts’.”
“I don’t think I’ll be much use to the Belmonts,” Eleanor said, but she rose, reluctantly, and followed her mother downstairs to the sitting room.
The rain was coming down in sheets and even with the curtains drawn and a coal fire blazing in the hearth, the room felt cold. Eleanor paced restlessly while her mother went to the kitchen to make sure the tea things were ready.
“Mrs Stanton has outdone herself and made a cake,” she said as she came back into the room. She was smiling, but even Eleanor could see how pale and gaunt her mother had become in the months since the war had ended. She rubbed her hands together and stretched them towards the fire.
“And Katherine said there wasn’t enough flour or sugar for a wedding cake,” Eleanor said thoughtlessly, and Anne’s eyebrows rose.
“What’s this about wedding cakes?”
Eleanor shrugged, wishing she hadn’t said anything, but she felt too restless and out of sorts to stay silent, and so she continued, her voice becoming a bit strident, “Just an excuse she has concocted to delay the wedding.”
“Eleanor!” Anne looked disappointed rather than shocked, which made Eleanor feel worse. “That is not a kind thing to think, much less to say.”
“Well, why haven’t they set a date yet?” she demanded sullenly.
“James has only been home a few months—”
“At least he came home,” Eleanor returned and Anne nodded.
“That is why you are so cross, then? Because James came home and…” she faltered slightly but then continued with determined calm, “Walter did not?”
“I’m not cross,” Eleanor said. She thought of how Katherine had said the same thing, back at Christmas. Her unhappiness was too soul-consuming to be described as being merely “cross”.
“Whatever you are,” Anne said quietly, “you can keep such opinions to yourself. You don’t know the first thing about Katherine and James.”
“What is there to know?” Eleanor asked with a flicker of curiosity, but Anne just shook her head.
From outside they heard the crunch of gravel, and Eleanor saw Mrs Belmont, dressed in a gown of green bombazine that had to be several years old, walk up to the front porch with her daughter Susannah. She grimaced as her mother went to greet them.
The next hour was, for Eleanor, interminable. Mrs Belmont made determinedly cheerful conversation about George’s rehabilitation, and how he was learning new skills to cope with his blindness, “even reading, which seems quite incredible to me. But with this Braille system – all these raised dots – he could read a book one day.”
Which was more, Eleanor thought, than Walter would ever do.
She didn’t like the Belmonts; she’d always thought Susannah a bit of a pretender, all milky sweetness and wide eyes. Eleanor had once seen her pull a cat’s tail when she’d thought no one was looking. And Mrs Belmont was one of those women who spoke in either hushed whispers or ringing tones, with nothing in between. Her husband managed the scone-flour factory, and Eleanor had always thought Mrs Belmont had pretensions to grandeur.
Now Susannah turned her milky-sweet gaze on Eleanor. “We’re just so glad he’s home with us,” she said, tilting her head as she smiled in what looked to Eleanor like exaggerated innocence. “We’ve so much to be thankful for, unlike some—”
“Susannah—” Mrs Belmont hissed, and Eleanor watched with pursed lips as Susannah made a show of widening her eyes and reaching for her handkerchief.
“Oh, I’m sorry—” she said, but Eleanor didn’t think she was. Susannah had always been jealous of her. When they’d been twelve their teacher at the girls’ school they’d both attended up on the high road had complimented Eleanor on her neat handwriting, just about her only academic accomplishment, and then had held up Susannah’s childish scrawl in comparison. Susannah had never forgotten it.
“You needn’t be sorry,” Anne said quietly, and poured more tea.
Susannah’s gaze slid speculatively, even spitefully, to Eleanor, and without another thought Eleanor rose from her chair and walked out.
She went into the vestibule, grabbed her coat and hat and walked outside. The air was frigid and damp; the rain had thankfully stopped, but only just. She stood on the front porch for a moment, at a loss. She did not want to go into the village and see people: Billy Sutherland with his bootlaces or Mrs Charters with her chocolate. She did not want to make pleasantries with women whose husbands had come home, or with mothers whose sons hadn’t. She was so very tired of the war, and it was over. It wasn’t, she thought with a surge of both fury and despair, meant to be this way.
Since she couldn’t face the village she went round the house into the garden instead, picking her way past puddles and churned-up mud. The garden was at its worst on this raw March day: the trees and bushes still stark and leafless, the flower beds bare and bedraggled.
There was nowhere to go; Bower House was dark, her grandmother out undoubtedly doing more good works, and so Eleanor simply stood there, shivering in the cold, hating the war and what it had done and equally hating herself. She could still see Susannah’s smug expression as she’d left the room, glad to have made Eleanor react in such a childish fashion.
She could not go on this way. She wanted to, needed to change, to rise from the rut she found herself in, and yet she felt as if she didn’t know how. She wasn’t like Katherine; she couldn’t bustle off to Carlisle and knit socks and pour tea for orphans and widows. And yet she wanted to do something, to offer beauty and hope where there had been none, and not just with Christmas crackers or a few boughs of holly. But what?
Eventually she heard the sound of the gate creaking open and then someone walking across the wet grass. She didn’t turn around, and then her father spoke.
“You will catch cold out here, Eleanor. You must come inside.”
She heard the gentle reproof in his voice and her throat clogged with tears. “I don’t think Mother will want me inside after the way I’ve behaved.” No matter how stupid Susannah Belmont was, it didn’t excuse her appalling behaviour – walking out in the middle of tea like a child having a tantrum! How could she have let Susannah get to her in such a way?
But, of course, it wasn’t Susannah that had driven her to it; it was everything else.
“If you mean leaving the sitting room when the Belmonts were visiting,” Andrew said quietly, “she is more concerned than cross.”
Cross. No one, it seemed, was cross. “I just couldn’t bear it, Father,” Eleanor whispered. Her eyes were still closed. “Any of it. Not the Belmonts, not the orphans and refugees who are so desperate, not even poor Billy Sutherland with his bootlaces. I can’t bear any of it. I’m sorry.”
“I’m afraid it’s the world we live in now, my dear,” Andrew Sanderson said, and his voice sounded tired and sad. “Like you, I wish it was not, but we cannot change what God has ordained.”
“Do you really think God has ordained all the crosses in the cemeteries in Flanders?” Eleanor demanded, her voice choking. “Did He ordain Walter dying in some muddy trench, thousands dying—”
“Eleanor.” Andrew spoke on a sigh, sounding both weary and stern. “I cannot explain to you why this war happened. I do not know all of God’s ways, and I won’t pretend that I do.” He was silent for a moment, and then he continued quietly, “I fear we have done a great disservice to the people of this country, preaching from our pulpits that this war was necessary or even good. Now that it is over, they are more disillusioned than ever, and worse, they feel betrayed by the people they had looked to for comfort and healing.” He sighed again and rested his hand on Eleanor’s shoulder. “I do not want you to feel the same. I would like to see you smile again, Eleanor, in time. I know you have suffered, my dear, as we all have. But the world still has happiness in it, and more importantly, it has hope.”
“I don’t feel either,” Eleanor answered. “But I want to. I want to do something, Father, but I don’t know what.” She dashed away the tears that stung her eyes with one cold hand. “What can I do?” she asked, her voice rising, and her father smiled sadly.
“Just being yourself brings great joy to us, Eleanor—”
“But I don’t want to be myself!” she cried. “I’m dreadfully tired of myself, and my fits and failures.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself, my dear,” Andrew protested. “We are all weak…”
“Perhaps I need to be,” Eleanor countered. Her father would always see the best in her, and Katherine the worst. But she wanted to see clearly now, see herself and any future she could have. She gazed round the garden, muddy and dead-looking, and remembered how it had been last summer, when Walter had been home. When he’d been alive. The grass had been velvety and verdant, the flower beds bursting with blossom, with life. No one had tended to the garden since then; because of his arthritis Mr Lyman couldn’t do much digging and no one had seemed to care. Yet in that moment Eleanor cared; it seemed a travesty to let the garden where she’d once been happy with Walter die along with everything else.
But what use, really, was a garden?
“Come, my dear,” her father implored, holding out his hand, and with a sigh of resignation Eleanor took his hand and went back inside.