Connie’s Courage Page 17

  Connie gave her a sympathetic look. Mavis, like many other nurses, had chosen to put her marriage plans on one side so that she could continue nursing, and because she felt the help she could give others was more important than her own personal happiness.

  ‘I know how torn he feels. His conscience is urging him to serve our country, but he also has his mother to think of.’

  ‘And not just his mother, Mavis, he has you to consider, as well,’ Connie reminded her fiercely.

  ‘I would not hold him back, Connie. Even though what we see here in the wards makes me so very afraid for him.’ Mavis gave a small shudder. ‘One sees the merest boys – for they are no more, Connie, you know that – pitifully wounded and yet so grateful for what little we can do for them, and so proud to have given their best.

  Their best, and in so many cases their health and their lives, Connie acknowledged inwardly.

  ‘I saw Josie the other day. She has gone so thin, Connie.

  ‘You cannot know how much I wish I had not made that cruel comment about Ted, Connie admitted in a low voice.

  Immediately Mavis covered Connie’s hand with her own and the two friends exchanged understanding looks.

  Ted, the delivery boy, had joined up in the first wave of enthusiastic volunteers. He had also been in the first wave of men to be gassed by the Germans.

  He and Josie had been married within days of his return home, a sad, quiet, little wedding conducted more as though it was an occasion for mourning rather than one for celebration.

  Josie had been devotedly nursing him ever since, lovingly tending the body that was now merely a rotting carcass, whilst Ted died slowly and painfully in the narrow bed they had never been able to share.

  All over the country there were thousands of other Teds and thousands of other Josies too.

  ‘Have you heard anything of Vera? Connie asked.

  ‘Josie said she was still working at the armaments factory, so far as she knew.

  ‘And your family? Everything’s all right with them? Connie asked, as casually as she could.

  Try as she might, she couldn’t say Harry’s name. She hadn’t attended his wedding, even though Mavis had pleaded with her to do so, insisting that she couldn’t possibly ask for extra time off.

  The wedding had taken place in the chapel at the school and had, according to Sophie, been the most wonderful affair.

  ‘It is such a pity you could not be there, she had told Connie. ‘Rosa is the most lovely person. She told Mother that she had fallen in love with Harry the moment she first saw him, and it is as plain as plain that he feels the same way about her.

  Even now Connie could still feel the searing stab of pain she had felt listening to Sophie’s excited revelations. How could she love Harry so deeply when loving any man was the last thing she wanted? When she knew that neither he, nor any other man, was worth loving? And knowing that, why couldn’t she be strong enough to stop loving him? Why wasn’t the fact that he had so easily overcome his supposed feelings for her, to turn to and marry someone else, making her feel glad that she had realised her own vulnerability and turned her back on him?

  Connie had thought she had learned the folly of loving another human being. She had lost her mother; seen her family torn apart by her aunts; experienced the desolation of having her father turn his back on his children; felt the shock and despair of her elder sister’s betrayal. And then, when she had believed she had found the love that would make her world right again, she had discovered that what she had so foolishly believed was love had been nothing of the sort. She had told herself that she was far better off without love – and she had believed it.

  She still believed it, she told herself fiercely, but that belief could not stop the pain she was feeling. A pain so intense that she could scarcely endure so much as to hear the sound of Harry’s name. Her only comfort was that no one else knew of her feelings, not even Mavis her closest friend, and certainly not Harry himself! After all, it was too late for her to long for things to be different now, Harry was married to someone else.

  Yet it hurt so much having to listen to Sophie singing Harry’s wife’s praises, whilst she herself burned with misery and envy.

  ‘Rosa told me that she has always wanted a sister, and that getting two is just like having the best Christmas and birthday presents she could have asked for, both at the same time,’ Sophie had told Connie excitedly, her eyes sparkling with pleasure. ‘She said that she would write to Mother and beg her to lend me to her for a visit!

  ‘She has the most beautiful clothes, Connie, and although we are not supposed to talk about it, I overheard her telling Mother that she has no need to worry about them managing on Harry’s wages, because she has her own allowance from some money left to her through her mother’s family.

  ‘And you should see the house she and Harry are going to be living in, Connie. It is so pretty, with the sweetest garden all surrounded by a wall. Rosa told me that when Harry was courting her, he came every day, no matter what the weather, to walk in the garden.

  Connie had felt her heart jerk against her ribs in angry protest, but fortunately Sophie had been too engrossed in what she was telling her, to be aware of Connie’s tension.

  ‘Rosa has had the whole house newly decorated in the latest style. And their bedroom! The bed is after the French style with blue drapes to match Rosa’s eyes and an embroidered satin coverlet. There is a chaise longue to match, and Harry has his own dressing room, and Connie you’ll never guess what … Rosa and Harry have their own private bathroom!

  Even Mavis had not been able to resist praising her new sister-in-law, confiding happily to Connie, shortly after the wedding, ‘Rosa is the most delightful girl, and she loves Harry so much it would be impossible not to love her just for that alone. She begged Mother so prettily to consider her to be a new daughter, and not merely a daughter-in-law, and she told us all that we are welcome to visit just any time we wish, and not to stand on ceremony at all.

  ‘Of course, knowing that Harry loves her and that she loves him is the best thing of all. You can see in their wedding photograph how she gazes up adoringly into his eyes.

  I am very happy for you all,’ Connie had responded woodenly. But somewhere deep inside of her there was a pain that just would not go away. A pain that became so much more intense whenever she thought of Harry so blissfully happy in his marriage, and so tenderly in love with his wife. And it was obvious to Connie, from what Sophie had innocently said, that Harry’s marriage to Rosa had been much more advantageous to him than marrying Connie would have been.

  She had told herself fiercely that it was just as well she knew what men were all about, and that she had not taken Harry’s declaration of love seriously. Even if he had genuinely believed that he loved her, he had proved how unreliable that love was, with the ease with which he had fallen out of love with her, and into love with someone else.

  Not for the world, had Connie been prepared to admit right away to her other feelings: the ones she had buried deep down inside herself; the ones that mourned the death of the tender, burgeoning shoots of potential new happiness she had felt beginning to grow. Instead, she told herself that she did not care how happy Harry was, whilst inside she ached with misery.

  But, as the weeks of Harry’s marriage had slid into months, Connie had realised that the emptiness inside her was growing, and not fading, and that her thoughts were filled more and more with regrets and longings for what she could no longer have.

  It shocked and frightened her that she should feel like that, her nights filled with longing for Harry and emptiness without him. How had it happened? How had the sharp thrill of awareness she had felt every time she saw him, or heard Mavis mention him, which she had thought of as so small a danger to her, turned into this? Connie didn’t know, but she did know that she had to put Harry out of her thoughts and out of her heart.

  Determinedly, she flung herself into her work with fierce dedication finding a temporary es
cape in its demands.

  Bodies:

  Harry’s mind was filled with them day and night. The bodies of fit, fighting men torn apart by the grim reality of war; the bodies of the not-yet-fully-grown boys he had taught, who had gone off to war with the same excitement with which they had anticipated a cricket match. But it wasn’t their silent stillness that tormented him, so much as the look of bitter reproach and contempt in their eyes. The same contempt he felt for himself.

  It didn’t matter that he had been declared medically unfit to fight, not once, but twice. Harry still felt like a coward; like a man who did not have what it took to be a man and do his duty.

  As he crossed the quadrangle, the wind tore at his gown and whistled through the quad’s silent emptiness.

  He was on his way home from what was now a regular weekly service to mourn the loss of those who were old boys of the school. Initially, it was just a spare trickle of names, the service conducted in a chapel containing just the members of the school, and the odd clutch of agonised relatives. Now, the trickle had become a deluge, so that there was standing room only in the chapel for the families of those killed.

  None of the Houses now possessed a senior year, nor the year below it: those pupils, those boys, those children, had all gone to war, and many would never return.

  Harry felt their loss very heavily, and so he felt, ultimately, must England itself. Many of the brightest and the best, and certainly the noblest, were already gone.

  He stood still as the cold silence was suddenly pierced by the sound of a woman’s grief. Today they had mourned the loss of the third son in one family. He had been fifteen and had joined up during the Christmas holiday, lying about his age.

  Her loss was more than his poor mother could bear. All her sons were gone, and her daughter’s fiancé as well.

  ‘I wonder who shall provide England with her future soldiers Mr Lawson?’ The woman had asked him grimly. ‘For mine shall be a generation of women without husbands. This War has robbed us not only of our husbands, but of our children as well.’

  Deep down inside himself, Harry knew that intellectually he could see no virtue in such a terrible waste of lives; but another part of him longed fiercely and passionately to be able to do his bit, and to fight, not just for his country, but also alongside his fellow countrymen.

  And if he did enlist who, after all, would miss him? Not Rosa his wife!

  Harry knew how upset and shocked his mother and sisters would be if they knew the truth about his marriage. But he would never hurt or distress them by allowing them to know. In their eyes, he was an extremely fortunate young man, married to a charming young woman who loved and openly adored him. Only he had seen the other side to Rosa’s nature – the private shocking darkness and hysteria, that was in such total contrast to the public sweet lovingness she exhibited to everyone else, as she clung to his arm and gazed soulfully into his eyes.

  There seemed no logical explanation for the moods which suddenly possessed her, dark destructive moods which Harry had come to dread, during which she would scream and hurl all manner of verbal insults at him. Sometimes she would even attack him physically, and threaten to take her own life, before collapsing into overwrought exhaustion.

  Harry had thought initially that they might be caused, in some part, by guilt because of the way she had trapped and blackmailed him into marriage; but then her father had taken him on one side, and told him that Rosa had inherited from her mother a delicacy of the nerves, which led to the outbursts.

  Harry had listened to his father-in-law as stoically as he could, whilst inwardly he had been filled with despair. In spite of everything, he pitied Rosa more than he could hate her. No, he could not hate her. But neither could he love her.

  In the place of the love and physical adoration he should have felt for her was only the pale shadow of his pity, and more shockingly the physical revulsion he tried so hard to hide. He reminded himself sternly that it was not Rosa’s fault that she wasn’t Connie, and he tried to hold in his heart the vows he had made toward her. But the truth was that their marriage was empty and barren, devoid of any real kind of love and shared intimacy, and empty, too, of respect and even affection. They had nothing in common, and Rosa claimed frequently, and he suspected truthfully, that she wished she had never married him.

  If her uncontrollable rages were hard to bear though, they were not so hard as their aftermath: those times when, after sleeping all day, she would awake in tears and full of remorse, begging him to forgive her.

  ‘Punish me as you wish, Harry,’ she would plead emotionally. ‘Do with me as you wish, beat me and chastise me, if that is your desire, for I have surely deserved your punishment.’

  And then when he told her not to distress herself, she would cry out, ‘Then if you will not punish me, I must punish myself.’ And she would start to claw and tear at her own skin so that he was compelled to restrain her physically, to stop her from hurting herself.

  There would be no calming her until he had told her that she had his forgiveness, but contrary to what she appeared to think, her sad debasement of herself filled Harry not with righteousness, but rather with repugnance.

  He had reached the house, and he hesitated outside the door, and then took a deep breath. The rich smell of roasting fowl filled the hallway, but its aroma failed to arouse Harry’s appetite. How could it when he had just come from a service mourning those who could never indulge such appetites again?

  ‘Harry, you haven’t kissed me!’

  He looked blankly into Rosa’s pouting face.

  ‘You aren’t a very romantic husband at all, Harry.’

  His stomach muscles started to clench, as he recognised the sharp aggrieved note in her voice.

  ‘All wives complain that their husbands are not romantic, my love,’ her father joked. ‘It is a condition of being married, eh, Harry?’

  ‘Is that true, Harry? Would you be so unromantic if you were married to someone else, do you think?’

  His clenched muscles became a tight knot of mingled anger and despair. The very last thing he felt like doing now was humouring her.

  ‘Rosa, I have just come from the memorial service for Jack Burton. His poor mother was -’

  ‘Harry, who is Connie?

  The knot in his stomach became a clenching fist of ice and fire.

  ‘If you mean Miss Pride, she is a friend of my sister s, he answered her carefully, whilst his heart burned with contempt for his denial of his love.

  ‘Is she so, indeed? A friend of your sister s, you say. You are lying to me, Harry. That is not the truth! How can it be when last night you called out her name in your sleep? Who is she? I must know. I will know.

  ‘Rosa, my dear, her father started to protest, but Harry had seen the look in her eyes and knew that her father’s warning would not be heeded.

  ‘Who is she, Harry? I demand to know! I am your wife! What is she to you, some … some harlot you have lain with, is that what she is? Is that why you cry out her name because you would rather be with her than with me? Did she crawl into your bed Harry, or did you take her there? Tell me, I demand to know! I have to know!’

  Harry could feel himself recoiling from the ugliness of the whole scene as he heard the venom in Rosa’s shrill, accusing voice, and saw the look on her face.

  Grimly he swallowed against the bile blocking his throat. For one mad moment, he had actually felt that he wanted to take hold of Rosa and demand that she stop sullying Connie’s name. ‘Answer me!’

  A plate flew past his head and shattered against the wall.

  Loathing and disgust burned and twisted inside him, withering the last shreds of the compassion he had fought so hard to hold on to. He could not, and would not, stand here like this and allow Rosa to insult Connie. But how could he protect and defend Connie without exposing her to even more of Rosa’s malice?

  A surge of mingled anger and helplessness rushed through him. Rosa’s father had already left the room a
nd Harry was afraid of what he might do himself if he stayed. Nausea and despair clawed at his stomach and his lungs cried out for the cleansing coolness of fresh air, in place of the putrid, fouled air of the dining room. Unable to trust himself to speak, he turned and walked toward the door.

  ‘What are you doing? You cannot leave. You must not … Tell me who she is, Harry. I demand to know … Harry … Harry!’

  As he walked out into the quadrangle, Harry could still hear Rosa’s wild screams. His heart was racing and his lungs felt as though they might burst. There was a pain in his chest and an even sharper one in his heart.

  He was, he recognised, afraid to go back. Because for the first time Rosa’s hysteria had filled him, not with aching helpless pity, but with raging savage anger. Hearing her sully Connie’s name had sent a red mist burning through him that had made him want to choke her into silence.

  He started to shudder, his body hot, and then cold. There would be no peace for him now, not now that Rosa had Connie’s name.

  He started to walk through the school gates and into the main thoroughfare that lay behind it, and the busy jostle of other pedestrians and traffic, his mind in turmoil.

  ‘ ‘Ere mate you go in’ ter enlist too, are yer? Didn’t think they ‘ud ‘ave the likes of me before, but now they need every man they can get, and I wants to do me bit. Ernie Henshaw’s the name.

  ‘Harry Lawson,’ Harry responded automatically, shaking the other’s extended hand.

  Ernie was a thin and undersized man with a pronounced limp who looked nothing like the popular image of a soldier. He also appeared malnourished and pale as though he had been ill, but Harry could see the fervour burning in his eyes, and suddenly he was filled with shame and guilt.

  Today in the school chapel, he had been overwhelmed by a need to honour the youthful fallen of the school who had sacrificed themselves so bravely. What better way could there be for him to do that than to follow their example?