The Very Thought of You (8 page)

Daily they prayed for those who had died at the front. Roll calls of boys’ names were read out, boys who had so recently walked down the school streets. But Thomas was still hedged in by his lessons, competing for the History Prize, and running for his house team. Never thinking much about the war, even when his brother’s cavalry regiment crossed the channel to France. Until his housemaster called him into his study after lunch one day.

“It was a dawn raid. He was leading his men with the courage you would expect. I’m afraid they were unable to retrieve his body.”

William, his indomitable brother, whose thick legs had strained the top lace of his riding boots.

Thomas was excused from afternoon school, and sent off to running practice. He ran and ran, and the breath of life streamed through his lungs, and the ground pushed up against his feet as he pounded along the track. But he could not stop himself imagining the alien landscape, and the random moment of his brother’s death in the trick light of dawn. He had vaguely assumed until then that any British deaths were those of incompetent soldiers, without his brother’s verve or timing. Now, with William caught out, he glimpsed the roulette of survival on the front.

He took tea in the High Street with his brother Edward, already in the uniform of the school’s Cadet Corps. They ate muffins, and all their thoughts were for their mother
and sister: they could only touch on their own grief through sympathy for the women in their family.

A few weeks later William’s memorial service was held at Ashton Park, despite the absent corpse. Only his bulletscarred helmet had been retrieved. Miriam Ashton was distraught and held onto Claudia, stroking her hair. It was no comfort to her that William had been heroic, because the soaring death toll had already devalued the worth of any one sacrifice. Nor could she lose the imagined moment of her son’s pain in death: the phantom shrapnel kept tearing through her own guts.

Thomas’s father was silent, but inside he wept at the memory of his son, whom he saw as a better version of himself. He was privately mortified that he could not have died in his place. But he was also pricked with guilty sorrow by the three young labourers from the village who had also died that month, yet would not be treated to the ceremony of William’s memorials. He ensured that flowers were sent to their mothers.

William’s leather trunk was returned by his regiment, all his chattels neatly packed by his batman, his shaving kit, his ivory hairbrushes, his silver flask and cigarette cases, his letters. It gave an oddly ordered impression of war, Thomas thought. His mother would not allow the trunk to be unpacked: it was locked up and stowed away, upstairs, somewhere safe.

Her anguish was only deepened when her next son, Edward, finished his schooling and arrived home for a visit in his uniform. In 1915, he trained for a month at Aldershot before his regiment was sent to the front.

When fifteen-year-old Thomas returned home to Ashton Park in the holidays, he found an altered place. All the young men from the estate had left to join the local yeoman rifles. For the first time, he and his sister saw the great shell of their house empty of parties. The fires were unlit, and the deserted
corridors echoed to their footsteps. Memories of William’s commanding presence crowded in on them, in every unused room.

Their mother had removed herself to London, to help run a soldiers’ canteen at Waterloo. Their father struggled to keep his estates going in the absence of so many labourers, then succumbed to his wife’s wish to turn Ashton Park into a hospital. At least the house was full again, thought Thomas. For the next few holidays, he carried supplies up and down the mahogany stairs to nurses in starched uniforms. He and his sister watched with appalled fascination as limbless young men were wheeled around in bath chairs on the front lawn. Claudia longed for Edward to come home on leave; Thomas dreaded his mutilation.

School was little better for Thomas, because every day brought fresh news of casualties from their teams, their school plays, their choirs.

Edward wrote home from Flanders, letters which at first – but only at first – commended the bravery and spirit of his company.

Dear Thomas,
I imagine with pleasure your daily routine at school. Enjoy it for me and do not hurry to join us. Here, death is so familiar that it weakens our will to live. What does it matter if the sun shines? Why should I shave?

Our bravery is bovine. We expect to die, and prepare for it daily. But just when you think you are resigned and emptied of fear, and free to fight, then a chance thought makes all the old hopes flood back in again and, with them, all the fear fuelled by hope.

Yesterday my fellow patrolling officer was picked out by a shell. It blew off his head. It could have been me.

But I have William for company, in his way. I feel his presence with me here, cheering me on, bringing me luck.

Stay away as long as you can—

Your loving brother,

Edward

The letter felt oddly rhetorical to Thomas. The writing was neat, the paper unsmirched. Was it really so bad? Thomas forgot the fights he had known through his childhood with Edward, and felt sucked into the abysmal world of the trenches. He could sense the stinking mud which was so often described, the infernal soup of earth through which the soldiers waded, while he, Thomas, ate buttered muffins over a stoked fire at Eton.

Edward survived as the men in his company fell. Through the long nights, he often recalled the sunlit lawns of his Yorkshire childhood. For too long now, he had left behind all that comfort and delight – first for the chilly dormitories of boarding school, and now, barracked with his men in trenches, with the stink of gangrene rising amongst them. The natural flickers of fellow feeling, of seeing how the limbs of working men were as good as his own, had made him doubt his inheritance. He would go back to his home a changed man – a better man, he told himself.

But in 1917 he slipped into the infamous Flanders quagmire of Passchendaele. Running along slippery duckboards on a wet night, he was blown into a flooded dugout by ashell which shattered his right side.

“at last a blighty,” he thought, “I’ll be home at Ashton for Christmas.” But he had not reckoned on his weakness, nor the depth of the mud, nor the distance to the duckboard. He hung onto a wooden rafter in the darkness and called for help, but the sky was loud with the clamour of shells.
He tried to move forwards, but there was no firm ground beneath his feet. He thought of Bunyan’s Christian, in his Slough of Despond, and prayed for help. But there was no true faith in his prayers, only panic. The mire was too thick to swim through. With his good arm he clung to the wooden beam, but the mud was heavy, pulling on his boots, drawing him down.

The sky was fitfully lit with the blazing flares of war. His shattered shoulder was throbbing with pain, and his too rapid breathing only sunk him further. The meteoric splendours of the battle sky echoed the involuntary flashes of light inside his own dimming mind.

Images flickered through him, of his pale-faced sister, of the yellow wallpaper in his room at Ashton, of bare white legs on the rugby pitch at Eton. The aroma of his mother’s scent seeped through his breathing, and he felt the touch of her white embroidered handkerchief. He wished he had spent more time with women. If he could just keep afloat till dawn, somebody would surely find him and fish him out. Christmas at Ashton Park, breakfast with new-laid eggs and toast.

After an hour, as freezing weariness and pain loosened his grip, he slipped downwards to darkness. He tasted the mud for a moment, thick, suffocating, before it flooded his lungs and he drowned.

Nobody in his company knew where he was, but they were sure he had not deserted. He was missing, presumed dead. Too many had vanished into muddy oblivion, and would surface only later, as picked bones, when the summer skies dried up the unnatural quagmire.

Ashton Park now lacked a second body to bury at home, and Miriam’s heart was broken. She clutched at consolations in the air around her, and began to speak to her dead sons through mediums.

My dear Thomas,
How close we are to the spirit world, if we only learn how to listen and open our eyes! Last evening, with the help of Mrs Ostleton, I had a sighting of Edward. He was smiling. He looked as he did before going off to the war. He told us that William and he are together now, and happy, too. We need not despair. We are all together, now and for ever. Take courage, dear Thomas. I will tell you all about the vision properly when I see you soon. We must help your poor father, and Claudia, through this terrible time.

Your loving Mama

Thomas was at first shocked by his mother’s retreat into the spirit world of her Anglo-Irish youth. But he, too, sometimes felt the presence of his brothers’ spirits, in his head, and in the promptings of his conscience.

His mother was desperate not to let her beloved last son go to the front. But like all his friends, Thomas went to war as soon as he had completed his schooling.

“It is not a question of
choice
, Mama,” he told her.

He found himself at Aldershot, where long lines of faceless barracks were interspersed with barren parade grounds. A monotonous landscape, manufactured and unreal. Thomas was drilled in the art of marching and the skills of open combat, which by all accounts were worthless on the front.

My dear Claudia,
I think of you at Ashton, with all the convalescents. I can imagine how much you must cheer them up.

Strange to think that Edward trained here, at Aldershot. The barracks are worn and shabby – did he ever say which building he was in?

Memories are to be cherished. I think of William and Edward daily, and the thought of them bolsters me. Other times, I am still shaken by their loss.

Take care of Mama. I know how she will suffer if I go too, and so I will do all I can to return to you.

Your loving brother,
Thomas

Thomas was an eighteen-year-old marching on a parade ground when the Armistice was declared, releasing him back to civilian life. With a mixture of relief and regret, he left behind his dreary barracks and returned to the Ashtons’ London home, Sussex Place, a wedding cake of a house in REgent’s Park, all pillars and porticoes.

His father and mother were waiting for him there, to rejoice in their living son, who carried now the weight of his brothers’ unused lives. Claudia joined them for a champagne toast in the drawing room, but privately felt that any celebration was inappropriate.

After two glasses, Miriam Ashton became lachrymose and reached out to her only son.

“You’re lucky, Thomas,” she said.

“I know that,” replied Thomas, a little abashed.

“No, I mean something else, I believe you have
luck with you
—”

“Please don’t say that,” chipped in Robert, unusual though it was for him to contradict his wife.

“You can be sure that Thomas and I will take good care of ourselves for both of you,” said Claudia, eager to pacify.

Miriam smiled and laughed, but Thomas was subtly shaken by his mother’s longing for his good fortune – what if lightning struck, or he fell from a horse, how could he fulfil all the hopes she had for her remaining children?

It was not long afterwards that an epidemic of Spanish influenza swept haphazardly through Europe. At Ashton Park, the cook’s daughter was the first to fall ill. Rachel Barry shivered and sweated, and her mother stayed with her through the night, giving her water, sponging her face and body. Rachel recovered, but the fever spread rapidly through the rows of recuperating soldiers in their hospital beds. Within days, three men and a young nurse had died.

Sixteen-year-old Claudia, helping with the nursing work, was taken ill on the third day of the outbreak. She lay in her old familiar bed, overlooking the broad sweep of parkland. Her head burned hot and she began to slip in and out of delirium, like the other victims.

Robert and Miriam Ashton were telephoned in Sussex Place. They caught the first train to York, and forbade Thomas from joining them. For two days they sat by Claudia’s bedside in desperate agitation. They sponged her, they talked to her, they tried to rouse her. They walked up and down the room, and rocked in their chairs, and gripped at their own fretful fingers until they were sore. But they could not reach their daughter – her soul was drifting free. Sometimes, in her delirium, she seemed to be talking to her brothers, as if they were standing at the end of her bed.

Her decline was too swift. Miriam was watching her daughter’s white face when she stopped breathing. Suddenly Claudia’s eyes were empty and still. She had vanished into the light of the sky, and nothing could bring her back.

Miriam howled out loud, in animal sounds. Half-delirious with exhaustion, she held her daughter and breathed into her mouth, hoping for a shudder of life. But the girl was dead as stone.

Robert stumbled into the room, and found his wife holding their dead daughter in her arms. He held them both, and
tears seeped down his face for Claudia, for Miriam, for all of them.

Thomas, waiting for news in London, was stunned by this capricious aftermath to the war. There was nothing to steady his heart but to walk, and he walked all day and late into the evening through the streets of London, through the darkening park, until exhaustion overcame him. Soon after dawn, he caught the first train to York, sleeping fitfully on the way. But when he arrived at Ashton Park, his mother sent him away, back down to the village, for fear that he, too, might get infected. It was another ten days before they would allow him to come into the house.

By then the epidemic had passed, but not before they had suffered five deaths at Ashton Park. The house hospital was wound up and rooms which had been stripped for wards were left empty and forlorn, still smelling of disinfectant.

There seemed to be an excess of iron buckets lying around the house.