White Feathers (30 page)

Joseph butted in. ‘Is James still in bed?’

Lucy nodded. ‘He had another bad night last night.’

‘Clearly,’ Joseph said and got up.

‘No, leave him, he’s …’

‘No, Lucy, I’m sorry but this can’t be allowed to go any longer and we’re all just condoning it by doing nothing. I know he’s had an absolutely bloody awful time, but he can’t keep on taking it out on everyone else.’

As he left the room no one disagreed with him, and no one got up to follow him. They went back to their breakfast in silence, but all looked up when Joseph and James came in about twenty
minutes later. Joseph’s lip was slightly split, his right knuckles were grazed and his shirt was damp down the front, as if he’d hurriedly sponged something off it. One of James’s eyes was bleary and swelling visibly. They sat down at the table without a word and casually laid their napkins over their laps as if nothing at all untoward had happened.

Eventually, James said, ‘I think I might go in to the hospital for a few weeks after all. As soon as I can arrange it. I’m, well, obviously things aren’t going too well.’ He looked up. ‘I’m so sorry, Lucy. I really am.’

Lucy, her eyes filling with tears once again, immediately reached across the table and took her husband’s hand. Tamar had to blot her own tears, and Andrew had a sudden fit of vigorous throat-clearing. Keely was on the verge of crying too, but somehow Tamar didn’t think it was because of Lucy and James.

After breakfast she sat on the sofa in the parlour — her favourite room in the house — and contemplated her errant daughter while she worked on a piece of embroidery destined to become a bodice panel in a new dress. She was enormously relieved that James had decided to go into the hospital, but something would really have to be done about Keely as well.

The family knew more or less why she had come home — she’d made no secret of it, and in some ways almost seemed proud of what had happened — but they were all paying the price of her misery, which was showing few indications of abating. Tamar had been very cross with her daughter for getting herself into such an invidious position, but given her own history she certainly wasn’t in any position to be critical. These things happened in wartime. But, of all things, to fall in love with a married man — Tamar really thought Keely should have had more brains than that and certainly a better sense of self-preservation.

When Tamar had heard from Erin that Keely had been utterly
infatuated with the man, her heart had gone out to her daughter: her feelings may have been misguided, but she had obviously loved Ross McManus deeply, which would have only made the sense of betrayal even more bitter and hurtful.

She had tried to talk to Keely about it but had been fobbed off with some comment about all that being in the past now. But Tamar knew it wasn’t. You only had to look at Keely to see that: her eyes lacked their usual sparkle, she had lost weight and she was very self-absorbed. When Keely had first come home, Tamar had invited some of the more attractive and eligible young men from the district to dinner now and again, but more often than not Keely wouldn’t even come down from her room. She had decided to let her daughter sulk until she became sick of wallowing in her own misery, but that hadn’t happened.

If Tamar needed any confirmation that Keely was still enamoured of McManus, it was provided every time the mail arrived — or didn’t arrive. On mail day Keely would moon about in the morning, then go down to the box by the gates. If there was nothing from McManus, as there never was, she would be in a black mood for days. Andrew was of the opinion that she wasn’t too old to be sent to her room without her dinner, but Tamar just laughed and said that would hardly make much difference since Keely spent half the day in her room any way.

Tamar was worried. Keely had received a letter from the matron of Napier Hospital several weeks ago offering her work on the veterans’ ward, which Tamar thought was very generous given Keely’s escapades in England, but her daughter had mentioned the offer once, then never referred to it again. Whenever Tamar tried to discuss it, she changed the subject.

It annoyed Tamar, this lack of enthusiasm, but she didn’t want to be too hard on the girl who, she believed, was enduring her own sort of shell shock. A woman, after all, couldn’t nurse all those poor
broken men month after month with no real rest and emerge from the experience emotionally unscathed. But Keely wasn’t trained to be anything other than a nurse, except some body’s wife, and with her face and constitution as sour as they were at the moment, that was most unlikely.

Tamar still had hopes, though. She wanted her daughter to be happy, to know the delight of a man who loved and supported her, someone with whom she would have children and grow old.

In a fortnight’s time there would be a welcome-home dance at the local school for the district’s returned and mostly wounded servicemen. James should be home from the hospital in time, if he could be persuaded to go, and there would be all manner of young men there. Perhaps one might even take Keely’s fancy. Each man was to be presented with a wristwatch to acknowledge his service, and the proceeds of the entry fee charged to non-veterans would go towards the district’s war memorial project fund, which Andrew declared somewhat cynically had become the country’s latest pastime. Tamar had berated him for his sarcasm, but it was true that communities seemed to be competing to get the grandest, most ostentatious memorial up as quickly as possible, even before the war was over.

A few days later, though, everyone at Kenmore forgot about the welcome-home dance: Erin was finally coming home.

C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN

W
ell before Erin returned, however, Kenmore had a visitor. Fred Wilkes was a small, faded-looking returned soldier who knocked on the front door one afternoon and explained through a pronounced stutter that he had served with Ian in France. He had come to pay his respects, he said, and hoped to offer some comfort to Ian’s family.

Tamar immediately ushered the man into the parlour, ignoring the state of his clothes and his rather rancid smell, and sat him down, calling out to Mrs Heath for tea and cake. She sat opposite him with her hands clasped in her lap, nervous in case Mr Wilkes might blurt out unpleasant details of her son’s death. But he only looked at her with sorrowful eyes that blinked rapidly and teared frequently.

When the refreshments came he ate four slices of fruitcake one after the other and washed them down with great gulps of tea, which he spilled down the front of his mouldy-looking old jacket. Because it was a hot summer’s day Tamar offered to hang up his coat, but he said, with a deep shiver, ‘N-n-no thank you, ma’am, it was sh-sh-shocking cold on the Somme and I haven’t b-b-been able to get meself warm since.’

Then it seemed to occur to him that Tamar might not want his
filthy clothes on her lovely brocade sofa and he jumped up. ‘Oh, s-s-sorry. Shall I go in the kitchen?’ He looked down at himself ruefully. ‘I’m a b-b-bit down on me luck, as you can s-s-see.’

‘No, no, of course not, Mr Wilkes,’ replied Tamar immediately, forcing herself not to finish his words to save him from embarrassment. ‘In fact, if you like, I can probably find something else for you to wear and Mrs Heath can put your clothes through a wash.’

‘Oh, no, I d-d-don’t want you to go to any trouble,’ he said. He coughed liquidly and thumped his chest. ‘S-ssorry, it’s me lungs. But I’d b-b-be honoured if you’d call me F-F-Fred, ma’am.’

Tamar stood. ‘Of course, Fred. Wait here and I’ll find you something else to put on.’

When she returned to find him staring miserably at his cracked and dirty boots, she was carrying an old pair of trousers, a shirt and some clean socks.

‘I hope you won’t be offended but I’ve asked Mrs Heath to run you a bath. You seem to have been on the road for some time. Nearly everyone’s out at the moment, so you won’t be disturbed.’

Fred looked up at her, his hands filled with Andrew’s cast-offs, and a tear finally escaped and ran down his cheek.

‘Th-th-thank you, ma’am,’ he said, his lips twisting in an effort to control his emotions. ‘Ian s-s-said you were a kind and generous woman, and b-b-beautiful, and he was right.’

‘Well, thank
you
, Fred,’ Tamar replied. ‘And please don’t call me ma’am. Mrs Murdoch is fine. I’ll get Mrs Heath to show you to the guest bathroom, shall I? And perhaps she can prepare you something more substantial to eat after you’ve refreshed yourself. We can talk about Ian when you’re feeling a bit better.’ She turned to leave the room, but paused at the door and turned quickly back again. ‘Which company did you say you served with in France?’

‘I didn’t, b-b-but it were the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Battalion,
C Company,’ Fred replied immediately, his voice full of pride. Then, ‘I weren’t in the same s-s-section as Ian but we served s-s-side by side.’

Once the grime had been washed off and he’d combed his hair, Fred Wilkes was revealed to be a moderately good-looking man of twenty-three or twenty-four. He’d had to roll up the cuffs and sleeves of Andrew’s clothes several times, but they were a vast improvement on those in which he’d arrived. Mrs Heath refused to put his old clothes in her nice clean copper but instead set fire to them, standing back with her fingers holding her nose and a very disapproving look on her face as the rags went up in flames.

When Fred had waded his way through cold meat and salad with fresh, buttered bread and another pot of tea — according to Mrs Heath’s muttered aside to Tamar, he had almost ‘taken the pattern off the china’ — he burped gently into his napkin and sat back with his hands spread across his stomach.

‘B-b-best feed I’ve had in ages, thanks, Mrs,’ he said, smiling up at the housekeeper and showing missing back teeth. She hmmphed and bustled about clearing the empty dishes from the table.

Tamar suggested, ‘Perhaps you’d like to bring your tea into the parlour?’ She hesitated slightly before adding, ‘And then you can tell me about Ian.’

When they were settled, Fred ensconced in Andrew’s favourite chair and Tamar on one of the sofas, he began.

‘He were a lovely b-b-boy, Ian. Everyone’s favourite, even when we were training t-t-together at Trentham. Always ready with a s-s-smile and a joke, nothing were ever t-t-too much t-t-t … God!’ Unable to get the word out, he grimaced in embarrassment and frustration. ‘S-s-sorry, Mrs Murdoch. It’s me nerves!’

Tamar nodded in sympathy. ‘Take your time, there’s no hurry.’

Fred took a deep breath and continued. ‘And strong! Carrying the other lads’ gear if they was s-s-struggling, giving them a helping hand, b-b-bucking them up when they had long faces. He was good at it too, s-s-soldiering. Sergeant said he’d make officer if his luck held.’ He stopped and bit his lip, blinked hard and cleared his throat. ‘It were the s-s-same when we was on the t-t-troopship. T-t-tower of strength, he was. We were all reinforcements, you know, and s-s-some of us had heard the horror stories going round about life at the front, and I got to be honest here and s-s-say a lot of us were getting quite windy about it all, but Ian was always chipper. He reckoned give us a m-m-month out there and the bloody Hun’d be straight back to Germany with their t-t-tails between their bloody legs, pardon my language!’

Tamar asked hesitantly, ‘Were you … were you there when he died?’

Fred nodded reluctantly. ‘We were all there. I w-w-won’t go into details …’

‘No, please don’t,’ interrupted Tamar.

‘But I will s-s-say he had his friends around him when his t-t-time came.’ Fred looked at the floor for a moment. ‘And it was quick. I know people always say that, but it really w-w-was for Ian.’

He looked up again, at Tamar sitting across from him, her face red from the effort of not crying and her throat working to keep the sobs at bay.

‘But I won’t d-d-dwell on that, Mrs Murdoch. Your b-b-boy died a hero, and that’s all I’ll say on the subject. I got plenty of other s-s-stories about him though, how p-p-popular he was and all that, if you got time to hear them before I set out again. And he t-t-told us so much about your place here, I feel like I’d know my way around s-s-straight off.’

Tamar plucked her handkerchief from her sleeve and blotted her eyes. ‘Do you have to go today, Fred? Perhaps you could stay a day
or two. I’m sure Mr Murdoch, Ian’s father, would be very happy if you would. James and Thomas, our other sons, are both away at the moment — Thomas is still over seas — but my son Joseph is home, and Keely is here, of course, our daughter.’

Fred gave a watery smile. ‘Yes, K-K-Keely. Still getting up to mischief, is she?’

Tamar stared at him. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Keely. Ian s-s-said she were a very outgoing young lady. Always matchmaking and that s-s-sort of thing.’

‘Oh. Well, she’s still recovering from her nursing experiences over seas at the moment. She was in Egypt and France, you know. And England.’

‘Oh, right, of course. They was all real angels, our n-n-nurses, and they worked damn hard. Looked after me a t-t-treat, they did.’

‘Were you wounded, may I ask?’

Fred coughed again. ‘Just the gas. And me nerves. Had a rough t-t-time of it for a while. We all did. Went back to the front line after me first hospital stay but ended up flat on me b-b-back again. Then back to the front, managed for a couple of months, got another d-d-dose and that was it. Me CO said send this man home, he’s done his bit. ’Course, getting work with a d-d-duff chest isn’t easy. I can labour all right, it’s just getting these b-b-blimmin’ farmers round here to give me a go, that’s all. What I wouldn’t give for half a ch-ch-chance! But you don’t want to hear about all that. I’m here to tell you about your son, not moan on about meself!’

Andrew, Lachie and Joseph came in at dinnertime. By then Jeannie and Keely, and Lucy and the children, who had all gone into town to visit James, had arrived home as well. James had seemed more relaxed, Lucy said, after a spell in the company of other returned soldiers also attempting to come to terms with their war experiences. In fact, James seemed so improved that Duncan
had consented to sit on his knee for ten minutes, a treat he didn’t bestow on just anyone.