‘Well, it is. But there! It isn’t anything like what some families have to go through. When I think of the men who came home blinded or with such terrible wounds – look at Lionel Parker, say, or Reggie Fletcher. Or all those who didn’t come home at all. And of course I wouldn’t trade George and the children for the world,’ she finished, with rather the air of a women’s magazine.
‘Hmm,’ said Margot. ‘The world isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.’
‘Oh, dear! Here I am going on and on about us, and I haven’t begun to ask about you.’
‘Oh, well. There isn’t really very much to say. I just go on the same as ever I always did.’
There was a short silence, broken only by Victoria. ‘Would you yike a cake, Bear? Yes pease! All right, here you go. Sank you! Would you yike another cake? No, sank you.’
Mary said, very carefully, ‘If you’d just talk to Harry...’
‘And say what?’
‘I know he still loves you...’
Margot gave a short bark of a laugh.
‘No,’ she said. ‘How can he possibly love me? Could you love George if he’d done what I did to – to Victoria? If you’d gone all these years living this other life, and all the time Victoria was there and nobody had told you she even existed ?’
Mary drew in her breath.
‘You see? It’s not so simple.’
‘But, darling, you couldn’t tell him. You didn’t even know he was alive.’
‘I’ve known since February,’ said Margot.
‘Well, that isn’t so very long. And he was on the Isle of Wight, and—’
‘The postal service does reach the Isle of Wight, you know. It isn’t entirely cut off from civilisation.’
Another pause.
‘Why didn’t you tell him?’
‘Oh...’ Margot twisted her head from side to side. ‘It was such a shock, him being still alive! The telegram they sent us just said Missing in action, so of course we all thought he was dead... And then in February I got a cable from his mother saying he was alive and coming home. I just didn’t know what to say. Then she sent me this letter about how he had pneumonia and how ill he’d been and would I go and see him? And –’ She stopped. ‘I funked it,’ she said simply. ‘They never let us be together without a chaperone, and I thought, how could I tell him with his mother there? And how could I write it in a letter? It wasn’t him who wrote, you see, it was his mother, so I thought he must be so ill that she was reading his letters to him. And if she found out... well, it would all be over for James and my parents, wouldn’t it? But how could I write to him if I hadn’t told him? What would I say? It would be starting the whole thing off on a lie and... I’ve been lying for so long, and I hate it more than anything. I couldn’t bear the thought of lying to him, even by omission.’
‘But what did you say to his mother?’
Margot looked at her hands.
‘I sent her a simply awful card. I said I was so sorry about Harry, and that I was very busy with work at the moment, but maybe when things had settled down, that would be lovely.’
‘Darling!’
‘I know!’ Margot wailed. ‘Don’t! I know! It sounded all right in my head.’
‘It sounds like the worst sort of cold-hearted brush-off you could imagine,’ said Mary sternly. ‘Did they even reply?’
‘Yes.’ Margot buried her head in her hands. ‘After an age, he sent me a letter. Quite a decent sort of letter, considering. But by then it was too late. I just didn’t know what to say. And now – well, it is too late, isn’t it? It must be?’
‘I think,’ said Mary very carefully, ‘that now is the time – this holiday, I mean. You’re here and he’s here and there’ll be parties and things where you won’t be chaperoned, won’t there? There always are. I think you behaved like a bloody fool, but I think it’s just about forgiveable – now. But if you leave it any longer, it won’t be. You’ll just have to go your way and he go his, and that’s that. When are you going back to that awful school?’
‘The fourth of January.’
‘Well, there you are. You have to decide what you want, darling. And you’ve got till the end of the hols to do it.’
Stephen
It was dark as Margot walked home through the village, the stars appearing one by one over the rooftops. Every little house was lit up, Christmas trees in the windows, smoke rising from the chimneys, and the air that glorious mixture of coal-smoke and dirt and frost.
As she opened the front door, she closed her eyes and breathed in the familiar smells of home – linoleum and coal and tobacco and wet umbrellas. This was a good home. It had been a good childhood, on the whole. She was glad it would be her son’s.
By the sound of it, everyone was in the drawing room. Ruth’s high excitable voice, and a familiar male laugh. Stephen. The prodigal son was home.
She took off her coat, unpinned her hat, and hung them on the coat stand. Then she opened the drawing-room door.
They were all sitting around the fire, the tea still spread out on the table before them. The children were playing a noisy game of Snap! James was watching with fascination, laughing every time Ruth or Ernest shouted ‘Snap!’ and joining in. Stephen was sitting on the hearthrug arranging chestnuts on the coal-shovel. Jocelyn had her embroidery on her lap, but she was smiling. And Mother – Mother was sitting in the chair by the fireside, her whole face aglow with joy.
‘Margot!’ she cried.
‘Hullo, Stephen,’ said Margot with a smile. She liked her brother.
‘Hullo, old thing,’ said Stephen. They embraced. He looked tired, she thought, watching his face with an odd quickening of anxiety. Stephen had had a hard war too. He’d gone to France in 1917. But while Harry had been captured almost immediately, Stephen had spent eighteen months in the trenches.
He’d been discharged in March and seemed happy enough, if rather distant. He’d always been a bit awkward, rather musical – he played piano and sang in the church choir – without ever being exceptional. There’d been some idea of him becoming a schoolmaster and he had agreed to teach piano and singing in a boys’ prep school without enthusiasm. The post had lasted less than a month. The headmaster complained that Stephen was often late – sleeping past breakfast and missing choir practice and seeming to forget his turn at taking prep. The situation had come to a head three weeks in, when he’d gone to the local pub with a couple of the other younger teachers, ex-soldiers, all – and, the headmaster had seemed to imply, rather struggling to integrate back into civilian life. They’d come back roaring drunk at midnight, singing soldiers’ songs outside the junior boys’ dormitory and splashing about in the fountain.
This had been a huge shock to Stephen’s family. Stephen was basically a good child – awkward yes, and idiosyncratic definitely, occasionally vehement (there’d been a teacher at school who’d mistakenly punished one child for another’s mistakes, and Stephen had been so furious he’d refused to speak to him for the rest of the year). But basically clever and good-hearted.