“I saw a lot of that in the trenches,” Izzie said.
“You weren’t in the trenches,” Sylvie said, always irritated when Izzie referred to her experiences in the last war. As they all were, to some extent. Only Hugh, surprisingly, had had some tolerance for “Izzie’s war,” as he referred to it. He had come across her once, during the horror of the Somme, at an advanced dressing station not very far behind the firing line. He was confused at the sight of her. She seemed to be in the wrong place—she belonged in the drawing room at Hampstead or in an evening gown, flirting and teasing some helpless man. The memory of her “indiscretion,” as he preferred to think of it—her scandalous affair with an older married man and the subsequent birth of an illegitimate baby—had been all but blotted from his mind by the mud. And anyway, that was a different Izzie to this one. This Izzie was dressed in some kind of uniform beneath a dirty apron, blood smeared across one cheek, carrying something foul in an enamel pail, and when she caught sight of him she gasped and said, “Oh, look at you, you’re alive, how wonderful! I won’t kiss you, I’m awfully filthy, I’m afraid.” She had tears in her eyes and at that moment Hugh forgave his sister for many future, as yet unmade, mistakes.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, full of gentle concern. “Oh, I’m a FANY,” she said carelessly. “Just helping out, you know.”
“The men were in the trenches,” Sylvie persisted, “not a few genteel lady volunteers.”
“The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry were not genteel ladies,” Izzie said, unruffled. “We got our hands very dirty. And it’s a terrible thing to label a man a coward,” she added quietly.
“Yes, it is,” Ursula agreed. “Not so bad for a chicken though.” Teddy laughed, finding refuge in humour. He was terrified of being found wanting in the coming fight. “She chickened out,” he said, indicating the chicken on Izzie’s plate, and both he and Ursula tilted towards hysteria. “What children you are,” Sylvie said crossly. Not really, Teddy thought. They were the ones who were going to have to stand fast to defend Sylvie and her chickens, Fox Corner, the last remaining freedoms.
The contents of his sister’s letters to him in Canada had been sparse (“the Official Secrets Act, and so on”), but reading between the lines he gathered that she had had a pretty awful time of it. Teddy had not yet been tested in battle, but his sister had.
She had been right about the war, of course, it had indeed been “bloody.” In the luxuriously warm safety of plush Canadian cinemas he had eaten his way through bags of popcorn while he watched, in horror, newsreels of the Blitz attacks on Britain. And Rotterdam. And Warsaw. And France had indeed fallen. Teddy imagined the fields of sunflowers ploughed into mud by tanks. (They weren’t, they were still there.)
“Yes, you’ve missed a lot,” Sylvie said, as if he had entered a theatre late for a play. His mother was now apparently very au fait with the events of the war and surprisingly bellicose, which was easy, Teddy supposed, from the relative comfort of Fox Corner. “She’s been seduced by the propaganda,” Ursula said, as if Sylvie wasn’t there.
“And you haven’t?” Teddy said.
“I prefer facts.”
“What a Gradgrind you’ve become,” Sylvie said.
“Hardly.”
“And what do the facts say?” Izzie asked, and Ursula, who knew a girl in the Air Ministry, didn’t say that Teddy’s chances of surviving his first operational sortie were, at best, slim, and that his chances of surviving his first tour were almost non-existent, but instead said brightly, “That it’s a just war.”
“Oh, good,” Izzie said, “one would so hate to be fighting an unjust one. You will be on the side of the angels, darling boy.”
“Angels are British then?” Teddy said.
“Indubitably.”
Has it been very bad?” he had asked Ursula when he met her off the train that morning. She looked pale and drawn, someone who had been indoors too long, or in combat perhaps. Was she still seeing her man from the Admiralty, he wondered?
“Let’s not talk about the war just now. But yes, it has been pretty awful.”
They made a detour to visit the churchyard where Hugh was buried. From within the church they could hear the thin voices of the Sunday-morning congregation straining over “Praise My Soul, the King of Heaven.”
Hugh’s grey headstone with its seemingly bland inscription—Beloved father and husband—was still harsh in its newness. The last time Teddy saw his father he had been tangible flesh and now that flesh was rotting in a hole beneath his feet. “Best to avoid morbid thoughts,” Ursula counselled, advice that would stand him in good stead for the next three years. For the rest of his life, in fact. Teddy found himself thinking what a decent human being his father had been, the best of all the family really. The grief caught him unawares.