It’s an effort, but I manage to climb out of bed and into a chair. I don’t want Evelyn to see me like that, all motionless, lying prone on a four-poster with the blankets up to my chin. A little girl shouldn’t have to see her mother like that.
Instead, I sit in the large wing chair in the corner, wrapped in a dressing gown, my toes balanced on the edge of the matching footstool. Evelyn’s just finished her dinner, and I’m grateful to see that she displays none of my symptoms. That her cheeks are pink and healthy, her eyes bright, her movements unfettered. She rides an imaginary pony around the room and tells me about her day, in the random, unconstructed sentences of a small child. The grapes she ate for lunch. The giraffe in the book Miss Portia read to her. The toy soldier Sammy let her play with.
“Sammy, darling? Who’s Sammy?”
Sammy is the boy she plays with.
“Whose boy?”
She shrugs. Just the boy.
(I am concentrating very hard. Thinking Sammy, my God, Sammy. What does this mean?) “Where? Where does the boy live?”
Miss Portia’s house.
“Is he Miss Portia’s boy?”
Yes. Miss Portia boy. He THIS many years old.
(She drops the pony’s reins, tucks her doll underneath her elbow, the rag doll that used to sit against the mirror atop my chest of drawers, and holds up seven fingers.)
I always take my aspirin late in the evening, when the house is quiet, because I don’t want anyone to catch me. Also, I’m starting to run low, and I think that if I take this pill just before I go to sleep, the effects will somehow last longer. The aspirin will see me through the night, the beautiful black velvet night, so thick and so heavy that I can just about live there, free of all pain, until morning comes.
Until the aspirin runs out.
What will I do when the aspirin runs out?
I wait until the atmosphere is absolutely still. Until every last floorboard has gone silent. And then I lie there a little longer, gathering my strength, because it requires such a vast amount of strength to push back the covers and rise from the bed. Such a colossal will to stagger across the width of the bedroom (sometimes I actually crawl, you know, because the effort’s so immense) and open the bathroom door and then, on top of all that, to open the door of the medicine cabinet and grasp the bottle of aspirin that the doctor gave me in Cocoa. A hundred little white pills, only there aren’t a hundred there anymore. Not even close. I try to count what’s left, to figure out how many days of relief I have remaining, but I lose myself in the middle. Well, never mind. I can always send out for more aspirin, can’t I?
But what if I can’t? What if I don’t remember? What if I entrust this task to Miss Bertram and she brings back the wrong kind of aspirin? What if—even worse—she decides I don’t need the aspirin anymore?
The bottle is shaking before me, rattling the little pills within, making me think of a snowstorm. One of those glass globes you brought back from your holiday in the mountains, filled with liquid, depicting some miniature landscape, and you shake and shake until the delicate white flakes within blur into a miniature blizzard, obscuring the miniature landscape within. Sophie bought one of those for Evelyn when we visited Switzerland last year. Geneva. Or was it Zurich? How Evelyn laughed. How she shrieked with delight.
And I realize that the bottle of pills isn’t shaking by itself—of course not. That my hand holding the bottle is shaking. That I am so desperate for my evening dose of aspirin, I am actually shivering with the force of my anticipation. One arm braced on the washstand. Mouth dry. Eyes hazy. Brain aching.
And I think—the first really clear thought I’ve had all day, maybe all week—
This isn’t really aspirin, is it?
Chapter 17
France, August 1918
I first met Samuel Fitzwilliam in the small, badly lit café near Chateau Thierry where the evacuation hospital staff used to go for a little food and company on our few hours off, that last August of the war. I was eating dinner with a couple of nurses, whose names I forget; he sat alone with a bottle of sherry and watched us silently.
I knew he was there, of course. I noticed him right away, not just because he was that kind of man—tall, marble-faced, shoulders wedged like anvils into a corner too small for them—but because his gaze was so familiar. His eyes, I soon discovered, were the exact shade and shape of his brother’s.
One of the nurses leaned confidentially over the table. “Don’t look now, but there’s a fellow in the corner over there, watching our every move.”
Everyone looked, except me.
“Ooh, very nice,” said one of the other girls. I think her name was Mary. “I do like those British officers. They’re such gentlemen.”
“Not all of them,” I said.
“Well, he’s too big for me,” said the first one. “Too big and too dark. And I don’t like the look in his eye. Like he wants to eat us up.”
“I wouldn’t mind that,” said Mary. She was sitting opposite me, and the officer sat diagonally to her right. She sent him a look that I supposed was flirtatious, and he must have acknowledged her in some way, because she laughed, and her skin turned a little pink.
The waiter came then, and we ordered our dinner. It was only five o’clock in the afternoon, but we were due back on duty by eight, and the hospital lay an hour’s walk away. Outside, the sun was still high, and the air was hot and salty, like a seaside holiday. I didn’t have much appetite, and the food at the café was terrible: usually cassoulet, made mostly with beans and only a little canned meat, or else a gritty stew made of shellfish. Hazel, who was on duty at the moment, called it mal de pesce.
But free afternoons were rare, and the food at the hospital canteen was usually much worse, so those of us lucky enough to be off-duty at four o’clock in the afternoon always met in the hospital courtyard, rain or shine or hail, for the walk down to the village and the Papillon, with its red-checked tablecloths and its decent vin de table, served in small, old glasses that the waiter wiped with his apron.
He was wiping them now, examining them critically against the light from the window, while I vigorously ignored the familiar, tactile sensation of being watched. The buzz along each hair on my scalp and arms; the awareness, as we ordered four plates of cassoulet and a bottle of wine, of each small shift in his position, each twitch of his fingers, though he sat behind me and to the left, just outside the limits of my vision.
The waiter nodded and left to fetch the wine. In his absence, I felt exposed, like an animal that has stepped outside its cover.
“He’s getting up!” whispered Mary, but I didn’t need the warning. I already knew that he was rising, sidling away from his corner, straightening his tunic. Beneath the edge of the wooden table, my hands gripped each other. A shadow cast itself over the red-checked cloth.