Mary lay back on the bed and dissolved into the immaculate morning.
At nine, finding her fingers still too relaxed for fine work, she needed her mother’s help to dress.
“You will want to quit that stuff as soon as you can,” said her mother, buttoning Mary’s blouse. “I don’t know what you plan to do with the day, but I cannot see it involving successful interactions with objects or persons.”
“You know the morphine is only till my wound is healed.”
Her mother picked up the brush and began on Mary’s hair. “It has been a whole month, darling. If you had cut something actually off, one might not begrudge you the paregoric. But you are a North, Mary. We don’t go south over flesh wounds.”
“The doctor says I shall have a limp.”
“Then live the rest of your life seated, if you must, but please do it sober.”
Mary stared out of the window, bracing her head against the tug of the hairbrush. She watched the freshly laundered clouds dissipate and resolve. The eye was an extraordinary instrument. How mysterious that it could be brought to bear on that tiny, distant pigeon—there—and then refocused in an instant on an object that existed only in memory. She watched herself at the same window, aged five, sucking on an orange boiled sweet, popping it out of her mouth from time to time to check how much remained and to peer at the slowly resolving city through the translucent glass of the candy.
“Mary!” Her mother set down the hairbrush with a bang. “I won’t have you go to pieces like this. Tell me your plan for the day, and I shall expect an update over supper. Why don’t you write to that man of yours?”
“To Alistair? Oh no. I haven’t written to him since I was hurt.”
“Why ever not? The poor thing must be frantic.’
“I no longer enjoy any happiness I have taken from Hilda. I hope Alistair will understand.”
“But you were so serious about him!”
Mary tried to bring her mother’s face into focus. “You have always insisted that I am not a serious person.”
“Then won’t you go for a walk, at least? Take an umbrella for the showers, and call on Hilda.’
“Hilda will be sleeping. We work nights, as you know.”
“Enough of this ‘we.’ You are not to go back to the ambulances. If you’d only listened to me . . .”
‘Then I’d be Mrs. Henry Hunter-Hall by now, in Gloucestershire, berating the keeper for displaying poachers’ heads on the railings.”
Her mother set to with the hairbrush again. “But would that be so awful, darling? To be the prettiest thing in Brimscombe and Thrupp?”
“I should rather die.”
“You nearly did.”
“Yes, but I tend to blame the Germans.”
“Well I blame you for getting in their way. There are a dozen ways of serving, for a young woman of your abilities, that are safer and more beneficial to the cause. Do you think less of your father, for example, that he serves in the House rather than in the street?”
“Of course not. But I let the War Office decide how I was to serve, and they made me a schoolteacher. Everything else has followed from that.”
Her mother looked away. “All the other mothers wrote letters to Whitehall, of course. But at your father’s level one must be so careful about the exercise of influence. I feel awful about it now. I never imagined the War Office would be so obtuse as to assign you to the ordinary lottery.”
Mary kissed her cheek. “I really don’t mind in the least.”
“Because you are intoxicated, darling. But I mind, very much. What is the good of influence if one can only use it on strangers?”
“But I am happy. Isn’t that what matters?”
“You aren’t ready to make your own choices. Look where it’s got you.”
“Where has it got me? Here I sit, in the very same room as you.”
“And yet you are miles away. It kills me to see you so dissolute.”
“You kill me, Mother. You hate my choices but make none of your own. We tiptoe on our carpets, deferring some imagined joy to a hoped-for day when Father will do some good for people. And in the meantime we do not live among people at all. We swim in aspic.”
The quick April clouds sent white and gray shades through the room.
“Your father was my choice. You were my delight. You may despise my life for its smallness—it may seem as nothing to you—but please do not think it is nothing to me. And the smaller it becomes, the more frightening I find it, because all that is left is so dear.”
Her mother had tears in her eyes, but Mary could not feel a thing.
April, 1941