I had no recollection of how I got home that day—there were gaps of time that were utterly blank, as if I were asleep. I did not go to a doctor. I could recall sitting on the stairs of the Chalcot Road apartment, pulling off my shoes and sobbing as I rubbed my icy feet. I remembered crying out in pain as I pulled my clothes off my aching skin. I remembered thinking that it was influenza after all, and that I would die, and that Alex would be disappointed because he had told me not to.
I was sick for a week, sweating and shivering in bed. I did, in fact, have influenza—though I got away with a milder strain that was not deadly, like the Spanish flu. After a week I was as wrung out as a dishrag, the act of merely feeding myself so exhausting I could barely perform it. I stayed in our dim apartment, one day after another. I had no friends or family, in London or anywhere. No one came.
I lay in bed one night as I was recovering, listening to the rain out the window and watching the wall. The signs had come that day that once again I was not pregnant. I would not have Alex’s child. I was alone.
Someone should write a poem, I thought, about the women. Not just about the men marching bravely to war and dying, but about their wives, their girls, their mothers and sisters and daughters, sitting in silence and screaming into the darkness. Unable to fight, unable to stop it, unable to tell the war to fuck itself. We fought our war, too, it seemed to me, and if it was a war of a different kind, the pain of it was no more bearable. Someone should write a poem about the women.
But I already knew that no one ever would.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
We were approaching All Hallows’ Eve, the tail end of autumn, when the last drifts of wet, loamy scent left the air and the world began to lose color.
“I’m sorry you got dragged into this, Cousin Jo,” Martin said. He tugged his scarf tighter around his neck. “You must know it wasn’t my idea.”
“I know,” I replied. We were standing outside, waiting for Cora. Martin and Cora were to go walking, and I was to accompany them, the awkward old stick of a chaperone. It wasn’t the first time.
“She’s rather nice, you know.” Martin turned and looked back toward the house, where the front door opened and the figure of Cora, swathed in a wool coat that looked expensive even from a distance, emerged. “I think I may ask her today.”
I hadn’t thought I would be surprised, but I was. “Are you certain?” I asked.
“Mother has a schedule,” he said with a hint of humor. “In any case, I think we’ll get on well enough, for as long as I’m alive.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Please don’t tell me you’ve been saying that to her,” I said. “It’s hardly the ideal way to court a woman.”
That made him smile. “I haven’t, I promise. Though I hardly know the ideal way to court a woman, do I? I’ve never done it.”
“I’m sure you’re doing fine.”
He gave me a curious look. “How did Alex court you?” he asked.
The memory gripped me heavily for a moment, fraught with emotion, then let me go. “He took me to dinner,” I replied.
“That was all?”
“That was all.”
Martin gave a low whistle.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Manders.” This was Cora, approaching us with her hands in the pockets of her expensive coat, a perfectly matched cloche hat on her head. Despite the sophisticated clothes, her gait was awkward, the coat hanging heavy on her gawky frame. She looked almost pretty, the cold air flushing her thin cheeks beneath her tilted eyes. She gave me a smile of even, white teeth.
“Good afternoon, Cora,” I said. If she insisted on addressing me like an ancient matron, I might as well act like one.
Martin glanced back at the house, where undoubtedly at least one parent was watching us from a window. “Let’s head off and figure out today’s route.”
He offered Cora his arm, and she took it, squeezing it a little and turning the smile on him. Martin said something to her as they walked, and Cora laughed, the sound honking over the trees. “You’re a funny one,” she said, her voice drifting back to me where I followed behind them. Then she leaned in toward him and said something I couldn’t hear.
I sighed. Chaperoning was positively the worst job in the world, worse than taking Dottie’s abuse in the library or listening to Casparov’s innuendoes. So far, I’d had to sit out of earshot as the two of them strolled among the abandoned stables and the overgrown tennis courts. I’d brought a book with me the second time, when it became clear I didn’t particularly need to stare at the courting couple as they sat side by side, talking quietly, Cora occasionally laughing at Martin’s jokes. Today they’d decided to walk in the woods. I swallowed my dread and tried to appear calm about it. It wouldn’t do for the dried-up chaperone to go raving about mists and dogs barking and Martin’s dead sister at the crucial point of the courtship.
When we were well into the trees, Martin stopped and Cora dropped her hand from his arm.
“Where d’you want to go?” Martin asked her.
Cora snapped her sleeve smartly and checked her watch. “I don’t know. How long will satisfy them?”
“Forty-five minutes or so,” Martin said. He turned to me. “What do you think, Cousin Jo?”