“I’ve profited from death,” her father had said sadly to Gwendolen when she was home on leave in 1917. They had watched together as bale after bale of barbed wire was brought out from the workshop and loaded onto a wagon, destined for the Front. “Crowns of thorns,” he said, sounding unusually poetic. He was a dutiful churchgoer, more to placate Mother than anything, but there were depths to his soul that were unplumbed by that same woman.
Her father died not long after, leaving a considerable sum, but the probate was in her mother’s hands. Gwendolen was not discharged until 1919. It was all influenza cases in the Army by then, of course—one last savaging from the Furies—and when she finally set foot on Yorkshire soil again it was to find the money had all gone. At first, her mother had tried to blame her father, saying he had squandered it on the stock market, but eventually she had to admit that she had transferred it all to a man whom she had met—of all places—at her church. A man called Thomas Noble, who had enticed money from her mother on the pretext that he would “handle her investments.”
“How could I have known?” her mother wailed. How could she not have known!
She was not the first foolish woman to be hoodwinked by a cheat, but that was hardly a comfort. The ignoble Mr. Noble was, of course, long gone, never to be heard of again. “Lost,” her feeble mother said. “Everything lost.” (No! Not lost! Stolen!)
They should have sold the lovely house, it would have released much-needed money if they had moved somewhere more modest, but Mother had refused to sell it and so time had limped on. The wireworks were sold for a cheap price, the world no longer wanted their never-ending bales of barbed wire, indeed it preferred to forget it had ever wanted them. They shut off half the rooms in the house and retreated, scrimping off Gwendolen’s meagre salary from the job she took in the Library. She realized now that she should have found a way to take matters into her own hands, but one grief after another—her brothers, Father, the money, not to mention the war itself—had taken its toll on her and she had allowed herself to be worn down on the grindstone of Mother.
* * *
—
When war broke out Harry was just eighteen, at Oxford. In the middle of the Michaelmas term he came home and said he was going to join up. It was only later that Gwendolen discovered that he had been bombarded by letters from their jingoistic mother urging him to volunteer. The next day Mother accompanied him to the Green Howards recruiting office, as triumphant as if Harry were already a victor.
“Don’t worry, Gwennie,” Harry said. “It will be over in months and it will keep Mother quiet for once.”
Harry was their mother’s favourite, Gwendolen was her father’s. Dickie fell between the cracks, so Gwendolen took him on. He was a terrible prankster, always getting on everyone’s nerves, always trying to attract attention. She could have happily boxed his ears on a daily basis for some joke or other he had played. He was given a “Magic Set” for Christmas and never stopped pestering them with rope tricks, card tricks, coin tricks (“See this coin in my hand? I shall make it disappear before your eyes. Prepare to be surprised!”) until they shouted at him to go away.
And so he did. Dickie had no need of dragooning. When he was fifteen he conjured his best disappearing trick of all, running away from home and lying about his age to join the Navy as a Signal Boy on HMS Indefatigable. “Are you surprised?” he wrote in his appalling hand on a postcard from Portsmouth. “I am having fun and japes. I expect you all miss me hugely. Here is a special kiss just for Gwennie. x”
Harry had been devoured by the amnesiac mud of Flanders Fields with nothing to mark where he fell. And, like Dickie soon after him, no grave for them to mourn beside. The same month that Harry disappeared into the mud, HMS Indefatigable went down at Jutland and the deep took Dickie, along with a thousand of his fellow sailors.
When they had come to London six years ago to participate in that harrowing pageant, the funeral of the Unknown Warrior, Mother convinced herself that it was Harry who was destined for the tomb. Although she knew it couldn’t be, Gwendolen liked to think that it was Dickie. He had had such a short little life and to be the one who “was buried amongst kings” might be some compensation. But, of course, if it had been Dickie, he would have pushed away the coffin lid and sprung out like a jack-in-the-box. (“Are you surprised?”)
All the missing, all the lost. Forever haunting the dogwatch that Gwendolen took alone every night.
* * *
—
Just when it had begun to seem to Gwendolen that the drudgery of her life might go on for ever, Mother had surprised her by beginning to fail. The Library service gave Gwendolen an unpaid leave of absence. Gwendolen had nursed many men near to their end, but she did not think that any of them had clung to life as stubbornly as Mother. The dull days of her dying seemed to stretch ahead with no end, just as the dull days of her living had. The Misses Tate, Rogerson and Shaw sent a little card, forget-me-nots, the kind you would send to a sweetheart, writing, “We are thinking of you, dear, from your friends at the Library.” (Not Mr. Pollock, she noted.) Gwendolen was so touched that she wept, but quietly, for her mother would have been monstrously jealous of such emotion. She had claimed grief for her own long ago.
Gwendolen had missed the gentle, April-violet-scented presence of the Misses Tate, Rogerson and Shaw. Missed the quiet talks about nothing that threaded through the Library days. “Gossip,” Mr. Pollock called it dismissively, but Gwendolen thought that was the word men gave to women’s conversation. Men talked in order to convey information or to ruminate on cricket scores and campaign statistics. Women, on the other hand, talked in an effort to understand the foibles of human behaviour. If men were to “gossip,” the world might be a better place. There would certainly be fewer wars.
“Goodness, Miss Kelling, you are quite the radical,” Mr. Pollock said when Gwendolen voiced this opinion. It had been during a rather heated discussion on acquisitions. There had already been a long-running battle over The Green Hat, by Michael Arlen, Mr. Pollock fearing its ability “to corrupt the provinces” with its immorality. There were topics in it, he declared, that he couldn’t even name in decent company. “Venereal disease? Homosexuality? Promiscuity?” Gwendolen offered, unable to stop herself. Mr. Pollock looked quite apoplectic. It was so very easy to light Mr. Pollock’s fuse and then watch him go off.
The battle over The Green Hat was won by Gwendolen mostly by dint of the fact that she was the only one in the Library who had read the novel. She disliked Arlen’s writing, disliked his narrator, disliked his green-hatted femme fatale, Iris Storm, and her abstracted, irritating character. They said she was based on Nancy Cunard, that the whole thing was a kind of roman à clef, and Gwendolen wondered what it would be like to find yourself in a novel. Infuriating, she suspected. Nonetheless, she was willing to go into combat for it, arguing that it was important for the Library not to be out of step with modern times, and also, was it really their job to decide what people could or could not read? (“Yes,” Mr. Pollock said.) Of course, part of her didn’t really care, but she had rather enjoyed these sorties with Mr. Pollock.
There was a constant stream of requests from female readers for the “racier” writers of the day—Elinor Glyn, Ruby M. Ayres, Ethel M. Dell. “The hot stuff,” Miss Shaw giggled. Lately there had been a positive deluge of calls for the new E. M. Hull novel, The Sons of the Sheik, something Mr. Pollock, in particular, objected to.
But why shouldn’t they stock the popular novels of the day? Gwendolen argued. What was so wrong with a little harmless pleasure, for heaven’s sake, especially after so much that had been endured. Must everyone read Scott or Smollett? Even Austen was heavy going for some readers. Mr. Pollock himself lauded Addison and Carlyle. Gwendolen could think of nothing worse. The sequel to The Sheik would be acquired over his dead body, he said, causing the benevolent coven to turn their grey heads and regard him speculatively, as if he had just spelled away the remainder of his grey and dusty life. Gwendolen couldn’t help but laugh.