Dusk Read online

  Helen dropped the brush and twisted her hair into a loose plait. Not her father. She did not want to think of him.

  But the recollection had already forced its way in – refusing to leave. Dad would have mocked her to see her pretending to be a competent nurse. Every time she dropped something – and her natural clumsiness always increased tenfold around him – he had clouted her, shouting into her face that she was a disgrace to the Sandfords. It was so unfair. He blamed her faults on her mother’s German blood, an Abendroth from Dresden before marriage, because, of course, nothing bad could come from the Sandfords, good Suffolk folk with ne’er a smudge on their family reputation. She had come to hate the sound of those stodgy farming folk, grinding their women down into the mud.

  Helen picked up the ribbon curled like a centipede on her nature diary and secured her plait in preparation for bed. Amazing that her parents had ever met considering her father’s stay-at-home nature; he didn’t trust the people in the next village, let alone from another country. Yet in his younger days he must have been different for Geerta had been introduced to Harvey Sandford by mutual friends while on holiday at Brighton and they had married only weeks later. Helen had seen the wedding photograph – her parents looking happy and painfully young. She had imagined how it must have been: the country solicitor’s clerk pretending to be a man of the world in the gay holiday atmosphere of Brighton, with its fluttering flags and Punch and Judy shows; the pretty, shy German girl, unable to read the nuances of the English tongue she was learning, translating his fumbling words into the romance of the lover she had created in her imagination. It had not started out so badly, but, as the war clouds gathered, her father had become embarrassed by his wife’s origins and found an outlet for this in his inadequate daughter.

  ‘You’re useless!’ her dad had yelled in Helen’s face once when she’d fumbled the coal scuttle.

  ‘Please, Harvey, let the girl alone,’ her mother pleaded. ‘She does not mean it. Here, please, drink your tea.’

  ‘That makes it no better, Mother.’ He snapped the paper straight, his movements having crumpled the pages. ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do with her. Spinster material, she is. She’ll be the bane of our lives, you mark my words.’

  And Helen supposed he had been right because she was the reason why Flora had upped and left for London, taking her little sister with her, a flurry of righteous white-blonde hair and red coat, the drab little sister in brown hurrying to catch up. Harvey Sandford had lost his golden girl the same day he had got rid of his curse.

  Served him right, nasty, selfish man. Leaving had the effect of wrenching the telescope from his grip and allowing Helen to look at him through the other end. He shrank to a petty dictator, his inadequacies even clearer.

  Footsteps approached the nurses’ dormitory at a run. Helen tensed, half expecting a summons to the operating theatre, but the messenger passed by. A reprieve. She still had time for sleep. Helen gathered up her hairpins and tucked them in the Chinese box by her bedside. She ran her finger round the rim. It was a beautiful object that an admirer had given Flora and then been passed on to her. Cardboard covered with a silk embroidery of creeping tigers in an ink-black forest, it folded up like a fan, so was easy to transport. Yet, when you pulled it out and pushed the base flat, it formed three hexagonal compartments, like a little bit of honeycomb. It was the only thing she had with her that belonged to her sister, but she doubted Flora even remembered it: she had been given so many gifts over the years and discarded them easily.

  That thought wasn’t so satisfying. Flora’s attitude to life was like that – throw out anything or anyone she did not want with her.

  My nature is more like the box, thought Helen whimsically, tipping out the pins and playing at folding and unfolding the honeycomb a few times. Memories springing out at a touch.

  Sebastian had once told her that he thought memory worked like a Russian doll, one leading to another, but that was too tidy. Hers brought the recollections side by side, jostling for attention, the now having to compete with the then. Flipping the boxes open a final time, she replaced her pins and slipped between the bedcovers, leaving the tigers to guard her little treasures.

  The reply to Sebastian’s letter would have to wait.

  Sebastian flicked through his notebook, reviewing his sketches. There was a portrait of his servant in the trenches, Ted Atkins, killed last week and not yet replaced. He missed the old campaigner’s steadiness and fussy ways. One page had a perfect thumbprint on the corner – in mud rather than ink.

  ‘What would you have been doing, if it hadn’t been for this blasted war?’ Captain Williams propped his head up on one arm.

  ‘Me, sir?’ They had been serving together for three months and this was the first time the captain had broached the subject of his private life.

  Williams rolled his eyes. ‘You had a future, didn’t you, even though you were barely in long trousers?’ He sighed and flopped back. ‘Nineteen fourteen. I was on a rubber estate in Malaya, saving up a nice little nest egg, planning to marry and settle down out there. Never imagined I’d end up in charge of a rabble of cockneys and public school boys.’

  Sebastian found it hard to picture the captain in such an exotic place; the redhead’s pale complexion must have made the equatorial sun a torture. It would have been a life of sunburn and peeling skin.

  Two years back. What had his own future held?

  ‘I’d just won a place at the Slade.’

  Williams raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

  ‘It’s one of the art colleges in London. Even did a few terms. I was going to be an artist.’ Sebastian grimaced at the memory of his old self striding so confidently through the West End, drunk on being young, feeling he had the world at his feet and believing love conquered all.

  Williams laughed. ‘Bloody good thing the war intervened then. Can’t let a good man like you go to waste.’

  Sebastian had heard this dismissal of his chosen career too often to bother to argue. It no longer hurt.

  A shell whistled overhead, exploding some distance away. Williams warmed to his subject, thankful for the distraction. ‘Modern artists haven’t a clue how to draw. Look at that Cézanne fellow. Saw one of his pictures once – couldn’t tell the sky from the sea.’

  A second shell landed short, rocking the trench with a percussive whump as the mud absorbed the impact. The candle on the ledge next to Sebastian puffed out. He fumbled for the matches, swearing under his breath. Neither of them commented on the near miss as the occurrence was too frequent to surprise. Outside there was a shout from the men, telling the bleeding artillery to point the effing guns in the right effing place. Sebastian wrenched his thoughts back to the ordinary world of artistic endeavour, which now seemed as fanciful as Shangri-La.

  ‘I was planning to return to New York last summer for an extended holiday – if the war hadn’t intervened. I grew up there until I was eleven.’

  ‘An extended holiday, eh?’ The captain’s tone was amused rather than mocking. ‘Ah, how the other half lives!’

  ‘My father’s family are from the States. I had ideas of going on a sketching tour of New England.’

  ‘Good Lord, a sketching tour!’ The idea tickled Williams. ‘But what have you done with your accent, Yankee boy?’

  ‘I’m only half American. The English side – my mother – insisted her boys went to Eton – it was where all her brothers went. Ironed out most of the accent, don’t you know.’ Sebastian put on an impossibly posh voice.

  Williams snorted. ‘Cut it out, Doodle, you sound like the bloody colonel. I’ll be wanting to salute you next. So where’s your old mum fr
om?’

  His mother would faint to hear herself referred to with such disrespect. ‘My “old mum” is from Somerset. Daughter of an earl.’

  ‘Blimey.’

  ‘Not an important one.’ Sebastian wondered why he was confessing so much to Captain Williams. The prospect of imminent death did that to a man. ‘Bit of a ramshackle lot, truth be told. Disgrace to the House of Lords and all that.’

  ‘Still, grandson of an earl,’ chuckled Williams. ‘And I’m the son of a coalminer. If you want any more proof that the world is barking, there you have it.’ He yawned. ‘I’m so bally tired, I can’t sleep.’

  Sebastian passed Williams his flask. He still had half his ration of rum left: he’d tipped it into his flask to make the chlorinated water palatable. ‘Maybe that will help take the edge off.’

  ‘You’re an A1 chap, Doodle, even though you are an offence to common sense. Yankee blue blood, just fancy that.’ Williams gulped down the contents of the flask and lay back on his camp bed.

  Sebastian slipped the notebook inside his right puttee, rewinding the wrapping round his leg, relieved Williams hadn’t mentioned the forbidden sketches even though he must have noticed Sebastian doing them. Soldiers weren’t supposed to go into battle with anything on them which could reveal details of the allied operations to the enemy, including casual drawings like the ones Sebastian did in his spare moments. Williams must have decided on his own authority that they posed no danger. Life in the trenches was a strange mixture of intimacy and restraint. It was hard to have a heart-to-heart with a chap who you were likely to see buy it the next time you advanced towards the enemy guns. Sebastian had learnt to think of the men around him as comrades, as distinct from friends. Comrades fell, you mourned and moved on. The loss of a friend would be too gutting to contemplate. He knew: he’d already lost too many.

  As Williams’ gentle snores rumbled, a distant steam train going through a tunnel, Sebastian closed his eyes and leaned back against the plank-lined wall, collar turned up against the incursion of rats that liked to lick the Brylcreem from a chap’s hair. He tucked his hands inside opposite sleeves to stop them nibbling his fingers. He felt like ninety, not nineteen. So weary, his bones ached. He wondered if he would ever feel young again.

  Helen. She always made him feel happy. He’d think about her; he would refuse to let this bonfire of all that was good and decent incinerate his stubborn hope that love did count and could survive. What point would there be in fighting if there were nothing better than this, if life were just a battle of tooth and claw, animals seeking to be the fittest? That wasn’t enough for him.

  So where was she now? Sebastian knew she was posted to a forward medical station somewhere behind the front line, but he wasn’t sure where, thanks to the censors. They had last met up a few weeks ago when he was on leave, before her move to the front. She hadn’t written since his last letter two days ago. He couldn’t blame the postal service as it was the one thing that was miraculously efficient in the whole fumbling war operation. The soldiers may not have boots that fitted, or uniforms in the right size, but they nearly always got their personal mail, thanks to the bravery of the messengers. He could hardly fault her for refusing to answer as he had just received word she had taken a position so close to the front and he had let rip his opinion of her risking her life. No one liked a scolding, least of all Helen, who despite her sweet appearance had the obstinacy of the proverbial mule. She had taken no notice of his protests when she had decided to come to France, so why had he been surprised when she took the next logical step closer to danger? Still, he hoped she had come to her senses and asked for another assignment, preferably back in Le Havre or better still one of the hospitals in England. He did not want her caught up in this mess.

  Williams shuddered and turned over, the planks squeaking beneath him. A rat scampered over the bed, but kept running when Sebastian threw a stone. The dugout returned to its counterfeit peace. Sebastian replaced the blanket that had slid off the captain’s legs. He had not done that for another man since he went camping with his brothers. Neil, the eldest, had been a terribly restless sleeper in a tent, arms flung out like a starfish, freckled face squashed against the canvas. He had gone down in the Mediterranean with Des.

  No, not that memory, not now. Tears stung Sebastian’s eyes, but he knuckled them away, his nose and throat burning with the effort of choking off the emotion before it could get hold. He swore under his breath, bringing himself back under control. War was a dirty business – but it was a business that had to be done by someone and their generation was the one selected. The bigger principles no longer seemed important; what mattered to him now was his loyalty to the other men and a desire not to fail in his duty. He could not let his brothers down.

  But that didn’t change the fact that the battlefield was no place for a girl, no matter how determined to do her part.

  2

  LONDON, 23 OCTOBER 1914

  Picking a shaft of evening sunlight streaming through the window as his spot, Sebastian settled down to read the papers in the library of the Junior Athenaeum Club. The leather armchairs squatted on the dark parquet floor like thrones for fat potentates; the air smelt of beeswax polish and fresh newsprint. The only noise was the hum of low voices, the softened tread of the well-trained staff and the rumble of traffic outside. What bliss. A quiet pause before the storm when his brother, Neil, arrived on leave for the weekend.

  ‘Seb, just the man I was looking for!’ Desmond Packenham strode across the room, his hand outstretched.

  ‘Des! Don’t tell me that the navy’s had enough of you already?’ Sebastian threw The Times aside with its talk of a German invasion to shake his old friend’s hand vigorously. ‘Or does it mean we’ve beaten the Boche already?’

  ‘Not likely. Got Jerry on the run though. I came down with Neil on the train. He told me where to find you.’ Des collapsed into the armchair opposite him. With his florid complexion and unruly fair hair, Des always looked permanently exercised about something. Naval uniform suited Des, thought Sebastian. He had always been a scruffy dresser, even when he had been at Dartmouth, the training school where he had teamed up with Neil, a like-minded, devil-may-care cadet. Now they both had commissions on the HMS Irresistible. Their captain must have taken them in hand and finally instilled some discipline because Midshipman Des now looked very dapper. ‘Can you do me a favour?’

  ‘I was supposed to be meeting Neil here,’ said Sebastian, experiencing a familiar inner groan. His older brother was forever landing him in scrapes and this one was approaching like a navy warship steaming into port.

  Des signalled for the waiter to bring him a drink. ‘He said he’ll see you later. He ran into Jack Glanville and his sister at King’s Cross.’

  Sebastian coughed. ‘Say no more. Neil’s desperately in love with Jilly. Has been for years. I imagine he went off like a hound on the trail of a fox.’

  ‘And left me high and dry.’ Des’s pale green eyes twinkled as he pulled two pink tickets out of his breast pocket. ‘And here I am with the two best seats for the Palace of Varieties tonight.’

  Sebastian raised an eyebrow. The shows at the Palace verged on the saucy as the management specialized in tableaux vivants of chorus girls clad in flesh-coloured body stockings, skirting just under the line of indecent. Not that he was embarrassed by seeing bare skin: the Slade concentrated on drawing skills and he spent many hours observing the unclad forms of life models, male and female, pencil in hand. But still, it was all a bit vulgar. ‘You require company for your excursion? I would’ve thought you’d only have eyes for the stage.’

  Des took out a slim gold case and lit a cigarette. ‘There
’s this girl.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Des leaned back, a dreamy smile on his face. ‘She’s a Venus, Seb.’

  ‘Of course she is. All the fairies and fluff girls at the Palace are goddesses or they wouldn’t have a job.’

  ‘But she’s different. New. Fresh. Amusing.’

  ‘Then go ask this paragon to dinner.’ Seb looked at his watch. ‘Your leave will be over before you know it. No time to waste.’

  Des puffed on his cigarette. ‘I know.’ He leaned forward, resting his arms on his knees, ready to share a confidence. ‘But she has a sister.’

  Seb feared he knew where this was heading. ‘Really?’

  ‘A sweet little thing – not so little actually. On the plumper side. Not a traditional looker – I have to be frank with you.’

  ‘And why should I be interested?’

  ‘Flora won’t leave her on her own. Some family trouble; the girl is very timid so won’t travel back after the show alone.’

  ‘This ugly sister is part of the chorus then?’ That made no sense.

  ‘Lord, no!’ Des chuckled. ‘No, she’s some kind of dresser to the chorus in the evening. Training as something or other during the day. Forget what.’ His cigarette sketched a vague circle like a priest’s blessing. ‘Teacher, nurse or something. It’s a few months since I last saw them. The pair live in some ghastly digs in Canning Town. Or was it Forest Gate? Can’t remember. The point is they stick with each other for protection. One won’t go out without the other after dark.’ Des subsided, not quite making port with his remarks. Did he realize, Sebastian wondered, that he had developed the habit of chopping up his conversation into short sentences like a telegraph operator? Too much time working signals perhaps?

  ‘What’s this to do with me?’ Sebastian cast about for a plausible reason to wriggle out of the request that was about to be made.