Thursday’s Child. Helen Forrester
of my hands lay on the coverlet and he took it in his.
‘Peggie, dear, Barney was killed the day before yesterday. Mother got the news this morning.’ The words came in the precise, clear tones he used when clarifying a point of law for one of his clients.
Although the news was something I had feared daily for months, I was stupefied by it and could not for a moment grasp the implication of his words. It was said that lightning did not strike twice in the same place, and it seemed impossible to me that in one war a woman could really lose two fiancés.
Jackie had gone down in the Swallow in 1939, a month before our wedding, and it broke my heart, but I was young then – and young hearts mend – so that when Barney proposed to me four years later life once more became worth living.
I had known Barney all my life. He was big, red-headed and impetuous, and I fell in love all over again. His only sorrow seemed to be that his twin brother, James, was lame and could not, therefore, join the Army with him. This had separated them for the first time in their lives – and now they were separated for ever.
‘Kill me, Lord, kill me too,’ I had shouted in my agony, as James’s words bit into my heart and mind.
I must have had hysterics; otherwise James would never have struck me, but I remember only an enveloping, physical pain. Barney was dead, and the knowledge of it killed part of me.
I clung to James’s hand: ‘Why did he have to die?’ I sobbed. ‘Why not take a useless fool like me, not a good man like him? Why couldn’t I die instead?’
James loosed his hand and put his arm around me. He smoothed the hair away from my eyes: ‘The good God must have other work for you to do,’ he said.
James was not the kind of man to talk about God, and his words stuck in my mind, but at that time I just lay in his arms with his face close to mine, and thought only of my own misery and not of his. He and Barney were identical twins, and he must have felt as if one of his limbs had been amputated without anaesthetic – yet he never mentioned his mother’s or his own suffering.
James was still nursing me against his damp overcoat when Mother returned from shopping. She could never tell the brothers apart unless she saw James limp, and she thought it was Barney sitting beside me.
‘Barney, how nice to see you. Leave at last!’
James said, ‘I’m James,’ and Mother understood.
‘My poor darlings,’ she said. ‘Your poor mother.’
In her time, Mother had faced many crises, and she was wonderfully patient with James and me that day. It was she who remembered to telephone James’s office – James was a solicitor, as was Barney – to ask his clerk to cancel his morning appointments, and it was she who later bundled him off to work, after letting him talk to her about Barney while she prepared lunch for him.
‘Is someone with your mother?’ she asked.
‘My aunt is with her.’
‘Then when you have eaten this, go away and work. Work is a good opiate.’
When he had gone, she came and sat on my bed and talked to me. She did not talk about Barney, but about James, of his brilliant brain, his sensitiveness and the sorrow he must be feeling. She said firmly that Angela, who is my younger sister, and I must help to comfort him and his widowed mother.
I listened dully. At that moment I did not care about anybody except Barney, and every time I thought of his lying, blown to pieces, in a German field, sobs shook me and I writhed in my bed, so that the pillows grew damp and the sheets became hopelessly twisted.
When Mother realised that it was too soon to divert my thoughts to other people, she sat quietly by me until Father and Angela returned from work. Perhaps she knew what I had not realised, that James loved me more than Barney did; and maybe she hoped that when the pain had worn off, I would transfer my love of one brother to the other.
Father came in and stared down at me with pitying eyes.
‘I am sorry, child,’ he said.
He bent and kissed me: ‘Have courage, little girl.’
He went away to eat his dinner, and I heard the quiet murmur of his and Mother’s voices in the room below.
I heard also Angela’s key in the lock of the front door, and the patter of Mother’s slippers as she went to meet her in the hall. I heard Angela give a little cry of anguish; Mother must have told her the news immediately, so that she did not blunder when she came up to see me.
There was a pause and then Angela’s dragging footsteps up the stairs. Enwrapped in my own misery as I was, even I thought how tired she must be to come so slowly.
Angela came into the room. She had taken off her hat and coat, but still wore the slacks and the overall she used in her work as a ‘back-room girl’. She had studied electronics, but none of the family really knew exactly what she did in the closely guarded Government laboratory where much of her life was spent.
She shut the door behind her and leaned against it. Her face was an unearthly white and, despite the heat of the sickroom, she was shivering.
‘Pegs.’ Her voice was only a whisper.
She looked so stricken that I motioned her to come to me. I had not imagined that my elegant, sophisticated sister had so much feeling in her, and I was jolted out of my self-pity.
She came and sat down on the bed, her shoulders hunched and her hands dangling hopelessly between her trousered knees. This ugly posture was enough to tell me how deeply she had been affected by the news of Barney’s death; usually she sat very gracefully, with straight back and ordered hands.
Suddenly she flung herself across me and wept, her breath coming in harsh gasps. I said nothing, feeling too full of grief myself to speak.
‘Dinner’s ready, Angela,’ called Mother.
‘Give me a handkerchief,’ said Angela, looking up quickly, her sobs hastily stifled.
I gave her a very wet handkerchief and she wiped her eyes and blew her nose. She tried to smile at me, as she said: ‘Woman must eat as well as weep.’
She went across to the dressing-table and powdered her nose with my puff, then came back to the bed, and in almost motherly fashion, straightened my top sheet and kissed me on the forehead. I could feel her lips trembling as they touched my skin, although she looked fairly composed as she walked to the door.
As she went out, she said: ‘I’ll come up after dinner and keep you company while you eat your supper.’
‘I can’t eat,’ I said.
‘My dear, you must. In times like this, one must keep strong – and you have a long way to go yet.’
‘I wish I was dead,’ I said.
After Angela had gone downstairs, I lay for a long time, thinking of Barney. I had always had a great affection for him, hot-tempered and ruthless as he often was; when we were younger, I had imagined that he preferred Angela to me as he had taken her out frequently, but it was to me that he proposed during the last Christmas he had spent at home. I had been so happy; it seemed as if the war could not possibly last much longer, and we planned to be married as soon as Barney was demobbed. He had survived the invasion of France safely and had enjoyed one more leave when his badly mauled regiment was brought home to be reformed. He had been tired and morose during that last leave, as if he had a premonition of what was to come, but after he was rested he became more cheerful and we spent two or three happy days together before he went back to his barracks.
I had begun to collect linen and china for the small flat we hoped to find. I wanted Barney to enjoy all the comforts I could scrounge for him in a tightly rationed country. I had bought sheets on the blackmarket, made pillowcases out of bleached flour bags, begged old curtains from Mother, and had bought from auction sales pieces of painted china and prewar silverware.