Lost Among the Living(2)

“They don’t serve sherry here,” I said in reply, handing her the book.

Dottie’s eyes narrowed perceptibly. I thought she often convinced herself that I was lying to her, though she could not quite figure out exactly when or why. “Sherry would have been most convenient,” she said.

“Yes,” I agreed. “I know.”

She turned to her companion, a fortyish woman with a wide-brimmed hat, sitting on the folding chair next to hers and already looking as if she wished to escape. “This is my companion,” she said, and I knew from her tone that she intended to direct some derision at me. “She’s the widow of my dear nephew Alex, poor thing. He died in the war and left her without children.”

Mrs. Carter-Hayes swallowed. “Oh, dear.” She looked at me and flashed a sympathetic smile, an expression that was so genuine and kind that I almost pitied her for the next three hours she’d have to suffer in Dottie’s company. When Dottie was in a mood like this, she took no prisoners—and she’d been in this mood more and more often the closer we came to England.

“Can you imagine?” Dottie exclaimed. “It was a terrible loss to our family. He was a wonderful young man, our Alex, as I know well, since I helped raise him. He spent several years of his childhood living with me at Wych Elm House.”

Her glance cut to me, and in its gleam of triumph I knew that my shock showed on my face. Dottie smiled sweetly. “Didn’t he tell you, Manders? Goodness, men are so forgetful. But then, you weren’t together all that long.” She turned back to the bewildered Mrs. Carter-Hayes. “Children are life’s greatest joy, don’t you agree?”

It would go on like this, I knew, until we docked: Dottie speaking in innuendoes and double meanings, cloaked in polite small talk. I moved away and stood by the rail—there was no folding chair for me—and let the noise of the wind blow the words away. I hadn’t bothered with a hat, and I felt my curls come loose from their knot and touch my face, my hair tangling and my cheeks chapping as I watched the water sightlessly.

This wasn’t her only mood; it was just one of them, though it was the most vicious and unhappy. Over the last three months I had learned to navigate the maze of Dottie’s ups and downs, a task I’d learned naturally, as I was well versed in unhappiness myself. She was fiftyish, her body narrow and strangely muscular, her face with its gray-brown frame of meticulously pinned-back hair naturally sleek, with a pointed chin. She looked nothing like Alex, though she was his mother’s sister. She was not vain and never resorted to powders or lipsticks, which would have looked absurd on her tanned skin and narrow line of a mouth. She ate little, walked often, and kept her hair tidy and her clothes mysteriously immaculate, even when traveling. All the better for chasing and devouring her prey.

I glanced back at her and found that she was now displaying the photographs to Mrs. Carter-Hayes. She kept six or seven of them in the slender photograph book, on hand for occasions in which she had cornered a stranger and wished to show off. From the softening of Dottie’s features I could tell that she was looking at the picture of her son, Martin, in his officer’s uniform. I had seen the photograph many times, and I had heard the accompanying narrative just as often. He is coming home to be married. He is such a dear boy, my son. The listeners were always too polite, or too bored, to question the fact that the war had ended three years ago, yet Dottie Forsyth’s son was only now coming home. That she still showed the photograph of Martin in uniform, as if she hadn’t seen him since it was taken.

There had been a daughter, too—I knew that much from Alex. My queer cousin Fran, he had said, in one of the few times he had referred to this side of the family at all. Queer cousin Fran had died in 1917, though Alex’s letter from the Front had not said how or why. She has died, poor thing, he wrote. Are the rations as bad back home as I hear? He never spoke of her again, and in the months I’d worked for her, Dottie had never mentioned her queer daughter Fran at all. Her photograph was certainly not in the book.

I turned back to the water. I should quit. I should have done it long ago. The position was unpleasant and demeaning. I had been a typist before I married Alex, before my life had been blown upward like a feather, then come down again. My skills were now rusty, but it was 1921, and girls found jobs all the time. I could try Newcastle, Manchester, Leeds. They must need typists there. It wouldn’t be much of a life, but I would be fed and clothed, with Mother’s fees paid for, and I could stay pleasantly numb.

But I would not quit. I knew it and, I believed, so did Dottie. It wasn’t the pay she gave me, which was small and sporadic. It wasn’t the travel, which had simply seemed like a nightmare to me, as if I were taking the train across a vast wartime graveyard, the bombed buildings just losing their char, the bodies buried just beneath the surface of the still-shattered fields. I would not quit because Dottie, viperish as she was, was my last link to Alex. And though it hurt me even to think of him, I could not let him go.

I had last seen him in early 1918, home on leave before he went back to France to fly more RAF missions, the final one from which he did not return. His plane was found four days later, crashed behind enemy lines. There was no body. The pack containing his parachute was missing. He had not appeared on any German prisoner-of-war rosters, any burial details, any death lists. He had not been a patient in any known hospital. The Red Cross, in the chaos after Armistice, did not have him on any prisoner or refugee lists. In three years there had been no telegram, no cry for help, no sighting of him. He had vanished. My life had vanished with him.