Lost Among the Living(55)

“Jesus.” Alex pulled off his other glove and put both hands to my face, the effect like icy blades on my skin. “Promise me you’ll see a doctor. Today.”

“I promise.” Again someone else was speaking through my lips, making words I barely understood.

There was a high, shrill whistle, a warning that the train was about to leave, that threatened to split my head in two. I focused on staying still and not throwing up from the pain and the dizziness, still smiling at Alex as if nothing were wrong. He was leaving. I mustn’t worry him.

He glanced at the train one last time, then picked up his rucksack and put it over his shoulder. He took my face in his hands again and leaned close to me, his clean-shaven cheek against mine, his breath on my ear. “I have done everything wrong,” he said to me, “everything, and you will never forgive me. But stay alive and I will come back to you. I will come back to you. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said. No, my mind screamed, as high and shrill as the train whistle, though my tongue could not form the words. No, no, don’t leave, I love you, don’t leave.

Then he kissed my lips and let me go.

I gasped. My mind scrambled through its fog. I tried to stand, but my legs wouldn’t obey me. Alex vanished into the crowd—gone, gone. Had he looked back at me? Already I couldn’t remember. It had all been so fast. What sort of kiss had it been? I knew all of Alex’s kisses, what every one of them meant. Had it been one of his passionate ones, or one of his sweeter, gentler ones? I didn’t know.

I finally levered myself from the bench and pushed myself through the crowd. Now I was just a flushed, red-eyed girl like dozens of others on the platform, stumbling about in grief. I tried to get to the train—I had no idea how long I’d been trying when the train gave a whistle and pulled away. I was pummeled on all sides, pushed and pulled by the crowd, by women waving handkerchiefs, crying children. My cheeks were wet with tears.

Had he looked back at me?

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 f*ck 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.