this war calls for everyone to do their bit. Everyone.’
The chatter slowly returned to the room and Cecil’s revelation, on the surface at least, had been glossed over. But there was no avoiding it. Cecil would go back to university the next morning and he wouldn’t be enlisting. Several guests slipped out early without even saying goodbye to John. Mother mingled for the rest of the evening, not once catching Emily’s eye. When they’d waved off the last of the guests and her brothers had gone to bed, Mother called her into her room where she sat propped up in bed.
‘Oh, my days,’ Mother said. ‘They will lock Cecil up you know. The way this government is enlisting men they’ll make an example of those who refuse. Oh my, two sons to worry about, on top of everything else. I can’t cope, I can’t breathe. Emily, will you help me up? My chest is quite tight …’
Mother’s skin had a tinge of blue to it. ‘Please drop your ideas, for your Mother’s sake. Don’t leave me, dear,’ she said. ‘Don’t leave me.’
July 1915
The morning John was to return to the Front the rain fell in stair rods, and the temperature was so cold they had to light the fires again.
John sat in the chair, biting his nails to the quick while Mother’s gaze never left him, trying to store away every detail.
Emily had also woken up earlier than usual, jolted into consciousness at the realisation that John was departing that day. Unlike Mother, she couldn’t look at him and instead gazed out the window. Her stomach lurched whenever she returned her attention to the room and saw him shifting about in his seat, checking his watch, his mind already back there, with his men.
No one had mentioned the previous evening’s events. Cecil’s revelations hadn’t been in the script and weren’t discussed now. Mother had lines on her face that weren’t there the night before. Her usually impeccable appearance was tarnished with unkempt hair and few of her signature finishing touches. She wore no earrings or brooches. Cecil’s defiance of convention was brave and he was being true to himself, but he didn’t give a single thought to the impact it would have on the rest of the family.
Cecil came into the room, just as Emily was thinking about him. Mother’s anguished eyes lifted from John and alighted on her younger brother. Emily avoided his eye, shifted her shoulder away from him as he reached out for her. Perhaps he ought to be made to realise how much this would change their lives too. Hoping and praying that the rumours of a conscription bill for the first time in British history were wrong wasn’t much of a position of optimism.
Mother said nothing about the cherry stains on her skirt or the conversation with Lady Radford about the need for land girls. If it had even registered with Mother that everyone else was in support of her working on the farm it had all been swept away by Cecil’s shock announcement and John’s imminent departure.
Then her heart stopped. The whole world stopped.
Mr Hughes’ car crunched across the gravel.
‘Time’s up then.’ John’s smile was feeble as he pushed himself out of his chair.
Emily stared at her shoes as Mother clung to him so tight that, in the end, he had to wrench her hands from his arms.
She, Cecil and John travelled to London together largely in silence and at Charing Cross they accompanied him to his train on Platform 5.
‘I love you, brother dear,’ she said, her voice muffled against his neck.
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t convince Mother to let you work on the farm, but you mustn’t give up,’ he said as he slammed his carriage door shut.
‘Just come home safe,’ she called as his train pulled away.
The two of them stood and waved until the train had disappeared off over Waterloo Bridge and snaked around a bend and into the grey gloom of the day. They remained in silence, a safe distance between them, lost in their own thoughts. John had been ripped away and they were powerless to prevent it.
The crowd on the platform was thinning out when Cecil told her he’d better be off, if he was going to catch a debate in a pub’s back room. Through clenched teeth she declined his offer to escort her back to the platform while she waited for her train back to Chartleigh. He dashed away, his kiss skimming her cheek, as he left her on the platform, awaiting the twenty-eight past twelve. That suited her just fine.
Once he’d disappeared down the staircase to the underground, she checked her watch, left the platform and the station and, on a wet Strand, she joined a taxi rank. If she was quick, she would still make it in time.
*
A wave surged through Emily’s stomach every time a man in khaki strode past. She waited by the Telegraph Office entrance with a beating heart, louder than the station clock on the tower outside. She couldn’t shift Mother’s voice from her mind. She’d be confined to knitting for a month if Mother learnt that Emily had met a man, a stranger no less, unchaperoned, in London. Then her mind flitted to what Theo would be like in the flesh. Would he think she was fast because she’d come without a chaperone?
It was ten past two and her concerns might be for nothing if she’d already missed him.
‘Emily?’ A voice came, just as she crossed the concourse. She jumped clean into the air, her stomach still twisting and turning as she turned and gasped at him. He was a good-looking young man, as his photo had suggested, better perhaps in the flesh. His sandy hair was parted to one side, and he had warm brown eyes. Nothing within her stirred though. Her knees didn’t go weak; butterflies didn’t hatch and flap their wings in her stomach. She’d had a silly hope that she’d fall in love and they’d get married and he would take her away from her worries.
She gasped as he lifted her up from the ground and spun her around, her cheek pressed against his, the sandalwood scent of his cologne wafting by. People stopped to admire the soldier and what they probably thought was his sweetheart. She smiled as if she held some secret knowledge.
He set her back down and now it was her turn to admire him. He was a vision in khaki; stiff cap, brown belt. His shoulders broad, capable and safe.
‘I’m glad you could come,’ he said. ‘Your letters have been a real tonic.’
‘I’m glad too,’ she said. ‘It’s been a sad day, and I’m glad of the chance to brighten it up. Now, how long do you have until your train?’
He checked the clock. ‘A couple of hours. I was wondering if we might take a stroll beside the Thames, see the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben.’
Together they walked out of the station into the driving rain and joined the taxi rank, the people waiting in front moving aside to let the returning soldier go ahead of them.
The taxi was soon held up in the traffic.
‘It’s the women’s march,’ the taxi driver told them. Emily couldn’t believe her luck. She’d read in the newspaper about the march for women’s right to serve their country, to work in the munitions factories and on the land.
‘Gosh, we might see Emmeline Pankhurst,’ she said. She suggested they hop out and walk the rest of the way. Theo had on his trench coat to protect him from the rain, and sheltered her with an umbrella, inviting her to steady herself on his outstretched arm.
‘I was going to suggest that we change our plans and avoid this part of town,’ he said, ‘but I can see you’re excited by the march.’
‘I am,’ she said. ‘Do you mind?’
He said that he didn’t, of course not. She’d never walked out with a man before. She found she couldn’t quite keep up with him. His strides were longer than hers and she found herself scurrying to keep under the comfort of his umbrella.