enough of such talk,” Evelyn replied. A brisk brunette, she was used to Mrs Speedwell, and Violet admired how efficiently she had learned to shut down her mother-in-law. It was always easier when you weren’t related. She had sorted out Tom as well, after the War. Violet appreciated her sister-in-law but was a little too intimidated to be true friends with her. “Come, give your Auntie Violet a kiss goodbye. Then we’ll go down to the shops while Daddy drives her to Winchester.”
Marjory and Edward scrambled to their feet and gave Violet obedient pecks on the cheek that made her smile.
“Why can’t we come to Winchester?” Edward asked. “I want to ride in Daddy’s car.”
“We explained before, Eddie. Auntie Violet has her things to move, so there’s no space for us.”
Actually, Auntie Violet didn’t have so very much to move. She was surprised that her life fitted into so few suitcases and boxes. There was still space on the back seat for another passenger, and she rather wished Edward could come with them. He was a spirited little boy who would keep her cheerful with his non-sequiturs and shameless solipsism. If forced to focus on his world, she would not think of her own. But she knew she could not ask for him to come along and not Marjory or Evelyn, and so she said nothing as they began to pull on their shoes and coats for their expedition in the rain.
When it became clear that Mrs Speedwell was not going to see her off as she normally did, watching from the doorway until visitors were out of sight, Violet went over and kissed her on the forehead. “Goodbye, Mother,” she murmured. “I’ll see you next Sunday.”
Mrs Speedwell sniffed. “Don’t bother. I may be dead by then.”
One of Tom’s best qualities was that he knew when to keep quiet. On the way to Winchester he let Violet cry without comment. Cocooned by the steamed-up windows and the smell of hot oil and leather, she leaned back in the sprung seat and sobbed. Near Twyford, however, her sobs diminished, then stopped.
She had always loved riding in Tom’s handsome brown and black car, marvelling at how the space held her apart from the world and yet whisked her efficiently from place to place. “Perhaps I’ll get a car,” she declared, wiping her eyes with a handkerchief embroidered with violets – one of Evelyn’s practical Christmas presents to her. Even as she said it she knew she could afford no such luxury: she was going to be dreadfully poor, though as yet that felt like something of a game. “Will you teach me to drive?” she asked, lighting a cigarette and cracking open a window.
“That’s the spirit, old girl,” Tom replied, changing gears to climb a hill. His affable nature had helped Violet to cope with her mother over the years, as well as with the War and its effects. Tom had turned eighteen shortly after news of his brother’s death came through, and joined up without hesitation or fuss. He never talked about his experiences in France; like Violet’s loss of her fiancé, they took a back seat to their brother’s death. Violet knew she took Tom for granted, as older children always do their younger siblings. They had both looked up to George, following his lead in their play as children. Once he was gone they had found themselves at sea. Was Violet then meant to take on the role of the eldest, to assume command and set the example for Tom to follow? If so, she had made a poor job of it. She was a typist at an insurance company; she had not married and begun a family. Tom had quietly overtaken her – though he never gloated or apologised. He didn’t need to: he was a man, and it was expected of him to achieve.
After they had moved her things in under Mrs Harvey’s watchful eye, he took her for fish and chips. “Mum’s a tough old boot, you know,” he reassured her over their meal. “She got through George, and Dad too. She’ll survive this. And so will you. Just don’t stay in your room all the time. Don’t want to be getting ‘one-room-itis’, isn’t that what they call it? Get out, meet some people.”
Meet some men, he meant. He was more subtle than her mother about the subject, but she knew Tom too wished she would miraculously find a man to marry, even at this late age. A widower, perhaps, with grown children. Or a man who needed help with injuries. The War might have ended thirteen years before, but the injuries lasted a lifetime. Once married, she would be off Tom’s hands, a niggling burden he would no longer have to worry about. Otherwise Violet might have to live with her brother one day; it was what spinsters often did.
But it was not easy to meet men, because there were two million fewer of them than women. Violet had read many newspaper articles about these “surplus women”, as they were labelled, left single as a result of the War and unlikely to marry – considered a tragedy, and a threat, in a society set up for marriage. Journalists seemed to relish the label, brandishing it like a pin pressed into the skin. Mostly it was an annoyance; occasionally, though, the pin penetrated the protective layers and drew blood. She had assumed it would hurt less as she grew older, and was surprised to find that even at thirty-eight – middle-aged – labels could still wound. But she had been called worse: hoyden, shrew, man-hater.
Violet did not hate men, and had not been entirely man-free. Two or three times a year, she had put on her best dress – copper lamé in a scallop pattern – gone alone to a Southampton hotel bar, and sat with a sherry and a cigarette until someone took interest. Her “sherry men”, she called them. Sometimes they ended up in an alley or a motor car or a park; never in his room, certainly not at her parents’. To be desired was welcome, though she did not feel the intense pleasure from the encounters that she once had with Laurence during the Perseids.
Every August Violet and her father and brothers had watched the Perseid showers. Violet had never said anything to her father during those late nights in the garden, watching for streaks in the sky, but she did not really like star-gazing. The cold – even in August – the dew fall, the crick in the neck: there were never visions spectacular enough to overcome these discomforts. She would make a terrible astronomer, for she preferred to be warm.
The Perseid showers she remembered best were in August 1916, when Laurence had got leave and come to see her. They’d taken a train out to Romsey, had supper at a pub, then walked out into the fields and spread out a rug. If anyone happened upon them, they could be given a mini-lecture by Laurence about the Perseids, how the earth passed in its orbit through the remnants of a comet every August and created spectacular meteor showers. They were there in the field to watch, merely to watch. And they did watch, for a short while, on their backs holding hands.
After witnessing a few meteors streak across the sky, Violet turned on her side so that she was facing Laurence, her hipbone digging into a stone under the blanket, and said to him, “Yes.” Though he had not asked a question aloud, there had been one hanging between them, ever since they had got engaged the year before.
She could feel him smile, though she couldn’t see his face in the dark. He rolled towards her. After a while Violet was no longer cold, and no longer cared about the movement of the stars in the sky above, but only the movement of his body against hers.
They say a woman’s first time is painful, bloody, a shock you must get used to. It was nothing like that for Violet. She exploded, stronger it seemed than any Perseids, and Laurence was delighted. They stayed in the field so long that they missed any possibility of a train back, and had to walk the seven miles, until a veteran of the Boer Wars passed them in his motor car, recognised a soldier’s gait, and stopped to give them a lift, smiling at the grass in Violet’s hair and her startled happiness.
Only a week later they received the telegram about George’s death at Delville Woods. And a year later, Laurence at Passchendaele. He and Violet had not managed to spend more time properly alone together, in a field or a hotel room or even an alley. With each loss she had tumbled into a dark pit, a void opening up inside her that made her feel helpless and hopeless. Her brother was gone, her fiancé was gone, God was gone. It took a long time for the gap to close, if it ever really did.
A few years later when she could face it, she tried to experience again what she’d had with Laurence that night, this time with one of George’s old friends who had come through the War physically unscathed. But there were no Perseids – only a painful awareness of each moment that killed any pleasure and just made her