move the toes of her right foot back and forth elegantly across the slate floor, like a ballerina practising. Her mother had said no but was Flora saying no? Could a mother speak for a daughter? Could Mrs Melbourne Edwards speak for Flora? These were modern times. Flora swayed slightly as she moved her pointed toes gently from side to side, and in her swaying Wilfred read her yes.
4
The Invitation
‘You couldn’t look smarter if you tried.’ Mrs Reece, flushed with vanity, reached up and straightened Madoc’s epaulettes. ‘Doctor Reece, doesn’t Madoc look a picture?’
‘Son, you do us proud.’ Grace watched as her father patted her brother on the arm, his worn, red fingers against the sleeve of the khaki uniform.
‘A Sergeant, Doctor Reece!’ Mrs Reece interjected. ‘Sidney isn’t a Sergeant and he’s been in the Fifteenth Welsh Regiment for six years as well. He enlisted just after the war, the moment he was seventeen – and he’s still only a Lance Corporal. I was telling Sidney’s mother last Monday, “Well, Madoc’s now a Sergeant and has a three-point chevron on his sleeve”. I know for a fact she didn’t like it that her son is still a Lance Corporal after all that time – when my son is a Sergeant.’ Mrs Reece reached up and tugged at the corner of Madoc’s collar. ‘I did a tidy job of those boots. I greased them with Quikko lamp black. They look very clean.’
Grace looked down at Madoc’s Army boots with their thick, serrated soles, tough hardened leather uppers and the extreme black perfection of their shine. They were big boots: Madoc had big feet. He’d always had big feet, to match his large head and his thickset body. Madoc smiled, his blue eyes charming beneath his bushy eyebrows. God only knows what happened to him in the war, Grace thought.
‘Mother, now! You spoil me. I’ll be back at the barracks before long and polishing them myself. Didn’t use spit, did you?’
‘Oh, get away with you, Madoc!’ Grace watched her mother beam and her father smile at Madoc’s teasing.
Grace straightened her pearl necklace, formed a smile on her face and felt a tugging in her chest. Her brother was going off again, somewhere no one had ever heard of in Africa, some camp in a wilderness, full of a mess of green tents and men polishing their shoes and pressing their uniforms, smartening themselves to kill. That’s all the Army seemed to Grace, polishing and killing. The Army was men without women and, Grace knew, being without women changed men, made them forget, made them more violent. Or Madoc, at least. Men without women thought everything was a war. Men who had been without women for a long time were dangerous when they returned.
‘Oh Madoc, what’ll we do without you?’
‘Pull yourself together, Mrs Reece,’ Dr Reece admonished. ‘Our son is a grown man with a job to do: let him go in peace. He’s not a child any more.’
‘You take your lunch tin with you, now, for the train journey. I’ve made you cucumber sandwiches. Don’t forget to eat properly.’
‘Mother!’ said Madoc, grinning. Then Grace watched as he bent down and picked their mother up in his arms and swung her round.
‘Madoc!’ Mrs Reece cried out jubilantly, her long woollen skirt sailing out. Grace could see that her mother was delighting in her son: his strength, his humour, how he tended her.
‘Madoc now, put your mother down,’ Dr Reece said, smiling and speaking quietly, knowing Madoc didn’t like loud noise since he’d come back from the Battle of Mammet and the trenches.
‘You’re light as a feather, Mother,’ Madoc commented, her wooden clogs tapping against the flagstones as he set her down on the floor.
‘Madoc,’ Mrs Reece said, taking her hanky from the pocket of her pinny and dabbing at her eyes. She was wearing her best pinny, the one Madoc had given her for Christmas.
Grace watched her father’s eyes moisten. Her parents were genuinely happy to be here with Madoc, but some of their cheerfulness was false; some of their red-faced animation was because they knew that their son might go away to the Army and get killed. They all knew that. It was quite possible that Madoc would board the boat to that world of men he lived with, and for another man, from somewhere else, to point a gun at him and accurately, precisely and intentionally and immediately, kill him. There would be a grave. And that would be the end