that tore through me like a butcher’s knife. Not screaming exactly, more a howling, a wailing, the same word repeated over and over, “no, nooooo”, becoming one, single note.’
I stopped again, the memories too painful. I glanced at Fabrissa, seeking her reassurance and that she really did want to hear this.
She nodded. ‘Please, go on.’
I held her glance, then fixed my eyes back to the same spot on the table.
‘It was the fifteenth of September, did I say that? Almost two years to the day since George had enlisted. I had seen him once or twice, of course. He had been injured and sent home twice. A problem with his ears after a bombardment, not too bad. A bullet in his thigh the second time, again not life-threatening. ’
I shrugged, a casual gesture concealing the anger I felt with the doctors, with my father, for letting him go back to the Front at all, though I knew it was what he had wanted. It was a thin line between heroism and arrogance, and George had always walked it. We were the Watson boys. Nothing could harm us. He had believed in the myth of his own invincibility, whereas I? I had always felt the world was a dangerous place, waiting to spring its traps.
‘Both times, they patched him up and sent him back. But we hadn’t had a letter in a while, not since May. He was due home for a couple of days’ leave, so I tried not to be worried. Also, that summer I’d been ill with a serious bout of influenza, so I’d not been able to follow the progress of George’s battalion in the newspapers so closely.’
I stared at my hands, at the lines on them. They were no longer the hands of a child pushing pins into a map on the wall.
‘The worst of it was that no one talked to me. Not then. Not later. No one told me anything. When I got to the hall and ran to my mother, she lashed out at me, as if she could not bear to have me in her sight. Not hard, but I stumbled back against the hall table, sending a bowl of late pink roses in a crystal vase crashing to the ground. Water and glass and torn petals all over the rug. It was left to Florence to take me to the kitchen and dab iodine on my shin. She was crying. Her cap was all awry. They were all weeping, Florence and Maisie and Mrs Taylor, our cook. They loved him, too.
‘Mother shut herself away in the drawing room until Father came home. I could hear them talking behind the closed door. I pressed my ear against the polished wood, praying that they would know I was there and allow me in. Comfort me. But they didn’t. And although I knew that there had been a telegram and that everything was spoiled, nobody told me what it said. What, precisely, had happened to George. They simply forgot about me.
‘I was fifteen, but I stationed myself halfway up the stairs, as I’d done when I was a boy, watching the front door, my head resting against the banister, my arm wrapped around the spindles for comfort. I sat there for hours, watching the setting sun shine through the stained glass and throw beams of red and blue onto the flagstone floor.’
‘Willing George to come?’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
Softly, gently, she reached out and covered my hand with hers. Her skin was cold, her touch insubstantial, so light, as if she were barely there. But I was overwhelmed by the understanding implicit in her gesture. Grateful for her care.
‘It was only some time later I learned the telegram said George was missing in action. I never understood why the news had taken so long to reach us. It had happened weeks before, weeks and weeks. The thirtieth of June. The Battle of the Boar’s Head, a place called the Ferme du Bois outside Richebourg l’Avoué. The day before the Battle of the Somme began. Missing in action, the telegram said. Not dead. So I was confused. I thought - hoped - that there was some doubt. Perhaps the Germans had taken him prisoner. Perhaps he was in hospital having lost his memory. I was furious with my parents for believing the worst so easily. For not holding firm to the idea he could be alive.
‘Later, they sent his things home through Cox’s. Damp and