· · ·
So they had a place to live, after all. When Laura went to the Parkeys’ lawyer, she learned, to her shock, that they had money to live on as well. Enough for respectable clothes, and for proper food, to bring all three of them back to some semblance of health.
It was even enough money for Laura, walking dazedly through the vast, dusty old pile, to think,Could I do it? Could I open a sanatorium here? Could I help the people the war broke?
But not yet. There were a thousand details of life to work out first. Winter, on the second day, went outside to the toolshed, found the heaps of rusty gardening implements, and set about cleaningand sharpening them. Overnight, it seemed, the garden was trim and weeded and fertilized with fish meal. They had not time to sow a spring crop, Winter explained to her, but they could have lettuces. Parsley. Cabbage. Even potatoes.
He brought flowers into the house every day.
Freddie helped Winter in the garden. But Laura had bought him a sketchbook and an easel, pencils and chalk, and later oils, and soon he was busy with his paintings. The images were jagged, done in violent colors, and made Laura’s skin crawl. But Freddie was always a little happier, a little livelier, after finishing one.
And so they mended, bit by bit, in their little rambling haven of a creaky old house. Across the ocean, the war went on, through that summer and into the autumn.The Allies are advancing now,Jones wrote Laura.They’ve had a victory near the Marne. I resectioned a bowel today, poor man, we shall see…
It feels like the end,Kate wrote.But people are still dying.
They were. People died and died and died that summer. From influenza, and hunger, and war. The horsemen galloped, disembodied, and the old world writhed in torment, giving birth to the new.
They never spoke of Faland. Freddie would not speak of his time in the hotel, except once he painted a jagged room of peeling gilt, and colors soaring like sound over the abstract canvas. Laura saw him looking at it, with a strange sickened longing on his face. Then he thrust his palette knife into the painting and ripped it end to end.
“It’s over,” said Laura. “It’s all right.”
“But I’ll never hear music like that again,” said Freddie, and he looked ashamed of himself for saying it.
Laura crossed the room and took his hand.
It was September when Laura and Freddie finally went together, alone, at dusk to see where the house in Veith Street had been. It was suppertime, and everyone was indoors. Freddie was muffled up so the neighbors wouldn’t recognize that dead soldier, Wilfred Iven.
Laura had bought herself a motorcycle and a motorcar, and practiced in determined laps, until she could drive both rather well. So she and Freddie motored down to Veith Street and got out of the car,and stood together, in silence, where the house had been. There was nothing left, really. The timber had been cleared away by their enterprising neighbors; anything beneath had long since been taken up by others or hauled away for scrap. There was only a cellar-hole, and memories.
Laura said, “We should sell it. The land will be worth a bit. Or perhaps I shall build a new house—not like ours, different from ours—and rent it to boarders. Young women, maybe.”Build something new,she thought.Something else to remember.For all her memories of this house from before had folded into the one—blood and glass and smoke.
Freddie nodded, not looking at her. “I remember how it was—what I saw. In the hotel. When the ship exploded. Was it really like that?”
“It was,” said Laura.
Her mother had not come to her, dreaming or waking, since she’d led them away from Faland’s hotel. A miracle for her beloved children, who never imagined that the world contained either the mysteries or the doom that she had believed in so fervently.
For the first time, Laura asked, “Was the pillbox like—like what I saw, in the hotel?”
“It was.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Mother was right, you know,” Freddie said. “About the world. Requiescat in pace.”
And he bowed his head into his palm, and for a moment neither spoke. Laura put an arm round him and he put an arm round her, and for a moment, they were as united as they’d ever been in childhood, as though Armageddon had never come between them. Then Laura said, “Come on. Winter’s waiting for us.”
And she saw, with pleasure and a little pang, the light come into Freddie’s face.
They turned and left Veith Street together, for the last time.
· · ·
Laura had thought that they would get better there. The house had a silence that was conducive to healing. They would build new lives there together, and new selves. Gardener, painter, nurse. They’d be all right.
But September became October, and Laura began to wonder whether Freddie was indeed healing. Day by day, his art grew stranger, and he grew thinner, and paler, and he was often silent, holding a book in his lap without reading it. Sometimes she’d hear him moving restlessly about the house after she’d gone to bed, and hear Winter’s measured step, going to find him, hear their voices together in the darkness.
October became November.
