Evangeline concentrated on keeping her sons alive, feeding them on oatmeal and potatoes and boiled chickens and keeping them well away from disease, immorality and nursemaids. She had to be particularly vigilant when it came to the large amounts of water threatening them at every turn. The river Kittrie flowed not a hundred yards from the house and had been partially diverted on the instruction of Roderick to feed a small, artificial loch he had created. This had been stocked with a great many young trout and, accidentally, a rogue baby pike which fed at leisure on its companions and grew to be legendary. Roderick devoted the rest of his life to trying to catch it.
The boys were all taught to swim in case of accident as well as being made to undertake regular walks and suffering annual bracing holidays at the island holiday home—
‘You mean here?’
~ Yes, don’t interrupt – and were forced to sleep for ten hours every night with their bedroom windows wide open, even in winter, so that they were sometimes woken by snow falling on their faces. By the time they were in their teens they were all in astonishingly good health with strong teeth, straight bones, good manners and clean habits and were, as everyone remarked, a great credit to their mother and their country.
When they went off to school, to Glenalmond, Evangeline wrote each of them a letter every week begging them to eat well, refrain from unhealthy thoughts and be vigilant around water, sharp objects and occupants of the sick bay.
When war was declared and the Hun were begging for a good thrashing Douglas was amongst the first to volunteer to give it to them. Feudalism still being a concept that was understood properly in that part of Scotland at the time, his example was followed by a swathe of his father’s tenants from the glen. Torquil crossed to France three months later and Murdo decided he wasn’t going to be left out of their adventures. Although he had been brought up not to lie, he swore to a recruiting officer that he was eighteen years old – he was fifteen – and eager to fight the foe. The recruiting officer signed him up with a conspirator’s wink.
They died in reverse order to that in which they’d been born. Murdo fell at Mons, neatly decapitated by a shell and six months later Torquil was lost for ever, drowning in the mud of no man’s land. Donald and Evangeline were not told at first because Torquil’s commanding officer thought he might eventually turn up but after a few weeks it became clear that those calcium-rich bones of his were going to secretly fertilize foreign soil for years to come.
A year later, Douglas was accidentally shot by his own side. He lived for several minutes after the bullet entered his brain and the snow that started falling on his face made him think that he was lying in his bed at home with the snow blowing off the hills through the window and that his brothers were safely asleep in their adjacent bedrooms (which in some ways they were), dreaming of their lives to come. Little Honoria had clearly been determined on her full complement of playmates.
Evangeline and Donald called their lost sons ‘the boys’, as if they were a single entity, rather than the individuals they had never really had the time to become. Donald comforted himself by imagining himself an unwilling Abraham, called upon to sacrifice his sons on the altar of patriotism. For a long time, Evangeline hung onto a secret hope that instead of drowning in mud, Torquil had deserted (she’d never been much of a patriot) and one day soon was going to walk up the long rhododendron-lined driveway, as jaunty as when he was alive. Time dulled this possibility and when the armistice was announced and there was still no sign of him, Evangeline decided that it was unlikely he would be coming home now and went down to the laundry room and hanged herself with a length of washing-rope from a large hook in the wall the purpose of which had always puzzled the laundrymaids but which now seemed only too clear. The end.
‘Sorry?’
~ The end.
‘Well, that was cheerful.’
~ Don’t hold me responsible, Nora says with a careless shrug, blame the story, not the storyteller. Do you want more tea?
Chez Bob
BOB WAS FAST ASLEEP IN BED WHEN I ENTERED THE FLAT. THE bedroom curtains were open and when I went to draw them I was reminded of Ferdinand – a comparison that couldn’t possibly work in Bob’s favour, especially as he was now sleepmumbling something about herring (‘They’ve got knives!’).
Something caught my eye down on the street – a figure was standing in the doorway of a building. It was surely the woman who had asked me the time only a few minutes ago. She struck a match to light a cigarette and I could see her hair – the colour of old threepenny-bits – and her perfectly straight nose. I suddenly realized who it was that she had a look of – the height, her carriage, the way she stood with feet splayed – she was like a poor and scrawny version of my mother, a prototype of Nora that hadn’t quite worked. The little flame of the match caught something else too – bitterness in the set of her features, disappointment etched in her skin.