3 March 1920
WE’VE JUST HAD the most horrific news at breakfast: Stephen has died.
One of the other doctors wrote to tell us, though Charlie and I had to wait for Morry to come over to translate the French.
You’d think they could at least have had the decency to find someone with a little English to compose the letter.
Apparently they had an outbreak of the Spanish flu three weeks ago, and it carried Stephen off with it.
Where is the bloody sense in that! That he would survive through the entire war in those squalid field hospitals under the Krauts’ fire, only to be taken out by the patients for whom he had stayed behind.
No: I do not think it can be as simple as bad luck.
I have been thinking it ever since Harry’s death: there is a pattern to this all.
One every three years. Always in the early months.
All leading back to that night … Charlie will not allow it.
‘You should know by now that death is senseless, Bellsy,’ he said to me this morning.
‘I understand that you want to find meaning to it, but I promise you there is none.’
‘What if there is?’ I had to ask. What if we are to blame for this? He didn’t believe me when Harry died, but look now! Charlie and I should never have done what we did, and it has come back as a curse upon us.
‘You need to pull yourself together. Stephen is—’ His voice choked, so that he had to try again.
‘We have just lost our brother, and all you can do is worry for yourself. I wish you would let the past rest, put down those morbid hare pictures you are so fond of sewing, and join me back here in the real world. This is not what Stephen or anyone else would have wanted for you.’
I was desperate to find a way to make him see. ‘But Charlie, what if what happened to them was all our fault?’
He refused to hear another word, just slammed his teacup down so hard it cracked the saucer, then went raging off to some other part of the house.
He can’t face the idea that we are being made to pay for our wicked actions, but Morry and I are fully agreed on the matter, at least. We cannot ignore the truth any longer: we must be ready for what is still to come.
‘Charlie will reconsider in his own time,’ was Morry’s advice, ‘and never forget that I am here for you as well, Bellsy. We must look out for each other, you and I.’