Chapter 18
18
It was as if the air inside every room at Merriford Manor had somehow become denser. Every step took gargantuan effort; every breath was almost suffocating. The thoughts that lumbered through Olivia’s mind, the inarticulate words she spoke, were all slowed by her palpable grief. She sensed the desolation hanging in the atmosphere, nestled in the shadows and crawling across the wallpapers. Even the servants, some of whom had already lost family members or friends to the war, bore the devastating news of the young Mr Fairchild’s death in their deflated posture, dipped heads and whispered voices. Some of the older staff had known him since he was a baby and had perhaps even hoped to serve out their days under him as master. It was too much to bear.
Lady Fairchild took to her bedroom for a week and when she reappeared, she was shrouded in black. Sir Hugo didn’t touch a newspaper for days. Olivia retreated to the tower and wondered if the awfulness of the situation would cause the voice to return, but there were no responses to her repeated whispers through the wall.
She did, however, find some comfort in writing her feelings and observations down, even penning a final letter to Clarence, which she tucked in her dressing table drawer. Grief was not new to her but experiencing it in a country at war was. It was not just her state of mind she had to wrestle with, but everyone’s around her as well. Being optimistic and cheery was becoming wearing. Anxiety was etched across the faces of so many, and the absence of young men in the fields and in the towns was no longer worthy of note. Even the way people grieved was changing – for how could the previous elaborate and indulgent practices to honour the dead be conducted when the loss was on such a catastrophic scale? That Lady Fairchild would lose a healthy adult son was unthinkable barely two years ago, but now her circumstances were not unusual. Was it better or worse that she was not the first of her close circle of society ladies to go through this? And did it affect how much sympathy she could expect when everyone knew that she would not be the last?
However, the extent of the physical affection between Olivia and the older woman was slowly growing. The day Her Ladyship had let the devastating telegram flutter to the floor, Olivia had dashed to her side and thrown her arms about the bereaved mother. For the first time in four years, her touch had been reciprocated. She felt herself gripped with a fierceness that had surprised them both. Olivia was not her daughter, nor was she even an adult, but the connection between them was real.
‘We will get through this,’ she assured Lady Fairchild several weeks later, when the grief wasn’t quite as raw. ‘Every day the pain will hurt a little less, and the sun will shine a little brighter.’
‘But if it should happen to Louis, too, or Howard… I feel so guilty for doing so little when they are risking so much. Perhaps if I was younger and unmarried, I’d have considered training as a nurse, but neither my age nor my husband would allow it. And whilst Sir Hugo might permit me to potter about in our kitchen gardens, growing food for the table, he would not see me ploughing a field or chopping out mangolds.’
Olivia understood because she felt the same. Why was it only in her imagination that she could wield a sword or sacrifice herself for those she loved? Their sex restricted them both and, for different reasons, their age. And so, when Her Ladyship visited her in the tower a week later, the news she brought offered the young girl some consolation.
‘After much deliberation, and possibly a degree of coercion from the powers that be, Sir Hugo has decided that Merriford Manor will serve as a convalescent home for the remainder of the war. I suspect he may have jumped before he was pushed, as several large houses have already been pressed into service as hospitals, but we are to give over a portion of the house to this end and can continue to live in the rest.’
She gave a small smile – the first Olivia had seen since Clarence’s death.
‘I know that the local cottage hospital has been struggling, and we are so fortunate to live here, with such beautiful grounds. It is the perfect place for our brave men to recuperate and heal, and I finally feel we are doing something practical.’
Olivia immediately had visions of herself as a modern-day Florence Nightingale and could not stop her rapidly spinning brain from picturing herself in a VAD uniform, mopping at the brow of some fevered invalid. Might she meet a gallant war hero whom she could dedicate the remainder of her life to, much as Ruth had done? Would her love story start at the foot of a hospital bed? She decided to write a short story about such a romance to cheer herself up, especially as it occurred to her that when Merriford Manor was full of strangers, it would prevent her wandering uninhibited around the grounds. Perhaps when she was eighteen, she could look into training as a nurse.
‘Clarence would have been pleased,’ she said.
‘I’m so glad you feel the same. It will mean a degree of disruption, but it’s the least we can do.’ Her Ladyship’s shoulders relaxed and she finally took in her surroundings. ‘It is so dark in here, Olivia. How can you bear it?’
‘Sometimes darkness is a comfort.’ She’d found such comfort four years ago by imagining herself to have a friend through the wall in the darkest part of the night.
The older woman’s eyes alighted on the open notebook across the small desk, and she glanced at the words.
‘Are you writing stories? Dabbling in fiction? Your governess always said your prose was exceptionally good for someone your age. Do you suppose it is down to your extensive reading? Or do you think it is something you have inherited from your father?’
Olivia shrugged. ‘My head is always so busy, I guess I have to get some of it down on paper, or it would spill out of my ears.’
The older woman gave another fleeting smile. ‘You should pursue it. It is one of the few acceptable professions open to our sex. And one that is compatible with marriage and motherhood. I, on the other hand, have always known myself to be purely decorative. With Clarence’s death, the convalescent hospital will finally give me a purpose. That’s the most exciting part of all of this; I’ve read of civilians volunteering at such places. Surely, even without nurses’ training, there are things we can do? Write letters for the injured, visit those who have no family, read aloud to the troubled of mind?’
Olivia caught the ‘we’ and sat up straighter, as Lady Fairchild’s announcement took on a new significance. Reading stories and writing letters were things she was exceptionally good at. Her Ladyship was quite correct: this could not have come at a better time. It would finally give them both a purpose.
* * *
To everyone’s astonishment, within a few short weeks, Merriford Manor was successfully transformed into a serviceable convalescent hospital. The great hall and morning room were taken over, with the family retaining just the dining room and drawing room, both on the east side of the main house. Sir Hugo had overseen the removal and safe storage of various paintings, valuable furniture and fragile ornaments. After the rooms had been cleared, there were endless deliveries of iron beds and single mattresses, stacks of white hospital linen, boxes of enamelware, bed pans, and medical equipment. Folding screens divided the spaces and offered a degree of privacy, as the rooms were converted into dormitories. Part of the west wing was given over to hospital stores, and arrangements were made with the kitchen staff to allow for the provision of all the extra meals.
One hot June day in 1916, Olivia stood in the cluttered library, now home to several large tables and cabinets from elsewhere in the house. She looked down over the driveway as trucks arrived with the wounded – the sightless and the limbless managing with wheelchairs and crutches. This would be home for these unfortunate men for the foreseeable future. It would be a place they could rehabilitate, and do so in the green and peaceful English countryside.
Even though the family largely cocooned themselves in those areas of the manor that they had retained for their personal use, the sights and sounds of the patients invaded every moment of their lives. They quickly grew used to seeing the men seated outside on the formal lawns in their hospital blues. The ill-fitting, blue, single-breasted jackets, blue trousers, white shirts and red ties made convalescing soldiers distinguishable from men avoiding military service, but were not popular with those who wore them.
The house had been so quiet before, when the boys were away, but now, there was always something going on: the constant arrival of Red Cross staff and volunteers from the village, the tip and tap of endless games of ping-pong, and the occasional jolly tune coming from the upright piano in the music room.
Lady Fairchild was in her element, recruiting local volunteers to undertake various tasks such as serving meals, providing companionship to the patients, organising recreational activities, and helping with administrative duties. Olivia was one such volunteer and she made herself useful, setting up a library for the wounded with books that had been donated, and reading and writing letters for those who were not able to do so for themselves.
Her tendency to select fairy tales and romances, when the men expressed no preference, was tolerated because the skill with which she delivered the story was, as one soldier put it, ‘enchanting’ – a word that caused her to think back to the almost kiss from Ernest all those months ago. Such was her popularity, that one end of the library was set up with chairs for her performances, and the men were quite put out if they missed an instalment.
Lady Fairchild took it upon herself to remind everyone that Olivia was just seventeen, and the only downside of her popularity was that she was removed from the tower and given a bedroom in the main house to preserve her virtue. With no Ruth to act as guard dog, it was, the older woman told her, better to be safe than sorry, and having long accepted that Seth would never return, Olivia was not as upset as she might otherwise have been.
‘I don’t know how I would manage without you, dear girl,’ Her Ladyship said, as they tidied up the library together after one particularly dramatic reading. ‘The tragedy of the Titanic has, rather cruelly, been my saving. You mean a very great deal to me, and whilst I could never presume to replace your mother, it would be a kindness, make me feel a little less distant, if you were to call me Cynthia.’
And for those brave and long-awaited words, Olivia rewarded her with a bone-crushing embrace.
* * *
‘Howard has written to say he’s likely to be deployed in September and we’ve had news from Louis,’ Lady Fairchild announced. ‘I was so worried not to have had any correspondence from him for a while, but he’s apparently been quite unwell with trench fever. The only silver lining to his letter being that, due to his recurring relapses, they are shipping him back to England for a time to fully recover.’
They had endeavoured to get him transferred to Merriford but, apparently, it wasn’t that simple. His mother, however, was able to visit him twice that summer during his stay at a hospital in Buckinghamshire. The icing on the unexpected cake was when his father pulled some bureaucratic strings and Louis was allowed to come home briefly before returning to the front.
Unlike Clarence, he had no compunction when answering his mother’s anxious questions, as he told of the bloated dead, the plagues of rats, the continuous roar of bombardment, and how on one occasion, he had handed out bags and ordered his men to collect up the pieces of their fallen comrades after a shell had dropped in their trench. Benji sat, wide-eyed, lapping up every detail, but the increasing horror was written across the faces of Olivia and Lady Fairchild.
‘It’s certainly no picnic, Mother.’ His expression was serious, as was his desire to respond honestly and to the best of his ability. ‘The lice get everywhere and the rats eat everything – from the tablecloths to the dead. My men are supposedly allocated one and a quarter pounds of fresh meat daily but the reality is that the only fresh meat in the trenches is the bodies of their friends…’
‘Enough!’ Lady Fairchild cried. Her face was white and Olivia threw Louis a frustrated look.
He merely shrugged. ‘Well, you would keep asking. And the brutal truth is that I’m on borrowed time. I’ve done the maths. Subalterns, like myself, are not expected to live beyond a few weeks. We lead our men out onto the battlefield, and snipers are always on the lookout for the uniform of an officer, picking us off first if they can.’
‘Louis!’ Olivia’s frustration was apparent, and he finally realised he’d overstepped the mark. Lady Fairchild didn’t press her son on anything further for the duration of his visit. She did, however, give him the tightest embrace when he left the following day, which he endured admirably, as his mother told him all the things that she wanted to say without the need for words.
* * *
Just eleven short days after Louis Fairchild had left for foreign shores, the family received word that he had died at a casualty clearing station on 4 September 1916, from wounds sustained during battle.
Tragically, his maths had been correct.