Phoenix and Ashes

'You would never know there was a war from here,' the old man said at last, and Reggie thought he sounded wistful. 'Must admit, I was dubious about this brouhaha your mother set her heart on, but—it won't be bad to forget for a little while, and pretend.'

'Like children playing truant from school,' Reggie replied, with bitter longing. 'But it won't go away.'

'But we can rest our minds from it for a little, surely, without feeling guilty.' The Brigadier sipped his brandy. 'We'll all put on our dominoes and pretend that outside the walls of Longacre it is 1912; we can even persuade ourselves for a little that our lost and absent friends are out there in the crowd, too. And as long as the masks are being worn, we can hold to the illusion. Is that so wrong?'

Yes, he wanted to say. Yes, because the ones that haven't been killed by the idiotic strategies of old men fighting a war with last century's tactics are out there putting their lives at risk because those same old men are so certain that what they want is God's will that they won't admit they are wrong or that what they are doing is a hideous, horrible mistake.

But he didn't say it. In part, because he knew that although the Brigadier agreed with him in his heart, he could never admit it aloud. And in part because it would only hurt that good old man further.

'Sometimes—one needs illusions,' he said, carefully, and left it at that.

Illusions. So much of what was going on here was an illusion. Not just this country weekend and the ball, but everything on this side of the Channel. No one wanted to talk about the war anymore, or think about it even, except those who had been in it. The topics that seemed to obsess most people had nothing whatsoever to do with the war except as the war had caused the problems. And that drove him mad, sometimes. He wanted to wake them up, drag them forcibly down to the hospitals and show them the shellshocked and the maimed, to make them care, force them to understand what this war was doing. Was he in the wrong, then, to want to break into the comfortable illusions and shout at them all, that their petty little concerns over their comforts, the shortage of servants, the rationed food, were selfish, self-centered and disgusting to him? That over there in France, that sound like thunder that came over the Channel when the wind was right, was the sound of people dying, and it was time they woke up and acknowledged it?

But he wanted to forget it too—part of him was so tired of it all that he was sick with longing for it to just stop, to go away, and take all his memories with it.

He turned his mind back to the problem of Eleanor with a feeling almost of relief. It was something to think about that was not the war, and part of him deeply sympathized with the Brigadier. Like those nights when he would lie in his bed at the hospital and recite poem after poem in his head to keep from thinking about what was out there in the dark, waiting for him to fall asleep. Because you could only think about the war and what it was doing to you and your mates for so long before you started going mad.

Eleanor Robinson should have been at Oxford, and was not, and it was not for lack of money in her family. And in fact, from all appearances, she was working as a servant. Why, oh why, had she not told him herself what was wrong? Pride?

For that matter, why had her father married a scheming creature like Alison?

She vamped him I suppose, like her daughters are trying to vamp me. I suppose if you've never been vamped before, it would be easy to succumb. When would that have been? He tried to reckon up the last time he had seen her. It was before the war, before he joined the RFC. So at some point between then and the start of the war, her father had remarried. He'd done some checking, and her father had died at some time around the first Christmas of the war. So why had his daughter not been at Oxford at that point? Had Alison persuaded the besotted new husband that it was unnecessary to give a girl a university education? Or had she pled the war as an excuse, claiming she needed Eleanor at home? Just how besotted had he been, to deny his only child her one dream? He must have been caught like a salmon in a net.

And then, just as the last of the sun sank below the horizon, it struck him. What if her father had altered his will in favor of the new wife before he went off to the war?

It was just the sort of thing that Alison would have insisted on, he was sure of it. Manipulative creature that she was, she would have promised, ever so sweetly, that she would take as good care of Eleanor as of her own daughters. So why shouldn't her dear new husband not change his will to make her sole inheritor? After all, leaving flighty young girls anything directly was generally a bad idea. Who could guess what they would do with their inheritance, and of course, there were always cads who would romance them for their money, then waste it and leave them penniless and deserted.

He stared into the growing darkness, as beside him, the Brigadier lit up a cigarette. The end of it glowed as he pursued that line of thought to its logical conclusion.

So, assume that was precisely what had happened. Then her father had died in the first months of the war, leaving her entirely at the mercy of her stepmother, a woman who clearly despised her. Then what? What was she doing here, dressed like a servant?

Well, what were her choices? To leave—and do what? She wasn't suited to anything but marriage, and if she'd had a sweetheart in the village, he doubted that she would have been so keen to go to university. There was a sad truth to her condition; she had no skills with which to support herself. She hadn't enough education to become a governess. She hadn't the money to train as a nurse, and although she could have gone as a VAD no one could really live on the tiny stipend that was allotted to the volunteers. In the beginning she wouldn't have had the stamina for a factory job, and the Land Girls hadn't been formed until later. That would have left her with only one option. To remain at home at the mercy of her stepmother, who must have seen her as a ready source of free labor and put her to work as a servant.