‘Listen to this, Edie,’ Gracie said, ‘Cadet’s Last Message,’ then waited a moment for Edie to absorb that before she went on:
‘The warship Leon Gambetta went down. Seven officers seized Admiral Senes, who ran out of his cabin clad only in his nightshirt, and forcibly lowered him into a launch, but the boat capsized and all were drowned. As the last boat was making for the shore, long after the Leon Gambetta sank, it passed a cadet — the last living object in the water. It was impossible to take him aboard, as the small craft was already crowded; so the boat forged slowly away from the boy, who gasped, “Never mind lads! Give a kiss to my mother for me.” ’
Gracie put the sheet of newspaper down on the table and smoothed out the creases with her hands. ‘I can’t let you scrunch up that sheet, Edie, it would be like scrunching up the boy’s memory.’ She looked up with tears in her eyes. ‘That would have been an English boy?’ she asked.
Edie nodded, she could feel the tears filling her eyes, too. She passed the kitchen scissors to Gracie. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘cut out the article and we will glue it to the wall and that way we can remember his sacrifice.’
She watched Gracie carefully cut around the article, then Edie lightly smeared some glue across the back of it and pasted the article to the wall and they both stood and looked at it and wondered how a boy could be so brave. They stood side by side in silence, united by their own helplessness in the face of the boy’s courage. What could they really do to save these poor boys’ lives?
‘I’m going to marry a brave English boy,’ Gracie said finally.
‘Good heavens,’ said Edie. ‘Why?’
‘I just think,’ said Gracie carefully, knowing she was putting bricks in place in her life that, once assembled, could never be moved, ‘that if the English are that brave it might be a good idea.’
Edie tapped Gracie’s nose. ‘You’ve got at least ten years before you marry anyone.’ And Edie reached for a jar of Bovril and held it out to Gracie. ‘Kiss it for good luck,’ and Gracie did so and Edie hoped that Theo would get that jar of Bovril as she wrapped it and put it in the box.
She wondered again if Theo was safe. She tried not to mind any more that he had got over his love for her and married Beth. In her notebook she had written:
Plan — Be happy for Theo and Beth even if I’m not.
And she really tried. She would remind herself that she loved Beth like a sister and so she could only wish good things for her. She told herself that she couldn’t be angry with Beth because Beth hadn’t chased Theo, they had found each other because of her. She had said no to him, rejected his love, so how could she expect him to give up his life for her and not to make a life with anyone else? And if he was going to make a life with someone else, she would rather it was with Beth than, say, Vera Gamble.
But when Beth announced they were engaged so soon after she had said no once and for all, it had cut her heart to pieces. The week after that he walked Beth home from church, leaving her and Papa to walk about half a block behind. She watched as Beth hung tightly onto his arm as if the faintest breeze would pick him up and blow him back to her. On the other side of him was Gracie, holding his hand and pulling him in different directions as she skipped and hopped. Edie could see he was paying more attention to Gracie than Beth but she didn’t wonder why. Gracie would command anyone’s attention. At the corner of Webster Street and Drummond Street Papa had leant over and patted her arm and asked meaningfully, ‘Are you okay?’, pointing his umbrella accusingly at Theo.
‘I changed my plan, Papa, and now I must wear it,’ she said, and hoped she was wearing it well.
Then, as well as walking Beth home from church, Theo had started visiting during the week. Edie knew his knock on the door like the back of her hand and for a moment her heart would skip and she would have to remind herself that it wasn’t her he was calling on. Sometimes while he was visiting they found themselves alone in the hallway together — she might have been going to her bedroom and he to the study to see her father — with no more than their breath between them and they would stand like that forgetting where and who they were until her father appeared and said something like, ‘Theo, come and look at this.’
When Theo spoke to her she felt a mashing pain in her chest. He spoke kindly, as if she could be anyone and certainly not someone he had fervently loved for years, and she spoke to him as though he was nothing to her other than Beth’s fiancé. But her heart was a pulpy mess.
Edie knew she had two choices. She could take bitterness and slowly shrivel, or she could love him privately, secretly, in her heart. Whenever she so much as glanced at Gracie and Gracie looked up at her and smiled, she knew that Gracie loved her more than anyone else in the world, even more than Theo had loved her, and she knew that she returned that love and that her decision was the right one. So she had watched as Beth had filled Theo’s stomach with her roast pork and his eyes with her prettiness and bantered with him in a way Edie never had and she became convinced that he was much better off with Beth. She would never have loved him as Beth
