Jonesy too feels as if the rug is pulled out from under him; there is no escaping her scorn.
‘You’ve become careless,’ Clovis accuses him. ‘Stay away from the stations.’
‘Have you been following me?’ he asks, surprised.
She resists the urge to smack him across the room.
‘Victoria Station in particular,’ she shoots back, ignoring his question. ‘You’ll be mistaken for a prostitute. Have you forgotten – they arrest people like you, prostitute or not.’
He bites his lip until it bleeds. Jonesy wishes he could tell her that he haunts the stations just like thousands of other people who search for their loved ones among the returning wounded. Stanley. He only goes for Stanley. His presence at Victoria is not related to picking up men, even though the reputation of the station’s surrounding streets is well known. But he can’t tell her, he dares not say a word, for he sees her clenched fists and her dangerous eyes, and knows that today she would do violence to him given the slightest provocation.
Willa and Jonesy are aware that the wind that brings this frightful shift is sleeping in the conservatory now, separated from his marriage bed like curdled milk.
Then, quite unexpectedly, Clovis makes a swift departure from her daily habits. She instructs Willa to leave a breakfast tray outside her bedroom door instead of laying her usual place at the table. It is then curious to see Clovis descend the stairs in a two-piece black, tailored suit. The jacket borrows from the military in its design and the skirt is as full as a riding habit’s. Her hair, drawn over a pompadour wire frame, accommodates her enormous black hat. As if she were in the deepest wartime mourning, she draws a thin veil over her face and proceeds out of the door without a word. There is no pattern to her days out except the number, which is four a week.
The house itself seems to sigh in relief when she goes.
There are so many dead young men. Is it any wonder that their families cannot quite believe that they would simply disappear across the sea to die on foreign soil? Might the mourner be forgiven for entertaining the idea that their cherished one makes some herculean effort to cross the torrid waters once more, unbound by death, to come home to lament and utter their final farewell? The number of women, and indeed men, who wish to contact the dead in the other world has never been greater.
Clovis operates from a first-floor flat, a room really, on the corner of Whittlesey Street just off Waterloo Road. It’s a respectable distance from the prostitutes that beleaguer the area, and more importantly, hundreds of thousands of soldiers pass through Waterloo Station and King George’s military hospital nearby. Where there are stations and hospitals, there are grieving people. She begins by stealing into St John’s church where lonely people seek solace. In a single day, she procures her first two clients.
It is quite easy work. Clovis first senses and then sees an apparition of the departed in the room. She does not attempt to describe them. Things are murky in the world of the dead. Before long the distressed mother is describing her son, or husband, and Clovis has but to nod, yes, that’s exactly as I see it. She never tries to guess names, or where the death occurred. Her clients are more interested in the message. And in this, Clovis excels, for she does not overact. Her soldier ghosts use words like ‘if’.
If I did not say it, or never said it enough, I love you.
If when you think of me you feel sad, please know that I am at peace now.
And so forth.
Clovis takes no pleasure or interest in any healing that may take place, she is not working to relieve anyone’s tortured mind, or to soothe any pain but her own. The salve she seeks is money; soothing coins in her pocket, calming and powerful notes in her purse. She is in complete control, here in the shadow of the war’s wounded. The years of her soft interlude are finished. Her edges are sharpened again. She has come back to herself. One day soon she will to return to Magdalen Street after her day’s work to conquer her sister’s wraith and blow its cobwebs from her house.
LONDON
1922
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Each time Verity teaches a man Braille, or when Constance sees the tension in a veteran’s face soften after she has has read Tennyson aloud, they return to Lawless House slightly less empty, the salve of being needed having been applied. Their work with blind servicemen continued throughout the war’s duration. Then Ireland’s fight for independence brought more casualties who were blinded by mustard gas.
One boisterous morning when the sisters are enjoying a pot of tea with the ex-servicemen, a new blind veteran enters the lounge from the terrace of the hostel, guided by a volunteer. The men rise from their chairs and follow a strip of drugget that crosses the room and leads directly to the French door that opens onto the terrace. The men overwhelm the soldier with welcome so that at first the sisters do not gain a full view. But when the veterans finally peel away from the young man, Verity takes such a resounding gasp, that the men are quite alarmed.
‘Please, what is it?’ they ask in unison.
‘It’s just that …’ Constance summons the words. ‘My sister and I …’
‘Sir.’ Verity sweeps over to the new veteran. ‘May I ask your name?’
‘Henry Mason, madam.’
‘Oh,’ she says, her voice thick and sore. ‘How do you do, Mr Mason.’
When he removes his service dress hat his auburn hair gives the sisters a start, but it is his dark glasses that spark a memory, a searing image of the boy playing with Verity’s spectacles, placing them on his face, running through the garden, peering through them in wonder at the way Verity views the outdoors.
‘We’re very
