They’d gone to meet him from the train, walking the same roads and lanes as she did this morning. Evelyn’s memory of the day was vivid still, seven years later. The steam from the train, the black coal smoke, hung heavy on the platform. Passengers alighted into a haze and looked around confusedly for those who had come to greet them. Evelyn and her family peered through the fog for the figure so familiar to them. They could not see him anywhere, and her mother had begun to wonder out loud if there was some kind of mistake.
Evelyn’s attention had been drawn by a tall, exceptionally thin figure moving slowly towards them. He was on crutches, his gait awkward. A dark suit was all she could make out of his clothing. His head was bowed, his attention apparently focused on the ground. She almost looked away. Then recognition dawned.
“Mother, Dad, it’s him! There!” She’d run towards him even as she finished the exclamation. “Eddie, we’re here! You’re back home now.” As she reached him, she instinctively took his face in her hands and looked into his eyes. What she saw, to her shame, made her cry out in awful surprise.
Edward’s face was scarred. His left cheek bore evidence of lacerations that had healed badly and his forehead and the area around his right eye looked shiny and contorted, as though he’d been burned. The scarring bothered Evelyn less than the dull, hard expression on the face, the clouded eyes that had once been so bright. It was as though Edward saw and recognised the world around him but was somehow removed from it.
Evelyn had willed herself not to look away. She lowered her hands to his shoulders, noticing how much weight he’d lost since she’d last held him. “Oh, Eddie, what happened?”
The question would never be answered.
It had taken Evelyn some minutes to realise that Edward’s awkward stance, dependence on the crutches, was a result of his left leg missing from below the knee. The horror of war was suddenly embodied by her Eddie, and Evelyn did not know whether tears or anger was the correct emotional response.
In the seven years since that day, Evelyn had read what she could about shell shock. But no matter what she read, Evelyn did not find anything to help Edward. The doctors and psychologists were at a loss, arguing amongst themselves. In the end, Evelyn tired of reading their educated commentaries. They were irrelevant to her experience of living day-to-day with Eddie.
He made progress, of sorts. The moments of eye contact grew longer, with more meaning. He would reach out and touch members of the family, usually in thanks or apparent affection. As though he was remembering the bare essentials of communication, his manners were the first part of his speech to return; he began, quite abruptly one day, to say please and thank you at the appropriate moments. The names of his family also crept in. In the last two years he’d occasionally passed comment on the weather, or the quality of the roast meat put in front of him.
Still, he remained mostly silent. And he did not leave the house. So now, Edward was left to his own devices. He spent his days in the parlour, mostly gazing out of the window. They kept him supplied with tea and left a pen and paper next to him. One day Evelyn found that he’d written his name over and over again on the paper. Another day was a sketch of a face, crudely drawn. She received no response when she asked him who it was. Only those brief touches of the hand, the moments of eye contact, told her that he was still here.
And now, at his urging, she was leaving him behind. In the drive he had shown to make her leave, to escape claustrophobic West Coombe, she had seen more of his former self than she had since he went to war. Rationalising this morning’s actions was easy in that context.
She had written letters to explain and had entrusted them to Edward before they had retired for the night. Although she knew there would be worry and pain, she felt sure that the notion that Edward had plotted this with her, that somehow Edward approved, would distract her parents from her own actions. Pragmatic as they were, her parents would undoubtedly be shocked, but not in a way that would greatly affect their day-to-day existence.
She felt more guilt about Michael. A few hours ago, desperate to move forward in her life, seeking something she did not understand, she had accepted his proposal of marriage and let him kiss her. He’d been so happy when she’d left him, just the evening before. Their time at the dance, and the fireworks, seemed a world away now, not just a few hours. That seemed ludicrous now.
Michael would be disappointed. Worse than that, he would be hurt. He’d pursued Evelyn for years, patient, waiting. She knew he loved her. Michael was popular though, he had friends enough to occupy him, women enough who would readily be courted. She was, surely, doing the right thing by him. Condemning him to a marriage in which she would never be a satisfied partner could not be the fair action for either of them. She hoped her letter would make that plain, and that he would forgive her.
She could not explain her motivations in encouraging him and then rejecting him. He would not understand that West Coombe was so small, so suffocating, that she needed to leave. Nor would he understand that, at twenty-five, she still did not feel ready to marry. That her affection for him did not translate into enough of a regard to be ready to promise to spend the rest of her life with him, to obey him, to do everything a man and woman did together. Michael was a good man but she could not marry, as her
