Elsie stepped outside, leant back on the doorframe and raised one arch-shaped eyebrow, thinking about the war effort. What bloody war? Here, tucked away in the Sussex countryside, her nearest neighbour more than half-a-mile away, there was no war. She strained her ears to hear something—anything at all—but there was nothing to be heard but that wretched, empty silence. Even the honey bees, flitting and shuffling restlessly between the purple chive flowers and those of the mauve sage were silent. As she fussed with her blonde hair, pointlessly impeccable and styled in shoulder-length rolls, she was certain that, if she were to die in wartime, it would be from the slow sinking-sand monotony of what her life had become.
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ she murmured, just to break the pitiful stillness, as she plucked a cigarette from the packet of Wills’ Gold Flakes that she squeezed in her hand. She lit it and took a long drag, reflecting on the last few months since her wedding day. Her heart began to tighten as she thought of that blustery day, two weeks before the declaration of war, when she had become Mrs Laurie Finch. Just four weeks later, her husband had been whisked off to France with the British Expeditionary Force, leaving her here, the anxious housewife. Since that unremarkable day last August when she had ceased to be Miss Elsie Danby and she had left her job as the village school teacher—as was the expectation—her life had fallen into a ghastly routine. It was a routine no less exacting or precise than one of the dreadful knitting patterns given to her by her mother, which was now stuffed among a pile of other useless papers in the kitchen. Baking, tidying, washing, cleaning, knitting. Endlessly.
Last Sunday, in an act of churlish defiance, Elsie had not attended church, but had instead done her washing, leaving Monday to become her day of rest. Her muted sense of satisfaction and mild victory over the scourge of housewifery had been dulled by the fact that it had gone completely unnoticed. She had rather expected a visit from the vicar, one of the neighbours or perhaps Mrs McKay or another church busybody. But nobody came and Elsie’s defiance twisted into stubbornness; she had made up her mind that she wouldn’t be attending church this coming Sunday, either. What did it all matter, anyway? She couldn’t work on a Sunday but soldiers could fight, could be lost, could be killed on a Sunday.
Pushing small haloes of smoke into the air through her plump red lips, Elsie realised with horror that history was repeating itself: she was turning into her mother, a timid little Victorian creature who had married on the eve of the Great War. Elsie, born a drearily predictable nine months after the Armistice, imagined her mother passing those four long years, rocking in her wicker chair by the fire, eternally knitting scarves and socks for the men in the trenches. Doing her bit.
The brace around Elsie’s heart tightened. It wouldn’t be like that for her. It wasn’t already; it was very different. She turned and there it was, on the mantelpiece. It had arrived last week when she had been in the kitchen boiling the whites. The door knocker had resounded and she’d dithered about whether or not to answer it, convinced that it had been the Kleeneze man back again with his wretched set of dusters and brushes. But it hadn’t been him, it had been the telegraph boy. All that she could now recall of him was the red piping on his navy uniform cuff as he handed over the telegram and had asked if there was a reply. No reply. What could she have said? Thank you, War Office, for informing me that my husband is missing, presumed killed on war service.
Elsie held the cigarette to her lips perfunctorily, but breathed around it. She had guessed, of course, even before the telegram had arrived. ‘Tens of Thousands Safely Home Already,’ the Daily Express headline had shouted from their edition of 31st May. ‘Many more coming by day and night.’ But Laurie did not come. The follow-up letter, as promised in the telegram, had revealed nothing more. And that was the last that she had heard. Missing presumed killed.
She let the burning cigarette fall to the floor, turned back inside and shut the door.
Sitting at the kitchen table, Elsie closed her wide blue eyes, trying to unclench her heart; but it refused. The pathetic helplessness of her situation echoed in the repetitive metallic striking of the grandfather clock in the hallway, each strike gaily announcing the death of more of her life.
The first thing that her eyes settled upon, when she finally reopened them, was the ceramic sign hanging just above the stove. The Devil makes work for idle hands, it warned. To people visiting Bramley Cottage it was simply a light-hearted wall adornment, but to Elsie it represented so much more than that. She wasn’t silly, she had been able to see the look in her mother-in-law’s eyes when she had unwrapped it on her last birthday; it was a look that had unquestionably summarised the wifely expectations placed on Elsie. It had been a warning to uphold her
