Day 26 - 2319 words

‘I am not being stupid!’ protested Effie. ‘I am doing my patriotic duty.’
‘By marking boys as cowards? By making judgements on men about whom you know nothing!’
‘Oh and you know all about it. From your first hand experience at the Front.’
‘Sarcasm is beneath you. I have offered to go, despite my Quakerism.’
‘Perhaps you have not offered with enough conviction. I understand that everyone is wanted, now. Effie, almost absent-mindedly, tucked a white feather in Ernest’s buttonhole. He tore it out and stamped upon it, and then she saw the anger in him, and took a step back, turning from him so that the crowd separated them. Ernest reached his arm out and pulled Effie towards him again, parting the surprised pedestrians.
‘Come with me.’
‘I will not!’ Effie began, but Ernest’s grip tightened and she was alarmed by the thin set of his lips. Effie became quiet and passive, and allowed Ernest to lead her through the crowd, and onto an omnibus.
They travelled in silence through the centre of London and out towards the leafy northern suburbs, changing buses in Finchley. Effie took the opportunity to sit on the opposite side of the bus from Ernest, protesting that if Ernest wanted her company that much he should be prepared to pay for a cab. Ernest said nothing. He had almost forgotten that Effie was with him, so taken up was he with the revelations of Jay Kerford, and with wondering how this parentage had affected him, and would affect him in the future. If he went to war, he thought, looking out of the window at the buildings, he could find Gabriel’s cavalry regiment and talk to him. But what would the knowledge that he was not the son of his parents do to him? Or, would it change anything? Gabriel still had two parents who loved him, and who had always loved him. Did it matter that his Father was, in truth, his Uncle?
Once off the bus Effie did not need to ask where they were going, for she knew that Ernest was taking her to his flat. She began to make some attempt at small talk, nervously chattering. Ernest pushed her up the stairs with less consideration than he showed to any girl he had picked up when he roamed around the East End.
Ernest stood Effie in the centre of the room and held both her hands.
‘Take a look around, Effie. This is mine, and it is all I am likely to have. Your parents, for all their airs and graces, are never going to give you more than a couple of pieces towards your trousseau and something for the first baby. We have nothing between us. Gabriel is not going to marry you, Effie. He needs someone with money, or with a background to match his own.’ Ernest marvelled at how easily he could keep that deception going, now that he knew the truth.
‘I never said Gabriel was going to marry me. I am wearing your ring, Ernest. Are you accusing me of being – of not staying true to that?’
‘I am accusing you of being a simple, shallow little girl who has no idea what the real world has in store for her.  I cannot believe I ever thought that you were… that you were anything more.’
‘Are you releasing me from our engagement?’
Ernest shook his head. ‘That’s what you want. Then you can be the wronged party. You can say that I trifled with you for years.  No. I want you to marry me. It is a good match for you. My station in life will suit you.’
‘Ernest you sound like a Victorian.  We are living in modern times. I can choose who I marry, if I marry at all. You have believed yourself to be in love with me, engaged to me all this time but you’ve never once looked outside yourself to think about what I might really like, or dream of. I am leaving you, Ernest, and you can go about being as much the wronged party as you care to act. I don’t care. I’m going home to tea, and you can do as you please.’
She took off her ring and placed it carefully on the table, then picked up her hat and swept towards the door.  Ernest stepped in front of her. ‘There is a way I can make you marry me. You’re not that much of a modern girl to bring up a child on your own.’
‘You wouldn’t.’ said Effie
‘I could. You’re already here, in my flat, alone.’
‘Ernest let me go or so help me I’ll scream’. Breathed Effie.
Ernest, slowly, stepped away. Effie left the room and ran down the stairs, her hat in her hand. Ernest sat on his bed until nightfall, then selected a coat, a wide brimmed hat and a scarf, and, his face hidden, went out into the night.

Oh, Ernest. Where have I led you? You are coming into your inheritance. You have come so far since you and I worshipped your Mother together. Now you see through my eyes - they are all the same inside. I have the proof under my fingers, my flesh and my knife.  They are women, not angels. At last I realise that is their strength.  What we project upon them is a faint reflection of our weaknesses. Ernest, if you do this, there is no return to the light. You will choose to step into your own nightmare.

Ernest spent three nights under Effie’s window, watching her. He found that the night suited him, while the daylight, even in the quiet back room of the shop, seemed to make him twitchy. He found more understanding of this night existence, practising following girls down quiet streets until he could follow Effie undetected. She went nowhere remarkable, however, and was always accompanied by her Mother or a friend. The more Ernest watched her, the more the ringing in his head subsided. He seemed to find some peace, watching the light in her room, her shadow moving softly across the curtains. At least, when he was watching her, he was not dreaming.
Ernest resumed his usual pattern of work, and was bent over a folio of prints when the elderly postman came right into the shop, instead of dropping the letters on the mat. He waited until Ernest came to him, and then pushed the letter into his hand. ‘It’s your papers, lad. And not before time.’ Ernest held the envelope crushed in his palm until the old man had shuffled away. He tore it open then, just to take in where and when he needed to report.
As soon as he could he bade a genuinely fond farewell to Mr and Mrs Letts, but did not allow any of their mood of sentimentality to infect him. He gently sidestepped questions about Effie, but gave Mrs Letts a letter to pass on to her. He told Mrs Letts it was releasing Effie from her engagement, that it was not fair on her to have to wait for him, when he might never return. He had to trust Mrs Letts not to open this letter, but he was sure that she would be satisfied with the romance of his account, and would not doubt his word. All the time he was making these arrangements, shaking hands and being kissed, Ernest had this idea that he was an actor, performing a part in a play. Soon he would be acting the part of a young and inexperienced soldier, against Gabriel in his role of seasoned Officer.

Ernest was not shocked by the trenches; he had been dreaming about them since he was a boy. For the first few days he looked around as if he was returning to lands where he had grown up, lands that, to him, never had been green or peaceful. His troop thought him so calm as to be cold. Some believed that he was already shell shocked, and that his detachment was a method of coping with realities that could not be born. But Ernest had been to even darker places in the night streets of London, and could thank his Father for his ability to take in the realities of blood, injury and death. There was some grim benefit to being a monster’s child, he thought, standing untouched amid the carnage.
On the night of a major bombardment he slept, curled up under his greatcoat, his boots dangling over the edge of a crate into the water and filth below. He dreamed of Effie. She stood in a garden in the middle of No Man’s Land. The garden was green and golden; the pool over which she stooped was full of water lilies. He moved towards her, calling her name, crawling out over the mud to reach her. But as he touched the soft flowers that made up the edge of the garden she turned away from him. She bent down to hold out her hands to two little children – twin boys, and then they walked away from him through the bullets and the bombs. When Ernest woke up, he found that he had been injured as he slept, by a long piece of shrapnel passing through the soft tissue of his hip. He staggered to a medical point and passed out, getting treatment in a field hospital where he also contracted an infection and a fever, serious enough to allow him to be sent home. His next clear recollection was of the long train journey to London, where he was put out on the platform at Victoria Station and told to make his own way from there. He had a month of leave to use up, before he had to report to the Medical Officer once more.

Ernest walked stiffly down into the familiar streets, and found himself once again bargaining for second hand clothes. He had no desire to be in his uniform for a moment longer.  
‘You’d better get a hat, guv’nor, if you don’t want to scare the ladies.’ Said the shopkeeper.
Ernest ran a hand over his shaved head. He had almost forgotten about it. ‘It was for the lice.’
‘Yeah I thought so. Hope you haven’t got any little friends with you now.’
Ernest forced a laugh. ‘They all got shelled to Hell. Even lice can’t live for long out there.’ He looked at his reflection as he adjusted his hat, and a gap toothed, scarred stranger looked out at him, so unfamiliar that he looked behind him down the street before realising he was only looking at his war-battered face. He had lost some teeth in an early shelling, when a stray tin mug had socked him in the jaw, and a couple more as a result of the infection. His skin was covered in boils and spots as a result of the poor diet and the constant wet conditions he had suffered for so long. There was no danger, he thought, of being taken for Gabriel’s twin brother now.
Ernest had a desire to see the Thames, to lean over a bridge and watch the uncaring water, the clean water, roll endlessly underneath him. He headed for Vauxhall Bridge, walking stiffly, but trying not to use his walking stick.  He pulled his scarf up around his neck and kept his head down, since a man of his age was a rarity on these streets, and he had no desire to be asked to talk about the fighting. Half way over the bridge he saw a woman in a white dress, standing on a packing crate, and scanning the passing workers. Ernest forced himself to walk near to her, knowing what would happen.  His legs were heavy under him, as he willed himself to go onward. He prayed that she would not take the action that would result in her doom, but she did. Effie stepped down from the crate, and offered Ernest a white feather. He took it, and looked into her eyes. He found no spark of recognition. There was not even contempt for him, this coward standing before her. There was only a smug delight in her own actions.
‘Do you know why I have given you this feather?’ she said in the tones of a school teacher to a small boy.
‘Yes Miss.’ Ernest said. ‘I know what it means.’
‘My fiancé is fighting at the Front right now’ Effie said. ‘He is a cavalry officer. But I am prepared to make that sacrifice, for my country. If I can do that, as a weak woman, surely you can raise your hand?’
‘Oh yes Miss. I can raise my hand alright’ said Ernest. He stepped in quickly, and knocked Effie senseless with one quick blow to the side of her exposed neck. He held her up so that she seemed to be simply leaning against him, and quickly dragged her to the end of the bridge and down the steps. As he laid her down on the dank concrete plinth at the bottom of one of the bridge pillars, he shook her enough to wake her up. He wanted her to know exactly what was happening to her. When she realised, she struggled, and it took Ernest all his strength to subdue her. He thought of his Father, and of how easy it would be at this point if he had a knife. Still, he pushed one hand over Effie’s mouth and held her down by twisting her arm behind her as he pushed against her body.  He found her to be a virgin, which relieved him from the necessity of killing both her and Gabriel, he reasoned. The violation of his fiancée complete, Ernest left her weeping under the bridge, and ran lopsidedly off into the night.