The Gift by Iona Grey

 Almost a year after the end of the Great War, the world is doing its best to move on. In the summer of 1919 there are peace parties in York, where bunting is strung between the lampposts and tables are set out in the streets.

Life goes on; that’s what the parties declare. The years of newspaper casualty lists and dreading the knock of the telegram boy are over and it is time to be joyful again. Elizabeth does her best to maintain the pretence, providing a tray of jam tarts for the tea and putting on her Sunday dress to join her neighbours, but she is glad when the day of celebration is over; when the Minster bells have finished their jubilant peal, the brass bands have played their last chorus and the tattered scraps of paper flags and trampled posies have been swept from the pavements. She is glad that she no longer has to sustain the smile that has made her cheeks ache as she watches the children in their fancy dress parade and doing egg and spoon races.

Almost a year. Longer since she lost him. She cannot comprehend it. She still hears his voice, still feels his presence in the house. Beside his photograph on the mantelpiece the clock they were given as a wedding present has stopped. She feels that she has too. The life they planned has been cancelled and she doesn’t know how to fill the days, the years, that stretch ahead of her.

I know it’s not how we thought it would be, he whispers to her during sleepless nights in the bed they shared, but it can still be all right. You were a girl with dreams; that was one of the reasons I fell in love with you. There was so much you wanted to do…

But she has no interest in that now. The future is not hers to pluck anymore. It has lost its rosy bloom and is spoiled, like fruit fallen into wet grass. She recoils from it. She trudges determinedly through the present, propelled by routine: her shifts at one of the city’s big chocolate factories, and domestic chores for which she feels no enthusiasm in a house no one else sees, but throughout it all her thoughts are pulled back to the past.

Our wedding day… remember? A blue-sky, birdsong day in May, the scent of lilac from the bouquet I’d cut from the tree in your mother’s garden. You in a borrowed suit and me in a dress I made on Sunday afternoons on Auntie Ivy’s Singer. Hardly daring to look at you in the church as we sang Love Divine All Loves Excelling, holding your hand tightly as we came out into the sunshine in a shower of rice. Holding everything I ever wanted…

They had such plans. Places they were going to visit, the book he was going to write, the family they were going to have. The little house that once represented all her hopes and happiness mocks her with its emptiness now. The door of the little bedroom that might have held a crib remains closed, his typewriter waits for words he will never write, stories that will never be told.

And so she goes out. She revisits the scenes of her memories, sliding into a pew at the back of the church, seeing herself as a bride turning her face to her husband as he promises to love and cherish her until death does them part. She doesn’t know whether she is watching the ghost of herself, or if she is the ghost, haunting the places where she left her heart.

His things were returned to her after his death, sealed in the tin in which she’d sent a fruit cake: her photograph and the letters she’d written; his razor (though she had no use for it – surely it would have been better given to another soldier?); a dog-eared pack of grimy playing cards and a box of matches. She cannot bear to look at them, but she sleeps with his last letter under her pillow and keeps the box of chocolates he sent with it in her drawer. The box is empty now, the chocolate long gone, but the perfumed echo of its sweetness lingers.

She goes to the Electric Cinema on Fossgate, choosing the seats where they sat together the evening before war was declared, when they still believed they had a future. She has bought a quarter of rose creams, her favourites from the factory, which he used to buy for her on birthdays and anniversaries. She lets one melt on her tongue as the screen flickers in front of her and a memory of the newsreel they had shown that night – men in khaki lining up for drill – imposes itself on the Mary Pickford comedy she isn’t taking in. In the dark cinema, she can smell his shaving soap and feel him beside her.

Charlie Chaplin, he murmurs. That’s what we saw – The Property Man. Did we? she replies (the woman in the row in front looks round), I don’t remember. The newsreel had worried you, he says. You turned to me and said it couldn’t be that serious, could it? Troops mobilising? I said they were reservists, that they’d sort it out sharpish when they got over there. Shows how much I knew.

No one knew. No one could have imagined.

 *

Albert imagined it.

He saw them line up outside recruitment offices and crowd into the station to be waved off by weeping loved ones. He was unfit for service; too old at forty-one, even if his lungs hadn’t been weakened by bronchitis and the dust that swirled like celestial confetti in the stonemasons’ workshop. He couldn’t go with the young men who had laid down their chisels and hammers in August 1914, but he read the newspaper reports and watched the newsreels and he imagined it all.

He owed them that much.

Later he saw the wounded return and carved the names of some of those who had stood on the station platform onto headstones; the few who were lucky enough to make it home to be laid to rest in Yorkshire soil. He didn’t have to imagine the pain of those who mourned them. He was well acquainted with that, having chiselled the names of his wife and baby son into a slab of good Yorkstone ten years earlier.

He saw the telegram lad knock at the door of the young woman opposite; the woman he had seen with her husband often enough, holding hands as they left the house together, tucked under the same umbrella, adjusting a glove, buttoning a coat, smiling up from beneath a hat trimmed with cornflowers in summer, velvet roses in winter. He sees her leave the house alone now, often in the evenings, her expression closed as she shuts the front door behind her. He understands the need to escape when the emptiness echoes. He still feels it himself, but at least he has his other work to occupy him; his nocturnal business of carving, chiselling, shaping, smoothing in accordance with the city’s ancient tradition, its secret craft.

One Sunday afternoon in late summer Albert sees her in the museum gardens, sitting alone on a bench, gloved hands folded neatly in her lap. A casual passer-by might not notice the expressions flitting across her face or the way her lips move, as if in conversation. He sees her close her eyes and lift her fingertips to her mouth in a gesture he cannot interpret.

*

It was a hot day, he says softly. The height of summer – the children were on holiday from school and they ran about, circling and squealing like swifts. We watched them… We bought a peach from the market, she joins in. The juice ran down my chin…I wiped it with my handkerchief, he whispers, and the smile in his voice makes her smile too. You kissed me! In public! With the children and the mothers and nursemaids all around… I couldn’t not, he says, and I can’t be sorry. I wish I could kiss you again.

*

The long summer subsides into September. At the factory the talk is of a new café that has opened in Harrogate. One of the girls, Ellen, was taken there by her beau. ‘You’ve never seen the like,’ she says, her eyes wide with wonder. ‘Marble counters and glass and mirrors, more like Paris than Yorkshire. The tea comes in silver pots and the cakes!’ Someone cynically asks how Ellen would know what Paris looks like, but the others are too captivated by her description of delicate continental confections; cream puffs and crisp layered pastries, meringues and melting macarons and glossy fruit tarts too pretty to eat; tea poured from a silver teapot into china cups. When she says the name of this paradise, Elizabeth winces. Bettys. His special name for her.

*

On the last day of his last leave he took her to a tea shop in York; a low, crooked building crouching in the shadow of one of the city’s ancient gates. It was a day of relentless rain and the windows were fogged with condensation, the small space cluttered with dripping umbrellas and bulky overcoats, many of them khaki. The imminence of their parting lay across the table between them, more oppressive than the weather. The iced bun he’d bought her was stale and stuck in her throat, the tea poured at the counter was stewed and tepid.

I’m sorry, he whispered, taking her hands. You deserve better than this. When this is all over I’ll take you to Paris, to an elegant café with tables outside and waiters in starched aprons, and a glass case on the counter displaying cakes you can only imagine. She nodded, devouring the dream. Yes. Tell me about Paris…

In spite of the inferior buns she finds herself returning to the same tea shop that autumn, sitting in the same table in the window, peering out at the street through the steam. When she leaves she retraces the steps they took that day, huddled together under the umbrella. She pauses at the window of the little shop selling antiques and curiosities, where they’d stopped so she could borrow his handkerchief to dab away the treacherous tears that wouldn’t wait until after he’d left.

Do you remember the little silver ghost we saw? she asks him. It was in the corner of the window, watching us from amongst the snuff boxes and brooches and sets of teaspoons. You told me about an ancient society of craftsmen within the city who made ghosts to bring good fortune and fortitude to those in need… She feels his fingertips brush her cheek. I would have bought it for you if I could, he says sadly. The ghosts of the Sorrowful Guild are rare and I assumed we couldn’t afford it, but I should have gone in and asked, at least. I would have liked to leave you with something… You left me with the story, she whispers, her breath clouding the glass. I loved your stories and I liked thinking of it. Those skilled craftsmen and women making spirits from different materials, infusing each one with goodwill and kindness, the presence of someone departed… It comforted me.

Some time after the telegram came she went back to the shop, resolved that whatever the price the little silver ghost would be hers. But, just like her husband, the ghost was gone.

*

The girls at work are arranging an excursion to Harrogate, to visit the elegant café that everyone is talking about. They will travel by train and have lunch there. Shift after shift the conversation circles between what they might choose from the menu and what they will wear, which cakes they will select to bring home in a white box tied with ribbon. ‘Are you coming Lizzy?’ Ellen asks, ‘You should. It’ll do you good to get out, have some fun.’  She shakes her head wistfully. She is managing to function and that’s enough. Fun? It feels like too much of a stretch.

*

You should go, he says that night, curled around her in bed. Ellen’s right, it will do you good. We didn’t get to Paris, but Harrogate would be something. Imagine… an elegant café in the continental style; that has to be better than stale buns and stewed tea by Bootham Bar. There’s a whole world out there, Betty… A future. A life to be lived…

 I don’t want to live it without you, she says, and tears slide into her hair.

*

On Friday afternoons she walks along the river, taking the route they used to walk together after he finished work at the North Eastern Railway Company offices. Sometimes she passes the solitary gentleman who lives opposite – a stonemason, she has heard, whose wife and baby son died before she moved into the street. He tips his dusty hat at her and gives her a smile in which she reads sorrowful understanding.  One day in late October, when the leaves are lying in russet drifts on the ground and willows trail skeletal fingers in the water she sees him get up from the bench on which she often sits, and she feels a pang of disappointment as he walks away. She instinctively feels he – more than the chattering girls at the chocolate factory, more than her no-nonsense mother, her busy sister with her brood of children – might be a kindred spirit.

When she reaches the bench she sees that he has left something. A box of matches. It must have fallen from his pocket, she thinks. It is the same brand as the one in the cake tin sent back from France. After a moment’s hesitation she picks it up, thinking to return it to him, but when she shakes it, it does not rattle. Empty, perhaps, and not worth returning? She slides it open.

Not empty.

She blinks. Tucked inside the box is a little ghost, like the one they saw together in the antique shop. This one is not silver, but carved from stone. When she takes it out and holds it in her hand it feels surprisingly warm. Comforting.

*

She is breathless when she arrives at the station, hurrying because she took too long getting ready, discovering that the lavender dress he always liked her in needed pressing and she couldn’t find the embroidered bag that matches her best grey gloves. Ellen lets out a cry of delight when she sees her. ‘You changed your mind! Just in time. Don’t you look a picture? A proper Parisian lady!’ The train thunders into the station in a hiss of steam and for the first time she is too busy admiring Ellen’s shoes, the glass cherries Annie has stitched onto a new ribbon on her hat, to think about that other day, and the train that had carried him away.

Her embroidered bag holds the matchbox in which the little ghost lies.

She knows it doesn’t make sense, but she feels she has a piece of him back. She has no grave to visit, no name on a headstone to trace with her fingers, but he is with her. Good fortune and fortitude. Kindness and comfort. The craftsmanship of a stranger’s hand, the tradition passed down through countless years, the knowledge of those who have gone before, who have all lived out their brief earthly spell and vanished from view, but who leave an indelible echo of themselves. It seems both unfathomable and reassuringly ordinary.

Bettys is everything they imagined it would be. More. Ellen was right, it is like nothing they have seen before. The window display is as sumptuous as a show at the Theatre Royal; intricately iced cakes and spun sugar fancies are artfully arranged amongst potted palms and silk-lined boxes of exquisite chocolates, richly coloured like the jewels of some exotic empress. Inside, her heels click on the polished marble floor as they pass a counter on which confectionary in delicately painted boxes is displayed, and glass cabinets where iced cakes in sugared almond colours are lined up on doilies. The air carries the same scent as the inside of the French chocolate box.

A string quartet is playing in the first floor café, where long mirrors reflect pale grey walls with pink panels, ornate cornices, the gleam of silver cake stands and the starched white caps of the waitresses who weave between the tables. It is at once thrillingly new and wonderfully opulent, but welcoming. A feminine space, she realises, settling a damask napkin on her knee and taking the menu Annie holds out to her. For the first time in forever the sharp edge of her sorrow feels softer, like something she can live with. She feels herself relax in the company of her friends, and the fog of grief lifts enough to give her a glimpse of a future that contains possibility. A different one than she planned, but one in which she can imagine being happy.

*

The short winter day has faded into evening as they get off the train in York. The women hug, juggling boxes, careful not to crush their precious purchases. She is tired as she turns into her street, her feet aching in her pretty, pearl-grey wedding shoes. She is glad to have given them an outing, grateful to have been somewhere worthy of wearing them. Before she opens her own gate she crosses the road and goes up the path to the stonemason’s house to leave one of the ribboned boxes on his doorstep.

She hears him open the door as she reaches her house. She turns and looks back. He is standing in the light of the room behind him with the box in his hand. He lifts it up in silent salute and smiles his thanks. The smile she sends back is genuine, and joyful. Their eyes hold for a moment before she turns away and closes the door, looking down at the box she bought for herself. A painted box of Swiss liqueur chocolates, finer than anything they produce at the factory. A box of indulgence and sensory delight. A reminder that she is alive to see and hear and touch and taste and experience moments of pleasure. A celebration of that.

*

You were right, she murmurs sleepily as she gets into bed, but tonight she has no sense of him beside her. Instead, the little ghost keeps watch from the nightstand, its dark eyes wide with the wisdom of the ages; centuries and more of lives lived and relinquished, but never truly lost. As she turns down the lamp and the darkness folds around her she thinks of the kind stonemason, her neighbours in the quiet street and all the streets beyond in the slumbering city, and feels glad that tomorrow she gets to wake up and go through another ordinary, extraordinary day in the peaceful world he and all those millions of men like him have gifted her. She gets to write her own story, and unfurl it into a future that still contains hope and pleasure and beauty, exactly as he said.