«letters to the somme»

nothing.

Rose cannot hear or see a thing.

Everything is hidden, light, flowers, happiness. All she sees are ashes and dust and darkness, shrouding a grotesque half-decayed shell of her former lover.

She sits cutting bandages. Sister Hardy’s words to her, so many months ago, have all but disappeared from her mind. Clara sits across from her, sorting pins quietly. Every so often, she looks up to see Rose’s dead eyes on her pale, shadowed skin. Her hands move on their own, delicate instruments wound into action.
Snip. The scissors she is holding could follow a metronome. Snip. Her life is fading away. Snip. Snip. Snip. Snip. Snip.
Rose breaks through her skin on the eighth cut. Dark red blood wells up on her finger, and she raises it to her lips to suck it dry.
“Have my handkerchief, Rosie.” Clara offers a white square of cotton to her. Rose stares at her.
“I wouldn’t want to mess it up.” She replies, tying her own onto the finger. And then Rose resumes her cutting. Snip. Snip. Snip.

Clara knows what she’s implying. Luke’s legs have been sawn off. James is missing and likely dead, or worse. And Jack is unscathed and writing letters to her every week. He suffers from only one disease; guilt. His best friends are broken beyond repair, and he has not suffered so much as a rat bite.

He was never a broody boy, was Jack. Luke is an optimistic, quiet lad, and James was shy and serious, but Jack is wild and unpredictable. They met in Newham. Clara was escaping her angry mother and ran straight into a pub. Jack, attractive with wavy black hair and impish blue eyes, was with a friend at a table. His friend knew the barman, and so Jack convinced him to let her hide behind the bar for a bit.

Jack has changed since then. Since his last leave, Clara remembers the long black waves she loved so much being shorn to a tidy crop, and his eyes being closer to grey. But he is whole and alive, and she cannot thank the Lord enough for that.  She can’t even imagine never seeing Jack again.

But enough about herself, she thinks, watching her friend.
If James is dead, so is Rose.

They visit Mary and Luke at lunch-time. Clara broaches the subject carefully. Luke is the only person that can rationalise with Rose, as they have proved over the last few weeks.
“Hello, Clara. Rose! Darling, how are you?” Mary pulls Rose into an embrace, but Rose’s face still remains cold and indifferent.
“What do you think?”
Luke hobbles up on his crutches. He has attached crude slings made up with his old shoes to his crippled legs. They do not give him the skill to walk, but he can move about and stand tall as a man. Something in Rose’s eyes change as she greets him. He knew – he knows James best after Rose. And he knows what James went – is going through at the front.

Clara and Mary sit in the kitchen as Rose helps Luke complete a round of the front garden. He is aiming to get faster to keep up with his players. His job at Chelsea does not pay a great deal, but he enjoys it and his team is winning.
“We all miss him, you know.” He sighs, sitting down on the grass.
Rose is about to scorn him when she sees the dark shadows under his eyes.
“I know that. But I know he’s not dead, Luke, he can’t be, only everyone seems to be telling me that he is and that it’s impossible that he’s still alive.” She bites back her tears. She has cried enough.
“Rose…” Luke sighs. “Men went missing when I was at the front. And while some came back…”
“See?” Her defiant, childish behaviour rises from her depressive state, the first time she has broken through her denial since the telegram.
“Some didn’t. I love James, and if he should come back it would be the best thing in the world. But if he…if he truly is dead – ”
At this Rose clasps her hands over her ears and closes her eyes.
“…then there’s nothing we can do about it.”