We Shall Not Sleep_ A Novel - Anne Perry [138]
Thyer nodded. “Would you like anything to eat first, or even to drink? You look as if you have been up all night.”
“Yes, I daresay I do,” Joseph agreed with a smile. “But I haven’t time. Perhaps after.”
“I’ll get the keys and tell Connie. She’ll be glad to hear that you at least are all right.”
Thyer returned a few moments later, accompanied by his wife. As always, Connie was delighted to see Joseph, but she understood that it could be no more than hello and goodbye. She had made a quick sandwich for him and offered it to him now, wrapped in a piece of paper.
“Only bread and what I would like to call pâté, but it’s really meat paste,” she apologized.
He thanked her and suddenly realized he was ravenously hungry.
She watched him, smiling, and handed him a glass of lemonade, knowing that anything hot to drink would take possibly more time than he was willing to afford.
Standing just inside the Master’s House, looking at Connie, gave Joseph a startling sense of timelessness. She was still beautiful in her own warm, generous way. And there was still the restlessness in her eyes, although the edge of it had softened, and she looked toward Thyer more often than he remembered her doing before.
It was as if only months had passed since he had stood here in the summer of 1914, speaking of war and peace with such innocence. No one had imagined that the world could change so much in so short a time. The past they had known was gone forever. He knew that here in its fullness for the first time. In this quiet hallway looking into the quad where nothing changed, he realized the enormity of the change in everything else.
“Joseph?” Thyer asked. “Are you ready?”
“Yes…thank you.” Joseph gave the empty glass back to Connie and bid her goodbye. He followed Thyer across the first quad and then the second into the street to where the car was parked.
The drive to St. Giles was swift. Not once did Thyer ask him what the purpose was of his sudden and urgent journey; nor did they talk of those they knew who were dead. Instead he discussed politics, in particular the character of Lloyd George, and the new ideas of widening the political franchise to include all men, property owners or not, and even many women.
“Times are changing at an extraordinary pace,” he said with a slight frown. “I hope we can keep up with them without too many casualties. The men coming home aren’t going to recognize the land they left behind, and may possibly not like it entirely. Women have all kinds of jobs, and we need them to keep doing them. We can’t now send them back to the kitchen.” He shook his head slightly. “A great number of them will not marry because there is no one for them to have. They have no choice but to earn their own way. We cannot make that impossible for them.”
Joseph did not reply.
“And very few places for servants. We’ve learned to do without them,” Thyer went on. “Jack’s as good as his master. We discovered that in the trenches. There are an awful lot of ‘Jacks’ to whom we owe our lives. I daresay you know that better than I do.”
Joseph smiled and agreed. They were racing through the November countryside at a far higher speed than Joseph would have expected from the master. He had always thought of him as a trifle staid, a scholar with little action in him. Perhaps he had been wrong.
They passed the quiet fields of the farm where Charlie and Barshey Gee had grown up, then that of Snowy and Tucky Nunn. The blacksmith’s forge was open, Plugger Arnold’s father bent over the anvil. It was all desperately familiar, and Joseph would have given all he possessed if the men he had known and loved could have come home again with him.
The street was quiet. There were half a dozen women in it, coats closed tight against the wind. The green was deserted, the duck pond flat and bright in the momentary sun.
They pulled up outside the house where Joseph had grown up, from which John and Alys Reavley had left that morning the world had changed, when Gavrilo Princip had fired a shot in Sarajevo