Cain walked down the silent corridor to a room he’d looked into earlier that day — the one with the locked glass cabinets lining the walls — the cabinets that had bottles and vials and ampoules inside. He looked for one with skull and crossbones on the label. He was set to break the glass and take something from inside which he could ingest to end the overwhelming agony of loss he was feeling in that moment — to remove himself to either a state of absolute nothingness or to some beautiful Afterworld where he might get lucky and find Pat among the angels.
But in that next moment he recalled from his chemistry class at the college that there were few medicines in modern times — even those Victorian holdovers, the mercury and arsenic compounds — that healed and killed with equal efficacy, few chemical substances to be found in a hospital medicine cabinet that could be depended upon to induce an instantaneous and relatively painless death.
Which is why Cain Pardlow withdrew from the hospital’s medicine supply room without breaking a single pane of glass — why, still unseen by anyone in his quest for infinite peace, he found himself in an unoccupied room, its window left temptingly half open. He smiled over how perfectly condign it seemed for him to take himself out of the world he now abhorred in the very same manner in which he’d been robbed of the only person he’d ever truly loved.
And with that smile still pasted upon his lips, and with no thought of Ruth and the plans they had been making together, Cain Pardlow threw himself from the window. He died a convenient eight seconds later from a severely fractured skull.
Chapter Nineteen
London, England, October 1940
Three days later Carrie’s mother died. Carrie was with her. And Jane had been with Carrie.
The two had grown very close during Sylvia Hale’s final hours and in the wake of the senseless deaths of Pat and Cain. The week past had been a particularly hard one for residents of the nearby London neighbourhoods that were being bombed night after night, filling the beds of the venerable St. Bartholomew’s Hospital with the injured until there wasn’t a single mattress left unoccupied. (This in spite of a good many of the victims having been removed to hospitals elsewhere in the city, and even outside of the city altogether, any place that offered some modicum of safety in a land in which no one — not even the already severely injured — was really all that safe.)
During their leave of absence from the factory, Carrie and Jane were conscripted by the Sisters of St. Bart’s to help tend to the Blitz’s most recent casualties. The two had worked very hard. Their assistance to the many men, women, and children who, like Carrie, had lost both their homes and close family members to the air raids kept Carrie from thinking too obsessively about her own trials, and prevented Jane from reliving in her every waking moment what Tom Katz had done to her.
During their few hours of rest, the two had lain in Jane’s bed, even when air raid sirens ordered them to retreat to the hollowed-out Higgins backyard Anderson shelter. As exhausted as they were, there were still times — a good many times — when the jarring, concussive sound of the bombs falling nearby and the AA guns noisily acking the night sky kept sleep beyond reach. During nights like these they whiled the time away by sharing whispered reminiscences of the happiest and funniest moments of their closely linked childhoods.
Tonight played out much as had the several nights preceding it. The only difference was that earlier in the day there had been a funeral. Carrie had watched her mother’s coffin being lowered into the ground, and had wept upon the shoulders of her friends Jane and Maggie and Ruth.
Molly, as it turned out, was in Worcester, doggedly determined in the face of wartime travel obstacles to attend the funeral of her beloved Pat Harrison — even though the journey took twice as long as expected, even though she was booted from one particular train when all the civilian passengers were forced to give up their seats to soldiers in transit, even though she spent one long leg of her journey with a screaming, soiled child having been thrust into her lap, even though she was hungry and thirsty and very nearly knocked unconscious when the train came to a sudden halt and someone’s hat box fell down on her head, and even though her trip required at journey’s end a frank conversation with Pat’s father about how he’d died. It was the most difficult conversation she’d ever had, but Mr. Harrison had shown her only kindness in spite of his overwhelming grief. He had even placed her in Pat’s old room, where she cried herself to sleep for each of the two nights of her visit, a pair of her dead lover’s boyhood pyjama trousers swaddling one side of her face.
The Prowses had also gone to Sylvia Hale’s funeral. As had factory forewoman Vivien Colthurst and one of the other assembly workers, Miss Dowell.
“Don’t you come back to work, love, until you feel up to it,” Miss Colthurst had said to Carrie, smiling sympathetically.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” Carrie adamantly responded. Jane, who was standing next to her, said that she also intended to come into work the next day.
That night Carrie and Jane drifted off early only to be awakened by the wail of the air raid siren. “I refuse to move from this bed,” Carrie dissented wearily.
“I’ll keep you company,” said Jane.
A moment later Lyle stumbled into the bedroom and sought to know, in a harried tone, why the two of them were just lying there and not getting their “blooming arses out to the Andy.”
“Because, little brother,” Jane calmly replied, “we’re waiting for the bomb that has both of our names stamped on it — the one that’ll deliver us from this blooming vale of blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”
“You go right ahead and bodge up Mr. Churchill’s words like that. He can’t hear you. But still it ain’t very patriotic.”
Jane chortled. “Since when have you got yourself all Hope-and-Glory patriotic, little brother?”
“Since I went down to enlist yesterday.”
Jane sat up in bed, nonplussed. “You didn’t!”
“I did.”
“And they took you? Even though the first time you get shot you’ll be bleeding Guinness all over the battlefield?”
“Have your bit of a laugh. They took me this time. By the way, that Peter Pan git what tried to fly himself out of that St. Bart’s window — the recruitment officer was asking if I knew him, since I must have said something about knowing every bloke what ever set a toe in the Fatted Pig. He hadn’t heard what happened to him and didn’t know why he never came back in to finish filling out his enlistment papers.”
Now it was Carrie who registered surprise on behalf of both herself and her bed companion. “Cain Pardlow had decided to enlist?”
Lyle nodded. “Even the most cowardly of conchies can sometimes come to see the light.”
“Did you know this, Jane?”
Jane nodded. “Ruth told me. The two of them had made a pact. He was going into the army and she was joining the A.T.S.”
“Now that Cain’s gone, is that what she still wants to do — leave the factory and go into the Auxiliary?”
Jane shrugged with her neck. “I don’t think she’s decided.” Jane became ruminative. “I didn’t know Ruth was so fond of Cain.”
“Oi! Ladies! It seems to me—if I may interrupt — that if we’re all going to be buried under a pile of bricks by the bleeding Luftwaffe tonight, I should at least have the pleasure of a last supper.”
Jane sighed. “Do you fancy a meal, brother? Are you saying you want me to get up and make you something?”