Emma had helped her put on her uniform after she heard the news. She had dressed her as she would a child. Pru saw that there were still dim lights behind the blackout shades at her home, when she got there after two in the morning. The faint trace of light was coming from her parents’ room. When she opened the front door, which was never locked in the big rambling manor house, she could hear them talking in the back parlor. There was a fire dying in the grate. The house was always drafty, even in the summer. Her mother turned to look at her in the dying light of the embers. Max was sitting with her, and their father was dozing in a chair by the fire, his chin on his chest. Even in the half darkness, they suddenly looked so much older to her. Everyone did now, a whole nation of people who had aged from hunger, heartache, and grief for five years of war. Max stood up, walked toward her, and put his arms around her. He looked just like their father when he was younger, which was comforting in an odd way. There was a sense of continuity to it.
“I was hoping you’d come,” she said softly, her words muffled by his jacket as he held her. “How are they?” she whispered about their parents, but she could see for herself when she went to kiss their mother. She held tightly to Pru’s hand as Pru sat down next to her, and her eyes looked ravaged. But she was as they always were: strong, quiet, determined to prevail no matter what it cost them, brave in the face of sorrow. They were the people she could count on, whatever happened, just as they could count on her. She hugged her mother close, and they both cried for a moment, and then her mother sat up straighter and Max watched them both. They were the two women he most admired. He always thought of them as brave and strong, and now was no different.
“I’ve spoken to Reverend Alsop. We’ll hold a service for Phillip in two days, before you and Max have to leave,” she said quietly. Pru wondered how many more of these services they could endure going to. There were so many. So many boys from the farms had been killed, and from the great houses. All the boys she had grown up with and found so boring before the war. They weren’t boring now. Most of them were gone, had been killed in the last five years in battles with names she would always remember, in Europe, North Africa, in places she had never been to.
Her mother gently woke her father, and they all stood up and walked upstairs together.
“You’ve come home, then,” was all her father said to her. He hadn’t doubted that she would, or that Max would. They had always faced everything together, and they would face this too. Pru kissed her mother when they said good night. The door to her parents’ room closed softly, and Max walked Pru to her own room.
“Will you be all right?” he asked, with eyes filled with loss and sorrow too.
“We always are, aren’t we?” Pru said quietly, and he nodded. “I can’t imagine him not being here when the war is over.” Max nodded agreement, gently stroked her long brown hair, and then walked to his own room to grieve in silence.
After she put her nightgown on and turned out the light, Pru stood looking out over their land in the moonlight. It had always been such a peaceful place, where she felt safe, until the war started. And now nothing was safe, nothing was sacred, nothing was certain, and she never knew who would be gone tomorrow. She longed to come back here, and just be with Max and her parents. But who knew what would happen by then, who else they would lose, how much more sorrow and loss they would have to endure, or how strong they would have to be, how many times. A cloud crossed the moon as she thought of Phillip. In his own room, Max was looking out the window, with silent tears running down his face, thinking how hard it must be to be a woman, always having to be strong and comfort others, and how lonely it was to be a man.
* * *
—
Constance, Pru’s mother, was already in the dining room the next morning when Pru came down to breakfast. The table was set impeccably, as it always had been, although her mother did it now. There were hardly any servants left. The young ones had gone, and only very old ones were left. Their butler had died of pneumonia in the first year of the war. But her mother saw to it that everything looked the same.
“How’s Father?” Pru asked her, wondering why it was always the men they worried about. They seemed to be much more frail in hard times somehow.
“He’s all right.” It had been a terrible shock to both of them, but now they were no different than their neighbors. Everyone in the village and all their friends in London had lost someone. They no longer went there in the war, and preferred to stay in Yorkshire. Constance had the children they were housing to think about. They would keep her busy now, which she viewed as a blessing not a burden. The young women who took care of them had already given them breakfast in the old servants’ dining room that no one used now, and had taken them outside to help with the gardening and then take a walk to the lake that Pru and her brothers had loved as children. Their old governess had always been afraid they would drown, and scolded them when they went there alone, which they did as frequently as possible.