Everyone she worked alongside in France had been insatiable letter-writers and resolute diary-keepers, but Gwendolen had felt no urge to chronicle, no desire for an aide-mémoire. Life was for absorbing, not recording. And in the end, it was all just paper that someone would have to dispose of after you were gone. Perhaps, after all, one’s purpose in this world was to be forgotten, not remembered.
“How practical you are, Miss Kelling,” Mr. Pollock said. “How ruthless,” her mother said.
Would ruthlessness have recommended her to Frobisher?, she wondered. Or was he the kind of man who regarded women as delicate flowers to be nurtured and protected. He was a man of sighs, frequent and doleful, like a dissatisfied dog, and yet she was sorry he wouldn’t be accompanying her on Saturday night. I am going to dance on the stage, he had read awkwardly from the scented notepaper, and Gwendolen had had to stifle a laugh.
She made a small detour to inspect the new memorial to the Royal Artillery at Hyde Park Corner, out of curiosity more than any reverence. She disliked memorials. The truth of the battlefield was absent—the mud, the globs of bloody flesh, the scattered bodiless limbs and limbless bodies. The rendering of suffering into cold stone could not convey the horror. In York, Mother had insisted on attending the unveiling, by the Duke of York, of the City Memorial, a project that had been mired in controversy. Like many others, Gwendolen had considered that it would be better to do something for the living of York—a maternity hospital or a park like the one that Rowntree’s had donated to commemorate the men of the Cocoa Works who had died. Their name liveth for ever more was carved into the York memorial. Another lie. Who remembered Dickie now?
No use speaking to her mother about such things. The war itself was of no interest to her, only the aftermath of her bereavement.
There was an attractive neo-Gothic monument to the South African War in Duncombe Place, near the Theatre Royal. Gwendolen passed it often. How far in the past the Boer War seemed—the stuff of dreary history books now—a dried-up beetle on a pin compared to the raw, raging behemoth of Gwendolen’s own war. （She was possessive of it, it had changed everything.） Impossible to believe that one day it, too, would be the forgotten past, remembered only in indifferent stone.
At least, she thought, the new Royal Artillery memorial had the guts to show a dead soldier. For that, if nothing else, she gave it respect. She refused to worship at these shrines to the dead and yet Gwendolen’s heart was moved by the sight of a small posy of withered flowers that had been laid on the memorial. A faded note declared simply For Daddy. What a wicked, wicked world it was that had allowed such a war.
* * *
—
Her destination beckoned, the “Cock o’ the North” finally exorcized from her brain. She paused for a moment on the pavement to appreciate the splendid exterior of Liberty’s new Tudor-style building and then experienced a quiet thrill when she enquired of the doorman, “Ladies’ Fashions?” and was silently directed towards the lift. Was he mute?, she wondered. Not a very handy thing in a doorman. She had known men to have their throats destroyed by gas.
She ignored the lift and sped up the magnificent staircase. The war was vanquished now. Here was all beauty.
* * *
—
Gwendolen was beginning to regret that she had not gone shopping for at least one decent outfit before leaving for London. It wasn’t as if there weren’t any dress shops in York. She was embarrassed by how shabbily provincial she must seem in the eyes of the assistant in Liberty’s who swooped on her like a hawk, sensing prey.
The assistant was only too well acquainted with thieves and knew that they prowled the shop floor in good clothes in order to blend in with the better class of customers who shopped there. Gwendolen sensed her calculating that someone as pitifully dressed as madam must be in possession of a new husband or a sudden windfall, rather than being intent on shoplifting. “Of course,” the assistant concluded, “let me see what I can do for you.” Was madam looking for something in particular?
“Well,” Gwendolen replied, “I think I’m looking for everything.” What a gift she was to commerce!
Where did this new-found wealth come from? you ask. A few days after her mother’s funeral, Gwendolen had visited the family solicitor, a Mr. Jenkinson, whose offices were in Stonegate, opposite the old wireworks—now a wool shop. “Like swords into ploughshares,” she said to Mr. Jenkinson, who welcomed her warmly, offering tea “or a small glass of port?” She declined both.