Megs came and took me by the elbow, her dark eyes and pointed features much like my own; she was the exact same height as me. Colleen had been the tall one. Megs and I walked through London in the summer fog, from the East End to Waterloo Bridge. ‘Walking’s the thing for grief,’ Megs said.
These were my mother’s words. ‘Walking’s the thing for grief,’ she had told us. And Colleen had looked up from her book and said, ‘Solvitur ambulando.’ At Mum’s blank expression Colleen translated the Latin: ‘It is solved by walking.’ And Mum laughed and said, ‘My clever girl.’
Now, faced with the worst grief of her life, our mother didn’t walk. She was unable to move. Louisa, too, had taken to her bed and refused to leave. Colleen’s death could not be solved by anything.
But Megs and I walked just the same. ‘Da won’t let us have a funeral,’ she told me.
‘Why ever not?’
By the time we reached the bridge, I knew the story. Colleen had been pregnant. The fellow had gone off to war and never answered her letters.
‘Who was he?’ All I could think of was the boys she’d turned away, without ever seeming remotely tempted.
‘He told her he was a philosophy student,’ Megs said. ‘She met him at the library. Perhaps he was a cad or perhaps he was killed in the war. Either way, when Da found out about the baby, he turned Colleen out of the house.’ Her face was pale, dark eyes lustreless. Hating to tell me there was something we could do – we girls – that would rob us of our father’s love. I’m not sure I ever saw my father smile again after Colleen died, but it may be that I just stopped looking at him. When he hardened himself against one daughter he hardened the rest of us against him. His wife, too.
Under a dull sun on Waterloo Bridge I stood arm in arm with the one older sister I had left. ‘ “It was only love,” ’ Megs told me. ‘That’s what Colleen said. Da said it was a sin and a disgrace. She said, “No, Da. It was only love.” ’
‘How could he?’ I never thought, How could Colleen? I knew about love by now. It was easy to imagine taking the same path as Colleen. But my father’s? I closed my eyes and tried to picture the young man clever enough to enchant my smart and beautiful sister, then callous enough to abandon her. He must have been killed, I decided.
Megs kept her anger focused on our father. ‘I suppose he figured he had one to spare.’ Her voice sounded empty and resigned. How many of us would Da go through before there wasn’t one to spare?
Megs and I let go each of other and leaned forward, staring down into the water. Colleen had walked here, taking the South Bank route, I knew that’s how she would go, and still nothing had been solved. Megs and I had walked the same way and still our sister was gone forever. As I look back now, with my view from the future, I see two young, brown-haired girls, small in the scope of things, and all around them machines of war, galvanizing themselves from every corner of the globe to encroach upon their world. But in that moment Megs and I didn’t see it. Never in living memory had a war touched English soil and it still seemed impossible, the way it wouldn’t years later, when the second one came along.
All I had at the time was the view from behind my own eyes. A foggy summer day in the city. Megs and I, exhausted from our walk, and from our loss, leaned against each other. I wished I could cry but my insides were leaden with the same flat, hollow ring of Megs’s voice. If I’d had flowers, I would have tossed them, to flutter down into the water, the same spot where Colleen had flung herself into the Thames.
Years later I would see a film, Brigadoon, and it would remind me how I held Ballycotton in my head during the war: protected, perfect, untouchable. Safe from the ravages of time and progress. Hiding in the clouds, waiting for my return.
In London the world was empty of its young men. My mother finally got out of bed and took me to have my portrait made. I was surprised when she walked into the kitchen, dressed for the day.