Chapter 4

Matthew made it to the work crew on Monday and ate the bread and cheese as soon as it was handed out. He saw Peter Mills looking at him. No one came to speak to him, though. He looped by the cemetery as he walked back to his room.

The work crew became more unpleasant as the summer warmed with long days and dirty tasks, but the food kept up. He tried a few greens from fields in his beans, using onion from the food queue, sometimes making a few dishes that tasted like something. He had sleepless nights but the daytime blanks mostly stopped. He walked by and into the graveyard on a nearly daily basis.

Walking by the train station on a hot evening he saw Mary and the children waiting on the street-side. The boys were both quite tall, George looking about and Rob facing the train as it pulled away. He thought Violet might have looked at him as he stepped into a shadow but supposed she was the least likely of the four to recognize him. She was thin and her hair was long and he wasn't sure he'd have known her if she hadn't stood so near her mother. They all stepped quickly into a car driven by someone he couldn't see and disappeared.

Walking again, he wondered for the first time if they'd seen him around the village. He didn't much notice his surroundings, he realized. When the car pulled to a stop at a shop on the main street as he walked through an alley across the way he almost smiled at the irony. Mary got out and went into and out of the shop in just a few moments. She turned along the walk and spoke to someone he couldn't see at first. A German officer walked up and opened the car door for her. He glanced up and down the street without moving his head and placed his hand on the small of Mary's back as she stepped into the car. The man, a colonel he could see now, smiled as he spoke to her. Mary moved easily and looked in his eyes as she sat back into the car.

Matthew sat for a time on the steps when he returned to his room. The hand on the small of Mary's back popped into his view but left him oddly quiet. He wished he were angry at her betrayal, or noble, glad someone was protecting her, but really he was just empty.

His dreams, though, remained full. Mary receded but the children came into them often, especially upsettingly. Izzy was often there, sometimes his parents. He stopped wondering why he was back; there was no why to anything except why he stayed alive. A stubbornness he supposed, his quality his mother had most disliked. Mary had rather liked it for a while.

His memory opened slowly to him. Sometimes they were all together, especially in the spring before the mobilization in '35. Mixed up in the remembering, he wondered what would have happened if he hadn't picked that time to become political, to oppose the looming build up to war. Of course, he'd imagined himself too important when he'd been drafted in, silencing him. And imagined himself too honorable to refuse his duty or even bring up his old injury, or the dreams of the first war that had still gripped him on the odd night.

Once he was in the army again he'd remembered he was just a cog like all the rest as they ground down to the inevitable invasion of the resurgent German homeland. He thought now he'd been more of a coward than anything else when he had reported for duty as summer began. What he should have done, though, he couldn't now discern though he wanted to, tried to when he had the energy.

He chose to remember the picnics of that spring, seeing George and Isobel returning from school, Mary free and confident with baby Violet in a way she hadn't been with the others. They'd made their own small home at Crawley House when their family had grown larger, making over guest rooms for two more children's rooms when they left the nursery. It had been Mary's great concession to him, he knew, and he remained grateful because it gave him the memories of everyone stuffed in the sitting room listening to the wireless, the children reciting poems in practice for school, the overcrowded table in the mornings before he headed off to Ripon. He felt his fullest self then.

For all that, he hadn't been surprised that Mary had brought the children to the Abbey while he was away during that version of the BEF. At first it had looked like a long haul with no predicting his return. Her family and the staff helped with the children, especially after his mother died. Their family became a part of the larger, and he believed Mary felt more solid with her home as it had always been.

The disasters in the Netherlands and the speedy collapse in Poland had led to their own uncertainties. Then he'd been so sick when he'd returned and useless to her in the weeks it took him to come back to himself that there was no question, really, of them returning to their old life. The notoriety of his unexpected resistance to the armistice had lingered even though he'd returned at the very tail end of the repatriations. He presented an oddly problematic figure, at once with a shade of heroism and yet quite inconvenient. More immediately, he hadn't been sure about returning to work as he felt raw and vulnerable in the renewed nightmares that found him as his physical health recovered. Downton had offered them refuge and he had found it a relief to follow Mary into old patterns as they had looked for a normal way amidst the new world.

As he remembered he realized he was feeling a little more real in his shabby room and life on the work crew. He felt good after showering and content when he received a small tin of cooking oil at the July food queue. The summer settled in and he found he sometimes slept most of the way through night when he could put off sleep long enough.

He remembered that September night in '39 when he'd told Mary he was going back. She hadn't believed him. He had wondered if she was right, that it was his drug, war. His words for the ditches filled with bodies of villagers had been just words. Perhaps she'd been right. He'd never been able to describe the moment he'd realized that in all the war he'd been through he had now seen evil that must be faced. Standing outside the house with its solid walls matching her connection to the place, he knew he'd never be able to explain why he would leave in a hopeless cause.

Even now, it was a choice he did not regret. He grieved his betrayal of her hopes, not seeing his children, not being there to stop Isobel from going into Ripon. He felt deep sorrow for leaving in '35 and not fighting on in '37. He felt a hole every time he should have felt her hand on his arm. It was, had been, all quite useless. But trying again to face the evil after he'd heard Germany had invaded France in '39 he kept as a single point of reference.

He walked on an August evening to the churchyard. The shadows held a cool comfort. He leaned along a sunken wall near the lines of family headstones and felt his body go slack, almost into sleep. He roused with a little lurch and stood up suddenly, turning to the gate and into Mary's gaze.

"Matthew," she said without other reaction. "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to see you here."

"I am sorry," he said, "I didn't see you. I will go."

"No, don't apologize. And you needn't go just yet."

"I suppose you have some sort of immunity."

"Perhaps, of a sort, if I wanted to claim it. But no, I think that even these rules allow a little space for parents at their child's grave."

"You are more sure than I."

She looked at Isobel's grave and then back to Matthew.

"I saw you two or three times earlier in the summer. You seem …." She looked down, thoughtful, but not upset. "Listen, Matthew, I won't apologize for what I've done, the choices I'd made. I can't say that I would have done the same if I had known you were alive, but to be honest I might have."

"Well," he said, feeling surprise, "that is frank at any rate. Are you sure you know what you are about, though? These people are something else all together. Even more than I realized."

"So you say."

So he would say, she might have said. She had no spite though. She was beautiful, the wrinkles about her eyes, the lines along her mouth.

"I know," he started and then stopped before looking in her eyes for the first time. "I left, you asked me to stay and I left. I think I understand. Now I suppose, well, I would leave now if I could but I haven't any papers. And I haven't any fight left in me." He took a breath. "I need to go. Good night, Mary."

She nodded at him and he walked away in the other direction