The Foreshadowing Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  PART ONE

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 51

  PART TWO

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 1

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Also by Marcus Sedgwick

  Copyright Page

  For Fiona Kennedy,

  my superb editor

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank the following for their assistance with the research for this book: Helen Pugh and the staff of the Red Cross Museum and Archives Department, the helpful members of staff at the Imperial War Museum, Martin Nimmo and Sue Rubenstein of mybrightonandhove.org, and Elizabeth Garrett, for her invaluable research into Clifton Terrace, and Brighton in general, in 1916.

  I have found many books invaluable for capturing the spirit of the time, including Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth and Chronicle of Youth, Enid Bagnold’s A Diary Without Dates, Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That and Captain Dunn’s The War the Infantry Knew. A Brief Jolly Change, the diaries of Henry Peerless, edited by Edward Fenton, was not only informative, but delightful to me, since it features members of my own family.

  So, believe me, or not,

  What does it matter now?

  Fate works its way,

  And soon you will stand and say,

  my words were true.

  AESCHYLUS, Agamemnon

  PART ONE

  101

  I was five when I first saw the future. Now I am seventeen.

  I can’t remember much about it. Or maybe I should say I couldn’t remember much about it, until now.

  For years all I could recall was laughter, nervous laughter, and later, silence, then later still, anger. I felt ashamed, guilty, hurt when I thought about it, but I had quite forgotten what it was. Or rather, I had made myself forget.

  Memories, half hidden for twelve years, have started to surface, in bits and pieces, until I see a picture of that day long ago, when I was just a little girl.

  We weren’t living in Clifton Terrace then, with my wonderful view of the sea, but I don’t know where we did live. There was a big garden, bigger than the one we have here. I was playing in this garden with another girl about my own age. Edgar and Tom were young then too, and even played with us sometimes when they weren’t trying to fall out of the big cooking-apple tree.

  It was summer, and the girl and I were best friends. Her name was Clare, and she was the daughter of friends of my parents. It was a long and happy afternoon, but eventually it was time for Clare to go home.

  And this is the part I had pushed away and hidden in the depths of my memory for so many years.

  I was standing in the hall, giggling with Clare while grown-up chat buzzed above our heads.

  Then I said something. I said something that stopped the grown-ups talking and started the silence.

  “Why does Clare have to die?” I asked.

  Because no one said anything, I thought they hadn’t heard me, so I tried again.

  “I don’t want Clare to die tomorrow.”

  Then they did start talking, and I knew they had heard, because Mother was scolding me, and Clare started crying and her mother took her away.

  I was wrong. Clare didn’t die next day. But I was only five, and, I suppose, didn’t understand that tomorrow meant something more specific than soon.

  Soon, however, I was right. Clare died of tuberculosis. It came quickly and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. I can remember very clearly now wishing I could have helped her. Stopped her dying.

  Then the silence started.

  Not long after, we moved house, here to Clifton Terrace, and gradually I forgot all about that day when I was five.

  Until now.

  100

  I have seen the future again, and it is death. I can no longer pretend it is my imagination.

  I wasn’t sure. That I had dreamt about something that came to be might just have been a coincidence. It was a month ago that I dreamt George had been killed. The morning after my dream Father was reading the Times at breakfast.

  “George Yates,” he said, without looking up. “That’s Edgar’s friend, isn’t it?”

  Mother nodded.

  Father read from the paper, still without looking up.

  “ ‘Captain George Yates died of wounds, Vermelles, September 26, 1915.’ ”

  I was too shocked to know what to think.

  “Poor George,” said Tom.

  “Poor Edgar,” Mother said, thinking of her other son. Her elder son, away somewhere in France.

  Clumsily she began stacking the plates from breakfast. Tom, my other brother, rose to help her.

  “Edgar is fine,” Father said. “He’s a strong young man.”

  Now he looked up from his paper for the first time, to fix his eyes on Tom.

  “And where’s that blasted girl?” he went on, meaning Molly, our maid. “Don’t we pay her enough to do that?”

  Tom ignored him and carried the plates out to the kitchen.

  “No harm will co
me to the strong,” Father said. “The brave.”

  He started to read the casualty lists again. I don’t know why he has to do it. He spends all day with the sick and the dying in the hospital.

  “Where is Molly?” Father snapped.

  “Cook’s away and Molly’s busy,” said Mother.

  “Alexandra,” Father sighed. “Help your brother.”

  I jumped up and tried to lend a hand, but I could only think about George. He had been at the front; he had been killed. That was not unusual, not anymore. But I had dreamt that it had happened, the night before news of it had reached us.

  Was that possible?

  Over the following days I tried not to dwell on it.

  I continued my studies during the day with Miss Garrett and in the evenings I sat with Mother. She’s always busy organizing her circle of friends, as well as running the house, and Cook, and Molly, who’s sweet, but scatterbrained.

  I tried again to persuade Father to let me help around the wards, but still he refused. He says it’s not fitting for a girl like me, and once his mind is made up, it usually stays that way.

  Although I tried to forget George, I couldn’t. Images of his death came to me; I don’t know where from. One morning I was sitting at my mirror, brushing my hair and thinking how long it was getting, when into my head came a picture of George’s mother reading the telegram that gave her the news. I saw George caught on the wire, the barbed wire of the no-man’s-land between our trenches and the enemy’s. But that may have been my imagination. I don’t know how he died.

  I was frightened, but the days passed and I told myself it was a coincidence. Thousands of men are being killed in France each week, and the fact that I dreamt about the death of one of them could be nothing more than chance. I even wondered whether I might have already heard about George’s death and not taken it in. Maybe it had already been posted in the lists and Father had missed it. It seemed unlikely, but I clung to this explanation until time allowed me to put it to one corner of my mind, if not to forget about it entirely.

  But after what happened yesterday, I can no longer pretend it is my imagination.

  Mother and I were walking down Middle Street. We passed the Hippodrome, where I used to love to go to see the circus when I was little. I dawdled outside, remembering a silly act we’d seen there once featuring Dinky, the high-diving dog. Mother pulled my hand.

  “Come on, Sasha,” she said. Sometimes she still uses my pet name, as though I’m her little Russian princess.

  The sea was in front of us. It’s late October, and there was a grim gray sky above us. Waves were being whipped against the seawall by fierce winds. As so often, the town was full of soldiers; a mass of khaki uniforms.

  We would have walked up to the hospital to see Father, but it looked as if it might start to rain any moment. People scurried past us; a horse and empty cart hurried for home, its driver glancing nervously at the sky.

  “We’ll take the tram,” Mother said, so we turned and cut through to the Old Steine, to the stop outside Marlborough House.

  There was a long queue. Everything was perfectly ordinary as we waited for the tram. When it arrived the ladies jostled a little to be first on, but in a good-tempered way.

  Mother looked at the gathering clouds.

  “Come on,” she said, taking my hand.

  “No,” I said.

  She glanced round at me, surprised.

  “Don’t play games, Alexandra, I’m cold and it’s about to rain.”

  “I’m not,” I said.

  I didn’t know what was wrong.

  I just knew I didn’t want to be on the tram. That I mustn’t be on it.

  A soldier waiting behind us was impatient.

  “Come on, darling,” he said, “get a move on.”

  But I didn’t move.

  I could see Mother was embarrassed. The soldier pushed past, bumping into me as he got onto the tram. He spun round on the step. I stared straight into his eyes.

  “Sorry, gorgeous, can’t hang about,” he said. There was a cheeky smile on his lips, but as he looked at me, the smile lost its life, and died on his face.

  I knew he was going to die. I don’t know what else I can say. I saw it. Not in France, not in the war, but soon. Here.

  “Are you feeling all right?” Mother said, not cross now, thinking I was unwell.

  “I don’t want to go on the tram.”

  “Sasha . . . ,” Mother began, and then stopped. She sighed.

  People pushed onto the tram, but the soldier stood on the step, still looking at me. Mother saw him, and I think it was that, and no other reason, that made her let me have my way. I knew what she thought about “rough” men.

  “We’ll walk,” she said, and the tram moved off.

  As it went, the soldier was still staring at me.

  I watched it go. Mother tugged at my arm, impatiently, but I couldn’t move. It was as though I was rooted to the spot. It all happened very slowly then. But somehow very quickly too. The tram got up to speed and rumbled away toward Grand Parade.

  The rain began to lash down then, very suddenly.

  A wheel lifted from the tracks somehow, on a point, maybe. The tram came off the rails and lay down on one side with a tremendous crash. It hit a wall and there was a shower of sparks and rubble.

  I was aware of noise all around us. The noise of the tram hitting the wall seemed to take the longest time to reach us, and to be the quietest sound. The sound of screaming was the loudest.

  Mother finally dragged me away. Last night, before I went to bed, I asked her why we had left, and she told me that there was nothing we could have done. That lots of people, too many, perhaps, had immediately swarmed around the tram to help others off. The police had arrived, and ambulance cars took the injured to the Royal Sussex, where Father used to work until he was put in charge of the Dyke Road hospital. I still feel I should have done something. I should have helped.

  This morning I read in the paper that most people in the accident had not been too badly hurt, but that one man had been killed.

  A soldier.

  Thinking back to yesterday, I remember feeling one emotion from my mother. Fear. But not fear of the accident.

  Although she doesn’t know that I have remembered, I know what she’s thinking about. She’s thinking about a day long ago, when I was five.

  99

  War. That’s all there seems to be.

  It’s all around us. Nothing is unaffected by it, no one is immune. Everyone has suffered, everyone has lost someone, or at least knows someone who has. There seems to be little else in the newspapers, little that anyone talks about.

  It is over a year now since the war began, but it seems no time at all since I sat listening to my brothers arguing about it, and with Father, too. I was sixteen then, and not supposed to have an opinion. But I sat and listened, in the corner of the room, while they talked. It may have been the actual day we declared war on Germany.

  Edgar and Father were very excited, Tom was quiet.

  “You don’t want to enlist in the ranks,” Father said to Edgar. “You can take a commission. With your OTC experience you’ll be snapped up.”

  “It would have been better if I was a regular already,” Edgar said. “It’ll all be over before I get there. By the time I get a commission and hang around on a parade ground for months, it’ll all be over.”

  “Then better you don’t delay. Move quickly and you’ll get your share of the glory.”

  I was listening to Father, but I was watching Tom. Edgar and Father stood by the dining room table, poring over the morning’s Times.

  Tom was gazing out at the sea lapping way beyond the West Pier, his thin frame silhouetted by a bright summer’s sun outside. It made me think as I often did that it was hard to imagine my two brothers were related. Edgar’s so much bigger, and stronger. He never seems to worry about things, he just does them, whereas Tom worries about everything and everyone. I’m told that on
ce, when I was little, I was crying about a dead bird in the garden, and he put his arm round me and told me that animals go to heaven too. I don’t suppose that’s true, but he wanted to make me happy. That’s how much he worries about people.

  Father turned to him.

  “Never mind, Tom,” he said. He meant because Tom was still only seventeen, and too young to enlist for almost another year. “You can still go to Officer Training Corps and then you’ll be ready. Maybe the war will still be on.”

  “Father!” Edgar exclaimed. “Don’t talk nonsense. That’s the sort of rot the pacifists spout.”

  Father didn’t like being spoken to like that, not even by Edgar.

  “Edgar,” he said, tersely. “I am simply trying to keep Tom’s chin up. It’s a shame for him to miss out when you’ll be away fighting.”

  Edgar glanced at Tom.

  “He wouldn’t go anyway,” he snarled. “He’s only too glad he’s too young.”

  “What do you mean?” Father said.

  “Just what I say.”

  “That’s an unkind—” Father began, but Tom interrupted him.

  “It’s true,” he said.

  That stopped us all for a moment. It was the first time he’d spoken.

  “What?” Father spluttered. “You’re not falling for all this Socialist nonsense, are you? I won’t have a pacifist in my house!”

  “No, Father,” Tom said. I could see he was scared of Father. “No,” he said. “I’m not a pacifist. But I don’t want to fight.”

  Father tried to interrupt, but Tom was brave enough to keep talking.

  “I want to train to be a doctor,” he said. “Like you.”

  What could Father say to that? He calmed down a bit.

  “That’s a good thing, Thomas,” he said. “A good thing. But there’s a war on now. If the occasion arises for you to do your bit, then you must! You will go and fight.”

  He seemed to think that was an end to the matter, but I, for some unknown reason, decided to speak.

  “Why should he go and fight,” I said, “if he doesn’t want to?”

  Edgar turned on me.

  “Stupid girl! You don’t understand anything about it. Don’t interfere.”

  I wasn’t surprised. Edgar says things like that to me. If he says anything to me at all, that is, these days.