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“The States are joining the war. He is enlisting,” she said, curled in on herself on the quilted counterpane, her body as racked with grief as it had been taut with joy on that same bed a week ago.

She sniffed and lifted her wet face to look at me.

“And you needn’t say you’re pleased. I think I’d slap your face for you if you did. ”

“I’m not,” I said, holding both her hands. “Believe me I’m not. I wanted to protect you and now you are crying.”

She collapsed onto my shoulder at that, and I held her very tightly.

They did not see each other for two years, although letters went to and fro by the boatload.

I had begun to think he did actually love her, just from the sheer volume of correspondence, but then in the last six months he did not write at all.

His mother wrote once, to say he was wounded, and then silence.

My sister went about for weeks like an alabaster figurine of Desolation. I hated him all over again, worse than ever, seeing the color in her fade, her disinterest in anything except the daily mail. The war had ended, and still there was this silence. I was sure he’d run off with someone.

Susan revived suddenly, however, when Father was posted to the Embassy in Brussels.

She begged for us to go too, said that it would be a wonderful opportunity to practice our French and learn Flemish.

Glad to see her taking an interest, I joined my voice with hers, to persuade Father to take us both, and Aunt Irene.

And now here we were. Father had rented this grand old house for us, achingly beautiful, bats in the ballroom, quite unlivable. On that first night, tossing on my dusty mattress, I wondered very much if I’d done right by my sister, trying to get us all out of Washington.

But Aunt Irene was a woman to make the best of things, and she had no intention of letting a mere house get the better of her.

She set to work on scrubbing at once, and scolded me and Sue into helping her.

But Susan was sly; she poked at the baseboards with a rag, but the instant she could get away she trekked off with nothing but a few francs in her pocket and all our years of haphazard education in French crammed, strongly accented, into her skull.

When she came back, she cut through all our furious lectures to say that she’d volunteered at one of the soldiers’ hospitals in Brussels.

I tried going with her for a day or two, because I was worried about her, and nursing sounded more glamorous than scrubbing – and anyway, she and I had always done everything together: learning and loving and playing and fighting.

But I couldn’t bear the hospital. The patients were all old soldiers, wounded in the last months of the War, their faces clammy-pale, or greenish, or yellow-tinged.

Sometimes they screamed for no reason, and sometimes they clutched at you, smelling of carbolic and blood, and sometimes they were angry at you, for no other reason than you were walking and they weren’t.

I read to them instead of properly nursing, because I found that I could not bear the sight and smell of their wounds.

There was one boy, I remember, called Lenny, who listened with vast owl-eyes in a wizened face when I read him limericks to make him smile.

He used to joke fluently in return, leave me panting with laughter, every face in every bed agrin, and he told me about his mother and his sister and how he’d sold insurance subscriptions before he was called up.

I think I stayed in the hospital for him; certainly, I came back every day for a week, reading material in hand, hating the war worse with every hour, wishing I were a girl in a story where time could be wound back to some vague, beautiful Before, when these men were whole and my sister was happy.

But I was not, of course, and one day Lenny simply wasn’t there anymore and they were too busy to do more than point at where they’d put him in the cemetery.

I didn’t have the strength to volunteer again after that.

Susan had taken to staying out late, coming home smelling dreadful, and when Aunt Irene asked what she’d been up to, Susan said, “Nursing,” which in those days was an unanswerable excuse.

I was happy enough to go back to scrubbing, myself.

You’d think I would have started cleaning in some useful room; my bedroom, say, or Sue’s, or the little sitting room with chipped walls the color of Himalayan poppies. Irene was responsibly ploughing through the kitchen and parlor. But I decided that first I wanted to clean the ballroom.

Most of that great house had been rendered quite practical in the years of the war. The froth of its colors, the frivolity of its cornicing, had been sacrificed to telephone wires and lumber rooms; the bedstead in my room was the same curving iron that, I imagined, went to fashion trench-knives.

But somehow, the ballroom had resisted the swift spring tide of the changing world; not even dust or mice or softening wood could touch its essential atmosphere of lugubrious grace.

One could imagine anything in that ballroom: knights or lovers or even a world where Lenny was still selling insurance and war was only an excuse for gallantry amongst the brave.

No one ever thought of me as romantic, not with Susan around wearing her heart on her sleeve and looking like a fairytale princess.

I was the sensible one. And yet, my imagination ran riot far more often than hers.

So I imagined and scrubbed and scrubbed more, wondering where Susan was and telling myself I didn’t care, that I should see her presently, and anyway, here was the parquet coming clean at last. Finally it was free of dust, although it would have been waxed, I thought, for a grand ball.

I rose from my grubby knees before one of the great, tarnished mirrors, and saw with fascination that the vast spaces of the ballroom had lent grace even to me.

My pinched, bookish face looked austere and wide-eyed and young.

And since there was no one to see, I curtseyed, awkwardly, to my own reflection and said, “Yes, I will have this dance,” and took an invisible hand and swept myself off into an invisible waltz, spinning round the clean floor and laughing, and then I heard it: music – violins and viols keeping time with my steps – and I spun to it, my heart beating faster and faster, until Susan’s voice broke my reverie.

“Alice – Alice,” she called, and I lurched to a halt, nearly falling, and terribly embarrassed.

“What do you mean, being gone for hours on end and then creeping up—” I began, and ordinarily, she’d have teased me for my silliness.

But now she just said, urgently, with a smudge of dirt on her nose, “I’ve found him. I’m bringing him here.”

I did not understand at all, but she added impatiently to my puzzled face, “Art, of course. Arthur. Mr Lewis. I found him. He was in hospital and I’m bringing him here.”

I stared. “Mr Lewis? But he – he abandoned you, he – I was sure he’d run off with someone!”

Susan drew herself up fiercely, and I saw with a fearful little pang that the strain had begun to print marks like craquelure on the skin round her eyes.

He was making her old before her time, the wretched man.

“He didn’t. He thought I shouldn’t be burdened with him, that’s why he wouldn’t write back.

But I hounded everyone I knew until someone told me where he was. ”

“Burdened with him?” I said, still blank.

The lines around Sue’s eyes deepened fractionally. “He was hurt. His face is different.”

***

I didn’t see Mr Lewis’ face that night, or for many nights thereafter.

He was brought in late, after Susan and Aunt Irene and I had a frantic four hours’ work airing another of the boarded-up bedrooms; his face was swathed in bandages from cheekbones to chin, and his eyes were horrible.

They were haunted, but not in the way that eyes were in books: patiently borne suffering that lent a face noble character.

They were lifeless as two holes, and even when Susan smiled with all her bright beauty and smoothed the blanket round his shoulders, well, he looked straight through and past her and I saw her lips quiver.

I tried to help her that night, when she got him settled, but I don’t think I did much good.

I kept imagining terrible voids under the concealing bandages and I could not bring myself to look into the flat, dead coins of his eyes.

Finally she told me I was clumsy and sent me away.

I went, but I held her when she came to my room and wept afterward, and eventually we fell asleep like children together on my creaking bed, with the door open, at Sue’s insistence, in case Mr Lewis cried out in the night.

The open door is perhaps why we heard the music.

I heard it first; I distinctly remember sitting up, thinking I’d dreamt the same disembodied melody that I’d whirled to in the forenoon.

But I wasn’t dreaming now. The music pressed on my ears, unbearably beautiful in a place and a year starved for beauty.

I shook Susan awake. Dried tears had glued her hair to her face.

“Alice?” Her face changed as she heard it too. “A gramophone?”

I shook my head, listening for all I was worth. No gramophone could surround you with music, so. I yearned with every fiber to know where it was coming from.

“Come on,” I murmured. “It’s in the ballroom, surely.”

Sue hesitated. “Art might need me.”

“He’ll be all right,” I insisted. “Just a look.”