Nineteen-sixteen, seventeen. Nineteen-eighteen and the armistice.
Nineteen-nineteen and the peace.
He was now definitely separated from his wife. Queenie had come back
from the war a year ago. As soon as it was over she had begun to rage
and consult lawyers and write letters two or three times a week,
threatening to drag Anne and Colin through the Divorce Court. But Miss
Mullins (once the secretary of Dr. Cutler's Field Ambulance Corps),
recovering at the Farm from an excess of war work, reassured them.
Queenie, she said, was only bluffing. Queenie was not in a position to
bring an action against any husband, she had been too notorious herself.
Miss Mullins had seen things, and she intimated that no defence could
stand against the evidence she could give.
And in the end Queenie left off talking about divorce and contented
herself with a judicial separation.
Colin still woke every morning to his dread of some blank, undefined
disaster; but, as if Queenie and the war had made one obsession, he was
no longer haunted by the imminent crash of phantom shells. It was
settled that he was to live with Jerrold and Maisie when they came back
to the Manor, while Anne stayed on by herself at the Farm.
Every now and then Eliot came down to see them. He had been sent home
early in nineteen-seventeen with a shrapnel wound in his left leg, the
bone shattered. He obtained his discharge at the price of a permanent
limp, and went back to his research work.
For the last two years he had been investigating trench fever, with
results that were to make him famous. But that was not for another year.
In February, nineteen-nineteen, Jerrold had come back. He and Maisie had
been living in London ever since he had left the Army, filling in time
till Wyck Manor would be no longer a Home for Convalescent Soldiers. He
had tried to crowd into this interval all the amusement he hadn't had
for four years. His way was to crush down the past with the present; to
pile up engagements against the future, party on party, dances on
suppers and suppers on plays; to dine every evening at some place where
they hadn't dined before; to meet lots of nice amusing people with
demobilised minds who wouldn't talk to him about the war; to let himself
go in bursts of exquisitely imbecile laughter; never to be quiet for an
hour, never to be alone with himself, never to be long alone with
Maisie.