Free The Very Thought of You by Rosie Alison

of his brother’s death in the trick light of dawn. He had vaguely assumed until then that any British deaths were those of incompetent soldiers, without his brother’s verve or timing. Now, with William caught out, he glimpsed the roulette of survival on the front.
    He took tea in the High Street with his brother Edward, already in the uniform of the school’s Cadet Corps. They ate muffins, and all their thoughts were for their motherand sister: they could only touch on their own grief through sympathy for the women in their family.
    A few weeks later William’s memorial service was held at Ashton Park, despite the absent corpse. Only his bulletscarred helmet had been retrieved. Miriam Ashton was distraught and held onto Claudia, stroking her hair. It was no comfort to her that William had been heroic, because the soaring death toll had already devalued the worth of any one sacrifice. Nor could she lose the imagined moment of her son’s pain in death: the phantom shrapnel kept tearing through her own guts.
    Thomas’s father was silent, but inside he wept at the memory of his son, whom he saw as a better version of himself. He was privately mortified that he could not have died in his place. But he was also pricked with guilty sorrow by the three young labourers from the village who had also died that month, yet would not be treated to the ceremony of William’s memorials. He ensured that flowers were sent to their mothers.
    William’s leather trunk was returned by his regiment, all his chattels neatly packed by his batman, his shaving kit, his ivory hairbrushes, his silver flask and cigarette cases, his letters. It gave an oddly ordered impression of war, Thomas thought. His mother would not allow the trunk to be unpacked: it was locked up and stowed away, upstairs, somewhere safe.
    Her anguish was only deepened when her next son, Edward, finished his schooling and arrived home for a visit in his uniform. In 1915, he trained for a month at Aldershot before his regiment was sent to the front.
    When fifteen-year-old Thomas returned home to Ashton Park in the holidays, he found an altered place. All the young men from the estate had left to join the local yeoman rifles. For the first time, he and his sister saw the great shell of their house empty of parties. The fires were unlit, and the desertedcorridors echoed to their footsteps. Memories of William’s commanding presence crowded in on them, in every unused room.
    Their mother had removed herself to London, to help run a soldiers’ canteen at Waterloo. Their father struggled to keep his estates going in the absence of so many labourers, then succumbed to his wife’s wish to turn Ashton Park into a hospital. At least the house was full again, thought Thomas. For the next few holidays, he carried supplies up and down the mahogany stairs to nurses in starched uniforms. He and his sister watched with appalled fascination as limbless young men were wheeled around in bath chairs on the front lawn. Claudia longed for Edward to come home on leave; Thomas dreaded his mutilation.
    School was little better for Thomas, because every day brought fresh news of casualties from their teams, their school plays, their choirs.
    Edward wrote home from Flanders, letters which at first – but only at first – commended the bravery and spirit of his company.
    Dear Thomas,

I imagine with pleasure your daily routine at school. Enjoy it for me and do not hurry to join us. Here, death is so familiar that it weakens our will to live. What does it matter if the sun shines? Why should I shave?
    Our bravery is bovine. We expect to die, and prepare for it daily. But just when you think you are resigned and emptied of fear, and free to fight, then a chance thought makes all the old hopes flood back in again and, with them, all the fear fuelled by hope.
    Yesterday my fellow patrolling officer was picked out by a shell. It blew off his head. It could have been me.
    But I have William for company,