The Edge of the Fall Read Online Free PDF

jackets, black trousers, their swords sparkling, as neat and rigid as toys, glossy horses to either side, the white wedding cake of the Palace at the end, like a pot of gold on the rainbow. Thousands and thousands of people cheering them just for walking down the street. ‘Look at how they’ve just got the healthy ones out,’ she said. ‘You’d think they hadn’t even fought.’ The first lot of plans had been for four days of celebrations. But who could have faced that?
    â€˜Stop it, Celia. Don’t talk so loudly,’ said Emmeline, pinching her. She was so large that you thought she might have the baby now, but it most likely wouldn’t be for another six weeks, the doctors said. Emmeline said she was so full of energy she felt like a schoolgirl, so they shouldn’t fret. She said she didn’t even need her husband; Mr Janus had gone off to one of his secretive meetings with the Workers. Probably best he wasn’t here, anyway, Celia thought. He’d never be able to contain his feelings. He’d be shouting about the ruling classes, claiming that the soldiersparading down the street were traitors to the people. She almost found herself agreeing with him.
    â€˜These are soldiers used for show,’ she said.
    â€˜Ssshh,’ said Emmeline again. ‘People can hear you.’
    â€˜But it’s true.’ Where were they, the men that she had taken in her ambulance? They had been bleeding, missing limbs with lungs full of gas, jaws broken, eyes burned beyond repair, broken faces, hands shot to pieces. One she remembered, screaming all the way, had no face, none at all, just a mass of red. These men, marching in formation, looked like pictures in a magazine, not even a limp or a withered-looking hand, smart, upright, rosy-cheeked. She wondered, bitterly, if people wanted the other type to hide away. The government maybe did, because they were a reminder – horrible, wounded, sickly – of how they couldn’t protect their people.
    But those broken men were everywhere: sitting on their heels outside pubs, rocking back and forth with their hands over their ears, hearing the bombs still; leaning on wooden legs as they put their caps out for money on corners; in the long queues outside shops and office doors that she supposed were in response to advertisements for positions vacant, none of them with a hope, because they had half-burned faces, or a missing ear, hair singed off or an eye that never closed. Or the most hopeless of all, the ones who wore those white porcelain masks, painted with bright blue eyes, almost obscenely red lips. ‘Thank you, sir,’ she imagined the proprietors saying. ‘We will let you know.’ Or the more truthful ones who would say, ‘I’m sorry, sir. You’d put the customers off with a face like that.’
    â€˜We’re not celebrating the past, Celia,’ said Rudolf, talking over Emmeline. ‘It’s the future. It has been the War to End All Wars. We will never have war again. Always peace.’
    She gazed at the next line of men, marching smartly in unison. What about those thousands who were still stuck out there? France – and those ones in the desert. When were they coming back? Another line of men came past. She’d forgotten to keep up with the list on her programme and now she had no ideawhich regiment was passing. How much time they must have spent rehearsing such a performance. How much money .
    If Tom were beside her, she could tell him this. But he didn’t want to see her.
    Tom had only sent two letters since he’d left the hospital. He said he’d met up with his captain in the army, who’d found him a job in his business. But she hadn’t heard any more from him, and he hadn’t left an address. She knew that she’d been silly in thinking that she might see him when they came to London – this city of millions, swelled by even more who’d