“We have a son,” Helene said, lying in the back of the cart. “Can I see him?” She did not have the strength at that point to turn her head to look at the child in Jerome’s arms.
Jerome passed the little boy bundled in dampened blankets, and I held him before her. She smiled, but she didn’t reach for him. She frowned a little, and I will never know if this was from the pain in her body or the ache of being unable to hold him. “He is beautiful. I remembered the name from a story you told me, one that you read as a child.”
I nodded and put my finger to her lips that were blue and cold. She went very still.
“Stay with me,” I whispered in her ear. But she didn’t. She left us then. And Jerome reached for her wrist, then closed her eyes, and the pain of it, if not for the child in my arms, would have consumed me. If not for the child, if not for the task I was then given, I would have run toward the enemy, begged them to shoot me. But for Samuel then, I had to reach safety. Though there is still a question of purpose, whether I deserve to stand while Helene now lies deep in the earth in a graveyard behind a broken church.
Mariette returned, and there are no words to describe her loss, only that there were times hence when she did not live well without her sister. She had moments of darkness that I recognized, too.
It was Jerome who decided what we should do next, after discussing our possibilities beyond Bailleul, a future where there were no wars and no fear of capture from my own men. We reached a small church in a village that would later be destroyed. Jerome asked the priest to marry us, a way of protecting us all, telling him that our possessions and identities were destroyed but that we needed the blessing of the church without the necessity of marriage banns, for the sake of the child. A man of the cloth could deny that, might turn his back, but he did not. Though I think as the enemy threatened shortly to wipe out his village, he would not have turned away anyone.
Jerome took us to Le Havre and gave us what little money he had, along with his name, which would allow me to leave the shores of France without my tarnished name on record. Mariette begged him to follow, to find another passage when he could. But I could not see it. Not with his sister there, and his wife and son buried in Flemish soil. He was planning to volunteer at the front, to help support soldiers in any way they needed. It was personal then, his duty, to assist to drive the enemy out, to stop them from reaching Lenore. But we did not know his plans yet, not until we received a final letter from him, then heard no more. Not until Mariette had written to the registrar for deaths did she learn his fate a year later. He died from shellfire while delivering meals to a clearing hospital. Mariette was inconsolable for days, and I nearly lost her, the girl she was. But she is stronger than any of us. Of that I am certain.
And as for me, my struggles continue. Every day is different from the last. Not just that the sky or wind is changed, but within me fires burn and fires die, rage and fear run through my veins, and a purpose I am yet to find.
LAURENCE
1922
CHAPTER 31
Mariette’s sharp movements and darting eyes reminded me of a restless filly eager to break from the herd to run free. Her seeming unrestraint was what drew me at first, followed closely by her belief that she was better than any of us, despite her peasant upbringing. She was refreshing, since most of the women and men I’d associated with had always known their place. But if I’m truly honest, what caused me to pause, to scheme, to plan for a battle, was that Rudy was lovesick. And the two of them together would spell my end. I had to put a stop to them first, and any notion of their future together. And if that meant breaking her in some way, so be it.
I saw something that I believe no one else had seen. I had always been more clearheaded and discerning, though one such gift in my family is not often extolled or appreciated. I had seen that the boy was most certainly Edgar’s. Though the frame and colors were different, the way Samuel put his lips together thinly when he examined me took me back to when Edgar and I were boys. The times when Edgar would be judge and jury and executioner, and always just before I received the harshest punishment: I would be cut off from him, ignored, while he strutted around unchallenged by anyone, unseeing and unwilling to see that I was as good, if not better than he was at most things. Samuel’s tilt of his head when he examined me—and the look in his eye of someone who is far away in some distant thought—was Edgar also. Edgar has seemed for most of my life cold and impenetrable. Not the quiet achiever everyone read him to be. Beneath the façade there were dark thoughts and insecurities, though, under general observations, they were too fleeting and subtle to knit them into something one could describe as an obvious flaw.
I learned my place from the moment I joined my father’s dinner table. Edgar was the one who answered the questions, to whom, when speaking, everyone listened. Oh certainly, they would humor me, even enjoy the vitality and rhetoric I brought to the table, especially Mother, but they would hear Edgar. His voice was the clearest to all and the only one that mattered. So to draw attention, which I can admit to myself I did on more than one occasion unsuccessfully, would only ever end in more condemnation, more punishment. And each time, Edgar would shut me out further. I wanted to be seen as Edgar’s equal, which never came. My mother, intelligent but insignificant in the scheme of things—since she had no control of the finances and was too worried about what everyone thought—doted on me, but it wasn’t the same as respect. I had inherited her love of fine things and her skill of mistrusting everyone, though I was much better at covering it.
Edgar didn’t always despise me. There were a few years, during our early days at school together, when he took me under his wing. I made friends quickly, excelled at subjects like Edgar, and the two of us played sport together on many occasions. We were both competitive by nature, and Edgar always respected a good competitor. I had grown tall quickly, though lankier and less muscled than Edgar. I was only just beneath his skill level in rowing and rugby. Edgar noticed this and appreciated me a little more than he had when we were small. We even talked about what we might do together when we graduated, entertaining the idea of starting a joint business.
If I have to pinpoint a time in history when our momentary solidarity fractured permanently, it was an afternoon when we were playing a game of rugby. It was a combination of my friends and Edgar’s. Edgar and I were on the same team, and our side won because of my final goal. I was amiably jostled and patted by Edgar and company all the way back to the school clubhouse, where we made our plans to spend the rest of the day by the river. We were high on sporting adrenaline, shoving and pushing each other in the water and egging each other on to swing on a rope from a tree that hung over the river.
One of the boys from my year, and new to the group, was smaller than many of us and not very good at rugby. He should never have been included since he had nearly cost us the game by dropping the ball a number of times. I’m not sure why he was even there that afternoon, since he also chose not to swim. He was somewhat sickly, had taken many days off school. There had been a rumor that he lived with his grandparents and he had several younger brothers who would not be attending the same school, as they could not afford it.
Looking back, I don’t see why Edgar thought “the event,” as it became known for a short period, was such a big deal. It was an accident, but he made it appear far more sinister on my part. I told the boy, Nigel, to have a swing on the rope, but he refused, making some feeble excuse that he wasn’t allowed to go in the water. So I grabbed him anyway around the waist and, with my other hand clutching the rope, swung out wildly over the creek. He shrieked as we swung back and forth, clinging on to me tightly. Most of the group stood on the edge of the embankment, waiting their turn on the rope, laughing and validating the prank, and it was perhaps this noise that drowned out the sharp rasps of Nigel’s breathing. He begged me not to let go, but as I began to lose my grip, I instructed him to reach for the rope, which he did; then I released myself into the water, grabbing h
is shorts and pulling them down with me as I fell. I left Nigel pantless, hanging from the rope and whimpering for help. Nigel could not hold on and within seconds fell into the water and did not surface immediately.
The laughter from the embankment had died down a little. Some had stopped laughing, and the smiles of others were falling quickly away. And there was Edgar, who was not smiling at all. He was staring at Nigel, who had noisily resurfaced and flapped his arms wildly to stay afloat. Edgar’s lips were pressed together thinly that day.
They say it was the coldness of the water that sparked the asthma attack. I didn’t see it in the white wash of frantic splashing. We were close enough to the shallows, where he would have been able to stand, but he didn’t, panicking, and I took the opportunity to push him and his noise back under the water. Moments later I didn’t see the punch to the side of my head that knocked me sideways. When I turned to react to my assailant, Edgar was lifting Nigel up and carrying him to the grassy shore. I had gulped back so much water that I could not yell after him, which was probably for the best, once I’d realized the seriousness of the situation. The boys on the side were watching Edgar carrying the boy over the embankment toward them, their faces slightly aghast, which I took at first to be because of Edgar’s violent act toward me, before they all turned to look at me. I climbed out of the water to witness Edgar turn Nigel onto his side. Nigel was wheezing, and his face had gone a bluish tone. Edgar then threw him over his large shoulder and walked swiftly toward the school, no doubt to the infirmary.
“He suffers from asthma,” said one of the boys. “I thought you knew that.”
I did. But I decided not to say so, nor add that I had little idea about such a condition, which would only make me appear stupid or cruel.
After that, Nigel left the school and didn’t come back, though there was no word of the reasons, whether from health, humiliation, or finances. But it didn’t matter. He died, we learned, months later from another episode. He was gone, and I was relieved that I would not have to see him again as a reminder of the moment that Edgar and I ceased to be friends and future business partners. Of course, it would be irrational to think that it was the only thing that had drawn us apart: an overexuberant brother and a sickly boy. There were other minor “events” before and since that have highlighted our differences and given Edgar some sort of perceived moralistic position of power over me. But it was not only one-sided. I never got over the punch to the head that left me dazed and bruised. He had humiliated me, and this I found hard to forgive. He never raised any discussion about what had occurred, but he no longer came to our rugby games and took more interest in other sports and books. When we went home he would find reasons to spend as little time with me as possible and while away the hours with Rudy or alone.
Once, several weeks after the event, I passed his dorm room and saw him sitting, reading.
“How did you fare in your exams?” I asked.
“Fine,” he said, pleasantly enough, though he was looking back at his book, a touch dismissively, as if I’d interrupted.
I began to walk away but stopped and turned. “Look, Edgar,” I said. “I had no idea Nigel was asthmatic.”
He looked away at something over my shoulder, a habit that would grow to be annoying. It was as if I didn’t exist for him at times.
“You should have known,” he said. “He was your friend.”
“Of course he was my friend.”
“Well, let’s hope your friends never have to rely on you on a battlefield.”
He gave me his punishing blue-eyed stare that told me nothing I said would aid in my defense. I had made my peace with the episode at the river, but it seemed that Edgar had not.
“You show little empathy and don’t know when to stop,” he said. “I thought maybe you had grown out of it. Perhaps you never will.”
I laughed then because he was ridiculous, and I stormed off. And on the battlefield years later, I would discover for certain that what he said was true. But it was a good thing to have in war: to not stop, to not become emotionally attached to those on either side, to keep fighting and killing until we ridded French fields of every last Hun. I had saved hundreds in my quest to not stop, to keep going until the end, regardless of those falling around me. And that weakness, which Edgar sought to highlight, proved to be my strength, for it would be I who returned a hero, not he. I would come home with medals, promotions, and bullet grazes alone. And not only would he not return a hero, he would not return to inherit the manor.
I never told Mother that when I was visiting some of my privates in the hospital, for I helped my battalion in the final months to victory, I had seen Edgar. I had heard he’d been admitted, though I had not gone out of my way earlier to visit. He was being treated in the wing where they sought to understand those unseen injuries that allowed men not to fight. I had seen him there shaking and trembling, and he had looked up as if he didn’t recognize me. But he did. I am sure of it. Some might say the perceived contest I had made between us was petty. But as I stood at the side of his bed, above him, I felt like I had already conquered my enemy.
“Do you know him?” one of the nurses asked as she approached his bedside with a cup full of medicine, while Edgar stared me down.
“No,” I said. What was the point? He had burned our bridge years ago, and I did not want it known that I shared the same blood as someone so ill equipped for war. Watching his suffering, I felt nothing and remembered only that he had despised me throughout our years together.
I had returned not to a hero’s welcome at Lakeland, but to a wake for Edgar, missing in action. Lakeland, it seemed, didn’t welcome heroes. My mother had been pleased to see me, but by that time, she was broken, and I could not claim victory, not in the way I’d expected. Rudy received me with suspicion and distance, as he had always done as a child, and his grief for Edgar was as clear as his regret that it was I who had returned, not he.
So I shed the uniform and went back to what I should have been doing, lording it up in London. Without the help of my father’s poor record, and with only limited use of my future inheritance, I still carved out an existence of fellow acquaintances, and I took up from whence I’d left. Though, my life felt hollow, and the more I entertained, the hollower I felt until the only time it felt truly good was to be drinking, smoking, and frequenting illegal opium houses still operating in the filthy basement bowels of London, where it would help me to remember how successful I was. And each time I returned to the estate, Lakeland seemed to appear more monstrous, a reminder of a dull and lonely childhood that I did not deserve. I could not wait to be rid of it and place Mother somewhere else, to carve up the land and live in London. The estate was impressive for weekends, as it showed where I had come from, but that was all. It was not my future.
And the day that I received a letter from Mother telling me about Mariette’s visit, I felt colder than I had since Edgar’s dismissal at the river. Even the violence of war and the fear of death did not affect me near so much as those two moments. Was I flawed? Some would think so, but I like to think of myself instead as a survivor of a family that was flawed.
Mariette was restless but, as I learned quickly, not fickle, which I had not seen until we were alone in the dark looking for eggs. She was ravishing against the inky-blue night. I put my arm around her, and she didn’t resist, not at first. Then when I drew her close to my cheek, to feel her warm breath against me, she pushed me hard away, forcing me to drop the lamp. I am honest when I say that I have never once been so brutally rejected. Women have pretended to be refined at such points, but never so blunt and cold.
“I am not interested in you,” she whispered to me in the dark.
She turned to leave, and I felt humiliated, picking up the lamp again and running after her. I grabbed hold of her shoulder.
“What are you doing?” she asked, offended by my touch.
“Rudy will never give you the life you want here. If that’s what you’re thinking.�
��
“You have no idea what I’m thinking.”
“He will never love you. He loved Edgar too much. In the back of his mind, he will be thinking about Edgar every time he makes love to you.”
She turned then but not before I caught some moment of doubt on her part.
“It is perhaps cruel what you do to him,” I continued. “Keeping Edgar alive in his mind.”
“It is perhaps not cruel if it is you I choose. Is that what you are saying?”
She had called out my hypocrisy, and at that moment Rudy’s lamplight filtered through the trees to head toward us.
She’d had the last word, but I’d seen the effect of our conversation, more noticeable by her somewhat dismissive approach toward Rudy once we arrived back at the house.
The following morning, as fate would have it, Elizabeth was feeling unwell, and Mariette showed great concern for her. I suggested Mariette accompany us on the ride to the train station, to assist her.
“Oh, would you please!” pleaded Elizabeth, ever so sweetly so that Mariette could hardly refuse.
Once we’d dispatched everyone to the station, and Mariette and I waved our goodbyes, and we were alone, I had to atone for the night before to successfully enact my plan. I said that we should be friends, that whatever had been said about me, I had in fact attempted to change. I told her that I loved my brother and was genuinely concerned that she would hurt Rudy.
“I could never hurt Rudy.”
“It is probably too late for that.”
She wanted to say something, but she didn’t, perhaps hoping that I would just be quiet as we commenced the drive back. She tried to dismiss me, but I could see that it got to her. I told her that I believed her about her son. She looked at me then, attempting to assess the truth. I told her that I had recognized Edgar in the child.
In a Field of Blue Page 32
