The Summer Before the War

by Helen Simonson

  “I suppose the greatest writers are by definition too true to their art to become as wealthy as those who write entertaining rubbish,” said Beatrice. “Only he does seem to have one of the nicest houses in town.”

  “He does not stint himself alone at home,” said Hugh. “He is as fond of good claret as the next man. Only when he has guests to dinner he invariably feeds them mutton and cheap Spanish wine.”

  “I look forward to that,” said Beatrice. “I have a feeling he and Mrs. Turber may compete to feed us badly. Perhaps I will start saving my bread crusts.”

  “If you become malnourished, I shall undertake to escort you and the young lady to a suitably respectable tea shop and feed you up on scones and cream,” said Hugh.

  “How gallant of you,” said Beatrice. “I imagine the same invitation would be forthcoming even if the young lady were less than beautiful.”

  “You must admit she is quite the damsel in distress,” he said. “My cousin Daniel will no doubt fling himself at her feet, parchment in hand.” Hugh seemed gloomy at this prospect, and Beatrice laughed at him. “Not to suggest that you are in any way not worthy of a poem or two,” he added. “I didn’t mean to imply…”

  “I am quite beyond such foolishness and therefore cannot take offense,” said Beatrice.

  “Nonsense,” said Hugh. “No lady is too old for a sonnet, which is why Daniel still writes them to Aunt Agatha’s cook and always thereby receives the largest slice of Victoria sponge.”

  “Victory is ours,” said Mr. Tillingham, returning with Agatha. “The Professor makes no objection to the arrangement.”

  “And Mrs. Turber is more than agreeable to being compensated for a second tenant,” said Agatha. “So the burden falls on you, Miss Nash. Are you sure you won’t mind?”

  “She can sleep in my writing corner,” said Beatrice. “I can squeeze my desk into my bedroom.”

  “I am deep in your debt, young lady,” said Mr. Tillingham. “You must bring your guest tomorrow to see her father. Not too early, of course. I work in the mornings. I think we should meet for tea, and I will make arrangements for the green parlor to be set aside for father and daughter to meet quietly at any hour.” He looked at his watch and repeated, “Not any hour, of course. I must be able to work.” With that he swept away to carry off the Professor. Beatrice watched Mr. Tillingham, solicitous, and the Professor, a little more cheerful, offer a brief farewell to the girl. The girl said nothing but merely watched her father leave, her hands at her sides, her body leaning slightly, as if invisibly pulled after him, and all the light gone from her face.

  —

  As the birds announced dawn, the girl in the upstairs cottage bedroom began calling for her papa. Beatrice woke to find her cheek pressed to a floorboard, her arms and legs stiff from sleeping on the parlor rug. She had given the exhausted girl her own bed, helping to remove her ruined boots and then merely loosening buttons and stays before pulling the clean sheets and blankets over the girl’s filthy dress and tucking her in as she might do for an invalid. She had then taken a quilt and retired to the parlor to sleep on the floor. Now the cottage was cold and dark, her quilt warm. It felt easier not to move, but another moan from above led her to unwrap herself and stumble to her feet. She gathered the quilt around her shoulders like a shawl and crept upstairs. The girl was deep in sleep, but twisted in her sheets, moaning and plucking at the covers with her fingers and muttering in French. Abigail the maid was crouched at the bedside, smoothing her hair and trying to straighten the bed linen with one hand.

  “There, now, you lie still,” Abigail was repeating quietly. “You’re safe now and Papa’s safe too.”

  “Does she need a doctor?” asked Beatrice, tiptoeing across the room in her stockinged feet.

  “She’ll be fine, miss,” said Abigail. “My mum has bad dreams sometimes. If you just speak to ’em like they’re awake it seems to calm ’em right down.”

  “I don’t know that she speaks English,” said Beatrice.

  “I don’t think it matters, do it now, miss?” said Abigail, leaning in to pat the girl’s shoulder. “Just a kind voice in the dark is all we want most times.” The girl gave a sigh and settled more peacefully on her pillow, her face relaxing. Abigail patted her hand, and the fingers stopped clawing.

  “You have the touch, Abigail,” whispered Beatrice. “Can you sit with her awhile?”

  “I could stay a bit, miss,” said Abigail. “But I need to get the stove lit soon. I’m thinking you’ll be wanting a fire laid under the copper for some bathwater, even though it’s not bath day?”

  “Yes, perhaps you’d better run along and get the copper going before Mrs. Turber wakes up,” said Beatrice. “That way we don’t have to disturb her morning with all this added generosity.”

  “I’ll bring you some tea, miss,” said Abigail. “If the lady cries out again, just hold her hand.”

  The girl’s hands lay on the covers like fledgling birds. Beatrice remembered how her father’s hands, similarly naked and blue-veined, had withered under her touch, and how she had felt the warmth retreat from them even before her father took his last breath. It seemed to Beatrice, in the chilly half-light of dawn, that this moaning girl had come out of that same place of death, bringing its smell and its fear with her, and Beatrice shrank from touching her. She slumped to the floor by the bed, drew the quilt tight around her, and looked hard at the window as if by staring she might urge the sun to quicker life.

  —

  It was still early when Beatrice went out into the courtyard bearing a large comb, a broad sash of white grosgrain ribbon, and her sewing box. Birds sang in a garden beyond the wall. A white butterfly was looking for milkweed. She could hear the snort and jingle of a horse tossing his head in the street and smell the peppery scent of Mrs. Turber’s tomato plants wilting against sun-heated brick. Amid the sounds and scents of the hot summer morning, the girl sat on a wooden chair in the small courtyard behind the cottage, head bent, allowing Abigail to vigorously towel-dry her hair.

  After a gentle scrubbing with carbolic soap, the girl had emerged from the dented copper hip bath in the kitchen as unself-conscious as a child being bathed by its nanny and allowed Abigail and Beatrice to rub her dry with two of Mrs. Turber’s rather rough cotton towels. She had one or two large bruises on her arms and a deeply bruised cut on her thigh, which was scabbing over but red and black around the edges. Beatrice sent Abigail for a bottle of iodine and they soaked the wound, the girl crying out only once as the iodine stung. When it was a dry purple stain, they dressed her in a set of Beatrice’s underclothes, neither the oldest nor the newest she owned, and in a medium-good cotton tea dress and a pair of embroidered leather slippers which had always been too good to discard but too flowery for Beatrice’s taste. Beatrice was sorry to lose the tea dress from her adequate but not extensive wardrobe, but understood that the loss meant she had picked correctly—bestowing a gift rather than the abject charity of handing over something only suitable to be discarded. She was also slightly pained that the dress hung loose on the girl, and that its cornflower blue, set against the pale skin and hair, made a color harmony worthy of a painter’s brush; whereas it had only ever looked washed-out against her own dark hair.

  As Beatrice approached, the girl stood and let Abigail gather the back of the dress with a few running stitches and then tie the sash around to hide the makeshift alteration. She then sat again and made no sound as Abigail set to work with the comb and fought her way through several nasty knotted tangles. Finally the hair flowed straight and smooth and Beatrice stepped in to roll and pin the pale corn silk into a simple, low bun at the nape of the neck. With her hair up the girl looked less like a frightened child and more like a young woman recently out of the schoolroom. Beatrice judged her to be seventeen or so.

  “What’s going on here?” said Mrs. Turber, stepping into the courtyard with a glowering face. “Water all over the floor and a fire blazing like it’s November.”

 
“Abigail was helping me bathe our guest, Mrs. Turber,” said Beatrice.

  “Just because I offered a roof, doesn’t mean…” The girl turned to look at her, and Mrs. Turber stopped as suddenly as she had started. “Well, bless me, she’s quite the angel, isn’t she?” she added and then did not seem to know what to say next.

  Beatrice translated for the girl that the large, red-faced woman thought she looked like an angel. The girl gave a shy smile and stepped forward.

  “Non, non. Vous êtes un ange, madame,” she said quietly. “An angel.” With that she kissed Mrs. Turber’s rough hand.

  “Bless me, she speaks English,” said Mrs. Turber and patted the girl’s hand, adding, “You are très welcome dans ma maison, mam’selle.”

  “Thank you, chère madame,” said the girl, her English romantically accented. “I am Celeste, I am daughter of Professor Fontaine.”

  “Well, don’t just stand there with your mouth open, Abigail,” said Mrs. Turber to her dumbfounded maid. “Take Miss Celeste in and get her some breakfast. Make sure you bring her a bowl of the good cream, and perhaps she’d like some smoked haddock and poached eggs?”

  “Your generosity is unbounded, Mrs. Turber,” said Beatrice, as Abigail led Celeste into the house. She wondered if she too was to partake of haddock and cream or whether her usual breakfast of porridge and toast, and the occasional overboiled egg, would be served.

  “She needs feeding up,” said Mrs. Turber, frowning as if Beatrice had failed to see this. “And she’ll be needing better than that rag of a dress, I’m sure. I have some bits put by from when I was younger. I had the waist of a hummingbird my husband used to say…”

  “That’s my second-best tea dress,” said Beatrice, distracted by trying to picture any bird with an appreciable waist.

  “Well, I’m sure it’s perfectly adequate,” said Mrs. Turber, giving her a doubtful look. “But Miss Celeste is clearly a girl of great refinement.” She let the thought trail away, and Beatrice had an unworthy urge to drop Aunt Marbely’s name in rebuke. The thought made her snappish.

  “She is very blond and lovely,” she said. “But were fairness the accepted test of rank and refinement, no doubt the royal family would all be albino.”

  “I was referring to her respectful manners,” said Mrs. Turber. “Something some of us could no doubt learn from.”

  “Touché, Mrs. Turber,” said Beatrice. “You are right of course and I am a shrew.”

  “The royal family indeed,” said Mrs. Turber. “I’ve never been so shocked.”

  “Then I am doubly sorry, for I know you are a woman who is often shocked, Mrs. Turber,” said Beatrice. “I am stiff and grumpy from sleeping on the floor and waking up too early.”

  “I suppose now you’ll be wanting the bed back again?” said Mrs. Turber. Beatrice could think of nothing worse. No doubt the wormy frame and lumpy mattress had been rendered more wormy, lumpy, and damp from being kept in Mrs. Turber’s cellar and chewed by mice.

  “Mrs. Kent has promised to send another bed,” said Beatrice. “But if you do have clothing and linens put by, I’m sure Celeste would be deeply indebted for your trouble.”

  Mrs. Turber brightened considerably at this suggestion. “I’ll alter them for her with my own hands, bless her,” she said. “I have a dress or two, and some red flannel petticoats that still have years of strength in them. A lady needs good, stout petticoats.”

  “In all seasons and climates, Mrs. Turber,” said Beatrice. As Mrs. Turber bustled into the house, Beatrice grinned. She was surprised to feel a warmth of purpose in being now connected to the great enterprise under way. To provide sanctuary was an ancient tradition, and as long as pride did not become hubris—she must not start talking of “my refugee,” like Mrs. Fothergill—she acknowledged that it felt gratifying to have found some small connection to the war.

  —

  Mrs. Turber was not the only citizen of Rye to be taken with Celeste. Mrs. Saunders, who did the washing and mending, was summoned after breakfast to take away the spoiled dress. In the passageway, she shook her head at Beatrice over the impossibility of cleaning such fine ruined silk, but when Beatrice brought her into the parlor to explain the matter to Celeste, not wanting to dispose of even this ruined item without consultation, Mrs. Saunders began to weep at the girl’s shy shrug of understanding and made tearful promises to do the work of Hercules himself to save the dress.

  “Please tell her it does not matter,” said Celeste in a whisper to Beatrice. “I shall never wear it again.”

  “You will if these hands ever ’ad any skill and learning,” said Mrs. Saunders. “And you shall ’ave the lace off it sure as I’m a good Englishwoman, for I will clean that with the blessed Sunday bread and eat potatoes instead.”

  Mrs. Saunders must have gone to gossip about Celeste at Pike Brothers’ haberdashery department, because not an hour later, Arty’s mother knocked at the door to drop in a small sewing kit and several lengths of hair ribbon for the “poor young lady,” while just before lunch the Misses Porter brought one of the nuns to visit, in case the girl had need of spiritual counseling, and presented Celeste with a small jar of their own gooseberry preserves. Lunch itself was interrupted by the arrival of Agatha Kent’s man with the bed in the farm cart, and Celeste looked to Beatrice as if she would drop in limp exhaustion as Smith and the farm boy labored loudly up the stairs and bumped about moving the writing desk and knocking the bed together with wooden mallets while the horse snorted at the open window and then put his head in the window box to nibble on Mrs. Turber’s pelargoniums.

  Beatrice had sent Celeste to rest in her newly curtained nook and was contemplating retiring to her own room, now stripped of its dirty linens, when there was a hideous shriek downstairs and Abigail called her down to receive a freshly killed rabbit that had sent Mrs. Turber into a fit of the vapors. The three boys she tutored had sneaked in through the back gate to knock at the kitchen door with the gift and to ask if the Belgian princess might be induced to wave at them from the upstairs window. Not to worry, reported Abigail, she had given Snout a box on the ear for his impudence and sent the lot of them packing. Beatrice suggested that for a girl her size, the boxing of boys’ ears was not a safe pursuit.

  “He’s my big brother, miss,” said Abigail. “He knows I’ll give him worse than that if he don’t mind his manners.”

  Beatrice was horrified. How had she not seen the family resemblance, the same streak of resolve in the thin faces? How close had she come, several times, to making some remark or giving some warning to Abigail about the boy’s family?

  “The rabbit is quite a prize,” said Beatrice, blushing with confusion. “Please thank your brother for me.”

  “Best not,” said Abigail. “Likely he poached it. He’ll come to no good, if he’s not careful.”

  “Your brother is quite the scholar,” said Beatrice, looking to make amends, if only to appease her own conscience.

  “If only he had his mind fixed on the schooling and not half of it always off in the woods,” the young maid replied. “I hope you’ll be hard on him, miss. Keep him up to his work.”

  “Did you like school?” asked Beatrice. If she was as sharp as her brother, it seemed a sorry waste that she should spend her life blacking grates and emptying chamber pots.

  “Oh, I loved it, miss,” she said. “But too much learning’s a waste for a girl like me. I’ll be married most likely and a few years in service and a bit o’ money put by means I’ll get to have my pick, rather than have to take potluck. You know how it is?”

  “It can surely never be a waste to feed one’s mind,” said Beatrice, shocked but impressed at the girl’s practical grasp of her prospects.

  “No offense, miss,” she said. “That’s all well and good for a lady like you, but I’m a farrier’s daughter. The husband I’ll be after likely won’t take kindly to a wife with airs of reading books and such.”

  “I think you’ll find most women in pursuit of a husband
share an interest in appearing less educated than they really are,” said Beatrice. “It is why I have a low opinion of them.”

  “Of women, miss?” said Abigail.

  “No, of husbands,” said Beatrice.

  “Maybe I won’t need one if my brother does make something fine of himself with all his schooling,” said Abigail, wistfully. “At least if I kept house for him, I’d know who was in charge—and it wouldn’t be him.”

  Mr. Tillingham and the Professor were seated on the lawn, two dark silhouettes at a white iron table, under the spreading sunlit boughs of an ancient mulberry tree. The tea urn had not yet been brought out, but a stand of small cakes and a silver platter of thinly sliced bread and butter suggested its imminent arrival. Only the white cloth on the folding side table flapped to break the green and silent tableau. Hugh wondered whether the scene before him was an illusion or whether the day before, among the suffering refugees on the docks of Folkestone, had been just a dream, for surely the two scenes were from incompatible worlds.

  When Mr. Tillingham had sent a note that morning inviting Aunt Agatha and her nephews to tea, Hugh had tried gently to suggest that Mr. Tillingham’s exhausted refugees should be allowed quiet.

  “That is precisely why we must go,” said his aunt. “If we decline, there is no knowing whom Mr. Tillingham might invite instead.”

  “Gentlemen, welcome,” said Mr. Tillingham, waving his cane. “I do hope the ladies are en route?” He turned to the Professor and added, “This fine weather does tend to make the bread curl and these days it’s a shame to waste good butter.” The Professor stood to greet them, and Hugh, who had not paid much attention to him during the long trip from Folkestone, saw that he was not as old a man as he had appeared. In fresh clothing and clean-shaven, he presented a compact but upright figure. He wore a dark tweed jacket over a high-collared white shirt and dull red tie, some dun-colored flannels pulled in at the waist, and a pair of soft shoes. That his shirt moved independently about the neck showed that it was too big. Hugh assumed from Mr. Tillingham’s approving glance that he himself had donated the items and was not displeased with the professorial effect.