This left a lot of scope for a man like himself, of course. There was no denying that the war had been the making of him, but a man had to capitalise on his assets. When peace came he would have all the cards in his hand. See Eithne’s face then!
When Neville arrived home that evening, however, Eithne was in no state for discussion.
‘She’s gone,’ she said. ‘She didn’t even last the day.’ His proud and beautiful wife sat slumped at the kitchen table, her head in her hands. ‘Oh, I miss Winnie! How could she leave me?’
Chapter Ten
Every time a horse is unbridled, the bit should be carefully washed and dried, and the leather wiped, to keep them sweet, as well as the girths and saddle, the latter being carefully dried and beaten with a switch before it is again put on. In washing a horse’s feet after a day’s work, the master should insist upon the legs and feet being washed thoroughly with a sponge until the water flows over them, and then rubbed with a brush until quite dry.
Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management
Winnie had fled back to Kent. When she arrived at Swaffley, however, she found the village deep in mourning. Lord Elbourne had been killed in action three months earlier, leading his unit into battle at Ypres. The big house was closed up and nearly all the servants gone. His wife and little boys had moved away, and nobody knew if they would ever come back. Most of the villagers were out of a job.
Winnie had moved back into her old bedroom above the stables, a screened-off portion of the bigger room where her brothers used to sleep. Her father had remained living there; he had nowhere else to go. Down in the yard the weeds were already pushing through the cobblestones – fat hen, thistles. A few weeks of neglect, and nature was taking over. The flowerbeds of the great house were choked with nettles. With nobody to tend it, life reverted to chaos. Only servants could keep it at bay. Winnie thought of the dust gathering in the house she had left behind. The home she had left behind. That she would still be living in if that thing hadn’t happened.
Swaffley was no longer her home; she had lived in fear of her father and had escaped into service at the earliest opportunity. Where else, however, could she go? She was utterly alone in the world. At night she lay in bed, pining for the sound of the trains.
She could still hardly believe what Alwyne had done. It was beyond her poor brain. Why had the man pretended to be blind? As some sort of horrible joke? Again and again she went over the times she had spent with Alwyne. There were some things she couldn’t bear to think about. Never, ever could she think about them. They made her want to die.
Other events, however, swam to the surface. All those books she had read to him, stumbling over the words when she should have been polishing the cutlery. Alwyne could have read them himself! Why hadn’t he told her his secret? She would have kept mum; she was utterly to be trusted. They had a bond together – she’d thought they had a bond together. She had even grown fond of him. He had told her he loved her! And all the time he had been taking advantage of her in the cruellest way imaginable.
Could Ralph have been wrong? Yet there had been something odd about Alwyne, something furtive. Now she remembered, there had been moments when he had seemed to look at her – to actually look at her – from behind his spectacles. Oh, she wanted to crawl under a stone!
For at times Winnie felt she was going mad – she who was the sane one, who had held her family together after her mother died, and looked after her brothers. Her father noticed nothing. He didn’t ask her why she had come home; he had no interest. He drank, and this took up all his time. He sat slumped in his chair, drinking all day, and then he went to the pub and drank all night. His condition had shocked her; she hadn’t seen him since Christmas. It was hard to believe she had ever been frightened of him. Once he had been a powerful man but now he seemed to have shrunk. The loss of the hunters had broken his heart and Winnie should have felt sorry for him but she just thought: why don’t my brothers come and look after him? Why does it always have to be me?
A new hardness had entered Winnie’s soul. Men were all the same; they bullied and tricked you, they humiliated you. And if they weren’t doing that they were drinking themselves into a stupor. They deserved the war.
Winnie took refuge in the stables. Her father hadn’t set foot in them since the requisitions officer had arrived. The floor was littered with the dust of the horses’ droppings. She sat in Dulcie’s stall, its basket still stuffed with mouldy hay. She sat there and tried not to blame Alwyne. God was punishing her for her sin. It wasn’t Alwyne’s fault; it was her own for goading him on. He had simply taken advantage of her need to be wanted and now she had lost her true family, Ralph and his mother, who had meant the world to her. She missed them deeply – the other lodgers too, despite their funny ways. What were they doing now? How were they coping after she had left them in the lurch? Did anybody cook Mrs O’Malley’s bloater? Come to think of it, did bloaters need to be cooked?
Those hot August days, Winnie moved around in a daze. She couldn’t think about the future, not yet. She cleaned her father’s rooms and helped him home from the pub; she cooked him meals. The stable yard was silent. Beyond it the house loomed through the trees, its shutters closed. What was going to happen to it? Would it be sold? Only Mrs Maitland, the housekeeper, remained, with her son, and the lame groundsman who had nowhere else to go. Winnie had presumed that the aristocracy led a charmed life, that nothing could touch them. The war, however, proved that they were flesh and blood like everybody else. A shell had no respect for a title. Perhaps Alwyne was right: an era had come to an end. One way or another, this war would destroy the ruling class, and like Lord Elbourne they would be gone for ever. ‘We have to seize the moment, Winnie, when the enemy is weak, to sweep the capitalist class system out of existence!’
Winnie remembered the ash flying as Alwyne waved his arms. In the twilight she sat at the window, watching the darkness thicken. She gazed at the black clots of the yew trees, the black bulk of the unlit house. A barn owl flew out, like the last, departing ghost. When she was a child the estate was filled with people and animals. Now they were all gone – all but her father, racked with coughing, mourning his horses.
Winnie sat there, waiting. Days turned into weeks, and nothing happened. As the fox barked, she remembered her blushes when Mr Turk cooked steak for dinner and she sat on the best chair, the wetness seeping through. Out in the fields the full moon came and went.
Winnie waited for the blood to appear. The corn was harvested with the help of Bismarck, the one remaining farm horse. She collected her father from the King’s Head, holding his arm as they made their way home across the pasture that had been ploughed up for potatoes. ‘Don’t ever leave me,’ he said, in his piteous drunkard’s voice. ‘You’ll always be my little girl.’
She waited, but by September Winnie could pretend to herself no longer. She was expecting a child.
Chapter Eleven
Up the road we staggered, shells bursting around us. A man stopped dead in front of me, and exasperated I cursed him and butted him with my knee. Very gently he said ‘I’m blind, sir’, and turned to show me his eyes and nose torn away by a piece of shell. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry sonny’ I said. ‘Keep going on the hard part’, and left him staggering back in his darkness.
Lieutenant Edwin Campion Vaughan, 8th Royal Warwicks
‘A hotel?’ Eithne stared up at her husband. She was midway through pulling off his boot; it was a nightly ritual between them. ‘You want to turn our house into a hotel?’
Neville, sitting on the bed, nodded.
‘And next door,’ he said.
‘Next door? What have you done with next door?’
‘Bought it.’
Eithne sat back on her heels. Neville wriggled his boot, to remind her, but she was too stunned to move.
‘When did you do that?’ she asked.
‘Last week.’
‘You bought the freehold?’
Neville nodded
. ‘They were glad to get shot of it. Tenants been causing them nothing but trouble.’
‘And I suppose that surveyor of yours said it was riddled with rot.’
Neville grinned. ‘Riddled.’ He put his foot in front of her face and moved it from side to side like a metronome.
Eithne pulled off his boot. ‘Well I never,’ she said.
‘Best investment we’ll ever make, my sweet. This war’ll be over by Christmas, you mark my words. Property like that’ll be worth a fortune.’
‘But what’s this about a hotel?’
‘Remember that Yankee boy?’ said Neville. ‘My thinking entirely. The old ways are dead and gone. You won’t get the servants any more, not now those girls have got out and about, driving buses and whatnot. Not now they’ve got a taste for it. They’re going to be typists and suchlike. Got the bit between their teeth. Look at those suffragette ladies – catch them mopping up Ada O’Malley’s wee-wee.’
Eithne unlaced his other boot. He was right, of course. A month had passed since the Daphne episode. Another maid had been engaged but she had lasted only three days before marching out of the house.
‘They want the independence, see,’ said Neville. ‘There’s going to be a lot of women around with no men to marry ’em, so they won’t be setting up a home. But they’ll be needing a place to stay. A residential hotel – respectable establishment, nice décor, piped hot water to every room, handy for connections to the Continent because these are career ladies, they’ll be off in their motor cars, they’ll be catching the train, they’ll be gadding about all over the place. Gentlemen, too – business types, professionals. No riff-raff.’ His voice throbbed with excitement. ‘I’m getting an architect to draw up the plans. We’ll knock through the wall next door and that’ll be twelve bedrooms, we’ll fit a modern kitchen and put a dining room on the ground floor, the big margin’s in the consumables, three hundred per cent mark-up, there’s a lot of profit to be made out of food.’
‘You’d know about that,’ said Eithne, pulling off his boot.
‘Been talking to my customers, hotels and restaurants around here, been getting a few tips. Nothing that I didn’t know already, of course, I got the know-how here.’ He tapped his nose. ‘It’s instincts, see? There’s a whole new class of customer being born, and I plan to get my foot in the door. We’re looking at a return of twenty per cent per year, we’re sitting on a bloody gold mine!’ His voice softened. ‘Come here.’
Eithne was kneeling on the floor. He took her shoulders and pulled her towards him.
‘Come here, my love.’
Eithne shifted, reluctantly.
‘We’ll call it the Continental Hotel,’ he said. ‘Like it? Gay Paree, a touch of sophistication.’
‘You’ve worked all this out?’
‘And that’s just the start.’
‘The start?’
‘You set up a brand, then people know where they are. Guaranteed quality. Look at Lipton’s. Sixty grocery shops they got, all over London, and more opening. Look at the Lyons Corner House. Start small and think big!’ He moved Eithne up, so her head rested against his chest. ‘I’m thinking, in ten years’ time there’ll be a Continental Hotel in every major town.’ She felt his hand fiddling with his trouser buttons. ‘So what do you think of your husband now?’ he murmured.
His hand grasped her hair. His member sprang up, red and raw. Gently he lowered her head, guiding her down on to him. Her mouth closed over his flesh.
He gasped. ‘That’s the sort of man you married,’ he muttered.
Steadying her between his legs, he moved her head up and down. He gripped her hair so tightly it hurt.
‘Oh yes …’ he muttered. ‘Oh dear God.’
As she sucked, Eithne heard a voice within her head. It came from far away, from another era – her son’s croaking voice, just broken.
‘When the war is over and the sword at last we sheathe
I’m going to keep a jelly-fish and listen to it breathe.’
She squeezed her eyes shut.
*
Eithne wiped her mouth with the flannel. She said: ‘You could have told me before. It’s my money too.’
‘Don’t come all sarky with me.’ Neville paused in his undressing. ‘Where’s your spirit, woman?’
‘When are you thinking to start?’ she asked.
‘When the plans are drawn up.’
‘What about my lodgers?’
‘What about them?’
‘I can’t just throw them out on the street.’
Neville pulled off his vest. ‘Ask yourself this, my pumpkin. Would they show you the same consideration? Eh?’
Eithne didn’t reply. She moved away from the wash-stand and stood at the mantelpiece.
‘It’s dog eat dog in this world,’ said Neville. ‘Not realised that yet?’
She looked at her husband in the mirror. ‘Think that, do you?’
‘You owe them bugger all,’ he said. ‘They’re a bunch of blooming parasites. Had it soft for too long.’
The marble mantel was dusted with soot. Eithne touched it with her finger. All this dirt, who was ever going to clean it away?
‘Can’t get a maid, they scare them off,’ said Neville. ‘And is it any wonder?’
Eithne wiped her finger on her skirt. Where would they go? Mr Spooner was just starting to improve – very slowly, but he was showing signs of recovery. And how could Alwyne cope, a blind man alone in the world? He appeared to have no family. Neville had no idea what those two men had been through, fighting for their country. Then, nor had she.
Love me, love my lodgers. They were more than just her livelihood.
‘Anyway, they don’t like me,’ said Neville.
‘That’s not true.’
‘Your son said so.’
‘He didn’t mean it. He’s just …’ She couldn’t explain.
‘That boy needs to do a good day’s work.’
‘He helps me here. I couldn’t do without him.’
‘Needs to get out from under your apron strings. Too bloody mollycoddled, if you want my opinion.’
Her husband sat there, a big man on her bed. The room, with its wallpaper of cabbage roses, seemed to press in around her. Neville had a point, of course – about Ralph, about the lodgers – but she didn’t like his tone. He sat there as if he owned the place. He did own the place.
Tonight, he looked like a cuckoo in the nest, sitting there with his great hairy thighs planted on her eiderdown. She wanted him to kiss her and tell her how beautiful she was. She wanted him to take her dancing. There was something presumptuous in his manner nowadays. And it still hurt, where he had pulled her hair.
Chapter Twelve
The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
This Eastertide call into mind the men,
Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
Have gathered them and will do never again.
Philip Edward Thomas
The German army was in retreat. By mid-October their lines had been broken along a twenty-mile front; the newspapers were optimistic that peace was in sight.
In Palmerston Road, too, an era was ending. Next door, the tenants were evicted. A ragged bunch, they emerged like refugees from their own war of attrition. Though they had caused trouble in the past, Ralph was sorry to see them go, pushing their handcarts along the street and spitting at the enforcement officer. It was the beginning of the end.
‘Our turn next,’ said Alwyne. The lodgers had been told the news, and given their notice. Mrs Turk, however, was allowing them to stay on until Christmas, out of the goodness of her heart.
For this, no doubt, they were grateful. Nobody spoke about it, though, as if by keeping quiet they hoped it might never happen. As far as Ralph knew, they had made no alternative arrangements. A listless air hung over the house. Fog rolled in from the river; it permeated the rooms and chilled their bones. Ralph and his mother had given up their battle against the
soot; it was hard enough work keeping people fed and the fires going, now the nights were drawing in. Besides, in two months the place would be torn apart. What was the point?
Ralph tried to goad Alwyne into action. ‘Now’s our last chance!’ he said. ‘If you tell the police they’ll put him in prison and you can stay here, everyone can stay here. Don’t you understand?’
‘Why don’t you do it, if you’re so keen?’
‘You know I can’t. My mother will never speak to me again.’
‘And if I do it they’ll ask me for proof, and then they’ll find out I can see and put me into prison. You really want that on your conscience?’
‘You should think of the greater good.’
Alwyne smiled. ‘Grow up, dear boy.’
Ralph seethed, in a fury of frustration. How the man irritated him – the stink of his cigarettes, the stained clothes, the sloth! The lisp, as if his tongue were too thick for his mouth. His championing of the working class was a charade. Winnie had slaved away and Alwyne had never lifted a finger to help. In fact, his attitude towards his fellow men seemed to be one of thoroughgoing contempt. Being blind, Alwyne admitted quite freely, was an enjoyable experience. People did things for him and saved him the trouble of doing them himself. Worse than that, he seemed to despise them for it. ‘Having a secret’s most gratifying,’ he said. ‘A feeling of completely unearned power. You should try it yourself.’
No wonder his wife had left him. Ralph had discovered this during one of their talks. Back in Bolton, apparently, Alwyne had been a married man, with a wife and children. His wife, however, had finally lost patience with him and walked out; there had been no contact between them for years.
What made it aggravating was Alwyne’s openness about it all. The man had no shame; it was like kicking against a brick wall. He even offered perfectly reasonable explanations for his behaviour, as if he were talking about a laboratory specimen.
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