The Lynmara Legacy

by Catherine Gaskin

  Upstairs her boys, Dan and Timmy, shared the nursery with Judy and Gavin’s children, Alistair and Fiona, jointly watched over by Henson and Judy’s nanny, Tomlin. Henson had been another source of irritation to Nicole in these past days, her constant querying of when they were going back, her talk of the war, her fears for the children. Nicole had given her answers, said they were booked for the end of September, which wasn’t quite true. They were on a waiting list for the end of September. Suddenly, everyone needed to get back to America, and still they tarried here. And Lloyd seemed like a man in a fitful daze. At the moment it would have been a relief for Nicole to go and physically shake him.

  Instead the relief from the tension which had built in the room came from Wilks announcing that tea was served. They all moved towards the dining-room. Nicole thought bitterly that on any other day as fine and sunny as this, they could have had tea in the garden and the sense of gentler times restored and renewed, but now no one wanted to be separated from the wireless set. Andrew and Allan and Ross were already waiting for them. They had spent the afternoon on a tour of Fenton Field and Potters, ostensibly to try to determine just how long they had before the harvest of the barley, but Nicole had the notion that they had been looking at their ancient acres in much the same way that Margaret had been replanning her garden, and Andrew must have been wondering which, if any, of his sons would be left with him to carry it all through. Ross had just put in his full training with the Territorials. All summer long he had spent crawling about in the wet heather of Scotland, and learning how to manoeuvre a tank, and sight its guns. He had come back hard and bone-thin, and the fresh youthfulness that had seemed to Nicole his greatest attraction had died in those weeks. Ross had come out of Cambridge with a brilliant First in Physics, and Gavin was still his idol. He was going on to postgraduate work there, he said, but he always said it as if a question mark lingered in his mind. They were all marking time. Judy and Gavin had arrived unexpectedly at Fenton Field, giving as their reason that they wanted to spend the last few days of Nicole and Lloyd’s visit with them there. The house had been crowded with children, for Allan and Joan had three, and they came over daily to play with their cousins, and another nanny settled into a good gossip session in the nursery, or out in the garden. But the sailing date had come and gone, and Judy and Gavin also lingered, and no one said anything. The Fentons had always been a close-knit family, and they drew closer in those days. Promptly at five o’clock, when they were in the middle of tea, Ross went and turned on the wireless as if he expected an emergency news bulletin. There was none. The Cabinet was in session. No ultimatum had yet been sent. ‘A bloody disgrace,’ Gavin said. ‘They should have signed a pact with Russia instead of Poland. Now there’s Russia and Germany holding hands, ready to carve up Poland, and we’ve got an ally who’s already beaten but just hasn’t lain down yet. Those dithering idiots …’

  And in Warsaw, they were told, the Warsaw radio continued to play the first notes of the Chopin Revolutionary Etude, over and over and over, indicating to the country and the world that they still held control. Long ago Nicole had become sickened by the sound of it, the monotonous, dreadful sound and its implied threat. In those days she came close to hating Chopin.

  She passed the scones and cream to Lloyd, and he took them and managed to thank her and still evade her eyes. And heart-breakingly she remembered how, that afternoon in the orchard long ago after Richard had read to them Rupert Brooke’s poem ‘The Soldier’, Lloyd had lightly dispelled the mood of sombreness that had fallen on them by quoting from another Brooke poem:

  Stands the Church clock at ten to three?

  And is there honey still for tea?

  Now Nicole looked closely once more at her husband’s face, saw its expression of abstraction as if he wrestled with something he could not communicate even to her. She realized that he had contributed nothing to the conversation all afternoon. He might well have been completely alone as he had sat among that group. He was waiting, as they all waited, but it seemed to her that his vigil held an element that was missing in all the others. The question that hovered over their future would be decided for them, and they would be committed, one way or the other, simply because they were English. But she and Lloyd were still free. No commitment would be made for them. But if they were free to go, they were also free to stay. The thought hit Nicole like a sudden touch of death. No ‒ he could not be so mad, he could not be. But she knew this was what she had been refusing to recognize during these weeks in which they had lingered at Fenton Field. And her irritation and anger died because it gave way to the much stronger emotion of fear. She sat silently through the rest of tea, and when it was over, she went upstairs to get a jacket against the growing chill at the end of this September day, slipping down the back stairs, around by the kitchen garden, and found her favourite place at Fenton Field, the edge of the orchard which gave the best view of the house, the lawns, the ancient trees. She sat with her back against the apple tree around which they had gathered that afternoon she remembered best of all here, and gave herself up to the thoughts of the summer just past.

  It had almost, Nicole thought, been the honeymoon she and Lloyd had never had. Margaret Fenton had gladly taken the children, and Henson had happily settled into the nurseries at Fenton Field which had been for so long unused. Lloyd had insisted on engaging a young girl temporarily to help with the extra work having Henson and the children would cause. ‘Just like the old days,’ Henson had purred happily. ‘Nannies always had nursery maids … and it will do Master Dan and Baby so much good to hear proper English spoken.’ So Nicole and Lloyd had been free, once the two lectures he had agreed to give at Cambridge before the end of term were finished. For Nicole it was a time of delicious idleness, a time of lying in bed late in the mornings at their hotel, of wandering through the colleges and along the Backs, of attending Evensong at King’s College. Lloyd had been invited often to dine at High Table, and she was often alone at Judy’s house, and they, between them, filled in the details of the missing years. She helped Judy put Alistair and Fiona to bed and marvelled at the efficiency of the way Judy ran her household ‒ delicious food, thriftily prepared, a choice of inexpensive but good wines, the little dressmaking room in the attic from which Judy’s distinctively chic clothes came. ‘I was damned if I was going to turn into a frumpy don’s wife,’ Judy said. ‘I just had to become professional. I never stop blessing Mother and Father for scraping up the money to send me to Madame Graneau’s. I miss the horses, though. But in a year or two Gavin will be able to afford a pony for the children, and that’ll be fun …’ They were happy evenings, and Nicole was always reluctant to leave when Lloyd came to take her back to the hotel. Often Gavin had returned from dining at his own college, and he urged Lloyd to stay. Nicole had discovered that Gavin’s secret passion was for a rare Highland malt whisky, and a case of it had been her and Lloyd’s present to the McLeods. Gavin sipped it contentedly with Lloyd by the fire as the clock slipped past midnight and the talk flowed on. There was often talk of war. It startled Nicole to learn how closely Lloyd had followed the events of the past years. Between them, he and Gavin had thrashed out the whole tragedy of the Spanish Civil War and Hitler’s rehearsal and trial of his new planes and weapons. They talked of the regime in Italy. Lloyd’s talk even turned to Japan, and Gavin was silent, eager to listen. It had been the only dark shadow on that perfect summer for Nicole, the knowledge that Lloyd had many thoughts he had not wanted to share with her, frightening thoughts, the vague threat to the secure little world she had built up around her. Almost then, she was glad when the time at Cambridge ended, and they moved on to London, where Lloyd was almost daily at St Giles’s. The talk of medical men was something Nicole was used to. Their problems were always so immediate, they had little time for speculation on what had happened in Spain or Austria last year, and even less to conjecture about what might happen to their own lives next year.

  The period in London was another reve
lation for Nicole. Almost daily she was with Charles and they went to the places they had visited when he had taken her around that first summer before Madame Graneau’s. This time, though, she was more considerate of Charles’s leg, and there were many rests on park benches, or the cloisters of the Abbey. She was surprised at Charles’s insistence on visiting all these places, the Tower, Hampton Court, Greenwich. It almost seemed to her that by the intensity with which he gazed at these loved and beautiful buildings, these milestones in the whole progress of English history, he was like a man saying farewell. She began to fear that he was ill, an illness that had nothing to do with his bad leg. But she discovered the source of this nostalgic turning back to the past when they stood before the poppy-lined Tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey. There Charles read the inscription on the black marble silently until he came to the last lines. ‘They laid him among Kings because he hath done good towards God and towards his house.’ This he said almost under his breath, and then, more loudly, ‘One should almost turn now and pray that there won’t be another one to lay here for the next time around.’

  ‘Uncle Charles, you don’t really believe there’s going to be a war? I’ve heard so much talk in Cambridge, and it sickens me …’

  He had looked down at her small white face which suddenly had become peaked with anxiety. ‘No,’ he lied, ‘I really don’t think so. Just an old soldier’s talk, my dear. We’re always rambling on … Tell you what. I’ll get the car and we’ll go and have lunch on the river somewhere … Marlow, maybe. We’ll sit out in the sun and watch the swans go by.’ They had done that, and found much to talk and laugh about, and all the time she had known that he had lied.

  One of the most joyful encounters of that time in London had been at the Tate Gallery. Nicole had the afternoon to herself, had intended to do some shopping, and at the last minute had, on impulse, directed the taxi to the Tate Gallery. She had wandered its halls realizing that now she saw what she had been unable to see five years ago. The process of education had been subtle and insidious, visiting exhibitions at Harvard and at the Boston galleries, flicking through and somehow learning from the art magazines to which Lloyd subscribed, or which had been loaned by some other member of the family; the Fentons were thrifty about magazine subscriptions, and saw that what they did subscribe to was circulated widely among the family. So the paintings Nicole saw now had an air of familiarity about them that had been totally lacking on that visit years ago. It seemed hardly a startling thing, then, when the hand fell lightly on her arm, and she turned to look into the face of Gerry Agar.

  ‘Glad to see you made it all by yourself this time.’

  ‘Gerry!’ Without thought she put her arms about his neck. ‘Oh, I’ve been ringing and ringing your flat, and all your butler will say is …’

  ‘Yes, I know … Sir Gerald is abroad, and we do not know when to expect him home.’

  ‘Are you always so mysterious?’

  ‘Saves a lot of boring explanations, dear girl ‏‒ and saves me from a lot of boring parties. Old Gerry is no longer the Deb’s Delight. Even the saddest of mothers with daughters longest on the shelf have given up on me.’

  ‘You’re not married?’

  ‘No one will have me, dear girl. I’ve tried …’

  ‘You haven’t tried … You were always the most attractive man I knew.’

  ‘Was I? Funny you married Fenton then, wasn’t it? Or did I get so absent-minded I forgot to ask you myself?’

  She laughed. ‘Never serious, are you?’

  ‘Never ‒ too much trouble. Have you had enough of looking this afternoon? What about the Savoy? That was where we went last time after the Tate. Do you remember …?’

  ‘I don’t think you’re at all absent-minded. And I bored you to death talking about Lloyd.’

  ‘Then come and bore me some more, dear girl. I’m longing for all my old chums to see me with the girl who turned into the most ravishing woman in London …’ He talked in the same vein, lightly, flippantly, all the way to the Savoy.

  Then when their drinks came, he settled himself back in his chair. ‘Now ‒ tell me about Boston and this man you’ve married, and your kids, and all the rest of it.’

  She shrugged. ‘What can there be to tell? I’m just a suburban matron, Gerry … looking after Lloyd, the house, the boys. Trying to practise every day, and not always succeeding. Trying to learn a bit … being sorry I didn’t finally get to Radcliffe. But in Boston having been at the Paris Conservatoire almost makes up for not having a college degree. It would be better if I had both. The Fentons are a rather formidably intelligent lot. They have libraries that they use, and the older ones have some good pictures. There have been some Fenton bequests to Boston galleries which some of the family rather wish they had back now. One of the uncles collected a few Renoirs. Some of the family haven’t forgiven him for leaving them to a gallery instead of inside the family. The younger ones would like to splash out a little ‒ Matisse, Modigliani, Picasso … your sort of thing, Gerry. But none of them have any spare money. But they talk about them …’

  ‘So you were in the Tate today. Doing what?’

  She laughed. ‘Why else would I be there except to enjoy myself? Perhaps I learned a little … One always can.’

  He questioned her further about the life she had; she found herself talking about the winters of concerts and music, the summers walking the sand dunes of the Cape, the life lived among the Fentons, the exchanges of books and magazines, the borrowing of tennis rackets and sailing boats. ‘They know I’m useless at sport, so they leave me alone on that,’ she said. ‘There’s a family joke that’s grown up about my reluctance to prance around a tennis court, or get on a horse. “She has to take care of her hands, you know.” But still, they respect that fact that I have to have the piano. I’ve made friends with the very oldest of the clan ‒ Great-Uncle Pete. He has a house about a mile away on the Cape. I go over there every day to practise. He keeps the Bechstein tuned for me. He likes to sit outside on the porch and listen. He pretends to read the Wall Street Journal, but I notice he never turns a page. The family thinks it’s a very odd friendship because he’s always quarrelling with all the rest of them. I like him.’

  Gerry nodded. ‘I rather like the sound of all your Fentons.’

  Nicole suddenly pressed him. ‘Why don’t you come over, Gerry? Uncle Charles has ‒ three times. He seems to like it. Look ‒ why don’t you come to dinner tonight? It’s just Lloyd and myself and Uncle Charles. Of course you must know that Aunt Iris won’t see me …’

  He shook his head, and she was aware of a sense of withdrawal. ‘Would have loved to do that, dear girl, but I’m off to Paris tonight. Got a few things to see to …’ She had the sense that the Paris visit had been decided upon just at that moment; Gerry had been an attentive and flattering listener to her recital of the life she lived in Boston and among the Fentons, but when she had tried to draw him into it, he had pulled back. She didn’t know why.

  As they left the American Bar of the Savoy she knew that several people stared at them. Gerry acknowledged the curt nod of one man wearing a military uniform, who, after giving that greeting, rather ostentatiously turned his back. ‘A cousin of mine,’ Gerry said briefly. ‘We always were a devoted family.’

  That night at dinner she related the meeting to Lloyd and Charles, told them about the visit to the Savoy, her invitation to Gerry to join them for dinner. She saw that Charles looked rather uncomfortable. ‘Perhaps it’s just as well he couldn’t come, my dear.’

  ‘Why ever not? What’s wrong with Gerry? Oh, I know all that nonsense about him playing ducks and drakes with a few dreary debs. But surely that can’t matter any more?’

  ‘It isn’t that. There’s been … well, there are some rather odd stories about Gerald Agar. He’s keeping rather strange company ‒ for an Englishman. Always showing up in Berlin. They say he advises Goering about his art collection. There’s even a story that he’s visited Berchtesgad
en, but I couldn’t really be sure of that.’

  ‘You mean,’ Lloyd said, ‘that he hob-nobs with the Nazis?’

  ‘More or less. Can’t say what makes him do it. A man like that ‒ plenty for him here in England. Of course he’s no fool where money’s concerned. I’ve heard rumours that he’s into armaments in a very big way. And South African gold mining.’ Charles looked uncomfortable. ‘Well ‒ I’ve never understood how these fellows make money. I just wouldn’t like to think it was made at the expense of this country …’

  Suddenly Nicole was aware of the curious glances that had come their way when they had sat in the Savoy, and Gerry’s quick excuse to avoid having dinner with them. The glances that had then seemed merely curious, now seemed hostile. She ate the rest of her meal in silence, and knew that Gerry had wanted no embarrassment for her, but had been unable to resist that one swift return to the summer of five years ago. But one never did go back, and they both knew it; it was only make-believe for a few hours. She knew then that Gerry would never make that visit to Boston. She had a sad and unreasoning intuition that she would never see him again.

  Gerry Agar did not go to Paris that night. He remained alone in his flat, having given his manservant instructions that he was to tell any telephone caller that he was not at home. Not that there were any but a few expected callers these days. Many people tended to look the other way when they saw Gerald Agar ‒ especially since Munich, and since one photograph had appeared in a London paper of him witnessing a Nürnberg rally. He ate his meal alone, and afterwards sat listening to a Beethoven string quartet on records, smoking a cigar, sipping his brandy and staring around the room at the pictures he had gathered there. He thought of the luminous beauty of the young woman he had been with this afternoon; he remembered her as he had seen her first, her expression thoughtful and withdrawn as she had gazed at the pictures in the gallery. He wished he might have walked those Cape dunes with her, might have sat with the old man on the porch and listened to her play the piano. But he knew he never would.