Margaret removed her glasses, and rubbed her weary eyes. She needed glasses almost constantly these days. A year of war had aged her in ways she hadn’t thought possible.
Wilks tapped on the door and entered. It was strange how some of the old customs survived the great changes. Gone were his striped trousers and black coat. These days he wore a sort of all-purpose jacket of grey cotton, equally suitable, he had said when he bought it, for answering the door, or plucking a chicken. Margaret sometimes wondered if in fact it wasn’t Wilks, rather than herself, who held the remnants of this family together. Wilks and, in her own way, Henson, who still insisted on teaching the children the manners of a more gracious time, which now seemed so far away it might have been a century ago.
Wilks made his usual half-bow, which wasn’t at all incongruous even in that ill-fitting grey jacket. ‘Lord Manstone to see you, Ma’am. I’ve left him in the hall. I’m afraid the drawing-room isn’t ‒’
Margaret rose. Wilks had to be as aware as she who Lord Manstone was. People like Wilks and Henson had such excellent memories for such details.
‘Please show him in here, Wilks. And I wonder? ‒ do we have any biscuits for tea?’
‘Miss Judith baked this morning, Ma’am. I’ll prepare a tray, shall I?’
‘That would be nice, Wilks. Thank you.’
Margaret had, of course, never met John Manstone. But she expected the good looks of the man who came into the small, cluttered room. She remembered the photographs of Nicole and his son, David, during the brief, notorious engagement six years ago. The father was an older, leaner, more worn version of that smiling golden youth of the pictures. He was wearing Army uniform, and the insignia of a Lieutenant-Colonel.
‘Mrs Fenton ‒ good of you to see me. Perhaps I should have telephoned. But I came on an impulse. It’s awfully hard to put an impulse into words on the telephone. I hoped I might see Nicole.’
Margaret was strangely touched by the way he said her name ‒ not as if she were the strange and wilful girl who had left such chaos and hurt behind her when she left England; he said it simply, gently. At once, when only these few words had been spoken, she liked him.
She gestured him to a chair, making room on the big round table in the centre of the room for his cap by simply sweeping aside the clutter. ‘I wish I could say she’d see you, Lord Manstone. It isn’t just you ‒’ She turned to him swiftly, in an appeal for him to understand. ‘You see, since Lloyd was killed, she doesn’t really see anyone. I could send for her, and I’m sure she’d come. But I couldn’t say she’d see you, or hear anything you said … She is … she’s frozen. She refuses to accept what’s happened. By not admitting it …’ She shook her head, ‘Oh, I’m sure you know. People like Nicole feel everything … feel too much.’
He nodded. ‘I’ve always known that about her. She has a strange power in that small body. One can see … yes, I suppose one can see how she might wreck herself.’
He had gone far beyond Margaret’s vague suggestion. She looked at him in alarm. ‘But in time … everyone accepts in time.’
‘Only what we choose to, Mrs Fenton. Do you think I might go and try to find her? Perhaps she might talk to me if she didn’t know beforehand that I’ve …’
She sighed. ‘Perhaps that might work. Whatever way you wish, Lord Manstone. If you could only get her to talk … we’d be grateful, I do assure you.’
‘Where would I find her?’
She shrugged. ‘Frankly, I don’t know. We’re almost finished harvesting. We do it partly by machine, and partly by hand, with whatever help we can get from anywhere. But we’ve not let Nicole do any of that. It’s hard work, and while she’s very healthy, she’s not strong ‒ you understand. But she has some amazing gift with animals. Andrew, my husband, says he doesn’t quite understand it. Nicole goes and does almost anything she wants with the horses ‒ and yet she says she’s frightened to death of them. That can’t be the truth ‒ they always know. And the pigs, and the hens. Can you imagine someone like Nicole milking cows, and cleaning out the sties? Well, she does. So you’ll find her ‒ well, somewhere. The stables, the sties. I notice she spends as long as possible out of doors. It’s quite dark these evenings before she comes in …’
‘I’ll find her, I’m sure. Thank you for telling me.’ He left his cap behind, and seemed to go by instinct towards the kitchen, where Wilks directed him to the stables. ‘It’s all there, m’lord. The stables, the cow byres, and beyond that the sties and the hen-runs …’
Wilks clucked a little as he looked at the tray he had laid out. Well, he hadn’t poured the water on the tea-leaves yet, so it wasn’t wasted.
Not even Margaret’s description had prepared him for what he saw. She was in the middle of the sties, raking the manure. On one side the individual sties were immaculate, hosed out, fresh straw in place. The others were waiting her attention. He heard the tuneless sound of her voice as he came nearer, a weird hoarse song that she chanted to the animals.
‘Nicole …’
She turned around. For a moment she seemed unable to focus clearly on him. Then a croaking whisper, ‘You!’
He moistened his dry lips. ‘I came because ‒’
She flourished the rake at him. ‘Don’t tell me why you came. I don’t need to ask. I know too well. You came to offer your sympathy. I don’t want it. You hear ‒ I don’t want it! Why don’t you go away? You can’t do any good. No good at all, you hear! None! Go ‒ go away!’
‘Nicole, please. I thought just this once we might talk ‒’
‘Talk! What’s there to talk about? Lloyd’s dead. What am I supposed to do? Sit there and drink sherry with you, and listen to you say nice things about him? What the hell do I care about that? You can’t do anything. He’s dead. Words won’t bring him back. Why did you waste your time? Haven’t you got a job to do? Everyone’s got a job to do these days, even an Ashleigh. Oh, yes ‒ I’m sorry. David did a splendid job. A hero. He knew what he was about. But don’t ‒ don’t waste any time standing around here offering pretty words. Get on with your job ‒ whatever it is. Get on with England’s job. Stupid, isn’t it? Neither Lloyd nor I are English. Neither are our children. But here we are. Landed with England’s war. Stuck. I’ve lost a husband ‒ a lover. They’ve lost a father. And we don’t even belong! I’ve never belonged. Nor did my mother. And yet here we are, my children and I, and we’ve lost something we can’t ever have again because Lloyd had some notion about England. Some crazy, wayward notion ‒’
‘Nicole, I’m not trying to say he’ll come back, or he’ll be replaced. I’m not trying to say you’ll forget. That it’ll pass. I just … well, I just thought I’d come and say that he’d saved David, he’d given a certain kind of skill, and you should try to think of the other men he did the same thing for. His notion of England? All right ‒ we need every kind of notion there is. Whatever draws men, whatever keeps them here, giving skills like his, they’re needed. Every one of them. I came here because ‒’
She gestured again with the rake, and he was once more aware that she had kept the fence of the sty between them. While she had raged at him, the big sow had come to rub herself against the dirty trousers she wore.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, spare me the graceful speeches. So, he saved David. I hope he saved a lot of other men. That’s what he was there for. I never understood why he had to do it, but that was why he was there. Yes, so you still have your David, and you want to say thank you. I know ‒ Lloyd told me he was badly wounded. He isn’t going to be that beautiful, golden boy any more, but you still have him. You have him … and I have your thanks. It’s not enough. It’s not nearly enough.’
‘You didn’t know, then? I thought perhaps … well, I came over really to say how thankful I’d been to your husband even though in the end his work was lost. I sat there in the hospital for five days. I thought I might see my only child live to be a vegetable. But he spoke to me. He even joked. He was going to be all right. That’s wha
t I came to thank you for.’
‘What do you mean ‒ was? He’s all right. He’s going to live. Lloyd said he was going to live.’
‘He would have. He would have lived quite fully because of what your husband was able to do. But you didn’t know they both died in that bombing, Nicole? … you didn’t know that? I supposed you did. Why you would, I don’t know. So many dead these days … why should you pay attention, at a time like this, to the newspapers?’
‘David? …’ she said softly, wonderingly, as if trying out his name. ‘David is dead? Only about ten people died in that bombing of the hospital.’
‘Lloyd stayed with him. His head was sandbagged to keep him from moving. Lloyd stayed with him. I suppose a nurse could have done that, but Lloyd stayed with him. Anyone who could walk was sent to the shelters in the basement. I went down there. And upstairs, David and Lloyd died.’
‘Lloyd ‒ Lloyd and David. Beautiful, golden David. He was meant to live. All these young men were meant to live. Oh, God, what are we going to do without all these beautiful young men? What … what …?’ She shook her head frantically, as if to clear a vision that had become blurred. The rake dropped from her hand, and the big sow scrambled back against the rail, snorting with surprise and anger. She took a few steps towards Manstone. The skin of her face seemed to cleave to the bones, so that, for these moments, it could have been an old, old woman who looked at him, an old woman with a stick-thin body, and black hair, an old woman who had once been beautiful. She reached the rails and her cracked hands with the ragged fingernails went out towards him. ‘David … David and Lloyd.’ He could hardly hear the words through the tightness of her throat. Before she slumped forward, he saw the first shimmer of tears.
Later that evening, she miscarried of her third child.
Chapter Five
The autumn passed into the dark short days of winter. Strength returned slowly to Nicole; it seemed to her that her body had aged very swiftly in those terrible days following Lloyd’s death, and the strength of which she had boasted had gone with the child she had lost. She felt herself to be useless, a burden on the little group at Fenton Field, and yet she seemed to have neither the will or determination to leave. She clung to this place and this family which in the end had been Lloyd’s strongest loyalty. At times she doubted that she would ever return to America.
As the winter went on and she came out of her cocoon of self-absorption, out of the blank indifference of her first shock and grief, she woke to the fact that a new war had begun. While she had lain in bed or sat before the fire in the sitting-room, listlessly trying to mend and darn, new maps had appeared on the kitchen wall. As the weeks went by and she began to read the newspapers again to be able to recognize what the maps represented, she saw what the new war was about. Once Hitler had conceded that the Battle of Britain had been lost by his Luftwaffe and the invasion postponed indefinitely, he had simply turned to an age-old strategy. His submarines would starve Britain into surrender. Now Andrew’s maps included one of the whole North Atlantic, that sickeningly long, incredibly dangerous journey which merchant seamen must make time and time again so that Britain could stay alive. With the French Navy lost the British Navy was insufficient to provide enough escorts. The convoys were herded together, chased about by a few destroyers, and the Germans learned to signal their sightings, gather their own forces into the infamous ‘wolfpacks’ for their attacks. They were stunningly successful.
The letters from Boston arrived at Fenton Field. ‘Nicole, surely now you must come back. There’s still time. Uncle Pete can still get you a passage, and in any case most of the ships heading west are in ballast. They don’t mind having passengers. But it has to be an American ship. It’s too dangerous any other way … Now, you’re to get in touch with…’
Nicole never took any notice of whom she was to get in touch with. She wrote to Liz to rent the house in Cambridge. ‘I wanted to keep it open and free in case Lloyd should decide he’d done enough ‒ or America came into the war and we all went back. I can’t face either the journey or that house yet. Will you store the personal things? ‒ you’ll know which ones. And will you keep on having MacGinty? He’s so old now, he can’t have much longer. And try to find someone to use the house on the Cape during the summers ‒ friends. I don’t want it rented to strangers. It’s a Fenton house. It has to be kept for the boys. Perhaps I should sell the Cambridge house instead of renting. Talk to Sam about it, will you, Liz? He’s pretty good in the real estate market.’ She added as an afterthought, ‘I don’t think I’ll ever live in that house again.’
And yet what house, and where? At Fenton Field she was in a group thrown together by the fortunes of war. It was impossible now to imagine the ending of this war, this war in which Britain had nearly gone under, and might yet do so. So why did she wait here, linger on? The reason for staying was gone. And her children were beginning to grow up. Where would they grow up, and with whom? Constantly she asked the question, and each time put the possible answers from her mind.
Slowly, and with a certain mechanical efficiency which sought to spare her body from the results of the punishment she had inflicted on it, she went back to some of the chores she had demanded. ‘Nice to see you here again, Mrs Fenton,’ Ben said on the first morning of that winter that Margaret had permitted her to go back to helping with the milking. The wound that had seemed fairly slight when Ben had returned from the voyages back and forth to Dunkirk had proved troublesome and resistant to treatment. An operation was scheduled when free space opened up at the hospital. Ben walked with a limp, and had been turned down by the Army Medical Board. Nicole had heard a story of someone in the pub commenting, ‘Half your luck’, when Ben had passed on the news. And Ben had knocked him down and been barred from the place for six months. That had been simply a gesture. The landlord let him back in again inside of a week. To the landlord of The Falcon Ben ranked with any man who had returned wounded from Dunkirk, uniform or not. It didn’t matter that he was under age for drinking either.
It was strange to Nicole to wake from her stupor of grief and find Roosevelt elected for a third term. She found herself echoing sentiments she read in the newspapers. ‘Surely now America will come in …’ But the British were still paying in precious and dwindling dollars for every ton of food or war material they bought and transporting it across the Atlantic in their own ships. She tried to stop herself from saying such things. It sounded too much as if she herself was not American. The darkest, coldest winter days of February brought the news that the US Senate had signed the Lend-Lease bill. Nicole had a long letter from Uncle Pete, weighing the pros and cons of this action and urging her once again to get on one of the few ships available to her. ‘While there’s still time, my girl. Don’t know what that hothead Roosevelt may do, and if we come in, then no ship is safe on the Atlantic.’
She read Uncle Pete’s words and did nothing about them.
And from the short dark days of February, the days lengthened into the longer twilights of March, and Andrew had a map up on the kitchen wall of another area of the world none of them knew about. They had to learn the names, the locations. It was a map of North Africa. It happened that there the British at first faced the Italians, and in January they had taken Tobruk. Then in February a man named Rommel came to take charge and brought his Afrika Korps. The whole North African campaign was more than another sphere of war to those at Fenton Field; Ross had been sent to North Africa. Ross, still young, and as old as war can make men, was already a major and had received his MC. And, as always, the lengthening days of March gave way to the chilly promise of April. And that in turn produced the budding of the hawthorn blossoms of May in the hedgerows. Nicole was returned in memory to the very first days, those lovely days of May, she had spent at Fenton Field.
2
In the house in Laurel Canyon Anna had the news, through the clipping service, of the death in Maidstone, England, of Dr Lloyd Fenton. The Boston papers carried a number of
news items on it, and a number of obituaries. None of the items said anything about the plans of Dr Fenton’s widow.
Anna found it hard to think of Nicole as a widow. She acknowledged that she herself had been widowed at an earlier age, but then she had never felt for Stephen as she had evidence of what Nicole felt for Lloyd Fenton. She waited through each week for more news ‒ news that Nicole was returning with her two sons to Boston. Nothing came, and Anna began to doubt the efficiency of the clipping service. She went to the public library and checked herself all recent issues of Boston papers. There was no news.
From her own happiness with this man, Michael Ovrensky, whom she had married, for the first time she knew real pity for her daughter. Often, in those days, she stared at Mike as he took his leave of her and wondered how she would stand the advent of his death. She kept turning the thought aside, and still it persisted. This was like no other feeling she had ever had. Once she had, as a young girl, loved madly and without reasoning, a man called John Manstone. After that, she had given love to a man called Stephen Rainard because he had loved her and restored her. And then, beyond what people called the prime of her life, she had been given the gift of Michael Ovrensky, a man from her past, who had been a boy she had loved, a man she now admired, respected, and with whom she found a sweet fulfilment of a passion she had thought did not exist in her. With Michael Ovrensky she shared a bitter-sweet love, a thing with its roots back there at Beryozovaya Polyana, a strong mingling of their different, but yet strangely shared experience. They had come out of Russia, and they lived an American life. They were exiles, and they found their home again.
3
Life moved on at Fenton Field at a pace that seemed to Nicole to have slowed perceptibly. It could have been that the tension of the first invasion threat was over, or it could have been the exhaustion of feeling embattled was beginning to tell. The weariness of struggling to overcome the shortages, the lack of help on the farm, was now a constant daily dragging reality. If any of the younger people about them had ever thought there was any glamour in war, the thought was now gone. They all lived a small, restricted life, and although none of them spoke the thought, because it seemed petty while men continued to die on the Atlantic and in the Western Desert, there were many times when they were bored with the sheer grinding routine of their tasks.
The Lynmara Legacy Page 42
