“Yes,” I said.
Simon went on, focusing his words to a tone of such deep privacy that they reminded me, for an instant, of his brother’s voice in the café. His other hand touched my cheek.
“You are the only true thing in my life, Virginia. The only thing left intact. The only thing that matters anymore. Since the day you drove your damned ambulance through the mud of that courtyard, I have thought of nothing but you. Have dreamt of nothing but you. Your skin and your lips, your beautiful eyes. The scent of you. The weight of you, lying in my arms, sleeping in my bed. I have been obsessed with you. Scheming for the next meeting, and the next, scarcely existing in the meantime. When I got word about the accident, I nearly went mad. You can’t imagine—but that’s enough. Look at you, you’re exhausted.”
“No! Don’t stop. Don’t go.” I closed my eyes. “I am much better. Much better now.”
“Good. You must get better as quickly as possible, do you hear me? I have laid such plans for us, but they all depend on a Virginia who’s herself again, all put back together and full of her usual ardor and determination, behind her wonderfully prim façade.”
“Plans?” My eyes cracked open again. “What kind of plans?”
“Never worry. I have it all worked out. I’ve made arrangements for you at a private hospital near London, as soon as you can be safely moved—”
“What?”
“I’m not going to be taking any more chances with you, phantom girl. I know one of the doctors there. You’ll be in excellent hands, safe and sound. The war will be over in a matter of months. Did you know that? The Germans are back on their heels. They can’t last much longer, not while you Americans flood in endlessly. And then there will be nothing left to stand in our way. This entire nightmare will be over at last. We shall be man and wife by springtime.”
“Man and wife!”
“Yes. I won’t take your objections any longer. I have discovered, in the past month, an absolutely invincible need to marry you. What do you say?”
My lips moved, but nothing came out. I must have looked astonished, or frightened, because Simon leaned forward and spoke in his doctor’s voice, terribly soothing.
“We must be married, dearest. This scare you’ve put into me, it’s brought me to my senses. For practical reasons, if nothing else. Just think if anything should happen to one of us. If you should have a child.”
I tried to remember all my earlier objections. I tried to conjure the sensation of dread, the picture of my mother, but the image was too blurred, a relic of a distant childhood, and anyway Simon’s face was too near. His words were too comforting. I sat there on my bed, seeking the well of my resistance, and I couldn’t find it. As his hand massaged the bones of my fingers, I lost the will even to search.
“Virginia, please. Whatever your fears, I promise you I’ll extinguish them. I shall never intrude on that marvelous independence of yours. I shall guard you and serve you and strive for your happiness every moment of my life. But I want you as my wife. I need you to marry me. Before God and the law.”
“But what about Lydia? Your brother?”
“Everything will be settled soon, I promise. The way will be clear. I’ll sort it all out; you’re not to worry about a thing. Just promise me you’ll be mine. No. No, that’s not it. It’s the other way around. You must promise me, my dear phantom girl, you’ll do me the very great honor of allowing me to become yours. To show you what marriage can be, with the right person.” He smiled. “With me.”
Sometimes, in quiet moments, as I lie in my bed and count the strokes until midnight, I wonder how different a course my life would have taken if I had withdrawn my hand in that moment and said no. If I had refused him then, if I had remained firm in my refusal ever to marry. My refusal to take on the trappings of ordinary domestic life, like the other girls. Like my mother did, until she was murdered.
But I know this exercise is pointless. Because how could I have refused him? Lying there as I did, on my hospital bed, bandaged and helpless, while he pressed my hand reverently and begged me to marry him. This man who had restored the promise of dawn to my life. This man who, in my blackest hour, injured nearly beyond repair, had not abandoned me but had instead brought me back to life. How could I not trust him?
Though my memory of those weeks inside the American Hospital in Neuilly remains dim and indistinct, even to this day, I do remember how this most seductive thought began to unfurl inside my brain at that moment, as Simon spoke. How a heady sensation overtook me, as if I’d been looking at a painting upside down all this time, and now, as if by enchantment, it turned right side up. And the revelation was more beautiful than I could have dreamed, if I had ever known how to dream such things.
I thought—yes, my God, I actually thought this—I will be safe now.
“Yes,” I said.
His eyes widened. “I beg your pardon?”
“Yes. Yes, I’ll marry you.”
“My God.” He kissed my hand. Wrapped it up between his two palms. “Splendid. My God. Say it again.”
“Yes!” I tried to laugh, but my ribs hurt and it ended in a wince.
“Careful!”
“Yes. I will marry you, Simon Fitzwilliam, you dear and foolish man. I can’t imagine why you’re asking. But if you’re so stupid as to want to marry me—”
“Only if you want to, Virginia. Only if you’re as stupid as I am, as splendidly and marvelously stupid—”
“I am! I—oh.”
He shook his finger. “No more of that laughing, Miss Fortescue. I won’t have you setting yourself back.”
“Yes, sir. No more laughing.”
“You have only to think about getting better, about healing this precious body of yours. Your head and your ribs. This left arm I saved personally from amputation at the hands of that damned pompous surgeon. That’s all you need to concern yourself with, at present, until it’s time to find your wedding dress and choose a bridesmaid. You’re to leave everything to me and take care of yourself, for once. Your own dear self.”
He kissed my hand—the right one, not the left, which was still stiff in its massive plaster cast—once on each knuckle, and then he turned my fingers over and kissed my palm. His short hair bristled from his scalp. When he was finished, he lifted his head, laid my hand against his cheek, and said, “You are to have faith in me, is that clear? Mrs. Fitzwilliam.”
I remember how I smiled at his earnest expression. The warm echo of his words. The sunshine of his voice, burning away the last of my doubt.
I remember how I touched his upper lip with my thumb and replied, “Perfectly clear.”
November 28, 1921
Darling V,
I do wonder sometimes if you shall ever read these letters. Whether I’ve been foolish to keep them back from their envelopes: foolish and rather vainly hopeful that you might, one day, find the courage or the forgiveness or the simple curiosity to seek them out. But I well remember how you treated my letters once, when you thought me guilty of another crime, and if there’s any chance at all that I might, by this method, preserve a record of my true thoughts for you . . . well, I suppose I have always known my chances were long, where you were concerned. That I was risking my all for a reward too bright even to contemplate.
Or maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe the act of writing is enough. I don’t know. I do know that it helps me, somehow. When the day is long & weary, and everything seems to be falling apart—as if you’re replacing a book on a bookshelf, & another one tumbles to the ground just as soon as you’ve fixed the first one, and then you put that one back and another one crashes down—when, as I say, life seems impossible & insupportable, I find comfort in scribbling these lines to you. Whether or not you see them. Whether or not you read them. Almost—but not quite—whether or not you care.
But you must care, mustn’t you? If you didn’t care, I should have been served divorce papers by now. Each day, you see, I tremble when the post arrives, just in case the
re should be some dreadful legal-looking envelope from some sort of New York firm, informing me that my wife no longer wishes to be my wife.
And each day, I am reprieved, & believe me, my darling, I am fully grateful for this reprieve. You can’t imagine. Today, for example, I have been up to my ears in the accounts, instead of tramping about my orchards as I prefer. The reason? I am contemplating a change in business strategy. The trees returned a decent harvest last winter; the ships are running out full and returning—well, let us say they are returning with some valuable cargo indeed, cargo that I believed would set us up beautifully for the coming year, enough to get ahead at last. But while revenues are tumbling like—well, like ripe fruit, if you don’t mind the phrase, ripe fruit into our waiting coffers, they are going out again in the same abundant manner. This valuable cargo of ours has attracted so many strings, so many distasteful connections, so many unsavory characters, I am determined to wash my hands of it and return to what I do best. The long, slow journey, instead of the quicker one. As I said, I don’t mean to be tedious, and I expect the less you know about all this, the better.
I wonder if I can live up to him. Your father, I mean. Whether, in all my striving, I can ever give you anything like the comfort & luxury he has provided. I admit I am jealous of him. Jealous of his riches & the genius that made him rich. It seems that however I try, however abundantly I call my orchards to give forth their fruit, it’s never enough. The growing of fruit, I suppose, is a far more commonplace genius than the invention of industrial gadgets.
On that note, I am off to do what my meager talents allow. Coax my trees unto fruitfulness.
Ever your own,
S.F.
Chapter 22
London, March 1919
By the time I married Simon Fitzwilliam, on the last day of the following March, at ten o’clock in the morning, my bones had knit and my eyes no longer swam when I read. I wore a new suit of pale gray and a matching hat of gray felt, though my shoes were old. For good luck, I told myself.
I wrote my name confidently in the parish register of Saint Mary Abbots, at the bottom of Kensington Church Street, and gave my bouquet of pink hothouse roses to Hazel, who was my bridesmaid. We stepped outside into the watery sunshine. The robins sang from the blossoming trees, and the daffodils thrust up from the earth. Simon stopped me on the church steps and turned me about for a long and somewhat indecent kiss. Everyone applauded. “Mrs. Fitzwilliam at last,” he said, when he lifted his face from mine, and he smiled and tucked my arm into his elbow. Hazel, delighted, brought out a Brownie from her pocketbook and took a photograph, which she gave to me later.
We held our wedding breakfast—such as it was—at the Savoy. Corporal Pritchard was there, and Hazel, and a few of Simon’s medical corps friends, boisterous and respectful. Of Simon’s family there was no sign. Not even an arrangement of congratulatory flowers. Never mind. We went through four bottles of champagne, toast after toast, and when the last man staggered away at half past four, Simon bore me upstairs to a hotel suite bursting with new spring flowers. The sky was still light and blue, but we made love anyway, swift and voracious, for the first time since June, when Europe was still at war.
Afterward, Simon rose to open another bottle of champagne and light himself a cigarette, while I lay on the bed, too happy to move, and watched him tread naked about the room in an utterly unselfconscious way, attending first to the cigarette and then to the bottle of Pol Roger in its silver bucket. This is marriage, I thought, when you have the right to each other’s bare skin and humble errands. I admired the squint of one eye and the patient play of muscle in his forearms as he worked the cork from the stem, while the cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. A soft pop, a gentle fizzle of air. He set the fat cork next to the ashtray.
“What an expert,” I said.
“Every gentleman should know how to open a champagne bottle properly.” He poured a glass for me and then for himself and carried them both to the bed. “To my beautiful new bride.”
“To my gallant husband.”
“What? Not handsome?”
“Handsome, of course. And charming. Invincibly charming.”
“Faithful. Devoted.” He kissed my lips. “A trifle zozzled at the moment, I admit, but that’s to be expected. I say, is it too soon to make love to you again? I don’t believe I’m much use for anything else at the moment.”
“I didn’t know there were any rules like that about making love. If there are, we’ve already broken most of them.”
Simon glanced at the window. “Twice before sunset might be tempting fate, but then we’re married now. Surely the gods will forgive us.”
“Yes. After all, we’ve already done our penance, haven’t we? Both of us. We’ve suffered enough.”
He smiled, stubbed out the cigarette, slugged down the champagne, and reached for my hips.
“My thoughts exactly.”
I think we both must have fallen asleep after that. When I woke up, the sky was dark and a gentle spring rain caressed the window glass. Simon lay on his stomach, one arm flung across my breasts, one leg straddling mine. His sweet, drunken breath dampened the air. The bedside lamp was still on, and I could see the vivid, irregular scars on my left forearm, where both radius and ulna, snapped in two, had torn through my skin seven months earlier. I wriggled my fingers. A miracle, really, that they still existed, that my hand still existed and sprang whole from my wrist. A miracle wrought by the man now sleeping beside me.
My head throbbed a little from all the wedding champagne. My mouth was dry and sticky. Seized by restlessness, I slipped myself out from under my bridegroom and rose from the bed to pour a glass of water.
I drank and poured again and drank. The hotel creaked lazily around me. The clock on the mantel, slender-armed and gilded, claimed five minutes to eleven o’clock. Not so late, then. I emptied the ashtray and turned out the light. Simon didn’t stir. For a minute or two—I really can’t say how long, only that it seemed like ages—I hung there, like the phantom he called me, until my legs failed and I sat on the edge of the bed and gazed opulently at him, my new husband, murky and shadowed among the tangled bedclothes, only just visible in the midnight glow of the city outside our window. Without quite touching him, I traced the outline of his long, trim limbs, the angle of his shoulder. The line of his jaw, glittering with peppery stubble.
I thought, I will know him always, he will father my children, we will grow old side by side. We will make love ten thousand times and plant fifty gardens in the springtime, and when winter comes we will lie together and keep each other warm, until the sunshine returns.
We slept through the night, and at dawn I woke to Simon’s kisses.
I remember how I wrapped my arms around his neck and inhaled the warm, sleepy scent of my husband’s skin. I remember thinking How luxurious. How luxurious that we could take our time, now that the first urgency was satisfied and a lifetime stretched out before us. We moved from the bed to the armchair to the floor to the wall, enthralled and perspiring, mating in a kind of exotic, primal waltz, and at one point, near the end, while the rain drummed against the window and we drove desperately toward resolution, Simon wrapped his long fingers around my jaw and the back of my head and said, “I am so sick of death. I am so sick of watching men die. I want to make you pregnant this second. I want to deliver our child with my own hands.”
So I dug my passionate young heels into the backs of his legs and prayed, too, prayed for a baby with Simon, prayed with all my strength that he would start a baby inside me on this tender April dawn: not because I had ever craved children, or imagined myself as a mother, but because I trusted my husband so profoundly. I believed his words. I believed that Simon, after four years of battling death, needed desperately to create life.
I don’t know if God was listening, or whether He still heeded the prayers of mortal men, or whether He gave and withheld His gifts for His own capricious reasons. From what I had seen of the h
ospitals and battlefields of France, He had probably abandoned humanity altogether.
But you will observe that the following December I gave birth to Evelyn, so I suppose it is quite possible—though by no means certain—that our wish that morning was granted.
Later that day, after we had bathed and had breakfast, we drove down to Cornwall to meet Simon’s family.
We hadn’t discussed them at all. Every time I’d raised the subject, during Simon’s visits to the small hospital in Hampstead, he had laid his finger on my lips and said I wasn’t to worry, he would take care of everything, they would accept me and love me once we were married. Once the whole affair was an accomplished fact. Once they knew me.
A week earlier, I had asked about the wedding, and whether any of the Fitzwilliams would attend.
No, he replied, looking away. I’m afraid they’re not ready for this. Everything has happened so quickly, and they are terribly old-fashioned.
I took him at his word. Why shouldn’t I? At the time I had no reason at all to doubt Simon Fitzwilliam, other than the preposterous accusations of his envious brother. The opposite. I had a hundred reasons to trust him. Hadn’t he rushed straight to the private hospital in Hampstead where I had lived since Christmas, immediately after his demobilization in January? And he’d hardly left my bedside since, except to make the necessary arrangements for our future together, the mysterious errands about which he refused to reveal any details. He had been devoted and attentive. He had seen to my every comfort. He took me on long walks to build my strength, he devised exercises for my eyes and my brain and worked me patiently through them, until I could read long chapters and solve puzzles without breaking down in fatigue and frustration. Until the sap began to rise inside me at last, and run in my veins.
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