Tall Chimneys: A British Family Saga Spanning 100 Years

by Allie Cresswell

  The 2nd Battalion 503rd PIR began to pack up at the airfield. Red-eyed girls were to be seen in the village. Cam and Aloysius started talking about ‘Our last week’ and then ‘Just a couple of days before we move out,’ and then, at last ‘Our last night at Tall Chimneys.’ That night I cooked two chickens I had killed especially, and made an effort with pudding, and raided the wine cellar for something special. I invited Kenneth and Rose and the children in. My idea was we would make merry, and send the boys on their way with cheer. But in fact the atmosphere at the table was awkward with things unsaid. Kenneth was particularly aloof and Anthony querulous. Our toasts were forced and falsely up-beat. John did not make an appearance and his empty chair at the table cast a pall like Banquo’s ghost.

  Awan kept on asking ‘Where’s Daddy?’ ‘Aren’t we going to wait for him?’ ‘I don’t want Daddy to miss the party,’ which kept his absence in the forefront of everyone’s minds.

  After dinner Rose and Kenneth took their children home and I put Awan to bed. Aloysius Brook made his excuses and took the jeep up the village; I presumed he had fond farewells to say. Cam sat on at the table while I cleared the dishes. This in itself was unusual; normally, he would have helped me. The fire cackled and spat - the wood was too green, I suppose. The radio played in the background.

  The silence between us was unnatural; we had never, since that morning he had been injured, been stuck for things to say. I stood at the sink and washed plates and pans, desperately trying to think of some subject to raise other than the thing that was upper-most in my mind. Suddenly I felt a hand on my sudsy arm.

  ‘Leave that, Evelyn,’ Cam said, quietly. He handed me a towel and while I dried my hands, he pulled the tie of my apron to remove it. It was the most natural, but also the most intimate gesture. He slipped it from my waist and the sensation could not have been more erotic if he had taken off my slip, my bra, my knickers. Indeed, I felt naked and vulnerable before him. He must have felt it, but, fine, respectable young man that he was, he took no advantage. He guided me to the chair by the fire and placed me into it, and then squatted down on the rug.

  ‘Evelyn,’ he began, but I interrupted him. Pandora’s Box must not be opened.

  ‘Oh! Please, don’t…’

  He shook his head. ‘I have to. We have to. You know it. I can’t go without speaking.’

  I nodded, dumbly. I knew he was right.

  He lowered himself onto the hearth rug and faced the fire. Perhaps it was going to be easier to speak the words if he didn’t have to look at me. His shoulder was on my leg. His hand rested on my foot. It was familiar and comfortable to have him seated thus; close, relaxed, unguarded.

  ‘At home,’ he began, and it was by no means a subject I had expected him to embark upon, ‘my family has a farm - I think I’ve told you about it. My Ma and Pa took it over after my Pa’s parents got too old for it. They built a second house on the plot. My grandparents lived there until Grandpa died. Then Grandma moved in with us. She’s elderly now; she needs looking after. So the new house is empty.’ He gave a little laugh, a private joke. ‘We call it the ‘new’ house, but in fact it’s fifteen years old. It needs up-dating, some. We all thought my brother would marry and settle there. He had a sweetheart, you know, Eileen, a girl from St Joe’s. They were set to marry but then there was the accident…’

  ‘Poor girl,’ I murmured.

  ‘Ma and Pa are still pretty hearty,’ Cam went on. ‘But the farm, well, it’s really too much for one couple. They were relying on the help. Really, you know, it’s a lot like here. Chooks, a couple of pigs, a vegetable patch. You’d like it.’

  ‘It sounds lovely,’ I said, automatically.

  ‘But more open,’ he went on, as though I had not spoken. ‘A fine view of the lake, from the rise behind the house. And in summer time we cross our neighbours’ land to swim and have cook-outs on the beach.’

  ‘Tall Chimneys can feel rather claustrophobic, at times,’ I admitted. ‘From the gatehouse, though, there’s a view of the moor, isn’t there?’

  My mentioning the gatehouse seemed to stop Cam’s flow, for a moment. I suppose it brought to both our minds the man who, at that very moment, was ensconced there.

  But presently he took up his thread once more. ‘I’m not going to pretend it isn’t hard in winter, Evelyn. It’s bitter! The water freezes - well, everything freezes. I mean, you think it gets cold here but you ain’t seen nothin’!

  ‘What kind of place is St Joe’s?’

  ‘A small town. A friendly place mostly. But our farm is quite a ways out of town. Quiet. Nobody comes by, hardly. And if you don’t want to go into town much, you don’t have to. Pa goes in a about twice a week, he can run any errands. And, of course…’ he hesitated. I sensed a leap. ‘Of course, I’d take Awan into school myself, every day, or at least to the school bus, so you could stay cosy and snug on the farm, if - that’s if - if you wanted to.’

  I stiffened. ‘You’re asking me to..?’

  He turned, then, and looked up at me. One side of his face, the side which had been close to the fire, was red, the other white with strain, his birth mark standing out more prominently than I had ever seen it before. His grey eyes were direct, his face absolutely serious. ‘Yes, Evelyn, I am. If I come home - if I survive the war - I want you to come home with me, and marry me.’

  ‘I’m...’ I began, but it was automatic.

  ‘No, you’re not. I asked Rose - quietly, very discreetly - and I know you’re not married. You’re free.’

  ‘I might not have been to church,’ I said, stiffly, ‘I might not have the certificate or the ring, but in my heart, and in my mind, I am married to John.’ Saying the words aloud sealed their truth. Why did it feel like a death sentence? How could it, at one and the same time, feel like a matter of honour, a stake in the ground, a thing worth dying for?

  Cam screwed himself round on the rug and got to his knees. He took my hands in his. ‘I’m sure it felt like that when you were younger, but the truth is there’s nothing holding you to him other than your sense of duty. You can un-marry yourself,’ he urged. ‘As honestly and sincerely as you connected yourself to him, and as easily, you can separate yourself. He can’t offer you what I can. He can’t give Awan what I can. A proper family, a home, a love which isn’t - I don’t know how to describe it - complicated, compromised - as John’s is, as it must be, else, why hasn’t he taken you to church?’

  ‘He’s married already,’ I said, tears brimming, testament to how much I had been hurt by that situation. ‘I didn’t know it when I… when we…’

  ‘He didn’t tell you?’ Cam scrambled to his feet and began to pace around the kitchen table. He was angry. The flush on one side of his face had spread right across it. ‘He didn’t tell you?’ he almost shouted. His moral outrage on my behalf took me aback; no one, not even my brothers, had taken such a stance.

  ‘He told me he would if he could,’ I stammered. ‘He wasn’t specific about the impediment and I trusted one day he would get round it. And in any case,’ I concluded, ‘it wouldn’t have made a difference. It was too late. I was too far gone.’

  ‘He took advantage of you.’ Cam’s perambulations had brought him back to the rug. He faced me from it, square on.

  ‘No. He protected me. There was a man - an associate of my brother’s, he was very predatory, he…’ I swallowed, ‘he molested me. John saw him off.’

  ‘And then did the same thing.’

  ‘No, no,’ I cried. ‘It wasn’t like that! We had already… before, and I was… willing. More than willing.’

  ‘But he wasn’t free, Evelyn. He had no right. And since that day, neither have you been. Hiding here, ashamed, hemmed in by your guilt while he travels the world, comes and goes, picks you up and puts you down again just as he pleases. You’re worth more, Evelyn, so much more.’ He squatted down in front of me and took my hands once more. ‘Let me give it to you, darling girl. Let me set you free.’

  He pulled me
to my feet and took me in his arms. His kiss was every bit as delicious as I remembered and had recalled to mind on numerous occasions, his tongue soft but more urgent, setting off a chain reaction of snapping synapses and oozing chambers which made my knees buckle. Still, his hands were respectful; they did not stray, as I wished they would. I pressed myself to him and felt his desire firm against my belly. I slipped my arm from around his neck and put a tentative hand there, but he disengaged himself. His lips were hot, his eyes burned, but he was master of it. ‘No, Evelyn,’ he said, hoarsely. ‘I will not do what John did. I will take you to church and have you as my wife, or not at all.’

  The next day, when he had gone, I stripped the sheets from his bed with heavy, languorous arms, and toyed with the smoothly-opening drawers in the chest. The idea of his investigative fingers probing its hidden recesses, his soft, careful hands spreading wax, was charged with erotic connotations and bitter regret. I felt myself flush. I glanced into the mottled mirror; the skin of my face was pink. If John had walked in at that moment he would have read my aroused sexual state immediately, as easily as he would have seen that I had been crying from my red, swollen eyes. I wondered if he would mention it, whether I would tell him what had taken place, pour out my feelings to him, if he would comfort me, and say he understood. It was ironic, I thought; he was the first person I turned to in any emotional crisis, my automatic harbour, but, now, in this situation, he was the last person I could tell.

  The house felt empty as I couldn’t recall it ever had done before. More officers would come; another battalion would replace the 503rd and continue the training program. But even when they did, I could not imagine they would fill the void that Cameron Bentley had left behind him.

  For a time, the skies over Tall Chimneys were silent, empty of the lumbering aircraft I had grown used to roaring above our trees. The silence and vacuity weighed heavier than the thunderous engines and unwieldy monsters ever had. It was unnatural; the stillness like some kind of dream-state. I wandered in it, lost.

  I thought over what Cam had said to me, that last evening. Had John, as Cam asserted, taken advantage of me? Was I just one of a string of women? For all I knew he might well have had other women, in Germany or France, perhaps, or, even right now, in London. But if that were the case, I had to ask myself, why on earth would he keep coming back here? What could I offer him, over and above those others? What, here, made the tortuous journey and the, frankly, rather acrimonious association we seemed locked into, worth the bother? The fact was, for whatever reason, John did always come back to me, and I still saw, in his eyes, behind the confusion, beyond the frustration, the truth of the promise he had made to me all those years before.

  Was it really guilt and shame which kept me at Tall Chimneys? At first, I admitted, yes. I had felt the stigma of my situation. I had seen myself as a mistress, an adulterer, fallen. I had worn my sin like a hair shirt, a badge of iniquity, keeping away from others lest my proximity taint them. But then, gradually, guided by Rose and Kenneth, vouched for and shielded by their families, I had shaken those feelings off. If others did not seem to be conscious of the stain, why should I? I’d told myself I had brazened out the world’s disapproval. But my world was so small! A tiny village, an insignificant market town! Such a small amphitheatre of defiance! In the face of a larger arena I knew my rebellion would be instantly strangled, smothered by deeply inbred coils of self-accusation and rendered to jelly by my sheer naivety. Only marriage, I realised, could shrive me. Only a husband could guide me. Without those two things, I would never be free.

  I had made no promise to Cam, but I felt in my heart that if he came back, I should go to America with him. The terrors of such a journey were immense, the idea of starting afresh in a foreign land left me palpitating with anxiety. Equally, the prospect of leaving Tall Chimneys, my friends, this comfortable, sequestered pocket of Yorkshire where I had dug myself in, filled me with despair. I knew I ought to wrench myself free. I was like an animal caught in a trap. I might have to gnaw off a limb in order to survive. I would be free, but oh! How I would limp.

  The idea of deserting Tall Chimneys caused as large a weight of guilt as the notion of turning my back on John. This house, without me in it, would be only so much stone and mortar. The rooms would bloom with dust and mould, the smokeless chimneys would fall. I had tried to save and sustain it, to protect the tradition and history for which it stood. As much as it had sometimes felt to me that the house was a burden as heavy as that borne by Atlas, and as often as my arms had ached as much as his must have done, I felt it would be a terrible abdication of responsibility to walk away from it. For the first time I really understood what a terrible dilemma the old king had faced, how torn he must have been between his desire and his duty, and what he must have suffered in the choosing of one above the other. At the time I had been all for the choices of the heart, unthinking of the lasting scars a dereliction of duty might inflict upon the psyche. I asked myself if Tall Chimneys was my pride or my prison, and I did not know the answer.

  The sheets smelt of Cam, and I did not launder them; I put them in a box under my bed, and when John did not come home, I pulled them out and wrapped myself up in them.

  John worked feverishly for a week or so after Cam had gone. I knew he was in the throes of some great inspiration - the signs were all too familiar to me; disregard of food, irregular hours, a distant, pre-occupied light in his eye, a lack of attention when anyone spoke to him of mundane matters. Without these tells I might have assumed he was giving me time to adjust to Cam’s absence, or even allowing me space to make a decision about my future, but I am afraid at that time I did not credit him with so much sensitivity.

  We attended a concert at Awan’s school (she was in the choir, chirruping tunelessly but with great gusto along with the other five and six year olds) but John’s eye kept wandering to a point beyond my shoulder where dust motes danced in the light from the high window. He kept leaning past me to see the pattern of shadow cast on the far hall wall by the gymnasium equipment. He was twitchy and unsettled, and asked me to drop him at the gatehouse on our way home, even though it was almost dark.

  Then, in the second week of November, the hectic light in his eye died, the rush seemed to calm and he came back to us. I assumed the great surge of inspiration had manifested itself on canvas, but he did not ask me to see his work, as he would have done in the past, and, again, I did not ask him. He remained at home during the day, reading the newspapers and smoking. I noticed for the first time his cough had returned.

  ‘I’m sure those things don’t help,’ I remarked as he lit another cigarette and started spluttering.

  ‘They do,’ he wheezed, ‘they clear the tubes.’ He returned to his newspaper, where something seemed to catch his attention. ‘Evelyn,’ he said, with a casualness which came across as somewhat false, ‘have you read the paper today?’

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘I haven’t had time. Is there news?’

  ‘Oh,’ he mumbled. ‘Just the usual.’

  It was lunchtime. I put bread on the table and began to ladle soup into bowls. ‘I wonder when the new cohort of officers will descend on us,’ I mused. ‘I don’t think I can put them in the north wing this time. It was one thing for the summer, but during winter, it’s barely habitable.’

  ‘Have you heard from the last cohort?’ John asked.

  ‘No,’ I said, too quickly. I was expecting a letter daily although Cam had made no promise to write.

  ‘How did you leave things, with Captain Bentley?’ John got up from the easy chair and approached the table.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I returned, again, much too sharply.

  ‘Evelyn.’ John gave me a rueful smile. ‘After all these years, do you think I can’t read you like a book?’

  My shoulders sagged. I gave him a baleful look. ‘We left things,’ I sighed, ‘in the air.’

  He nodded, sympathetically. ‘Delicious soup,’ he said, and began to eat.


  Afterwards, he took up the conversation again. ‘I suppose it’s like Monique and me,’ he observed, ‘slightly, anyway. My sense of duty to her, my feeling of being honourably bound, no matter how I might feel about you. It’s the battle of the head and the heart, isn’t it?’

  Afterwards, it occurred to me he had been trying to be sympathetic, to let me know he understood how I felt. But, at the time, it felt as though he was turning the rack, and the fact his train of thought ran so exactly along the same lines of mine made me feel trespassed upon.

  ‘It isn’t like you and Monique,’ I shouted. ‘You hate Monique. I don’t hate you!’

  ‘No, I know,’ he said, kindly.

  His kindness broke me. I confessed everything. ‘I’m torn between you,’ I burst out.

  ‘Of course you are.’

  ‘I don’t know what to do! Cam can offer me…’

  ‘Marriage, children, a home,’ John enumerated, reasonably.

  ‘Yes, yes, all of that! But I’d have to leave Tall Chimneys,’ I wailed. ‘And you. I’d have to leave you!’

  John nodded. ‘Of course. He’d want to take you to America.’

  ‘But this is where I belong, here, at Tall Chimneys, with Awan and you.’ I put down my spoon; all pretence of eating lunch abandoned. I faced him across the table. ‘And that’s the problem, John. I belong with you. But you don’t belong with me. You go off, and you have a life, and there’s Monique, and it’s all so complicated and so compromised...’ Unconsciously, I used Cam’s words to describe my relationship with John. Their very utterance felt like a betrayal of all John and I had been to one another.