The Golden Hour

by Beatriz Williams

“Well?” I urged.

  “Can’t say.”

  “Can’t you? Your own wife?”

  “It isn’t a question of trust.”

  “Isn’t it?” I said, and when there was no answer I went on in a loud whisper near his ear, so he could hear me over the storm. “You’ve put them in a bind, haven’t you. Those chaps of yours, back in London. You did your job too well. And now they know you know about the whole thing. You know the duke’s a traitor.”

  Thorpe reached out and put his finger on my lips. I pushed his hand away and linked my fingers at the back of his neck.

  “Let’s fly away. You can’t go back. They’ll never let you live with this knowledge in your head. Fly away with me.”

  “No.”

  “One of the Out Islands, maybe, or somewhere else. The other side of the world. Indochina, maybe. Have the Japs invaded there yet? Or Tasmania.”

  “We can’t go to Tasmania, Lulu.”

  “Just think. The two of us. I’ll make you happy, I swear it, we’ll have our own little world together, a little home, sunshine and babies and—”

  “No,” he said.

  “But—”

  “No.” He rolled on his back. Side by side, we stared at the ceiling, and the shadow of the electric fan as it swept the air. Outside the window, the rain poured down on the roof, drowning out the noise of the thunder. His pale skin stretched across his ribs. I thought of the rubbers in the nearby drawer, untouched.

  “When do you leave?” I said.

  “Tomorrow. They’ve got a place for me on a Liberator leaving at dawn.”

  “At dawn?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dawn tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  “Exactly when were you going to tell me this?”

  “I’m telling you now.”

  For an instant, a streak of lightning turned the room as bright as noon. A boom shook the house. We lay there on the bed, holding hands, and waited for it to pass. Another streak, another boom. Underneath it all, the rain roared on the metal roof, and the tears ran from the corners of my eyes and down my temples to the pillow, because I understood. Now I understood.

  “Do you remember what we said to each other on the airplane?” I said.

  “Every word.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Try me.”

  “Well, you remember how I called the Windsors a pair of romantics, and you said they weren’t romantics at all?”

  “I remember.”

  “You said that it was a modern thing to do, choosing love over duty.”

  “Ah, yes. Rather facile of me, wasn’t it?”

  “You mean you don’t believe that now?”

  “I mean, at that point, I’d never really loved a woman before. I didn’t know what sacrifice meant.”

  “Maybe the duke didn’t know about sacrifice, either. I don’t believe he ever really wanted to be king. Do you?”

  Thorpe released my hand and reached over to the bedside table to find a pack of cigarettes. He offered it first to me. I shook my head. He tapped one out for himself and produced a match. “Well, I imagine he wanted the privilege of kingship, right enough. It was the responsibility that went with the privilege, that’s what he didn’t want.” He lit the cigarette and smoked it thoughtfully, one arm tucked behind his head.

  “Yes. He discovered that being king didn’t mean you could have anything you wanted, but that you couldn’t. And he wanted her.”

  “Yes. And he got her. And his freedom.”

  I rolled on my side to face him. The lightning came again, the wind howled against the walls.

  “My God,” I said. “You’re the romantic, aren’t you?”

  “Rubbish.”

  “Yes, it’s true. I see it now.”

  “You see what you want to see. The truth is, I’ve betrayed every ideal I ever held. I’ve killed men who never saw me coming. I’ve lied and stolen. Then you. I saw you and wanted you and seduced you—”

  “You fell in love with me.”

  He shrugged and reached for the ashtray. “I was also searching your papers, allowing you to continue serving as a courier for information that was more than your life was worth, at least to the men on either side of it.”

  “But I knew. I let you.”

  “I betrayed you.”

  “And you hated yourself for it. And I loved you for hating yourself. I love both sides of you, the sweet, idealistic boy you were before, and the man you’ve had to become.”

  Thorpe reached over to the ashtray and crushed out the cigarette. I glimpsed the side of his face as he returned his head to the pillow and folded his two hands beneath. “My parents are both dead,” he said, and though the thunder covered his words, I still understood him. “I was raised by my grandmother, who still lives in our old place in Scotland, outside of Inverness, with one of the maids who takes care of her. She’s going a bit soft in the head these days, I’m afraid, but she’s the sort of woman who will probably outlive us all.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  He turned his head on the pillow and stared at me, though he couldn’t have seen much, just the reflection of light in my eyes and the bridge of my nose, my cheekbones, the way I saw his. “My half brother lives in Florida, up the coast. My mother’s son with her first husband, a German. His name is Johann.”

  “Johann,” I repeated.

  “My sister’s name is Margaret. Margaret Thorpe. She never married. She lives in London, Draycott Avenue, works for the War Office. If anything should happen to me, go to one of them.”

  “If anything happens to you, I’ll track you down to the ends of the earth, by God. I promise you that.”

  He was staring at me the way you stare at a painting, at an altar. He seemed to be straining for something. I thought, Just take it, for God’s sake. He looked nothing like the boy on the beach when we arrived a few hours ago. He cupped his hand around my jaw. When the lightning came, I saw a silver track along the side of his cheek, falling into the scar.

  “I believe you,” he said. He dragged me over his hips. When we had fit ourselves together, from base to stem, he wrapped his arms around my waist, and I wrapped my arms around his neck, and so we remained, stock-still in the rumpled sheets, while the storm raged and crashed outside the window.

  Over at Westbourne, Harold Christie had picked up a copy of Life magazine and headed to his guest room, adjacent to the bedroom of Sir Harry Oakes. Oakes retired soon after. He drew the mosquito netting around his bed, took a revolver from the drawer of his bedside table and laid it under the lamp, as was his usual habit, and settled himself to sleep.

  It was some time before Thorpe and I went to sleep. I don’t know exactly how long we made love, just that it went on without end, that we were afraid to stop. Maybe we felt some kind of premonition, I don’t know. Maybe we were simply wise enough to take what we could from each other, to stockpile what we needed, like squirrels who understand there’s a long winter ahead. I couldn’t get enough of his skin, or the little hairs that grew in a trail below his navel, or the tips of his fingers. His hip bones, his eyelashes, the smell of his hair. I was delirious, I was woozy with him.

  At one point, we wandered into the kitchen for the pitcher of water in the icebox. When we had finished drinking, he drew me back against him, one palm on my breast, one palm on my womb, his teeth at my shoulder, and we stood there, perfectly balanced, listening to the fury outside.

  I said, “When did your parents die?”

  My head swam from pleasure and fatigue and dread. I was leaning against him, I knew, suffering him to bear my weight, because my legs had already given him all they could. I listened to his silence, and at last I put my hand on top of his.

  “My father was killed at the Somme,” he said at last, “about two months before I was born.”

  “Oh. Oh, no. No.”

  “Margaret was nine years old, nearly ten. He was a career officer, a major in the army. Went down gloriously
, of course, for king and country.”

  “But your mother.”

  “Well, they were deeply in love, from what I was told.”

  There was a long pause, in which the shutter over the kitchen window came loose from its mooring and started to bang. Bam, bam, bam, like someone pitching rocks at the wall. Neither of us moved. His mouth was in my hair; I felt his breath near my ear, shuddering a little. We smelled of each other, of perspiration and human love, of salt and ozone. I turned in his arms and looked in his bleak eyes, his pale, freckled face that glittered with stubble.

  “They were deeply in love,” I said.

  “Yes, they were. So deeply, in fact, that she drowned herself in the river shortly after giving birth to me.”

  We went back to bed. Thorpe turned me on my side, eased back inside me, and came at last in a series of quick, sure spasms. In the next instant, he was asleep, and so was I.

  And at some point, either before or after this final culmination of ours—nobody can say exactly when—a person or persons entered the bedroom of Sir Harry Oakes, struck him three times behind the left ear with an object also unknown, covered him with feathers and gasoline, and set fire to his body.

  I came awake to an empty bed, some hours later, and called Thorpe’s name. He arrived instantly, dressed and smelling of soap.

  “What’s the matter?” I murmured, reaching for him.

  “Time for me to go.” He kissed my lips and set my arms back in the bed. “I’ll come back to you as soon as I can.”

  Elfriede

  August 1916

  (Scotland)

  On their eleventh wedding anniversary, the day Elfriede goes into labor with their second child, Wilfred’s kit arrives home at last. There was some delay, explained in official letters and telegrams that Elfriede didn’t read. Anyway, there it sits on the library rug, delivered by special courier along with a note from Wilfred’s batman that describes how carefully, how reverently the contents were packed up. How beloved Major Thorpe was, how cruel his loss for the men. Those who remained alive, anyway, after that disastrous July day on the Somme.

  These are words Elfriede will read later, however. For now, the letters remain stacked on her desk, unopened. Dozens of them, from Wilfred’s men, from his fellow officers, from the War Office, from this batman of his. Private Collins, who’s been with Wilfred since India and is now shattered.

  She notices the smell first. Like a charnel house, like the mud of a thousand dead men. And then the sound of screaming, Margaret screaming. Elfriede runs, or rather lumbers, toward the source of both sensations, smell and screaming, and that’s when she sees what remains of her husband. Some canvas thing, and Margaret collapsed on top, wailing in primal agony.

  As for Elfriede, she hasn’t wept yet. Not a single tear. They simply won’t come. Margaret cries for them both. Wilfred’s daughter hasn’t stopped shedding tears for her father, it’s like a fall of continuous grief, never ending, and Elfriede must be her sponge. Her Cloth of Tears.

  So prove it. There’s nothing real about Wilfred’s death, is there? If Wilfred were really dead, Elfriede—his lover, his wife, his blood companion, the mother of his children, she who harbors Wilfred’s heart inside her own chest, his soul inside her own skin—if he were dead, she’d feel his death in her bones, in the corridors of her body, and she feels nothing at all except the kick of Wilfred’s baby in her womb, and the wetness of Margaret’s tears on her chest, her arm, her lap. (What there remains of her lap, anyway.) Well, really. How can those blue eyes be closed? How can those limbs, which were made to tangle around hers, made for this single purpose and none other, to hold and soothe and make love to Elfriede—how can those limbs have gone still? How can that mind, which was made to give laughter and life to others, be lifeless? It’s impossible, obviously. No physical evidence whatsoever exists to prove that Wilfred Thorpe is dead.

  Except, perhaps, this lump of canvas, on which their daughter weeps.

  Elfriede staggers carefully to her knees and pulls Margaret into her arms. She sits on the floor with Wilfred’s children, born and unborn, and holds them close. Margaret’s sobs take the form of words—I can’t, I can’t live without him, he can’t be dead—and Elfriede answers her in kind. He’s not, darling, he’ll always be with us, Daddy would never leave us. The baby, who knows nothing of the outside world, just throws out an elbow or a foot or something. Elfriede thinks of that last night of Wilfred’s leave, and the way the baby shifted and turned between them, making his father laugh for possibly the first time in the entire five days he’d been home. He’s a busy chap, right enough, Wilfred said, and Elfriede, lying on her side, facing her husband, drinking the gentle sound of his laughter, put her hand on his cheek and said, Like his father. More laughter, and Are you quite certain of that, my love? A chap at the front has to take his wife’s word on these matters, so naturally she pondered for a minute and replied, Well, it’s either you or Jock Cholmondeley, every other man’s gone off to France, and Wilfred smacked his forehead and said, Cholmondeley, that rascal! I always knew he was in love with you, and pretty soon they were giggling like old times, like before the war, like Florida, and one thing led to another until Wilfred and Elfriede, baby or no baby, were once more exchanging proofs of their enthusiastic devotion to each other, like before the war, like Florida. How could you be more alive than that?

  When Margaret’s wailing subsides at last into hiccups, Elfriede calls for the downstairs maid, who appears almost at once. Pale, stricken face. Even the household staff adores Wilfred.

  “Annie, I need your help with Mr. Thorpe’s kit,” she says, matter-of-fact.

  “Shall I—” The maid gulps fearfully. “Shall I unpack it for you, ma’am?”

  “Unpack it? No. You must bury it. Bury it in the garden, I don’t care where. Just bury it.” She strokes her daughter’s hair and bends awkwardly to kiss the small, trembling ear. “It upsets the children.”

  “B—bury it?”

  “Yes. Straight away. What are you waiting for? Bury it!”

  And Annie scrambles to obey.

  Soon afterward, the sporadic tightening of the muscles around her womb strengthens into regular, progressively deep contractions. She takes Margaret to her grandmother, who’s been living in the guest bedroom at Dunnock Lodge since July, managing the household in a spirit of tremendous Scotch efficiency, and rings up the doctor herself. “It seems to be advancing quickly,” she tells him calmly, and he promises to be on his way at once.

  On her way back upstairs, she pauses outside the music room while a contraction grips her. They’re boiling the water in the kitchen, preparing the linens. There’s a baby on the way, after all, poor Major Thorpe’s wee babe, we must all do our bit for the major’s sake. Elfriede rides out the pain the way you ride a wave in the Atlantic surf, don’t fight it, let the wave do the work, let the wave carry you into shore. She holds herself upright on the doorframe and stares at the piano, remembering how Margaret played for them both on that last evening, before Wilfred returned to the front, and Wilfred himself took his daughter upstairs to tuck her into bed a final time while Elfriede, wanting them to have this moment of private farewell, stayed downstairs and played Chopin. Wilfred, returning, came to a stop in the doorway, exactly where Elfriede stands now in the iron-hot fist of a contraction. What’s the matter? she asked then, looking up to find his strange expression. You played that in Switzerland, he told her. That one always reminds me of Switzerland. She finished the piece and Wilfred came to sit by her on the piano bench, saying nothing at all, just sitting and staring at Elfriede’s hands on the keyboard.

  When the contraction subsides, Elfriede lets go of the doorframe and continues to the stairs, up to the bedroom, where her maid, Mary, summoned from the mending, waits anxiously to change her into a white nightgown.

  “You’ll be just fine, ma’am,” Mary says, for the third time. “Only think, a beautiful new baby to remember him by, a precious wee gift from the Lord. You’ll
be safe in His hands, ma’am.”

  Elfriede knows better, of course. When the nightgown is on and the dressing gown draped over her hardened belly, she checks the dresser to make sure the Cloth of Tears sits in place, folded neatly in its box in the far corner. In her head, she hears Wilfred’s voice, over and over.

  You cannot die.

  I’m existing in you alone.

  She settles herself in the armchair to wait for the doctor.

  A mere hour and a half later, Elfriede gives birth to an enormous boy, nine pounds four ounces, as the British measure these things, burly and red-faced, squalling handsomely. The tuft of hair on his head is paler than his father’s but unmistakably ginger. Elfriede touches it with her finger as he nurses. “Well, there’s no doubt who’s his dear father,” Mrs. Thorpe says weepily, holding the entranced and dry-eyed Margaret close to her side.

  “No doubt at all,” says Elfriede, and she waits for the blackness to descend.

  Lulu

  December 1943

  (Scotland)

  The drizzle comes in angry bursts against our backs, blowing in from the northeast. Margaret settles her chin inside the collar of her raincoat and her hands inside her pockets. We both wear rubber boots that squish against the grass as we walk. Mine are too big. Margaret tells me they belonged to Thorpe when he was thirteen or so. Just before he started sprouting up, she says.

  Behind us, Dunnock Lodge is grim and wet and rambling, like Wuthering Heights or something. The slate roof gleams with rain. We tramp across a meadow that looks as if it used to be a lawn, and sure enough, a fountain emerges from the thickets. When I peer into the bowl, I see about three inches of brown water covering a layer of dead leaves.

  “It’s where Mummy used to have garden parties for the officers’ wives,” Margaret says. “She tried so hard, and they never did like her, except for a few. She was so beautiful. Jolly foreign too, which set their backs up. And of course she wasn’t cheerful or chirpy, either, at least with them. She kept herself hidden from them.”