The Very Thought of You
Page 27
Perhaps it was enough that she had loved Thomas. Perhaps just to have loved was enough – just to have seen this world, and known it, through the eyes of love.
Anna was panting a little, and could feel her own heartbeats. But as she looked around now, the park seemed to flower for her once more, as if touched with grace – it would only be fleeting, she knew, but here was Ashton Park quickening again before her eyes—
Later, when Anna was found dead on the bench, nobody knew who she was, or why she was there, or what it meant that she had collapsed beside this copper beech tree.
One of the House guides, Rufus, was just finishing his tour when a visitor ran into the saloon to raise the alarm.
He had never seen a dead person before, but as soon as he reached the old woman, her inert body was unmistakable. He rang the estate office to tell them.
“There’s a house visitor here who found her, says he saw her earlier in the rose garden. Yes, she seemed fine then.”
Rufus noticed how his supervisor’s face was blanched with shock as they waited for the ambulance to arrive. But he was ashamed to find himself edgily checking his watch, because he didn’t want to be late for his date that night. He did spare a quick thought for the woman’s family, but only while wondering which shirt he should wear, even when the paramedics arrived. She was old, after all, he told himself.
An hour later, he replayed the unexpected scene to his girlfriend at dinner.
“An elderly day tripper with a fireak stroke,” he said, putting her out of his mind.
The ambulance had long since gone when the caretaker began closing up Ashton House for the night. Shutting the windows, securing the garden doors, checking that nobody was left wandering through the corridors. The last of the evening light was still pooling unseen in the saloon’s antique mirrors, but then the caretaker came in to close the wooden shutters and lock the door, and any remaining light was shut out there too.
Only darkness and silence now flowed around the empty rooms, until at last the house lay quite still, like a photograph, ready for tomorrow’s visitors.
Acknowledgements
Several years ago my father gave me a batch of papers belonging to our cousin, a diplomat called Sir Clifford Norton. It was eerie to read his letters and dispatches from the Warsaw embassy, written just before and after the Nazi invasion in 1939. At around the same time, I visited a beautiful House in Cornwall which was open to the public. The visitors’ tour included a very touching archive of children who had been evacuated to the House during the Second World War.
Reading my cousin’s Warsaw diaries and seeing the photographs of evacuees in Cornwall sparked something in me. I was struck by the unexpected repercussions of war stretching right through to the stately homes of England, where small puzzled children were despatched, often not seeing their parents for several years.
Clifford Norton and his wife “Peter” (her confusing nickname) are the only “real” characters in this novel; they remain at the margins of this story, but act as an occasional chorus on the wider world beyond Ashton Park. As a couple, they had a knack of turning up at some of the defining moments of their century. Clifford was an Oxford classicist who survived the trenches at Gallipoli, and then joined the Foreign Office. Through the 1930s, he was private secretary to Sir Robert Vansittart, the charismatic head of the Foreign Office, whose persistent efforts to tackle Hitler’s threat were repeatedly ignored and thwarted, first by Baldwin, then Chamberlain. Norton was a central figure in Vansittart’s group of “anti-appeasers”, and when he was posted to Warsaw, he did all he could to stiffen his Government’s support for the Poles. As ambassador in Switzerland during the war, it was Norton who sent reports of the death camps to Churchill, though his pleas to bomb the lines to the camps went unheeded. But his most effective service came after the war, during his years as ambassador in Athens: there, recognizing that the Greek civil war could open the door to rapid Soviet expansion, and that Britain was unable to provide the requisite aid, he played a dogged backroom role in wooing the Americans to intervene in Europe, with the Truman Doctrine. His obituaries painted him as an unobtrusive but tenacious diplomat who quietly played a key part in ushering Marshall Aid into Europe.
His wife Peter was a more flamboyant figure, a woman of infectious energy and vitality. As a young advertising agent, she fell under the spell of the Bauhaus group, and became a close friend and supporter of Gropius, Klee and Kandinsky. During the 1930s, she was drawn to the Surrealists, and in 1936 she opened what was the first avant-garde art gallery in Britain (called the London Gallery), together with Roland Penrose. She was passionate about art’s potential to change people’s lives, and her Cork Street gallery immediately became a centre for new art in London. When the Nortons were posted to Warsaw, she handed the gallery over to Penrose and E.L.T. Mesens, but continued to support emerging artists all her life, and was a founder member of the ICA. An archive of her papers can be found at the Tate.
Peter was also known for her tireless charitable work. She was a great one for driving aid lorries across Europe, and after the Nazi invasion of Poland, she threw herself into work for Polish refugees, setting up a camp for them in Scotland. During the Greek civil war, she was decorated for her many strenuous efforts to provide aid for war victims, particularly orphaned children. Anecdotes about Peter’s generosity abound.
Amongst Peter Norton’s papers were several wartime testimonies collected from Polish refugees, from which I was able to draw some details for Pawel’s escape from Poland.
I’m very grateful to the friends who encouraged me through this book’s various stages, particularly Katy Emck and Stephen Wall, who were patient enough to read several drafts. Special thanks to Anna Webber, Elisabetta Minervini, Alessandro Gallenzi, Mike Stocks, and all the team at Alma. And my heartfelt thanks to Tim, Lucy and Daisy.