by Justin Go
—Bonjour, Mireille says. Êtes-vous Monsieur Desmarais?
The old man regards us suspiciously through pale and watery eyes. He admits that he is Monsieur Desmarais. Mireille tells him our names, touching my arm as she explains that my great-grandfather was an English soldier who was billeted near here with a family called Lefèvre during la Grande Guerre. Desmarais studies us further. He inches forward and looks at the iron sky above our shoulders, at the dirty Peugeot in the driveway.
—Bien, he says. Come inside before you get wet.
Desmarais takes our coats in his beefy hands and sets them on wooden hangers. He hooks the hangers on a curtain rod above the radiator in the living room, then he sits down in an armchair. We sit on a sofa wholly encased in yellowing plastic that adheres to our clothes and makes strange noises as we shift uncomfortably in our seats. Desmarais switches off the television.
—I live alone, he says in French. I don’t go shopping often. So I have nothing to offer you to drink.
Mireille tells him that we are fine as we are. Desmarais asks Mireille where she is from and they talk a little about Picardie. He asks Mireille if I’m English and I tell him I’m American. The old man nods.
—I knew Americans. In ’44. But you have not come to talk about that.
Desmarais glances at Mireille. He looks back at me.
—I was born in 1926. So I never met the Englishman.
—The Englishman?
—He stayed here with my mother’s family. The Lefèvres. My father’s name was Desmarais—
The old man has a strong northern accent and I understand him only with difficulty. He explains that many English soldiers stayed with his mother’s family during the war, but only one officer. His mother was a young girl then and the officer helped her with her lessons.
—The Englishman had been wounded, Desmarais says. Do you know where?
—La gorge. And in the leg.
Desmarais touches his throat.
—Oui, la gorge. My mother said he spoke very softly. I never heard about the leg.
—It’s incredible, Mireille says, that your family remembered him this long.
Desmarais shakes his head and says that it is only natural that his family remembers the Englishman. He tells us that this whole village hated the English, for to be occupied by them was only one step above having les Boches here. He says the English were low people who drank too much and caused trouble.
—They knew they were going to die. And for this piece of land?
The old man gestures toward the bleak landscape outside and says that it must be a hard thing to fight for a country that is not your own. But he says that this Englishman was different, for he was an officer and he spoke French. Desmarais holds the proof of these things. The old man goes into the next room. He is gone for some time, and when he returns he has a box upholstered in burgundy fabric. He opens it on the coffee table.
—Some of my mother’s jewelry.
He looks up at us and grins, revealing a set of crooked yellow teeth.
—Nothing valuable. That was all sold.
Desmarais pulls a small drawer in the jewelry box. He takes out a silver cross and hands it to me. The cross is square, its four arms adorned with the imperial crown, the royal cypher of George V set in the center. The medal doesn’t have its ribbon.
—What is it? Mireille asks.
—A war medal, I say. The Military Cross.
Desmarais says that it is because of this medal that his mother remembered the Englishman. For all her life the cross was hung over the mirror of her dresser. The old man stands abruptly.
—I just remembered, he says. My niece gave me a box of tea. I can make you tea.
Mireille tells him we don’t need a drink, but Desmarais insists and finally Mireille offers to make tea herself. Desmarais tells her where to find it and Mireille goes into the kitchen. The old man leans toward me with a conspiratorial whisper.
—I suppose you have come to ask about la malle.
—La malle?
Desmarais raises his eyebrows. Was it not for la malle that I had come here? I shake my head and explain that I don’t know the meaning of the word. A malle is a case for traveling, Desmarais explains, and when he was a child one would take une malle on a voyage on an ocean liner. When the English officer left this house he left behind a small malle. Later the Englishman wrote and said he would come to collect it. For this reason, Desmarais tells me, the family had kept la malle for many years and though the Englishman never came, Desmarais had now kept it too long to dispose of it.
—My niece wants me to get rid of everything in the attic. But one can’t simply throw these things away. When a man grows old he wants to keep what’s left, even if it isn’t useful.
Desmarais winks at me.
—Of course, a young man like you won’t understand. But wait until you get older—
—I believe you now.
The old man smiles with polite disbelief. I ask him what is inside la malle, but he only shrugs.
—A bunch of burned papers. You can see for yourself.
I follow Desmarais up a set of carpeted stairs to the second story, the old man gripping the rail as he climbs the steps one at a time. He asks me to fetch a step stool from the bedroom, then instructs me to stand on the stool and push up a square door in the ceiling. I push the panel and it swings open on its hinges. There is a short iron ladder that pulls down.
—Faites attention, Desmarais warns. There may be rats up there. I think la malle is next to my fishing things, on the side with the window.
I climb the ladder into the attic. The roof drops steeply on each side, the space lit by a single window that projects a shaft of light across the room, exposing the odd remnants of a long and varied life. Stacks of cardboard boxes and piles of old electronics. A few rusty fans, a rack of old coats. Everything is dusty but arranged in good order. A pair of old bamboo fishing rods is leaned against the sloping ceiling. Beneath a stack of tackle boxes I uncover a small brown trunk, my fingers carving tracks on its dusty surface. The trunk is about two feet wide and a foot deep, perhaps intended to carry boots or hats. It is crafted of leather and fitted with brass hardware. Three initials are stenciled onto the front: AEW.
The latch at the center is unlocked. I unbuckle the two brittle leather straps and pull back the lid.
Ash and half-burned paper, the canvas lining blanketed with powdery soot. A few cloth-bound books: Scrambles in the Alps, The Spirit of Man: An Anthology. The spines creak and snap as I flip their pages. I take a breath.
Beside the books there is a bundle of charred envelopes. Some are blackened on the corners, others all but burned. 2nd Lieut. A.E. Walsingham, 1 Batt. Royal Berkshire Regt., B.E.F., France. Ashes flake off my fingers as I open the envelope and unfold the sheet inside. The letter is written in a peculiar blue-black script: long and florid capitals, frequent dashes of varying length, elaborate ampersands. It is dated October 17, a few weeks before Ashley was wounded.
Dearest –
Eleanor & I went to the London Library today. I picked a tall stack of volumes, but sitting down to them, found myself asleep before ten pages were read. I dreamt of wondrous things – the stave church at Urnes I told you of, but the famous portals were yet uncarved, so you drew out your knife & we shaped them together – you carving one creature & I the other, their bodies linked fast. You lopped off a piece of the portal as a Souvenir for me, and told me to guard it well, for we were now as joined as two souls could be. Then the carillon tolled, for it was time for us to enter the church, but when you put your hand on the door – I awoke.
So I bade good-bye to Eleanor & strolled along the Embankment. Surely, I thought, even this most English of rivers flows to the sea & then towards you. On the pavement I watched a tramp draw, in chalk, the most exquisite replica of a Delacroix, only to be washed away by a rain that began to fall. Having no shilling, I gave him a ring from my own finger as recompense. He at first refused it, but I
explained the ring had been an unwelcome gift, and I was richer without.
Of your question – of an Engagement – you already hold me by far more tender strings, and they are no less binding. Can you love me so much – Without – for just so long? For ten times so long? We shall not speak of wills, even gold or silver. Without you all should become lead, and would be no gift to me. I would lose more than any widow ever had. They lost husbands – I would lose my morning star, not yet risen.
Of Promises – the greatest I can fathom – I give myself to you, not in the tired rites of civilization, but through my own Design – as if love had never been before, and so I made it just for you.
Imogen
I try to refold the sheet, but my hands are shaky and it breaks at the crease. I put the letters back in the trunk and carry it down the ladder. The old man nods approvingly.
—You should take it.
—But you’ve kept it all this time.
I open the lid to show the contents, but the old man dismisses this with a sweep of his hand. He tells me he has enough old papers of his own without the need for old papers in a foreign language.
—When I’m gone my niece will just throw it out.
Desmarais descends the staircase at a crawl. I swing the attic door shut and bring the trunk downstairs, setting it on the living room carpet. The old man lowers himself into his armchair and switches on the television with a remote control.
—The news will be on soon, he remarks.
Mireille comes in carrying a tray with three mugs of tea.
—It took forever to light the stove—
Mireille looks at the trunk. She looks back at me. Her mouth is open.
—Tu as trouvé quelque chose?
Desmarais grins. —He did. And now we will drink tea, just like the English.
23 November 1916
SS Invicta
English Channel
The journey back from France was dreadful. After the quarrel with Ashley, Imogen left the cottage at Laviéville and spent a terrible night confined to a hotel east of Amiens, watching the train of refugees flow past on the muddy road. She had not eaten since breakfast and all the restaurants were closed, so she sent the elderly porter out to search for food. He came back half an hour later dripping wet with only a small round pain de campagne gripped under his overcoat. It was wet and flecked with dirt. Imogen tipped the porter and chewed the loaf greedily in bed, listening to the rumble of guns in the darkness.
She spent the second night at a dirty hotel in Boulogne waiting for a ferry the next morning, stir-crazy but also fearful of leaving her room. She drew a bath but the hot water went out halfway through and she sat paralyzed in the lukewarm tub, too weak to move, too cold to stay, wondering if Ashley had been harmed in the bombardment, wondering what reason she had to return to England at all. She put her hand to her stomach under the water and decided the swelling had started after all. But a moment later she changed her mind.
Imogen dunked her head under the bath. She listened to the humming silence of the water against her eardrums, the soft ping of her bracelet on the enamel tub as she pictured continents they might escape to: sun-bleached fields with horizons twice as wide as they had ever known. She stayed in the bath until her teeth began to chatter.
Imogen boards the ferry in the morning. The sky is gray and blustery, the sea in the Channel very rough, the few passengers on deck searching the choppy waves for signs of U-boats. The only other woman is a stout nurse in the khaki uniform of the nursing yeomanry. She leans against the rail beside a life preserver, scanning the ocean with a set of field glasses. She invites Imogen to have a look. Imogen obliges, but she sees only the same dark water, the same white froth magnified to ten times the size. It makes her dizzy.
The woman lowers her voice. The mast and the cables of the ship’s derrick sway high above her cap.
—Heard about the Britannic?
—Pardon?
—Sunk yesterday in the Mediterranean. Along with God knows how many souls. Imagine, there could be a U-boat under us at this very moment, or a mine—
Imogen thanks the woman and hands back the field glasses, continuing along the promenade deck toward the stern. The nausea has come back and she does not know if it is the ship or the child or Ashley or everything put together. She goes to the ship’s doctor, but he is too busy attending wounded soldiers to see her. A sympathetic nurse gives Imogen a bottle of patent medicine for seasickness. It tastes of bitter herbs and alcohol and syrupy mint, and Imogen goes back on deck feeling worse than ever, the horizon pitching and rolling, the air thick with cold spray, black smoke pouring from the twin funnels above her. She grasps the railing and watches the swells break against the ship’s hull.
It had all gone wrong. For weeks she had fretted away long nights in stark terror of Ashley’s death, picturing how it might come to him in a bullet or a bomb, wondering if she would feel the smallest tremor in the ground, a rustling in the grass. But when the catastrophe finally arrived there had been no tremor, no warning, because in going to France she had somehow mangled the one thing she was trying to save. And he had mangled it too.
For it hadn’t only been Ashley in danger, Imogen suddenly realizes. They could all be brought under the waves of chance, their whole being submerged in an instant. It could happen to anyone on land or sea: the gold-braided naval officers on the navigation bridge, the ladies at tea in Mayfair and Belgravia, the art students sketching the Velázquez at the National Gallery. Even the frock-coated gentlemen in gray suede gloves walking through the solid doors in Whitehall that were never locked, the War Office and the Admiralty from which the whole empire was directed—they were all weaker than they knew, so much weaker. For nothing was certain, least of all the things one counted on to survive.
Imogen takes the bottle of medicine from her coat pocket and throws it over the rail, watching it flip end over end until it is lost in the gray.
It seems hours before the ship reaches Folkestone. Imogen boards the connecting train and at dusk the conductor enters her compartment to draw the air-raid blinds. The electric light is too murky to read by and she does not know they are in London until the conductor opens the compartment door.
—Madam, it’s the terminus. Charing Cross Station.
She takes a taxi to Cavendish Square and enters the house, creeping up the carpeted stairs to her bedroom. She throws her dress on the floor and pulls off the silk combination she has been wearing for three days. She had left her spare in Laviéville. Her bed seems alien with its Turkish counterpane and soft bolster. She is nearly asleep when she hears her door open in the darkness. Imogen turns her back to the door, pulling the covers tight around her shoulders. The door closes again.
In the morning they are waiting for her in the parlor: her father leaning beside the mantel clock with the smoldering stub of a cigar in hand; her mother looking pallid on the divan, her hands in her lap; Eleanor perched on the piano bench, her legs crossed tightly at the knee. Her father clears his throat.
—Imogen. It’s time we spoke.
Imogen glances at her sister, but Eleanor turns her face to the window. Imogen looks at her father.
—I was at Beatrice’s in Surrey, didn’t Ellie tell you? I meant to come back yesterday, but the trains got muddled by the zeppelin—
Her father taps his cigar on an ashtray on the mantel.
—She told us, her father says. And we’ve more pressing matters to discuss.
He comes quickly to the point. He impresses upon Imogen that the decision is not simply hers to make, that the ignominy of the existence she intends would not only be hers but scrupulously allotted to all four of them, even to the more distant relatives of the Andersson or Soames families.
—You imagine you’re simply deciding for yourself. But what you do affects all of us.
Imogen crumples into a chair. She has not bathed since her return and her hair and skin smell of salt water. Her father continues his discourse, outlining
the consequences of an illegitimate child, the hardship it would incur on Imogen and the child and the family at large. To this speech Imogen’s mother adds meager words of agreement. Her father begins to question her.
—You say this fellow won’t marry you?
Imogen puts her hands to her face. She can feel the nausea coming back.
—I don’t want to marry.
—But what are his intentions?
—It doesn’t matter what he intends. It’s my life—
—Imogen, will he or will he not?
Imogen looks at her father. Her voice is hard.
—He will not.
—Can he pay anything?
She glares at him, too angry to speak, her fingers clutching the bracelet on her wrist. Her father is unperturbed.
—You don’t care for money now. But you will in time.
—He can pay, Eleanor whispers. He gets thousands and thousands per year, so Charles heard. They say his uncle was frightfully rich and left him nearly everything.
Imogen’s head turns with a start. She has never heard of Ashley’s money before and she is on the point of questioning Eleanor when her mother begins talking in an oddly calm voice, her words evidently well rehearsed.
—Darling, what I say may sound cruel to you at first. But Papa and I have put a great deal of thought into this, and I promise you it’s the best thing for everyone. Most of all for you—
Imogen has trouble listening, but she absorbs the dim outline of their plan. Eleanor will announce she is expecting a child; Imogen will write to Ashley to say she has miscarried; the two sisters will go to Sweden, ostensibly to escape a winter of rationing and bombing raids for the comforts of a neutral country; the sisters will live in the seclusion of a rural home, the secret of Imogen’s pregnancy closely guarded; Imogen will deliver the child with the assistance of a hired live-in nurse; Eleanor will return to England with the child and raise it as her own. The plan would neatly solve every problem, for Imogen and the family would emerge with their reputations unscathed, the child would grow up without stigma, and Eleanor would gain the child Charles and she had so far failed to produce.
