White Feathers

by Susan Lanigan

  ‘Mr Shandlin, what would you like?’ she asked, hoping to break him out of his sulky reverie.

  ‘Eva, I know you like your Jane Austen, but this isn’t the last century, and we’re not in school any more: you can call me Christopher.’ He turned to the waitress, who had reappeared. ‘The soup, please. I didn’t get to have luncheon.’

  ‘We don’t do soup. This is a tea rooms only,’ the waitress said smartly.

  He sighed. ‘Whatever everyone else is having, then. Eva, put that away, will you? I can take for this.’

  ‘But there’s really no need. I have—’

  He cut her off with an impatient gesture of his hand and counted out some coins. Eva realised that she had trodden on some exposed nerve of masculine pride and closed her purse. Their eyes met; something flared in his, and, for a moment, the atmosphere changed. But then the waitress returned with plates of cake on a tray and the moment passed.

  ‘I hate this,’ he said abruptly, after a few moments’ silence. ‘This ridiculous process by which people attempt to get to know each other with someone else watching. Going through a set of lines in a play stage-managed by convention.’

  ‘This cake is very heavy,’ Agatha commented. ‘Kinda sticks in my stummick. Begging yer pardon, miss.’ She dubiously cut another morsel with a dessert fork and chewed it slowly while Eva and Mr Shandlin – she felt unable to call him Christopher – looked down at the table, at the sky – everywhere but at each other.

  The miserable repast eventually coming to an end, Eva, with desperate gaiety, proposed another walk. They took the same route around the park as before, three abreast, watching as young lads on the artificial lake splashed each other with their oars, one even jumping in to retrieve his hat, the rowboat rocking violently at his leap. ‘Lawks-a-mercy,’ Agatha sighed, regarding them, ‘but you wouldn’t think there was a war on, would you?’

  ‘You do remind us at every opportunity,’ remarked Mr Shandlin sotto voce, in such a manner that Eva wanted to hit him. Why was he being so sullen? She should have wished the day to last forever but she just wanted to go home. Perhaps sensing her anger, he finally asked something approaching a civil question. ‘How is your sister? Is she quite recovered?’

  ‘She’s better than she was,’ Eva said, ‘but I worry about her.’

  ‘What is it? If I may ask?’

  ‘Consumption.’ It was the first time Eva had said the word out loud.

  ‘Ah.’ He nodded. ‘I see.’

  They finished their circuit at the bandstand, where, to Eva’s surprise, Mr Shandlin expressed a desire to sit down for a moment. Eva followed him up the steps and sat on the bench that ran around the inner circle, Agatha beside her. ‘The Three Musketeers in the Park,’ Eva muttered to herself, though if he heard her he gave no indication of it. He undid his shoelaces and redid them, all without looking at Eva.

  Agatha pulled on Eva’s sleeve discreetly. ‘Miss Eva, I just seen a friend of mine. I’ll need to speak to her for just a moment.’

  ‘I’m sorry, what?’ Eva said, confused. But Agatha was walking away from the bench. ‘I’ll be back,’ Eva said to Mr Shandlin, who merely grunted in response.

  ‘I seen a friend,’ Agatha repeated. Then she added, in a rapid whisper, ‘Miss Eva, did you know Missus Catherine hit me the other week? She read some book that told her it was usual to serve newspapers on a silver dish but she never said nothing to me, and I’d just brought them in the usual way and left them there. She picked up the tray she wanted and she hit me here with it.’ Agatha lifted her hair and showed a scar on her forehead. Eva exclaimed in horror. ‘I plain went out cold and when I came around she was shouting at me. There was me on the floor and all I could see was the Missus’ face all red and shouty. Everyone in the house is terrified of her, Miss Eva. Us downstairs heard she was in service herself, and they are always the ones that turn on their servants the worst. We know what she did to you. We still talk about it.’

  ‘And your friend?’ Eva said, after a long pause. The wind blew up again, and she pulled her coat around her.

  ‘Miss Eva,’ and now Agatha’s eyes were wide open, light hazel, ‘there is no friend. We – that is, Nelly and myself – we was just thinking you deserved a break. Only twenty minutes, mind.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Eva said, a little choked.

  Agatha merely winked in reply, and turned on her heel. Eva returned to the bandstand, where she and Mr Shandlin were almost alone, apart from an old woman in black, slumped on the bench, smelling of strong liquor. He continued to say nothing, slouching back, half turned away from her, hands deep in his pockets. She sat three feet away from him, turning away in similar fashion. The old woman stirred and snorted in that way drunks do when a dream interrupts their stupor.

  ‘Eva.’ He called her, softly. She did not turn around. ‘Eva, don’t be like that. Come back here.’ He patted the space beside him. She was not going to sit next to him. ‘Come back.’ Still she did not move. ‘Ah well,’ he said, ‘if Muhammad won’t go to the mountain—’ He rose and sat beside her.

  Their thighs touched, just as her knees had with David Wentworth Hopkins’, but this time the feeling was altogether different; Eva had to steady herself as even that slight contact made her skin tingle. With him so close by, the heat from his body palpable, Eva felt vulnerable, as if the knots she had tied to keep herself intact were pulling away, unravelling. ‘You won’t look at me,’ he said. ‘Why, Eva? What’s the matter?’

  Eva was having a hard time keeping her composure. She bunched her hands. ‘Why did you ask me to meet you today? You’ve hardly said a kind word. It would have been nice—’ She stopped, not trusting herself to finish her sentence.

  ‘I just wanted to get to know you a bit better, that’s all, without getting a ten-point interrogation on the doorstep. Oh, damn it, now you’re crying.’ He put his arm around her shoulders and clasped both her hands with his other hand, so that he was almost facing her.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ sniffed Eva.

  ‘Oh, I think you are, and my fault too! I’ve made a mess of things, as usual.’ He released her hands and rummaged in his pocket, pulling out a handkerchief, uncurling her fingers and placing it gently in her palm. ‘Go on. It’s clean, I swear it.’ He laughed nervously.

  Eva shook her head. It was too much, all of this. One minute he was cold and withdrawn, and now here he was at her side, stroking the base of her thumb with his and occasionally caressing her shoulder with his other hand. His touch was so new, after all the previous months of looking and not looking, greeting and avoiding, then their parting … it took a few moments for her to compose herself.

  Then she turned around and looked him full in the face. He was barely three inches away from her. The corners of his mouth twitched with the ghost of a smile. ‘There you are, dear girl. Now you see it all.’ Yes, Eva did see – and was shocked. How pale and anxious he was, his forehead suddenly lined and old, his eyes huge, the look of tender supplication in them. She had never seen his face so close, so it was hard to judge, but he looked desperate, almost as desperate as she.

  ‘Mr Shandlin’ – he drew back and looked ready to protest – ‘Christopher’ – he relaxed once more – ‘I care for you. More than I should. When you’re there I feel such happiness and when you’re not everything seems mean and trivial. If you’re just being friendly and detached and guiding me in my education, then please stop. It’s not fair—’ And now she was crying properly, not just surreptitious tears; now that she had said her piece, all her courage had fled: she could not look at him. To see pity in his eyes! She would rather die. But he did not let her go, or pull away, or admonish her.

  ‘Eva, shush.’ He gently brought her head to his chest. She felt his heart beat, the pulse rapid, the rhythm light-strong, light-strong. So that was where the iambic rhythm came from, all those sonnets and whatnot, that simple, repetitive motion that would continue without rest until the day you died. From the heart. She stopped sobbing and listen
ed, and the act of listening made her calm again. Through her half-open eyes she could see a few pigeons waddling about, their coos gentle and rumbling as they picked at cake crumbs.

  Part of her wanted to protest that they were in a public park, he was being too demonstrative, but then his hands were in her hair, and he kissed the top of her head – very softly – and along with that heartbeat, strong and steady and powerful, she felt his now-confident hand at the back of her neck.

  Something huge inside her finally rolled away, as if Sisyphus had been allowed to let his boulder career down the mountain and stand up, unburdened and free, the air light on his shoulder. She felt so safe. And he – Christopher – felt so warm, and close. He surrounded her.

  She looked up at him, and he caught her chin in his hand. Before she knew what was happening he was kissing her hairline, then her eyes, then, lightly but insistently, her lips, again and again. For such a sharp-tongued man, his lips were surprisingly soft, and each kiss seemed to leave barely a trace, the briefest of impressions. Once or twice, he exhaled heavily, like a sigh, or the sound he had made when she had crashed into him while dancing.

  She wanted to respond to his kisses, though she was unsure how. She opened her eyes; his were almost closed. He looked so fierce and strange! She was about to try and kiss him back when he withdrew and opened his eyes, keeping her in his embrace. ‘There,’ he said, ‘that detached enough for you?’ He was trying to sound debonair, but his hands were trembling.

  ‘You do like me,’ she said in wonder.

  He made an exasperated sound. ‘Of course I like you, Eva. Good God above, I thought it was obvious. The question is,’ he said, with some return of his earlier irritation, though he still held her fast, ‘do you like me? The other day you were rabbiting on about that boy – David this, David that. It nearly drove me out of my wits hearing you use his name again and again and not ever saying mine, not once. You’re so damned formal with me – every time you address me as Mr Shandlin it feels like being struck in the face with a wet towel. You were keen enough to know my name once, if I remember rightly, keen to the point of impudence. So why not use it?’

  Eva laughed happily. ‘Christopher—’

  ‘That’s better!’

  ‘—you are an idiot. Can you not understand that I could call David anything under the sun because I don’t care a thing for him? I was only entertaining him because my family put me under so much pressure. It makes no difference to me whether he’s called David, or Mr Hopkins, or Mincing Machine, or Teapot—’

  ‘Or Lavatory Brush, or Effluent Pipe,’ he cut in, with no little spite.

  ‘Don’t interrupt until I’m finished! What I’m saying is, his name is not dear to me. I can repeat it all day without the slightest emotional disturbance. But yours … Do you remember when I told you I was leaving The Links?’

  ‘I remember it all too clearly. I was most put out.’

  ‘I was about to say, “Goodbye Christopher”, but you walked off and left me there before I could even speak. And I had to stand there and watch you go. It was agony.’

  He swallowed. ‘And to walk away was agony too.’

  ‘Why did you?’

  ‘Oh, God – I had good intentions. It was just as I said then, I felt I owed it to you to do the right thing.’

  ‘“The right thing”? You mean because you were my teacher?’

  ‘Yes.’ His reply was barely more than a whisper, and his grip tightened on her hand. ‘You are so young, Eva, just seventeen.’

  ‘I’ll have you know I turned eighteen in May. Your advice then left me very confused, Christopher. You told me to marry someone who would support me. You didn’t seem to include yourself in that category. You were so uninterested. I quite hated you.’

  ‘I only knew – and this was quite beside any feelings I had for you – that a mind like yours ought not to be wasted. I presumed your family would get you married off pretty quickly, and I just hoped, for your sake, it would be to someone freethinking. I wanted to keep myself out of the way.’

  ‘And yet you liked me well enough,’ Eva said in wonder.

  ‘Oh, I liked you all right, Eva Downey. I more than like you. That was part of the reason why I avoided you after my … outburst. I knew then, you see. I could no longer be innocent of my real feelings: my God, they were nearly uncontrollable. Seeing you there in the front row each week was a torment. Dancing with you? Emily Jane Brontë would have called it “divinest anguish”.’ He kissed her again. ‘I never had the remotest notion of falling for any of my pupils; I could not imagine a development less convenient for my sanity or my bank balance. And yet here I am. When I ran into Miss Destouches the other day and she told me you were about to marry that Hopkins fellow, I realised I would have to make a sprint for it, otherwise I would lose you. And I realised that I couldn’t bear that, I couldn’t bear never to see you again, never to …’ He shook his head and looked down at his knees.

  Eva hesitantly put her hand to his cheek, and immediately he imprisoned it in his own. She leant over to kiss him on the lips. He responded, then lowered his head on her shoulder and hid his face in her neck.

  ‘I missed you,’ she whispered.

  His voice was muffled. ‘I missed you too.’

  The old woman started shouting something, then fixed them both with a glare. ‘Shameless! Shameless! I blame the war.’

  Eva looked up and saw Agatha’s returning shape beyond the plane trees. ‘I’ll need to go soon,’ she said.

  He sighed and straightened up, releasing her. ‘Yes, we had better. My train is in forty-five minutes.’

  At London Bridge station, the waiting room was full and smelt of sweat and onions. A locomotive could be heard hooting as the remnants of smoke drifted backwards along the platform. Christopher pulled Eva to him; once again her head was resting on his chest. She was breaking every rule of propriety in the book, but God she didn’t care. Agatha had her Turkish cigarettes and was happy to look the other way. ‘So,’ he said, ‘how does this work, then? What intricate social mechanism comes next?’

  ‘Well,’ Eva said, ‘I hardly know more than you, but arranging a date and a time is usually a good start.’

  ‘I have a half day on Wednesday. May I see you then? Same time?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Without Grace Poole?’ He gestured at Agatha.

  ‘Don’t call her that,’ Eva said, ‘she’s been very kind. You know she has to be there. Or Catherine will send someone else.’

  ‘It’s no hardship for me to leave you alone, sir,’ Agatha, overhearing, chimed in with a slight frown, ‘but Missus Catherine was most particular. A respectable girl like Miss Eva needs chaperoning, sir.’

  ‘And how do I get Miss Respectable Eva unchaperoned, then?’

  ‘Oh, that’s easy,’ Agatha said. ‘You have to speak to Mr Roy, then propose to Miss Eva, and then you become engaged.’

  ‘Good God,’ Christopher said, frowning. ‘Marriage? I have a train in five minutes – no, three.’ He dropped Eva’s hand and kissed her on the forehead. ‘Don’t worry, dear girl. We’ll sort this out. Just don’t marry that other chap, that’s all I ask.’

  ‘I think I can safely promise not to do that,’ Eva said, smiling.

  Christopher waved from the door of the waiting room and disappeared onto the platform. A shaft of sunlight fell on the tiles, and his dark form was briefly illuminated until he was lost in the crowds. Carriage doors banged shut in quick succession, then the train let out a series of loud, high-pitched asthmatic gasps as it moved out of the station. Eva watched it leave and did not move until Agatha put her hand on her arm.

  16

  TO THE

  YOUNG WOMEN

  OF LONDON:

  Is your ‘Best Boy’ wearing khaki?

  If not, don’t YOU THINK he should be?

  If he does not think that you

  and your country are worth

  fighting for – do you think he

&nbs
p; is WORTHY of you?

  Don’t pity the girl who is

  alone – her young man is

  probably a soldier – fighting

  for her and her country – and for YOU.

  If your young man neglects his duty to his

  King and Country, the time may come when

  he may well NEGLECT YOU.

  Think it over – then ask him to

  JOIN THE ARMY TO-DAY!

  14 October 1914

  Dearest Sybil,

  It’s been such a long time! I was hoping to get to see you before your wedding to Clive, but we seem to keep missing each other. I do wish we could talk more. It was wonderful talking to you on the telephone just after that magical day when Christopher declared his intentions to me. I let you go on for a while sounding guiltier and guiltier at the supposed mess you’d landed me in. Thank God you did what you did, Sybil, or else I’d now be Mrs David Wentworth Hopkins and holed up in a house with his ancient sister, silently losing the will to live. God bless you for that, and Christopher for not being a mouse in the end, in spite of his moral scruples. Yes, I suppose he is quite a bit older than I – he is thirty-one – but sympathetic temperaments do make it less important, do you not think?

  Mind you, sad as I am that your new activities take you away from me, I am enthralled by your latest interest in lady motorcyclists. The Spitfire Motorcycle Club sounds wonderful, and I really hope Clive doesn’t mean it when he says he won’t let you go on any more trips to Malvern. Can you not tell him that motorcycles may be useful for the war effort, and, besides, it helps keep you from worrying about Bo?

  I suppose you’ve heard the Turks are in on the game now too. Grace has put a whole new row of pins on her map where they’re attacking the Russians and is fretting about supply routes, as if she’d know a supply route from Adam. Christopher calls her ‘The Darling’, after that girl in the Chekhov story who always takes on the personality and style of speech of her current husband, except that Grace’s true husband is War. I wish he wouldn’t. She’s already overheard him do it once and it angered her very much.