Moonlight

by Fergus O'Connell

  However, she wakes after only a couple of hours and is instantly wide awake. She realises how far off balance this information about Henry has thrown her. Her thinking has been completely cockeyed. Normally, when she is faced with any problem, Clara is a clear thinker, but with this, up until now, her mind has been a jumbled up mess.

  This thing that has just happened to her may be the biggest calamity of her life. However, it may also be that she has been handed a second chance at happiness. To get her thinking clear, she knows exactly where she has to start. What does she want?

  She doesn’t think her little list is too much to ask for. First, she wants a home where she can feel happy and not alone. Now this ‘not alone’ business is not as simple as it sounds. There is a part of her that likes to be alone. In her marriage with Henry it seems like the only time she can have this is now, when she is lying in bed, thinking about the future or playing out her little fantasies. So she wants to be able to have that. She wants to sometimes be Clara Jordan, as she was before she was married – to do the things that girl used to do. Read books. Go out by herself. Have a little money. Meet the friends she had, all of whom seem to have drifted away in the intervening years.

  But then she also wants a man to cherish her. He will have his own life, as James does, and then they will have a life together. She imagines the four of them going to France together, one little, happy family. Could they do that next year? Could it happen so soon? She imagines them in a little country inn on the bank of that river, the ‘somm.’ A steep thatched roof. Are the roofs thatched in that part of France? The girls sharing a room and she and James in the room beside them. Could the girls get used to that – that James wasn’t their real father but he was acting as their father? Could they ever accept that? It is so far beyond what is normal. Her father, much as she loved him, would be shocked that she is thinking along these lines.

  And she also wants that man to love her body. Desire it. Want to touch it and lick it and caress it and yes, to fuck it. And she wants a man’s body that she can do the same to. She thinks that James has a handsome face. He is taller than Henry by several inches and from what she can see his body is slim – certainly slimmer than Henry’s even though James is older.

  What would it be like if she were married to him? Would he be a good father to the girls? A step-father. The words sound strange. She thinks he would be. She could imagine him being very loving towards them. But what if he wasn’t and he lived a sort of life of his own separate from her and the girls? Clara sees that her only real course is that of divorce. To stay with Henry while he carries on with this other woman would just condemn her to a lifetime of misery. If she takes the path of divorce, it’s possible – just possible – that the result will be that she will be handed a second chance at happiness. She believes that pursuing this course will exact a terrible price from her. If she is to go through with all this, she wants to be sure about what is waiting for her at the end, what all this suffering might lead to and whether it would be worth it.

  Henry. Her mind suddenly catapults back to the man who lies beside her. Those nights he has spent away, he has spent fucking another woman – putting his cock into her and riding her. It is an image she can’t get out of her mind. Clara feels disgusted and finds herself moving away from Henry so that she is right over on the edge of the bed. It is here that she falls back asleep.

  Chapter 35

  Thursday 23 July 1914

  July 23rd dawns, the day the Austrians are due to play the Serbs. The whole of the German military and political leadership ostentatiously go on holiday. All along Germany has been egging Austria on, while at the same time trying to deny all knowledge of what its ally is doing. The holiday thing is part of that. Germany’s game plan now goes like this:

  As soon as Austria presents its ultimatum, the Germans will do a big diplomatic push with the other teams – Russia, France, Britain – with the intention of localising the war. The Germans intend to say that the Austrian action has taken them completely by surprise. They will point out the fact that Der Kaiser is on his boating holiday and that eminent men like the Minister for War and the Chief of the Grand General Staff are on leave.

  In London, Clara is in the kitchen when Henry comes down. He is dressed – all he has to do is put on his jacket – and carries his newspaper. Ordinarily, Clara would have made tea and allowed it enough time to reach just the strength he likes. When she heard him coming down the stairs she would have started his toast under the grill. This morning she has done neither of these things. As he comes into the kitchen with a cheery, ‘Morning, my dear,’ Clara doesn’t respond and instead just walks out. She goes upstairs in the direction from which Henry just came, goes into their bedroom and sits on the edge of the bed, looking vacantly out the window.

  Henry is quite nonplussed by this. His first thought is to go after Clara, saying, ‘What about my tea and toast?’ But something tells him that this mightn’t be the best thing to do. He makes some tea himself. Then he tries to light the grill but realises that he doesn’t actually know how to do that. ‘Damn it,’ he curses. ‘Blasted woman.’

  Intensely irritated, Henry ends up leaving for work on an empty stomach. When Clara hears the door slam – which it does, shaking the house – she says, ‘Fuck him!’ aloud.

  Today, for President Poincaré, there are more salutes, more anthems and, at last, the visit is complete. His final words to the Tsar are, ‘This time, we must hold firm.’ Then the President’s warship sets course for Stockholm. ‘Thank God that’s over,’ Poincaré thinks.

  Behind him, in St Petersburg, the Russian Foreign Minister tells the German Ambassador that Germany will have to ‘reckon with Europe’ if she supports an Austrian attack against Serbia.

  When Der Kaiser reads the dispatch reporting this conversation, he writes in the margin, ‘No! Russia, yes!’ So the other part of the German plan is a ‘bring it on’ with Russia. Germany wants to play one game in the Group of Death – against Russia – and then be declared the winner. But of course you know, clear thinking reader, that the Von Schlieffen Plan doesn’t allow for this scenario. Would that everybody else had been as clear thinking.

  ‘There’s something I need to discuss with you,’ Clara says.

  James has hardly had time to raise his hat in greeting her. She has decided it’s best this way. Get the whole business done and over with so that if he wants to walk out of her life, he can do it now. Standing – she hasn’t heard him when he suggested they find a seat – she tells him what has happened.

  ‘I didn’t know whether to tell you or not,’ she says, looking into his eyes and trying to gauge his reaction. ‘It all seems so … so sordid and I know it’s nothing to do with you and maybe I shouldn’t have involved you but I didn’t know where else to turn—’

  Clara feels herself rapidly losing her composure. She really doesn’t want to break down and cry. Things are bad enough.

  ‘Please—’ he says, but Clara just keeps going.

  ‘I need to know if I have a friend in you.’

  As she hears the words, she knows how plaintive they sound. She imagines that James has lots of friends and here is she without one in the whole world other than this one, this stranger who she has met in a park.

  ‘Please,’ he says again, and this time she stops – or, at least, pauses.

  ‘I said that I would help you. I shall – in every way I can. In the short time I’ve known you, you’ve become a very dear friend, Clara. You have no idea how much I’ve looked forward to our day together today. If you would like to meet with a solicitor, I shall arrange it. I shall come with you if you would like that.’

  ‘Oh, yes please, I would,’ she gushes. ‘That would be too kind of you.’

  ‘It’s nothing, my dear Clara,’ he says.

  At exactly 6:00 p.m. at the Serbian Foreign Office in Belgrade, the team of the mighty Austria lines out against that of tiny Serbia. With a name straight out of light opera, the Austrian m
inister to Belgrade, Wladimir Baron Giesl von Gieslingen, hands over a note containing the Austrian ultimatum to the Serbs. He tells them that he expects a reply within forty-eight hours. He doesn’t tell them that if the Serbian government does not accept all the points of the ultimatum, his orders (from Berchtold) are to sever diplomatic relations and leave the country immediately along with all the embassy personnel.

  The Serbs are unable to reply to this early score, and victory in this first leg goes to the Austrians. It is one of the few times the Austrians will win a game in the Group of Death.

  The defeated Serbians have to do something before the second leg, which will now be played at the end of the forty-eight hour deadline – in other words, on Saturday 25 July at 6:00 p.m. Nicholas Pasitch, the Serbian Prime Minister and manager of the Serbian team, is on an election tour in the south of the country when the Austrian note arrives. When summoned to return, he does what any sensible man would do in the circumstances – he leaves for a holiday in Greece and has to be pulled off the train to receive the telegram of recall. There is only one thing for it. Just as with Berchtold before him, Nicholas Pasitch also needs to phone a friend.

  Pasitch’s problems are twofold. First of all, he wonders if he will even have a team. The Serbian harvest isn’t in. If he issued the order to mobilise, would the Serbian peasants actually obey it at all? Or would they instead carry on with their harvest, ensuring food for the winter and money to pay their taxes and for wine? In addition, the Serbian team has only 120,000 rifles and no artillery. Gloomily, Pasitch comes to the conclusion that he can only play if Russia backs him. Of course, what this really means is that he will have to do whatever the Russians tell him to do. If they say play then he’ll play, if they say don’t play, then that’s going to be the end of him in the Group of Death. It perhaps makes him wonder why Serbia has a manager at all – since the Russian manager effectively manages both teams.

  That night Pasitch asks for Russian support. However, the Russians know they’re not fit to play Germany, which could well be what would happen if they decide to support the Serbs. Pasitch’s request is refused. He’s told to accept the Austrian ultimatum and that, with any luck, international opinion will cause the Austrians to change their minds. Some friend, Pasitch thinks.

  At about the same time that Pasitch is gloomily pondering the nature of friendship, Clara is lying in bed replaying one of the nicest days that she has had in a long time. Not that anything dramatic happened. Well, she supposes, telling James all about Henry was dramatic. But after that, they walked around the park for a little. They had lunch in a café. They walked some more and sat in the sun and watched the birds. Clara was somewhat fearful that she would bump into somebody she knew – not that she knows that many people – and so she kept steering them into the less frequented areas of the park. But in the end they met nobody and it was as though time slowed down so that the afternoon seemed to go on and on and on. Before they parted, they exchanged addresses, Clara writing his on the inside back cover of her little diary.

  ‘If there’s anything,’ he said, ‘any kind of emergency, write to me. Say where I should meet you or what I should do, and you can consider it done. Or come to where I live. If there’s anything – anything at all.’

  ‘But you know you can’t write to me,’ says Clara anxiously.

  ‘Of course, I know that,’ he replies.

  More than anything else, Clara believes that James is a man who is considerate, who wouldn’t take her for granted as Henry does all the time now. Although that’s in the process of coming to an end, she thinks vindictively.

  Clara finds that her head is full of James. She is either remembering the events of the afternoon or wondering how she will get through the seven long days before she sees him again. For this is what they have arranged. And James is going to organise a meeting with a solicitor and they will meet again next Thursday for James to tell her when that meeting will be.

  Before she falls asleep, Clara recalls the high point of that sunny afternoon where, some time before they arranged to meet again next Thursday, James said to Clara, ‘I like you very much, Clara’ to which she replied, ‘I like you very much.’

  Late that evening, Grey writes in his diary. ‘If war should occur between the four Great Powers, it would result in a complete collapse of European credit and industry; in the present great industrial States, this would produce a state of things worse than 1848, and, irrespective of who might be the victors, many things might be completely swept away.’

  Chapter 36

  Friday 24 July 1914

  The Russian Council of Ministers meets in the afternoon to decide its response to the crisis. They are all agreed that neither the Russian Army nor Navy is ready to play Germany or Austria or anybody else for that matter. But they are also agreed that Russia cannot stand entirely aside. What are they to do?

  Sazonov, the Foreign Minister, comes up with an idea. How about if Russia mobilises in the military districts adjacent to Austria? It would show that Russia is supporting its ally, Serbia. At the same time, since there would be no mobilisation along its border with Germany, this would show the Germans that Russia had no warlike intentions towards them. The rest of the Council of Ministers is delighted with this idea. It seems to give them exactly what they want. It’s a gesture of support for Serbia but without any firm commitment. It also doesn’t raise the diplomatic temperature in a way that might risk a war against Germany.

  Of course, you, well-informed reader, know that there is a rather serious problem with Sazonov’s suggestion. And as usual, it is Edmund Blackadder who has the best analysis – it is bollocks. It’s unworkable. You know that partial mobilisation can’t work for the reasons that we’ve explained much earlier in our story. So why does Sazonov not know? Well, I suppose in fairness to him, he’s not a military man.

  However, there is one man at the Council of Ministers meeting who should know. That is the Russian Chief of Staff, Nikolai Yanushkevitch. But Yanushkevitch is new to the job and is reluctant to contradict the Foreign Minister. As well as that, maybe Yanushkevitch doesn’t actually know that there is a problem with partial mobilisation. He has spent most of his career occupied by administrative duties in the Ministry of War. He has never held a field commission and his command experience is limited to a short period as a company commander. (That and pornography and anti-Semitism, both of which Yanushkevitch has an abiding and active interest in.) It is said that Yanushkevitch owes his promotion mainly to his engaging personality – something which, presumably, Russia’s Jews would not agree with.

  So for whatever reason, the meeting breaks up under the illusion that a policy of partial mobilisation is possible and an order is issued to that effect.

  In England, while people are reading about the Austrian ultimatum in the Evening Standard, Sir Edward Grey holds a copy of the document in his hand. He is at a Cabinet meeting attended by, amongst others, Winston Churchill, and they have been discussing a separate issue entirely – the possibility that there might be conflict in Ireland following the partition of that country. In quiet, grave tones Grey reads the document. When he has finished he says that he has ‘never before seen one State address to another independent State a document of so formidable a character.’

  It has been clear to Grey for many years that Austria wants to play Serbia. In the past he has managed to discourage this with the help of the Germans. He intends to try this approach again, unaware that Der Kaiser has already told the Austrians that they will have his backing. So Grey suggests mediation between Italy, France, Germany and Britain as the best way of stopping an Austro-Serbian war. A conference could be held in London chaired by these four powers to resolve the dispute between Austria and Serbia.

  How convenient it would be, Grey has often thought, if these endless silly squabbles in Central and Eastern Europe could be worked on and resolved here in London. The countries could just send their ambassadors – even though they are foreigners, they are me
n that Grey likes and gets along with – and the problems could be worked through. Then there would be no crises and he could spend his weekends fishing and listening to birds.

  Now instead, Grey is going to have to work with the other managers – Poincaré, Der Kaiser, Berchtold, the Tsar. They are distant people whom he hardly knows at all. Now, he will have to try to guess what they were thinking and planning to do. He will have to examine minutely what they say and try to judge whether that is what they really mean. He will have to ask himself whether they were acting in good faith or are scheming.

  It is all so complicated. But he takes as his opening position that nobody in their right mind would want to play in the Group of Death. That much, at least, has to be true. So having gained the Cabinet’s approval for the intervention by the four powers, Grey looks forward once again to a weekend at the cottage.

  It has been an enjoyable day for Der Kaiser on board his yacht the Hohenzollern, anchored at Balholm. He receives a dispatch from the German Ambassador in Belgrade saying how sad the Serbian people are at being faced with the choice of either war or national humiliation. Wilhelm writes in the margins of the report: ‘Bravo! One would not have believed it of the Viennese!’

  In Vienna, the British Ambassador reports, there is wild enthusiasm for a game against the Serbs.

  In London, the British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith writes to his friend Venetia Stanley that ‘the Austrians are quite the stupidest people in Europe.’

  That same day, Henry and Mary go for lunch. By this time, Mary is so full of anger, she feels like a coiled spring. She is angry with Henry because of the way he is stringing her along. She is now firmly convinced that he hasn’t told his wife that he wants a divorce. And she is angry at that bitch of a wife of his, who is now clearly playing her own game. They have only just left the office and are heading towards the tea shop when Mary says, ‘You haven’t asked her for a divorce, have you?’