The Kissing Garden

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘I can’t say I remember him saying that. On the other hand he might have told you that I hate it when somebody asks me to play. I immediately become all thumbs.’

  ‘In which case I won’t ask you again.’

  Inevitably Amelia did play for him, lured to the keyboard by the simplest of tricks.

  She was pouring them both a second cup of coffee when Ralph sat himself down at her piano and began leafing through her music before proceeding to murder all her favourite melodies. By the time Ralph was three-fingering his way slowly through ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’ she could bear it no longer.

  ‘Oh very well – what would you like to hear?’

  ‘It never fails.’ He looked up at her, mischief and mayhem in his eyes.

  With George away so much Amelia’s enjoyment in playing the piano had somehow foundered. There seemed little point in playing to yourself. This evening, however, she had an audience, which was perhaps why she found she could not stop, so that by the time she had worked her way through ‘Stormy Weather’ and all her other favourites, the fire had died down, and Clara had popped her head round the door to say good night.

  ‘You play beautifully,’ Ralph told her, still leaning on the piano watching her. ‘I don’t suppose you know “I Can’t Get Started with You”?’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve even heard it.’

  ‘It’s new. And it’s going to be a smash. Let me play it for you.’

  He went round to where she was seated at the piano but before he was only halfway there Amelia was already protesting.

  ‘Why don’t you try and sing it? Or hum it, or something?’

  ‘I don’t think you’ll pick this one up easily. It has a very difficult middle eight. Let me just map it out for you.’

  Reluctantly Amelia made room for him at the piano stool.

  ‘Don’t get up. There’s plenty of room for both of us on a duet stool, I am happy to say, Mrs Rafferty.’

  Now Amelia found that it was Ralph playing and singing to her, and as he did so it seemed to Amelia that the duet stool was becoming less and less roomy.

  Each verse ended the same, and each time Ralph sang the words they seemed to have more and more import.

  ‘Yes,’ Amelia said hastily, for want of anything else to say, when he finished. ‘I see what you mean about the middle eight.’

  ‘Mmm, tricky, isn’t it?’

  The middle eight was not the only thing that was tricky: not looking at Ralph was tricky too. She knew that she must not look up, least of all look round, because if she did she knew he would kiss her.

  ‘I’ll show you to the cottage.’ She tried to spring up from the stool, but that was as far as she got.

  They couldn’t hear his laugh; no-one could, except the two men sitting high in the yew trees. ‘Damn him,’ the Noble One said. ‘May fire rain on his cursed head.’

  ‘I warned you, sir,’ Longbeard sighed, stroking the soft white hairs of his whiskers. ‘I said he was here.’

  ‘Then kindly be rid of him, wizard! Send him flying! Do you not see, the wretched knave shall ruin everything! Just as he did before! He already has her in his thrall.’

  * * *

  Try as she might, Amelia could not get rid of the sense of that kiss. It was only the lightest of kisses, but as she tossed and turned in her bed before sleep finally induced oblivion, she could not forget the sensation.

  How could she have let him? she kept asking herself. How could she have liked him kissing her? She was a married woman – she was married to George. She rolled over yet again on her pillow, holding it in her arms while she struggled to make some sense out of the evening, and, failing, fell asleep.

  The next day Amelia was up early, as always. By breakfast time there was still no sign of Ralph. Imagining that he must be a heavy sleeper, Amelia returned inside, and had a cup of coffee and a slice of toast in the kitchen with Clara before beginning her day’s work in the garden. At half past ten she saw him emerging from the cottage to stretch and have a good yawn in the sunshine before he noticed her. Amelia at once busied herself, nevertheless watching him out of the corner of her eye as he ambled across the lawns.

  ‘Morning, Mrs Rafferty,’ he called, without a trace of the embarrassment that Amelia herself was feeling. ‘What an extraordinarily perfect morning. All right if I go and help myself to some breakfast?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Amelia replied, determined to be as formal as she could. ‘Clara will show you where to find everything.’

  As he thanked her and turned to go, Amelia straightened up, about to call him back, but then thought better of it. It hardly seemed quite the right time nor perhaps the place to ask a man she barely knew what exactly he had meant by kissing her the night before. They had after all parted in complete silence. Amelia fleeing upstairs while Ralph made his way, albeit possibly a little hazily, to the guest cottage.

  So, not really knowing what she should say, she let him go inside to be ministered to by Clara while she went on working in the garden, all the while wondering how and when exactly to approach the subject.

  Since she did not expect George home until early afternoon, she decided that perhaps it was best left until Ralph and she sat down together for lunch, when she could more easily bring the subject up – if indeed she had the courage to bring it up at all.

  ‘You look as though you are sitting on an egg, Mrs Rafferty,’ Ralph said as he helped them both to some sherry in the drawing room at midday. ‘Do you have something you wish to hatch?’

  ‘To be hatched, actually. It was something you said last night. Just before dinner.’

  ‘About being on the run? I was wondering when you’d get round to it.’

  ‘You could have volunteered the information.’

  ‘And have you drop dead from shock? Oh la la.’

  ‘That bad, is it?’

  ‘Terrible, madame.’

  ‘Who are you on the run from? The police?’

  ‘Worse. Must worse – from someone’s husband,’ Ralph said, poker-faced.

  He looked so droll that Amelia found herself laughing, but even as she smiled her heart sank as she realized that he was, quite clearly, some sort of professional adulterer.

  ‘Do you want to elaborate, Lieutenant Grace?’

  ‘Would it be wise to follow one indiscretion with another?’ he wondered, refilling both their glasses with sherry. ‘I shouldn’t have even mentioned it. In fact I don’t actually know why I did. I was probably just being provocative. In fact I’m sure I was, because since I arrived here I seem to have lost most of my common sense.’

  He lapsed into silence, but Amelia refused to prompt him out of it, just sipping her sherry and staring out of the window, wishing hard that George would be back soon so that he could take charge of his friend and she could return to her gardening and forget all about what happened between them the previous evening.

  ‘About Paris,’ he said finally. ‘And my voluntary exile. Well, not so voluntary an exile as it happens, since I was actually sent home.’

  ‘Really?’ Amelia’s look contained as little interest as she could pretend.

  ‘Yes.’ Out of the corner of her eye she saw Ralph thoughtfully rub his chin, as if not quite sure how to play his next move. ‘Yes,’ he continued. ‘It was the wife of someone rather important as it happens, although I hasten to add it was none of my doing.’

  ‘These things never are, are they? At least not as far as my understanding of them goes.’

  ‘What started out as a mild flirtation,’ he continued, ignoring her, ‘turned serious – but not on my part. That really wasn’t my intention.’

  ‘You were just amusing yourself.’

  Amelia turned to look at him, and knew at once from his expression that she had him cornered.

  ‘Touché,’ Ralph shrugged, smiling ruefully. ‘It wasn’t actually quite like that, but fair enough – I concede.’

  ‘So. They booted you out from Paris – what? For good? And yo
u came back to England to lick your wounds.’

  ‘Not for good – an enforced long leave, shall we say. Until the smoke dies down. I’m too valuable a member of the service for them to get rid of me.’

  ‘He said with due modesty.’ Amelia laughed. ‘You are too much, Ralph Grace, you really are.’

  ‘There’s more to it than that, if you’re interested, Mrs Rafferty.’

  Amelia said nothing, leaving it to him to decide whether or not to continue.

  ‘The woman in question was being wronged,’ he said, realizing he was not going to be prompted. ‘I know you’ll say it was no excuse, but her husband is a well-known Casanova, putting himself about not only in Paris but in every city to which he is delegated, while she is expected to stay at home darning his socks, or whatever women do – bottling and salting beans, making chutney.’

  ‘In that order?’ Amelia teased. ‘Hardly the chic Parisienne.’

  ‘Very well, ironing his shirts. Sitting sighing over his photograph – we both know what I mean. And that’s precisely what Madame X did. She stayed at home and was a good wife. Until finally Monsieur X started bringing his women home and – well. And entertaining them, shall we say, under her nose, and when she protested – he beat her up.’

  ‘And you came to her rescue?’

  ‘I came to her help.’

  ‘Sir Galahad.’

  Ralph turned and stared at her with a look of bewilderment. ‘Don’t mock, Mrs Rafferty. Marriage can’t be a prison for women. Although it seems that’s what many men would like to make it, particularly in countries where the religion denies women the right of divorce. Think of yourself in such a situation. Your husband fornicates, interminably. Everyone knows he is being unfaithful – in fact your best women friends vie with each other to be the next one in his bed, leaving you alone and friendless, trapped in a loveless marriage. Then as the icing on the cake he makes sure to beat you up. Wouldn’t you long for someone to come to your help? Someone to take some care of you? To amuse you? To love you?’

  Amelia shrugged her shoulders. ‘I would run away.’

  ‘You discover George is lying, that he’s not the man you fell in love with and married. And that he is having let’s say just one affair, rather than a whole string. Then you meet someone who treats you as you should be treated, do you think that’s a mortal sin? Or some sort of heinous social crime? Surely not. I don’t think that’s what you think.’

  ‘You hardly know me,’ Amelia said quietly, taking his empty glass and getting up from the window seat. ‘You really only met me yesterday. And now it’s time to go into lunch.’

  But Ralph was not to be diverted merely because he had food in front of him, and the truth of the matter was that Amelia was more than happy to listen to him, because he talked to her, not at her, as so many of the men she had recently met in George’s company seemed to do.

  ‘Has George spoken much to you about the war?’

  ‘He told me all sorts of things about the war. Why?’

  ‘If it hadn’t been for George I would have shot myself on several occasions. No, that’s ridiculous,’ he said, stopping himself and smiling. ‘I could only have shot myself once. What I mean is that on more than one occasion I was quite ready to shoot myself. It’s strange. You’re fighting for your very life and then suddenly – you want to end it. But there you are. There isn’t a lot of logic where war is concerned. Particularly when you’re as young as I was. One moment I was in the classroom, gazing out at a sunny landscape and dreaming of going to Oxford – and the next I was waist high in mud and gore, wondering just how long I might live.’

  ‘I know,’ Amelia said quietly. ‘As I was forever saying to George, I don’t think the rest of us have any way of even beginning to understand it.’

  ‘Why should you? We didn’t – God knows we had no idea. We might as well have been going off for a rugger match. What saved me was George. I don’t know how we became friends – it was nothing to do with having been at the same school because we didn’t know each other – and he was older than me – and my senior officer. A captain to my humble second lieutenant. We weren’t even from the same sort of family. My family are all painters and sculptors--’

  ‘Really? Mine too. My father is a poet although he is much better known as a painter.’

  ‘Of course. I know of him, as it happens, quite well, because both our fathers were in the Artists Rifles. Anyway – where was I? George. Yes, well I really admired George. In fact I think I probably hero-worshipped him. He was a remarkable soldier, you know. Never gave a thought to his own safety, only to that of his men. And not unnaturally his men adored him. Would have gone to the end of the world for him. Except – that’s exactly where most of them were already.’ Ralph stopped.

  ‘Don’t go on if this is painful for you . . .’

  ‘What George was, when I come to think of it, was – inspirational, that’s the word I was looking for. Just when you thought you could go no further, there would be George, looking for all the world as though he just stepped off the parade ground – or out of some Boys’ Book of Heroes – and you’d get an infusion of courage. We instantly became friends. Whenever we got some time to ourselves, we’d shack up in some billet and we’d talk, and talk, and talk. I’d sit and sketch while George would read. He had this little volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets--’

  ‘Bound in blue leather,’ Amelia said, interrupting with a smile. ‘I gave it to him. For his birthday.’

  ‘I know. His eighteenth. He’d carried it in a breast pocket of his uniform ever since. By the end of the war he knew every sonnet off by heart.’

  ‘No, that is something I didn’t know.’

  ‘He’d sit and recite them, even when we were in the front line and there was a lull in the action. He’d ask for requests, and one of us – usually one of the bombardiers, one of the men – someone would request a particular sonnet and George would recite it. Sitting in what was left of a wood somewhere – with the guns charged and ready – with the dead and the wounded lying all around us while we waited for the next bombardment, Captain George Dashwood would recite Shakespeare. Until Major Walker came along. He was a brute of a man who seemed to hate us – more than the enemy I sometimes thought. Of course he didn’t dare confront George, for not only was George a hero, he was also a hundred times the man Walker was. Knowing that George and I were friends, he picked on yours truly. He would send me on suicidal sorties, make sure I was attached to a battery in the most vulnerable position, assign me the most menial jobs you can assign a lowly second lieutenant. I tell you, if it hadn’t been for George, I think I might have turned my gun on myself.’

  ‘But you didn’t.’

  Ralph smiled impishly. ‘Or if I did, seeing where I am today, I must have missed!’

  Amelia laughed.

  ‘Anyway, just when I’d got myself sorted out and was turning into not a bad soldier – not a brilliant one like George, but not a bad one – I did something that could have had me court martialled and shot, albeit this time by a firing squad.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I shot Major Walker,’ Ralph said, raising his eyebrows. ‘I still can’t believe I did it. I shot and killed a member of my own army, and a senior officer to boot.’

  ‘I see. At least I don’t see. I don’t see at all.’

  ‘George didn’t tell you everything?’

  ‘Obviously not.’

  ‘I thought I did it for what he did to that wretched little French girl, but I don’t think I did. I think I did it for what he did to me, and all the rest of us who went to Malvern or Marlborough or wherever he so disapproved of people being schooled. Young men plucked from the sixth forms of England, who’d been thrown into the melting pot without an idea of how to fight or be a soldier. Young men whom he made absolutely no effort to help. I shot him point-blank.’

  ‘How? I mean – I mean did you really do it in cold blood?’

  ‘No, I didn’t do it in cold blood. G
eorge knew that, and that made the difference, I think.’

  ‘George knew? George knew you had shot someone? That you’d shot Major Walker?’ Amelia looked at him in amazement as Ralph continued with his story.

  ‘We’d been ordered to take up new gun positions but had run into a totally impenetrable barrage. The few of us who survived took cover in an abandoned foxhole and when there was a brief lull in the barrage George suggested making a run for it to a ruined farmhouse about a hundred yards ahead. Major Walker, who’d really taken no part in the fighting at all, suddenly yelled he’d had enough, and started to make a run for it back to the line. Cowardice in the face of the enemy. So I drew my pistol and shot him. Not in the back. I called to him first – and when he turned, I shot him.’

  ‘You were mad.’

  ‘If he’d seen an ordinary bloke deserting under fire, Walker wouldn’t have hesitated. The only difference was he would have shot the chap in the back.’

  ‘You don’t have that right, Ralph. To judge a man and be his executioner.’

  ‘Oh, I think you’ll find war abnegates all so-called rights, Mrs Rafferty.’

  ‘Did George report the incident?’

  ‘He should have done, but when, as my senior officer, he wrote his report, he merely put that Walker had been killed “in action”. So, you see, I owe George my life.’

  Amelia picked her pudding fork up as if to try to finish her dessert, only to replace it almost at once with a sad shake of her head.

  ‘Why did you tell me? You didn’t have to tell me. George didn’t tell me.’

  ‘George promised he would never tell anyone. Not for himself, but for my sake. Even after all this time, I could still be charged.’

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘Most certainly.’

  ‘So you’re a wanted man.’

  ‘I very much hope so,’ Ralph said, and his impish smile returned.

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ Amelia retorted, getting up from the table. ‘And you know it.’

  ‘If you really want to know, I don’t know why I did tell you,’ Ralph said, as he followed her back into the drawing room. ‘It’s most peculiar, but since I found myself back here, I told you because – how can I best put it? Because I felt compelled to do so. As if someone was willing me.’