A Future Arrived

by Phillip Rock

  “Just Colin,” Charles said quietly, taking the flowers from his father and placing them on the mound of wet grass.

  DEREK RAMSAY TURNED his battered motorbike into Fern Lane and pulled to a screeching halt in front of a whitewashed stone cottage. His usually neat uniform was wrinkled and black with rain after a furious drive from Kentish Hill. Valerie had heard the sound of his approach and opened the door before he could fish the latch key from his pocket.

  “Bloody hell!” he said angrily as he stepped inside.

  “Delightful greeting, I must say. My first forty-eight-hour leave in weeks and you arrive late and pleasant as a bear.”

  He bent to her, kissing her firmly on the lips. “Sorry. Not quite myself. The powers that be shot me a rocket and I’m just blowing off steam.”

  “Oh? What happened?”

  Removing his sodden hat, he tossed it toward a peg on the wall, missing by a foot. “They bumped me up to wing commander. Wing commander! To a bloody training command! An inspiration to the new lads, they told me. Paterfamilias to the fledging brood of Fighter Command … a bloody scoutmaster!”

  “Calm down,” she said, holding him, feeling giddy with relief. Selfish of her she knew, but he had done so much during the desperate summer. Ribbons on his chest. Fifteen German planes shot down. But she knew the terror of his nights. The sudden cries and twitching limbs as he relived in his dreams each terrible fight. “I can’t think of a better choice for the job, Derek.”

  “And something else. Hush-hush at the moment. I could be sent to America some time next year … to Arizona and Texas. The Yanks may lend us bases there to train our pilots. If that happens, what about us?”

  She smiled into his troubled eyes and ran her fingers across his mouth. “I shall stay here, do my job—and keep on loving you. Exulting in the joy of being Mrs. D. Ramsay.”

  “You heard from Raymond through the Red Cross?”

  “No, but I did hear of him. A chap on De Gaulle’s staff phoned me from London. Raymond isn’t a POW and never was. He’s in Vichy, an aide to Laval. I knew his father’s Fascist friends would take care of him.”

  Derek looked puzzled. “I don’t see how that can be of any great use to us.”

  “I will write a letter, a very charming letter, and send it to Raymond via the Swiss chargé d’affaires in Vichy. In it I will tell him that I have no objection to his divorcing me, realizing as I do what an embarrassment it would be to him if it were known that his wife is a sergeant in the Royal Air Force! That should do it, don’t you think? Deliciously uncomplicated.”

  “Clever little girl, aren’t you?”

  “Clever enough to have found you, Fat Chap.”

  “A mutual cleverness,” he said, holding her tightly, breathing in her delicate perfume. Savor every second, he was thinking as he kissed her. Etch them into memory for the long days ahead.

  VICTORIA CARRIED THE one suitcase they shared between them and held Jennifer by the hand as she pushed and shoved her way toward the ticket counter at Euston Station.

  “Two first-class returns to Liverpool, please.”

  “Is this journey really necessary, miss?”

  Victoria glared imperiously at the little man behind the wicket. “Of course it’s necessary. Would anyone go to Liverpool if it weren’t?”

  “Sorry, miss. Have to ask, you know.”

  The carriage was nearly filled, stuffy and dim.

  “A seat by the corridor would be best for you,” Victoria said.

  Two naval officers occupied those seats. They both noticed Jennifer’s drawn face and obvious pregnancy and gave them up gallantly. Victoria flashed them a devastating smile. “Knew the navy would come through.”

  “Think nothing of it,” one of them said.

  “My husband’s in the navy … Lieutenant Commander Gerald Smith Blair. He’s serving on Rodney. Perhaps you know him.”

  “Afraid not. But meeting his wife is pleasure enough.”

  “What a charming thing to say.”

  Jennifer gave her a poke in the ribs and whispered, “Stop flirting, for heaven’s sake.”

  “It’s quite harmless,” Victoria whispered back. “And it helps pass the time.”

  Liverpool in the afternoon was dark and smoky. There had been a raid the night before and an oil tank still burned at Birkenhead, the black smoke rolling across the Mersey in the wind. The two naval officers, who had been laughing and joking with Victoria for the entire journey, made themselves useful by practically commandeering one of the few available taxis, and they rode with them as far as the Adelphi Hotel.

  “You must come in for a drink,” Victoria said. “You’ve been most kind, both of you.”

  “Sorry,” one of them said wistfully, “but we have to get to our ship.”

  “Nice boys,” Victoria said as they walked into the hotel.

  Jennifer began to laugh. “Oh, Vicky, you’ll never change.”

  “Good. You laughed. I thought you might be annoyed with me.”

  “That would be rather like being annoyed with one’s cat because it doesn’t bark.”

  They had adjoining rooms and Victoria unpacked, sorting out their things after insisting that Jennifer take off her shoes and lie on the bed. She ordered Bovril and toast to be sent up.

  “You can be very motherly, Vicky.”

  “Your condition brings out my better instincts.” She sat on the side of the bed and stroked her sister’s brow. “I’m going to be a very proud aunt, Jenny. I hope it’s a girl. All dark curls and ringlets.”

  “I don’t much care what it is. I just wish it were here. Four months. God!”

  “The time will pass, darling. And you’ll enjoy staying with Dulcie. To be born in a stable. A peaceful thought.”

  Jennifer fell briefly asleep and awoke with Albert beside her, holding her hand.

  “Hello, Thax.”

  “And to you, hello.” He bent his head and kissed her. “Feel all right?”

  “Never better. A bit tired. Crowded train.”

  “William will pick you up tomorrow in the car. Did you ship your things?”

  “Sent them off last week. I cried when I locked up the flat. Just couldn’t help it. Pregnancy makes one sentimental.”

  He lightly touched the soft swell of her belly. “It won’t be forever.” She sat up and he placed an arm around her waist. “Plans have been changed, Jenny. I can’t stay the night. The convoy’s sailing before midnight.”

  She rested her head against his shoulder with a sigh. “Oh, dear, I was afraid something like that might happen.”

  “An admiral told me that it’s imperative we sail now and not tomorrow. Wouldn’t tell me why, of course, but they know what they’re doing. It’s the largest and most important convoy they’ve ever sent to Egypt, so they’re being almost excessively cautious.”

  “They’d better be. With you on it.” She pressed his hand tightly. “I have a feeling you’re going to be covering events in the Middle East for a long time, Thax.”

  “You could be right.”

  “If you’re still there in a year I’m coming out to join you … take a house in Cairo or Gezireh.”

  “Now, Jenny, please …”

  “No,” she said with surprising intensity. “I’ll get there somehow. Go to Capetown … make my way from there. You’ll see.”

  “I hate to remind you that there’s a war on.”

  “All the more reason to be together. I married you for richer or poorer, sickness and health, war, famine, and pestilence.”

  He smiled at her and moved their interlocked hands to rest where life was growing, beating gently against their fingers.

  “I’ll not stop you,” he said.

  SQUADRON LEADER ALLISON parked in Norham Gardens. The letter from Kate Wood-Lacy was in his pocket and he checked the address again before getting out of the car. It was the sixth letter he had received from her during the past few months, but the first from Oxford.

  It was starting t
o rain again, quite hard, and he was glad he had remembered to bring his overcoat. He found her rooms after a bit of trouble. She had moved into an old warren of a building, and the pattern of numbering made little sense. She was on the top floor with a splendid view of University Parks and the River Cherwell. She was wearing slacks and an old sweater and looked very pretty with her hair tied severely back with a piece of ribbon.

  “I didn’t expect you until tomorrow,” she said as she opened the door.

  “I took my leave a day early. Couldn’t telephone because you neglected to include your number.”

  “Telephoning is hopeless. There’s only one phone and that’s in a sort of common room buried in the depths someplace.”

  “This is very nice,” he said, glancing around. It was plainly furnished but large and comfortable. Boxes of books lay everywhere. “Still moving in, I see.”

  “I think I’ll still be moving in at the end of term. There’s not nearly enough shelf space.”

  “Find a chap to build some for you. That’s what I did when I entered Trinity.” He toyed with the hat in his hands. “Look, if it’s inconvenient today …”

  “Not at all. I’m happy to see you. It’s such a horrid afternoon. You’ve brightened it up.”

  “I thought we might have tea. I know an excellent place in St. Giles.”

  “Super. It’ll only take me a minute to get dressed. Would you like a coffee? I can heat some up on my trusty hot plate.”

  “No, thanks. I’m fine.”

  “All right, then,” she said, starting from the room. “Won’t be a tick.”

  A girl of sense and sensibilities, he was thinking as he sat down to wait for her. He had only met her once before meeting again at the funeral. His impression of her in the Norwich pub had been one of admiration for Colin’s taste in women. Lovely of face and charming of manner. No more than that. Their long walk together through the streets of Abingdon after Colin had been laid to rest had revealed far deeper qualities to him. She had been so calm and self-possessed, so perceptive of his own feelings of pain and loss which he had done his best to keep hidden. She had said something that afternoon that had touched him deeply. “It must be so terribly hard on you … sending friends out every day … knowing they may never come back.”

  He had felt the need to write her a week later and they had been corresponding ever since.

  She wore a light wool dress in soft shades of heather blue, a little plaid tam on her head. Her hair was down now, hanging in brown folds to her shoulders. He wanted to tell her how beautiful she looked.

  “You’ll need a raincoat,” he said.

  It was a small and very old tea room. Countless generations of Oxford scholars had carved their initials in the heavy oak tables and into the wooden beams.

  “Have you ever been here before?” he asked.

  “No, but I’ve heard of it. I will certainly come again.”

  He ordered tea and fresh, hot scones. “Looking forward to your first classes?”

  “Yes and no. Excited and depressed at the same time. Studying seems such a waste somehow.”

  “Does it? What if all the colleges closed and no one was working for the future?”

  “If there can be such a thing as a future. I want to be a botanist. Flowers, trees, plants. To study them … learn how to protect them from disease … to grow newer, better strains. And while I’m doing that other people are bent on destroying the very earth. It’s lunacy.”

  “It would be an even greater lunacy if you gave up in despair.” He reached across the table and touched her hand. “There has to be a tomorrow or Colin’s death and all the other deaths have been wasted. I can’t accept that, Kate.”

  She studied his face for a moment, her expression somber and thoughtful; then she smiled in sad remembrance. “Neither can I. Not in my heart.”

  It had stopped raining when they left. Clouds scudded low in the brisk wind, wreathing the spires of Trinity. They walked down St. Aldates and into Christ Church Meadows toward the river. She suddenly took his hand and held it very tightly and they began to walk faster, not saying anything, striding along together as though something wondrous—magical—lay not too far ahead.

  P.S.

  Insights, Interviews & More …

  About the author

  Phillip Rock

  About the book

  The Passing Bells Series

  Discussion Questions

  Read on

  The Wartime World of A Future Arrived

  About the author

  Phillip Rock

  BORN IN HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA, in 1927, Phillip Rock was the son of Academy Award–winning silent film producer Joe Rock. Phillip moved to England with his family when he was seven, attending school there for six years until the blitz of 1940, when he returned to America. He served with the U.S. Navy toward the end of World War II. He spent most of his adult life in Los Angeles, and was the author of three previous novels before the Passing Bells series: Flickers, The Dead in Guanajuato, and The Extraordinary Seaman. He died in 2004.

  Of The Passing Bells, Phillip Rock wrote, “The idea came to me when I was a boy and stood with my father in a London street at the hour of eleven on the eleventh day of November and first heard that awful minute of total silence as the entire nation stood with bowed heads remembering their dead. It took a long time to put it on paper.”

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  About the book

  The Passing Bells Series

  THE GUNS OF AUGUST are rumbling throughout Europe in the summer of 1914, but war has not yet touched Abingdon Pryory. Here, at the grand summer home of the Greville family, the parties, dances, and romances play on. Alexandra Greville embarks on her debutante season, while brother Charles remains hopelessly in love with the beautiful, untitled Lydia Foxe, knowing his father, the Earl of Stanmore, will never approve of the match. Downstairs, the new servant Ivy struggles to adjust to the routines of the well-oiled household staff while shrugging off unwelcome attentions, and the arrival of American cousin Martin Rilke, a Chicago newspaperman, threatens to disrupt the daily routine.

  But ultimately, the Great War will not be denied, shattering the social season and household tranquility, crumbling class barriers, and bringing its myriad horrors home—when what begins for the high-bred Grevilles as a glorious adventure soon begins unraveling the very fabric of British high society.

  He drove up to Flanders in the early summer of 1921 knowing that it would be for the last time. He had finally, after nearly four years, reconciled himself to the unalterable fact that she was dead.

  So begins this haunting novel of war’s aftermath and the search for love and hope in a world totally changed. A generation has been lost on the Western Front. The dead have been buried, a harsh peace forged, and the howl of shells replaced by the wail of saxophones as the Jazz Age begins. But ghosts linger—that long-ago golden summer of 1914 tugging at the memory of Martin Rilke and his British cousins, the Grevilles.

  From the countess to the chauffeur, the inhabitants of Abingdon Pryory seek to forget the past and adjust their lives to a new era in which old values have been irretrievably swept away. Charles Greville suffers from acute shell shock and his friend Colonel Wood-Lacy is exiled to faraway army outposts, while Alexandra Greville finds new love with an unlikely suitor; and to overcome the loss of his wife, Martin Rilke throws himself into reporting, discovering unsettling currents in the German political scene. Their stories unfold against England’s most gracious manor house, the steamy nightclubs of London’s Soho, and the despair of Germany. Lives are renewed, new loves found, and a future of peace and happiness is glimpsed—for the moment.

  The final installment of the saga of the Grevilles of Abingdon begins in the early 1930s, as the dizzy gaiety of the Jazz Age comes to a shattering end. What follows is a decade of change and uncertainty, as the younger generation, born during or just after �
�the war to end all wars,” comes of age: the beautiful Wood-Lacy twins, Jennifer and Victoria, and their passionate younger sister, Kate; Derek Ramsey, born only weeks after his father fell in France; and the American writer Martin Rilke, who will overcome his questionable heritage with the worldwide fame that will soon come to him. In their heady youth and bittersweet growth to adulthood, they are the future—but the shadows that touched the lives of the generation before are destined to reach out to their own, as German bombers course toward England.

  Discussion Questions

  1. At the beginning of the novel, the earl suffers from a spell of severe chest pain. What stress seems to bring on this health scare?

  2. “It’s going to be a lousy decade,” says Martin Rilke on air when civil war breaks out in Austria, giving hint to the arrived “future” of the book’s title. First Martin, then Albert, witnessed the rise of the Nazi party and the chaos breaking loose in Europe. Do you think they have any idea of what is to come?

  3. Charles Greville’s path has not run as smoothly or to such noble heights as his parents once imagined, and the same applies to Alexandra’s and William’s occupations. Do you think the parents are disappointed with their children’s choices?

  4. Why do you think Albert Thaxton wants to pursue journalism when his way is paved to attend university?

  5. In the novel, while some war-weary citizens would rather be distracted than think about another impending war, people like Martin and Albert gravitate toward the center of the action. Which reaction do you sympathize with more?

  6. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque is a novel about the experiences of ordinary German soldiers during World War I. Published in 1928, it was instantly an international success and is still known for its realistic portrayal of a soldier’s experience. But in Berlin, in 1930, Albert Thaxton witnesses a riot caused by the release of the film version. Why are this antiwar book and film so unpopular in Germany?