It was not in the casualty lists I found Richard Blodmore’s name; the news came first in a letter from Lady Sybil. ‘Poor Lord Blodmore has been wounded ‒ but I expect you know that. Elena has gone to England to be with him. They say he’s lucky to be alive ‒ a shrapnel wound to the face, I heard. He could have been blinded. It was at Passchendaele …’
He was alive, that was all I cared. But he had nearly died in an action which had won the British no ground. From July to November the battle raged, and in the end the exhausted troops were unable to follow up the advantage won by the surprise attack of the tanks and the penetration of the German lines. They fell back, and gave up most of the miles they had won. Edwin crumpled the papers in fury. ‘Those fossilised Generals! Will they never accomplish anything?’
But Richard was safe, and back in England. Then we heard that he had returned to Ireland. A long leave for convalescence. Perhaps discharge. But trained officers and men were getting fewer as the toll of casualties mounted. I rolled bandages and thought of him, and lighted candles with the prayer that by some miracle the end would come before he was sent back into service. I never thought about his shattered face. His life was enough.
III
The months slipped away. There was much talk, worried talk, in Jerez about the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the beginning of the civil war there. ‘They’re worried,’ Edwin said, ‘because this country has a social structure rather like Russia. They’re afraid of Bolsheviks ‒ and when you see estates like the Marquesa’s, you know why.’
Then we were in the spring of 1918, and the gnarled, twisted, black stems of the vines of Jerez put out their green shoots. The sun, so gentle in winter, began to have force. And the letter came from Lady Sybil Wareham that Lord Blodmore had been posted back to France. By July we were stunned by the news of the murder of the Czar of Russia and his family, and saddened by the accounts of the second battle of the Marne. ‘We must do it this time,’ Edwin said. ‘If the Allies and the Americans can just push together …’ We had almost given up hoping there would ever be an end. The protagonists seemed now like two weary giants facing each other bare-fisted, too bloodied and exhausted to see that it must be all over. ‘Why don’t they just stop?’ my mother said with the simple logic she was sometimes capable of. ‘No one is going to win.’
We listed the collapse of Turkey, the collapse of Bulgaria, and, after so many centuries of rule, the end of the Hapsburg monarchy. ‘When the eagles die,’ Edwin Fletcher quoted, ‘woe to the sparrows.’
The papers had not reached us at the time the telegrams began arriving. ‘I don’t understand,’ my mother said. I snatched the first from her, fearing it was news of Richard Blodmore. ‘Deepest sympathy in your loss, but how proud you must be of his heroic deeds. Love, Sybil Wareham.’
‘Who?’ I said. ‘Who does she mean?’
The official telegram came only after a dozen others like Sybil Wareham’s, all of them from people we had known at Clonmara. It had been sent to Clonmara, and redirected to Jerez, probably by Elena.
The War Office deeply regrets to inform you of the death in action of Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Drummond. This officer died in the performance of duty in circumstances of extreme gallantry.
My mother let the telegram flutter soundlessly to the floor. ‘Thomas ‒ Thomas is dead! Your father, Charlie, is dead.’
I picked up the telegram and read it. ‘I didn’t know my father had become a Lieutenant-Colonel.’
‘Neither did I,’ my mother said faintly. ‘Well, with so many officers killed, I expect he moved up rather quickly. But a hero! I always thought of Thomas taking rather good care of himself. He’s survived all these years. I imagined he had got himself some good safe job away from the front lines. “Extreme gallantry …” I wonder …’ She didn’t actually weep, but her eyes were bright with unshed tears. ‘Such a long time ago … I was mad, of course. Quite mad to marry him. And he was mad to suggest it. But for a little while we were in love. At least I know I was in love. It all went so quickly … and he never saw you. His only child.’
‘I may not be his only child.’
She looked at me sharply. ‘That’s true. That’s perfectly true. How do we know there isn’t some woman, some children for whom this is terrible news? Some woman the War Office doesn’t recognise. She is bereaved, and I … I’m a widow. We’re both widows, Charlie. How strange. How strange it all is, suddenly. After all these years.’
‘If there had been another woman, surely he would have asked for a divorce? You could have been free a long time ago.’
She shook her head. ‘Thomas wasn’t like that. What he had, he wanted to keep forever. He would have liked me to come back to him, submissive, asking for forgiveness. I couldn’t have done it ‒ ever. He also knew, if there was a divorce, I could never be remarried in the Catholic Church. It was a mistake from the beginning, and there never was any chance of repairing that.’ For a moment she pressed her hands against her temples, rocking a little. Then she rose and went to the sideboard and poured herself some brandy. ‘I think I’ll go and lie down for a while …’ When she went, she took the brandy decanter with her. I could hear her muttering as she closed the door. ‘Extreme gallantry … Doesn’t sound like Thomas at all.’
When she was gone I sat for a while thinking of what my life might have been like if she had chosen to stay with Thomas Drummond or to return to him, as he had demanded. I would have been one of those children born in India, sent back to school in England, or to live with my grandfather, sent away to escape the heat. I might have had brothers and sisters. We would have lived in a series of houses provided by the Army. I thought that that might have been where the marriage had come apart right at the beginning. My mother would have been hopeless at accepting or adapting to the unwritten code for Army wives. She wouldn’t have known how to be polite to the major’s wife, or the colonel’s wife unless she genuinely liked them; she would have flirted with every officer in the regiment. There would have been no free and easy life such as she had lived as the only, beloved, indulged child of Lord Blodmore. No, I didn’t think there would have been a place in the Army for my mother.
I wondered if she wept a little upstairs with her brandy, wept for dreams that had vanished into cruel reality, wept for the memories of a romance gone cold, for the waste of youth. She couldn’t weep for whatever my father had become, because she had never known that man. Nor did I.
* *
Apart from other telegrams and letters from friends in Ireland, a letter came from the colonel-in-chief of my father’s regiment. It reached us in Jerez at the time when it seemed an armistice was about to be signed. The October sun was warm and bright, and the air was filled with the characteristic smell of the new musts in fermentation.
‘The tragedy of his death is compounded by the fact that he served for so long and with such bravery here in France, often exposing himself to enemy fire to lead his men. He insisted on leading where other, junior officers might have gone in his place. He seemed to have no regard for his own safety, but his whole effort was bent on trying to do what he could for his men. He kept morale high, and his personal bravery was an example to all. In the action at St Quentin in which he lost his life, he personally carried four wounded men to safety beyond the range of enemy machine-gun fire, returning each time to that stretch of open territory under continuing fire. He was killed in a successful attempt to overrun a long-range gun emplacement which the machine-gun fire protected. His gallantry and dedication to duty were of the highest order, and should be so recognised. I have recommended to my superiors that his award should be no less than the Victoria Cross.’
A little later a packet arrived in Jerez containing the things which his batman considered were most personal to him. It seemed my father had been, or had become, a spartan type. There was very little of value, or anything that indicated softness. A gold watch, a pair of brushes, well-worn, a single pair of thin gold cuff-links, plain gold studs for his dress
shirts ‒ only the bare minimum that an officer would need. There were no photographs, no diary, no notebooks; there was a copy of the Bible which appeared little used. Perhaps out of tact, other things had been omitted. But the package did contain a medal in a box, which Edwin identified as the Distinguished Service Order. ‘Your father made a practice of being brave, I see.’ I looked at the few personal things which survived the man, and they revealed nothing of his personality. ‘I suppose, I should, in fairness, send them to his father, if he’s still alive,’ my mother said. ‘And there were brothers … but he still had me listed as next of kin. He meant us to have these if he were killed … Charlie, dear, you’ll write to his brother, won’t you? His name was …’ Her brow wrinkled in the effort at concentration. ‘His name was Gordon, I think … or was it Russell? The eldest, I mean. There were other brothers. They weren’t at all well off, you know. That was why Thomas had to make his own way in the Army. He always said he reckoned to pay his mess bills by his winnings at cards. He had a very cool head in things like that. Funny he should have wanted to marry me. He knew I had no income. Perhaps he thought Father would settle something on me …’
It was ironic to learn from the War Office that my mother would now receive a war-widow’s pension. His estate consisted of a few hundred pounds in cash, and some shares in South African gold-mining companies, and the de Beers diamond company. These he had left to me.
Don Ramon at the bank considered them carefully, his eyebrows raised. ‘I will make enquiries, Doña Carlota. I think these are very good shares. They don’t represent a fortune of course, but they have appreciated many times since they were purchased. They should yield a small income. Always useful.’ He looked at me speculatively. ‘Quite obviously your father must have done a little more than soldiering when he served his time in South Africa during the Boer War …’
My mother was in tears over this. ‘He shouldn’t. There are his brothers. He must have nieces and nephews. I think he did it just to make me feel bad, to point up how badly I’d treated him.’
‘Perhaps I was his only child, after all.’
She nodded. ‘Perhaps. Perhaps he knew more about us than we thought. Perhaps he didn’t forget, the way I did.’
But we never knew. As the silence of more than twenty years had been unbroken by a single letter, so it remained to the end. Apart from his will, there was no shred of evidence that he had ever thought about us, my mother and me. There was no last letter to accompany his personal effects, nothing that a man in constant danger of death might have written. There was no message to me. I had been born a stranger to him, and I had remained a stranger right to the end. There was a terrible sense of loneliness in his death which chilled me. For the first time, now when it was too late, I began to want to know him.
And the new thought came, that because of him, because of the war-widow’s pension, because of the small income that the gold-mining and diamond-mining shares would bring, we, my mother and I, might be able to take some small step towards independence from the Marquesa. He had restored a little pride to us, and that was the greatest gift of all.
* *
All Jerez, which had come to offer condolence at the news of my father’s death, came again to offer congratulations when it became known that the award of the Victoria Cross had been confirmed. The newspapers containing accounts of his last heroic hour had by now reached the town, and everyone had read them. The Blodmore legend now took on another aspect. I was the child of an authentic hero, and my children shared in the reflected glory. My mother was utterly bewildered by it, and more often than not refused to talk to visitors about it. ‘How can I?’ she asked of me. ‘How can I talk to them when I know nothing about him? How old are you, Charlie? I keep forgetting.’
‘Nearly twenty-seven.’
‘Twenty-seven? ‒ are you? Then it’s more than twenty-seven years since I’ve seen him. How can I talk about him?’
More than the questions of those who came to call, she was troubled by the questions of the children. Juan was stiff-chested with pride in having a grandfather who had won the supreme award. ‘I never thought about my other grandfather,’ he said, and it seemed logical. There was the barest shade of reserve in the congratulations Don Paulo offered. The man he had been able to dismiss as a rogue and a scoundrel, a man of no account whatever, was certified as a hero in the eyes of his grandchildren. Don Paulo did not care to share their veneration with such a man.
The Armistice had been signed while all these events swept over us. ‘It’s only an armistice, not a victory,’ Edwin said gloomily. ‘We will probably have to fight it out all over again someday.’
Christmas came, and the turn of the year. ‘I must go home when the spring comes,’ Edwin said. ‘I have to make a life back there.’ He had been answering advertisements in papers for the various teaching posts which were available. ‘More fool I that I didn’t take something when the men to fill those positions were scarce. Now they will all be flooding back, all wanting the same jobs … I let myself be seduced by the Andalucian sun.’
Then the letter came from my father’s colonel requesting that my mother should make the journey to England to receive personally the posthumous award of the Victoria Cross from His Majesty. It would, he wrote, be a landmark in the history of the regiment, which had never before had a winner of the Victoria Cross. The letter tactfully suggested that the regiment would be honoured to pay any expenses which Lady Patricia might incur in travelling to England, and, of course, she would be the guest of the regiment, staying at his own house, while she was in England. There was no mention of Lieutenant-Colonel Drummond’s Scottish family. It was evidently preferable that the daughter of an earl should go to Buckingham Palace to receive the medal than some truculent Scottish Presbyterian farmer.
My mother was at once in a panic. ‘Oh, Charlie, I can’t! I just couldn’t do it! I’m not up to that. Not any more. I’d make a fool of myself, and disgrace you and the children.’ She put a self-conscious hand to the white streak in her hair, as if emphasising her diminished ability. ‘You know what I mean … You understand, don’t you, Charlie?’
I knew. Since her injury, she was physically unable to undertake any such task. I had seen her shake with nerves at small social gatherings, terrified that she might do something wrong, might, as she chose to put it, ‘disgrace’ us. The ordeal of appearing at Buckingham Palace, of curtseying to the King, of attending the regimental dinner in her honour, would have been too much, even if there was not the added misery of having to do without her daily intake of alcohol. She could not stand before the King of England smelling of brandy; but without it, she could not stand there at all.
‘Charlie, you must go. Yes, my darling, you’ll do it beautifully. They’ll all adore you. After all, it wasn’t your fault that our marriage came apart. They’ll just see you as you are ‒ young, lovely, and sweet, the daughter of their hero. Darling, do it for me! Do it for the children. Think how thrilled they’ll be to be able to say that you went and received your father’s medal. You have to do it, Charlie. I’ve let everyone down, but you mustn’t. You hear me, Charlie. You have to do this for us all!’
I agreed; I had to. Juan, Martin and Francisco would never have forgiven me if I had refused. Maria Luisa nodded. ‘It must be done.’
The necessary letter was drafted, and sent off. From Colonel Saunders came an enthusiastic response. The regiment would be honoured. Their headquarters were near Winchester, and I would be their guest. Most tactfully it was suggested that if I should like a few days to visit London after the presentation at Buckingham Palace, which was arranged for April, I could either stay at the London home of the Colonel’s sister, or at a hotel, whichever I preferred. All expenses, of course, would be gladly borne by the regiment.
Maria Luisa began to fuss about my clothes. ‘Wear grey with a touch of lilac to the Palace,’ my mother said. ‘Black would be out of place, and hypocritical. You must have two evening gowns for the time you sta
y with the regiment. They will want to fête you. It’s a very unfashionable regiment, darling ‒ Thomas wouldn’t have been accepted in anything better, even if he’d had the money. But I’d like you to look your best. Since you’re going, you must do your best for us all.’
The excitement in the town was intense. While cousins and second cousins had won military honours during the war, none had achieved the Victoria Cross. My itinerary and wardrobe were openly discussed. And behind the fans was a soft sigh of relief that it was I, and not my mother, who would go. For that short time I represented Jerez, its pride in its English connections; it was possible, in a backhanded sort of way, that I might sell some sherry, or at least get it talked about. It was regretted that my father had not belonged to a really first-rate regiment, like the Coldstream, or the Life Guards, but then, one mustn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
My mother wanted me to have everything of the best, the best that Seville could produce. I protested about the money being spent. The regiment, after all, would not pay for my wardrobe.
‘Those shares, darling. You could sell those shares.’
‘No! He didn’t mean them to be sold. I’m sure of it.’
‘Borrow against them.’
‘No!’ But Don Ramon, falling into the spirit of the occasion, advanced some money against my mother receiving her new war-widow’s pension.
The Summer of the Spanish Woman Page 36
