Casement was exploiting this terrible war to realize his sentimental obsession with Ireland. He must have been planning it for a long time, as he strolled the gardens of Rolleboise and ate their food, as he wrote to Ward asking for money, and for more money. Ward assured Neave that he would let him know if Casement tried to contact him. Ward stood and, as he shook hands, had managed, “What an ending to what promised to be a brilliant career.” He could hear the hitch in his voice.
For some odd reason, this betrayal has sent Ward back to thinking about his father, and that time when he signed on to the Wishart. He was fifteen, younger than Herbie, when he left for the sea, just a child, and the fact that his father had let him—no, had made him do that . . . also that his mother stood by as her favorite son went into the care of men who, in another time, would have been pirates, is some sort of rent that, even at the age of fifty-two, he has not managed to mend. He is a different man now—well, at least a man—and he survived, obviously. But Ward doesn’t like feeling as he did then. The intervening years, washed over with all the bravado of what he managed through physical health and good humor and the friends it brought, that life literally scripted into books, all seems worn to nothing in the early morning hours, or when he walks the perimeters of the property alone. Yes, he’s been betrayed. Betrayal. It’s a man’s word. What he really feels is abandoned.
Ward has only an hour before he needs to be in Vernon on the first of a series of transports that will take him to his position on the Front. Sarita has been making herself scarce. In the hallway, he sees Beatrice shuttling by with a stack of clean linen.
“Beatrice!” he calls.
“Oui,” she says.
“Could you please tell Madame that I would like to speak with her and that I am leaving soon?”
Beatrice nods, taking in Ward’s uniform as she does so. From her furrowed brow and pursed mouth, it would seem that she shares Sarita’s opinion of his actions. He cannot expect Sarita to understand that which he himself doesn’t fully comprehend, but she has to support him. Isn’t that demanded of one’s wife? However, Sarita is an exceptional woman and uses her knowledge of this to except herself from all accepted behavior.
She stands at the door in a simple blue dress, holding the leather-bound book where she records the daily expenses, hesitating before entering the room. “So you are intent on leaving.”
“Yes, Sarita, I am.”
“Have you looked at yourself in that uniform?” She sinks into a chair and places her hand over her forehead. There’s a moment of silence. Beatrice appears in the doorway and, noting Sarita’s posture, immediately withdraws.
“Do you have a headache?”
“No,” she says, outraged. “I do not have a headache. I’ll tell you what I do have. A stupid husband.”
“That’s not helpful.”
“Helpful? Have you thought this through at all? You have a heart condition. You’re also deep in middle age. I don’t know why they’re taking you. Can you even lift a stretcher? Have you lifted anything heavier than a forkful of omelet in the last ten years?”
“I must do what I can for the war effort.”
“All right. Well, let’s consider it. Charlie will be headed to the Front in two weeks. Herbie will be making his first solo flight sometime in the next few days, and then he’ll be headed for Germany. And now we’re supposed to send you along too? How about Roddie? Why don’t we tell him to pack his bag and you can take him with you?” Sarita stares at him. “This is some variety of suicide. You realize this.”
“It’s nothing of the sort.”
“Listen to yourself. Nothing of the sort. War effort. Not helpful.”
“Sarita,” he says patiently, “you are not showing your most attractive side.”
She calms herself, although, from the catlike stretching of her hands, he knows she’s deeply aggravated. “Have you been paying attention?”
“To what?”
“To yourself. One minute you’re listening to Northcliffe’s advice that the best place for you is in New York getting America in the war, and the next you’re dressed like a Boy Scout headed for the Vosges. You’ve been depressed. I’ve seen you staring out into space for reaches of time, and that’s not like you. It’s like me, but not like you. I know we’ve had some blows.” She’s referring to Casement and he hopes she won’t name him because he doesn’t know how he’ll react. “You are forgetting that you are a powerful man from a powerful banking family. There is no better place for you than the lecture circuit in America, and Northcliffe has already volunteered to set it up and do the necessary publicity. You are married to an American. You are an internationally renowned artist. You are an explorer and a best-selling author.”
“You left out circus performer.”
“That supports my argument.”
“I’m not ready for the lecture circuit in America,” says Ward. He’s sure he won’t convince her, no matter how hard he tries, so he thinks he can basically say anything. “That is the refuge of an old man.”
Sarita leaps from her chair and, taking him by the shoulders, steers him to the mirror. “Take a good look, Herbert. What do you see?”
“I know what you see,” he says, ruffling the ever-useful metaphor of his thinning hair, “but I see a man who might be able to save a few lives. You don’t know what I’m like under fire. I get frightened, but it doesn’t stop me from doing my job. I cheer people up. I give them comfort. And I’m going, so you should make peace with it as soon as possible.”
She meets his gaze but glances away. He follows the path of her eyes to the poker in its brass stand but knows she’s looking inwardly. “It’s as if you have no regard for me.”
“You know that’s not true.” He turns her so that they’re facing each other. “One of those boys who I pull off the field could be Charlie. I think of that. Tell me truthfully that if anyone would take you, you wouldn’t do the same.”
In the garden, larks are singing, intent on performing the music of summer. Sarita’s gray eyes rise to his face. “You’ll be in the line of fire.”
“That, unfortunately, is where stretcher-bearers are needed.” He watches her thinking, her twitching brows, but knows better than to ask after her thoughts.
“And what am I supposed to do?”
“Sarita, you do what you’ve always done.”
“And what exactly is that?”
“Keep the planets in rotation.”
She shakes her head, an act of defiance that actually shows her resignation. “I suppose you’ll write every day.”
“I will find the time.”
They sit side by side on the stiff, little loveseat and go over the small things that need attention, how to send packages as the food will not be sufficient, a quick rundown of what Sarita’s doing with the expenses to see if she’s left anything out, when they might meet in Paris when he has leave, whether Roddie can stay in France for the summer, which he’s against as the boy just wanders about muttering to himself, enacting his loneliness, as if he’s the cripple from the Pied Piper of Hamlin.
Ward gets up. “We should head to the train station.”
“I’m not going.”
“You’re not seeing me off?”
“Take Roddie.”
“You won’t come?”
Sarita shakes her head, and when he goes to embrace her, she won’t raise her face to him. He has to wrap his arms around her folded limbs that are holding the accounting book. And right there, he wonders if he’s doing the right thing, if he has any right to abandon his wife, who is holding so much together and is now doing it completely alone.
The lease on the house in Weston-Super-Mare is up at the end of the week, because Charlie will be gone, and she will no longer need a place for him. Herbie, too, is gearing up. He will be stationed in France—also Charlie—so there’s no reason f
or Sarita to be in England. Roddie will be back in school, within easy reach of her father, who is a good influence on the boy. Dimples is in London, nursing baby number two—another boy—and Cricket is still in New York, because she’s sick of the war and New York is certainly more fun than London.
And Herbert? He is indeed carrying the wounded in the mountains of Alsace. A minor relief is that he is not responsible for the removal of injured from the battlefield. Those stretcher-bearers—as she was informed by Harmsworth—have an average survival rate of two and a half weeks. Herbert’s job is to get the injured from the Posts to the areas accessible by ambulance and from the ambulance to the hospital. So he is carrying a stretcher, but not in the line of fire, although he’s far from safe. Herbert has witnessed plenty of death: ready corpses, and people about him being blown up, taken away by shrapnel, pouring blood—out of holes that were once legs or arms or abdomens—and sometimes collapsing like wet paper bags as their lungs are crushed by poisonous gas.
Herbie is here for the night to spend time with Charlie. Herbie has to be back at Brooklands tomorrow. She has her two boys under her roof and she is not sharing them with anyone, not with Roddie, who begged to be let off from school but who would have, no doubt, suffered an attack of anxiety upon being returned to Eton. Not with her father, who is preparing for a trip to New York. And not with Herbert, who is waiting at the Front. She remembers Charlie as a boy jumping off a boat landing and Herbert, in the water, catching him. That’s probably what Herbert thinks he’s doing in the Vosges.
These are magical days, magical hours. It’s as if she can hear each second expire as she wills time to still, to not pass. And the boys? They understand the war better than she does. They’ve lost friends, people they know, but wrapped in the banner of youth, they can’t escape joy. Because it is a joy to be that young, to be that beautiful. Now she’s old and she’s wise, and that is no fun at all. Herbie’s voice, plaintive, bounces down the hallway, and there’s Charlie, a bark—who would have thought this music would be taken from her?
She should not be false to herself. She always knew that Charlie would leave, and then Herbie. This is what boys do when you do your job well. This is why it is so taxing to be a mother, to get your sons’ legs under them with all tenderness and then to bravely walk away. Do not look over your shoulder. Believe that they’re capable of handling it all, even when they reach for you. Give them back their hand. Tell them you’re not needed anymore, that anything they might require to survive is all there, within them, and if it isn’t, that they’re capable of creating that strength.
Minute to minute, even when there’s no clock for her to look at, she knows that time is passing. The war is hungry and wants to take everything.
Charlie and Herbie are in the hallway, arguing. She tries to think of something cheerful to say, or at least not desperate. She could mention the boiled beef, since it was cooked in such a way that it had neither tenderness nor flavor—miraculous because, in this dish, one is usually sacrificed for the other. Perhaps it wasn’t beef at all. Bucket Woman has been very quiet as of late, and she certainly would have provided a tough joint for the table. Humor can be manufactured—must be—as otherwise she is a dark presence, not a support, yet another thing to remind of the death that lurks everywhere, of the death that is celebrating its proximity to all this vigorous youth.
“You’re still here?” she asks the boys. “I thought you were going out.”
“We are,” says Charlie. “Although Herbie is being a complete bore.”
“I’m not,” he protests. “It’s just that Charlie always has to have his way.”
“What does Charlie want?” asks Sarita. She sees Herbie roll his eyes. He thinks she favors Charlie, wants to give Charlie anything he desires, and maybe she does, but it’s out of habit, not because she prefers him to Herbie.
“I just want Herbie to have a good time,” says Charlie, squaring his shoulders at his brother. “If I have to hear another thing about Joyce Nicholson—”
“You wouldn’t say that if you’d met her.”
“What makes you think I haven’t?”
There’s a moment. Charlie has that dispassionate look and Herbie’s rattled, showing that the last blow landed well.
“I would like to remind you,” says Sarita, “that the war is actually with Germany.”
“Charlie is relentless,” says Herbie. “He just won’t give up.”
“Charlie is a relentless person who never gives up,” says Sarita agreeably. “What is going on?”
“Charlie has set something up with that girl in the village.”
“That girl in the village is Jane, and you are actually set up with her lovely sister Bernadette.”
“I doubt that Bernadette is lovely.”
“You wouldn’t say that,” Charlie lathers up the sarcasm, “if you’d met her.” He smiles and waggles his eyebrows in the exact same way as does his grandfather. “And I’ve told her wonderful things about you, about your pretty blond hair and how brave you are, being a pilot and all that.”
Herbie’s knuckles are chapped because it’s cold flying up so high, even in the summer, and he’s always had a problem with dry skin. He picks at it as he assembles his thoughts, and announces, “I feel like Charlie is prostituting me, Mother.”
Charlie probably is, and it’s funny, thank God—an easy laugh for her. “You should go, Herbie, have some fun, just don’t drink too much. Remember, you’re flying tomorrow.”
Charlie begins to steer Herbie out the door, his hands on his shoulders. “You’d be surprised just how generous these girls get when they hear you’re heading out.”
“Charlie, that’s enough—” says Sarita.
“And Herbie, you could use some experience.”
“I am standing here,” says Sarita. “You could wait until you’re outside.”
“It’s just that I told Joyce—” says Herbie, although the protest has worn out.
“Bernadette might be your soul mate,” says Charlie.
“Soul mate?” says Sarita. “What are you talking about?”
“Herbie’s been brought up on that tale of your romance with Father, how he found you on the upper decks of the Saale in the middle of the night looking out to sea and fell instantly in love.”
“Is that how he tells it?” says Sarita.
“Do you have a different version?” asks Herbie.
She waves them both off. “Herbie,” says Sarita, “Joyce will still be there, in London, tomorrow. Go have fun with your brother.”
In the evening, she is knitting with Rose, the girl who—despite her poor cookery—is actually a machine when it comes to turning out socks. Socks are difficult, particularly with this regulation yarn, which is on the thin side. Rose manages three socks for every one of Sarita’s and they are all the same size. No one expects Sarita to be knitting socks, but no one expects Sarita to be doing anything.
Rose has a sweetheart fighting up near Cantigny. His name is Derrick and he has a good writing style. Rose finds this surprising and doesn’t seem to quite trust Sarita’s assessment of his letters. Derrick says things like, “When you get away from the Front, the silence kind of screams at you,” and “I’m glad I’ve got you, because the lads who don’t have girls only have their mothers to miss and that’s sort of embarrassing.” Sarita has started sharing bits of Herbert’s letters too, describing caves that serve as operating theatres and steep slopes garlanded with barbed wire. In this manner she and Rose have become friends, although it is a cautious friendship maintained with lowered eyes and constant activity. They haven’t actually admitted to being friends and chances are—class difference and all—that they won’t. They each roll out their personal narratives as a means of escape for the other woman, eager to be similarly relieved themselves. Here’s what Derrick’s up to and what he says, and this is what’s happening to Herbe
rt and Charlie.
And Herbie, who is struggling with the other officers as he’s younger than them all—the youngest pilot in RFC by at least a year. Herbie actually looks his age too, which doesn’t help. He’s not shaving, unless one calls the removal of the fine line of soft whiskers from his upper lip “shaving,” and is the butt of many jokes. Being Charlie’s brother has prepared him for this and he weathers it just fine. Apparently, the previous week they had been in training with the gunners and Herbie had been matched with a heavyset Yorkshire man, who took one look at Herbie and refused to get in the plane. He didn’t want to be killed, and on English soil, because he was being sent into the air with a twelve-year-old. Herbie understood and was actually hoping that they’d give him someone closer in age and more fun, but apparently the fact that Herbie weighs in at 130 pounds means that he does get matched with heavier gunners. The reason that Herbie shared this story is that his superior had, firstly, pointed out that the man from Yorkshire had to get into the plane even if Herbie was twelve because it was a direct order, and then added that the man was being an idiot because Herbie was actually the best pilot they had. He never got lost, was so mechanically astute that he could probably build a plane from scratch, and—at this point—had the most flying hours of anyone at the school. Also, as he was light, whoever was with him could carry extra ammunition. “They call me Sparrow,” Herbie shared, “and I’m supposed to be good luck.” So Herbie is not only the best pilot at Brooklands but also the company mascot.
At midnight, the door to the hallway slams open. Sarita doubts that she’s been sleeping but doesn’t exactly know how she’s been passing the time otherwise. Her sock confirms a lack of progress. Rose left for bed hours ago. She thinks Herbie and Charlie are trying to be quiet, but if that’s the case, they’re failing so extravagantly that it’s hard to tell.
Valiant Gentlemen Page 45
