The Last Summer

by Judith Kinghorn

  “Don’t go to America. Please, Tom, don’t go to America,” I said through tears. “Stay here, in England. There are jobs here . . . opportunities here . . .”

  “Clarissa . . .”

  “Promise me, promise me you won’t go.”

  “I can’t, I can’t make that promise,” he said, lifting his hand to my face, wiping away the wetness. “I can’t make that promise,” he said again, kissing my forehead. “But I shall try, for a while at least, not to go.”

  We didn’t leave the island until early evening. He rowed us across the water slowly and in silence, and then he sat on the jetty as I changed back into my clothes in the boathouse. We walked through the pink blush of the meadow and stopped by the tree—“Our tree,” he said—and looked back at the lake. It had been a perfect day. One etched on to my memory forever.

  Of course, I’d entirely forgotten about any arrangement with Mabel, or the fact that Henry had had no idea where I was. And as I walked across the hallway, toward the stairs, Henry’s voice boomed at me from the doorway of the drawing room. “Issa, thank God! Where the hell have you been?”

  I stopped in my tracks. “Oh, hello,” I said, calmly. “Where’ve I been? I’ve been having a wander about the estate, and I rowed out to the island.”

  He moved toward me, and I immediately saw from his face how frightened he’d been.

  “You can’t just disappear off like that, for hours on end and on your own; don’t you realize? Don’t you realize anything could happen to you?” He was shouting, in a state.

  “I’m so sorry, Henry. I forgot the time,” I said, reaching out and touching his arm. “But I’m here now, darling, and as you can see I’m perfectly safe and unharmed,” I added, looking up into his anxious eyes.

  For a moment I thought he might cry. I could feel the tension in his body; see the strain in his face. And I felt immeasurably guilty to have caused him such distress.

  “Bloody stupid . . . bloody stupid . . .” he muttered, as he turned and walked away.

  Later that evening, before dinner, I telephoned Charlie.

  “Yes, it’s been a heavenly day here too, though I haven’t seen much of it,” I lied. “Mabel and I have been so busy packing up the place.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  I’d already decided that I wanted to spend all the available time I had that week with Tom. I knew that our time was limited, and I also knew that though it would be unbearable to say good-bye to him, I had no choice; I had to. Somehow, in my mind, there seemed to be a degree of absolution for my sins, my infidelity with Tom, if I returned to my husband. My unfaithfulness was finite. I would, ultimately, do the right thing, I thought.

  I’d invited Tom to join us for dinner that evening. Henry was drinking heavily again, and he, Michael and Julian were reminiscing about the war—about the brothels at the front. Tom and I barely spoke. Instead, we conducted a conversation with our eyes, knowing the others would not notice. After dinner the five of us retired to the drawing room and played gramophone records once again. And I danced with him once more as the other three sat around smoking, watching us. I’m really not sure what they saw, but they must have seen, must have known. While we were dancing, holding each other, I whispered to him to come back to the house later, through the servants hall and up the back staircase. I knew Henry would soon be out for the count. And, perhaps sadly, Michael and Julian didn’t really matter.

  “Good night, all,” I said, when I left the room, leaving all four men there, and blowing them each a kiss.

  As I climbed into my bed I heard Henry and the other two singing their way up the staircase, followed by an attempt—by Henry, I presumed—to play “The Last Post” on his bugle. Tom, I thought, must have gone home but would be back shortly. Then my door opened, and there he was.

  “Tom! Henry has only just gone to bed.”

  “Clarissa, they barely know what day of the week it is let alone where I am or what we may be up to,” he replied, pulling off his tie.

  “Are you absolutely sure? If he finds out he’s bound to tell Mama.”

  He didn’t answer me. He took off his clothes, leaving them scattered across the floor and climbed into bed with me. Then he said, “If we’re going to have an affair, Clarissa, can you please stop mentioning your mama?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “And that’s another thing—you must stop apologizing to me.”

  He took hold of me, kissed me passionately.

  “I’ve been longing to do that all evening,” he said, and then he reached over and turned out the lamp.

  The next few days were blissful. We spent every afternoon together, usually on the island with a picnic. Once, when it rained, we rowed back across the lake and spent the remainder of the afternoon locked inside the boathouse. We scripted and acted out a play all about life at Deyning, with each of us playing a multitude of different parts. Tom, of course, proved to be the better mimic, adding something more—“a soupçon of wickedness,” he said—to each familiar figure: an unsurprising but ridiculously lascivious Mr. Broughton, with a penchant for being naked while gardening; a lusty Edna, with a preference for women; and an acutely observed spoilsport called Mabel. And as I rolled about the wooden floor, half naked and crying with laughter, I didn’t think about tomorrow or next week. I didn’t think about the future, or the past.

  But sometimes, in our quiet moments, I’d watched a frown creep into his brow. I’d felt him wince, his whole body tense, seen him shut his eyes. And I knew in those moments that he was remembering the war. Not inviting it back, but having it forced forward in his memory. And I didn’t want to ask him about it, because I didn’t want him to have to go back there, to remember. And the one time I had asked him, when I’d said, “Tell me. What is it? You can tell me . . . I want you to know you can talk to me about it,” he’d turned to me and said, “No. I don’t want to talk about it. I’ll never talk about it.” He’d looked at me with such intensity, such fear and pain in his eyes. “I don’t want you to know,” he said. “I don’t want you to know what I’ve seen . . . what I’ve done.”

  Each evening, after dinner, we danced; and later, upstairs in my bed, we made love. On our last night he said to me, “We will be together, one day; I know it. And if I thought for a moment it wasn’t to be, I think . . . I think I might stop breathing.”

  I wanted to tell him then about Emily. I wanted to but I didn’t know how to. I hadn’t uttered her name to a living soul, and I’d buried her so deep inside my own that it was almost impossible for me to think of her as being real. Had I actually had a child? Was there really a little girl somewhere looking out on to the world with those same serious dark eyes?

  Emily.

  She’d be two years of age: walking, speaking, part of another family. And that was my comfort, the one thing I’d held on to: that she belonged to someone, somewhere. For if I wasn’t able to love her, the idea that she belonged, that she was held close, loved and cherished, offered a degree of assuagement.

  But if I spoke her name—what would happen?

  On our last night together I did speak her name. As we lay in bed, wrapped in each other’s arms, I said her name out loud.

  “Emily . . .”

  He turned on to his side. “Emily? And who, exactly, is Emily?”

  I closed my eyes. He said her name.

  “A little girl. She’s a little girl,” I said.

  He laughed. “And where, pray tell, does Emily live?” he asked. “Or is she one of your imaginary friends?”

  “Yes, I suppose she is.”

  I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t tell him we had a child, one I’d misplaced, given away, and then, after telling him that, leave him myself. So I played a game with him; a game dictated by him.

  “And what does she look like?”

  “Oh, she’s very small . . . with dark hair and very dark eyes. Serious eyes.”

  “Hmm. And is she kind?”

  “Oh yes, she’s very kin
d, but quite shy.”

  He reached out, stroked my hair. “Is she here now?” he asked.

  I stared up into the blackness. “Yes and no . . . I like to think she’s here.”

  “Well, perhaps you can leave little Emily here with me tomorrow. And perhaps . . . perhaps occasionally I shall send her back to you with a message.”

  I swallowed, closed my eyes again. “Yes, I think she’d like that,” I said, beginning to cry. “I think she’d like that very much.”

  He took me in his arms and held me tightly. “You’ll know when I’m thinking of you now, because Emily will be there,” he said.

  —

  The following morning Charlie arrived. I hadn’t expected him until later in the day, and, luckily, I was still at the house, attending to another list with Mabel.

  “Charlie!”

  He stood in the doorway for a moment, smiling, then came toward me. “Hello, darling, I thought I might as well take the day off—come down here early and surprise you.”

  “Thank you, Mabel,” I said, and then I whispered, “Oh, and Mabel, would you be so kind and let Mr. Cuthbert know that my husband has arrived, and I shan’t be needing his help with the boxes.”

  I’m not sure what Mabel thought. She must have known that Tom hadn’t lifted a box all week. But she nodded at me and said, “Yes, miss. I’ll let him know.”

  That evening Tom declined my invitation to join us for dinner and sent a message via his mother that he was “otherwise engaged.” I sat in the dining room with the men, but I hardly spoke, and I couldn’t eat a thing. I looked down at the food on my plate, glanced up at Henry and the others as they spoke; and I tried to smile back at Charlie. I stared at the bare walls, felt each and every minute as it slipped away; and I longed for him. I wanted to run to the cottage, find him and hold him once more. And when Charlie climbed into my bed later that evening and reached over to me, I finally felt the shame of infidelity. For I was being unfaithful: I was being unfaithful to my heart.

  Early the next morning, as we said our good-byes, Tom was nowhere to be seen. Looking back, it was probably better that way. I couldn’t have coped with a farewell, or even a polite adieu, and I knew he didn’t want to see me with Charlie.

  As we drove away I felt physically sick. And I didn’t look back. I didn’t want to see my world disappearing from view. I wanted to stop the car, get out and run back up the driveway, home, and to him. I wanted to tell Charlie. I wanted to say to him, “I’m sorry. I’m so very, very sorry, but I love someone else . . .” And then he spoke. He said, “I know how hard this must be for you, Clarissa. I know you feel as though you’re leaving behind everything you’ve ever loved. But you have a new life now, a life with me. And I know we’re going to be happy.” He reached over, placed his hand upon mine. “So happy.”

  . . . Yes, the sale of the place is sad, very sad. It is a loss, the end of an era—as you say, but in truth that era ended for me when William and George died. It is all gone now, that life, & those halcyon days; it went with them, & belonged to them . . . and in my dreams I see them in the Elysian Fields . . . at Deyning.

  PART THREE

  Chapter Twenty-four

  . . . What worries me most is not the financial struggle, but H’s increasing alcohol addiction and fragile state of mind. He was once so full of life & ambition—easily the most ambitious of the three—but that aspect of his character has completely gone, & now all he does is sit & stare, lost in a trance, and often quite unable to hear me. He continues to suffer from nightmares, & is prone to weeping, about what he cannot tell me.

  Had I known, that morning in the spring of 1919, how my life was to unfold, had I known how infinitely precious love is, I would have told Charlie everything and run back to Tom. But the war had just ended and I was still young and craved some semblance of the life I’d been brought up to live. I was neither mature enough nor strong enough to cope with any estrangement from the remnants of my shattered family. My mother had suffered such loss, and Charlie, mentally as well as physically fragile, was dependent upon me. It seemed to be up to me to try to restore a sense of normality to our lives, to be the Granville who lived happily ever after. My marriage to Charlie—our future together—was the foundation of that, I thought.

  When I left Deyning that day I hadn’t allowed myself to dwell upon a future without Tom. At that time I still lived from day to day, week to week. I simply didn’t think about the years ahead. And, apart from those few weeks we’d shared before the war, and that final week at Deyning, Tom and I had never spent any time together. Not really. He was not and had never been a part of my life. Oh, in my head, in my heart, he’d been everything, but that remained a secret, my secret. So, I followed a path through muted seasons, occasionally allowing myself to think of him, wonder about him, but I was resigned to the separateness of our lives; resigned to that sensation of loss as being part and parcel of life. Brothers, cousins and friends didn’t grow old, but remained childhood memories; fathers passed on; homes changed; and babies, too, could be taken. Why would the man I’d fallen in love with not disappear from my life too? It was part of a pattern. It seemed to me that anything, everything, I loved and held dear, I would be estranged from.

  One month slid into another, and then into another, and I moved on with my new life: my life in London as Charlie’s wife. I’d already lived in the city for a number of years, already become acquainted with its many and various tones of gray, accustomed to—and even admired—its hard lines: the almost black shiny new roads and smooth slate rooftops; the murky shape of skeletal trees through smog, and those glinting, hot summer pavements. But now I felt only its weight, and that weight deep and heavy in my heart, as though I was holding in my breath, not fully exhaling. As though I was waiting. Waiting.

  But waiting for what?

  It had all gone, everything. There would be no dawns or sunsets like those I’d known at Deyning; no early-morning mists to watch rise up from a lake, and no moonlit-drenched trees to wish upon. And there was no Tom. No Tom. He and everything I’d cherished had gone and could never come back. Yes, I’d lost all I held dear. I’d lost everything. And so I began to go back there, quietly, in my mind. I began to measure time—days, weeks and months—against that place: against the past.

  But all of us were burdened, none of us free. For we’d been the children destined for a great war. The ones who’d run at it, into it, singing, and shouting happy adieus; now tormented souls, haunted by our stolen youth and absent friends, and our memories of another time. And peace, peace of mind and heart, was not God-given, not our birthright. Instead, it floated around us, teasingly. Peace. We all spoke of it, liked the sound of it, but it was a word already worn thin. And that other time, like a half-forgotten dream, came in flashes of color, light and shade; vaguely familiar shapes and fragmented images. Silence took me back, and stillness too. The scents of summer, its sounds: the whisper of the giant beeches in the park, the distant hum of a mowing machine; the sight of children picnicking, or out in boats on the lake; a lone butterfly, dancing amidst the geraniums and lavender of a window box. Yes, all of these carried me back.

  I had no idea then that grief is never entirely spent. No idea that it can be suspended, frozen, sometimes for years. War had anesthetized us, numbed our senses, and even the warmth of summer could not thaw that chill around our hearts. Birthdays, Christmases, high days and holidays; family celebrations and simple pleasures, once so treasured for their languid, perfect moments were irrevocably altered by those missing: those forever young, smiling faces. And so my life was not the life I’d once imagined for myself. How could it be? My cast of players had gone; Deyning had gone; and my heart had been displaced. My marriage to Charlie was not what it should have been, for I wasn’t able to give myself fully, or to love him the way I knew I could. And we were both haunted. Haunted by the memory of how we’d once been, who we had once been, and that childish notion of unfettered happiness.

  Charlie’s lov
e was of a different nature. Our relationship had not been founded on physical attraction, or chemistry, though—initially, at least—it had flickered. I had married him to do the right thing, and, perhaps, to be safe, secure: to be married. And he’d probably married me for the same reasons: to have a wife, someone he could call his own, look upon and feel proud of, the way one would anything one deemed valuable, and perhaps rare and pleasing to the eye. To Charlie, our marriage, I knew, was something of an achievement.

  During those early days, I didn’t allow myself to ponder on our relationship. I embraced my role as best I could and distracted myself perfecting the part. There were people to see and entertain, a husband to amuse and look after. And we tried, I think, in those early years, to be happy together, to be in love. We both wanted children, wanted that cushion around us, and it was my fault, I thought, my fault no children came. My body seemed unwilling to produce that seal of approval without my heart’s agreement. And it seemed a fitting punishment.

  I went to see doctors, specialists, and, unbeknown to Charlie, tried any number of remedies and potions from women in far-flung parts of London promising me a baby. I’d lied, of course, when doctors had asked questions. I’d pleaded ignorance to the workings of my body and never said, “But I know I can do it; I’ve done it before.” Perhaps it was that. Perhaps it was simply the tedium and disappointment of living with that longing for a child, but the complexion of our marriage changed. We stopped discussing possibilities, the future, and children. And then, three years into our marriage, we stopped sleeping together.

  Of course I’d known from the start that my marriage to Charlie was a mistake. But I had promised to marry him, and I’d made him that promise when he was a fit and able-bodied man, fighting for his country, for all of us. I couldn’t have abandoned him when he returned home, invalided; as though a war-damaged fiancé was somehow not quite up to scratch. And so, though I was lonely, hungry for love and physical intimacy, there was no way out. Happiness, I realized, was an ideal as elusive as peace.