I once tried to talk to Mama about my marriage, but she stopped me almost as soon as I began. “Clarissa, Clarissa,” she said, her eyes fluttering closed, smiling, “a successful marriage is not about physical love, or passion. That type of love—however intoxicating—simply doesn’t endure. A successful marriage is founded upon a partnership; it is an alliance, an understanding. And it is about companionship and, sometimes, forgiveness and tolerance too . . .”
I didn’t tell her how much I’d already tolerated, how often I forgave Charlie. I’d never spoken to her about his black moods or his unreasonable and increasingly volatile behavior: the rages about something being out of place or dinner not served at the correct time. I’d never mentioned the silences, the evenings when he refused to speak or even look at me, and then, later, disappeared off into the night.
“But I’m still young, Mama. I need to be loved.”
“You are loved, my dear. Charlie adores you.”
“I don’t want that . . . adoration. I want real love.”
She sighed, looked at me, narrowing her eyes, as though trying to tune into my thoughts. “Life is about compromise, Clarissa. We all have to make sacrifices; all of us . . . even me.”
I looked up at her. “But you had a perfect marriage. You and Papa loved each other . . . had children and were together until . . . until he died.”
She smiled, closed her eyes again for a moment. “Yes, I loved your father, not least because we shared four children. We shared a life. And it was a good marriage, but no marriage is perfect.” She sighed again. “And my marriage was not always perfect.”
I stared at her. I’d never heard my mother speak of her marriage before, never known her admit to imperfection in any area of her life. All at once a door had opened, and I wanted to know more. I wanted to know who my mother was; what she’d known, how she’d felt. Had she, too, known grand passion? Had she ever been forced to question her life, her marriage to my father? Had someone come between her and Papa?
“Have you . . . have you ever loved anyone apart from Papa?” I asked.
There was a pause. She looked away from me, and I knew there was something.
“Yes . . . there was someone, once; many years ago now.” She raised her hand to her chest, searching for her pearls. “But it was not to be.”
“Before you married Papa?” I asked, silently willing her to tell me, to say more.
She stared at me.
“After you married Papa?”
She closed her eyes, momentarily, and I knew that to be a yes.
I wanted to ask her more questions, but I wasn’t sure how, or if she was prepared to tell me any more. Then she said, quite calmly, in a matter-of-fact voice, “It was a long time ago, and it was impossible.” She smiled at me. “I had you, your brothers—and, of course, there was Papa. And it was . . .”—she twisted the long strand of pearls through her fingers—“. . . could never have come to anything.”
“I had no idea.”
“Of course not. Why would you? You were still a child.”
“Did Papa know?”
“No, he did not. Oh, he may have had his suspicions, and we went through a few . . . a few difficult years. But I loved your father, Clarissa. And I have no regrets.”
This was all my mother was prepared to tell me at that time. It was another lesson in compromise and sacrifice.
—
My life in London was quite different to that time during the war, and my circle of friends had changed too. Charlie was working in the city and we saw more of his friends and work colleagues than we did of my old crowd. A number of them had moved on anyhow, were married and living in the country. But occasionally, at a party, we crossed paths with one or other of them.
Jimmy Cooper had remained in the army after the war. He’d been out in India for two years and had only recently returned when we bumped into him at a charity dance at the Hyde Park Hotel. I knew Jimmy, like his mother, to be a diligent correspondent. He always seemed to keep track of everyone, knew who had married whom and where they were living. And as I stood chatting with him that night, he did indeed seem to know more—was more up to date on everyone’s movements—than me, despite having been away for two years.
“I can’t believe you’ve been away for two whole years, Jimmy Cooper, and yet you have all the gossip!” I said to him, and he laughed.
“I have to admit, most of it’s passed on to me from Mama. You know how much she loves to know everything,” he said with a smile.
“Yes, and hand it on. I think that’s the part she likes best, don’t you? She’d have won a medal during the war—for reconnaissance!”
“Ha! You’re right. She’d have been a superb spy . . . though perhaps a little too conspicuous behind enemy lines.”
I laughed. The thought of Venetia, trussed up in all her finery, crawling through no-man’s-land, was a bizarre but highly amusing image. And while it was good to be laughing, to be able to make jokes about that time, I had a sudden stab of guilt: guilt that we were standing there, at a dance, laughing about the war. And I felt a twinge of guilt about Venetia too. I hadn’t seen her in a while. In fact, if truth be told, I’d been avoiding her. The last time I’d called upon her she’d asked me too many questions: questions about my marriage and about Charlie. “You and Charlie . . . you’re happy?” she’d asked, staring at me with those piercing violet eyes.
“Yes,” I’d replied, “yes, of course.”
“It’s just that . . . well, you sometimes seem a little distracted, dear, a little lost.”
I’d shrugged, shaken my head, unsure what to say. “I’m fine, it’s fine,” I said, looking away from her.
“Fine? Fine does not make my heart sing, Clarissa. Fine does not evoke that flutter of happiness I so wish to feel when I look at you. And you know, you can tell me . . . you can. I’m always here for you. You’re the daughter I never had . . . as dear and as precious to me as my own.”
“Mama says that marriage is about compromise . . . and sacrifice. She says passion does not endure.”
She smiled. “Ah, I see. And you . . . you’ve known passion?”
I hesitated, and then I said, “Yes, yes I have.”
“But not with your husband, not with Charlie?”
I looked down, shook my head.
She sighed. “You’re still in love with him, aren’t you? You’re still in love with Tom Cuthbert.”
At that moment I was relieved to hear her say his name. She knew, and I was pleased she knew. I wanted someone to know the truth. When I began to cry she moved over to me and took me in her arms.
“Please, please promise me that you shan’t say anything to Mama.”
“Of course I shan’t. I wouldn’t dream of it . . . there are many things I don’t tell your mama, Clarissa.” She took my head in her hands and looked at me. “But you have to try and make your marriage work, my dear. Otherwise . . .” She stared at me, unsmiling, with tears in her eyes now too. “Otherwise you have years of loneliness ahead of you, and I simply can’t bear the thought of you lonely and unhappy.”
Even later that same day I’d regretted telling her. I wasn’t convinced that she wouldn’t report back to Mama or inadvertently say something. And so, for the next few weeks, I’d purposefully avoided her, hoping to put a distance between that sad outburst and myself. Hoping we’d both forget. But weeks had turned into months, and now I felt guilty.
“I must visit your mother,” I said to Jimmy. “I’ve been a little lax in my calling of late.”
“Yes, you must. You know how much she adores seeing you . . . adores seeing you both.”
I glanced over at Charlie. He’d moved farther away from us, was talking with a group of people I didn’t recognize, and so, with practiced nonchalance, I took the plunge.
“And do you ever hear anything of Tom Cuthbert?”
“Ha! Now there’s a name that doesn’t often crop up,” he said, stopping a waiter and grabbing us each another gla
ss of champagne. “But Cuthbert was never the best correspondent. Bloody unreliable, I’d say.”
“But now that you’re back—will you be seeing him?”
“Good grief, didn’t you know? He’s in America.”
“America? No, no . . . I didn’t know.”
“Yes, been there for almost two years now, I think,” he said, sipping his champagne. “And doing quite well for himself too, from what I understand.”
“Really . . . I had no idea.”
And it struck me then, the separateness of our lives. For Tom had been living on the other side of the world, living on another continent, for almost as long as I’d been living my new married life in London.
“How strange,” I said, thinking out loud.
“Why’s that?” Jimmy asked.
“Oh, nothing. I just thought . . . thought he would be living here in London . . . thought he would be in the city.”
He laughed. “No, not Cuthbert. He was always restless, even at Oxford. Never quite . . . fit in. And I suppose he’s gone to make his fortune.” He laughed again, and for some reason I did too.
And then I said, “But you know . . . he probably will, Jimmy.”
“Ha! Yes, you’re right, he probably will. And he’ll no doubt return here one day waving his crisp American dollars in all our faces!”
“No, he’d never do that. He’d never be arrogant or ostentatious in that way.”
He looked at me curiously. “You rather liked him, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, smiling, “yes I did.”
That same night, back at our home, Charlie had come to my room. I was tired, told him I wanted to sleep. He was drunk, and more unsteady on his feet than usual. He hated his walking stick, hated his disability and, perhaps, hated himself. He was in an angry, belligerent mood, and when he stumbled and I climbed from my bed to help him, he turned and shouted, “No! I don’t need your help! I don’t need a bloody nurse, I need a wife.”
“You have a wife, Charlie. I’m your wife.”
He moved over to me, his face inches from mine. “Yes, you’re my wife and you’re stuck with me, Clarissa. And I’m stuck with you!”
“Is that what you think?” I asked quietly. “Is that how you feel?”
“What do you care how I feel? What do you know? You know nothing . . . nothing at all about suffering and pain, real pain. Oh yes, yes, you lost your brothers—and you never let us forget that, but you’ve never had to give up anything, anything of yourself, never had to sacrifice anything. You don’t know what it’s like . . . you have no idea. And look at you . . . you can’t even produce a baby.”
I closed my eyes, waited a moment before I spoke. “I know it’s difficult for you, and I try to understand . . . really I do.” I reached out, touched his arm. “I’m sorry.”
He turned to me. “But you’re always bloody sorry!” he shouted. And then he pushed me back on to the bed. “And if you’re really sorry,” he continued, unbuckling his belt, “you’ll fulfill your obligations . . . as my wife.”
I didn’t protest, didn’t say anything. And I didn’t push him away. I didn’t move. I lay on the bed, exactly where I’d fallen. I looked away from his contorted face, closed my eyes and tried to shut out the pain; tried to imagine I was somewhere else: . . . the lower meadow . . . the lower meadow; under the tree . . . look up, see the sky . . . see the clouds . . .
When he’d finished, he struggled up from the bed, picked up his stick, and then left the room. He didn’t say anything, didn’t speak. What could he have said? What was there to say? I was his wife. He was my husband.
Minutes later, I heard him leave the house.
I’m not sure how long I lay there. All I remember is a burning pain, and the tick-tock . . . tick-tock . . . tick-tock . . . of the clock. I didn’t want to cry. I didn’t want to acknowledge what had just taken place in any sob or sound of anguish. Even then, I knew it had to be locked away. Forgotten.
“America,” I whispered. “America . . .” I said again, louder. I wanted to hear myself speak, to shatter the silence, break through the hideous echo. And as I spoke the name of that faraway continent I imagined Tom, standing, looking out from one of those very tall buildings; so tall and so high he could see across the curve of the earth’s surface to England, to London, to the light of my room, to me.
“Tom . . .”
Was that to be it? I wondered. Were my snatched moments with him to be the sum total of my experience of passion and real love in this life? Were they already spent? Had I already and unknowingly passed through my zenith: that moment of unutterable perfection, when everything is the very best it can be, will ever be?
Oh, but you had it, you had it, Clarissa, and you knew it . . .
And at that moment I thought of William, hurtling toward the ground in a burning airplane. I thought of him and George. They had both died so young; had either of them ever known real passion, passionate love? And I so hoped that they had. I hoped that each of them had known at least one moment, one splendid, unforgettable moment; one that in the hour of their death they’d been able to return to; to know that they had lived, truly lived.
I felt a solitary tear slide down my temple into my hair.
No self-pity, Clarissa, no self-pity . . . think of them; think of all of them.
And I did.
I saw Frank’s whitened cricket shoes, Hugo Hamilton’s bow tie; Julian’s pale lips, and Archie’s smile; I saw hands waving back at me from a train carriage window, and boys in uniform—standing proud and tall. I saw my father, his map and his pins and his bits of ribbon, and the men at the station, tattered and frayed and caked in mud; and the men in red coats, and the posters and words; the words, and the gloves . . . the gloves, the balaclavas, the socks; the socks and the gloves, and the uniforms sent home . . . the mud and blood and the uniforms sent home. Home.
Chapter Twenty-five
. . . I am quite well, & continue to distract myself with the social merry-go-round here, and my friend V’s (who’s quite the Bohemian now) new interest in Spiritualism. She’s rather keen for me to attend one of her séances, telling me that G or W may well “come through,” and though it’s tempting, I’m not sure . . . Of course, there was a time when I would never have entertained such an idea, but V assures me that no HARM can be done, & that her Madam Zelda (apparently the very best & most fashionable in all of London) never fails to bring Them through . . .
When I recall the winters of my childhood they’re inevitably bathed in a pure white light, the reflection of a frozen landscape. I remember awakening to that brilliance, seeping into my room through the heavy winter drapes; the rush of chilled air as I threw back the eiderdown and climbed from my bed; the ice on the inside of the windowpanes; and the world beyond, a place of strange new shapes and alabaster stillness.
Once, when I was still quite young and my parents away in London, we awoke at Deyning to find the thickest blanket of snow I’d ever seen. It was over a foot deep. “A right rare dumping,” Edna had called it. We were cut off, completely stranded for the best part of a week, the servants and me. And Mr. Broughton had to walk five miles through the snow-covered fields to the village to send a telegram to my parents. For the first few days normal routines and lessons were suspended, but conditions were so bad that Miss Greaves forbade me to venture outside. So I’d sat at the nursery window looking out upon that still, eerie landscape: the skeletal trees and frozen lake; the dark shapes of the deer moving slowly across the white parkland in the distance; and that low-hanging sky, so full of snow it seemed to billow with the weight. Each evening I ate downstairs, in the kitchen, with Miss Greaves and the others. I was allowed to stay up late, and we sang songs and hymns—with Miss Greaves at the piano—in the servants’ hall. And one night, terribly late, ready for bed and in my nightgown, Edna took my hand, led me through to the scullery, and then lifted me up on to the slate bench.
I stood there transfixed, watching tiny white crystals spirali
ng out of the blackness, sliding down the skylight above me. And when I turned to her, for her to lift me down, she wrapped her arms around me, kissed me and held me to her so tightly, and then she carried me all the way back to the servants’ hall just as though I were a baby, her own baby. I used to tell her all the time that I loved her, and I did.
I didn’t want the snow to melt, didn’t want things to return to normal. But as soon as my parents returned home, and despite more snow, everything changed. Evenings of song beyond the green baize door stopped, routines and order resumed, and even Miss Greaves appeared less than enthusiastic at the resumption of lessons on the nursery floor.
I can’t recall another winter as severe as that, and I certainly never again experienced the warmth of that snowed-in camaraderie, but for a few weeks during January 1925 snow fell steadily over London. Frozen days gave way to nights of glistening, moonlit frosts. No number of blazing fires could keep us warm, and no number of clothes could stop us from shivering. And it was then, in the depths of that particularly hostile month, that my brother Henry slipped further from us. It had been a gradual sink into the abyss, a slow dance into oblivion. The hedonistic mix of parties, pills and whisky, which had once alleviated his anguish, had become increasingly ineffective. And that keyhole in his memory, that small glinting light of who he’d once been, finally faded.
Unlike Charlie, who, despite his disability, had managed to pick up the pieces of his life and had gained employment working at a city-based firm of solicitors, Henry was still without a job, and without any wife. He lived in a rented flat in Marylebone, spent his nights at bars and parties, and gambling, and his days sleeping. I don’t think he’d ever expected to have to work and, after the war ended, though he’d toyed with the idea of staying in the army, and at one stage had even talked of going out to India, he’d slowly drifted into a malaise.
The Last Summer Page 23
