by Gloria Cook
‘Yes?’
‘I can’t help being curious about Perry’s wife. How did she die? He never mentions her and I don’t like to ask.’
Selina made a vague face. ‘Her name was Ada. There’s not a lot to tell about her. I never met her. Perry married her shortly before going on active service.’
Weariness was coming over Emilia and she let her eyelids fall. Then snapped them open again. ‘I was lying here when my boys were attacked by one of the dogs, and soon afterwards Jenna was born.’
‘Don’t run away from bad memories, then they can’t haunt you.’ Selina smoothed at her hair.
‘Do you really think that’s true?’
‘Mostly. It always helps if you share your fears, your feelings.’
‘Thank you, Selina. You’ve been very kind.’
Selina stroked her hand. ‘I’ve enjoyed talking to you, Emilia. I’d like us to be friends. Sleep now. I’ll stay a while.’
When Emilia closed her eyes again, she felt the other woman giving her a gentle kiss on the cheek.
Outside the bedroom door, Selina met Alec rushing down the long corridor. She put her finger to her lips to silence an outburst of concern. ‘She’s resting at last. Make sure your servants do all the tasks she usually does for the next few days. Emilia needs space and comfort. I’ll call back tomorrow and see how she is.’
‘I’ll see she’s not disturbed.’ Alec’s brow was furrowed, the few lines gathering at his eyes deepened. ‘Tilda says she’s burnt to a crisp. How come?’
Selina tugged at the black hair curling over his collar. ‘It’s not as bad as that but she’ll be sore for a couple of days, so be careful when you touch her. Like you, she’s not looking after herself. You’re both getting woefully thin. Eat a good dinner tonight and coax her to as well.’
‘Yes, I’ll do that. Thanks for looking after her.’ He glanced at the bedroom door, eager to get on the other side and see Emilia for himself.
‘I’ll see myself out. Let me know if there’s ever anything I can do for you or Emilia, Alec.’
Alec entered the room on tiptoe, shut the door as softly as he could. He sat on the bed, leaning over Emilia, watching the tensing in her face as she dreamed. She had pushed the cloth off her brow in her sleep and it was wetting the pillow. He put it back in the washbowl, then using feather-light fingers caressed the damp hair away from her neck. ‘Don’t be sad, darling. Don’t stay sad,’ he whispered. ‘I love you so much.’
There they stayed until the afternoon was over, she sleeping, calmer now after his tender touch, he in loving attendance.
‘Oh,’ she moaned, her head aching so much she could hardly lift it. ‘The boys…’
‘Sara’s brought them home, don’t worry about anything, darling. You need to sit up and drink, let me help you.’ He pushed a careful arm in under her waist and raised her. She leaned against his strong body and sipped from a glass of water. He kissed the back of her head, heedful to avoid the lotion-pink areas on her neck and shoulders.
‘You’re good to me.’ She sank back against his hard muscles, ignoring the sore areas that came into contact with his body. She raised his hand to her lips and kissed it.
‘I’ve missed you, Emilia. You know what I mean…’ His voice came husky.
‘I do, Alec, and I’ve missed you too. Of course, the usual six weeks weren’t up before Jenna died.’
‘I suppose we haven’t made love because it is more than us being together, it’s the process that made her.’
He had been thinking, thinking about how losing Jenna had marred every part of their life together. It made Emilia cry and grip his hand, afraid to let it go. Afraid to let him go any further away from her, for they had chosen different routes and different friendships to cope with their tragedy, and soon they would be busy with the haymaking. ‘Alec, I don’t want another baby yet. Perhaps next year. You do understand?’
‘Yes, of course. I’ll see to it. By the time this sunburn’s gone perhaps we’ll both be ready to make love again.’
‘I love you.’
‘I love you, angel. Dolly is going to put the boys to bed. After we’ve kissed them good night, why don’t we have a quiet meal up here? Just on our own?’
‘I’d like that.’
The quiet meal did not happen. Tristan turned up to discuss a problem, which quickly led to trouble.
Chapter Thirteen
Why don’t you ask Jonny to help you do that, Tris?’ Winifred crept into the spacious library-cum-study which Tristan had taken over as his own private space. Panelled in highly polished mahogany it was the usual sort of domain for relaxing, reading and working in. He was unpacking the last trunk of his belongings sent on from the Isle of Man.
Tidy even before his regimental training, he pressed out a crumpled sheet of newspaper used as wrapping, and smiled at her. ‘I should have done this ages ago, quite forgot what interesting little gems I had in here. See these?’ He held up a pair of tall metal vases. ‘Any idea what they’re made from? Artillery shell cases. The raised floral and leaf design was formed by hammering round it. Done by Belgian soldiers, these particular vases. I’ve got quite a collection of trench art, bought many a piece off other chaps, mostly from the ranks, when word got round I had a fascination for it. Ex-soldiers have approached me to buy from them. Sadly, many needed the money. I thought I’d display it all in here.’
Winifred took one of the weighty vases from him to study it by a bay window, where it glinted in the sunlight. ‘It’s beautiful, but also rather grim, don’t you think? I understand though why people should want such a souvenir, or as I should say, a memorial.’
‘It gave the men something to do to take their mind off the horrors. I’ve got a brooch of Art Nouveau design painted on cloth somewhere. You must have it, darling. Wear it in tribute on Armistice Day. And there’s some Ypres lace too, it’s beautifully made.’
‘Thank you, darling. It’s all very fascinating, and don’t think I’m not interested, but what about Jonny?’
A shadow crossed Tristan’s thin face, making the tan from his constantly being outdoors, helping the craftsmen with the repairs, appear darker. ‘He’d be spellbound by the whole thing if it wasn’t mine, Winnie. You know how things stand between us. I only made things worse by running to Alec yesterday.’
‘You were asking Alec for his advice. I can’t understand why he became so upset. Until this, I didn’t realize just how unreasonable he can be. Poor Emilia. But what are you going to do about Jonny? We can’t go on like this.’
‘Whatever I do isn’t going to be right for someone.’
Tristan drifted back to the day before. Having set out for Ford Farm in a furious mood he had arrived disturbed and offended by his son’s latest misdemeanour.
‘You can see what a fix the little beggar’s put me in,’ he had explained to Alec, who had come downstairs to him, in the den. ‘Jonny sulks and is rude at every opportunity to Winnie, Vera Rose and the maids. He swears and has been disruptive at school. The final straw was a cruel practical joke he played on the newspaper delivery boy with a length of rope. The boy was sent clean over the handlebars of his bicycle and he was damned lucky not to have been seriously hurt. I’d confined Jonny to the house for a week. After lunch today he went up to the attic where he actually lit a cigarette and managed to set fire to an old couch. In fact, it was in perfect condition, only up there because it didn’t fit in with some new decor a few years ago. Well, it’s Winnie’s house, he could have burned it down, and all this is making me feel like an intruder in my new home. Clearly, I’ve got to punish him severely for his misdeeds, so that’s why I’m here, to tell you I’ve forbidden him to stay at the farm during the summer holiday.’
‘What? You’ve done what?’ Suddenly Alec, who had listened grimly from the start, was shouting as loudly as his voice would rise. ‘For goodness sake! I’ve lost a child, yet you see fit to come and subject me to a lot of self-pitying complaints about a boy’s natural behavio
ur. Yes, natural. Hasn’t it occurred to you that Jonny’s only trying to get attention because he feels it’s he who’s an intruder in the house? You’re the one who ripped him up from his roots. Show him some understanding, for heaven’s sake. You had no right to say Jonny couldn’t come here, you’ll also be punishing Will and Tom. Have you forgotten they’ve not long lost their sister? One minute she was here, the next she was gone. Just like Jonny. They miss him. I miss him. Or are you too bloody damn selfish to realize that?’
Tristan had backed away from his elder brother as if blown off course by the fury in his breath. He had shaken his head, unable to articulate the answers and justifications that had been forming inside his head throughout the vicious tirade.
Alarmed by Alec’s bawling, Emilia had pulled on her dressing gown and come down to them. ‘Alec, why on earth are you in such a rage?’ Tristan could see she was feverish, holding her head, which was probably spinning, as she went to where Alec stood, red-faced and fuming beside the fireplace.
‘Go back to bed, Emilia. This need not concern you.’
‘Em,’ Tristan had appealed to her. ‘I’m sorry to have come like this while you’re unwell.’
‘What’s going on?’ she had demanded. ‘Alec? Tris? Tell me.’
Alec had ignored her and stabbed a stiff finger at Tristan. ‘I never had any trouble with Jonny. Never! If you can’t cope with him then it would be better if he came back here to live, for good.’
‘Alec, that’s a terrible thing to say,’ Emilia had shouted at him, clearly getting angry herself. ‘I don’t know what Jonny’s done, but Tris has got the right to be concerned about him. Now apologize.’
‘He’s planning to keep Jonny away from me.’ Alec had glared at her, then at Tristan. ‘We’re close, very close, as close as…’
‘Father and son?’ Tristan suggested, past a painful throat.
‘Well, we’re close. That’s all I’m saying.’
Then Emilia had trembled and staggered as if about to faint, and Alec had carried her up to their room, leaving Tristan stranded alone.
‘It was terrible, Winnie. Alec nearly crushed my soul. I can understand now why Ben felt the need to go off suddenly and why he hasn’t been in touch.’ Bringing a sigh from all the way up his body, he joined Winifred by the window. Gazed out to sea where he usually found inspiration and balm. ‘What am I to do about my son? The son I hardly know after so many years absence in his young life? I don’t want to allow him to go to the farm after what happened there, that’s for sure, but if I don’t, there might be some nasty consequences. Jonny’s threatened as much. He says he hates me over the ban. He says I’m shiftless and useless because I haven’t decided what to do yet with the rest of my life. He wouldn’t listen when I tried to explain that I wanted us all to settle as a family first. Truth is, I simply don’t know what to do about him. I had easier decisions to make in the war.’
Winnie put the vases down on the windowsill and looked up at the gaunt and worried face of the husband she had grown quickly to love.
He saw the way she was twisting her lips and he rested his hand on her shoulder in the caring, intimate way that, unknown to him, she loved. ‘Is there something else? Don’t be afraid to tell me, darling.’
She lowered her face and rubbed it against his fingers. ‘I’m sorry, Tris, but I’m afraid we may have another problem. You see, I’m pregnant.’
‘What?’ He let out an enormous puff of surprise. ‘How did that happen? Well, I know how it happened, but a baby wasn’t really on the cards, was it? A baby! But that’s… that’s brilliant, isn’t it? You don’t mind, do you? There’ll be quite a few years between it and Vera Rose.’
She wrapped her arms round Tristan and reached up to kiss his lips. ‘I’m delighted. It’s what I’ve been secretly hoping for once I knew our marriage was working, and it is, Tris, it’s working very well. We’ll have to keep it to ourselves for a while, for poor Emilia’s sake. She’ll be glad for us, but a few more weeks between little Jenna’s passing over would help before we break the news.’
‘Yes, of course.’
Tristan was suddenly staring at the shell-case vases. ‘I think I’ve got what could be a good idea. Where’s Jonny now? It might just work…’
Chapter Fourteen
Ben set out on the journey he had been making daily for the last three weeks. To a silent city of the dead.
From a small, friendly hotel in Ypres, he set himself on the Menin Road and then a north-east course to Passchendaele, marching on strong, determined legs over ground that was flat in places and ridged in others. Over land that just a few short years ago had been battlefields. There was a church-silence now where once artillery and aircraft shells had screamed in destruction and thousands of young men had been killed instantly or died of wounds and diseases.
Nearly all the land and surrounding forests had been blasted into mires of mud, mud deep enough for men to drown in. How terrible to drown in mud. It was land left scarred and sacred for ever, once barely supporting miles and miles of trenches, some only yards from enemy lines, where men, living, breathing souls, husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, had huddled, cold, lonely and frightened, part of them still a child inside, wanting only to go home. Now the land was mercifully retrieved as roads or farmland, or honoured as military cemeteries. Several cemeteries. And there were the countless poor wretched souls who had been buried by shell blasts and would lie in their friendless secret places for ever.
He had lingered in the few remaining trenches and in the blasted-out woods, some well off the beaten track, and in German pillboxes, the most solid of the unchanged features, until he’d got a feel of the pride and anguish and suffering. He had also experienced some fearsome vibrations from the past and chillingly felt and smelled the lingering aura and stench of death. Desolate and disturbed, he had acknowledged he would never be able to comprehend how it must have actually felt to endure those dreadful deprivations and the formidable, terrifying battle conditions.
So much loss. So much suffering. And now with the Allies failing to agree on a moratorium on Germany’s war reparations, and France and Belgium occupying the Ruhr and its coalfields, leading to more hatred and violence, and the German mark in desperate decline, and a vociferous little individual named Adolf Hitler, the leader of the small but extreme anti-Semitic Nationalist Party, stirring up more unrest, Ben wondered about the possibility of the world being threatened from the same quarter again.
It was hot and sunny, the sort of weather when it was wonderful to roll up shirtsleeves and leave neck buttons open and to amble along, but it was inappropriate here. He was wearing a dark suit and black tie and stopped every half mile to shake the dust off his trouser hems. As on every other day he was keeping a distance from the road to avoid travellers on the same quest, in horse-drawn or motorized vehicles, some on organized tours run by war veterans. All were here to remember their beloved dead and see their last resting place.
The road was busy. With the number of dead it was inevitable there would be a large number of pilgrims. The Ypres Salient was the most visited place on the Western Front, circled as it was by vast cemeteries, and nearly every visitor ended up at Passchendaele, the most poignant and the most terrible and the most important battlefield of the Great War.
An hour and a half later Ben arrived at Tyne Cot Cemetery, the largest of the British cemeteries, site of a former battlefield. Overheated and perspiring, he used his handkerchief to mop his brow, then to wipe the dust off his shoes, bringing them up to a military polish. Then he was moving through the forest of gravestones, rows upon rows of them, neat rows of regulation oblong memorial stones, repeating a trail he had left his footprints on many times before.
He passed black-clad, sorrowing mothers and wives, some with children of an age too young to have been born before their fathers were killed. There were elderly stooped fathers; sisters; brothers; cousins; old comrades; and guides. When he reached his holy grail, his particular lozenge-
shaped white marker, he took up guard there.
‘Here I am again, Billy.’
There he stayed. And stayed.
Occasionally other mourners skirted round him, sympathetically allowing him his veneration. A guide pointed him out to a small family group and whispered, ‘That’s him.’ Ben had no idea people were moving on with eyes filled with tears for him. That he had acquired the title in Ypres as the ‘saddest pilgrim’.
Sometimes he continued his one-sided conversation aloud. Other times he spoke in his thoughts. And he listened. The listening was important. And he was receiving the voice of the six-years-dead Corporal William Rowse, 14th Infantry Battalion, more clearly each day. Billy – Emilia’s brother, who had been just an ordinary bloke, cheerful, uncomplicated, honest, inoffensive and helpful. Billy – in death somehow putting him right.
Time passed. Those paying homage left and were replaced by others and others still. Ben stayed.
A woman crept close to him. He did not see her. Did not twitch a muscle or blink an eye. It was as if he had turned to stone. Every bit a statue like those being erected, in ever-increasing intervals in this sad and blessed region, in memory of the ‘glorious dead’.
She watched. She waited. She gained nothing from him, except the occasional sight of his lips moving in silent speech or prayer. It was true what she had heard about him. He was young and immensely good-looking, war-wounded in one eye, and so full of melancholy one instinctively wanted to reach out and comfort him. Mothers were said to long to take him home to replace beloved lost sons.
She must not disturb him. It was time to leave him to whatever it was that plagued him so much.
The sudden shift of her going caught his eye. Ben looked up. Stared at the neat, sparely shaped female in a plain black suit and a small hat; a little black tasselled bag was hanging from a drawstring over her gloved wrist. He grimaced to ease his stiff facial muscles.
‘Oh, dear, I’m so sorry. I never meant to intrude. Please forgive me.’
