The Memory of Lost Senses

by Judith Kinghorn

  “It’s a novel then?” said Sylvia.

  “Yes, as I said on the telephone, it’s loosely based on Cora’s life and, I hasten to add, not quite finished. But I’d value your opinion . . . She had such a remarkable life, inspiring, I think.”

  “Yes, it was certainly that,” Sylvia conceded.

  “I’d appreciate your opinion . . . thought you might take a look, point out any obvious mistakes . . . and I wondered if you might be prepared to elucidate on a few other matters . . . and not necessarily for the book.”

  “Oh?”

  “The truth is, I’m still rather confused about Cora’s marriage to Edward. Why she kept it a secret for so long, and why she married a man so very much older than she was. He was an old man and she still quite young, not that much older than me when she married him. I know it can’t have been a . . . a proper marriage, a physical relationship, nor even for the company, the companionship of a husband, because they never lived together. I presumed it was for some sort of security, but then . . .” She paused.

  “Then?”

  “Then, more recently, I’ve been pondering her relationship with George. You see, I’m aware that she knew him long before she married Edward, and though she was always rather guarded about their friendship, later, when she was . . . confused, she spoke of him so much. It was always George this, George that. She very rarely mentioned Edward, or Jack, or Antonin.” She paused again, scrutinizing Sylvia. “I realize now that they were closer than I had at first thought, that she may . . . well, may perhaps have been in love with George—and not his father?”

  She said this as a question, but Sylvia offered no reply. And she quickly went on. “Of course, I may be wrong, but even so, it must have been queer to George for his friend, one of his contemporaries, suddenly at that late stage to become his stepmother.”

  Sylvia smiled. “Oh, I don’t suppose George ever viewed Cora as a mother, even a stepmother. But you are correct, they were close, very close friends, and for many years.”

  “You were there, at the wedding? You knew them both, George and Edward?”

  Sylvia nodded. “Yes, I was there. I knew them both.”

  “And you never detected anything . . . between Cora and George?”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  In the taxicab, en route to the Café Royal, Cecily wondered if she had misinterpreted Sylvia’s reaction to her novel, which had been odd to say the least. She had forgotten about Sylvia’s obsessive nature, that all-consuming love she had for Cora—anything and everything to do with Cora. She had appeared surprised when Cecily mentioned and then produced the manuscript, despite the fact that they had spoken about it on the telephone, for hadn’t Sylvia said then, Oh how lovely, I’m so pleased?

  But Sylvia seemed to think she had some divine right over Cora’s life, as though she owned the copyright to it, all of it. As though only she knew the truth. And oh, how she guarded it! When she said, “I’ll try and take a look at it, but I am actually rather busy,” Cecily could have laughed, and almost had. For what was there for Sylvia to be busy with, there at the Windsor? What was there for her to do?

  She lit a cigarette. The traffic on Oxford Street had ground to a halt and she stared at the murky shapes waiting in queues to be transported home. But she saw none of them. The photograph, reminiscences, and the memory of that summer had stirred her, taken her back. Back to a time when everything shone, back to a time when even the prospect of war had not been enough to dampen hopes and dreams . . .

  She had been home for a day when Rosetta mentioned his name, told her that Jack Staunton was in Bramley, at Temple Hill. “Don’t suppose her ladyship’s too happy about him going off up in them airplanes neither.”

  “Airplanes?”

  “Well, yes, he’s learning to fly. Been having lessons over at Farnborough. You ask your mother if you don’t believe me.”

  So she had asked her mother. “Is it true that Jack Staunton’s back and that he’s learning to fly?”

  “Yes, it’s true. Though for the life of me I can’t understand why he’s got himself caught up in that nonsense.”

  “I can,” Cecily said, watching her mother, bent over the sewing machine. “Do you know how long he’s home for?”

  Her mother didn’t look up. “He’s been to call a few times, inquired after you, asked where you were,” she said, fiddling with the fabric under the needle as she spoke.

  Cecily sat down in the chair opposite her mother. “But how long is he here for?”

  Madeline glanced over her spectacles at her daughter. “I’m not sure, he didn’t say. But I told him you’d been in Paris for almost a year. He couldn’t believe it. Yes, I said, she’s never going to settle in Bramley, not now. But I told him that due to the situation you’d come home and were living in London. Very wise, he said, very wise. And Walter, too, is keen to see you. You know he adores you, would marry you in a heartbeat, and yet you keep him hanging on . . .” She looked away, shook her head. “It’s cruel, I think. Really, I do.”

  Cecily rose from her chair, walked to the window. Daylight was fading, the tops of the trees golden in the twilight. “I can’t marry Walter. I’ve told you before, I don’t love him in that way.”

  “In that way?” her mother repeated and then laughed. “My dearest girl, do you really think all of life is about being in love? It’s about making the best of what we have, and being gracious—and thankful—in our acceptance of that.”

  Cecily closed her eyes, didn’t answer for a moment, and knew full well that she should not answer. She knew that she should leave it at that. But she couldn’t. She turned to her mother. “No. You’re wrong. It’s not about acceptance, Mother. It’s about creating the life you wish for . . . dream of. Creating a better world, a better place in which to live. Otherwise, what is our life about? What is our legacy?”

  “My legacy is you,” Madeline replied quickly. “You and Ethne.”

  Cecily sighed. “The world is changing, Mother, and even if there is a war, it will continue to change, for better or worse. We can’t stand still, we can’t stop progress.”

  “Progress? Your generation is too preoccupied with progress. Is it not enough to have a life and someone to love?”

  Cecily didn’t answer. Yes, she thought, of course it is. It’s the most important thing, surely, to have someone to love, to be loved.

  “I’m surprised he hasn’t called today,” her mother went on. “Jack Staunton, I mean. I told him you’d be home Saturday. In fact, I was surprised he wasn’t at church this morning. Of course, she never goes . . .”

  Jack Staunton. Each mention of the name caused a flutter.

  “Oh well,” Cecily said, “we probably have nothing in common now. He was always . . . rather arrogant, I think.”

  “Jack? No, he’s not arrogant, dear, quite the opposite. And, considering everything”—Madeline paused, looked across the room to the empty hearth—“considering everything, it’s really very encouraging.”

  She had wondered what her mother meant by “encouraging,” but chose not to ask. “Poor Walter,” her mother began again, “seems to work all the hours God sends.”

  “I can imagine,” said Cecily, turning away, staring out through the open window in the direction of Temple Hill. “I wrote to him, you know. When Mr. Gamben died, I wrote separate letters to each of them . . . How is Annie?”

  “As happy as the day is long.”

  Cecily smiled. “All she ever wanted was to get married and have a family.”

  “Well, it’s enough for some of us. And Luke’s a good husband to her. He loves her and he loves that baby.”

  “I’m happy for her.”

  She was looking forward to seeing Annie again, but they had lost the place with each other during the course of the past two years. And Walter, dear Walter, he had almost proposed to her the night before she lef
t for Paris—would have done so had she not stopped him. And was it not in fact Jack Staunton’s words she had borrowed to deter Walter, when she told him that she had no wish to be tied down, no desire to be married for at least another five years?

  Jack. Almost three years had passed since she had stood and kissed him at the top of that hill. Almost three years since she had felt her heart split in two and thought she’d never, ever recover. Almost three years . . .

  After he left she had wondered if he would write, had longed for him to, just to see her name in his hand. And she had waited. But nothing came, not even a postcard. Then, early the following year, having managed to persuade her mother to allow her some of the money her father had left to her, she had gone traveling with Aunt Kitty and cousin Erica. They had been away for six months, had visited Paris, the Riviera, Rome, Naples, Florence, Geneva, the Rhineland, and almost every place with a church or cathedral in between. By the time she returned home, Jack had been and gone. He had stayed at Temple Hill for only a few weeks that summer, due to his own somewhat hectic itinerary. Then another Christmas came and went without any sign of him. He was skiing, Cora had said. And that Easter, “away with friends . . . on the Riviera.” Their paths, it seemed, were destined not to cross, and Cecily—by then determined that they should not cross—enrolled on a secretarial course in London (with French as an extra). By winter she had returned to Paris, sharing what she described to her mother as a shoebox off the Champs-Elysées with a girl from her course.

  “Almost three years,” she said out loud in the taxi.

  “Almost three years,” she murmured, standing by the window in her mother’s workroom.

  “Mm? What’s that, dear?”

  “Oh nothing. I think I’ll take some air, have a walk in the garden.”

  As she moved toward the doorway, she said, “Oh, and how is Cora?”

  “I’m not entirely sure. No one ever sees her but Mrs. Fox seems to think she’s gone a little doolally.”

  Cecily stopped. “Doolally?”

  “Mm. Communing with the dead, she said.”

  “And how does she know?”

  “Edith Davey, the housekeeper up at Temple Hill, is very friendly with the cook at the rectory. They speak.”

  “You mean they gossip,” Cecily said and moved on.

  Outside, the air was soft, fragrant with the scent of honeysuckle and jasmine. It felt good to be back there, home, out upon that hillside once more. And yet so much of the place reminded her of him. But how could that be? How could the place she had lived for so long be infused with the presence of someone who had only been there, in her life, for a matter of weeks? How could he do that to a place and to her?

  It made her angry and perplexed her. I have done it, she thought, sitting down upon the warm stone of the steps to the lily pond; I have hung on, dragging a romantic notion forward, from here to Europe and back again, and then to Paris and London. I have done it to myself. So, he called and inquired after me, she mused. It means nothing . . . nothing. He has nothing better to do with his time here . . . is most likely awful now . . . like those graduates in London who say, “Bramley? Is that a new college?” and then laugh. Well, if he comes, if he were to appear now, I shall be indifferent, she thought. Yes, I am indifferent . . .

  She had been sitting on the steps for no more than five minutes when she heard the voice. “Hello, stranger. Your mother said you were out here.”

  “Reckon we’d be better cutting down Piccadilly,” the cabdriver said, interrupting.

  “I’m in no rush,” Cecily replied.

  She was only thirty minutes late, only nine years behind, and she wasn’t ready to step back into now. Not yet. She wanted to remember, needed to savor those weeks, those few weeks, not quite amounting to months, that they had had together before the war, before he said, “I’ll be back soon.”

  They had picked up where they left off. Resuming what was unconcluded with a new sense of urgency and without any questions. Resuming a courtship begun three years before. Those who did not know might have used the word whirlwind. Because within weeks Jack had asked her to marry him, at the top of the hill—the place they had first kissed. And within a heartbeat she had said yes.

  But he was like that, she thought now. He knew what he wanted and went after it, as though aware of the limitation on time. As though he knew.

  They married four days after the declaration of war, at Saint Luke’s in Bramley, and afterward Cora hosted a small reception in the garden at Temple Hill. The week after their return from honeymoon—five days in Brighton—Jack signed up. Like most others he enlisted for a “temporary commission for the period of the war.” He was assigned to the Rifle Brigade. But of course it was not where he wanted to be. Jack wanted to be in the air. And he was one of a few who had already taken a turn up in the sky.

  Jack got his wish early the following year. After attending a military school in Birmingham and gaining his flying certificate, he was attached to the Royal Flying Corps’ Number One Squadron, and almost immediately deployed to the war zone, piloting biplanes over the fields of France and Flanders on reconnaissance missions. He was happy to be doing his duty and thrilled to be flying.

  Cecily lived in fear and dread. She never knew for sure when her husband was flying, or where he was, would only find out about his movements after the event, in the form of a letter, a telegram or, occasionally, a phone call. Shortly after their marriage she had had a telephone installed at their cottage. “For emergencies only,” she had said, only to regret it later. Because the very last thing she wished for was any emergency call. She wanted to hear from him, Jack; wanted to hear his voice and know only that he was safe, alive.

  Whenever he managed to secure leave, he came home to Cecily at their rented cottage on the northwest fringe of Bramley—exhausted. He was understandably somber, less ebullient. But by then everything and everyone was changing. Young, fit and able-bodied men had disappeared from the village, and it was left to the women to do the jobs the men had previously done. Cora’s servants had been halved in number, and then halved again, as her kitchen and parlor maids joined the war effort, and left for farm or factory work. Her precious garden had been dug up, turned over to produce vegetables and accommodate livestock. She was left with Mrs. Davey, and a daily, and her gardener, Mr. Cordery, who was too old to enlist.

  Cecily followed events in the newspaper; she read of the losses to the British Fleet and to the army, and then, with even greater horror, of the losses to the Royal Flying Corps. She became used to the distant sound of air raids and bombs dropped by German zeppelins along the coast. And Cora told her it was different to any of the wars she had known before. It was a modern war, she said, voracious in its appetite for young souls, relentless in its cruelty.

  On Jack’s last leave, Cecily savored each second of each minute, barely sleeping so that she could watch him while he slept, take all of him in. And that was all he did, sleep, for three whole days. But on his final day they had gone back to Brighton, with Cora.

  The place had been crowded with army personnel and couples unashamedly walking hand in hand; young women in their Sunday best clinging on to their sweethearts; parents walking proudly alongside their uniformed sons—all of them enjoying those precious hours before the inevitable “Adieu” and that grim journey back across the Channel. Under the strange and intense winter sun that day, the young men in uniform appeared to Cecily almost iridescent. They were there and alive, but not really there; destined for glory, destined for death, they were already going, already gone, already ghosts.

  And there were the others, too, the walking wounded and injured, in mud-caked tattered uniforms, staggering on crutches, sitting along the promenade in bath chairs; some missing limbs, others disfigured or badly burned. Jack had made a point of stopping to speak to them, shaking hands, slapping backs, making jokes. They all did that, Cecily noticed. As
though they had been at some macabre, nightmare party and could laugh about it now, momentarily, before reentering that doorway, and the cacophony of the theater.

  Cora had seen injured soldiers many times before, she said, after the Crimea, as first deserters and then disoriented soldiers slowly made their way home to England; and on the streets of Rome, after Garibaldi marched on the city. She told Cecily that she thought her sensibilities had long ago been anesthetized to life’s tragedies and war’s casualties, but even she struggled with the sights that day.

  They had sat hand in hand opposite Cora on the train journey back to Linford. And from time to time Jack lifted her hand to his lips and held it there, eyes closed, as Cora chattered on. But there had been signs, even then, of Cora’s confusion and muddled memory; early signs, which went unnoticed.

  “Did we have luncheon today?” she had asked.

  And they both laughed, thought she was ragging them. Jack said, “Yes, and you said it was daylight robbery. Three shillings, remember?”

  She shook her head.

  “Whitstable oysters, consommé, turbot Marguery, fillet of beef and peach cardinal. A feast!” Jack said.

  She smiled. “Ah yes, of course.”

  Later, alone in the bedroom of their cottage, they had lain on the bed staring at each other. He said, “Don’t cry, please. I’ll be back soon, a few weeks . . .”

  “Promise me, promise me hand on heart you’ll come back . . . promise me you shan’t let yourself get killed?”

  He held his hand to his heart. “I promise.”

  “And you’ll never ever forget that promise, will you?”

  “Never.”

  Against the odds, Jack had survived almost two years in the Royal Flying Corps, and had been promoted from Flying Officer to Lieutenant. But he had been in Number One Squadron, deployed on reconnaissance duties and not fighting. When he telephoned Cecily two days after returning to duty to tell her that he was to be promoted to Captain and that the squadron was to become a dedicated fighter squadron, she said nothing. She closed her eyes and knew: knew immediately that aerial combat would be infinitely more dangerous than reconnaissance. But he seemed oblivious to any peril, and spoke only of his new airplane, a Nieuport 17, and its powerful engine and large wings.