by Lorna Gray
‘House? What house?’ Phyllis’s head snapped round.
The Colonel replied genially, ‘Mrs Abbey’s old house. He bought it in the spring. Won’t live in it, though. Amazing that he could afford it at all. He’s saved every penny he could since he was a boy working in the fields, more when he was fighting and now he’s applied that same determination to the purchase of a property that must have paid excellent rent. But this one’s not quite right for him and as it turns out he’s got to sell up again now because he needs the money to buy his parents’ cottage when we go. He takes tremendous care of them, you know. They didn’t even know he owned a house.’
Phyllis hadn’t known either. I was sure of it. And Richard must have made the mistake of seeming like he might speak again at the same time that my face must have been mirroring a suspicion of Phyllis’s feelings because suddenly the Colonel was using me as a distraction and growling, ‘What’s the matter? Why are you looking like that?’
He was glaring at me and then he was blustering in a bullying tone, ‘You’ve seen the man. You’ve had a chance to compare. Are you gossips forever going to tar Danny’s achievements with that slur everyone casts against his mother just because she was the pretty young widow who worked alongside Mrs Cooke in this house and I’ve done the best I can for the woman by leaning on a few old army friends for the sake of her boy? An introduction from me got the boy enlisted into a role that used his real skills and trained them, too. And because I cared enough to do it, are you now carefully examining the colour of his hair, his build, the colour of his eyes and comparing them to mine? Are you? He is not my child. His father was a belligerent fool who died falling off a hay wain and I had a wife and two sons, and two sons only, and now—’
I gaped. It was too close to the slur I’d lately been forming about Mrs Abbey’s son and I knew, too, how the Colonel’s last sentence had been supposed to finish. He meant that his wife and child were dead. And it flustered him, mainly because he knew it carried a great weight and it might have seemed as if he meant to tip us all into outpourings of sympathy. He stumbled and the moment might have passed into deeper confusion except that Richard remarked calmly, ‘Emily isn’t remotely insinuating that, sir. Knowing her, she won’t have even heard that particular rumour until just this moment.’
And the mildness of his intervention seemed to restore the Colonel and, unexpectedly, the old man was settling into wafting a hand while saying, ‘All right, all right. You don’t need to come over all courteous to me, boy. The girl knows I didn’t mean it.’
There was fondness there, beneath the bombast. And then Phyllis was adding to the salvation by remarking for the benefit of both men, but perhaps not for mine, ‘You were in London during the war, I believe, Colonel, in an advisory role? My cousin once described the sound made by wave after wave of our planes as they passed overhead there as terrific. But I think she meant it was terrific in the truest sense of the word, as in full of terror.’
This was rapidly turning into the oddest evening of my life. She naturally had an aversion to any more revelations about Danny and she thought this was the surest way of ensuring it. Whereas I was burning the dinner.
I wrestled with the oven and muttered, ‘I wasn’t in London when I was describing that. Mother and I were staying with my aunt in Norfolk.’ I had a crushing suspicion that Richard would be piecing together the details to guess that this was yet another reference to the era in which I’d learnt to drive a Sunbeam.
‘Brave heroes those RAF boys, the lot of them,’ the Colonel murmured into his glass.
‘Emily would tell you that it wasn’t heroic,’ countered Phyllis, woodenly ignoring my second desperate plea around her name. She was looking heated, almost feverish after seeing Danny passing this time along the length of the tithe barn and still not coming in. He’d walked uphill towards the lane and out of sight and I sympathised but I couldn’t stop her. Phyllis was adding cheerfully, ‘She’d tell you that it was a terrifying thing to be lying there each night counting out the planes one by one and hoping against hope that the same number would count back in again. She’d call it barbaric, desperate and even essential, but never heroic. My cousin,’ she added as a confidential aside to the Colonel, ‘believes those who didn’t have to fight are all experiencing a legacy of secondary guilt. She’ll tell you that the sheer weight of accepting that people acted as heroes to save her life and the lives of helpless people like her means having to shoulder the responsibility of deserving the generosity that inspired it. The pressure to be perfect exacts a toll upon the soul and she can’t bear it. So instead she denies the lot.’
‘You were young,’ the Colonel observed kindly to me. ‘It must have been very frightening.’
I was horribly conscious of Richard standing somewhere near me. I was also thinking that I really shouldn’t have written Phyllis so many letters if she was going to persist in quoting from them.
‘That’s not what I meant at all,’ I said rather more heatedly than I intended. ‘My cousin is paraphrasing, and badly at that. I believe what I said was that I was witness daily to the sheer hunger for German death; heavens, I probably shared it because losing was too terrific – there’s that word again – to contemplate. A short time ago I was waving young men off into the skies, knowing that they were frightened out of their wits, but that they would do it anyway. And knowing that they would bring death to people I’d never even met, who were almost certainly doing the exact same thing on the other side. But, all the same, I was wishing our men to be successful because that meant they came home again. I knew that what they were doing was a gift. I’m fully ready to call anyone you like a hero. But the term itself isn’t healthy. What we took from them was alien and cruel and any goodness that came out of the war came from hate. There’s my piece of your guilt, Phyllis. It’s the strain of being made to feel involuntary gratitude for a gift so horrific I can’t even comprehend the sacrifice. It’s the responsibility of having to grow up being the helpless figure these people were laying down their lives to protect and yet never having the power to refuse the part or even ease the debt just a little. And it’s the unforgivable shame of knowing that all the time they were fighting I’d already lost sight of my basic humanity to such an extent that I too was wishing a stranger’s family dead for no better reason than that she and her German children stood between me and some hazy idea of kinship. I betrayed everyone.’
Silence.
It was suddenly hard to catch my breath. My voice had risen at the last. I hadn’t meant to say any of that. I’d only meant to suppress this line that was leading inexorably back to mentions of the supposed injury to my heart caused by some foolish young airman. I should have left well alone. As I’d said, Richard’s secrets weren’t anything to worry me. Now this one vital secret of my own was unleashed and rattling about in this room with everyone else’s peculiar agitation – with Phyllis’s and the Colonel’s, I mean – and still it was impossible to catch my breath. My hand quivered when I felt the merest whisper of contact as Richard put out his fingers to briefly touch mine. It drew my eyes and I focused with slightly desperate exasperation for the few seconds of contact before his hand returned to his side again and at last my lungs steadied a little. There had been an answer in that speech of mine to the observation he’d made this morning about my loss of faith in humanity; here was the explanation for my absolute refusal to accept any more grand gestures. This was why I had begged him not to turn me into another one of his responsibilities. I didn’t know if he’d noticed before that the aversion was in reference to men like him who’d given their soul for people like me. My powerlessness during the war to either accept or deny their sacrifice had been unbearable. Now the war was over, the decision to depend on another person had to be mine. It had to be, otherwise I would never be able to keep any hope for a more equal future at all.
This guilt was the true force behind that sense I had of always being in the wrong. He hadn’t understood before that the b
lame was something I’d inflicted upon myself. It was the sort of thing that didn’t normally form into words, and probably for good reason. Through that brief, private touch to my hand, Richard had been making it clear that he certainly didn’t think it warranted being wrenched out of a person to serve as an idle distraction like this. Any second now, the Colonel was going to finish the job and ask me quite seriously if I had been ‘Blitzed’.
But he didn’t. After an excruciatingly intense moment, the old man laughed. And I mean to say, he really laughed. His head fell back with a roar and sometime afterwards he had to wipe away a tear. Still snatching for breath, he lifted his head once more and managed to gasp out, ‘Did you hear that, Richard? Your young friend has concluded, after due consideration, that war is unhealthy.’
The Colonel made his chair creak as he sagged in his seat. ‘Refreshing honesty,’ he said, fighting and failing to contain himself. ‘Summed it up in a nutshell. Put her finger right on it. I want to know what she thinks about famine.’
I hadn’t thought the Colonel had it in him to laugh like that. I didn’t believe his son had thought so either. Then Richard risked undoing it all by cutting straight through all the minutes of disguise by at last asking plainly, ‘Father, who was here earlier? What is it that you don’t want to tell me? Because someone was here. There are teacups all over the desk in the library and I know it can’t have been for Bertie Winstone because you’ve never willingly served him tea in your life if a good spirit happened to be near to hand.’
It was said boldly and delivered with a consideration that was inescapably wry. It had its effect. I had been certain that the answer would involve yet another mention of Mrs Abbey. But when the Colonel collected himself and brought his eyes to his son’s face, I thought Richard had been bracing himself to meet something else. Something more desperately personal, like this old man’s agonised shame whenever he felt the urge to shield his remaining son from any more injuries in the Langton name, and in the process achieved nothing but the drawing of further care from that son for himself.
In the event, however, the Colonel’s expression was somewhere on the edge of failure instead of consumed by it. Agonised, but clumsy, as though a difficulty dwelled here that was awkward rather than tragic. And perhaps a sense that it was further complicated by the presence of two guests. I watched the Colonel’s face as he shot a little glance at me and then confessed quite pathetically, ‘A man from one of the newspapers called by. I let him in. I’m sorry. He mentioned something about PC Rathbone and I didn’t guess what he was until we’d been all over the house. He was looking at the traces Mrs Cooke left behind and he seemed rather too interested in that old print of your mother’s that is hanging on the woman’s bedroom wall. I deduced he was sniffing out a new story about John’s ridiculous treasure hoard and I’m sorry.’
It was, unexpectedly, the first time I’d ever heard him mention John by name and in some ways it was wonderful, but still it was all wrong because instead of the usual pattern of the father seeming beaten down by a reference to the younger son’s death, this shamefaced confession seemed centred on the mention of the journalist. It seemed to me that here the Colonel was making an awkward demonstration of his idea of what constituted a father’s defence of his living son. It was less practised than Richard’s endless efforts to shield his father from the layer upon layer of grief that dwelt here. It was gingerly done. Gestures of parental concern did not come remotely naturally to the old man. But, above all, it told me that the Colonel believed very seriously that the distress of a newspaper story was a symptom of Richard’s history rather than his own.
As it was, it appeared that concern really wasn’t required here anyway. Richard drew breath, with relief, it seemed to me, and said with quite extraordinary affection, ‘Is that all? Heavens, Father, you had me expecting … I don’t know what. But this was bound to happen eventually, wasn’t it? And I find that these days the sort of stories the rags pick up don’t quite matter as much as they did.’
The Colonel was taken aback. ‘They don’t?’
‘No.’
‘Oh.’
Grey eyes widened upon his son’s face. They seemed to read something in Richard’s words that I couldn’t see before retreating to the empty glass as if he didn’t quite dare look anywhere else. Then he repeated himself on a stilted note of realisation and from the faintly impatient movement of Richard beside me, it was clear his father thought he had stumbled into proof of something else that was equally personal, although it wasn’t clear that the discovery was either expected or easily digestible. Or that Richard had necessarily intended to lay whatever it was quite so bare before his father like this.
‘Oh. Well, anyway,’ the Colonel declared with a flickering glance at me that made me flush without quite knowing why, before the old man suddenly returned to action as if he’d decided the safest course was to simply ignore the lot and take the reassurance as it was intended. He lurched bull-like onto a new path. ‘Anyway, Bertie came in at the end and set this fellow scampering onto a wholly different scent. Bertie made a point of declaring that his recollections of his assault are hazy at best. So now this newspaperman is going to have a fine old time making up nonsense about that story instead. Bertie told him that the first person he remembers seeing with any clarity that evening is our new young friend.’
The Colonel was beaming triumphantly. I stood there letting the dinner burn a little more, trying not to look at Richard, and thinking: I’d understood why Phyllis might have wanted to direct our conversation away from the endless talk about Danny and I believe I had guessed something about the Colonel’s frailties that had made war his safest topic. But I wished I could understand where everyone had got the idea that it was acceptable to keep using my name to divert attention from the more unpleasant things, when it could only end with Bertie Winstone telling a journalist a particularly silly thing like that.
Chapter 22
I was woken by the smell of burning again. My cousin and I were in John’s room since it was one of the few chambers that had a decent bed suitable for an invalid and enough space on the floor to make up a mattress of sorts for me. It had, believe it or not, been the Colonel’s suggestion. After the peculiarity of our pre-dinner conversation, Phyllis and the Colonel had enjoyed themselves immensely during the meal by arguing about the correct course for our nation’s behaviour to Greece and the miners’ strikes and other worthy issues. For me this had only served to prove that I’d been wildly naïve in ever imagining that I might tag along on Phyllis’s next trip. Her brand of splendid femininity and worldly cynicism was rather out of my league.
John’s room had an enormous Georgian linen cupboard that spanned the space between the bedroom door and the window. It towered in the gloom of night. It also gave off a faint smell as though something unpleasant had been left to dry in a corner in a way that even penetrated the pervading scent of mothballs. But all of it was overcome at about two o’clock in the morning when this eerie room became tinged with the odour of fire.
My mattress was practically beneath the heavy green curtains that screened the window anyway so it was easy enough for me to twist onto my knees behind them and peer out. The moon was a miniscule fingernail sinking behind distant trees. The garden terraces stood as dark bands beneath my window. They ran smoothly, line by line, downwards past the severe dark of the machine barn and the farmyard until they met the rougher blur of sheep pasture on the valley hillside below. The valley bottom was screened by the tall evergreen plantation, but I could make out the faint profiles of the rooftops from the settlement opposite. And far to the right, before the valley was obscured by the tall stand of trees that surrounded the steward’s ponds, a distant window light marked where Eddington must be. It was too steady and small to be a fire and was probably a small lamp set to act as a nightlight for the children. Apart from that there was nothing. Nothing but a faint haze in the valley bottom as if there would be a heavy dew in the morning, only ther
e couldn’t be because the ground had been dry for weeks.
On an impulse I eased myself to my feet and claimed my cousin’s long cream housecoat from the back of a chair. Its silken lines were a long way removed from the box-like housecoat worn by that sweeper of steps in Gloucester; this was on the scale of borrowing the floor-length sophistication of a London socialite and it showed how little Phyllis was really suited to the strange, dithering character she had assumed in her cottage.
I was stopped at the door by murmur so faint that it barely took the form of sound.
‘Emily? Is that you?’
I opened the door a fraction and slipped out, making no more sound myself than a rustle of skirts. His eyebrows rose a fraction as he took in my borrowed glamour, but he said nothing. The unbrushed hair and the fine-drawn face was me. The long line of the gallery stretched behind him, dimly lit by a distant oil lamp. He didn’t even bother to mention the smell of smoke.
He merely said softly, ‘Will you come?’
I nodded and slipped back into my room. He was more properly dressed than I was. He was wearing trousers and a woollen jumper and this time he really was braced for walking because the jumper was also dark. I wished it wasn’t. Firstly it suited him and it was distracting when I ought to be serious. And secondly, the idea of stealth gave the urgency of our errand a different edge of tension.
He was waiting for me at the head of the servants’ stairs when I re-emerged some five minutes later, clad once more in my rather more ordinary slacks and blouse. He collected a torch from a broom cupboard in the dark of the stairwell and it was as he reached down a thin navy gardening coat from a hook by the kitchen door that I realised it wasn’t actually so warm on this summer night that I shouldn’t have thought of bringing a jacket. As it was, the coat was for me anyway. He hung it around my shoulders, hesitated for a moment in the act of straightening the collar to explain in an undertone, ‘Your present outfit isn’t quite as blindingly bright as your previous elegant getup, but it wouldn’t hurt to at least have the power of running to ground, even if we don’t intend to use it.’
