‘You have to go and I have to go.’ She scrunched up her face, so she didn’t cry.
‘That’s a good look,’ Peter said.
‘Don’t,’ said Tess. ‘I—I’m trying not to.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I’m trying not to cry.’
‘Aw, sweetie,’ he said, and his voice was kind. He put his finger under her chin. She looked away from his eyes, at the chipboard door next to them. ‘Whatever. When you’re back home, just remember how it felt to be this way, to be this person. Remember. It’s too easy to forget that kinda stuff.’
Why are you going back there? She could still feel it all: the warm breeze in the room, the smell of the hotel, jasmine mixed with coffee and heat, most of all heat, the kind of warm terracotta-petrol-tarmac-y heat you never found in England, certainly not London, let alone Langford. The smells of Langford were wet grass, petrol, certainly, rain, a certain ‘farmyard smell’, as her mother used to put it, and something else…the smell of an English country town, whatever that was. Mustardy? Wet tweed? Cheap, horrible scented candles, the kind that were on sale everywhere?
Tess tore her mind back to the present. She wrapped her arms slowly around Peter’s neck.
‘I won’t forget,’ she said, and she raised herself up so she was on tiptoe. ‘I won’t forget. I will always remember you, darling.’
His hand slid over her hip, onto her bottom, and he pulled her towards him again, and for a few moments more she was lost in the deliciously familiar feeling of total happiness, of Prosecco and moonlight and sex. Then Peter opened the door, wheeling her bag towards the stairs, and she followed him. As she did, closing the door behind her, there was a soft click down the corridor and Tess looked up. There, in a creased shirt and jeans, his hair standing on end, was Adam. He had dark, almost black, shadows under his eyes, and he looked as though he’d got up in a hurry. There was no time to say anything—they had said too much already. She gave him a small smile.
‘I’m off, then.’
‘Of course,’ he said.
Peter was halfway down the stairs. ‘Hey, is that Adam? Bye, man. It was good to meet you.’
Adam leaned towards the staircase. ‘Bye, Peter. Good to meet you too. Tess, can I have a word?’
‘Sure,’ she said. She patted Peter’s shoulder, motioning for him to go ahead, and he took her bag downstairs. ‘What’s up?’ she said, opening her handbag to check her passport was there. She didn’t look at him, didn’t want him to see how upset she was.
‘She’s dead,’ Adam said briefly. Tess’s head snapped up.
‘Leonora?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The hospital just called. I’m on my way there now.’
‘What happened, do they know?’
‘She just—drifted away, they said.’ He scratched his head and closed his eyes briefly. Tess looked down at the waiting group, at Peter talking to Diana. ‘You should go,’ Adam said.
‘We can cancel—’
‘No, no,’ Adam said firmly. ‘Absolutely not. It wouldn’t make any sense.’
‘My God.’ Tess put her hand on his. Outside, the minibus hooted its horn impatiently. ‘I’m sorry. Adam—I don’t know what to say.’
‘It’s over,’ Adam said, nodding, not meeting her eyes, looking past her into the distance. ‘That’s all. We can go home now.’
It was only later that Tess would think how very sad it was that the end of anyone’s life should be greeted like this. Even Leonora Mortmain’s.
April 1943
Neither of them knew it was going to happen. She would look back and marvel that she could have woken that day with no idea of what lay ahead of her. That she could start the day as a—oh, as a child!—and end it in his arms, his hands clumsily stroking her hair, their slick bodies clinging to each other, exhilarated, exhausted.
The atmosphere was tense in the Hall that early April morning; it was tense throughout the town, throughout the country. They had been at war for three and a half years now; there were men and women from the town out in the Atlantic, at danger from U-boats, fighting in Tripoli and Tunisia, in Italy and somewhere in occupied France. And what lay between France and England? Nothing, except the Channel. And so they worked, and watched, and waited.
Leonora was tense, too. A spoon had vaulted out of her hand—she had watched it spinning, almost leisurely, through the air, crashing into the wooden dresser that stood in their breakfast room and breaking a vase. It was bad luck, it wasn’t her fault. Father’s dogs, Bonhote and Tugendhat (named after First World War generals), had started to scrap in the hallway, barking loudly and suddenly, and she had jumped.
‘You’re eighteen, Rara!’ her mother had said, trying not to raise her voice, her face contorted into an agony of suppressed anger. Her mother never shouted, no one did in Langford Hall. ‘Why are you so clumsy? You must be more careful!’
‘The dogs barked, Mother. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize they were so close—I jumped.’ She didn’t add, couldn’t add, that she hated dogs, always had. Their big slathering jaws, the way they didn’t care, thought it was fine to simply leap on one, whether one liked them or was terrified of them. Once, Tugendhat had pinned her up in the corridor—he was an Alsatian mix, an ugly brute—snarling and growling, and when Leonora had screamed, Sir Charles Mortmain had hit her on the hand with the ruler three times. For raising her voice.
Her mother was harassed to a point almost past sanity. ‘I do not care. You should be ashamed of yourself. Look at this mess. Your father will be extremely angry.’ Mama was leaning forward, shouting at her daughter now, the pent-up anger of the tension and the sudden spring heat releasing itself. Her face was red and shiny. A greasy tendril of hair flapped out from behind her ear.
‘I’m sorry, Mama,’ Leonora said, genuinely contrite in the face of her mother’s rage. ‘I didn’t mean to, but the dogs—’
She was going to say, ‘The dogs scared me,’ but she halted, not convinced this would be the answer her mother was looking for. Her parents had no sympathy for her fear of the dogs, her father in particular.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ her mother said, stifling a sob. ‘I’ll need to find Eleanor, to see if we can have this mended. Oh, Rara, just—just go away!’
Leonora did, without a backwards glance. She ran to the door, pulled it open, ran out into the sunshine without saying goodbye, her heart heavy, her teenage sense of outrage already melting away into guilt, and sorrow, and a resolve to bring something back for her mother. An ice cream? Some flowers? A book? Her eye wandered as she caught her breath, diving down the warren of sidestreets that was Langford’s medieval centre, and through a gap in the houses she suddenly caught a glimpse of fields, of the countryside beyond, a flash of enticing green. Spring was well under way, it was the first really warm day of the year. She shivered. She would slip quietly through the streets, out through the gap in the ancient city walls, down the stairs to the water meadows. An apple and a book, that was all she needed, she’d pick some flowers for her mother on the way back. She had a beautiful primrose-coloured hardback of Catullus’s poems in her pocket; Leonora was a romantic soul, though given scant opportunity to explore this at Langford Hall. And now she was free. She jumped excitedly in the air, scratching her bare arms. Everything was all right again, the memory of Mother’s face as she picked the coloured shards of china off the floor but a distant memory, with the extreme callousness of youth.
‘Hello there, Atalanta. What mischief are you up to now?’
She jumped, and turned around guiltily.
‘Philip! My goodness, you gave me a fright.’
‘Exactly.’ He smiled, and took her hand from her mouth. ‘If you weren’t up to something awful,’ he said, mock-slapping her fingers, ‘you wouldn’t be looking quite so guilty. What is it, eh?’
Philip Edwards was awfully annoying this year; so pompous. One year away from Langford at Cambridge, and he thought he was God’s gift to the universe. She snatched her hand back to her side, mortified at the blus
h she felt at the warmth of his touch. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I’m just escaping home, that’s all. Ma’s furious with me. I’ve been awful.’
‘I bet you have.’ There was laughter in his voice, but a note of sympathy too. She heard it. ‘I was just off for a walk,’ he said. ‘Got some reading to do.’
‘Oh, me too,’ she said airily. She patted her coat pocket.
‘What’s in there?’ he asked, leaning forwards.
She was instantly embarrassed, as if he had caught her in a lie, or exposed a secret part of herself. ‘Get off,’ she said, wriggling away, but he pulled the slim volume out of her pocket and held it above her head. He grinned.
‘Love poetry!’
‘It’s not,’ she said, though she was blushing. ‘All sorts.’
‘I know, I know, my little Atalanta,’ he said.
‘Don’t call me that,’ she said, though actually she liked it.
He jabbed a finger. ‘Look—Atalanta the swift-footed huntress, who rejected all men and wouldn’t get married until whoever it was dropped the golden apples and distracted her. Second poem.’
‘That’s not true!’ The stain on Leonora’s cheeks deepened; marriage, indeed any relations with the opposite sex, had never occurred to her, raised as she was in the oppressive atmosphere of the Mortmain home. Never—until recently.
‘Oh, come now,’ he said, slightly wolfishly. But then, seeing her embarrassment, he softened instantly. He patted her arm and she relaxed. ‘I was heading down to the water meadows. I wanted to see you, wanted to talk to you about something.’ He shifted on his feet. ‘Um—fancy coming with me?’ He looked down at her. He was so tall these days, and she felt so little; when had he grown so much, outstripped her, turned into this tall, broad-shouldered man? Where had the eight-year-old Philip who could fit into her pink silk party dress gone? Who was this stranger, almost a man, in front of her?
She was suddenly shy, which was ridiculous. ‘Of course,’ she said, drawing herself up to her full height. ‘I was intending to go that way, anyway.’
‘Really?’ He smiled. ‘We are of one mind, then.’
‘Absolutely,’ she said, and they set off together as the morning sun crept up and over the rooves of the town, flickering through the silent streets.
She shouldn’t have let him. But the truth is, she wanted to. Wanted to feel his arms around her, his body on top of her. They were close, always had been. She sometimes hugged her maid, Eleanor, the person to whom she was probably closest other than Philip. But no one else in young Leonora’s life hugged her, touched her, was physical with her, and so it was easy, really, to move to that stage, since he was the only one she had ever spontaneously thrown her arms around, tripped over and wrestled to the floor, kissed.
And so when they were lying side by side, on the rug he’d brought with him, in silence, listening to the wood pigeons coo dolefully in the trees at the edge of the park, feeling the blazing, lazing summer warmth steal over them, she did not move when he leaned over her, nor was she wholly surprised. Leonora Mortmain was an impeccably brought-up young woman. She would simply not have known how such things should be initiated. She only knew she was terrified for a second, and then completely happy, when he leaned up on one arm and stroked her shoulder, kissed her cheek.
His hair flopped into his face, shading his features as he hung over her.
‘Are you all right?’ he said, his hand stroking her leg. She could feel the warmth of his palm on her skin, through her thin cotton dress.
She wiggled a little, her hair fanning out behind her, and smiled up at him. ‘Of course I am. Are you?’
‘I am now, Rara.’ His fingers moved more slowly, he was staring down at her. ‘I missed you. It’s been a long term. Christmas seems like a lifetime ago.’
At Christmas, at a party, she had kissed him, or rather let him kiss her, in a dark corner of a house filled with old men and women, the people who had been left behind. It was just the two of them in the study, as music blared out from a wind-up gramophone in the drawing room. He had pressed up against her, his hands clutching the back of her head. She had enjoyed it, even though it should have felt wrong, this boy who was now a man, her oldest friend, doing these things to her.
The next day, he had met her, walking along the lane back to the Hall, on the way back home, and he had kissed her again, pushing her gently against the old oak that had stood for centuries at the crossroads. His body was warm against hers in the cold, his tongue in her mouth alarming at first and then exciting. This time they had both wanted it, and it only stopped when they heard the uncertain roar of a motor engine coming towards them. They had broken apart, and it was only then she realized his hand was inside her dress, on her breast, and that she liked it there.
Now, here in the fields, Leonora didn’t know what they were doing; she wasn’t sure he knew either, only that it felt right. And that’s when Philip kissed her. He undid the buttons on her delicate lawn cotton dress, gently kissing the skin each button revealed, one by one, and parting it until she was almost naked. He took off his trousers and shirt, and then he removed her starched, semi-corseted brassiere, draping it gently over the high grass; it bobbed as if held up on stilts.
‘Do you remember coming here in the summer, when we were little?’ He pushed her hair off her face, kissing her eyes, her cheeks, her lips. ‘Just the two of us, down here?’
‘Of course I do,’ said Leonora shyly. Her fingers beat a light motion on the back of his neck. She stroked his skin, it was smooth, it smelt comforting, of hay and incense and—oh, of Philip, her oldest, most beloved friend, and being naked with him, which should have felt so extraordinarily strange and wrong, felt wonderful, delicious, right.
‘When I was at school, when I was utterly miserable, I’d close my eyes and think of you, of us, here, in the summer, and it would all seem manageable suddenly.’ He moved her arms so they were above her head, pinning her hands there, so he could run his hands over her body, over her breasts, kissing her stomach, her breast bone, her nipples—she could feel the scratchy hairs on his face, rasping against her skin. She smiled, looking down at his soft hair, his hands on her body, then she looked up, to the sky above her, the trees around them, and breathed in. She was happy—a little scared, but happy. She kissed the top of his head.
‘It’s all right, now,’ she said softly. ‘You’re back here. And so am I.’
‘I know,’ he said, his voice muffled. ‘Oh—Rara.’ He kissed her passionately, and she him, and he wouldn’t let her move until he came up for air and they moved together, and she took him in her hand, instinctively, curious, and stroked him till he groaned. He was quiet for a moment, and she nodded up at him, and his eyes were enormous, his face serious.
When he finally pushed slowly, carefully, into her it hurt, but only for a moment, and then it felt strange and wonderful. As if he was plugging something, filling her up. They hardly made any movement in the field; he rocked his hips urgently against hers, and she welcomed him in, till he came inside her, his cry strangled, as if she was hurting him. Then silence.
And then it was as if she was snapped back to reality and they were two teenagers again, one in a half-undone dress, her knickers in the grass, the other with his trousers discarded, his pants around his knees, breathing heavily against each other, rocking again, just the two of them, as his breathing subsided and she stared up at him.
‘Hello,’ he said, pushing the hair off her forehead. ‘My little Atalanta.’ He smiled, blinkly heavily at her.
‘Oh—hello,’ she answered. ‘Oh, Philip—’
‘I’ve been wanting to do that for a while now,’ Philip said, with an attempt at composure, and then a smile broke out over his face, the one she knew so well, and he shifted his weight from on top of her, and covered her mouth with kisses.
It was scorching hot, deadly quiet in the grass where they lay. She was silent, wondering what they had just done, amazed at how powerful it felt, knowing it was right
.
‘I’m going away,’ Philip said after a while, his breath in her hair. ‘Next week, I’m going.’
He rolled off her, and fiddled with his trousers. She lay there, not sure what to say, his sweat drying on her, cold in the heat. Wetness slithered between her legs. She felt suddenly grubby, there in the dusty grass.
‘Where?’
‘To the barracks, I suppose.’ He cleared his throat.
She still didn’t understand. ‘Barracks?’
‘Local barracks, over in Thornham. Mum was hoping my eyesight’d stop me from enlisting. But I went yesterday. The sergeant-major said it was fine.’ She stared at him, aghast. He said, almost proudly, ‘There’s no way I’d stay at home like a lily-livered little snake, not like Roger Bowen, getting his daddy to get him off the hook. There’s a war on and I’m eighteen now.’
‘Philip—you’re not going to fight,’ she said, sitting up, clutching his jacket. He turned to her in surprise. ‘You can’t!’ she said, her voice sounding weak and silly, even in her own ears. ‘You—’
‘I’ve got to, Rara,’ he said, looking puzzled. ‘How can I not?’ He smiled at her gently, smoothing her hair off her forehead again. He caught her to him, and held her, still naked, against his chest. She could feel his heart, hammering inside him, the cooling sweat on his strong body. ‘What would you think of me if I didn’t go and fight? Listen to me. It’s a dirty fight but we’re going to beat Hitler. You’ll see, I’ll be home by Christmas, and we’ll be married, and your father can go to hell. I wouldn’t have—I wouldn’t have taken you like this, if I wasn’t sure.’ He looked down at her fiercely. ‘D’you hear me?’
His hand enfolded hers, caught between their bodies, as he cradled her.
‘Don’t go,’ she said, realizing now the severity of what they had done, and of what he had always meant to her. She pulled away from him. ‘How can you go? How can you say we’re going to be together? We can’t be!’
I Remember You Page 30
