He released her hands and stepped back. But she was still sniffling and there was something so archetypically moving in the sight that I felt compelled to speak.
“Will you write us a poem, Mrs Danton? Will you write something about Robert and me and send it to my parents? I will make sure to copy it and send it to Robert wherever he is and when he comes back, we will come and tell you whether we liked it or not.”
Her face brightened and she wagged a finger at me.
“Aren’t you the cheeky one? You ask for a work of art and then have the gall to say you might not like it.”
But her smile was wide and her shoulders pulled back again. She narrowed her eyes.
“Of course, if the portrait of you is not to your liking, Miss Rose, that might have less to do with the quality of the poet and more to do with your own inner qualities.”
We all laughed and so at least that first goodbye ended happily. You might be surprised to know, Diane, that I truly cared about Mrs Danton. I was nicer back then. By 1945, my ability to feel compassion was greatly diminished. Every bomb whistling its doleful dirge as it descended, every flattened home, every reported death of one of those spotty youths I spoke of before tore a strip from my heart until I could feel no emotion for anyone outside my immediate circle. I would recover, we all would, but some of the damage was, I fear, irreversible.
I hugged Mrs Danton, thinking I would probably never see her again. I’d already decided that if Robert volunteered, I would not continue my studies. It would make no sense to cling onto dreams that belonged to the past while the man I loved fought to protect our place in a new world order. It would be too incongruous to be borne, no matter what Charlotte had advised. I was very idealistic then, Diane. I wanted and needed to share as much of Robert’s life as I could.
In those weeks before he enlisted, I used to daydream about how I might follow him to the battlefield, imagining myself as a modern-day, better equipped, less dissolute version of the women who followed their men during the Crimean War. There was something decadently appealing about these ladies who made their way to the Black Sea to peer at the fighting through opera glasses from the decks of private yachts.
In the library at Somerville, I found an original copy of Fanny Duberly’s journal, described inexplicably as a classic travel book. I thrilled to the idea of this redoubtable woman riding side-saddle to watch her husband go into battle during the Charge of the Light Brigade. She would rise before dawn with the troops, pack up and glug a mouthful of brandy before setting off on her horse.
I was aware that not all women who joined their men on the journey to the Crimea fared so well – some took to alcohol and some became prostitutes in the narrow alleys of Scutari when they realised the army could not or would not provide for them. Despite this and despite what I knew at second hand of the horrors of war, there was a part of me that wanted in on what was coming. I’d like to say it was a feminist urge to be equal, to be a player not a bystander. But my motives were not purely feminist – did we even really know the word then? In truth, I was gripped by a teenager’s lust for adventure. Nothing more complex than that. Empires have been built and wars sustained by this kind of foolish thinking for centuries and our generation was no different.
I did not imagine myself on horseback, of course. I have always hated those beasts, ever since one lunged at my fingers when I was trying to feed it when I was about three. Charlotte and Henry laughed so hard the pain was almost worth it. No, I saw myself – I almost blush to admit this – bringing tea to Robert, as he stood erect and defiant on the fire step, peering with a gaze of steel over the sandbagged parapet into no man’s land. You see how naïve I was, Diane. My only reference was the Great War. I thought it would be like that again. I was so wrong. The loss and horror and misery were similar but everything else was so different. Twenty years is a long time for those tasked with improving the killing machines and they had used the inter-war years well, as Robert pointed out to Mrs Danton. He was just wrong about the effect.
Robert’s mother lived just outside Felixstowe in an elegant house she had bought with her ‘war loot’, as Robert called it. She herself had little to do with the steel industry – her brothers ran a clutch of factories in Sheffield – but when her father died in 1914, he left her a percentage of future profits as well as a generous lump sum. When her husband died, leaving her another substantial legacy, she moved from the family’s modest townhouse to this grandiose, colonnaded two-storey residence on a couple of acres, just north of the town.
“She loved my father, of course,” Robert said as we sped through the countryside around Colchester, hooting madly at any pedestrians, cyclists or animals that had the temerity to step into our path. Robert was an enthusiastic and reckless driver, like most men at that time.
“But she felt he held her back, socially I mean. He was a very plain-spoken, humble man. He hated the fact he had married into what he took to calling ‘the industry of death’. When I was younger I thought he was being a bit harsh – after all before the war, steel companies including Pritchards were making railways and ships and cars. But my father found fault with that too. I remember one time when Uncle Toby came to stay and he held forth after dinner about how the Pritchards were an integral part…”
Robert took both hands from the wheel to mimic his uncle’s gestures so that the car swerved wildly towards the ditch. When I stopped screaming and he stopped laughing, he continued.
“Sorry about that. I guess you do need to keep your hands on the wheel, as they keep telling us. Anyway, Uncle Toby said the Pritchards were an integral part of the Empire-building machine. He’s always been a pompous ass but my father was having none of it.
He said: ‘You would consider that an honour, would you, Toby?’ I remember he was stroking his beard and whenever he did that, it meant he was about to put someone firmly in their place. I was sitting in the corner, hoping they’d forget about me as it was past my bedtime. I recognised the danger signs and wanted to see where this would end. I was rooting for my father, of course. He went on to lecture Uncle Toby about Britain grabbing power in places where we weren’t wanted. I think he even talked about brutalities against the natives. He asked my uncle if that was indeed something to be proud of. I remember Toby grinning smugly and looking at my mother. He fake-shook his head like this, like a disappointed teacher, and then he said: ‘Felicity, I always said you married a liberal.’” Robert laughed.
“My father just smiled. I think he was quite proud of that.”
Robert’s father had not fought in the Great War; as a doctor he was exempt from conscription. But he was anything but exempt from the consequences of war. He worked in a convalescent centre near Felixstowe and treated the men who made it home. Robert said he called them ‘the pulverised’. He said his father’s heart gave out because it could no longer bear the weight of what the broken men told him over long days and endless nights.
I would have liked to have known Mr Stirling. I was not so keen, however, on meeting his wife.
I asked Robert if he thought his mother would like me. He’d laughed a little too brightly and pulled me into his arms, perhaps to prevent me from seeing his face.
“How could she not?” he said.
“Let me count the ways,” I mumbled from the depths of his tweed-covered chest, my eyes anxiously peering ahead as the car swerved again.
Mrs Felicity Stirling née Pritchard was positioned at the top of the broad steps leading to the front door when we pulled up. Something about the way she stood, straight-backed with her hands folded demurely in front of her, rang false to me. It was as though she was consciously acting out the part of the elegant doyenne – recreating something she had seen at the pictures.
“She’s wearing her pearls,” Robert breathed as he stopped the car. “Heaven help us.”
I was hardly a dream future daughter-in-law for that era. The fact that I had gone up to Oxford would have been extremely off-putting for some mot
hers. My origins, as we said then, were relatively humble. Educated, yes, but definitely not wealthy. Pretty but hardly stunning enough to justify an imbalanced match. I could tell, from the strained smile on Mrs Stirling’s face, that I had already disappointed her and I hadn’t even stepped out of the car.
“Robert, my darling,” she gushed as he ran up the steps to her. “You look wonderful. I’m so thrilled you’re here even if… well, the circumstances.”
For a wild moment, I thought she was talking about me and I flushed. But then I remembered the war.
“Mrs Stirling, it is a great pleasure to meet you. Thank you so much for inviting me,” I said as I climbed the stairs like a commoner approaching her Queen. I swear, Diane, I almost curtsied.
“Welcome, Lina. And you must call me Felicity, of course.” She tittered gaily, tilting her head towards Robert whose face was stretched awkwardly between a grin and a grimace.
“Do come inside. You would hardly believe it is summer. I almost feel we should light a fire, although I cannot bring myself to ask Carter to do it. I’d feel like such a silly girl.”
Despite my fears, Robert’s mother was perfectly pleasant to me for the next few hours. She prattled and primped and flattered her son outrageously but if she occasionally took on Mrs Bennet-levels of absurdity, I spotted something harder, more calculating in her eyes when she thought I wasn’t looking. She was a woman with a plan, a woman who had always had a plan. I concluded that she did not like me at all but on the brink of a war that even she could not control, she needed to focus on her son. Felicity Stirling was anything but the frivolous woman she pretended to be – I am sure that is what drew Robert’s father to her – and she had no intention of estranging her only son before he went off to fight. Dislikeable people are never truly evil. We are all just trying to survive as best we can.
At dinner, Felicity leaned across the table to quiz me about my parents. I knew Robert had already furnished her with the basic details so I presumed the conversation was a not-so-subtle exercise in stating the obviousness of my inferiority.
“I imagine Oxford was quite the change for you, dear,” she said. “Quite an achievement to go up to study literature.” The unspoken “for a girl like you” hung in the air.
I flicked a glance at Robert. He raised his eyebrows in apology.
I turned a full smile on Felicity.
“I have my grandfather’s genes, I believe. He was an editor on the local paper before the Great War and my mother says I got my love of words from him.”
“You’re too modest,” Robert jumped in, no doubt to prevent his mother from making any snide comments about sensationalism in the press. “You don’t just love words, you master them. I’ve read some of her essays, Mother, and they are excellent. Maybe you would like to read one yourself?”
“Of course, that would be delightful,” Felicity said, clapping her hands with excitement. Or perhaps it was restrained fury at the realisation that her son really was in love.
“You must bring me a few the next time you come,” she said.
There never was a next time. I was too busy during the war and whenever Robert got a few days leave, we hunkered down in London where I was living by then. Neither of us wanted to share our love with anyone else, not as long as there was a Doomsday clock ticking over us. Our time was too precious. We were too precious. Of course, Robert visited his mother once or twice but I had my own fretting parents to reassure so we did our home visits separately.
In 1944, Felicity Stirling succumbed to the cancer that had ravaged her spine and caused the excruciating back pain that explained the rigid posture I dismissed as so affected the first time I met her. I could not like the woman but I admired the way she loved her son unconditionally. In other words, more than I ever would, or could. I was glad she did not live to see what happened. It would have broken her heart. But perhaps if she had survived, Robert would not have taken his own life. Felicity Stirling would never have let her child kill himself. She would have shared his burden. She would not have dodged his need. The women of her generation, Charlotte’s generation, were Amazons, a fact that we often forget because we focus on what they were not allowed to do, instead of on what they did. I have noticed, Diane, that as our lives have become easier over the decades, we have become softer and less able to cope. And so every technical and social advance seems to chip away at the best of us. Another irony of the human condition.
The next day, Robert enlisted. The flustered sergeant, who took his name and other details, could not say when exactly he would be required to leave for training and he seemed more put out by this than Robert.
“It’s not like this whole mess crept up on us like a thief in the night,” the sergeant said, shuffling his papers and repeatedly pushing his glasses up his sweating nose. “We all knew what we were doing when we said we’d bail out Poland if Hitler invaded it. That was March. Three months later and we still seem to be on the back foot. No dates for training yet, no locations. I swear I sometimes think the brass couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery.”
He shook his head dolefully.
Robert, who looked as though he was signing up for a week in Butlins, smiled broadly. He was fidgeting with his hat though and he had never been a man for idle movements.
“I suppose that’s the downside of British phlegm,” he said too brightly.
The sergeant didn’t even smile.
“God help us when the fun really starts,” he muttered.
When it was done, we walked down the steps outside the drab office. Wispy clouds scudded above our heads, pushed inland by the strong sea breeze like litter blowing down a blue street. Everything seemed disconcertingly normal. I felt cheated. My darling had just signed over his life and future to the army and here we were walking sedately down the steps, as though this Saturday would unfurl like all Saturdays ever.
I needed a bigger horizon. I needed to look over there to where it would all happen. That’s where I wanted to say goodbye. Not on these steps and not in Felicity Stirling’s house where she would smother my sorrow with her own. I wanted to say goodbye looking out at the sea that would separate us and then, one day, bring him back to me. I told you I was a silly romantic back then, Diane.
“Can we go for a walk on the pier?” I asked.
Standing at the end of the jetty, wind-whipped and glistening with sea-spray, we pushed into each other as we gazed out in the direction of Holland and France.
“I did always hope to travel in Europe,” Robert said. “Although, I never thought I would be on a trip with half the young men in the country. I imagined sailing a barge alone, along the canals into Rotterdam, or wandering in grumpy Gallic solitude through Paris’ Latin Quarter. Still, I suppose this trip is paid for and we’ll likely cover more ground so that’s something to consider.”
I loved his irreverent, dry sense of humour, Diane. As to what he saw in me, I do not know. I can’t say I believe in love at first sight but I don’t know how else to explain how we ended up together. Robert’s attributes were obvious but I never understood what brought him over to my table that day in the teahouse. I don’t subscribe to the view that there is one true love for everyone, if we can but find that perfect match, but maybe there is something in the idea that some people are meant to come together. Call it chemistry, or Charlotte’s kismet, or a kind of tragic magnetism.
“I can hardly bear the fact that you will be there without me,” I said.
“I, on the other hand, am delighted that you will not be there,” he replied and he was no longer smiling. He turned to me, brushed the hair from my face and took my two hands in his.
“I don’t want you to see how I will be. All of us who go to fight will have to dig into the darkest parts of our souls to survive. We will do things we will be ashamed of, we will be weak and cowardly and brave and remorseless and broken and despairing and cravenly hopeful. Deep down, you know this. The poets couldn’t gloss over it despite all their pretty words and
you have seen what war did to your father. I will have to be utterly different over there and I need to know that you will be here, waiting for me to come back, waiting for the man I am now. That will keep me going. That will pull me back to sanity. I need you to be safe, to be here to guide me home. You will be my lighthouse.”
He kissed me and our tears soothed our salt-seared lips. Seagulls wailed over our heads, pitting their puny bodies against the wind.
“I’m scared,” I whispered. “The war will come here too this time. It won’t be like before. Everyone knows we’ll be bombed. How can I be your beacon if I’m also under attack?
Robert, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to do what we have to do to get through this.”
“That just shows how smart you are,” he whispered into my ear. “We should be scared. We will be scared but we will prevail. I don’t know how, darling, but I do know that our story will not end here. We won’t let it. We can’t.”
CHAPTER 9
The day war was declared set the tone for the next six years. Fear, expectation and farce. An entire nation glued to their wirelesses, listening to endless music on the BBC, everyone holding their breath. Then finally, the words that sealed our Fate. (Forgive me, Diane, I’m doing it again. Some of these tropes cannot be avoided.)
“This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany,” Chamberlain said.
I was with my parents in their kitchen in St Albans. As Chamberlain went on to say we would be fighting against “brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution”, Henry stood up and left the room. I watched him walk out to the garden, pick up his spade and begin digging in his vegetable patch. Charlotte gave a small sigh, rose and went to put the kettle on the stove. But her hands were trembling and she could not strike the match to light the gas. I took the pack off her and lit the ring.
The Reckoning Page 9
