Rory, who was left to sleep from nine at night until eight in the morning, was always wakeful until the early hours of dawn. He was hungry too, and on Thursdays Lily and he feasted like children raiding a larder on all the things they liked best and then washed it all down with two bottles of stout.
“Good?” Lily asked him, her mouth full of biscuits.
Rory nodded, the muscles of his neck responding more and more easily.
When they had finished their feast, Lily swept up the crumbs and folded up the paper bags to burn on the drawing room fire when no-one was watching. Rory stopped her with a shaking hand.
“All right,” he said very slowly, his mouth working on the words, his throat thick. “Nurse Bells—good sort.”
“Say again,” Lily commanded.
“Nurse Bells—a good sort.”
“Oh! Good sort!” Lily exclaimed. “She won’t tell that we’ve been picnicking?”
Rory slowly smiled, the warmth coming to his eyes and then slowly spreading across his face as the recalcitrant muscles moved. “No,” he said carefully.
Lily beamed. “We’ll do it again, next Thursday,” she promised. She leaned forward and patted his cheek. “Got everything you want till the morning?”
Rory nodded. “Good night.”
By the time Stephen came up the stairs Lily had washed her face, cleaned her teeth and was in bed with the lights out and her eyes firmly shut.
It was no defence against him. He always took her on Thursday nights without her consent, but without her denial. Stephen’s desire was always irritated by Thursdays when Lily radiated confidence and his son had enjoyed free run of the house for the whole afternoon. Lily lay still and let him do what he would without encouragement. She would not even put her arms around his back as he moved on her. Stephen pulled back before his climax and spilled his seed on her nightdress. Lily pulled the wet patch away from her body without even opening her eyes, and went to sleep at once.
She had learned the knack of detachment, she had learned that skill, which most women of her class and generation knew: of enduring sex with her husband without letting either desire or repulsion arise. She lay as still as a corpse while he took her, she turned her back on him when he had finished. She was never wakeful, she was never distressed. She had learned the knack of going far from him.
It was Stephen who lay awake watching the ceiling. He felt as if in all his life, in the trenches, in shellholes, cradling a dying man and retching himself for fear, that he had never felt as lonely as he did now: with a wife who lay beneath him like a bolster while he made love to her, utterly untouched by him; and a child who had stolen the affections of his home. He watched the moonlight on the white ceiling and listened for the church clock. It struck midnight and then one, then two, before he slept. Then he dreamed.
In his dreams he was far from Portsmouth. He dreamed of a leave that had been granted to his battalion in late May of 1917. They had five days’ leave and everyone was going to Paris. Stephen and Coventry were going behind the lines to stay at Little England. Perot was haymaking, scything the hay in the field since the haymaking machine was broken and there was no way to get the spare part he needed. Stephen and Coventry stripped down to their breeches; each took a scythe and worked alongside the man until it grew dark and the big yellow moon came slowly up, and Juliette called to them from the lit doorway of the little farmhouse.
They ate a thick rabbit stew and drank red wine. After dinner Perot shambled up the stairs to his bed and Coventry went to his sleeping quarters in the barn. Stephen and Juliette sat together drinking the last of the wine, either side of the table.
When the bottle was finished Stephen stood and took her hand. She looked up at him. She had clear honest eyes like an English girl, like the best of English girls. Stephen said, “Juliette, I love you. I want to marry you,” and watched her smile.
She rose from her seat and he put his arms around her. She was wearing an old skirt and a thin white blouse and he could feel the warmth of her breasts as he held her close. His hand slid up from her waist and nervously touched the underside of her breast. She was still smiling. Stephen bent and kissed her mouth, her neck, and then down to the open neck of the shirt. She smelled deliciously of cooking and haymaking, of the open air and the warm earthy smell of an aroused woman.
His hand cupped her breast and he felt the nipple harden under his palm. Her hand came around his neck and held him close. Stephen, a virgin, trembled with desire; but then his education as an English gentleman held him back. He broke free from her.
“No,” he said gently. He shook his head and touched her cheek. “No,” he said. “I would be a very beast if I touched you now, with things so uncertain. Juliette, forgive me . . .” He broke off. She was watching him with a little puzzled smile. She did not understand him at all.
“I want you to be my wife,” he said again. “I want you to marry me.”
She nodded lightly and reached for him, but he put her hand aside. “I want it to be right for us,” he said in his school boy French. “I want us to wait until we are married.”
There was a flash of something, perhaps laughter, in her eyes but she shielded them with lowered lids, nodded solemnly and leaned her forehead against his shoulder.
“When the war is over,” Stephen said, “you’ll come home with me and we’ll marry in England and buy a farm in England. Your father and your mother could come too and we could farm it together. I don’t want to go into Father’s office. I don’t want to live in Portsmouth. We’ll buy a lovely little farmhouse and it will be just like here. We could buy somewhere in Kent and grow apples and pears.
“They call it the garden of England, it’s beautiful there. Or perhaps we could grow vines and make wine.” He sat down on the bench and drew her on to his lap. “You’ll see,” he said. “There’s going to be a big push this summer. But the English will win, we’re bound to win, and the war will be over. Then you and I will marry.”
She nodded.
“Or we could marry now!” he suddenly exclaimed. “The padre could do it. And then if anything happened to me you’d be an Englishwoman. You’d have a pension and the army would take care of you. You could go to my home and Mother would look after you. That’s better! We’ll marry at once.”
“No,” she said gently.
Stephen broke off and looked at her. “Why ever not?” he demanded. “You’d be an Englishwoman then, not a Belgian. Think of that, Juliette!”
She nodded gravely at the thought. “I want to be married when the war is over,” she said softly. “In the church. With my friends there.”
“Yes,” Stephen said thoughtfully. “Of course you do. A proper wedding in peacetime.”
Juliette nodded. She did not tell him of her utter certainty that the Allies would lose the war and that the last thing she wanted was English citizenship under a German occupation. She would have been his mistress while the farm was safely behind English lines, she would never be his wife. If the Germans came forward, as her father and sister were certain they would, then she would take a German husband, as any sensible girl would do, and a strong German man would come and help with the farming and caress her after dinner. She was a survivor, not a patriot.
She smiled and stayed on Stephen’s lap until they were both sleepy. Then he kissed her again and she went upstairs to bed. She undressed quickly and slipped between rough cool sheets. She hitched up her nightshirt and slid her hand down between her legs and satisfied herself quickly, gently. She reached orgasm thinking of a man who would take her with confident passion, perhaps without her consent, a man nothing at all like Stephen. She chuckled at the folly of the romantic Englishman who thought he would marry, who thought that his doomed army would win, and fell easily asleep.
Stephen turned over in his marital bed, breaking into his dream, and cuddled closer to Lily’s warmth. They had been good days, that leave at the farm which he called Little England. At night they could hear the constan
t rumble of guns, like a thunderstorm far away. But after a while he blotted out the sounds of death and heard only the birdsong and the noise of the farm animals: clucking hens, the hysterical squeals of pigs at feeding time, and the continuous heartbroken lowing of cows separated from weaning calves. Perot made them work like peasants and Stephen had paid him in gold, the only acceptable currency, for their keep. Stephen and Coventry ate well and the pinched frightened trench look went from their faces. They filled out on fresh food and new-made bread and they forgot the taste of the tinned substandard Maconnoochie stew and stale tea. It was only five days but it seemed like a child’s summer holiday. It seemed to stretch for ever.
When they had to return to the line they walked back in a depression so deep that they did not speak for hours. The officers and men home from Paris were pallid from drinking bouts and sick with infections. Stephen thought of Juliette’s purity and ignored their coarse teasing. That night they were ordered on a raid across no-man’s-land, into the German trench to take prisoners and information. Stephen took only one prisoner. He shot the other German soldiers smack in their faces as they came out of their dug-out with their hands up. He was not even angry. He was gripped with a merciless cold executioner’s intolerance. These were the men whose greed and stupidity were standing between him and life with Juliette. He felt bleakly savage towards them.
Stephen grew very popular with the men under his command after they had seen him shoot unarmed soldiers. They preferred the simplicity of war waged without rules. Straightforward murder was much preferable to the complicated combinations of chivalry and massacre which other officers tried to impose. Stephen, watching his men’s hatred, their lusts and their terror, knew that all of them were becoming savages. And that when they got home, if they ever got home, they would never live like sane men again.
• • •
At the end of the month Lily broached the subject of Nanny Janes. She waited until Muriel had left the breakfast table and Stephen was folding the newspaper and finishing his last cup of tea.
“Nanny Janes’s trial month is over,” Lily said lightly. “How quickly the time has gone.”
Stephen nodded. “So it has. I’m sure she’ll want to stay, she seems quite settled. I must have another go at speaking to the Harcourts—the family where she was before. They were away when I last rang.”
Lily hesitated. “That doesn’t matter, I don’t want her,” she said baldly. “I’ve given her a fair trial as you wanted, Stephen, and I’m sure she’s a very good nanny. But I’d rather look after Christopher myself. The best days for me are Thursdays when she has her afternoon off. I look forward to Thursdays all week. The worst day is Friday morning when I know it’s another whole week before I can bathe him. Please let her go, Stephen. He’s my son. I want to care for him.”
Stephen looked at Lily’s pleading face. “I shall see,” he said magisterially. “I shall speak with her now, before I go to work. I shall have to see what she thinks.”
He moved towards the door. Lily went with him, putting her hand on his arm. “Stephen, please,” she said. “I’ve not asked you for anything since we’ve been married. Not one thing. But I am asking you this. Please let me care for Christopher on my own. I can manage perfectly well. If you don’t want him in the dining room or downstairs in the evening I will keep him in the nursery. He can go on sleeping there. Sally can sleep in there with him and call me if he wakes in the night. But please send Nanny Janes away and let me look after him.”
Stephen smiled, enjoying his power. “Why don’t you send her down to me?” he suggested. “I’ll see her in the drawing room, before I go to work.”
“It’s not her decision,” Lily persisted. “She’s not his mother. I am.”
“Send her down to see me.” He did not even have to answer Lily.
Lily fetched Nanny Janes and then went into the nursery to be with Christopher. She picked him up from his cot and held him close to her heart. She felt as if they were under sentence and Stephen and Nanny Janes would decide whether they could ever be happy again. Christopher let out a small squawk of complaint, she was holding him too tightly. Lily released him at once and sat on the nursery chair and laid him back on her knees and smiled at him. She wiped the tears off her cheeks with the back of her hand. When Nanny Janes came into the room Lily was still there, sitting hunched on the chair. She turned her face to the older woman as meek as a scolded child.
Nanny Janes took Christopher from her without a word. It was time he was out in his pram in the garden. Lily let her son be taken from her arms and slipped down the stairs to the drawing room. “You kept her on?” she asked.
Stephen was packing papers into his briefcase. “Of course,” he said. “You had no actual complaint against her, did you? You did say you were sure she was a good nanny.”
Lily shook her head in silence.
Stephen went past her to the door. Browning was waiting with his overcoat, Coventry was standing by the Argyll. Lily held his briefcase while he shrugged into his coat. Browning discreetly retreated to the back stairs while Lily held the front door open for her husband.
“I shall be master in my own house, Lily,” Stephen said.
He pecked her cheek and went down the steps to the car. Lily shut the door behind him and went slowly up the stairs to her bedroom. She could hear Christopher’s gurgles and coos as he was dressed but she made herself go past the nursery. She went into Rory’s room instead and laid her head against his hand on the counterpane and rested there for a while, saying nothing.
30
LILY SPENT THE MORNING watching Christopher from the nursery window. It was a fine warm morning and Nanny Janes took her knitting out with her and sat in the sunshine while Christopher slept. The pram was turned carefully away from her so that Christopher would not see her face and know that he was not alone. The essence of Nanny Janes’s system of childcare was that a baby should spend as much time alone as possible. Gregariousness, affection, spontaneity, were to be feared as signs of vulgarity and weakness. Loneliness and silence were signs of health.
Lily watched Christopher’s waving hand and then saw it sink slowly into the pram and relax as he slept. Nanny Janes would sit beside the pram for the rest of the morning, only leaving her post if Christopher woke and cried for hunger or for loneliness. She would not stay within earshot of the nagging sound of a crying baby. It served no purpose to hear him. If he was not due for a feed he would not be fed. If he was not due to be picked up he would not be touched. Christopher could cry from nine till one if he wished; no-one was allowed near him. To pick him up, to respond to his cry, would be to spoil him and to destroy the system of discipline. Christopher would learn, as most babies under this traditional regime learned, to sob himself to sleep or into a state of quiet hopelessness. It was how Stephen had been brought up. It was how Rory had been brought up. It was part of the compulsive mimicry of the upper classes which had always been the rule for the Winters.
Lily left the window and went to Rory’s room. A new specialist nurse was with him, teaching him exercises to revitalize the wasted muscles. Rory’s damaged body was coming to life. It was learning to work again. “D’you mind if I come in?” Lily asked.
Rory smiled at her with his attractive crooked smile. “See the show,” he croaked.
“He’s coming on like wildfire,” the nurse said pleasantly. “And the more practice in talking he gets the better.”
“I can talk with him,” Lily said. “I am free all week. I am only ever busy on Thursdays.”
The nurse nodded, but Rory’s dark eyes scanned Lily’s wan face. “Old bag stays on?” he asked.
“Say again,” Lily said. “I didn’t get it.”
Rory tried again more slowly. “The old bag,” he said. “Stays on?”
Lily giggled reluctantly. “Yes,” she said. “Stephen spoke to her this morning. She’s here for good.”
Rory nodded.
The nurse set him an exercise for his
fingers, and then clapping his hands. Rory was clumsy and uncontrolled, he was sweaty with frustration and distress by the time she said: “That’s enough for today.”
“Feel a fool,” Rory said irritably.
“You’re coming along fast,” the woman said encouragingly. She turned to Lily. “He really is,” she said. “It’s a very remarkable recovery.”
Lily nodded and the woman packed her little case. “Same time tomorrow,” she said cheerily, and left.
“Got a concert?” Rory asked carefully.
“Tomorrow,” Lily nodded. “Widows and orphans.”
Rory nodded. “Singing much?”
“Two songs. Charlie’s accompanying me. It’s in a church, a concert of sacred music. He’ll be playing on the organ.”
Rory smiled. “A change,” he said.
“Yes. He does all sorts. In a church at tea time, at the Kings in the evening, and in a nightclub at midnight!”
There was a slight very faint sound from the back garden. Lily turned her head to listen. “That’s Christopher,” she said. She glanced at the clock. “He’s only slept an hour. He’ll have to be there for three hours now and she won’t pick him up.”
The cry was a little louder, penetrating even the front bedroom. The baby was not going to go to sleep again. Rory looked at Lily’s pale miserable face. “He’s not allowed inside until one,” she whispered. “He’ll cry and cry.”
They were both silent, listening to the heart-tugging wail from the garden.
“He’s out there all on his own, crying for me,” Lily said.
“Fetch him,” Rory said suddenly.
“What?”
“Fetch him.”
“I can’t,” Lily said. “I’m not allowed.”
Rory’s crooked smile gleamed at Lily. “I’m allowed,” he said impishly. “Fetch him to me.”
For a moment Lily hesitated, then her face lit up and she slipped across the room and smacked a kiss on Rory’s cheek. “Of course you’re allowed!” she exclaimed. “I’ll tell Nanny Janes to bring him in to you.”
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