The Rose Stone

by The Rose Stone (retail) (epub)

  Their feet rustled in the fresh and fragile grass of early summer. “I’ll try. If you think it will help.”

  “I’d be very grateful.”

  Anna looked around. Maria and Victoria were still sitting by the wall, their skirts spread prettily around them, their attention taken by the tennis players. Nicholas and Benjamin were playing fivestones on the path not far away. Of Sophie there was no sign. “Where is she?”

  “Maria.” Louisa lifted her voice, “Where’s Sophie?”

  Maria shook her head. “I don’t know, Mama. She went off on her own.”

  Louisa looked at Anna in exasperation. “You see what I mean?”

  * * *

  Sophie was at that moment in her favourite spot at Bissetts. Beyond the lawns and kitchen gardens at the back of the house, by the overgrown, thicketed boundary that gave on to meadows and a distant church spire was a small ruin. Once it had been a two-roomed cottage, then a makeshift stable. Now the building had all but fallen down and was nothing more than a nettle-infested, ivy-grown heap of tumbled bricks. Two walls still stood, however, and enclosed what had once been a small yard-garden. It was sheltered and sunny and had within it a tiny pool, scummed now and overgrown with weeds and water plants. Sophie had discovered this place many years ago, once, whilst staying with Uncle Josef, and had shared it with no one. She had believed it then, when the world had been kinder, an enchanted place. She loved it still, and still, too, half-believed in the magic with which her childhood had invested it. She sat, gingham green-stained and crumpled, knees drawn up, watching the busy insect life of the little pool. She picked up a small handful of gravel stones and held them high above the surface, letting them drop one by one, watching the wide ripples for the magic pattern that she had once believed meant a wish fulfilled.

  —I wish I could stay here – just here – for ever;

  —I wish horrible Miss Bantry had never been born;

  —I wish I could be like Victoria;

  —No, I don’t. But I wouldn’t mind being less like me;

  —I wish I were grown up. I wish I were Aunt Anna;

  —I wish Papa hadn’t lost his arm;

  —I wish people wouldn’t be so absolutely awful sometimes.

  A cuckoo called in the distance. Something scurried through the undergrowth beside her.

  —I wish, I wish, I wish that there was no such thing in the world as boarding schools.

  Chapter Seventeen

  In the course of her first year at St Hilary’s Sophie ran away twice. On neither occasion did she get any further than the station of the small village near which the school was situated. The headmistress, Miss Salisbury – an unusually enlightened woman who showed, in the opinion of many of the more conservative members of staff, more understanding and tolerance than Sophie deserved – did everything that was reasonably within her power to help the child to settle, but to no avail. Sophie, caught between the world she knew and one that she considered neither knew nor cared about her, and in which she felt a stranger, was unhappily – and predictably – badly behaved. Whilst the world beyond the high walls that bounded the school grounds stirred and trembled with a groundswell of revolutionary change as the unrest of the working classes built towards bitter industrial strife and women besieged Parliament and engaged in pitched battles with a police force whose avowed intention was to break the women’s movement once and for all, Sophie suffered helpless homesickness and a largely self-inflicted loneliness. She was popular neither with her fellow pupils, who found her arrogant and difficult to get to know, nor with most of the staff, to whom she showed an even worse face. St Hilary’s was a school for the solidly middle-class – Sophie’s first shock came when her father told her firmly that in his application to the school he had described the Red Lion as an hotel, and that, like it or not, that fabrication would have to stand. It was unfortunate, too, that she arrived as a new pupil in a class of a dozen or so girls whose friendships and loyalties were particularly well formed and cemented. Not that there were not, at first, those to make overtures to the tall, interesting-looking girl whose ability on the games field put her into the first team for netball and for hockey within a month of her joining the school. But Sophie would have none of what she quite mistakenly construed as their patronage, and unsurprisingly they soon left her to her own devices. So, during that first year she was more miserable than she had ever imagined it possible to be, which simply aggravated an already difficult situation.

  The summer of 1911, however, brought some relief – the long school vacation, most of which was spent, at Josef’s suggestion, at Bissetts with him. Louisa and Boris were only too thankful to accept, happy to keep the girls away from the events that were stirring in London. It was a stifling summer, and the city sweltered in heat and tension. In Parliament a constitutional crisis involving the curtailing of the power of the House of Lords caused chaos for the government. In the country at large industrial unrest was seething – seamen, dockers, miners, transport workers, all were bitterly dissatisfied, and resentment and discontent were building to explosion point. During that uncomfortably warm June, the month that the new King, George the Fifth, was at last crowned, there were strikes, riots and fire-raising all over the country. A month later, however, these domestic troubles were for a time at least overshadowed for two tense weeks by an outside threat as a Germany that was pursuing ruthlessly a policy of expansion confronted France in Morocco. Off the coast of Norway, uncomfortably well-placed for a sudden strike across the North Sea, the German Fleet steamed, an overt threat to British security. David Lloyd-George, speaking at the Mansion House, asserted publicly that if Britain felt her interests anywhere in the world to be threatened, she would fight. An outraged Germany growled, and Europe teetered on the edge of conflict. In the bar of the Red Lion, however, the credibility of this threat soon crumbled beneath the weight of more immediate issues. What was the Navy for if not to defend our shores? Leave it to them. More pressing was the need – some were now saying the right – of every working man to a living wage and security for his family, for improved conditions in the docks and in the mines. One by one they went on strike: the miners, the dockers, the transport workers. There was rioting in Liverpool, in Manchester and in London and the troops were called out. By the middle of August, with the threat of war thankfully receding, the whole of industrial England’s railway system was paralysed. London itself had been brought almost to a complete standstill and was like an armed camp, with soldiers patrolling the streets and camped in the parks.

  Safe at Bissetts, however, Josef and the girls were little affected by the disturbances. They learned what little they knew from newspapers and from Louisa’s letters, and buried there in the tranquil peace of the rural Essex countryside it all seemed far, far away. Sophie lived that long summer day by day, grateful for the peace and pleasure of the place in which she found herself, refusing to look back or ahead, spending the warm days in exploring the countryside, reading beneath the tall old trees, dreaming by the side of ‘her’ little pool. With youth’s almost unique ability to live purely for the present, she dismissed the thought of the coming year and lived for the moment. The big house itself was empty, apart from a small staff – Alex was working in the city and living in the London house, Alice and the boys were summering in Italy. Mrs Brown, the Roses’ cook, took great pleasure in exercising all of her considerable culinary talent upon feeding the occupants of the cottage. At least – as she confided to Mrs Lawson, the housekeeper – her good offices were much and openly appreciated by old Mr Anatov and his two young guests, which was more than could be said with regard to some others she could mention—

  In the valleys the miners were starved back to work: but the dockers won their battle and put new heart into Trades Unionists all over the country.

  Sophie Anatov lay dreaming upon the summer grass and ignored the rest of the world.

  The rest of the world, however, flatly refused to be ignored forever. Time, that intrac
table enemy that cannot be defeated, moved inexorably on and inevitably the day came for her to return to school.

  Louisa arrived from Plaistow a couple of days before she was due to leave, with her school trunk, it being felt that a trip all the way to London and back would be a tiring waste of time for the child. And then, despite Sophie’s best efforts to pretend that it would not happen, the moment finally came when she and her mother stood upon the platform of the tiny country station, the labelled trunk at her feet, and looked for words to say goodbye.

  “I’ve hardly seen anything of you,” Louisa said.

  “No.”

  “But – you did understand? About staying at Bissetts? It’s been awful in London. It was so much better that you should be here.”

  “Of course. And we didn’t mind. We enjoyed it – apart from not seeing you and Papa of course—”

  In the distance a small plume of smoke reached a vapour-like finger above the massed green of the treetops.

  Louisa took her daughter’s hand. “Sophie – please? Try to be happy. It’ll be better this year, you’ll see. You know the place, and the people—”

  “Yes.”

  “Papa had a very nice letter from Miss Salisbury. She’s very concerned about you. And she hopes that you’ll settle this year.”

  Sophie said nothing. They could hear the train now, distantly and cheerily puffing up the incline towards the station. The rails hummed. People on the platform began to collect together coats and baggage.

  Louisa struggled on. “And next year – with any luck – Maria will be joining you. She’s so looking forward to it.”

  “I’m sure she’ll enjoy it,” Sophie said, with truth. There seemed to be, somewhere lodged in the pit of her stomach, a cold stone, chill and heavy.

  Her mother clasped her suddenly to her. The child was already a good two inches taller than she. “You’ll be fourteen soon. Quite grown up.”

  “Yes.” Sophie stepped back from her, smiling woodenly.

  “I’ll send you a cake. To share with your friends.”

  “Thanks.” The brief word was all but lost in the busy clatter of the train’s arrival. It sighed steam and was still. Sophie climbed into a carriage, banged the door and let the window down, leaning out to watch as her mother saw to the safe stowing of her trunk in the guard’s van. Louisa came to the carriage window, reached an anxious hand and lifted her face for a last kiss. The engine let out an imperious shriek and the train began to pull away. Louisa moved with it, still holding her daughter’s hand. “You’ll be all right?”

  “Of course.” Sophie managed a too-bright smile. She let go of her mother’s hand as the train gathered speed and, clamping her shapeless uniform hat on to her mane of blonde hair, hung from the window watching as the small figure who stood upon the platform, hand upheld, diminished to doll-size and finally disappeared as the train swayed around a bend.

  Sophie sat back into a seat, bolt upright, and stared ahead, bleakly, into space.

  A woman sitting opposite her smiled companionably. “Going back to school?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have far to travel?”

  “No.”

  The woman appeared not to notice the unmannerly brusqueness of the replies, nor the suspicious brightness in the girl’s eyes. She fluttered a gloved hand. “How much I envy you modern girls! My own daughter simply adores her school – she’ll be Head Girl next year, I do believe. How very different from my own childhood – only the boys were lucky enough to go away to school in those days, my dear. So see how lucky you are—”

  Sophie, very deliberately, turned her head away and stared stonily out of the window.

  * * *

  The third time that Sophie ran away from school her plans were better laid and she made it all the way to that person and place that to her personified refuge, Uncle Josef and Bissetts. It was a wild and wet winter’s night in the December that followed that sultry, violent summer that Sophie, victim of yet another clash with authority in which she had inevitably come off worst, climbed from her dormitory window, scaled the school wall and set off to walk not to that station that was closest to the school and where she had been so easily apprehended twice before, but across country to the next stop down the line. It was a cold and frightening journey, and a child of less obstinate courage would have given up long before her destination was reached. Sophie, however, chilled, tired and more than a little frightened, had set it grimly in her mind that this time she would reach Bissetts. Surely – surely – Uncle Josef would stand up for her? He wouldn’t let them send her back? Uncle Josef was getting old. He needed someone to look after him. Why shouldn’t they live there, at the cottage, just the two of them? She wouldn’t give up. She wouldn’t.

  The woebegone figure that turned up at last in the sheltered porch of the cottage that night, was however, far from an heroic one. The long dark walk from the station had leeched the last defiant self-confidence from her; she had never felt so much an outcast as when she had plodded, drenched as a drowning cat, past the secured windows and doors of the cottages along the road, never been so grateful for the sight of that familiar, studded door. Even the unexpected sight of her Aunt Anna’s face, sleepy and questioning, at the open door did not surprise her enough to overcome the enormous relief at having at last come to warmth and safety.

  “What the – Sophie! For Heaven’s sake! What are you doing here? Lord – you’re soaked! Absolutely soaked! And shivering – come in. Here, let me help you—” Anna, pulling her dressing robe about her against the cold air that streamed into the house from the open door, stopped suddenly as the implications of her niece’s unexpected appearance filtered through to her sleep-clogged brain. “Oh, Sophie,” she said.

  Sophie was crying. She had lost her hat in the scramble over the wall, and her hair was sodden rats’ tails, water-dark and bedraggled. Her heavy woollen coat had simply soaked up the rain, and hung heavily, chill and unpleasant-smelling. Her feet were wet. She was, as Anna saw, shaking like a leaf, from cold and misery. Her skin was pallid, blue-tinged.

  “Come along.” Anna was suddenly brisk. “Get those wet things off before you catch your death. I’ll get the eiderdown from my bed. It’ll be warm and dry at least. And Sophie – be quiet, dear, please. Papa – Uncle Josef – hasn’t been at all well. Oh, don’t worry,” she added as the young, woebegone face turned to her in fresh alarm, “it isn’t serious, and he’s much better. But he has been rather unwell and it’s best his sleep isn’t disturbed.” She bent to poke the dying fire briskly. Small flames licked around an unburnt log and the flare of it lit the familiar, homely room briefly. “Hurry – you’re drenched. We can’t have you catching pneumonia—”

  Sophie silently climbed out of her sodden clothes and accepted the eiderdown her aunt offered. She curled into an armchair in front of the fire, her long legs folded beneath her. Anna took the wet clothes into the kitchen, where the range at this time of year was always kept burning, and came back a short while later with a steaming cup and a handkerchief. Sophie accepted both with muttered thanks, and blew her nose resoundingly.

  “Well,” Anna said, pensively, “here’s a to-do.”

  Sophie ducked her head. She had stopped crying. Her mouth was stubborn.

  The silence lengthened.

  “Are we going to sit here like this all night?” Anna asked at last, mildly tart. “Or are you – eventually – going to say something?”

  Sophie lifted her head. The young, strong bones shone in the fire-light. “I’m sorry.”

  Anna considered. Then, gently, she shook her head. “Not good enough. We’re going to have to do better than that. But first—” she stood up “—we must get a message through to the school. They must be worried sick about you. Papa doesn’t have a telephone here, so I’ll have to walk up to the house. Don’t move—” she lifted a firm finger “—you hear me? Don’t move until I get back.”

  “But – Aunt Anna – it’s awful out there –
you’ll get drenched.”

  Her aunt surveyed her, not unkindly. “My dear child – it’s a little late – isn’t it – to be considering the welfare and convenience of others?”

  Sophie had no answer to so obvious a truth.

  “Just stay where you are. We won’t be long. And then – we’ll see what’s to be done about all this.”

  * * *

  Several hours later Anna surveyed her niece’s blotched, unhappy face with exasperated affection and sighed. The built-up fire flared and flickered between them; the buffeting of wind and rain against the window reinforced the air of cosy privacy that had encouraged intimacy and confidences. For hours – and for the first time in her life – Sophie had poured out her troubles with honesty, into a more or less sympathetic ear. Now she sat, still huddled into her eiderdown, nose and eyes reddened by emotional weeping, but much calmer. Anna remembered – oh, how well she remembered – the age, and the sense of confusion that went with it. She remembered too a child younger than this one who had run away and had been comforted.

  Joss.

  The thought of him, as always, intruded suddenly and disturbingly into her mind, like a rock that breaks the water of a smooth, fast-running stream.

  Sophie sniffed disconsolately.

  Anna smiled. “Could you drink another cup of cocoa?”

  “Yes, please. If it isn’t too much trouble.”

  “Of course not. I won’t be long.” Anna picked up the cups and went back into the kitchen. Although all their meals came from the big house, Mrs Lawson always made sure that the larder was well stocked with snacks and beverages. She put a small saucepan of milk upon the range, reached for the cake tin. Then she stood for a moment, a hand to her tired eyes, her mind distracted from her niece’s predicament to her own – to the enigma of her relationship with the man who was her husband.