The Rose Stone

by The Rose Stone (retail) (epub)

  “I saw the design that you did for the new Red Cross poster the other day. Congratulations, it’s excellent.”

  Anna jumped. Joss stood beside her, his eyes upon their daughter and her new husband.

  “Why – thank you.”

  “I thought it very striking.”

  She said nothing. Joss had arrived very late the evening before, long after she had retired to bed, and they had seen each other hardly at all in the whirlwind morning.

  “How are you?”

  He nodded. “Well, thank you.”

  “Will you be – staying long?” She was struck, as she had been before, by the ridiculous formality of their relationship. How very pleasant to see you again, Mr So-and-so. Will you be staying long? Her mouth turned down, wryly.

  “I’m afraid not. We’ve a very important contract to fill. I’ll have to leave first thing in the morning.”

  What else had she expected? Why should she care? His absence, she found herself telling herself, has always been more comfortable than his presence—

  There came a sudden shout of laughter from a group of people standing nearby. Anna glanced at them and smiled. Beth, at the centre of the gaiety, winked back. A mistletoe branch was being passed from hand to hand, and the appropriate forfeit taken. Not far from them Samuel Bottomley’s daughter, a tall, ungainly girl with a plain, kindly face smiled too, and said something to the serious-faced young man in uniform with whom she was standing.

  “Everyone seems to be getting on remarkably well,” Anna said, lightly. “I have to say that I had my doubts.”

  A burst of applause signalled the cutting of the cake.

  “I rather like weddings,” she went on, inconsequentially, in the face of his silence. “There always seems to be that feeling that people have truly gathered to wish the couple well. Don’t you think?” She was aware of his eyes upon her. Oddly, she found she could not face the dark gaze, and she averted her own, letting it slip over the sea of happy, animated faces around her. “Even now. Even with this dreadful war—” Suddenly the vivacity seemed to drain from her. She looked down at her half-empty glass, then lifted her head at last to look at him. “The third Christmas,” she said softly. “How many more, do you think? How many more Christmases? How many more deaths?”

  He shook his head. “Who knows?”

  The crowd around them was singing now. “For they are jolly good fellows, For they are jolly good fellows—”

  “Joss—”

  He raised questioning eyebrows. He stood very close to her in the overcrowded room. It was a moment of strange intimacy. She wanted suddenly to touch him. Shout at him. Shake him. Shatter, at last, for better or for worse, that rigid barrier of distrust and hostility that had held them apart for so long. God in heaven, she found herself thinking, isn’t there enough hatred in the world at the moment without our adding to it? And for what? Isn’t tomorrow more important than yesterday? “Joss – couldn’t we at least—”

  “Mama! Papa! We’ve been looking for you absolutely everywhere?” Nicholas swooped upon them. His young, boy-smooth cheeks were champagne-flushed, his eyes bright as gemstones. Ben, as always, trailed in his wake. “Samuel says Papa has to make a speech. He’s in quite a tizzy about it.” He lifted a bright, challenging head and looked at Joss. Anna’s heart sank at the look in the man’s eyes. Nicholas laughed. “You’re holding up the proceedings, you know. Awfully bad form.”

  “I’m coming.” Joss, with no look at Anna, shouldered his way, politely apologetic, through the crowd to where a radiant Victoria and a Samuel, looking at least ten years younger than his age, waited. Anna sighed. Nicholas glanced at her, an odd light in his eyes.

  “Come on, Mumps. Cheer up. You aren’t losing a daughter, you know. You’re gaining a grand-dad!”

  “Nicholas!” As always she could not withstand his laughter.

  He leaned to her, whispering. “Come on upstairs. We’ve cleared the nursery and got the old gramophone going. Dancing, and singing and—” he rolled his eyes “—all kinds of mischief. There are,” he added solemnly, “even a couple of the younger Bottomleys up there. So your reputation will be quite safe!”

  She laughed. “Later.”

  He grinned and sidled away from her through the quietening crowd. Ben hesitated, hovering at her side for a moment before with a quick, nervous smile he followed his brother.

  Joss’s speech was short and entertaining. Anna saw, as he finished, his eyes searching the sea of faces. As they rested upon hers he began to move towards her.

  “Anna, my dear! How much it must mean to you to see Victoria so safely settled and happy—”

  She turned. Hermione Smithson, portly, white-haired, stood beside her, beaming, her florid face sheened delicately with sweat. Beside her was Josef, frail-looking but smiling. “I was just saying to your father—”

  Anna turned her head.

  Joss had gone.

  She hardly saw him again, except from a distance. In the morning he had left before she had lifted her champagne-heavy head from the pillow. He had, however, left a message for her. He would not, he regretted, be home for Christmas; the contract he had mentioned was vital to the war effort and must come first.

  Of course.

  Anna leaned to the mirror and thoughtfully smoothed the skin about her eyes, touching her moistened finger tip to her arched, tidily plucked brows.

  She would ask Beth for Christmas. The boys adored her. And Arabella. And that fascinating man that Arabella appeared to be living with. What was his name? Something Italian. He was an opera singer. She must try to book him for the Red Cross Gala in January. Josef, of course, wouldn’t want to come all the way to town for Christmas; but she and the boys could spend the New Year at Bissetts. They could go beagling on New Year’s Day. With all those retired Colonels and Brigadiers. That would be fun.

  She straightened, sighed, and then with a burst of impatient energy that refused to take note of her thumping head, she reached for her gown and started for the bathroom.

  * * *

  It was the worst winter that Europe had known in nearly forty years. The same cold that had frosted the air of the church where Victoria had become Mrs Samuel Bottomley froze men to the very marrow, sometimes to death, in the desecrated countryside that was the front line in a war that as yet no one showed signs of winning. Another Christmas; no truce this year, no comradely meeting in the barbed and deserted land between the opposing lines. The men that died that Christmas day, a sacrifice not to the Christian God to whose favour, ironically, both sides laid claim but to the flawed gods of war and national greed were just as dead, the day notwithstanding. Such things as hope, and promise and the birth of a Child had almost ceased to have meaning in those muddy, rat-ridden holes in the ground where quickness of eye, a good strong arm, a sense of humour and – above all – a highly-developed sense of self-preservation were understandably of more value and assistance to a man than the traditionally Christian virtues of loving kindness and forbearance.

  Lieutenant Rupert Rose, MC, was astonished to discover, in the early spring of 1917, when the raw days and bitter nights still flayed skin to blood and froze fingers and toes from agony to insensibility, that he was ordered on leave.

  “To take effect immediately, Rose. Get yourself a razor packed. There’s a truck leaving in half an hour.”

  Rupert shook his head. “If you don’t mind, Sir—”

  “Oh, but I do mind.” His Commanding Officer fixed him with a look that had quelled rebellion in more recalcitrant souls than Rupert’s. “You’re off, lad. For a fortnight. And that’s an order.”

  “But—”

  A cold eye stopped the words before they could form. “But you want to collect a few more medals before the end of the month, Lieutenant?”

  Rupert flushed hotly. The bunker, despite the cold outside, was fuggily warm, and already in his unsuitable clothing – he had been inspecting the forward lookout posts when he had been summoned – he was sweating
uncomfortably, the skin of his wind-flayed face stinging. “No, Sir. Of course not, Sir,” he said stiffly, resentment in every formally correct line of his body.

  The face softened. “Go home, Rupert,” the captain said, sympathy in his tired voice. “Before you get yourself – or someone else – killed. The war will still be here in a couple of weeks’ time.” He smiled bleakly. “Don’t worry. We won’t be going anywhere without you.”

  Rupert saluted, spun on his heel and left. Thirty minutes later he was perched uncomfortably on a pile of dirty sacking in the back of a truck that rattled towards the reserve trenches and the railhead, his eyes upon the familiar, shell-lit night, his mind a blank.

  * * *

  Bissetts hadn’t changed. Incredible as it seemed to him in this world where he had felt that surely nothing could have remained untouched, Bissetts was the same. The great trees, wind-tossed now, still reached to a peaceful sky, the grass was green and smooth, unpitted, the brickwork of the house solid, unscarred, soft and mellow. The Essex countryside stretched its tranquil patchwork about the house, with no raw wound of war to be seen. He had all but forgotten that such a place could exist except in memory. The very silence shouted in his ears. He stood for a moment on the drive, looking at the house. He had dismissed the trap that had brought him from the station – with the shortage of petrol had come a revival of the more traditional modes of transport – at the foot of the wide drive and had chosen to walk to the house; though whether the more to savour his homecoming or to put off the moment of his arrival he himself would have been hard-put to say. He hunched into his greatcoat, pulled the collar closer about his ears, the wind whipped at his cap, tugged at the heavy skirts of his coat. Beyond the house he could see the tennis court, the grass long-grown and winter-rough, the empty netposts green with mould.

  Richard’s voice: “My ’vantage. Come on, Rupe – you can do better than that.” Cool lemonade. Laughter. Cucumber sandwiches. Crisp apples from the autumn orchard—

  A pain stabbed, so savagely that it took his breath and stilled his blood with its agony. No. Bissetts was not the same. Would never be the same. For one instant he had to make a physical effort to prevent himself from turning, running back the way he had come. Running anywhere. Anywhere but here.

  “Rupert! Christ! Son – it is you? Your mother said it was – we couldn’t believe—” His father stood at the open door. Behind him a young man in uniform, a crisp, snow-white bandage about his head and covering one eye, watched with an interested, sympathetic smile.

  Alex ran down the steps and across the crunching shingle of the drive at a speed remarkable in one so large. A yard from Rupert he stopped. His face was working. “You didn’t let us know – didn’t tell us you were coming.”

  “I couldn’t. It was – very sudden.” The bone-weariness in the young face was echoed in the voice.

  Alex took an odd, juddering breath, controlled with difficulty the impulse to fling himself upon this tall, gaunt figure and hug him. He stuck out his hand. “Welcome home, lad.”

  Rupert took his hand, felt its tremor, smiled. “Thanks.” Over his father’s shoulder he saw that now his mother, thin and elegant, her changed face radiant, had appeared at the door of the house. He covered the distance between them in seconds. “Mother!” He clenched her to him, felt the strong, nervous hands clutch fiercely at his shoulders. Then he lifted his head and froze. A young woman holding a child stood on the stairs in the darkness of the hall, staring at him, an absolute agony of grief in her dark eyes. A ghost of yesterday. The very last person he had expected to see. “My God!” he said, and closed his eyes, knowing what he had done to her.

  Sophie very, very carefully descended the last few steps, transferred the weight of the child on to her left arm. Extended a steady, narrow hand. “Rupert. How lovely to see you.”

  He did not know – how could he – that the tears that had suddenly started to run unchecked, it seemed almost unnoticed, down her cheeks were the first she had cried since his brother’s death.

  * * *

  She avoided him for days, as far as she could, and he could not find it in his heart to blame her for it. Who knew better than he the likeness between himself and the dead; as who knew better the disparity? And in any case his own frame of mind did not prompt him to any close association with Sophie, or for that matter with anyone else. He slept as much as he could, walked the winter lanes alone when the restlessness of dread forced him out, tried – unsuccessfully on the whole – to live from day to day without thought, to enjoy this brief respite. And all the time in his mind, in his gut, in his very bones the fear crouched, waiting; waiting to leer from a shadowed corner, to grin in the darkness, to gnaw with sharp teeth at his strength, his will – sometimes he wondered if not at his very sanity.

  His enemy showed itself one day, a day of gusting, gale-force winds and rain that drove against the window like hard-flung stones, when he sat before the fire in the upstairs sitting room, a book open but unread on his lap, his eyes distant upon the flames. Outside, trees creaked in protest as the wind shrieked to a crescendo. The sharp crack as one of the brittle branches of the old ash tree that stood upon the lawn not far from the house finally gave under the onslaught might have been a pistol shot. Rupert’s head snapped back in shock, and he ducked, cringing. His mother, her eyes upon the window, did not notice the movement. Sophie did, and he caught in her eyes a sudden, surprised flash of unnerving compassion that he found utterly intolerable. He stood up abruptly. “I think I’ll stroll down to the village.”

  His mother looked around at him in astonishment. “But – darling! – it’s absolutely foul out there! You’ll get soaked.”

  He shook his head. “I need a bit of air. And I’m almost out of cigarettes.”

  Minutes later he strode down the drive, hands in pockets, collar turned against the wind, his footsteps crunching on the wet gravel, his face lifted to the driving rain as if he welcomed its sting. He walked to the village, bought the packet of cigarettes that were his excuse for the errand, dismissed the thought of a pint at the local pub for fear that he would almost certainly find himself paying for it in a friendly and inquisitive conversation, and turned back towards Bissetts. The rain had stopped for the moment and the wind had died a little, though it still blustered across the drenched countryside and piled the fast-moving rain clouds one upon another like mountains of dark fleece. He slowed his footsteps. If only time could be arrested. If only this tranquil moment of safety and solitude could be captured forever, riven from past and from future to exist alone, like the bubbles he and Richard had used to blow as children into the still summer air that would waft, rainbow-hued to the bright sky, there to hang and drift feather-light in the sunshine until they burst. Until they burst. He stopped for a moment, tilted his head to watch the racing clouds.

  Is that what death will be like? Like the sudden bursting of a bubble? I hope so. God – I hope so. That would be bearable. At least for me.

  “Rupert?”

  She stood by the roadside, watching him. Her fair hair was wind-blown as a child’s and in the dark storm-light the lines of strain upon her face were disguised. Almost he could have believed that they had stepped back in time, and were young again.

  “I popped down to see Uncle Josef. Then I waited for you. Do you mind?”

  He shook his head. “Of course not. How is he?”

  Sophie half-shrugged. “He’s not too bad. Physically he seems fine, in fact. But he does ramble a lot – at least, I think it’s rambling. The news from Russia – the riots, the Tsar’s abdication – it seems to have set him thinking about the past more than ever. It’s only natural, I suppose. He talks a lot of my Aunt Tanya. Yet sometimes I think he’s almost forgotten who I am.”

  “She killed herself, didn’t she?”

  “Yes, she did. Before we were born. Yet – he talks as if it were yesterday. He speaks of her – to her, sometimes – as if she were a child. She came with him from Russia, you k
now.”

  “Yes. I did know.”

  “I think she wasn’t – quite right in the head.” They had turned into the gate and were strolling slowly towards the house. She looked at him, unsmiling. “I don’t suppose you fancy a bit of a walk?”

  He hesitated.

  “All right,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “No – please – I’d like to.”

  “No. You wouldn’t. And I don’t blame you.”

  Suddenly and unexpectedly, after the weeks, the months of silence, he wanted to talk. He stopped. She turned, and tilted her head to look steadily at him. “Please,” he said again.

  She nodded.

  They turned their footsteps on to the wet grass beneath the tossing trees. “When I first arrived,” he said after a moment, “I thought – I rather expected – that you might leave.”

  “I nearly did. Then I thought – no. It would just be running away, wouldn’t it?”

  Their feet whispered wetly in the short grass. “I’m glad, so very glad, that you agreed to visit them,” he said, softly. “I can’t tell you how much it means to them.”

  Her mouth turned down, bitterly, at the corners, but she did not speak.

  “It must have been very hard for you,” he said.

  “Yes. It was.” She glanced sideways at him, half-defiant. “But I don’t want you running off with the idea that I’m noble or anything. I’m not. I did it for Richard. Purely for him. And for Flissy.”

  “Richard would have been very proud of you.”

  Dark lashes veiled her eyes. Her face was expressionless.

  “I’m sorry – you don’t want to talk about him.”

  She looked at him then, and he saw the pain, the desolation of loss. “There’s no point, is there?” she asked, collectedly. “Richard’s dead. Gone. Nothing will bring him back. One of thousands. Of hundreds of thousands. Perhaps – who knows? – of millions before this – this lunacy is ended. Flissy will never know him. God! What are we doing to ourselves?”