As he lunged forward, caught her shoulders, urgently and painfully in hard hands, the diamond fell unheeded to the floor. “Anna – stop it.”
Blinded by tears she struggled to be free of him. “I l-loved you so much. So very much – and I thought it was I – I – who had failed. I who was to blame that you didn’t love me. And all the time,” the shreds of her control were slipping from her, “all the time it was this that lay between us – this – s-story that was ‘not yours to tell’.” She clamped her mouth shut, biting her lip painfully enough to draw blood, fought the hysteria that she knew to be rising, and won. He was watching her with night-dark eyes, his hands still strong and supportive upon her shoulders. The stone glittered on the floor between them, a bright, baleful eye. She wrenched herself from his grip, sat back upon her heels, sniffing, her eyes upon the diamond. “You’ve never loved me, have you?” she said, the words no question. “You married me to punish my father. To take me from him. To make sure that no matter what you did your connection with him and with the stone could not be broken. So that you could torment him forever. And all the while you let me struggle – fight for a love that never existed—”
“No,” he said.
“I’ve loved you. All of my life I’ve loved you. The child I was – the girl who married you—” Her head came up sharply. “Joss did you never feel any pity at all?”
She saw him flinch, physically, as if at a blow. Strangely, the sight gave her pause. She took a breath. “I’m sorry,” she breathed, as if truly she had hit him. He bowed his head. A still silence fell between them, heightened by the far-off rumbling echoes of the infernal, the terrible guns. He lifted his head at last. “And Nicolai Shuvenski?” he asked, gently.
She did not hesitate. “Yes, I loved him. But not as I did you. And it never would have happened if you had cared for me. Never.”
Unexpectedly he reached a hand to her face. “I believe you.”
At the gentle touch of his hand, the first such gesture he had made in what seemed to her to be a lifetime, she closed her eyes. Tears still squeezed from beneath her lashes. Tiredly she bent her head and rested it against his hand. Suddenly she found herself thinking of Tanya, as she remembered her; beautiful, gentle, afraid. “Oh, God, Joss,” she whispered, “it’s all so horrible. And I’m so very sorry.” She was in his arms then, without volition, the most natural thing in the world. And when his mouth covered hers the need that rose shook them both, relieving them of sense, of bitterness, of grief, and leaving only a physical need that it was beyond either of them to resist. In silence he took her hand and led her to her bedroom, locking the door behind them. In the light of the small lamp she looked at him, at the ravages of bitterness and of pride and knew that she loved him now above all things. As she always had. She gave herself freely, the joining of their bodies an explosion of pleasure and of pain. Their whispers, after, were those of lovers. “I’ve loved you always,” he said, in the dark hours when pride had long been surrendered. “You must believe me. Beneath it all, I’ve loved you always.” And she, wanting to believe, believed and cried out with the pleasure that he gave her, that she had craved so long.
* * *
Benjamin it was who found the stone, the next morning on the floor of the drawing room. “I say – look at this.” He held up the lovely thing to the light. “What on earth’s it doing here? Hey – be careful, you idiot!”
Nicholas had snatched it from him, was looking at the pendant with strangely intent eyes. “The Shuvenski diamond,” he said.
“What?” Ben was thunderstruck. “Here? On the drawing room floor? You’re nuts, Nicho.”
“I tell you it is! I know it. I’d know it anywhere.” Nicholas’s voice, like his eyes, held an intense excitement.
“How would you? Why would you? You’ve never seen it. It’s got nothing to do with you.”
Nicholas lifted a bright, picturesque head. “Oh, no? Well that’s where you’re wrong. I know it because I asked Mama to draw the design that she did for it. I still have it upstairs—”
“What on earth for?”
“Because, brother mine,” Nicholas’s voice was soft, his eyes riveted to the swinging jewel, “this lovely lady is more mine that anyone’s. That’s why. One day she’ll be mine, as she should be—”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No.” Nicholas grinned suddenly, “I know you don’t. But one day—” He stopped, stood for a moment as if frozen. Ben, slow to follow the direction of his brother’s eyes, looked puzzled.
“What’s the matter?”
“Benjamin.” Joss’s voice was very quiet, utterly authoritative. “Leave us please. I wish a word with Nicholas.” He stood by the open door, his eyes fixed upon Nicholas. Ben stood for a moment as if rooted to the spot, something in his father’s face setting the shaved hairs at the back of his neck prickling uncomfortably. Nicholas stood very straight and still, the pendant swinging from his fingers. Joss stepped forward, his hand outstretched. “Give that to me.”
With no word Nicholas handed it to him. Slow, mutinous colour was mounting in his cheeks. He tilted his head defiantly, staring into Joss’s cold face with no trace of fear.
“Benjamin.”
Soft-footed, Benjamin walked to the door, paused for a moment, his eyes upon his father, then very quietly left the room, pulling the door to behind him. Before it was completely closed, however, he heard Joss’s voice, chill as ice and edged sharp with a strange anger. “So. The Shuvenski diamond is more Nicholas Anatov’s than anyone’s? That, I think, calls for an explanation.”
The temptation was irresistible. Ben stood like a statue as the voices from the other side of the door wrought their bitter damage.
* * *
Anna woke that morning to find her husband up and about before her. Recollection was instant and complete, the bad and the good. At some time during the night it had occurred to her to wonder at the terrible burden her father had carried through his life, and to grieve for it. She thought of it again now, and her happiness was for a moment tempered by pity for him. She looked at the clock, ticking upon the table as if it had been any ordinary, common-or-garden day. She had a meeting of the Refugee Committee early this morning, with barely an hour to get up, dressed and across half of London. Singing she slid from between the sheets and reached for her velvet robe.
Later, she arrived home more eager than she cared to admit even to herself for the sight of Joss’s face, the sound of his voice. Like a lovelorn girl she had found herself thinking of him, on and off, throughout the day, the memory of the night bringing warm blood to her cheeks whilst the world about her talked interminably of quotas and fund-raising and shortages and clothes collections.
She handed her small, smart hat to Madge. “Is the master at home, Madge?”
“No, Ma’am.”
“Oh.” She paused in her busy movements, disappointment taking the edge from her smile. “Well, I don’t suppose he’ll be long. I’ll leave tea for a while.”
The girl looked uncomfortable, “’e left, Ma’am. Packed ’is case an’ left. ’E’s left you a note.”
Anna stared at her, then followed the direction of the girl’s pointing finger to where a white, undirected envelope lay upon the hall table. “What do you mean – left?” she asked, carefully.
“Just that, Ma’am. Packed ’is bags, made a few telephone calls an’ – left.”
Anna walked with as much control as she could muster to the table, picked up the envelope, tapped it, unopened, upon the palm of her open hand. “Did he say when he’d be back?”
“No, Ma’am.”
“All right. Thank you, Madge. I’ll take tea in the drawing room.”
Cold as stone she opened the letter. The girl was right. Joss had left. With no explanation and no apology, let alone a word of love. The note, brief and to the point, contained his forwarding address in Manchester for urgent matters and very little else. Very, very deliberately Anna to
re it to shreds and dropped it into the fire.
Chapter Twenty Four
This time he did not return. Indeed within a very few weeks it became perfectly apparent that Joss Anatov no longer considered the Bayswater house to be his home; and Anna, confused, resentful and more hurt than she would admit even to herself, found herself having to face the fact that, despite that one strange night they had spent together and which had seemed to promise so much, with his hatred for Josef gone there was now apparently nothing left to hold her husband to her. In frigid anger she resisted any temptation to contact him. She was determined that this time she would neither cry recriminations nor demand explanations. She was, after all, a grown woman and no heartsick girl to pursue and to beg the man who had chosen to treat her so. In the weeks that followed it seemed to her that her feelings for Joss had been switched off as surely and completely as the light in a room that is left closed, dark and empty when its occupants leave. It was, in fact, a positive relief, she told herself sensibly, to be rid of him. Living without him had always been a lot less harrowing than trying to live with him. Life went on. And only a fool would let it pass her by because of the graceless inconsistency, the capricious bitterness of one man. The fiction was established that Joss’s commitments in the north were too pressing to allow him to come to London; how many of the family knew, as she did, that upon his many trips to the capital Joss stayed at his club in St James’s, Anna neither knew nor particularly cared. Let the world think what it might. She had her work, her home, her friends, her children. What had he ever been able to offer worth more than that?
In Europe, as the first American troops began to arrive in France, the Germans, in March 1918, launched a final, desperate offensive designed to crush the war-weary allies before these fresh and well-armed reinforcements could make a decisive difference. It almost succeeded. From Cambrai to the Somme the British lines were all but overwhelmed – whole battalions, taken by surprise, cut off from their fellows, enveloped in a terrible miasma of fog, smoke and choking gas stood their ground and fought with futile and ferocious courage because the orders to retreat did not reach them: in some cases they were wiped out to a man. By the end of March the long-held line of the Somme was gone and the British Fifth Army all but smashed. For a while the fate of Europe hung once more in the balance. But it was not just the British, the French and their Allies that were weary to death of this blood-letting: the German army had been in the field for too long, and their losses had been as great as anyone’s. As it became clear that the hoped-for collapse was not going to materialize, and as American men and arms began to pour to the Front, the symptoms of a collapse in morale began to appear in the German ranks, isolated and apparently insignificant at first, but straws in the wind nevertheless. For two months the struggle continued unabated, and for some it seemed that it might never, after all, end – that the world was caught in a madness from which it could not escape until the last drop of blood had been spilled. Then, towards the end of June, the initiative swung the way of the Allies; inexorably they began to push forward, pressing the German armies back towards Berlin and the Rhine. Spirits lifted. This, surely, must herald an end? But for hundreds of thousands of men and their families the good news came too late. That last, despairing offensive and the stubborn resistance it had met had been terribly costly to both sides. Five hundred men of a single battalion of the Rifle Brigade simply disappeared in one disastrous day on the Somme, wiped out, with not even their bodies ever recovered.
From the French coast the hospital ships sailed, and the trains steamed into London with their loads of wrecked humanity. It was on a sweltering day in August 1918 that the train carrying Captain Rupert Rose pulled slowly into Victoria Station. He watched with strange dispassion as the boy in the stretcher beside him, who had died a few minutes before, was lifted with little ceremony and carted like a lump of dead meat upon a pallet out on to the platform. “It’s all right, Sir,” the orderly grinned, seeing Rupert’s eyes upon them, “we’ll be more careful with you.”
He was long months recovering. Whilst he lay upon his hospital bed the war flames flared, flickered and died at last. On the eleventh of November the nurse who tended him wept tears of happiness as she told him that the war was over, the slaughter done. The tears that Rupert shed, later, in the concealing darkness, were not however for the joy of the living, but for the comfortlessly mourned dead, who lived still within him. Yet those bitter tears – almost the first he had shed for his dead brother – were not wasted. Sophie, visiting him the next day, saw in his face a new peace, in his eyes a new light as he looked at her. And through her own tears she smiled as she held the cool, still hand.
* * *
There could have been no gladder heart than Anna Anatov’s on that long-awaited Armistice Day; and no more frustrated hero than her son Nicholas, whose heroic aspirations had got no further than an application for the Military Academy at Woolwich. To say that he was disappointed that the war had ended before he could join it would have been an exaggeration, for not the most insensitive soul in the world could have been unhappy to see the bloody business over, and Nicholas, with all his faults, was far from that. Yet still he could not help but rue the lost opportunity for excitement. Now, suddenly – and to his mother’s unutterable relief – the most adventure that the future held was a university entrance examination. Characteristically and carelessly he shrugged, laughed, and set about finding some substitute entertainment. Inevitably that involved a devilry that took no note of consequences. Equally inevitably it involved Ben, though the younger boy – who had conceived an unexpected and desperate determination to win his way to Oxford University – did his best to stay out of his rash brother’s wilder scrapes. Twice Anna found herself the recipient of polite but caustic letters from the boys’ headmaster. The first, involving breaking bounds, a forbidden late-night party and a couple of over-willing girls she did not take too seriously. Visiting the school, her questions as to the none-too-veiled references that this was not the only incident to cause concern about the Anatov boys, were cheerfully dismissed by a Nicholas too sure of himself in his mother’s affections to worry about such things. “Take no notice, Mumps love. Old Baxter’s living in the last century. No one’s told him Victoria’s been dead these eighteen years.”
Ben was quieter and very obviously more concerned about the possible repercussions of their escapade. That he had not wanted to go to the party in the first place he did not mention: but his eagerness to reassure his mother that such a thing would not happen again predictably brought upon his head his brother’s blithely undisguised scorn.
The second confrontation, a month later, was more serious, and even Anna could not indulgently excuse it.
“I do not, Mrs Anatov, propose to go into unpleasant detail,” Mr Baxter lifted a dignified head and fixed her with a pained, slate-grey eye. “It is not, I’m afraid, something I find easy to discuss. Suffice it to say that the offence concerns the smuggling of strong drink – alcohol, Mrs Anatov! – into the school. And – worse – we have strong reasons to believe that certain younger boys are involved.”
Anna stared at him. “Are you trying to tell me that Nicholas – that my sons – are encouraging younger boys to – to misbehave?”
He raised pencil-thin, repressive brows. “Just so, Mrs Anatov, I’m afraid. And I feel that I must warn you that any repetition of this kind of behaviour will lead to your sons being required to leave the school immediately. I hope I make myself clear?”
Anna flushed. “You do, Mr Baxter. Perfectly.”
“I will not have such mischief perpetrated within these walls.”
“Of course not.” In her mind Anna was roasting both her sons over the slow fire of her anger. How dare they put her in this position?
Unsmiling, he showed her to the door, stood for a moment shaking a grave head. “I’m surprised at Benjamin, Mrs Anatov. Surprised and grieved. The boy has a brain. Pray tell him to use it.”
“I
will.” Anna’s voice was grim. “Oh, I promise you I will.” But neither her anger nor the severe punishment meted out by the school could repress Nicholas for long. He was bored, and avid for experience. He saw no reason for self-restraint. His restless and indulged nature refused to be curbed. The chance for glory had been taken from him, so, with no regard for consequences, he would brighten up his life some other way. And no one would stop him.
* * *
It was on a cold March afternoon that Anna came home to find her sons’ school trunks stacked in the hall. At first the possible significance did not strike her.
“What on earth’s going on, Madge? The boys aren’t due home for weeks yet, surely?”
The girl avoided her eyes. “Don’t know, Ma’am.”
Anna, her swift movements arrested, stood quite still for a moment. “Where are they?” she asked, very quietly.
Madge took her coat, her head still ducked. “In the drawing room, Ma’am, Waiting for you.”
Slowly Anna started up the stairs. She heard their voices through the open door long before she reached it.
“Why didn’t you tell them?” Ben sounded as if he were almost in tears. “Nicholas, why didn’t you? Why did you let them believe that I – that I—” His voice broke.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Ben, stop snivelling!” Nicholas’s voice was sharp with nerves and with anger. “It’s over and done with. What does it matter anyway?”
“Matter?” The tears of frustration and anger were clear now in Ben’s voice. “I’ll tell you why it matters! You’ve ruined my life, that’s all! Not only have I been tarred with the same – the same unspeakably rotten brush as you—” he plunged on, ignoring his brother’s acid bark of laughter “—you’ve ruined any chance I might have had of making it to university. I’ll never get the exams now. Don’t you see what you’ve done? Don’t you care? Are you really so damned self-centred that you don’t know?” He choked, could say no more.
The Rose Stone Page 47