The Dust That Falls From Dreams

by Louis de Bernières

  ‘I did have a fiancé, for a while,’ said Mary wistfully.

  ‘Killed?’

  She nodded. ‘At Beersheba. Still, at least we won the battle. It’s some consolation. It would have been so much worse if we’d lost.’

  ‘I suppose you added the “St George” yourself,’ said Mr McCosh, and she nodded. ‘It was a good touch,’ he said. ‘Jolly good. Well done. Most ingenious.’

  79

  Kalopsia

  Sophie and the Reverend Captain Fairhead bought a house on 1 March 1920, on the day that Charles Garvice died. Neither of them was a fan of his novels, and they were considerably more saddened when Mrs Humphrey Ward died three days later. On the 17th they attended Queen Alexandra’s unveiling of the statue of Edith Cavell in London, taking Mrs McCosh with them, who was so thrilled by seeing the Queen that she tripped over the spike of her own umbrella in the general rush to get a better glimpse, and made a rent in her skirts.

  On the 30th they moved into their new house in Blackheath, just near the top of the village. It was situated in a tranquil street lined with chestnut trees that attracted all the local children in the autumn, when it would become a battlefield littered with opened shells and smashed conkers. Cries of ‘Mine’s a thirty-niner!’ ‘Mine’s an eighteener!’ floated up amongst the eaves. The clever children drilled holes in their conkers with a skewer when they were fresh, and then left them to shrivel and harden in the airing cupboard until the following year. No doubt they made fortunes in later life thanks to their patient good sense. If one were to defeat an opponent, one would automatically acquire their score and add it to one’s own, and so there were exceedingly enterprising children who, when their champion conker was just about to break, would sell the right to the next contest for three farthings. In the summer, residents enjoyed the pink candelabra on the trees, and at night they harkened to the virtuosity and passion of a nightingale which never failed to return. In the autumn it was replaced by a robin, whose voice was just as sweet.

  Sophie and Fairhead’s house had a pleasant mature garden planted up with azaleas and camellias. Inside it was dark but not gloomy, and Sophie draped everything with paisley-printed cloths that were both cheerful and casual. They bought mahogany furniture at auction, including an imposing but woodwormy four-poster bed that collapsed the first time they made love on it.

  Like Daniel, Fairhead was in a quandary about what to do with his future. It seemed altogether likely that one day they would have children. In the meantime Sophie was content to follow the drum, should he be posted abroad or away, but Fairhead himself declared that an itinerant life was no life for little ones, and, furthermore, he was not sure that he wanted to remain in the army chaplaincy, or even remain a clergyman.

  ‘I’ve painted myself into a corner,’ he said to his wife one day. ‘I’m unqualified for anything except the Church or a public school. Or, worse, a prep school.’

  ‘Let’s go into trade,’ suggested Sophie. ‘Mama would be so shocked.’

  ‘But your father is in trade,’ said Fairhead.

  ‘Well, Mama does find it shocking,’ replied Sophie. ‘She tries not to think about it. She aspires to inherited wealth.’

  ‘Well, it’s thanks to Great-Aunt Arabella that we have this house. Let’s not denigrate inherited wealth.’

  ‘I’d only denigrate it if there were no chance of it. Isn’t it odd that no one is called Arabella any more?’

  ‘Or Anastasia. Or Rahab. Or Salome. Or Judas. Or Delilah.’

  ‘I’m not surprised about Salome and Judas and Rahab and Delilah.’

  ‘No, neither am I. What do you think I should do?’

  ‘You keep asking, dear, and the only thing I can think of that would really suit would be to be a hospital chaplain, as I keep saying. You are so good with the mortally ill. Simply excelsitudinous.’

  ‘I don’t really have the faith any more.’

  ‘Can’t you pretend?’

  ‘Honestly, darling! What do you think God would want of me?’

  ‘But you don’t seem to believe in Him any more! And God can’t want anything, can He? If He’s omnipotent He can have whatever He wants whenever He likes, can’t He?’

  ‘Gracious me, Sophie!’

  ‘Well, He can, can’t He?’ She paused whilst she unpicked a bad stitch in her embroidery, then said, ‘Why don’t we think about what God would want if we were God?’

  Fairhead laughed. ‘You really are utterly original. I can’t imagine where I found you.’

  ‘Court Road, Eltham,’ she said. ‘The Grampians. And all because of poor Ashbridge, if you remember.’

  ‘I think I must have found you in some exotic place where completely new ways of thinking have resulted from the intercourse of philosophers and angels. What would you want if you were God?’

  She bit her lip and thought for a few seconds. ‘I would want us to rebuild the Garden of Eden. I’d want us to recreate it.’

  ‘We have a lovely garden,’ he said.

  ‘Let’s build a wall round it so no one can look in.’

  ‘That would be rather high. And awfully nice. We can’t afford it, though.’

  ‘Let’s do it ourselves. I’m sure Daniel would help. He loves that kind of thing, and he’s at an awful loose end just now, and having to live at The Grampians is driving him quite barmy. He knows everything about stresses and whatnot, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Rather like me.’

  ‘You don’t know anything about stresses and whatnot,’

  ‘No, I mean the loose end.’

  And so it was that over a period of three months, in a desultory manner, a red-brick wall rose up and encircled the azaleas and camellias. It was nine-foot high, with occasional buttresses, and was capped by demilunar tiles. At the southern end Fairhead planted passion flower, to remind himself of the religious origin of their idea, and because he enjoyed the fruit, and in the least windy places he planted clematis. Sophie insisted on having climbing roses up one wall, and Virginia creeper up another.

  There came the day in late spring when Humorist won the Derby, and the sun broke out of the cloud over Blackheath. The walled garden blocked the wind and trapped the heat, and Sophie and Fairhead put a tartan rug on the lawn and brought a picnic of tea and sandwiches out of the house, in order to celebrate the official opening of their new Garden of Eden.

  After they had polished off the food, Sophie flung herself back on the rug and spread her arms wide, saying, ‘Bliss, oh bliss, oh bliss!’ Suddenly she stood up and pulled Fairhead to his feet. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘We are walking round the garden two or three times to make sure no one can look in.’

  ‘Are we?’

  ‘Yes we are.’

  ‘As my beloved wills.’

  Arm in arm they circled the garden, scrutinising every angle. ‘No one can see in,’ declared Sophie at last. ‘We are invisible and indiscernible.’

  ‘We are indeed invisible and indiscernible and indivisible.’

  ‘We are safe from scopophiles.’

  ‘No scopophilia here.’

  ‘There are no balloonists or aeronauts. Let’s take our clothes off,’ said Sophie.

  ‘Darling, we can’t possibly.’

  ‘We can if we lock the front door.’

  ‘But, darling, it’s not done!’

  ‘What is this?’ asked Sophie, waving her arm to indicate the whole garden.

  ‘The garden?’

  ‘The Garden of Eden,’ she said firmly. ‘No clothes, no fig leaves.’

  ‘I’m really not sure I can. I’m a clergyman, for God’s sake!’

  ‘Oh fie!’ she said, sitting down on the rug and holding her arms up to him. ‘Come here, clergyman. It’s what God wants if we were God. They were naked and they were not ashamed.’

  Afterwards they lay entangled on the rug with the sun on their skin. Sophie rolled aside a little and said, ‘Oh, darling one, I’ve got kalopsia.’
<
br />   ‘I’m sure you can cure it with Beecham’s,’ murmured Fairhead.

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask me what it is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You old spoilsport. And we forgot to lock the front door. Talking of kalopsia, have I ever told you that you are the apple of my eye, the pineapple of my pineal gland, the melon of my mouth, the nectarine of my knees and the fig of my foot? Have I ever declared before witnesses that you are the most beautiful man in the world? Have I ever informed you that you give me the most truly fearful tentigo, such as will wear me out before I’m thirty?’

  ‘Almost every day. My scepticism remains, however. My teeth are yellow and my moustache is orange down the middle from smoking too much.’

  ‘I know it’s only because I love you,’ she said.

  ‘No amount of love would turn a moustache orange. I’m sure it’s the cigarettes. Do I take it that you’re fishing?’

  ‘In what manner might I be piscatorial?’

  ‘You want me to say you’re the most beautiful woman in the world.’

  ‘No I don’t. I know I am. I have complete confidence. My pulchritudinosityness knows no bounds.’

  ‘It’s infinite.’

  ‘Quite. Because you love me. You exist, you love me, therefore I am beautiful. It’s a perfect paralogism.’

  ‘I like a nice paralogism,’ said Fairhead. ‘Let’s have one for tea.’

  80

  The Toasting

  It was the custom at Christmas for the McCosh family to do two things. One was for them to wait upon the servants, the day before Christmas Eve, and treat them to a proper Christmas dinner, complete with a goose, roasted parsnips, chestnut stuffing, Christmas pudding, and their own present under the tree, to be opened afterwards. Mr McCosh’s father had got the idea from an army friend, who had told him that in the Queen’s Bays it was the custom at Christmas for the officers to wait upon the men.

  Since this custom had been imported from Mr McCosh’s family, rather than from that of his wife, she, needless to say, heartily disapproved of it, even though it originated in the manners of an elite cavalry regiment. Mr McCosh, however, always entered into the spirit of the occasion, and enjoyed it with great gusto even if the servants did not.

  He had to concede that it had lately become a somewhat melancholy occasion. Because the male servants had never returned, there were only Cookie and Millicent left, apart from the Honourable Mary FitzGerald St George, who had been given leave to return to her father for Christmas. Whereas before the war the two women had not felt at all self-conscious being served by the family, it was distinctly embarrassing and awkward now that there were only two of them.

  This year Mrs McCosh seemed highly confused, and so the sisters ushered her upstairs for a rest, and created chaos as they attempted to conjure a decent supper out of their inexperience. Fortunately Cookie always made two puddings on Stir-Up Sunday, but now she sat in the withdrawing room with Millicent, lightheaded from the unpleasantly dry sherry that Mr McCosh insisted on plying them with, in a lather of worry about what appalling mistakes the sisters might be making in the kitchen. Fairhead sat smoking in one armchair, having exempted himself from kitchen duty on the grounds of incapacity, masculinity and general incompetence. Gaskell, monocle in place, her short dark hair slicked back, smoked one Abdulla after another from her immensely attenuated cigarette holder. She was clad, as usual, in such a manner as to suggest that she was just about to go shooting. Her plan was to go to her own family the following day, and she was not helping in the kitchen on the grounds that it was already too crowded down there and she only knew how to cook under the stress of continuous bombardment. Daniel sat next to her, with both Esther and the cat on his knee, peeved at having been excluded from the kitchen, when it was quite clear to himself that the French half of him might have been quite useful. He found it agonising to have to sit still for any length of time anywhere, an agony that always seemed so much worse when it occurred in the McCosh withdrawing room, especially when Mrs McCosh was there. His own mother had gone to stay with her family in France for the Christmas period, and Daniel greatly wished that he could have been there with her. ‘Don’t worry,’ Mme Pitt had said, ‘une belle journée we will have a Christmas all ensemble en Normandie.’

  Christabel came in, perspiring and flustered, and said, ‘Cookie, how long should we rest the goose?’

  ‘About half an hour, miss.’

  ‘Oh dear, I fear that supper will be frightfully late,’ said Christabel, hurrying out.

  ‘Would you like me to come and look, miss?’ called Cookie after her, in vain.

  ‘I wonder if it will snow,’ said Mr McCosh, like the good Scot that he was, who knows only to talk of the weather when no other topic is at hand.

  At this point Millicent burst into tears, not merely because she had thought she might spend all her Christmases with Hutchinson, but because an unexpected catastrophe had descended on her family out of the blue, and she was unable to restrain her despair any further.

  ‘Millicent, what is it?’ asked Mr McCosh, who had been standing by the fireplace with his left arm on the mantelpiece and a substantial glass of neat whisky in his left hand.

  ‘What’s up, dear?’ asked Cookie, glad to have something to deal with.

  Millicent sobbed into her hands. ‘We lost everything,’ she cried at last. ‘We got nothing left!’

  ‘Nothing left? What on earth do you mean, girl? Lost everything? Farrow’s? Do you mean Farrow’s?’

  ‘Yes, sir, it’s them lot. They’ve gone and taken everything, and we won’t never get it back. How are we going to manage? Every last penny, and now we’ve got nothing! All our savings! Gone!’

  ‘Oh good Lord,’ exclaimed Mr McCosh. ‘If I’d known you’d put all your savings into Farrow’s, I would have advised you against it. I know Farrow and Crotch, nice enough fellows, and very plausible, but their interest rates were quite mad. I wasn’t at all surprised when they crashed.’

  ‘Oh, you poor thing, you should have kept it all under the bed, like sensible folks,’ said Cookie.

  ‘Now we know where you keep yours,’ observed Fairhead. ‘You’ll have to put it somewhere else.’

  ‘How much have you lost?’ asked Mr McCosh.

  ‘About two hundred pounds, sir. It was everything that me and Mother saved up for years and years, sir.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said Mr McCosh. ‘I suppose you know that the government has refused to bail them out? There’s no compensation?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I’ve seen the people outside the branches. The weeping and wailing. It’s most distressing. I don’t know if you know Mr Hughes at the toy shop in Eltham? He told me he couldn’t pay for his Christmas stock, so I lent him the money at 2 per cent for three months. The least I could do. Damned bankers! They’re the scum of the earth. I can’t tell you how much trouble they’ve caused me and how many opportunities I’ve lost because of damn bankers. They only lend to you when they know perfectly well that you don’t need it. Damned bankers. Curse the lot of them.’

  Millicent sobbed into her handkerchief, and Mr McCosh said again, ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ sniffled Millicent.

  ‘Thank God I took my money out of Farrow’s to buy a motorcycle,’ said Daniel. ‘At least I have something to show for it.’

  ‘I withdraw my remark about the madness of buying it,’ said Fairhead.

  ‘Ah, but do you apologise?’

  ‘My dear fellow, that would be to go too far. You will undoubtedly come to grief on it one of these days. Should hospitals ever require spare parts, it will be to motorcyclists that they will turn.’

  ‘In future you should put any spare money into Martin’s Bank,’ said Mr McCosh to no one in particular. ‘They are very solid, very solid. There’s a branch in Eltham. Let us propose toasts, as usual. Millicent, to whom would you like to propose a toast?’

  ‘Um, my poor old m
other, I think, sir.’

  ‘Well, here’s to Millicent’s poor old mother!’ exclaimed Mr McCosh, raising his glass. ‘God bless her!’

  Gaskell said, ‘I propose a toast to Oxford University!’

  ‘My dear lassie, why?’

  ‘Because on the 14th of October they gave out degrees to women for the very first time.’

  ‘Ah, the monstrous regiment of women gains apace! Here’s to Oxford University!’

  ‘And a curse on Cambridge for not,’ added Gaskell.

  ‘A curse on Cambridge!’ toasted Mr McCosh. ‘What about you, Cookie?’

  ‘I’m toastin’ Charles Elmé Francatelli, sir.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Charles Elmé Francatelli, sir.’

  ‘Gracious me, Cookie. Who’s he? Sounds like a wop.’

  ‘Wrote my favourite cookbook, sir. A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes. That’s what it’s called. It’s a godsend, sir.’

  ‘For the working classes, Cookie? When do you get a chance to use that?’

  ‘All the time, sir. Wouldn’t have got through the war without it. You know that giblet pie you like, sir, and that toad-in-the-hole and them Norfolk dumplings and that rabbit pudding? Them’s all from that book, sir.’

  ‘Good God, are they? You’ve been cooking for us from a book for the working classes? Well, I’m damned. Socialism comes to Court Road! Gracious me.’

  ‘Don’t tell the mistress, will you, sir? But he was a cook to Queen Victoria, sir, and I do use the posh book he wrote too.’

  ‘I certainly won’t. She would have a thousand fits. And kittens. But she would certainly be swayed by his having been a royal cook.’

  ‘I do use Countess Morphy’s book ’n’ all, sir.’

  ‘Cookie, you’re a dark horse,’ said Fairhead.

  ‘Oh well, here’s to what’s-his-name the gastronomical wop that got us through the war!’ Mr McCosh drank, and the company followed suit.

  ‘I propose a toast to Dame Nellie Melba,’ said Fairhead, ‘the most wondrous warbler of them all.’

  ‘And I to the monstrous regiment of women,’ said Mr McCosh, ‘and in particular to Cookie and Millicent, without whom we would all grind to an ignominious halt.’