She had nothing to say about herself except in connection with Ronald. Ronald was the burden of her song: his good looks, his sweet open nature, his excellent job, when she had married him just before the War. . . . As she talked, she stared out at the shambling furtive figure in the snow. I was thankful to have my back to the window. It seemed monstrous that I should look at Ronald Kilmartin as he was now, while his wife’s low rapid voice described him as he had been.
He was a keen Territorial, and had joined his unit on the outbreak of hostilities, and gone to France towards the end of the “phoney war”. His experiences during the long battling retreat to the coast, the standing under fire on the beaches before marching into the sea to be taken off and brought home by one of the Little Ships which had gathered there, seemed to have done him no harm. But towards the end of a further period of training at home, Mrs. Kilmartin thought that Ronald had changed. He was subject to sudden gusts of bad temper, he became secretive and withdrawn, he slept badly and suffered from constant nightmare. He began to look what he was, a haunted man. It was from hearing him talk in his sleep that Mrs. Kilmartin learned what spectre dogged her husband. He was terrified of being taken prisoner, not only because under strain he might give away information, but simply for fear of being shut up.
Afraid to speak of it to this changed, morose Ronald, she finally told their own doctor, who shrugged his shoulders wearily and said that no doubt thousands of men were in like case, and short of an immediate end to the war, nothing could be done.
“Of course if he reports sick to his M.O.—” the doctor suggested. But Ronald Kilmartin never thought of doing this, and took his nightmares with him to North Africa.
From his short hurried letters it was impossible to tell his mental state. Mrs. Kilmartin, busy with the innumerable wartime jobs which occupied women all over the country, became too tired to worry except about his real and active danger as a fighting man.
“I sometimes wonder if I failed him there,” she said, turning to stare at me out of her large shadowed eyes. “If I’d let him know that I understood, he might have written about it and perhaps—”
“But whatever you said, you couldn’t have prevented his being taken prisoner,” I murmured rather helplessly.
She threw out her hand. “But—he wasn’t taken prisoner! He went right through to the end without ever being wounded! Everyone called him ‘Lucky Kilmartin!’ Lucky! If they could see him now—”
I could hear the scrape-scrape of the shovel through the snow as I stammered: “You—you mean—”
“I mean that he went on until he was demobilised and came home. Then he fell to bits,” she said.
“Surely they could have done something for him? His mental condition is just as much a result of the war as if he had been wounded—”
“Yes. They could have put him into a mental home and he would have gone really mad. But how could I let that happen?” she asked.
I saw that she couldn’t, and I realised that there are worse things than losing someone you love by death, Hugo. I knew it before, but I don’t think it ever came home to me until I sat there opposite this ghost of a woman and listened to her story. . . .
All their relations, his as well as hers, urged Mrs. Kilmartin to give it up and send him into a home, but she would not and at last a cousin who owns Wallace Cottage, offered it as a refuge, the families clubbed together to contribute what money they could, and the two came here to live.
“Is he—your husband—better in the country?” I asked. “So far from specialised medical opinions—”
But Mrs. Kilmartin said that a town made Ronald worse and apart from that, he had had wild bouts of spending money which they did not possess, with an idea, usually, of making amends when he had been more than ordinarily gloomy and difficult. He would go and order a fur coat or an expensive radiogram, which then had to be returned if possible without his knowledge; and no matter how careful she was, Mrs. Kilmartin said, things slipped past her. A brooch or a pair of ear-rings he had ordered in a contrite moment he would forget to give her when the moment had passed, and unless she found them in his pocket or a drawer of his dressing-table, she would know nothing about them until the bill came in, or worse, someone arrived at the door demanding payment. . . . I remembered the little man who had been so persistent with me, and felt sorrier than ever for both the Kilmartins.
“So you see,” she ended. “We are really better here, away from shops and houses. And you have been so good, leaving us alone—”
“I have often felt that I ought to have tried to be more neighbourly,” I said.
Mrs. Kilmartin shook her head. “Believe me, the truest kindness is to leave us alone, Miss Monteith. It sounds rude and strange, but you see, Ronald suspects everyone of wanting to shut him up. He even suspects me at times. Because you haven’t shown any interest in him, he is getting accustomed to you—the first person he hasn’t hidden from since I got him home from the army! His own friends did him more harm than anyone, because they reminded him of the war. . . . When I heard that Piper’s Cottage had been sold I took him away. I didn’t dare to keep him here while you were moving in. But now—there are days when I begin to think that there’s a probability of his recovering—”
All this was said quite calmly and simply, and the only thing I could do was to take it the same way. When she got up to go I did not go out, in case I disturbed her husband, and presently I saw them from the window admiring the path he had cleared to the gate. . . .
CHAPTER XI
END OF APRIL, 1952
Our trip was an unqualified success. It never looked back from the moment we stepped on board the Arromanches at Newhaven, in bright sunshine, to cross a sea like blue silk. After staying on deck to watch the white Sussex cliffs fade into hazy distance, I went below, the deck being suitable only to wearers of trousers, unless I had been provided with three hands: one to hold my hat on, one to keep my skirt from flying up over my head, and one to clutch the handbag containing my passport and our travellers’ cheques. It would have been sheer brutality to drag Atty from his breezy post, so, begging him not to fall overboard, an injunction which he received with kindly contempt, I left him. Not long after, he suddenly appeared at my side, his eyes blazing with excitement, to announce, “Aunt Sara, we’re out of sight of land. There’s no land in sight!” I imagine he had been picturing the Channel crossing as something like the Queensferry passage across the Firth of Forth. . . . Breeze or no, I was determined to see the coast of France as soon as it came in sight, so Atty and I hugged the rails and watched more chalk cliffs, remarkably like those we had left behind, loom up on the horizon, and buildings gradually taking shape. A voluble but agreeable Frenchwoman with a pouter pigeon’s figure and very bright small dark eyes in a well-powdered face, had taken us under her wing and poured out volumes of information on our rather dazed ears. As we drew near the harbour entrance, Atty suddenly said to me dubiously, “I suppose everyone’ll be speaking French there?” nodding at the town of Dieppe.
“Yes, of course they will,” I said.
“What’ll we do, then?”
“Speak French too,” I said.
“But can you, Aunt Sara?”
“Oh, I hope so. I expect we’ll get on all right,” said I.
Atty said no more, but I could see that grave doubts were assailing him. (However, I had the satisfaction several days later, of hearing him tell a nice American couple from New York, whom we met on one of the bus tours, “My Aunt Sara speaks French like a native—of France, I mean.”)
Of our hotel at Tours, which we reached in the small hours, I shall only say that it was cheap and clean. The beds, like all French beds, were comfortable, and the plumbing beyond words. I had warned Atty not to expect much in this line, but he was startled, even so. Fortunately he is of a philosophic nature, and had made up his mind that he liked France, so he accepted their failings in this particular line quite calmly.
I could write a whole boo
k about what we did and saw, Hugo; I don’t know which we enjoyed most, seeing the sights or just sitting under trees in front of a café sipping an apéritif and watching people going about their daily business, so like and yet unlike ourselves.
Our days were divided between bus tours called “circuits” and this pleasant dawdling, wandering about the old narrow streets behind the big tree-lined boulevards and looking at crumbling timbered houses dating from the fifteenth century. In the evenings we dined nobly at a small restaurant near the river, always the same restaurant, not so much from want of initiative but because Atty liked it. I think he was right, probably, for after two evenings we were hailed as old friends, our special table was kept for us, and our bottle of Vouvray or Chinon if unfinished at one meal was produced the next evening. Besides, the place as exquisitely clean, and the cooking, done by Monsieur the owner, admirable. His wife in her neat black dress and with her neat black head, gave us such a welcome and wished us “bon appetit” so cordially that we felt we were parting from friends when our last evening came, all too soon. Once more Atty had to submit to being kissed on both downy cheeks!
You won’t want to read a long detailed description of all the chateaux we saw on our “circuits”, nor am I any good as a guide-book. As is so often the case, we liked best what was least praised, and enjoyed ourselves most in places where we were allowed to wander as we liked, instead of trailing among an obedient horde in the wake of a guide. All too often, when Atty and I, spying some enticing corner which offered us a peep from lofty terraces to a river far below, tried to linger, we were called to heel by a peremptory: “Messieurs-’dames! Attendez le guide, s’il vous plaît!”
“But it doesn’t ‘plait’!” as Atty said sadly. “And I don’t understand what he says, anyhow!”
The trouble lay in the point of view. We were interested in the history of the Chateaux and their beautiful surroundings; the French—and our fellow-sightseers were mainly French—were all for “les meubles”. They would listen with rapt attention as the guide pointed out every single piece of carving on an elaborate cabinet, while Atty fidgeted and I possessed my soul in patience as best I could. In consequence we were overjoyed when we found an unfurnished castle, for it usually meant that we could look at it in peace.
We saw the famous gardens of Villandry, the little beds laid out in intricate patterns edged with trimly clipped box. The delicious warm smell of box rose to us on the long terrace shaded by pollarded limes from which we looked down on this pleasance. And there was Chenonceau built out on arches over the Cher like a bridge, with roses in their first bloom hanging down to the water and the rides of its surrounding woodlands carpeted with flowering periwinkles: Chenonceau which Henri II gave to Diane de Poitiers, and which after his death, she had to exchange for Chaumont with his widow Catherine de Medici, Chenonceau where Mary Queen of Scots was feted as the bride of the young Francois II. . . .
We followed guides along halls and corridors until our brains were reeling with French history, we wandered in splendid parks among fine trees. We got the shock of our lives in Tours when, walking innocently through the courtyard of what used to be the Archbishop’s Palace to the Musée des Beaux Arts, we suddenly came face to face with an enormous stuffed elephant occupying a coach-house, his trunk and tusks sticking out at the open doorway. We drove for miles through the beautiful country, rosy with apple-blossom and fresh with young green, with here an ancient church, the steeple and roof alike covered with slates, or there a big farm among its tile-roofed barns.
But the place that captured our hearts as well as delighting our eyes was Azay-le-Rideau, and that is why I have saved it to the last to tell you about. We fell so deeply in love with it that after visiting it on one of our tours, we came back and spent another whole day there, travelling by the ordinary bus, an immensely long yellow affair, the “Rapide de Touraine”, which we had noticed careering at breakneck speed on several occasions and Atty had christened the Yellow Peril.
Azay-le-Rideau belongs to a fairy-tale, a French fairy-tale, perhaps La Belle au Bois Dormant, and it ought not to be reached by anything so prosaic as a bus or car. A glass coach, or at least a prancing steed, gaily caparisoned, would be more fitting. However, as the yellow horror deposited us in the main street of the village, we went down to the Chateau on foot, which was not so out of keeping.
It was even more beautiful and enchanting than we had remembered it: the white walls rising from the still water which surrounds them, the slate-roofed tourelles gleaming silver-blue in the bright sunshine, the green pastures and stately trees set about it. The air was loud with bird-song and the murmur of water, for the Indre flows nearby, and has been led into the grounds by channels at many points, so that we were constantly crossing streams by little bridges. When I tell you that Atty saw a black redstart, you will understand that the uttermost pinnacle of delight was reached, and Azay-le-Rideau stamped as the perfect place on his impressionable mind for ever. . . .
I have been writing this in the train from Tours to Paris, and from Paris to Dieppe, and on the boat—(It was blowing a bit, which explains the wiggly writing, and all round me in the saloon people were sitting with closed eyes and expressions of fixed endurance, changing to horror whenever Atty appeared at intervals with bulletins from on deck: “They’re taking basins round to people now, Aunt Sara. Little yellow basins. Gosh, imagine feeling sick!” or “Lots more people are sick now, they look all green. I’d like some chocolate out of my bag please.”)—and am finishing it as we roar northwards through the night. We have one of those nice new third-class sleepers, and Atty is fast asleep in the upper berth.
I have enjoyed our holiday enormously. Even if I hadn’t liked it for its own sake and all I have seen and done, Atty’s open and whole-hearted pleasure alone would have been worth going to see. But I am looking forward to getting back again to Ravenskirk, and how beautiful my bare hills will look when they begin to crowd up on the skyline, shouldering each other, all opal in the clear morning light. . . . Perhaps the nicest thing of all about going on one’s travels is the coming home again. Good night, Hugo, or rather, good morning, for it is past midnight, and I must try to sleep a little now.
CHAPTER XII
MAY, 1952
By this time, Hugo, you will have seen from the last County Mail I sent you, that Ronald Kilmartin is dead. It happened while I was in Edinburgh, where I stayed on for a week after Atty went back to school. Poor fellow, he had seemed so much more normal that his wife had relaxed her attention a little, and he went out on a wild afternoon of wind and rain and was never seen alive again. A shepherd found his body in a deep pool of a flooded hill burn two days later. . . .
I read this news in the daily papers, and although I didn’t know if I could do anything, I cut my visit short and came home at once. Somehow I could not bear to think of Mrs. Kilmartin alone in her house with no one next door. For one thing, I was afraid she would be blaming herself, and she was in no fit state to stand any further strain. So, even if I did not see her, I was at least at hand in case she wanted me.
As if to make amends for the stormy weather, the lengthening May days went past sunny and mild, with bright blue skies where great masses of soft white cloud lay almost motionless, throwing their shadows over the green hillsides. A faint mist of emerald showed where the distant woods were coming into leaf, and in the low-lying marshy meadows lady’s smock and marigolds were flowering. I spent all the daylight hours except for hurried meals, either in the garden (which, though full of blossom, was also full of flourishing weeds), or on the hill with Pam. It was strange, looking at the innocent clear trickle of Piper’s burn, to think that a stream no larger than this had killed Ronald Kilmartin. . . .
Aunt Nettie, of course, is firmly convinced that it was suicide, and nothing I can say will alter her opinion, which is shared by all her friends and neighbours. It does not matter to him, now, but I would not like Mrs. Kilmartin to know what Ravenskirk is thinking. It is so stup
id of them, as well as unkind, because if he wanted to do away with himself he could have, hundreds of times over!
Mrs. Kilmartin said something of that sort when she knocked at the door one morning, and after a little persuasion, came in and had a cup of coffee. “I am so thankful that I can truly believe it was an accident,” was what she said. “You see, Ronald never wanted to die, though his life was so miserable. He was entirely absorbed in his fear of being a prisoner—”
He was a prisoner, of course, the captive of his own fear, but naturally I did not say so, a more unfortunate casualty of War than many whose wounds had left visible scars.
I asked her if she was not going to her relations, or her husband’s, at least for a time. I could not think it was good for her to stay alone in that house which must be haunted for her, but she shook her head.
“No,” she said, shutting her lips so firmly that they made a thin hard line above her obstinate chin. “I’m not going near any of them. They are all glad that Ronald’s dead, and even if they don’t tell me so in words, I’ll see it in every look they give me. Oh, I know!” she added hurriedly, though I was not going to speak. “I know all the arguments—a merciful release for him and all the rest of it—and I am glad for his sake that it’s over. But they are glad partly for my sake, and partly because they feel free of a responsibility. No, I shall stay here until I see how I stand for money, and then if necessary, I’ll take a job. It rather depends on whether the relations will go on paying the rates and taxes on Wallace Cottage, and allowing me a little to eke out what I’ve got myself. I might be better with a job, but I don’t think I could stand up to one just yet.”
“At least,” I said. “Don’t shut yourself away from everyone. There’s no need for that now, and you would find some pleasant acquaintances here.”
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