Statues in a Garden

by Isabel Colegate

  I do not think that Violet knew about her mother and Philip either. Other people did of course, in the way that people always do somehow, but it is easy to remain ignorant of something as totally unexpected as the truth would have been to Violet or Kitty. Violet and Wilfred were on their honeymoon in Deauville when they heard the news of Aylmer’s death, in a telegram from Edmund. They came home at once, and then of course Wilfred was recalled to his regiment. He was killed at Le Cateau in November 1914. Violet nursed at the convalescent home all through the war, and afterwards married again, quite happily I believe, and had several children.

  Edmund volunteered for the Army as soon as possible, and the women were left to organize the convalescent home. Cynthia was not much use at first, because she had relied so much upon Aylmer and felt lost without him. That was partly why she pursued Philip so desperately, she thought he might take Aylmer’s place. But she had resilience, and when she found she had lost Philip, she pulled herself together and ran the convalescent home with efficiency and charm – and guile. Her patients were the most pampered in England. She was adept at obtaining for them on the highest level special privileges, special food, special services. In some funny way, too, she got special patients: the best looking, the gayest, the sons of friends, the heroes. And since she was getting older and had lost her husband and her lover, she took anything that was offered by way of consolation. She was not notorious, or in any way embarrassing, but I suppose she did, for what that was worth, lose her reputation, and after the war she did not see so much of the friends she and Aylmer had shared, but moved in different circles and more or less supported a whole crowd of people rather younger than herself, and then when she died, some time in the thirties I think it was, there was something about drugs – not that I believe for one moment that she had taken her own life, but there was an implication that she might have been relying rather on stimulants, and the papers made much of it, printing photographs from the days of her fame and making out that she had had a terrible fall.

  I believe she did see Philip again, during the war, in London, but I don’t think anything came of their meeting. It was soon after that that he married Ida.

  Philip did not rejoin the army because it appeared that there was something wrong with his eyes, but he had something to do with some government department during the war, which turned out to be useful afterwards. As a matter of fact I believe he was one of the earliest ‘war profiteers’, and certainly after the war he did make his fortune, and became a big financier, and meddled in behind the scenes politics, and got his peerage. At the end of his career he was rather too closely involved with the pro-Hitler faction and might have found things awkward, if he had survived, but, perhaps fortunately, he died in 1938 at a comparatively early age. Ida divorced him after a year or two of marriage, and he had several other marriages, none of them very successful, but he had everything he wanted in every other way, and perhaps that was what he wanted too, variety. His last wife was quite pretty and much younger than he was.

  The war was rather a relief at first. It seemed appropriate after our own private disaster.

  Of course we thought, as most people did, that it would be over in a few months. Edmund particularly was desperate to get to the fighting before it was over. He welcomed the war more than anyone, because he was so distressed by what Philip and Cynthia had done, and by his father’s death, and he thought that a righteous battle could somehow cleanse the air. He thought that Honour had come again, and all that. It seems silly now, but a lot of people thought it at the time.

  Edmund got on to Philip’s Army friend, little Smallpiece, who managed to get him commissioned in his own regiment in a matter of months. Little Smallpiece himself was sent to France at the end of 1914 and was killed in his first engagement some where on the Franco Belgian border. His commanding officer was killed before him and he led the men back into the attack as he had been taught, his little feet pounding the shaking earth with rightful pride, and was killed and got his posthumous D.S.O. Edmund had a longer war.

  Alice went with Cynthia and Violet and Kitty to see him off at Victoria Station the first time he went. There was a band playing and the horses were excited and had to be backed on to the train, and the General came along in plumes and all the men cheered and all the women cried. It was very grand and brave and though we cried we would not have wanted him to stay behind. That was in the early days, before repetition had robbed the farewells of their glamour and before the daily casualty lists had become part of our lives.

  Edmund and Alice corresponded all through the war, and he spent his leaves at Charleswood, where she was nursing. He had some idea that he ought not to marry her until the war was over, but it was generally accepted, though never exactly stated, that they were engaged. His letters changed over the four years, from the early ones, rejoicing in the idea of the battle, to the ones which hardly mentioned the war but spoke only of afterwards and Charleswood, and then to the ones in which he wrote at last, ‘Something must have gone wrong,’ and ‘We out here may not be much use when it is over,’ and ‘There’s been a mistake.’ There were probably hundreds of packets of letters like that in different parts of Europe after the war. The story of all that, and of his last leave with Alice, and of her feeling that this time they had not been able properly to communicate, this story does not belong here. It doesn’t belong anywhere really. Anyway he was killed in 1917 in the Battle of the Somme and there may have been a moment between the time when the piece of shell hit him and the time when his intestines and stomach were draped across the branches of a dead tree and his dissociated head and legs sank in the mud to be trampled on by his advancing troops, when the thinking part of him could think, Thank God.

  Alice finished the war at Charleswood, and then went back to look after her old parents in Ireland. She started a small school there, which brought her much satisfaction, though it was a financial failure.

  25

  And I, I suppose, was Alice, but it was a long time ago.

  Sometimes I think I was closer than that, was Kitty, abandoned by her father, or was one of those girls, a bridesmaid, part of the picture, running in the garden, hiding behind the trees, shading myself under a foolish hat from the sun which shone on a world which was mine. Because I, Alice, was always an outsider, an admirer, but from the outside, it was not my world. It was theirs, and particularly Aylmer’s, their representative. And I remember old Mrs Weston’s talk of love, and its requirements and our ignorance, and her dying bitterness against Aylmer

  But I am old, and out of touch, so how can I make generalizations? Besides, I had hardly begun to take in what I was seeing before the war broke out, and my lessons were left unlearnt I sit in my distant Irish house and read the papers and think, What are we coming to? like any other old woman, and think, reading of a boy lying bleeding between East and West and the world watching and no one moving. If Aylmer Weston had not killed himself this would never have happened So much did he seem to me to stand for, so much does his suicide seem daily to recur.

  Because, as I said at the beginning, this is a private fable, and if it is also about something that happens or might happen all the time or anywhere, and if it is also Ida’s fable about Adam and Eve or man’s idea of life, and Mrs Weston’s about the impossible demands of love or man’s idea of man, that is nothing much to do with me. People make little myths out of the deep discoveries of their lives, one way or another, it is an instinct. And those few months were the vital ones in my life. I do not wish to apportion blame or praise, or seem foolishly to regret the passing of an age which was full of faults, only, for me, had Aylmer not killed himself, had the war not come, we were going to build a kingdom of love. And if you say Aylmer’s death was nothing to do with the coming of war, the answer is that the failures are parallel, and that anyway this is a fable, as I said.

  I am Alice on a grassy bank in the autumn sun of 1914, holding in my hand my first letter from Edmund, and with a soft stone trying t
o write on the back of the letter the name I am thinking of, which is love. I have written L O V and there is Kitty, walking up towards me from the house, and I must tell her that little Smallpiece has been killed and she will be sorry because he amused her and was kind.

  ‘Oh Kitty, I am afraid I have something to tell you.’

  She sits at my feet, admiring the future.

  ‘I know. It is that we are all about to be destroyed.’

  About the Author

  ISABEL COLEGATE was born in 1931. As well as working as a literary agent, she is the author of thirteen novels, (including The Shooting Party, which was adapted into a film in 1985) and one collection of short stories. She lives in Somerset.

  ALSO AVAILABLE BY ISABEL COLEGATE

  ORLANDO KING

  The masterpiece of one of the most important and overlooked British women writers of the twentieth century, with a new introduction by Melissa Harrison; ‘Isabel Colegate has no rival’ (The Times)

  Orlando King is a trilogy about a beautiful young man, raised in a remote and eccentric wilderness, arriving in 1930s London and setting the world of politics ablaze. In a time of bread riots and hunger marches, with the spectre of Fascism casting an ever lengthening shadow over Europe, Orlando glidingly cuts a swathe through the thickets of business, the corridors of politics, the pleasure gardens of the Cliveden set, acquiring wealth, adulation, a beautiful wife, and a seat in Parliament. But the advent of war brings with it Orlando’s downfall; and his daughter Agatha, cloistered with him in his banishment, is left to pick through the rubble of his smoking, ruined legacy.

  Elegant and muscular, powerful and razor-sharp, Orlando King is a bildungsroman, Greek tragedy and political saga all in one; a glittering exorcism of the inter-war generation’s demons to rival the work of Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark.

  ‘If you are curious as to why Britain is still ruled by a tiny cadre of notvery-introspective aristo-capitalists, Orlando King is essential reading’ SUNDAY TIMES

  ‘Colegate’s sharp-eyed trilogy about a young man on the make in 1930s London feels particularly resonant right now, given its acute take on male privilege and power’ I PAPER, Summer Reading Picks 2020

  ‘An extraordinary achievement’ Frances Wilson, TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, Summer Reading Picks 2020

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  First published in 1964 in Great Britain by The Bodley Head

  This electronic edition published in 2021 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Copyright © Isabel Colegate, 1964

  Copyright introduction © Lucy Scholes, 2021

  Isabel Colegate has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers

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  ISBN: PB: 978-1-5266-2160-3; EBOOK: 978-1-5266-2159-7

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